Release the Leopards

As the war in Ukraine reaches the one-year mark, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said last Tuesday that Russia has "lost strategically, operationally, and tactically." Which is not to say that the war is over or has been won—there are few winners in war, if any, really—but only that losers can sometimes be identified and named, Putin and the Russian Empire, first and foremost. When the Empire experienced a similar defeat in 1904-5, the Czarist regime collapsed into revolution. Futures are complexly contingent, so I don’t presume to predict the outcome of this war, the post-war, or its inchoate prospects for peace and reconstruction, but if all parties stay their current courses, we have cause for hope that all of this death and destruction can entail a better Ukraine and a better world. Supporters of the Ukrainian cause, however, must not slacken their efforts. Guns, treasure, and unity are still required.

A second loser: The Trumpian rump of the Republican Party, the so-called GOP, have been such tools of oligarchy and authoritarianism in general and of Vladimir Putin specifically, that they could more transparently express their call letters in the Russian/Cyrillic script—ГСП. Their (dis)putative House leader, Kevin McCarthy, has proclaimed that U.S. aid to Ukraine will not be a “blank check,” and the propaganda outlet of the ГСП, Fox Lies, continues to feature sycophants and apologists whom Russian media have taken to heart. They are losers, too, shameless appeasers, embarrassments. Donald Trump kissed, and continues to kiss, Vladimir Putin’s ass; Ukraine, and the global forces of more liberal and democratic values, interests, and institutions have kicked it.

Alas, Year Two

A year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a year of heroic resistance, a second invasion impends. Failed and desperate as Putin and his lackeys have been to date, they retain sufficient resources, if not to win on their original terms, sufficient to wreak further havoc on the Ukrainian people and state, to press the West in its support of Ukraine, and to issue nuclear threats. The pathology of Russian nationalism, insecurity, fatalism, and autocracy has weathered yet another year of history, promising a war of further attrition, squared, perhaps cubed.

 

No reports of Russia from Russia of dissent or critical thinking of any alternative sort encourage us to believe that anything but more of the brutal same—or worse—is in the offing. One reads of their public discourse only a vituperative hallucination. Apparent critics drop off of buildings like flies. The echo chamber of Russian media thrums a bass of doom and a treble of hysteria, the Fox idiot Tucker Carlson a darling. In the old Soviet Union, where the press consisted of Izvestia, “News,” and Pravda, “Truth,” it was said on the streets in Moscow that “there was no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.” Would that media consumers fifty years later were that savvy. Everywhere.

 

Zelenskyy still lives! My Polish prayers go out to Ukraine and Ukrainians, along with a few paltry dollars. Their efforts remain for us in the West an example of civic virtue and courage.