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.
