I’m only surprised that Putin didn’t do this earlier: Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally accomplished what has been telegraphed for a few weeks, the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts (provinces). Before a crowd of what passes for dignitaries in … Continue reading →
Putin is planning the tried-and-true Russian tactic of throwing a lot of its male citizens into the fray and overwhelming the enemy by numbers. One problem, though, is that – unlike, for example, the Nazi invasion of WWII, when Russia … Continue reading →
I’ve avoided making predictions about the endgame of the war in Ukraine, but here’s an article that discusses the possibilities: At the time of this writing, it is not yet clear what the outcome will be. His first strategy having … Continue reading →
…not with a bang but a whimper: The smaller number of marching units, the absence of the “Z” sloganeering, any air units, and the elite of the Russian Army all gave the parade a more subdued air. It was not … Continue reading →
I found this quite fascinating. I was already familiar with this guy – Konstantin Kisin – from his “Triggernometry” podcasts, but I was previously unaware of much of his personal history as discussed here.
Continue reading →Poor innocent Russia, threatened on all sides by enemies while minding its own peaceful business, wants everyone in the world to know it’s prepared and ready: Russia announced on Wednesday it had successfully launched a new missile that it said … Continue reading →
As soon as it became clear that the Ukraine war wasn’t going to end with a very quick Ukraine capitulation and Russian victory, I started to wonder how it was going to end. It seemed to me early on that … Continue reading →
Again: We’ve heard it from Vladimir Putin himself. We’ve heard it from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. But just in case we somehow missed the message, a political scientist and longtime supporter of Putin by the name of Sergey Mikheev … Continue reading →
I’ve not been impressed by the intelligence community’s take on much of anything Russian (or maybe anything in general), and that’s not just lately. I’ve written before about how the intelligence community failed to accurately foresee and predict the collapse … Continue reading →
Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine we’ve been arguing in the comments here about his motives and goals. Putting that aside, this post is about something else: the state of the Russian military. And by “military” I mean army, navy, … Continue reading →
Zelenskyy recently made a speech right before the NATO summit in which he said this (in English): The War of Russia is not only the war against Ukraine. Its meaning is much wider. Russian started the war against freedom as … Continue reading →
It’s hard to conclude otherwise. It seems to me quite obvious that if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons, Russia would not have attacked it. Or at the very least, Russia would have been far more reluctant to have attacked … Continue reading →