As people should know by now, anything that comes out of Vladimir Putin’s mouth is strictly for domestic consumption, and that all everyone else can do is wonder if this guy just has total contempt for what other countries and their people are seeing and hearing, or is a pathological liar who is so paranoid that he actually believes the things he says. Even Fox News’ Tucker Carlson can’t “help” him much anymore, except to make insipid claims like the “real victims” of Russia’s invasion are not Ukrainians, but Americans—which I suppose he means by price increases which he of course knows all about with his $35 million-a-year salary spouting nonsense and sewage.
The latest lie was that Putin had ordered his troops to stop attacks on the steel factory in Mariupol, and that the remaining Ukrainian resistance was going to be “starved out.” Well of course that didn’t happen, as Russian forces merely continued to bombard the plant with missile and rocket fire. It is now being reported that civilian evacuations are being permitted, but we will see how long that lasts, given Putin’s previous claim that Russian forces were going to concentrate their attacks on the Donbas region and halt further attacks elsewhere, which turned out to be not exactly true either.
Russian attacks in the Donbas, aided by Russian-backed separatists, isn’t merely a tit-for-tat reach for territory; the Donbas is where most of Ukraine’s heavy industry is located, so Russia’s attempt to absorb the region is an effort to emasculate the country. Putin also apparently hopes to capture the port city of Odessa in the south, which will essentially totally cut off Ukraine from the sea and make it even more vulnerable to Russian predations. Although NATO membership seems off the table for Ukraine, and EU membership is opposed by Austria, elsewhere Finland and Sweden have expressed interest in joining NATO, which certainly wasn’t part of the “plan.” If this occurs, it will be another strategic blunder by Putin. That is what happens when you lie and lie and lie until the concept of “trust” simply has no meaning, and nobody but other countries that also lie and can’t be trusted (say, China) are your only “friends.”
In the meantime, NATO countries have managed to avoid sending in their own troops into Ukraine, which is a fair trade-off for a few cents more on consumer products, which was already happening anyways because of the end of pandemic lockdowns and people having money to spend and not enough product available to spend it on. What we are seeing in the fighting is that Russian military planners learned the wrong lessons from their previous adventures in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria. Last month Griff Witte in the Washington Post noted that as in Afghanistan, in Ukraine the Russians underestimated the opposition and overestimated their own capabilities:
The invading troops met fierce resistance from outgunned fighters defending their homeland. International allies, including the United States, rushed to aid the underdogs. And a war that Moscow had seen as a chance to show off its might became instead a bloody and embarrassing display of weakness.
The U.S. didn’t do much better in over twice the number of years, but the U.S. never committed the kind of firepower and heavy weapons in Afghanistan that the Russians did, preferring to “assist” the Afghan security forces, which apparently required this assistance to have any backbone in response to the Taliban attacks, which it quickly lost when the U.S. left the country. In Chechnya, the Russians faced a relatively weak but persistent insurgency, but Russian forces showed a remarkable degree of incompetence, where as many Russian troops were killed by “friendly fire” as by Chechen forces. And in Syria, it was a “test run” of the effectiveness of terror bombing, which in Ukraine has only managed to accomplish increased hatred of, and resistance against. Russia.
Of course everything relied on a quick blitzkrieg strike on the ground, capturing Kyiv and overthrowing the government, in which Russian forces failed miserably. Striking in the middle of winter and early spring thaws wasn’t very smart (even the Germans weren’t that dumb) to begin with. But in other ways the Russians have been their own worst enemy, overestimating their big machinery against advanced U.S. and NATO shoulder-fired anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.
For example, it was the belief that in reducing crew members in a tank from four to three—removing the shell loader by installing a revolving carousel around the turret’s base which automatically loads the gun—makes the tank more difficult to hit because of its lower profile; in fact it is even more susceptible to a competently aimed shoulder-fired weapon. Here we see the turret of a Russian tank somehow dismembered from the rest of the tank:
Ukrainian special forces showed the “jack in the box” effect of hitting a Russian tank in the “sweet spot,” where once ignited, the explosive power of all the Russian shells sends the turret high into the air:
This has also been a problem with Russian infantry vehicles, where NATO vehicles of the type do not have “manned” turrets, and shells are hand loaded (as in NATO tanks) from protected compartments. Russian tank crews are no doubt obliterated from such hits, and we are told it takes 12 months to fully train a new tank crew.
The Russian military has also taken a “hit” by the downing of one their advanced Su-35S fighter aircraft:
We are told that the advanced targeting system that supposedly can track a stealth aircraft and took years to develop was found largely intact for analysis and countermeasures. China purchased a number of Su-35s with this technology, and although it is assumed that they will of course steal the technology through reverse-engineering, this will do them little good if the technology is already “out-of-date.”
And then there was the “pride” of the Russian fleet, the refitted with advanced weaponry cruiser Moskva, which embarrassingly sank for competing reasons in the Black Sea:
It is speculated that one “advancement” not made was to the ship’s 40-year-old fire suppression system, and that can be largely to blame for its sinking. Thus despite being out-manned and out-gunned, Ukrainian forces with a motive to fight have not only slowed or stopped Russian advances, they have reduced Putin to those crazed Hitler rages that we see in the German film Downfall, and who knows what insanity he is still capable of, no matter how many Russians need to go out for slaughter:
Of course the present failures of Russian forces in Ukraine has to be blamed on someone, and of course Putin is framing his war as a defensive move against the U.S.-led NATO forces, while conveniently leaving out the part that he just screwed-up, and the Russian people are paying for that in blood:
But then Hitler didn't have nuclear weapons, and Putin does, which only makes him more dangerous.
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