Ukraine, one year on

I'll admit freely that I was one of those who assumed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be, if not a walkover, over quickly and in Russia's favor.

"The fighting continues in Ukraine, with the Russian forces doing surprisingly poorly (relative to the preponderance of weight-of-metal on the Russian side...). I still doubt the outcome is in play - poor or not, quantity has a quality all it's own (just hard on the people in the "quantity"...)."

Well.

I'm a well-known Eeyore in Portland soccer circles and that carries over into geopolitics, as well. I still don't see how this ends well for Ukraine. Largely, though, not so much because of Russian battlefield performance but because of Western and especially United States political attention span.

It's difficult for the Western democracies, driven by the short electoral cycle, to keep eyes on the prize - in this case, ensuring that a rapacious kleptocracy isn't rewarded for its neighborhood aggressions - and this problem is made even more difficult because the EU/US Right is openly Russiaphilic. 

This isn't just Trump, either. He's obviously either 1) just a stooge, 2) deeply in hock to the Russian oligarchs/Deutschbank execs who are propping up his "wealth", or 3) compromised in some truly vile way (old saying: "dead girl or live boy" because nothing short would genuinely shame Trump...) by Russian intelligence. Throw in his visible man-crush on Shirtless Vlad, and his stanning the Russians is utterly unsurprising.

But the remainder of the Western Right is all-in on Putinism because it clearly fits into the jigsaw puzzle weirdness of their worldview, where transgender teens and moms-against-assault-rifles are existential threats while rapacious plutocrats and anthropogenic global warming aren't.

Unfortunately for Ukraine these people are either close to or holding the levers of power. Watch this U.S. Congress - the nutbars in the House WILL strip out support for Ukraine. Empty G and her fellow Nazis have a Molitov-Ribbentrop Pact that ensures their constant attacks on Ukrainian aid in hopes of ensuring a Russian victory.

And without Western help the Russians will win; if not the complete subjugation of Ukraine - occupying the Ruthenian heartland will be no easier in 2025 - worse, if anything - than it was in 1946 - then the effective "Finlandization" of Ukraine or worse.

Even with that help, it's going to be damn near impossible for a true Ukrainian "victory". Russia is still immensely larger and can keep hammering at the Ukraine so long as the Ukrainians can't effectively hammer back. They can't; Russia has the geographic strategic depth that no Ukrainian weapons can threaten short of risking Putin throwing a nuke.

And if he does...

So I think we're still stuck with the "lessons learned" we learned a year ago:

1. Thucydides is still correct: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

No real explication needed; we're still here.

I still agree with Point #4. But that doesn't mean that everyone else does, so being capable of giving a bloody response to those who, like Putin, believe that they can just take what they want by force is still, sadly, a necessity.

But.

Anyone who's familiar with the U.S. procurement and doctrine processes knows that neither one is particularly well suited for ensuring that We the People get a most our of our tax dollars. The "conservatives" love to blabber on about how there's SO much "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the federal government, yet are unwilling to look for it where it lives; in the "defense" budget.

2. When someone tells you what they are, believe them.

This applies both to Putin - who told us he was going to put the USSR back together repeatedly - and to the Western Right, which has told us over and over that they want what Putin has; the ability to harm, jail, and kill those he/they hate and the power to bind and loose regardless of the democratic norms and opinions of others who disagree. And are fine with him doing what he wants if he helps them with what they want.

3. The Russian military is proving what a bad fucking idea personal autocracy is.

As if we hadn't seen enough of that from the reign of Dick Cheney, who intended to reverse the Decline of the Imperial Presidency, and Donald Trump. There's a reason that old imperialist Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government...except all the others. And the worst form - both for those who live within it and for those who outside who are the targets of it - is autocracy, whether in the sort of kleptocracy currently in Russia or the theocracy dreamed of by Western Christopaths or the Dictatorship of the GOProletariat that lives inside Lauren Bobert's head.

4. Smedley Butler is still right, too; war was a racket and still is.

The "leaders" - in Russia and here in the US - will never pay and never have paid the price for their war crimes. Dubya isn't in jail in the Hague, Cheney is still a bloated remainder of the stupidity of the Iraq Misadventure, and Putin won't be the one who falls out of the window.

So here we are; a year on, with more dying and more killing to come, and with no real hope for a "good" outcome, merely bad and worse.

And if there's a more powerful statement about how war is all hell, I can't think of one.