It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his easy wins in preparation to ratchet up pressure to force western Ukraine into the Russian Federation.
The rest is history. The Russian military proved ill-equipped and ill-supplied. It was poorly led, with a high percentage of low-morale, conscript troops. Russia had no viable strategic plan to capture, much less hold, the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine was Russia’s version of our Kabul—but tens of thousands of deaths added to the equation.
Russian strategists naïvely believed NATO would become paralyzed in mutual recriminations and fear and follow the usual German prompt of appeasement. In fact, NATO united precisely because of the dire worries over further Russian aggression, as the alliance pressured Germany to back off from its self-interested Russian romance.
Sanctions seldom have a good record of quickly stopping a war, and they have not so far in this instance, either.
But Russia’s naked use of force, its war crimes against civilians, and pathetic propaganda turned off most of the Western world and it, in turn, boycotted, sanctioned, and embargoed Moscow. These porous and slow-moving efforts nonetheless will eventually make it even more difficult for Russia to muster the economic and military wherewithal to sustain a stalled invasion.
Why Putin Invaded
The Western alliance had clearly lost any power of deterrence by February 24, 2022. The catastrophic rout and flight from Afghanistan and utter abandonment of an embassy, and billions of dollars in sophisticated weaponry to the Taliban, suggested to the Russians that the current U.S. military had adopted different objectives from its once feared past. It appeared to some in Moscow that the Pentagon was starting to resemble former Soviet armies, where ideology trumped military preparedness and lethality.
Biden enhanced that impression in so many ways.
This is a war that should have NEVER happened. But Puppet Biden’s handlers wanted one, and they got it.
How bad can Ukraine be when Susan Collins of all people shows up in the middle of a “war zone.” SERIOUSLY.
VDH isn’t reading the same reports on this war that I am.
Oooh, I like that article! Never once says anything about how I’m a Nazi comedian with a horrible human rights/war crimes record of my own, and how I run a country sized money laundry on behalf of seriously corrupt American politicians, all of whom I have dirt on, them AND their kids!
It also makes it sound like I’m winning!
Think I’ll play my favorite song on the piano to celebrate!
https://youtu.be/oua0Puihrkc
Hey man! I’ve been a Nazi comedian MUCH longer than YOU! We were installled by the same people too!
Ha ha Jerry M!
I called her office and asked why she wasted taxpayer money to go that far for a photo op.
Then asked what she thought of her pal Zelensky after he signed a law making political opposition illegal and gave himself the power to seize their property.
No answer.
He left out the part about war being the favored money laundering scheme for demoncrats.
VDH speculates tangentially based on MSM reporting and war propaganda .
What a load of horse shit!
Well, at least VDH didn’t cry for the Ghost of Kiev, though he does seem to be out of his lane here. But maybe this piece is part of what it takes to to turn the ponderous establishment cruise ship ever so slowly towards reality.
VDH could get a job as Biden’s mouthpiece.
Putin – Bad, Zelensky – Good. Life is so simple a simpleton could figure it out.
VDH is a neo con hack; fake news abound in this article. Russophobe Reagan era thinkers have to change
Im not ready to put VDH out to pasture, but he did screw the pooch on this one
Doesnt mean his insights arent valuable most of the time.
One of the “insights” that makes me laugh is the notion that the stocks of Russian shells, missiles are running low and this may become a problem
Who are we talking about here .. freakin’ Lichtenstein? Russia, even in its reduced form, is as big as South America. It also inherited a military industrial complex from the USSR that dwarfs our own, especially in mundane matters like artillery shells and missiles. They can make more, folks. They can keep up this grind for years
.. One thing that did puzzle me in the beginning was this move on Kyiv. What was that all about? Russia had nowhere near the troops and hardware to take a city the size of Kyiv. When they assaulted Berlin in WWII, they mobilized a million men for the attack. Thats five times the number for this entire operation in Ukraine. The only explanation, to me, is they wanted to see if Ukraine could be bluffed into surrendering