A week ago we heard retired U.S. General Ben Hodges predict that Ukraine would take back Crimea next year. Wow! That's great news.
It is not an opinion held by all. In this video, former MI6 chief Alex Younger is not so optimistic. The entire interview is interesting and informative, but his opinion about the course of the war begins at about 8:50.
Could you use a pick-me-up video? Give this one a try.
A small organization called Ocean Conservation Namibia is in the seal rescue business, if you can call it a business. On the coast of that southwest African nation, seals by the hundreds become entangled with fishing lines, fishing nets, gill nets, Coca-Cola cans, hard hat head bands – whatever is thrown in the ocean – in astounding numbers. In time, the entangled lines cut into the animals' necks, causing horrible wounds. These guys patrol the beaches and the docks looking for seals in such danger, capturing them, removing the entanglement, and setting them free.
What a great job!
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| Sen. Mike Lee with his ventriloquist |
Over the last six years, Donald Trump has ruined many Republican political careers. Lee is now scrambling to avoid becoming another of them. The two-term senator knows exactly why his campaign is in trouble and what led to his humiliation on Fox News [i.e., when Lee almost begged Mitt Romney for his endorsement, which Romney has withheld].
Lee isn’t in trouble because of (just) Democratic voters. His re-election is teetering because of Republican voters who are disgusted by his full embrace of Trump—including his attempts to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. These machinations created space for former CIA officer Evan McMullin to run as an independent after convincing the Utah Democratic Party not to put anyone on the ballot this year. McMullin has, improbably, energized a coalition of moderate Republicans, unaffiliated voters, and Democrats behind his candidacy. Mitt Romney has chosen not to endorse either candidate, saying they are both friends.
Maybe we've been too hard on Romney.
Nearly every day the evidence mounts that Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a blunder of breathtaking proportions. Case in point: The Kalinouski Regiment.
In the October issue of The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes about the Kalinouski Regiment, a military unit made up of Belarusian volunteers, formed in March to help defend Ukraine from the Russian invaders. The New York Times puts the current size of the growing regiment at nearly 500 troops. Members of the regiment oppose the Lukashenko regime in Belarus. They joined the Kalinouski Regiment to help Ukraine and receive NATO military training, with an eye to the long term goal of removing Lukashenko.
Belarus was a component of the USSR until it declared its independence in 1994, after the communist giant fell apart. In its first and only free and fair election, Belarus elected Alexander Lukashenko president. Lukashenko immediately began closing down the pillars of democracy in the country: free speech, free press, opposition parties, and free and fair elections. Nevertheless, Lukashenko's control of the country has always been tenuous, and he has depended on Russia, and Putin in particular, to help suppress his opposition and keep him in power. Most recently, he received Russian assistance to quell demonstrations throughout the country following his "victory" in the country's fraudulent 2020 elections.
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| Belarus |
Belarus shares a 674 mile border with Ukraine on the south, and at its closest is less than 65 miles away from Kiev. The Russian attack on Kiev in February originated from Belarusian soil, though it did not include Belarusian soldiers. Lately Putin has been leaning on Lukashenko to commit huge numbers of troops to help rescue Russia's failing invasion, and Belarusian troops have been deployed in the last week to the Ukraine border, where they are reportedly organizing with Russian troops.
But, though Putin may demand it, you can be sure that sending Belarusian troops into Ukraine is the last thing Lukashenko wants. His hold on power is too tenuous. The absence of a large part of his army from the country, fighting in an increasingly unpopular war, will leave his regime exposed, and Russia is not in a good position to come to his aid, as it did in 2020. And, long-term, he certainly sees that Belarus is on Putin's to-do list as the Russian president goes about his reconstruction of the Russian Empire of Peter the Great.
The Kalinouski Regiment hopes to have something to say about that.
Yesterday Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (last seen running for his life from the January 6 insurrection he had urged on) and Florida Senator Rick Scott (best known for his leadership of Columbia Hospital Corporation while it defrauded Medicare and Medicaid, for which it was fined $1.7 billion) joined Herschel Walker (who helped Georgia beat Notre Dame in the 1981 Sugar Bowl) on the campaign trail.
They got their just desserts:
Retired General Ben Hodges was once the commanding general of United States Army Europe, so he brings a wealth of relevant background to this survey of the Ukraine battlefield, and its prospects for the next year.
We think his discussion (below) is worth the 12 minutes of your time. [Spoiler alert: He expects Ukraine will have recovered Crimea by Summer 2023.]
The New York Times has an important front-page article today, A Distracted Russia is Losing Its Grip on Its Old Soviet Sphere. Last week we were writing about how Russia's preoccupation with Ukraine was leaving the Central Asian nations up for grabs, and how China is moving in. You may fairly ask, "What has this got to do with me?" Today it doesn't. Tomorrow we may wish we hadn't been so myopic about the countries with funny names.
In case you don't have a subscription to the Times, here are some tantalizing morsels that might make you consider at least the online edition:
With the Kremlin distracted by its flagging war more than 1,500 miles away in Ukraine, Russia's dominium (sic) over its old Soviet empire shows signs of unraveling. Moscow has lost its aura and its grip, creating a disorderly vacuum that previously obedient former Soviet satraps, as well as China, or moving to fill.
...Today, Armenia is fuming. Its prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, who has been a close ally, appealed to Moscow in vain last month for help to halt renewed attacks by Azerbaijan. Furious at Russia’s inaction, Armenia is now threatening to leave Moscow’s military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization.
The Kazakh government that Mr. Putin helped prop up in January is veering far from the Kremlin’s script over Ukraine, and is looking to China for help in securing its own territory, parts of which are inhabited largely by ethnic Russians, and which Russian nationalists view as belonging to Russia.
And here along the mountainous border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, long-running quarrels between farmers over land, water and smuggled contraband escalated last month into a full-scale conflict involving tanks, helicopters and rockets, as the armies of the two countries fought each other to a standstill.
...Moscow’s security alliance has long been touted by Mr. Putin as Russia’s answer to NATO and an anchor of its role as the dominant (and often domineering) force across vast expanses of the former Soviet Union. But now the bloc is barely functioning. Five of its six members — Armenia, Belarus, Russia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — have been involved in wars this year, while the sixth, Kazakhstan, has seen violent internal strife.
...Some officials in [the Kyrgyzstan capital of] Bishkek wonder if Russia winked at the military action by Tajikistan, a tightly controlled dictatorship ruled by the same leader since 1994, even longer than Mr. Putin has been in control of the Kremlin. Kyrgyzstan, by contrast, is considered the only Central Asian country with a modicum of real democracy and a relatively free press.
The view of Mr. Putin siding with Tajikistan — rather than being an unbiased umpire between two members of his military alliance — gained more ground this past week when the Kremlin declared that it was giving the veteran Tajik dictator, Emomali Rahmon, a prestigious state award for his contribution to “regional stability and security.”
Kyrgyzstan’s foreign ministry said the award, announced by Moscow “while the blood of innocent victims has not yet cooled on Kyrgyz soil,” had caused “bewilderment.”
Read the whole article.
Putin is trying, step-by-step, to reconstitute the Russian Empire of Peter the Great. But his obsession with Ukraine is leading to neglect of the rest. He's a murderous tyrant, to be sure. But apparently he can't walk and chew gum.
William Saletan at The Bulwark has been watching Fox "News" so we don't have to. Today he reports that while the daytime programming is presenting accurate information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the demimondaines of the Fox evening hours apparently aren't watching. It's too early to call them a fifth column, but ....
Read Saletan's article here.
A sample:
“Putin is making nuclear threats,” [Tucker Carlson] noted. “Whatever the reason he is making them, the fact he is making them . . . is enough for any responsible person to say, ‘Now we stop.’”
Really? We want to make it that easy for Putin?
The Bulwark, by the way, is a web site founded by conservative Republicans (specifically, Sarah Longwell, Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol) whose loyalty to facts and truth is greater than their loyalty to the Republican Party. Thus, former Republicans.
