P.M. Carpenter

Russia's mistakes, advantage, advances, and Ukraine's opportunity

As Lt. Col. Erwin Rommel wrote in his book on infantry tactics, chapter 2, section 3: "Command posts must be dispersed."

Otherwise, you as the enemy are likely to experience what the Ukrainian military did today to the Russians in the Kharkiv province. When one of its reconnaissance units in the Izyum area spotted the compact Russian base (above), it relayed the coordinates to the special forces of the Ukrainian National Guard, which "worked on it" with heavy artillery, reports The New Voice of Ukraine.

U.S. intelligence has perceived that Russian forces in the Ukrainian east have learned lessons from the mistakes they made in the Ukrainian north. It appears they have a few more lessons to learn. The manner in which Russians establish their bases and command posts reminds one of the way they rolled their tanks down the streets of Ukrainian cities up north.

Ukraine was able to execute its artillery mission today because of the new and powerful weapons the West has been shipping to the besieged nation. Just yesterday and today, more than 12 U.S. cargo planes delivered radar systems, drones, heavy artillery and other equipment.

President Biden has requested $33 billion more in aid for Ukraine, $20 billion of which would be in military goods. That's the good news. The bad news is that he had to ask Congress for the appropriation, and Congress rarely acts quickly — on anything.

Meanwhile, Britain is sending missile launchers and it has offered to supply Poland with tanks that can then be transferred to Ukraine. Poland has already sent more than 200 Soviet-made tanks, as well as mobile artillery, drones and rocket launchers. Canada is sending howitzers and sophisticated cameras for Turkish-manufactured ballistic drones.

Britain's defense minister, Ben Wallace, has said that his nation's military support should unable Ukraine "to choose where it wishes to settle for peace." His personal view, however, is that Russia must be booted from Ukraine in toto.

"I want Putin not only beyond the pre-February boundaries. He invaded Crimea illegally, he invaded Donetsk illegally and he should comply with international law and in the long run leave Ukraine," said Wallace in a statement to members of parliament.

Cheers and a hearty hooray. I quite agree. Ukraine's total victory is within reach as long as the West keeps shuttling heavy offensive and defensive equipment to the country. A few dozen jets would help immensely, in view of Russia's thundering airstrikes in preparation for artillery strikes and then advancing ground forces.

A U.S. defense department official has described Russia's progress as "plodding." But however slow, it's still progress. And the one military component Ukraine is destined to remain short of is air power — unless it receives further help from the West.

Now is the time to strike and strike hard, from the air as well as on the ground. Russia is hurting, manpower-wise. British intelligence re-confirmed today that "Russia has been forced to merge and redeploy depleted and disparate units" that were recently humiliated in northern Ukraine, and so morale is likely to remain poor. It has also resorted to transporting soldiers from Russia's far reaches to the Donbas. "Moscow is trying to gain momentum," reports say.

Ukraine's challenge is to stop that momentum cold. And it can with the right support from the West, and the right timing of that support. For Russian forces are not only suffering from some of its old mistakes, it's wearied and, on troops, it's beginning to run low. Hit 'em now.

The free world must disregard the U.N. and create a worldwide NATO - to prevent more Ukraines

Since the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia, the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the post-WWI creation of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 — a quixotic attempt to "outlaw" war — and the establishment of the United Nations, the world has searched for ways to keep nations from invading and slaughtering each other. And the world has failed. Miserably.

The latest exhibit of international peacekeeping's dysfunction, that is, of the U.N.'s dysfunction, is, of course, the Russia-Ukraine war. Vladimir Putin's regime sits as a member of the global body, whose mission, in its words, is to be "the one place on Earth where all the world’s nations can gather together, discuss common problems, and find shared solutions that benefit all of humanity."

This week, Putin's Russia landed five missiles on Ukraine's capital city, which at the time was hosting the U.N.'s secretary general. Finland's foreign minister has called for the U.N. Security Council to examine the unprecedented outrage. Yet Russia is a permanent member of the Council with veto power, hence even a statement of condemnation would be doomed.

The absurdity of a warmongering, atrocities-committing Eurasian shogunate sitting on an alleged peacekeeper's "security" council is also a conspicuous assault on even the concept of international stewardship. As a humanitarian organization, the United Nations is a valuable resource; as an arbiter of peace, it is useless.

In urging Russia's expulsion from the U.N. earlier this month, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky explained his watertight reasoning: "so it cannot block decisions about its own war." In any respectable court of law, a self-interested judge would be required to recuse him- or herself from presiding over a case. At the U.N., a corrupt judge is assigned the protection of his own criminals.

Putin is laughing at his good fortune; his charter-sanctioned freedom to make a mockery of the world's only "conflict resolution" organ, even to show his contempt of the body by bombing a city in which the organization's leadership is meeting in solemn, sympathetic unity with the head of an aggressively brutalized nation. Brutalized by a dictatorship that sits cynically — ironically is too soft of a modifier — within the U.N. as a principal decision maker.  

This is not to argue that other U.N. member nations are saints. Still, there exists a vivid dividing line between those states of the world that prize liberty and national self-determination and those that do not. The president of one of the freedom-defending states has perceived the modern world's greatest crisis with alarming accuracy: the life-or-death struggle between liberal democracies and repressive autocracies.

In this struggle our planet's conflict arbiter is — let's just say it — worthless. The U.N. is made pitiably impotent by the autocracies that embody the world's most undesirable attributes and undertake its most objectionable transgressions. If the free world is to confront and overcome its defining crisis, it must fundamentally reorganize.

The most direct and possibly only approach to an international body charged with authentic, global suppression of national belligerence would be the creation of a worldwide NATO — with all its mutual-defense provisions. Let us not forget that the free world has the numerical advantage. Pew Research reported in 2017 that the world's democracies outnumbered autocracies by 96 to 21. (Other nations were classified as anocracies.) Free nations are also more likely to be the world's more prosperous nations, thus their combined resources would make the project financially doable.

Had such a global peace-enforcing organization existed when Vladimir was merely contemplating Ukraine's invasion, he would have stopped at contemplation. He never would have tackled the power of NATO as it is, let alone a NATO whose national membership stretched across the globe.

If Earth is to be a genuinely civilized planet, it requires a genuinely effective peacekeeping force. The United Nations is inherently incapable of performing the task. NATO, transfigured into the GTO — a fully armed, adequately manned Global Treaty Organization — could, and in fact obligatorily would, prevent the Putins of this world from ever again initiating unprovoked aggression.

Russian oligarchs are inching toward a coup. Next, the people. Then, maybe, the military.

According to outside reports and inside interviews with Russian oligarchs, the war in Ukraine has begun to "fray" their nerves and those of the Russian elite, the "cracks are starting to show," the division between pro-and anti-war factions is "becoming more marked."

In fact Russia's internal tensions at the highest levels were foreshadowed as early as 24 February, when President Putin summoned the country's richest muck-a-mucks for an update. Reports are revealing that among the latter, there was "shock" and "depression." Said one attendee, "Everyone was in a terrible mood. Everyone was sitting there crushed." Said another, "I’d never seen them as stunned as they were. Some of them could not even speak."

Their stupefaction was, to many others, now stupefying. The Biden Administration had been warning for weeks that Russia was intent on invading Ukraine — warnings backed up by the entire U.S. intelligence community. Yet even those warnings were somewhat superfluous. After all, Putin had been amassing troops on Ukraine's borders for just as long. What did the world think was going on? That Vladimir would spend all those rubles to gather troop formations and execute elaborate (though ultimately useless) training maneuvers only to spend more rubles to pull back the troops, tanks, trucks, etc.?

Here was one of those precise replays of history. In 1941, Hitler bamboozled Stalin with the tale that hundreds of thousands of German troops amassing on Russia's border were there merely for training exercises. Somehow, the usually paranoid Soviet totalitarian believed him. Then Nazi Germany struck. In the present-day story, Putin was Hitler. And much of the world was Stalin.

Which brings us up to today. Disgruntled, disillusioned Russian oligarchs are weeping more for themselves than their country's quite possible collapse. Their assets are being frozen; in many cases, tens of billions of dollars worth. Said one to the Washington Post: "It's a catastrophe.... In one day, they destroyed what was built over many years." Now the destruction may become permanent, since the White House has proposed the liquidation of these assets, the proceeds going to Ukraine.

Privately, the oligarchs are fuming at Putin. They believe he "blindsided' them by furtively(?) aiming for war. Publicly, their fulminations are, understandably, tempered, what with Putin's temper and inclination for lethal reprisals. Worse, they feel helpless. Unless the disgruntled oligarchs go public with their anger and sense of betrayal, Putin doesn't much give a damn what they think. The best they can do — so far — is express dissatisfaction with certain government proposals designed theoretically to counteract the damaging effects of Western sanctions.

A steel magnate, for instance, criticized the parliamentary idea of requiring foreign buyers who are interested in Russian goods other than energy to pay in rubles. He told a Moscow newspaper that the proposal would injure Russia's export markets — duh — which Russia had "fought for for decades." A metals plant owner strongly cautioned that a legislative measure that would confiscate fleeing foreign companies' assets would rock investor confidence and bring a return of 1917's revolutionary unrest. An aluminum oligarch "has gone furthest," writes the Post, saying that Russia's war in Ukraine is "insanity" — insane, however, only because of its economic downsides. The West, he smartly added, is also to blame for the war. Nevertheless, rather unsmartly he charged that the war is "a madness for which we will long be ashamed of."

The Post reports that Russian oligarchs remain emotionally paralyzed by fear. "I don’t know who has the balls to fight back," said one. Yet their paralysis may be temporary. In fact I would go so far as to wager that eventually they will overcome their fear, for otherwise they'll have nothing left. "If the war is long, and [we] begin to lose, then the chances will be greater" for open resistance to Putin, said one oligarch. "There will be a serious battle for Donbas and, if it is not successful, then there will be a big battle inside Russia," he added. The "if" becomes more of a when upon contemplating Ukraine's long-term odds of battlefield success. The West is now pouring war metériel into Ukraine that the nation needs most, and the Russian army is exhausting itself and its supplies.

Additionally, notwithstanding the heavy, pro-war propaganda with which Putin is dousing the people, Ukrainian attacks inside Russia are unnerving the locals and, reports the Post in a separate article, "threatening to upend President Vladimir Putin’s effort to insulate his citizens from the fighting." Add to that the mounting coffins and countless funeral ceremonies held for Russian soldiers, all across the nation. The people said enough during Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, and someday, they'll say "enough" about Ukraine.

Putin will then have a two-front war on his hands: one front manned by the privileged rich, the other, the commoners. Putin's military brass are likely to join in a third front, once the zeitgeist of the had enough ethos is plain to see — everywhere.

Trump, and the electorate's misunderstanding of what "conservatism" means

A part of the chart below makes sense, although not for the reason voters in 2016 believed. Obviously, Trump's 42% in the combined, "liberal" and "moderate" categories is idiotic. However his lesser 47% (compared to his presidential predecessors and GOP detractors) in the "conservative" column is at least a bit closer to reality — except that his conservative percentage should have bottomed out at 0%. Trump was never a conservative, no more than a Madison Cawthorn. He hasn't an ideological thought in his little head. Trump is just Trump: a bloated bag of unjustified ego; an ethical void; a classic, textbook sociopath with psychopathic tendencies who, like Richard III, would murder his nephews if it meant so much as another dram of self-aggrandizement and power. And because sociopaths never improve, he'll be exactly the same Trump in 2024 as he was in 2020, early 2021, and 2016.  

This, which happened today in Kyiv, could go on for years ...

... unless Russia's oligarchs, military officers and intelligence specialists pull off a coup and hang Vladimir Putin from a Kremlin lamppost. I'll provide the rope.  

The Russia-Ukraine war, another living-room war. Except ...

We who are removed by geographical and ideological grace from the hell of eastern Ukraine, its Dantean outreaches, and its distant, battered neighbors in the north, south and west, often yet all-too humanly see it as an abstraction. It's in the headlines and much discussed, sometimes debated, on news programs. We sit and watch the arrows and semi-circles of offense and defense on the Donbas map; we monitor what if any supplies are making their way to the Ukrainians; we read of the billions of dollars their Western friends are allocating to the war; we ponder Vladimir Putin's latest rhetorical atrocity.

We do all this from afar. Our angst and sympathies for Ukraine and its people may be deep and sincere, but perforce we also attend to the customary activities of everyday life: engaging with family and friends, delving into work, indulging blissful relaxation. The Russia-Ukraine war, for most of us, is subtext.

On occasion, however, we encounter visuals that are penetratingly painful and far more searing than anything we read about or listen to. We see powerful, heartbreaking scenes of Ukraine on fire, bombed-out apartment buildings, and in some venues — with more to come — dead Ukrainian bodies lying on the streets, murdered by insanity-ruled Russian soldiers, if they can be called that, rather than Putin-cell terrorists.

Yesterday I came across one such visual, passed along by Mother Jones' David Corn. This mere 44-second clip is shocking in its immense, earth-scorched devastation, courtesy Russia:

Video taken near Kharkiv by an American volunteering with the Ukrainian military. This is the hellscape Putin continues to create. pic.twitter.com/1vCRRNRWG1

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) April 23, 2022

Before you is what Russian forces have proceeded to do in the Donbas: air bombardments and artillery shellings in preparation for troop advances, reported the British Defense Ministry. Putin's killers and ravagers of towns and villages are spreading south of already occupied Izium, on the Donbas's western outskirts; their "progress" was made possible by vulnerabilities in Ukraine's less-manned, less- equipp
ed line around Kharkiv, northwest of Izyum, observed the Institute for the Study of War.

The ISW also surmised that two columns of Russian forces heading east to west in parallel motion intend to strike the strategic villages of Barvinkoe and Sloviansk, creating a corridor to the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic. Worse, Gen. Dvornikov's troops may use their southerly advance out of Izium to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east. But, as always, rather questionable is the readiness condition of Russia's physically and emotionally exhausted troops, noted the ISW.

Meanwhile, the hell of Mariupol gets hotter by the day. Russian forces continue to pound the city with "unguided free-falling bombs" — meaning they'll fall ... wherever — thus murdering even more Ukrainian citizens. In Russia's way of war, there is no honor, no decency, no traditionally respected rules of combat. Theirs isn't really combat, though. It's slaughter.

Beyond contributing to Ukraine's humanitarian relief and encouraging others to do the same — which we all can do here — what can a conscientious citizen of the free world do? That, gentle reader, is the most painful facet of this faraway hell — although any Ukrainian would gladly exchange places with us.

Let us pray for Elon Musk's "Twitter clusterf---"

The Atlantic writes that "liberal users on Twitter have greeted the news of Musk’s pending acquisition of the platform with everything from indifference to despair." Count me as residing within the indifference realm. I don't much care if Elon buys Twitter or forgets all about it and goes careening off into some other temporary obsession.

"I don't much care" does not mean I don't care at all. My marginal hope is what The Atlantic also writes: that "right-wing alternatives to Twitter have failed to take off because conservatives want to make liberals miserable, not build a community in which there are no libs left to own. If conservatives successfully drive their targets off Twitter, or if the network becomes an unusable cesspool, it will become similarly worthless, both financially and politically."

Hallelujah. Let right-wing anarchy reign, and cause the walls of their jeremiads to come tumbling down. So I kinda care about Twitter's pending sale.

Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook offers this (emailed) Musk-clusterfuck news:

Musk took aim at Twitter employees and others this week in a round of tweets that raised new concerns about the company’s future under his freewheeling approach to content moderation. (He also said — with tongue presumably in cheek — that he would buy Coca-Cola next, "to put the cocaine back in.")

Musk criticized a longtime Twitter executive who has shaped its content policies. He tweeted that a past moderation decision by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and safety expert, was "obviously incredibly inappropriate." He later posted a meme mocking Gadde. Almost immediately, some people began tweeting abusive, racist and sexist attacks at her.

"Let’s make Twitter maximum fun!" Musk also tweeted. But the company’s current and former leaders did not appear to share that sentiment. Here is how some of them reacted to his criticisms:

"Bullying is not leadership," tweeted Dick Costolo, who was Twitter’s C.E.O. from 2010 to 2015. He also responded to the meme Musk posted, writing: "what’s going on? You’re making an executive at the company you just bought the target of harassment and threats." [Editorial note: I detest the overused word "meme" nearly as much as I detest the quickly hackneyed phrase of "cancel culture."]

Twitter’s C.E.O., Parag Agrawal, offered a muted defense of his staff. He tweeted that he was "proud" of employees who were working to improve Twitter "despite the noise." In private, Twitter employees grumbled that he wasn’t outspoken enough in defending them....

Could Musk back out of the deal? Some investors are still betting on it, with Twitter’s stock trading below Musk’s offer price.... And Tesla’s stock has fallen by around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, reflecting worries that a distracted C.E.O. could be bad for the electric carmaker.... And there are questions about the financial viability of the deal: Twitter would take on some $13 billion in debt as part of Musk’s buyout, versus about $5 billion on its balance sheet now, and its earnings are modest relative to that much bigger interest bill.

By the way, I definitely don't care, not one bit, about Tesla.

Russia's advance in the Donbas, and German lessons from Erwin Rommel

This week is bringing unfortunate news from Ukraine's eastern front. Russian forces are steadily, though slowly, gaining territory and towns. Still, there is an upside. Their advances were predictable, and predicted — for the short term. The longer-term forecast, on the other hand, is encouraging.

As was written on this site last Saturday: "The Russians, with a fresh and ferocious commander, are on the ground, in possession of superior numbers as well as superior equipment — and more of it coming each day — while the West's military supplies to the Ukrainians are somewhere in the air, and maybe will make it to the right locales. Advantage, for next week, Russia."

On Sunday, however, I voiced this expectation: "Yesterday I assessed that throughout the next week, the advantage is weighted toward Russia. I see no reason to reevaluate; it will be a while before its foe is properly armed up. For the long term, though: advantage, Ukraine."

As is evident in last week's writing, Ukraine's brighter future hangs on the West's hasty shipments of heavy, offensive weaponry to the eastern front. In that, there is nothing new; outside military supplies to Ukraine have dictated the course of this war since before its beginning. Now, the timing of those shipments — with the proper contents — is more critical than ever. A veritable army of analysts had urged the U.S. and its NATO allies to initiate and expedite supplies of offensive equipment much sooner. Today there is no longer a need for convincing Western leaders. Ukraine's future is inextricable from the West's swift logistical efforts.

As was also rather easily foreseen — except by blinkered, retired military brass (such as this guy) windbagging their way through cable-news interviews — the presence of Russia's new supreme commander in Ukraine, Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov, has made a notable difference in Russia's performance on the ground. The difference is improvement. Having learned from his troops' catastrophic forays into northern Ukraine, Dvornikov is plodding ahead methodically. We see no quick, deep thrusts into enemy territory, stretching supply lines and permitting the Ukrainian Army's encirclements. These fresh tactics may seem elementary and obvious, nevertheless they required the intervention of the experienced Gen. Dvornikov's command.

What also seems obvious is that Dvornikov has read Gen. Erwin Rommel. Last night I was reading what's considered his masterpiece of military literature, Infantry Attacks. Hitler read it and was impressed, which contributed to his promotions of Rommel, who in 1937 — the book's year of publication — was a lieutenant colonel. In 1943 the U.S. military made the work required reading for officers. (I also have Rommel's unfinished sequel, "Tank Attacks" — unfinished because of a rather inauspicious case of involuntary suicide after the failed, 1944 plot to kill Hitler.) I have never been a military enthusiast. Yet military history is inextricable from political history, my field of professional study. As such, I wanted to be better informed about military tactics. Hence my reading of Rommel's Infantry Attacks.

Some of the action in Rommel's opening chapters entails 1914 warfare in French territory quite similar to that of Ukraine's Donbas: The ground is open, flat, and rare is the occasion for a soldier's concealment. Rommel was a lieutenant and platoon commander in the German army in 1914. Two decades later he wrote of his involvement in a German attack that "had to be carried out over terrain that was two miles in width and offered little or no cover." Rommel recalled that one German battalion "quickly took cover in the potato field and found protection from this fire by digging with their spades. They had no casualties in spite of the heavy day-long artillery bombardment." A reserve company, however, advanced, which "led to heavy casualties from enemy artillery fire. This teaches us again that no massing together is permissible within enemy artillery range." Rommel also advised that if soldiers "lose their nerve and break for cover" wherever it might be found, "the commander must take vigorous action, using his personal weapons if necessary."

Russia's Gen. Dvornikov is conspicuously following the tactical understanding of Rommel & Battalion in France. On not dissimilar ground in the Donbas, he is digging in, protecting his troops from artillery fire and advancing only with due caution. And should some of his men "lose their nerve and break for cover" during advances, I suspect Dvornikov is also following Rommel's command advice of inspiring gallantry among his troops by shooting the (smart) cowards who advance backward. Actually, Dvornikov had no need for Rommel's advice about battlefield inspiration, for he would have already known that in the Second World War, Red Army commanders routinely shot any man seen running in the wrong direction.

Even the usually optimistic Institute for the Study of War has turned a bit gloomy. Its recent campaign assessment of Russian forces is that they "have adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine."

Russia's new and sounder pattern is unlikely to succeed for long, however, given that its military leadership will be unable to effect much change in the steady depletion of its redeployed troops, its daily consumption of limited resources, and a nagging lack of morale among the men it must rely on.

But for Ukraine, its war is still the West's war. Ukraine's success depends on the speedy delivery of Western supplies of advanced anti-aircraft systems, tanks, heavy artillery and other offensive weapons. Up-close Javelins will do little good in open-field combat. The eastern front portends mostly a long-range battle — the killing of men from considerable distances. Only the West can supply Ukraine with such battle-winning goods. One hopes that far more of them arrive soon. If so — and there is abundant reason to believe it is so — Ukraine will begin turning the situation around.

Could a GOP Anti-Trump defeat Trump?

With the assistance of "several Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president," the Atlantic's Mark Leibovich, a writer I admire, frames a quite questionable scenario for 2024, Leibovich & Co.'s dubious thesis is that the notion of Trump as the Republican Party's sure nominee is "outdated." What's needed, say Leibovich and friends, is a brazen Anti-Trump to challenge him, ridicule him, and call him a "loser" at every opportunity. This just might do the trick, they say.

Says former congresswoman and GOP strategist Barbara Comstock: "For Republicans, whether they embrace the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on him." This she notes after also noting that he "lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House," the first president to accomplish that stunning feat since Herbert Hoover, 90 years ago.

Says former Jeb Bush campaign aide and Bulwark writer Tim Miller: "The problem with 2016 is that people waited ’til they were at their politically weakest point before they started pounding Trump."

Says Michael Cohen, yeah that Michael Cohen: "It is erroneous to think there’s a benefit to being the adult in the room against Donald Trump. There’s a way of going after Trump that I would call intelligent mockery."

And, finally, Leibovich himself: "If it was true in 2016 that other Republicans couldn’t touch Trump, it’s not necessarily so now, given the win-loss record he has since accumulated."

I don't particularly wish I could agree with Leibovich and his Republican advisers. I'd rather see Trump run and go all the way — in the primaries. He is Democrats' best, poison-tipped weapon, possibly their only weapon. Why would anyone in his or her right mind want to see a bold Anti-Trump running against a (probably) electorally debilitated Democratic nominee? No, I hope Republicans hoist him on their shoulders and carry him to victory at the GOP convention.

And I flatly disagree with Leibovich & Friends in their belief that a Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu or Chris Christie could pull off what they propose. Sure, they could ridicule him and poke him with taunts of being a loser, but the MAGA maniacs know what they want and they want Trump. Plus they're the ones who maniacally vote in primary contests. Every. Time. Trump would dance on the challenger's political grave after each Primary Day, and the little Trumpeters would dance and beam along with him.

An honorable try, Mark. But your thesis won't fly.

With love, from Trump to McIntosh, "Go f--- yourself"

This is good. Trump had a "Go fuck yourself" note sent to his former pal, the far-right Club for Growth's president, David McIntosh, reports CNN. Only about two weeks ago, Trump weighted down a North Carolina stage and praised McIntosh as "a winner" and "fighter.... You are a great man."

What was the great man's sin? What did he do to deserve Trump's adolescent wrath, in three little adolescent words? Well, with his organization's considerable cash, Mr. McIntosh has persisted in his endorsement of mentally unstable Josh Mandel in Ohio's senatorial primary race.

There's more. In television ads McIntosh has been bashing the hillbilly multimillionaire and mentally unstable J.D. Vance, whom Trump has embraced. Now, though, he's bashing Trump, too, as being out of touch with the mentally unstable MAGA crowd.

In a return, "Go fuck yourself" act of non-repentance for our thorough enjoyment, today McIntosh released this television ad:

Interesting move: Josh Mandel’s backer, the Club for Growth, is now explicitly whacking Trump in their TV ads over his endorsement of JD Vance and even his endorsement of Mitt Romney (!) in 2012. pic.twitter.com/87F2tE16hw

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) April 27, 2022

McIntosh and the Club for Growth are as deeply unhinged as Trump, Vance and Mandel, but damn, I gotta love the two, Mr. M and the CfG, for telling the Orange Blight what he can do with his, ahem, displeasure.

Neo-Nazi publicity is publicity Ukraine doesn't need

EMPR (an abbreviation of EuromaidanPR) Media — a Ukrainian, "self-funded, alternative news media outlet born on the barricades of Euromaidan" — reports that Andriy Biletsky, the commander of the Azov Battalion (about 1,000 strong) and political party leader, has made the questionable claim that the "Russians cannot start the battle for Donbas or they are just delaying it until they take Mariupol."

Biletsky added that with 9,000 troops, "We will be able to relieve Mariupol if we win the battle for Donbas. It is Mariupol that is delaying the battle for Donbas for Ukraine." A glance at this recent map (NYT) of the eastern front throws Biletsky's assessment into more than a touch of doubt. The red arrows are neon-blinking signs of a robust battle stretching hundreds of miles. The battle is also projected to consume weeks or even months. By battle's end, Mariupol's courageous defenders, hunkered down in a steel plant, will have been starved or bombed out. Nevertheless, Biletsky's optimism, while heartening, is misleading. 

The colossal downside to his story? You may not know who this battalion commander and political party leader is, but his identity is less than admirable. In fact it is downright repulsive.

The political party Biletsky leads is that of the "National Corps," a far-right, white-supremacist organ founded in 2016. With the world's thanks, it failed to gain so much as one seat in the Ukrainian parliament in 2019, having won only 2.5% of the popular vote, thus also failing to reach the required, 5% threshold for a seat.

The party's far-right bona fides appear in its "principled" embrace of an all-powerful, combined presidency and prime ministership; the supreme commander-in-chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces. A strong president in times of war may be a necessity, but Teutonic or Stalinesque fascism is scarcely what Ukrainians' desire. They, and their friends throughout the free world, are quite pleased with the thoughtful, popularly endorsed, pluralism-driven Volodymyr Zelensky.

Biletsky's National Corps party also advocates Ukraine's revisited status as a nuclear power. This advocacy, of course, only serves to provide Vladimir Putin with the deceptive propaganda of Ukraine as a whole being desirous of nuclear weapons. Which it decidedly is not. But Putin needs to bamboozle the Russian people with scary tales and ghost stories about Ukraine's looming, thermonuclear threat to the motherland.

In addition, the National Corps is opposed to Ukrainian membership in either the European Union or NATO, which, paradoxically, is perhaps Mr. Putin's most fervent desire. This, he happily condones: to keep Ukraine entirely separated from Western influence and any politico-economic-military cooperation. And in the category of just plain weird, Biletsky's National Corps advocates the establishment of an old, post-WWI geopolitical scheme to unite Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia into one "superstate."

Now, though, in the category of the wholly repellent, Andriy Biletsky is nothing if not a grade-A bigot. In a 2010 speech he demanded the coming together of "the white races of the world into a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen" — a clarion call as Hitlerian as they come. The Guardian, that year, interviewed one of Biletsky's true believers, who obliviously said "there’s nothing inherently wrong with national socialism as a political idea. I don’t know why everyone always associates it immediately with concentration camps.” Could be because Hitler's national socialism was a race-based ideology that extolled the annihilation of Biletsky's latter-day "Untermenschen."

The Guardian also reported that the National Corps' leader has since "toned down his rhetoric." Three years earlier, Biletsky denied both his racism and having ever delivered racist speeches. It's telling that another true believer said, as The Guardian put it, that "the National Corps are not neo-Nazis and did not want to establish a white supremacist state, although he admitted that some members hold white supremacist or neo-Nazi views." They just happen to hold those views as National Corps members, no particular connection.

It's a damn good thing that Ukraine isn't full of Andriy Biletskys, as Putin insists it is. If Ukraine were full of them, then the world would say to Putin: "You can have it."

If the Russian people knew the truth, they would "spit out" Putin and Lavrov "like a gnat"

President Biden should not have said "this man cannot remain in power." He should have said these men cannot remain in power, given that Sergei Lavrov is to Vladimir Putin what Joachim von Ribbentrop was to Adolf Hitler. That Russia's foreign minister can say that prevention of nuclear war "is our key position on which we base everything" while his president repeatedly threatens the world with nuclear attacks is a marvel of fascistic insidiousness.

With seeming sobriety, Mr. Lavrov also said this week on Russian state television that the potential of nuclear war with NATO has grown because the West is "engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy." There would be, of course, no proxy war if Russia had not illegally invaded neighboring Ukraine, a barbarity for which Putin, Lavrov's boss, has provided several conflicting, nakedly surreal casus belli. Lavrov added that he "would not want to elevate those risks artificially," which in fact he was doing by raising the spectre of nuclear war.

It was Ukraine's foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who explained Lavrov's real message: "Moscow senses defeat." Kuleba added that for 15 years "Lavrov's trademark ... has been that sort of bravado:" displays of the madman theory in the face of losing face. Adding more sanity to an insane setting was Britain's armed forces minister, James Heappey, who told BBC Television: "What the West is doing to support its allies in Ukraine is very well calibrated."

Some have said that the West's calibration has been excessively narrow. But whatever the proper measures should have been in supplying Ukraine with effective weaponry, we can all agree that the West never applied undue haste. The first crack in America's probable overcautiousness came when President Biden, in mid-March, began shipments of Switchblade, or so-called "kamikaze," drones to Ukraine. Profoundly noteworthy is that in providing these drones to Ukraine, the U.S. crossed Moscow's nuclear "red line." Yet Putin pulled no nuclear trigger. Noteworthy, and instructive.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby described Lavrov’s ominous words as "obviously unhelpful, not constructive.” Lavrov's words were also an unsightly tantrum — a prepubescent kicking and screaming against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's stated intent to "weaken" Russia. The foreign minister said "this is an illusion." If so, it's one of matter over mind, since the West and Ukraine's efforts to "wear out, exhaust the Russian army and the Russian military industrial war complex," as Lavrov put it, appear to be working.

Lest you think Sergei has a diminished, possibly spent supply of exotic sophistry, blather and bombast, think again. For only one day after he rattled Vladimir's nuclear saber, he intoned that Ukraine is "not really interested in negotiations" because the West is strong-arming the invaded country into perpetual war. "If that continues, negotiations won’t yield any result," said Lavrov. "The United States has practically ceased all contacts," he continued, "simply because we were obliged to defend Russians in Ukraine."

In the way of brass balls, that was a twofer, anatomically and literally. It was Putin, not President Zelensky, who declared on April 12 that negotiations were "at a dead-end." His choice, not Ukraine's.

As for the reason Lavrov gave for Russia's invasion — defending Ukraine's Russophones — Putin has given four others: it's self-defense, against NATO's expansion; Ukraine isn't a real country, just part of Russia; Ukraine desires nuclear weapons, which threatens Moscow; and Russia must re-expand to a Greater Russia to rebalance world power and keep the wicked West at bay. It's dealer's choice, or take your pick. If you dislike these reasons, President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will gladly come up with more.

Roughly 17 million Russians died in Hitler and Ribbentrop's war against them. If only today's Russians could know that their own leaders are but Slavic incarnations of the psycho-suicidal Nazis who cost them so dearly, they would take Putin's advice and "spit them out like a gnat."

A weird, vacuous view of Russia's invasion

Yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul made an Elmer Fudd Looney Tunes point in committee session while adding that he wasn't actually making the point. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was understandably shocked by Paul's fatuity, while leaving the rest of us just as shocked.

"The countries that have been attacked, Georgia and Ukraine, were part of the Soviet Union ... since the 1920s," observed the senatorial international relations expert. (Film follows, below.) Blinken then attempted to educate Paul on the elementary facts of unacceptable international misbehavior, which, also in fact, even an elementary school student could understand without being so instructed.  

The senator was clearly defending Vladimir Putin's revanchist aggression and inexpressible atrocities in Ukraine. He did so, one gathers, because Donald Trump is a pal of the autocratic mass murderer. After all, said Trump less than one month into his one, wildly corrupt, unspeakably ignorant term: "There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?"

Hence Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia were just everyday parts of the globe's mainstream conduct; even the oft-sainted U.S. goes around slaughtering thousands of innocent foreigners, don't you know. Why all the fuss about Putin's Russia? It's no worse than Paul's America today.

You may recall when American conservatives extolled America as God's blessed gift to the world; it is, and always has been, they argued, a glorious beacon of liberty, human rights and religious freedom. Theirs was as one-dimensional and foolishly simplistic as any American-exceptionalist argument, and yet, like most argumentative oddities, there was some truth in it.

Far-right pseudoconservatives such as the roundly disgraced Donald Trump and benighted Rand Paul have merely taken the argument and  — on good buddy Russia's behalf — turned it on its head.

The logical conclusion? The United Kingdom has every right to reclaim its former outposts, those rebellious united states, violently if necessary. After all, America was once part of Great Britain.         

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): “The countries that have been attacked, Georgia and Ukraine, were part of the Soviet Union ... since the 1920s.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “That does not give Russia the right to attack them.” pic.twitter.com/jnlRP6wAsN

— The Recount (@therecount) April 26, 2022

Danny Kaye's "Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)"

When I was a kid, I thought Danny Kaye was the funniest man alive. (Well, maybe along with Donald O'Connor.) I still hold to that opinion. I watched The Court Jester I don't know how many times in late-night movie shows, and I could watch it another 15 or 20 times. His talent for mimicry was otherworldly (I began mimicking Kaye) and his stupendous ability to flawlessly run off tongue-twisters rendered me agog. Since we've entered an age in which so many things Russian are the focus of our attention, I thought I would share what was his big break in show business: the 1941 Broadway play, "Lady in the Dark." In it he "sang" Ira Gershwin's "Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)" — a salute to Russian classical composers, back when we liked the Russians. This is no alliterative tongue-twister, but how he managed to rattle off the names sans error every night on stage and twice on Sundays, I'll never know how. But I'm not Danny Kaye. (I couldn't find his Broadway rendition on YouTube, unfortunately. I know not what TV show this rendition is from. But who cares?)

Russia's greatest challenge now lies in western Ukraine, not the east

For weeks, Russia threatened airstrikes on the West's shipments of heavy military hardware into Ukraine. What has puzzled is that that it failed to follow up with those strikes. Until yesterday. Russia finally hit five rail venues and fuel depots in western and central Ukraine.

Nevertheless, I have wondered why the lengthy delay in Russian airstrikes on Western war matériel that soon will be blasting the aggressor back to Moscow. As I noted in the previous post, the U.S. is shipping tanks and assorted missile systems into Ukraine; Germany is sending dozens of armored antiaircraft vehicles; and Britain is piling on, sending yet more armored vehicles capable of downing jets and helicopters. One would think Russia's greatest urgency in eastern Ukraine would be to bomb this hardware in western Ukraine.

Yet, weeks passed — even though the hardware has flowed eastwardly for quite a while now  — and no damaging airstrikes, not until Monday. Why? From military analysts, the perfectly unpuzzling answers are rolling out with clarity, although the answers have been no real secret for some time.

First, they say, Russian pilots are leery of the very equipment that Ukraine has been receiving: air-defense capabilities that can blast the pilots, too, back to Moscow, and not all in one piece. Furthermore, say analysts, Russia must preserve what long-range precision missiles it has, which aren't that many.

Russian supplies of such weaponry as Kalibr and Iskander precision missiles "aren’t necessarily large," says Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russia specialist at the U.S. military think tank and research institute CNA. And "they are using them up, and they don’t want to use them all because that would weaken their ability to fight NATO."

That is a most unlikely prospect, but Putin is paranoid and a bit unhinged when it comes to believing the West is the true, sprawling "evil empire." He just never knows when Evil might strike — insert The Twilight Zone's theme music here.

As understandable as that explanation is for Russia's airstrike delays, there's another reason. Let's just say that Russian military commanders seem to comprehend that their country is pretty bad at precision-missile strikes. Or as former Pentagon official and CIA officer Mick Mulroy put it in military jargon, the Russians are "not very good at dynamic targeting" — that is, striking targets in motion, rather than sitting like helpless ducks.

Russia's military would be wise to bone up on the martial science of precision strikes, and soon. Because the West's heavy military supplies are flowing into Ukraine with what U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calls "unimaginable speed." Except it's not unimaginable. It's being done, on Ukraine's railway system and roads in the west.

Added Mulroy: "The fight for Donbas will be won or lost primarily on logistics: weapons, equipment and ammunition. There have to be uninterrupted supply lines from the U.S. and NATO." That is now the West's greatest challenge, as it is Russia's.