Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

People are complicated. Love is not.

I was promised a recession.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Bark louder, little dog.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War for Ukraine Day 308: A Brief Wednesday Night Update

War for Ukraine Day 308: A Brief Wednesday Night Update

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I’ve picked up a low grade stomach bug, nothing serious just annoying, so I’m going to keep tonight’s update brief.

We’ll start with Major General Budanov, the head of Ukrainian Military Intelligence, who made a battlefield circulation to Bakhmut today:

The Defense Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine’s site has the details:

On December 27-28, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, Chief of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, visited the advanced positions of the Ukrainian Defence Forces in Bakhmut, where Special Forces intelligence officers are working.

Major General Budanov listened to reports from the commanders of the Defence Intelligence units, set them tasks, as well as awarded the servicemen, who especially distinguished themselves in battles against the invaders.

Lots of pictures at the link!

This guy will never have to buy a round of drinks on any multinational assignment with American military personnel!

Here’s President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump:

I wish you health, dear Ukrainians!

Today – so it turned out – is the day of summing up this year and plans for the next year.

I held a meeting with officials specializing in international relations regarding events and plans for January.

I met with the Minister of Defense of France who arrived in Ukraine. We discussed cooperation over the year, the reconstruction of our country and another step in strengthening our air defense. Thank you, France!

I met with government officials and heads of parliamentary committees. We discussed the solutions that are being prepared.

Today, I also delivered the annual Message to the Verkhovna Rada on the external and internal situation of Ukraine. About how we all – all Ukrainians – changed the world this year and what we will do next year.

Probably, you could already see the highlights of all these events in the news, or you will see them.

I would like to add one more thing to everything that was done and said today. Add something non-political.

No matter what is happening and what is on your mind, support each other. Necessarily.

Please take the time to say kind words to those close to you. Even if these are not people close to you – just to other Ukrainians.

Please find an opportunity and a moment to thank for the work, to praise for this or that effort, for the care.

And if a person is in such a difficult situation, at such a difficult time, remains alone and for some reason does not have relatives, please ask if he or she needs help. Or just help without even asking.

If you know that a person is waiting for a son or daughter from the war, please pay attention: say hello, listen, help.

Hug your family more often. Tell your friends more often how much you appreciate them. Support colleagues more often. Thank your parents more often. Rejoice with children more often.

Do not forget to call when relatives are waiting, even just to hear: how are you? Do not forget to write messages to friends and acquaintances at least sometimes – you should not lose contact now.

And please don’t forget to say thank you when you’ve been helped. Please try to support those who fight for our country.

Our attention to others, when it may be lacking from one of our relatives – for various reasons, our words that can warm those around us when events are too cold, and our care for each other when circumstances are challenging – all this is also our common defense.

We have not lost our humanity even though we have gone through terrible months. And we will not lose it even though there is also a difficult year ahead. We will reach victory. And we have to do it really together.

Take care of Ukraine, appreciate each other and do everything to help our warriors!

Every day – until victory.

Glory to all our people! 

Glory to Ukraine!

Here’s former NAVDEVGRU Squadron Leader Chuck Pfarrer’s most recent assessments of the situations in Kremenna and Bakhmut:

Speaking of Bakhmut, The Kyiv Independent‘s Illia Ponomarenko is reporting from there:

We have some clarification regarding the Ukrainians killed in action attempting a sabotage mission in Bryansk, Russia. They were not Ukrainian Special Operations, nor were they regular Ukrainian forces:

That doesn’t discount the dangerous mission they undertook or the sacrifice they made to try to accomplish it.

Nine for mortal men doomed to die…

TaMara’s comment when I sent the first tweet to her:

Jesus.. and they’re hideous

Tom Levenson’s when I sent it to him:

I don’t think the writers for this season are trying at all.

No reply yet from Cole.

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

You know what this means? Balloon Juice strategic film series guided discussion of the Patron cartoon!

The new video at Patron’s official TikTok is the trailer above:

@patron__dsns

Уххх!🔥Перша серія вийде вже 7 січня на моєму YouTube і на @megogo_ua! Ставте дзвіночки, щоб не пропустити❤️

♬ оригинальный звук – Patron_official

The caption machine translates as:

Uhhh!🔥The first episode will be released on January 7 on my YouTube and @megogo_ua! Set the alarm so you don’t miss ❤️

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

75Comments

  1. 1.

    Mike in DC

    Adam, if Svatove and Kremina are liberated, how distant of a goal is Luhansk itself?  I understand that it’s still over 100km away from those places, and that Severodonetsk and Lyschansk would come first, among others, but it occurs to me that retaking Luhansk and Donetsk would effectively “win” the Eastern front of this war(wouldn’t it?).

  2. 2.

    Alison Rose

    Okay, many different feelings: Zelenskyy’s address about caring and helping each other and how words can warm us when events are cold had me all soft and fuzzy, Bakhmut made me angry-sad, those rings made me LOL as did the Defense of Ukraine tweet, and Patron’s video made me very happy.

    It’s a lot. It’s so much to try to wrap your head around, and that’s me speaking from thousands of miles away. I know I can’t even imagine what it’s like from the eye of the storm. All because one pathetic stubborn maniacal man-child and his country of drooling minions refuse to stop living in the past. Sigh.

    Thank you as always, Adam. Hope you feel better very soon.

  7. 7.

    Origuy

    It looks like the Bird site is having problems. Accessing Twitter from the web gets you an error; the Android app doesn’t allow logins. Only the iOS app gets through. Apparently a problem with the authentication process.

  9. 9.

    West of the Cascades

    Wow!! If only they could get the guy who voiced Paddington Bear in Ukraine to do the voice of Patron. Although I understand he’s busy on another project these days.

  10. 10.

    Andrya

    Nine for mortal men doomed to die…  Speaking as a die-hard Tolkien fanatic, that made my day.  (And get well soon!)

    A question for all the jackals… Three days ago I tried to make a donation (several hundred dollars) to United24.  My credit union flagged it as fraudulent/criminal, and would not let it got through.  The next day they texted me to ask if it was legitimate and I texted back “yes”.  Tomorrow I’m going to visit them in person- I know from past experience that phoning them will only lead to an hour of automated phone answering hell.  (There’s a special place in hell for whomever invented automated phone answering.)

    So here are my questions to the jackals:

    1. Has anyone else tried to donate to United24 and had similar trouble?
    2. Has anyone else donated to United24 and has it go through without trouble?
  12. 12.

    oklahomo

    @Origuy: Took me about ten clicks but finally got in to watch slowly spinning blue circles resolve to my notifications.  Thing has run like shit the last few days.

  13. 13.

    Anoniminous

    Seems to be a trend.
    A new wave of mysterious deaths of Russian high-ranking officials:
    24/12: Alexander Buzakov, 66- General Director of military shipyard
    25/12: Alexey Maslov, 69- former Commander-in-Chief of Ground Forces of Russia
    24/12: Pavel Antonov, 65- one of the richest deputies in Russia

  14. 14.

    CaseyL

    Those ring aren’t only comically overwrought, they also look to be uncomfortable to wear.  Plenty of places to pinch a less-than-slender finger.

  15. 15.

    Anoniminous

    What the Hell?

    combat losses are likely forcing the Russian military in the area to use squad-sized assault groups …

    The typical Russian squad size is SEVEN PEOPLE! Completely useless to send that few against entrenched defenders.​

    “5/ The Russian military’s reported use of squad-sized groups is likely a result of prolonged attritional warfare and indicates the degradation of larger doctrinal formations above the platoon level.”

  16. 16.

    Alison Rose

    @Andrya: I had a similar issue when I tried to donate during the summer using my card. But I was able to do so through Paypal and have done monthly recurring donations that way with no issues.

  19. 19.

    WaterGirl

    @Andrya: United24 is a foreign entity.  My credit union flags the same transaction every January as I pay my annual renewal amount for the time-tracking software I use for work for my clients.

    I feel pretty confident that that’s all it was, and if I were you I would try again with an online donation before heading down in person.

  26. 26.

    Bill Arnold

    @Anoniminous:
    Very busy edit history on that page. (dark joke)
    Original was 9 July 2022:
    curprev 11:40, 9 July 2022‎ Cgbuff talk contribs‎ 2,150 bytes +2,150‎ ←Created page with ‘{{Short description|Series of unusual deaths since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine}} The ”’2022 Russian mystery deaths”’ are a series of unusual deaths that have occurred since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine,…

  31. 31.

    Ruckus

    @Origuy:

    I just checked twit for some links in this post but I’m no longer logged in. I have no idea if my account is gone, stolen, never existed, etc. And I just tried and can’t log in. Damn it I no longer exist….

    Looks like everything is going normal elon. All fucked up.

  33. 33.

    dmsilev

    @Ruckus: Washington Post:

    Twitter experiences a widespread global outage

    Twitter experienced a global outage late Wednesday, according to numerous reports from Twitter users and the online tracker Downdetector.

    It wasn’t immediately clear how many Twitter accounts were impacted by the outage. As of just before 8 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Downdetector had tracked more than 10,000 user reports of outages. Virtually all 10,000 reports had emerged over the course of the previous hour.
    […]

    Twitter operates three major data centers globally. Musk ordered the biggest data center in Sacramento to be shut down on Christmas, provoking anguish among current and former engineers, according to a person familiar with the order who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

    The person said that in group chats among current and former engineers on Wednesday, some speculated that the outage was triggered by a software update gone wrong.

  35. 35.

    Ken

    @dmsilev: Impressive graph at downdetector.

    I noticed over the past couple of weeks that downdetector has a “new normal” problem — it shows the normal number of reported outages, but that’s based on a moving average. So where a year ago that was around 2, over the past few weeks it’s been creeping up. If today’s behavior keeps up, in a month it will be showing that’s it’s “normal” for twitter to have 4000 reported outages, assuming the thing’s still running in a month.

  36. 36.

    Anoniminous

    @dmsilev: ​ Tesla’s stock price has collapsed, down 71% this year. Jan 1 it was $400/share, today it’s $113. Part of that simply has to be people are starting to realize Musk is a bullshit artist and a terrible, terrible, business man​

    People have been saying Twitter is tottering along by momentum, without the necessary support and engineers to keep the place running.

  37. 37.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ruckus:
    Just a few minutes ago, it finally realized that I was still logged in in the browser I use for my non-anon id.
    Whatever. Twitter is running on fumes and good resiliency engineering that was mostly done and maintained by employees who are no longer employed by twitter.

    .

  38. 38.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Ken: I *had* been noticing a non-trivial and very-noticeable slowdown on my visits to the site [ETA:  to twitter] in the browser, as well as the loading of LG&M’s twitter widget (on the RHS of their page), over the last week-or-so.  Very noticeable.  Though it’s gone today, which is interesting in itself.

  39. 39.

    Ken

    @Jay: Maybe the Russians are upset that this year’s NATO Christmas video was filmed in Latvia.

    It probably didn’t help that the soldiers are singing the Ukrainian Carol (Щедрик) while marching steadily, inexorably forward. Ding, dong, ding, dong….

  41. 41.

    Ruckus

    I was finally able to log back in to twit but from all the comments I’d say that twits time seems to have come.

    Except Greta Thunberg’s. On twit earlier today she put Andrew Tate in his place. His bragging and dick waving didn’t go well for him. At all. She’s got 2.1 million likes for her roasting him with a one line come back. And people are still adding on their likes as I type.

  42. 42.

    Ruckus

    @Bill Arnold:

    Yep!

    I am figuring out mastodon. It is a lot different than twit and does the same thing but does it a lot differently. It’s going to take an old fart a while to get up to speed.

  43. 43.

    Alison Rose

    @Ruckus: And of course, one of my buzzkill friends had to complain that Greta’s response and everyone boosting it were body-shaming and using genital size as a stand-in for bad personalities or something.

  45. 45.

    Ruckus

    @Alison Rose:

    I saw someone do something like that but to me it all started with him being a dick and her responding to his dickishness in a fine and funny manner. He dick shamed himself and she just helped him out a bit by finishing him off with a kick to his likely tiny area. And made a direct, deserved and seemingly fatal hit.

  46. 46.

    piratedan

    @Alison Rose: mayhap I’m wrong, but that sounds like way too much holier than thou to me…

    Guys with tiny dicks have been getting laid for centuries, lately by not being knuckle dragging aholes and noting that being an attentive partner counts for more than being a “one trick pony”, so to speak.

  47. 47.

    Alison Rose

    @Ruckus: Yeah, like…to me, sure, we shouldn’t act like having a small dick is in and of itself something embarrassing, because it isn’t. But in this case, the point is that some men DO feel embarrassed about it and decide to act like aggressive assholes to compensate internally for their own perceived deficiency. So that’s the “energy” she’s talking about, and I’m fine with it.

  48. 48.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Alison Rose: I found her response perfectly cromulent, given this particular bit of Tate’s tweet:

    Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.

    I mean, he was just *begging* for someone to clapback at him for his boasting about his dick size.  B/c that’s what it was — that’s what he was doing.

  51. 51.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Alison Rose: BTW, I’m assuming you saw his 10hr-later response to Thunberg, full of “I’m rubber you’re glue” energy?  Too pathetic, the guy shoulda limped off the field after  he got kneed in the groin the first time.  In a battle of wits, that guy’s *unarmed*.

  55. 55.

    Alison Rose

    @CaseyL: It’s kind of frustrating because they’re a really empathetic person which is good…but it leads them to do a lot of this “that thing you think is funny is actually bad and you’re bad for thinking it’s funny” stuff. Obviously there are times where “IT’S JUST A JOKE!!!” is bullshit and I don’t mind calling out people for laughing at racist/transphobic/etc kind of stuff. But they take it way too far sometimes.

  57. 57.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Carlo Graziani: It came from this DailyKos post: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/28/2144175/-We-don-t-really-understand-Russians

    1. apparently Kos has posted a link to this Medium post previously
    2. the comments are very educational.  Lots of Russian and Russia-adjacent people commenting on their reactions to it.
    3. there’s also a link in those comments to a vid of a Finnish prof giving the same sort of explanation in a university lecture: apparently some former secret service guy.

    It’s a really grimdark picture of Russia.  I will say that it conforms to what I have gathered, reading Window on Eurasia over the years.

    One thing that I found myself wonder (and which I think should be a very, very important subject of sociological and historical research, once Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty, security and safety, have been accomplished, is to figure out what precisely changed in Ukraine, that allowed the Ukrainians to break free of this mental prison in which Russians are trapped.  B/c they were in that prison, too, and yet today it is *clear* that they’ve mostly escaped, and are turning into normal Europeans.

    I really want to know the details, and I think it’s important and valuable, b/c we’re going to have to somehow apply the same trick to the constituent peoples of Russia, as that empire continues to fall apart.  God willing.

  59. 59.

    Carlo Graziani

    @Mike in DC:

    Adam, if Svatove and Kremina are liberated, how distant of a goal is Luhansk itself?  I understand that it’s still over 100km away from those places, and that Severodonetsk and Lyschansk would come first, among others, but it occurs to me that retaking Luhansk and Donetsk would effectively “win” the Eastern front of this war(wouldn’t it?).

    I would say that the significance of the fighting in Svatove and Kreminna is not really about the liberation of those towns, or of the nearby population centers. It is really about contesting the ability of the Russians to make war at all in Luhansk oblast, by moving to cut off their ability to supply their forces there. The UA could do this by moving eastward from their current Svatove-Kreminna positions, and cutting off the last rail line connecting the Belgorod supply depot to Starobilsk.  The fact that Prigozhin has been complaining bitterly that MOD has not been delivering shells to Wagner forces at Bakhmut is a sign that Russian logistics are already under strain from Ukrainian pressure, presumably because some of their depots are in HIMARS range.

    Unfortunately, the weather has been rainy and above freezing, and the forecast is for at least another couple of weeks of the same. Which means that the fighting in that area is certainly an ugly, dangerous infantry slog in a sea of mud, rather than a cross-country dash to slash the Russian military’s logistical throat.

  60. 60.

    Carlo Graziani

    @Chetan Murthy: I don’t know what a formula would be. But I do know that you could easily compare the hopelessness of ever making a civilized country of contemporary Russia with the analogous hopelessness concerning Germany at any time in the decade prior to 1945—or, taking a longer view, since that country’s Prussified unification under Bismarck.  And yet here we are, with a unified Germany that seems to be, from the point of view of democratic culture, healthy and stable, if extremely stolid and irritating at times.

    Admittedly it took the annihilation of the previous regime and complete seizure of the country in order for this cultural transition to be accomplished. I’m going out on a limb: that’s not in the cards here.

  61. 61.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Carlo Graziani:

    I’m going out on a limb: that’s not in the cards here.

    Agreed.  Also:  whatever else one can say, I think it’s fair to say that the Ukrainians are doing this themselves, without outsiders guiding them, constraining them, giving them tutelage, whatever.  This is why I think it’s really important to figure out why and how they were able to start down this path.  I read in the comments of that dKos post, people saying it’s b/c Ukraine was always subjugated by Russia, and somehow that led to their ability to make this change.  But I don’t buy that that’s why, b/c it doesn’t seem to be working so well in the other stans.

    But whatever: I’m no political scientist/sociologist/historian.  Those people will figure it out, hopefully, and hopefully they can help other stans as well as to-be-newly freed peoples from the Russian Empire, to go down that path more quickly.

  62. 62.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Carlo Graziani:

    I do know that you could easily compare the hopelessness of ever making a civilized country of contemporary Russia with the analogous hopelessness concerning Germany at any time in the decade prior to 1945—or, taking a longer view, since that country’s Prussified unification under Bismarck.

    Is this really accurate?  I’ve read many people arguing that Germany was if anything a really modern European nation before WWII, with long experience with rule-of-law (albeit not like the UK, but still not the caprice of authoritarianism), and that their turn towards Nazism was a sign that other modern nations (like the US) could take that same path.  Even under the Soviet boot, East Germany was a much better-run place than Russia, IIRC: better industries, better standard-of-living.  Or at least, that’s what I remember reading: maybe my memory is faulty.

  63. 63.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Chetan Murthy: A different way of asking the same question: One way of understanding this “why Russia sucks” that echoes with both Window on Eurasia and Kamil Galeev’s writings, is that outside of Moscow/St Pete (“Muscovy”), Russia really is an empire.  The provinces (“regions”) are really imperial subjects, and the people there are treated like natives in an empire’s possessions.  And that hasn’t changed, up to the present-day.  By contrast, I don’t think Germany treated its citizens (ok: it’s “Aryan” citizens) that way, even under the Nazis, and certainly not before.

    In that sense, I don’t think Germany pre-1945 was anything like Russia at any time.  Hope this makes sense, what I’m asking.

  64. 64.

    Carlo Graziani

    @Chetan Murthy: I’m making a coarse generalization. But even during the First World War, German troops were conspicuous for their willingness to use terror against civilians in Belgium and France (to say nothing about the Eastern Front), viewing such acts as perfectly justified by even the least failure of submission.

    People in writing in France, in England, in Russia before and during the war were terrified of Germans of that era, and fascinated by them as well. There was of course the rich literature, and science, and culture. But there was also the Obedience (see the Medium article) which manifested as Discipline rather than as Russian Passivity, and could be mustered by authority at any time, to produce unrivalled power.

    And there is no question whatever that within fifteen years, millions of German citizens would subscribe wholeheartedly to one of the vilest, most despicable, most violent political cult that the world has ever had the misfortune to be forced to mobilize to put down.  And putting it down was a very close-run thing, because those Germans inherited from their Prussian unifiers a military culture that made them, hands down, human-for-human and resource-for-resource the most terrifyingly powerful armed force the world has ever seen. None of the armies opposing them even came close. It took all of them, acting together, to suppress the menace.

    And yet, nowadays, one sees no more sign of any of that menacing German character than in many Western nations, and the US is probably more “Prussian” than Germany now.  So, things do change.

  65. 65.

    Steeplejack

    @Chetan Murthy:

    I think another factor is that before the Nazi era Germany had a long tradition of mainstream participation in “European culture,” for almost any definition of that. I don’t think Russia has ever had any such tradition. Its few forays, in areas such as ballet, classical music, literature, always felt “extra” to Russian society, or maybe part of the “Muscovy” thing you mentioned.

  66. 66.

    Carlo Graziani

    @Chetan Murthy: To be clear, I agree with you. The two are not the same. The only analogy is that in 1944-1945, people despaired of ever making anything reasonable of Germany, to the point that there existed a “Morgenthau Plan” to “Pastoralize” Germany — completely de-industrialize it, so as to render it incapable of ever threatening the world again, on the presumption that even permitting the slightest industry in the hands of such monsters would be inviting a repetition of disaster.

    So, all I’m saying is that sometimes, that kind of despair can be due to the unavailability of historical perspective.

  67. 67.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Carlo Graziani: OK, now I get you, and now I partially agree.  Certainly after following Adam Tooze’s “The Prussian Way of War” writings, it seems pretty clear that Prussia’s contribution to Germany has been a certain reliance on war, and a particular kind of war (kinetic, shock-and-awe campaigns) as a tool of state power.  Over and over and over.  I can imagine how some people in 1945, looking at the preceding century-and-a-half, could despair of the Germans ever being willing to be at peace with their neighbors.

  68. 68.

    sab

    @Carlo Graziani: My first husband was Jewish with all his grandparents from Ukraine. They emigrated to midwest US. None of their relatives remaining in Ukraine survived, but whether they died from Russians or Germans isn’t clear.

    My first husband had a close friend and mentor who was an Israeli sabra, but his parents were from Ukraine and emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. Two of his aunts survived WWII: one married a Polish Catholic and assimilated. Another fled into Russia and then somehow made her way to France.

    Both of them agreed that their relatives in Ukraine were warned about Germans intentions by local Christian Ukrainians, but they didn’t believe them. They had been through WWI, where the Germans were reasonable and the Russians were simply monsters. They thought WWII would follow the same pattern.

  69. 69.

    sab

    @Chetan Murthy: Russia’s governments in the last 1500 hundred years have never given a single fuck about their people grueling to survive with their terrible climate. A fair number of them did survive, but with absolutely no help from their government

    ETA This is who their government is. I hesitate to say this is who they are, because a lot of governments don’t reflect their people.

    But with their appalling media who knows.

  70. 70.

    Chetan Murthy

    @sab: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-kreminna-battle-recapture-russia-supply-lines/32197165.html

    WATCH: Ukrainian soldiers defending the key eastern city of Bakhmut say the battles are constant and “cruel,” describing ineffective Russian tactics that are endlessly repeated. They say Russian soldiers advance, Ukrainian artillery destroys them, then more come the next day. Captured Russians say their comrades face execution on desertion charges if they don’t keep moving.

    There’s nothing for it, except for us to provide Ukraine with the weapons to kill all these soldiers.  When enough Russian soldiers have been killed, then maybe the rest will turn their weapons on their superiors and those “barrier battalions” of Kadyrovites, and save themselves.

    To your point: yes, I think that this is what Russians are: cowed, oppressed people, so beaten-down that they’re willing to kill others just to avoid being killed themselves.  Willing to do unspeakable things because they are commanded to do so.

    When enough Russian soldiers are dead, this war will end.

  71. 71.

    bjacques

    Sometimes, “Hard To Be A God” seems like a documentary. Dead thread, but to me it looks like, at the slightest opportunity for escape, Ukrainians made their move. Just the incidences I know about are the Russian civil war, WWII (an unfortunate choice, but one also made by Finland and at least one of the Baltic countries), and Maidan (2014 and counting). That doesn’t look like fatalism to me.

  72. 72.

    Jay

    @Chetan Murthy:

    starting with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian Independence, there have been continuing “missions” from the West to Ukraine, peer to peer, social org to social org, later, Government to Government, University to University, to assist Ukraine in reforming their Ukrainian Government and society.

    It’s been over 40 years of Ukrainians leading and the West assisting in the process of reforms. Some were simple, small one offs, such as assisting a Ukrainian company with the “norms” of meeting EU and Western standards of regulatory compliance, so they could export, or University to University, Scientific to Scientific exchange programs.

  73. 73.

    Geminid

    There is a fresh article in the New York Times about efforts by the US and other countries to cut off western-made components from reaching Iran for use in the drones that country is providing Russia. One problem is that Iran has become proficient at evading sanctions that try to deny them these “dual use” electronic components for its nuclear and missile programs. This article will likely be a topic of discussion in tonight’s Ukraine post or comments.

  74. 74.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Carlo Graziani:

    To add a bit of context–which helps explain, but not excuse or minimize their embrace of Nazi ideology–the Germans had suffered not only humiliating defeat in WWI, but also loss of territory, dislocation, and severe economic deprivation owing to the Depression and hyperinflation. What is the American excuse for embracing Trumpism, by comparison?

  75. 75.

    Carlo Graziani

    @O. Felix Culpa: None at all. What I learned from Trumpism, and, more generally, from the rise of global illiberalism since the end of the Cold War, is that it is absolutely not necessary to be German in order to be a “Good German”.

    Look, I started a subthread casually and carelessly, to make a limited point that went off-course. I am absolutely not reviving collective guilt accusations against Germans, or making coarse cultural comparisons.  What I was hoping to bring out was the fact that before 1945, many very perceptive and knowledgeable policymakers and intellectuals despaired of ever being able to live safely in a world that had a German nation in it, based on the history of Europe since the wars of unification.  And yet, after 1945, the basis for that despair disappeared.

    What was required was a total calamity for the German nation, of course.  I’m not sure that it would be safe for us to wish that on Russia, although many things are outside our control, of course, and in any event at the moment such an outcome seems like a remote contingency. Nonetheless, big cultural shifts can occur over time, and the example illustrates that one can be blind to them because historical perspective is not yet available.

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