I do not write this blithely. I have spent days watching, looking at, evaluating, and analyzing everything I could find about not only the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but Vladimir Putin himself. And I have come to a conclusion.
Ever since Trump was inaugurated, for four long years we were pelted with one common theme when it came to international relations, Trump and Putin, Trump and Putin, Trump and Putin. It shone as clear as the sun in Trump’s abject subservience every time the two were together, and Trump’s desperate attempts to model himself after Putin in his actions as President. And in fact, they do in fact share something in common, they’re both chickenshits!
Look, Trump spent almost a 40 year career in New York real estate by being a brazen bully. His reputation was that he would stew for years if needed to pay somebody back for a slight. He threatened small vendors and providers with endless litigation that would bankrupt them if they didn’t let him screw them on the payments. And as President he did the same thing, only this time, a Democratic led House slapped him down, hard.
Putin has done the same goddamn thing. He has threatened smaller countries with devastation if they don’t submit to his will. His military successes? What successes? He went in and carved out a small chunk of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and then skedaddled. He coerced the government of Berlarus into an advantageous bilateral agreement for Putin. And in 2014, Putin was so cowardly that he used undercover troops, the little green men to gouge out a part of Ukraine’s Crimea province for him to annex. He’s a brazen coward.
From where I’m sitting, the US and NATO need to give the Ukraine anything they need right now to prosecute this war. Simply because Putin has bitten off more than he can chew, and even if he wants to deny it, everybody else knows it. Look, let’s just take a step back and look at this calmly and dispassionately for a moment. The prevailing western logic is that the US and NATO don’t want to give Putin an excuse to widen the conflict, right?
The simple question is why? Look, right now Russia has 200,000 troops in the Ukraine, and they are bogged down and hardly moving. The Russians have the second largest air force in the world, after guess who, but 15 days into the invasion, they don’t have control of the skies over the Ukraine! Now granted, the Ukraine resistance has been heroic, for instance, once Ukrainian soldiers started falling in battle, Putin never even considered the thought of Ukrainian civilian soldiers rushing up to fill the holes. And while the Ukrainians are far better supplied than Putin expected, thanks to US and NATO assistance, they still don’t have a portion of the weaponry that the US and NATO has available. And yet he’s still bogged down, and we’ll see how Russian sentiment goes when 5,000 Russian body bags start coming back to Russia for burial.
Look, do yourself a favor, look at Trump and Putin together. They’re both full of shit! They huff and they puff, but they don’t produce. After 15 days on the ground with superior forces both on the ground as well as in the air, and Putin hasn’t accomplished a goddamn thing, do you seriously believe that he wants’ to go to war with NAtO and the US? He can’t even take out Ukraine, but now he wants to go toe to toe with NATO?
Give President Zelenky what he wants. Ukraine wants those Polish MIG’s for their air defense, get them to them. Ukraine wants a no-fly zone? Give it to them. Because while Putin will scream and cry like an infant without his rattle, he can’t afford to go to war with the US and NATO. Because he can’t even beat fucking Ukraine!
Let’s just say that the US and NATO declare a no fly zone over Ukraine, and Putin responds by saying that this was an open declaration of war with Russia. What happens next? Well, within 36 hours, US and NATO air assets wouldn’t just punish Russian assets in Ukraine, but they would conduct surgical strikes against Russian radar assets in Russia to deprive them of any possible control of the air. It would take only 1 strike from US jets to turn the 40 mile Russian convoy into twisted metal.
And Putin knows it. Just as he knows that he can’t actually launch a nuclear strike. Russian forces have the same command control procedures in place that US forces do, and no sane Russian Colonel or General would bring about the destruction of his country over Ukraine.
Putin is a cornered rat. But he’s not an insane rat. And even if he is, he is not going to be able to launch nukes over Ukraine. His own ego will not allow him to be the vehicle for the destruction of his country. He’ll scream and yell, but it will all be sound and fury from an idiot, signifying nothing.
It might seem a picayune point but for any Ukrainians that get to read this it matters – refer to it as Ukraine. It is and despite all the devastation being inflicted on it will wind up remaining a sovereign nation. Ukrainians overall had plenty of reasons forged over decades and generations to hate Russia the country and even more so now.
“The Ukraine” is how the USSR thought of and referred to this beautiful land and its people. Basically, as a part/province of Russia and as its “breadbasket.” Old school folks in Russia still think of and refer to it as “The Ukraine” as though it belongs to Russia. Fuck that shit.
It’s Ukraine. And for Ukrainians it matters that they be referred to in the proper way. As a sovereign country, and not via the Russian/Soviet term which indicates it’s a possession of Russia.
While you’re correct that Ukraine prefers its name not have a definite article in English, it’s not entirely unprecedented among sovereign nations.
There are four countries that currently include the definite article “The” as part of their legal name: The Netherlands; The Philippines; The Bahamas; and The Gambia. The first three have the definite article as the country’s name reflects more than one entity; in the Netherlands’ case, the name refers to the geographic condition of the various parts of the country that originally formed it (notably Holland, Zeeland and Friesland, all of which had areas that were below sea level) while The Philippines and The Bahamas are, of course, countries comprised of numerous islands. The Gambia is an odd duck with its name largely reflecting its position along both sides of the Gambia River. (You can arguments for the US and the UK and the UAE, but again, there’s a “multiple” components to each country.)
Upon independence, Ukraine probably should’ve made a formal request of English-speaking countries to use the country’s Ukrainian transliterated name, Ukraïna (much as Cape Verde and Ivory Coast* request the Portuguese Cabo Verde and French Côte d’Ivoire as their official English forms).
Why should Ukraine make any sort of formal request? There is NO definite article in Ukrainian for the name of the country. It is simply slipshod usage, comparable to referring to Afghanis as ‘Afghans’
I agree that the country is called “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”. However, I don’t get your explanation as far as the Russian language is concerned, because in Russian (and Ukrainian for that matter) there are no definite or indefinite articles like “the” or “a”. So in these languages, there can be no distinction between “Ukraine” and “the Ukraine” as there is in English. And in many other languages, like French, it is common to use a definite article with the name of a country, like “La France,” “L’Espagne.” So the difference between “Ukraine” and “the Ukraine” very much applies to English.
The Politics of Definite Articles: Ukrainian Edition
In the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Alfred tells Bruce Wayne, “Some men just want to.watch the world burn.”
I am not entirely sanguine about Vlad’s sanity. At the very least he is a psychopath and possibly a narcissist. He appointed all.his generals for loyalty, not competence. He also doesn’t have half the country telling him.to.sit down and shut up and acting somewhat as a check. If he cannot win even a small.victory to.boost his eho, he !ight just use tavtical.nukes. Only thing stopping him.is that Ukraine will no.longer be useful.as Russia’s breadbasket. You cannot farm land contaminated by radiation. But he owns all.that predictable, other than being a greedy, malevolent asshole who.doesn’t give a damn about his people and thinks assassination not opponents is acceptable.
There may not be many body bags coming home. He is supposed to.have a portable crematorium with the army convoy. And I suspect that Ukrainians (who.are resorting to mass graves for their own people) will.be just fine burying Russian bodies in a,separate mass grave.
So send those Polish Migs and a squadron or two of A-10s to Ukraine…war over in a day or two as all Russian ground transport is destroyed!
I never said a word about sending US assets…My point is that Putin knows that he’ll lose a conflict with NATO and the US, so hew’ll squeal, but won’t accelerate the tensions…
Sending Warthogs isn’t just a matter of shipping a batch of planes – it would also require pilots to be trained and also training for maintenance crews. This would involve direct support on site by either the USAF or Fairchild to train the Ukrainians.
Remember what happened previously when the US sent ‘advisers’ into another country and how that escalated?
“Because while Putin will scream and cry like an infant without his rattle, he can’t afford to go to war with the US and NATO. Because he can’t even beat fucking Ukraine!”
I’m afraid you don’t get it, Murfster. If we declare a “no-fly zone” in Ukraine, we’ll have to do just what we did when we declared a “no-fly zone” in Iraq: shoot down enemy fighters and take out Russian radar sites on the ground. Then what will happen? Of course Putin won’t aim his tactical nukes at us. He’ll start using ground-to-ground or air-to-ground tactical nukes AGAINST UKRAINE, claiming that we were the ones who escalated the war first. What will we be able to do then — attack the Russians with our own nukes? No way; that would lead to nuclear war for sure. We would wind up surrendering Ukraine to the Russians. And if you think Putin is too “rational” and too much of a “survivor” to initiate first use of nukes, just remember how close we came to World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis closer than anyone realized at the time. And Khrushchev was just as much as a “survivor” then as Putin is today. Khrushchev was eventually toppled by his own Central Committee for “harebrained scheming.” I would bet that several Russian generals are considering the same action today. Let’s keep giving Ukraine every kind of weapon they need and tightening the sanctions as much as we can, and see if history repeats itself.
The much-argued No Fly Zone is largely irrelevant, thus far, as the Russkies aren’t using much in the way of fixed-wing aircraft, relying on helicopters and cruise missiles instead. The choppers can be knocked down by Stingers, the cruisers SHOULD be being stymied by electronic counter measures to scramble their wee brains. But hell yeah, get all the MiG-29s possible to the Ukrainians, just so the Russian air force knows they’re awaiting them. And meanwhile, stoke up the arsenal of Stingers and Javelins, so the tough and courageous Ukrainian ground forces can keep the Russians stalled. An immobile army is what’s known as a sitting duck.