My Worst Fears May Be About To Come True

You gotta look down upon me Jesus, you gotta help me make a stand. You just gotta see me through another day   James Taylor   Fire and Rain

As heartbroken as I am over the images coming out of Bucha today and yesterday, I honestly can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve been a political junkie for just about 50 years now, and as such I’ve been watching Russia play this sick bullshit for far too long.

Going all the way back to the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Russian playbook has remained the same. It was never a war fought by two armies, it was always a war against the civilian population, with a liberal dose of terror thrown in. That one only mired them down 10 years before they slunk off with their tails between their legs.

But you honestly can’t teach the criminally stupid. After the implosion of the Soviet Union, Russia went into the breakaway republic of Chechnya, with the same plan. Their ground forces seldom engaged, instead using aerial bombing and long range artillery to terrify the population. They got what they wanted and got out.

And then they went into Syria, and this time they weren’t in it for themselves, they were propping up a corrupt dictator to ensure that their naval bases remained secure. And again, ground troops seldom tasted combat, instead they dropped barrel bombs and chemical weapons on civilians. There’s a good reason that Russian ground troops don’t fight if they can avoid it. In Syria, a privately funded Russian oligarch army went up against a single US Marine outpost in eastern Syria. When it was over, the Russians withdrew with more than 200 dead, and without a single Marine casualty. These guys suck.

And then on to the Ukraine and Crimea in 2014. This time there was a twist. Putin was so embarrassed by his army that he let Russian backed Crimean separatists do the bulk of the dirty work, sending in Little Green Men in green fatigues with no national identification on their uniforms. But once again, it was the civilians who basically took it in the shorts.

About 5 weeks ago, a week into the war, I wrote an article in which I worried that as much as the US and NATO wanted to avoid getting into a wider conflict, events may overpower their desires. Because knowing the Russians, I could literally see war crimes on the horizon, the kind of stuff that would make the world recoil in horror, and demand that the US and the western alliance do something to directly intervene.

But thankfully, the first 5 weeks didn’t deliver on my fears, for two reasons. First, the Russians were so pathetically prepared, incompetent, and poorly supplied that the highly motivated Ukrainians were able to stall them out, and keep them from getting where they wanted to go to do the damage they wanted. Second, since they couldn’t get there, and their attack aircraft kept getting blown out of the sky, they had to fall back on long range artillery and missiles. And while the images of bombed out urban landscapes was heartbreaking, and while there was a humanitarian disaster, there were few images of the kind of human carnage that evoke a stronger reaction viscerally.

But all of that changed last night and today. The images coming out of Bucha are exactly the ones I feared when I wrote the article, and here they are. There is already a near global hue and cry for a war crimes investigation against Russia and Putin. And as much as it kills me to say it, it’s only going to get worse from here.

As I wrote yesterday, Russian claims of an orderly drawback from Kyiv to give peace talks a chance are pure and utter bullshit. The Russians fell back in a rout under heavy Ukrainian pressure. And as I wrote, as long as the Ukrainians are well enough supplied to keep on their tail, and keep shelling them under pressure, the Russians will continue to retreat in a rout.

And the longer they do, the more area they will liberate and reclaim. And the more towns and villages they reclaim, the more war atrocities will be exposed. Because this is what the fucking Russians do. They have no dignity, and they have no code of honor. What else can I say? And as more atrocities are uncovered, the more the global pressure will build for the US and NATO to do something to stop it. Unless we give the Ukrainians what they want, and let them finish it.

Personally, I hope that the images you’re seeing on your television screen hasn’t already stopped turning your stomach. It should, it proves you’re human. But you had better get ready, because starting right now, you’re going to see a shitload of it on an almost nightly basis. Just keep being horrified and regally pissed.