Sinko De Mayo!

Via the UK Independent,

Russia’s Admiral Makarov warship has been hit by Ukrainian missiles and burst into flames, according to Ukrainian officials.

The frigate would be Russia’s latest high-profile naval loss in a troubled campaign, coming after reports that US intelligence helped Ukraine locate and sink the Russian warship Moskva weeks ago.

The Makarov was said to have been sailing close to Snake Island in the Black Sea south of Odesa.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Anton Gerashchenko reported on his Telegram page that the Admiral Makarov was hit by a Ukrainian “Neptune” anti-ship missile. He cited Russian sources.

According to the UK Daily Mail,

Ukraine may have shot another Russian warship overnight with an MP saying one of Putin's state-of-the-art frigates is 'in trouble' in the Black Sea.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, head of the council of Odesa which houses Ukraine's largest naval base, identified the vessel on his Telegram channel this morning as the Admiral Makarov - a $500million frigate that was only commissioned five years ago.

He said the vessel ran into difficulties overnight, before reposting a report from a local news outlet suggesting it had been shot with a Ukrainian missile near Snake Island - whose defenders memorably told another warship to 'go f*** yourself' .

Unconfirmed reports suggest rescue vessels and aircraft have set off from Russia's largest Black Sea port of Sevastopol towards the site, while flight tracking data shows an American drone circling nearby.

. . . Nobody from the Ukrainian military has so-far commented on the attack, and there has been no acknowledgement from the Kremlin either.

However, the Ukrainian armed forces did add one boat to its tally of destroyed Russian equipment published today without giving further details.

The Makarov is an Admiral Grigorovich-class frigate, one of the Russian navy's newest vessels and the most state-of-the-art frigate operating in the Black Sea.

A commenter at reddit /r ukraine conflict said, "Looks like the Ukrainians celebrated Sinko de Mayo in a big way!" and that was too good for me to pass up. But the US Right continues to get this sort of thing wrong: yesterday Allahpundit at the Hot Air blog wrung his hands that if US intelligence was involved in sinking the Moskva last month, this could start World War III:

Is there some strategic benefit I’m missing to turning this into a hot war between the U.S. and Russia? Like, “the war will end much faster and with fewer casualties if we let the U.S. Air Force bomb Russian troops in the Donbas for a week”?

Between this and the leak last night about U.S. intelligence targeting Russian generals, we’re like a day away from Biden calling Putin a pussy and daring him to try something.

. . . Lately I’ve been trying to soothe my nerves about the provocations we’re engaged in by telling myself that maybe there’s something important the intel community knows about Russian capabilities that’s left them confident there’ll be no reprisal for leaving our fingerprints all over their failures. What if their nukes don’t work anymore? Or what if we’ve figured out a way to disable them remotely? There’s nothing they can do to hurt us!

It seems to me that Ukrainian performance in the first weeks of the war, whether or not US intelligence was actually pulling the strings (every indication is that it has been, but leave that aside), Ukrainian performance combined with Russia's manifold ineptitude emboldened the EU, NATO, and even the former neutrals Sweden and Finland suddenly to stand up to Putin, nuclear threats or not. The calculation appears to be that if Russia proved so incompetent in attacking a third-rate power like Ukraine, think how they'd do against even a second-rate power like Poland.

It's quite clearly become a proxy war. Another US conservative, Victor Davis Hanson, who has always struck me as overrated, recently wrung his hands over how Ukraine reminds him of the Spanish Civil War:

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

. . . Small, skilled Ukrainian teams with Javelin and Stinger missiles destroyed multimillion-dollar helicopters and armored vehicles. Cheap, armed drones are now ubiquitous on both sides. Do these relatively inexpensive arsenals presage a more decentralized brand of warfare, where handheld weapons take out relatively sophisticated tanks and helicopters? Are we back to the superiority of quantity over quality in weapons of war?

Perhaps, but whether armor and artillery prove vestigial weapons and tactics remains to be seen as the theater is now shifting to the rolling wide-open plains of Eastern Ukraine.

. . . Before Ukraine, few, if any, recent leaders of a major nuclear nation had ever seriously threatened to use nuclear weapons against either his enemies on the battlefield or those who sent help to them—not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in the wider Middle East. Now Vladimir Putin not only brags about his nuclear arsenal and tests long-range missiles but boasts about his right to use any weapon he chooses to defeat Ukraine and its suppliers.

Ukraine, like Spain, has awoken us from our false sense of security that has grown since the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, soldiers in war sometimes do deliberately flatten apartment buildings and shoot civilians en masse—whether in 1936 or 2022. And some leaders apparently now view nuclear bombs as more or less deadlier conventional weapons.

Again, Hanson's theme is the risks of "starting World War III" amid concerns of nuclear winter, and that Russia and the West are morally equivalent in this sort of war -- and he goes beyond that to repeat the conventionial wisdom that Ukraine may seem to have been winning around Kyiv, but Donbas will be a different kettle of fish. But the weeks following such dire predictions have proved it hasn't.

It's hard not to reply that, Allahpundit and Victor Davis Hanson aside, we're in fact in a proxy World War III as we speak. The one certainty is that our previous assumptions are being upended on a daily basis, and so far, the presumed US intelligence assessments are proving remarkably correct. This is oddly reassuring.