But Where's the Ukraine War?

Today is February 20, which is one of the dates National Security Handler Jake Sullivan proposed as a perhaps-as-early-as for Russian tanks to appear in the streets of Kyiv. The logic here appears to have been that the Olympics would seize the world's attention, giving Putin the opening to invade while everyone was distracted. The problem was that the Olympics turned out to be the most boring and uneventful in history, and they provided no distraction. They weren't even worth a yawn.

The distraction throughout this period has been in Canada. I'll get to that, but let's get to the more imnmediate problem of bad looks. Russian tanks in the streets of European capitals are a bad look. Always have been. Let's face it, they would immediately drown out figure skaters, no matter how good the figure skaters. The guy who's figured this out is Vladimir Putin, who in fact seems to be a world leader who learned something from the 20th century. I get the sense that he, if anyone, understands that if he can get what he wants without tanks in the streets, he'll do it. My take is that so far, he's succeeding.

In fact, he's doing so well that he's making President Biden look hysterical. Biden's been predicting tanks in the streets any day now since late last year, and his predictions keep not coming true. A growing part of the problm is that Biden's been reassuring us that his predictions are based on our intelligence:

“We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week ... in the coming days,” Biden said, citing the “significant intelligence capability” of the United States.

These remarks were from Friday, as today's deadline of February 20 edged ever closer without tanks in the streets. It's getting more and more like the guys who predict the end of the world and have to keep moving the date forward, with lamer and lamer excuses each time. I'm not sasying this won't eventually happen, but if it does, it's going to be on Putin's schedule, not Biden's, and for the foreseeable future, it looks like Putin will get what he wants without a direct invasion.

Indeed, if Putin appears to have learned a thing or two from 20th century history class, Biden and US intelligence have not -- consider what they failed to predict, from Pearl Harbor to the Chinese intervention in Korea to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact to Al-Qaida. They aren't much good at all, something Truman and Reagan at least understood. No coincidence that they helped write 20th century history.

So let's move to Canada. It sounds like Prime Minister Trudeau skipped 20th century history class the day they covered how police running down peaceful demonstrators -- with horses, dogs, fire hoses, clubs, gas, whatever -- isn't a good look. You don't even need to shoot them, although Kent Sate teaches that's a bad look, too. There are far too many examples, St Petersburg 1905, Birmingham 1963, Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970, Tienanmen 1989, and so forth -- that there was an awful lot for Trudeau to ignore. And it seems to me that the lesson has been the same every time, the demonstrators are playing a long game, and as the victors, they eventually get to write the history. A few cracked heads, a few dog bites, a few put in jail for hooliganism or whatever, a few knocked down, even a few, or more than a few, shot dead -- they eventually come out on top.

I hate to say this, but the guy who paid attention in 20th century history class is Putin.

Not A Good Look

The puzzling thing to me is how quickly US civil authorities are backing off their COVID mandates even as Trudeau insists mandates even stricter than those in the US are non-negotiable, now to be enforced by horses running down the workers in the streets of the capital.

And US and Canadian COVID trends are just about identical:

US politicians are scrambling to announce they're "following the science", while Trudeau -- not even in step with his own provincial premiers -- is keeping the controls on by ukase. I don't know where this is going to end up, but it looks like we in the US owe the Canadian truckers a great deal. Events in Windsor and Ottawa have clearly concentrated US minds most wonderfully.

What's The New Narrative?

I saw a headline on one of the aggregators this morning: "NYT wonders: Is Putin still rational after two years of pandemic isolation?"

It’s one thing to use the madman theory of foreign relations as leverage. It’s quite another to actually have an insane man in charge of a very large, modern military. For years, people have operated on the assumption that Vladimir Putin acted on a coldly rational basis, and based on his pre-pandemic track record, that assumption not only proved safe but accurate.

As far as I can see, Putin's strategy in Ukraine has been in place since 2014, when he effectively seized Donbas and Crimea from Ukraine via separatist proxies. As Tucker Carlson put it,

But if there’s one thing you absolutely must know about Russia, if you’re going to navigate this world, that thing is that on February 16, 2022, Vladimir Putin is going to invade our closest ally in the world, Ukraine. So write that down — February 16, 2022, Ukraine invasion begins. That’s the day.

Joe Biden has been very clear about that, so were the Intel agencies and of course, their stenographers in the news media. As Politico put it, quote, “Russia will start a physical assault on Ukraine as soon as February 16, multiple U.S. officials confirmed.” A physical assault.

The Ukrainian state media outlet Ukrinform, however, offered an opinion from the scene:

Russia has been waging war against Ukraine for eight years already. These are the eight years of daily reports of deadly shelling, IDPs, and casualties among our military and civilians.

So, my first questiom is why anyone at the New York Times thinks COVID changed anything if Putin actually made his Ukraine move almost six years before anyone had even heard of COVID. A second question would be whether anyone, even at the New York Times, thinks any world leader has been locked down like ordinary people have been, such that it would make him crazy. Heck, Biden is the one who stays locked own.

President Biden, meanwhile,, is still giving the same message:

President Joe Biden warned Thursday morning a Russian attack on Ukraine could begin in the coming days, casting a new incursion into the country as all but certain and warning Moscow could stage events in the lead-up to generate a pretext for war.

. . . Pressed on whether he believes an attack will happen -- and when -- Biden said: "Yes. My sense is it will happen in the next several days."

So does he have a new invasion date? I've got to conclude that so far, Biden is looking ridiculous. Meanwhile, Putin has risked nothing, and he's lost nothing. He's effectively reinforced the status quo in Donbas and Crimea, someting Ukraine acknowledges. How is he insane?

The existing narrative isn't working. Someone needs to come up with a new one -- even if we accept that Putin is crazy, it simply means Biden is being jerked around by a crazy guy. Actually, for that matter, it's too bad neither Biden nor Speaker Pelosi got the name of Putin's plastic surgeon.

How Bad Are Things In Canada?

This story that I found this morning gives an indication of how strict the COVID regime has been in Canada -- and in spite of that, Quebec's premier, whose regime has been one of the strictest, is against Trudeau's invocation of emergency powers:

Quebec stepped up its “deconfinement plan” this week and began lifting coronavirus restrictions, while Premier Francois Legault rejected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s effort to crush the Freedom Convoy protest movement by invoking emergency powers.

“I think that I was very clear with the prime minister that the federal Emergencies Act should not, must not apply in Quebec,” Legault said on Monday. “We don’t have any problems in Quebec so far. The Sureté du Québec has everything under control.”

. . . CTV News reported that size restrictions on private gatherings have been lifted in Quebec, restaurants can seat more customers, four visitors a day are now permitted at old age homes if they have vaccine passports, and seniors are permitted limited outings.

Gyms and spas are now allowed to operate at half capacity, while outdoor events will be allowed with up to five thousand attendees.

Beginning on February 21, capacity limits will be removed on retail outlets, places of worship will be allowed to operate at half capacity, and amusement parks will be allowed to reopen with attendance limits. A week later, the capacity limits are due to be removed from houses of worship and all but the largest arenas, while bars and casinos will be allowed to reopen at half capacity. Most of the capacity limits are supposed to be phased out by the middle of March.

On Tuesday, Quebec announced the beginning of the end for vaccine passports, amusingly beginning with liquor and cannabis stores on Wednesday. The passports will be gone almost entirely by March 14, which is also when Health Minister Christian Dube is expected to begin distributing antiviral treatments for the Wuhan coronavirus.

“Proof of vaccination will still be required for domestic rail and air travel, as mandated by the federal government. Masks will also still be required in all public indoor spaces in the province,” CBC News noted.

In comparison, even in California, restrictions on retail and restaurant capacity pretty much ended in the middle of 2021, while the US Supreme Court effectively ended specific restrictions on houses of worship earlier in that year. The Supreme Court has also made most government efforts to enforce vaccine mandates moot. The debate in the US is now almost exclusively over masking, with most states no longer requiring masks in any environment except schools, where efforts to lift those mandates in certain specific jurisdictions are likely eventually to succeed.

Los Angeles County is one of the few holdouts anywhere for mask mandates outside schools, but the county rule was widely disregarded at the Super Bowl on Sunday, and no effort was made to enforce it.

The extreme differences between Canadian provinces and US states suggest the actual level of frustration with COVID restrictions in Canada and provides some background for the trucker protests.

But I've seen remarkably little analysis of the actual status of Trudeau's emergency powers. As far as I can tell, they don't have legal effect until Parliament approves them.

Less than 24-hours after declaring wide-ranging powers, including terror finance laws to defund the trucker, Trudeau came to parliament to persuade them to support his move.

Conservative Party interim Leader Candice Bergen [confronted Trudeau] over his invocation of the Emergencies Act.

“The Prime Minister invoked the Emergencies Act and 24 hours in, there are more questions than answers,” Bergen said. “Questions about whether this is justified, questions around if the criteria is met, questions around what this means to Canadians’ rights and freedoms.”

“Parliamentary approval is required in order for the prime minister to use this unprecedented sledgehammer,” she noted. “So can the prime minister tell us when will parliament be debating this? Will it be coming to us on Friday? And does he expect that we will look at it Friday, but then rise, take a week off, and not actually deal with this until March?”

. . . Interim Conservative Party leader Bergen made one exceptional point: What if what Trudeau is doing makes things worse?

If the existing restrictiinos in Canada are as bad as they are -- and even the provinces that are relaxing them are taking their time to do it -- I wonder if Trudeau, his supporters, and legacy media are badly misreading the national mood.

Did Putin Win?

With the predicted morning of the Ukraine invasion come and gone without the spetsnaz parachuting in, there have been remarkably few after-action reports in any media. Of the few, this summary at the never-Trump Hot Air blog seems to give the most favorable analysis for Biden's handlers:

“February 15, 2022, will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted. If they really have called off the invasion and they need to huff and puff about western propaganda to save face, have at it. Barring some major secret concession to Putin, it’d be a momentous victory for the White House and NATO to have stopped the biggest war in Europe since World War II without any bombs falling.

Has the invasion been called off, though, or merely postponed?

Ukraine’s president had been warned by western intelligence that tomorrow, the 16th, was the day Russia planned to attack. He decided to make it a “day of unity” for Ukrainians, calling international attention to the date. Maybe Putin looked at that and concluded he’d appear foolish if he followed through by invading on the schedule the west predicted, essentially confirming that western intel knows the moves the Kremlin intends to make before they’ve been made. So he stepped back and called for more diplomacy, altering the timeline for war.

That's under the peculiar assumption that Putin had set a mid-February deadline for unspecified concessions from maybe Ukraine, maybe Biden, or there would be a war. But a February 16 deadline was entirely the creature of Jake Sullivan, Biden's handler. All the other players, from NATO to Ukraine to Putin himself, were at best skeptical. So in effect, Sullivan created a diplomatic straw man and then claimed victory when the straw man did nothing (as straw men are wont to do), interpreting the inaction as "blinking".

The story speculates about potential demands from Putin, primarily that Ukraine never join NATO, but Putin himself never articulated any particular demand as a condition along the line of "if my demand for X is not met, we will invade Ukraine on Febvruary 16". President Kennedy, on the other hand, did articulate specific demands with Khrushchev and did set an effective deadline by instituting a quasi-blockade of Cuba on October 24, 1962. When Soviet ships didn't challenge the blockade, that was an important sign of Soviet concessions.

In contrast, Russian troops performed "maneuvers" near Ukraine with no particular diplomatic reason specified and no particular conditions articulated for their withdrawal. Any conditions or putative deadlines were the creatures of US media and politicians. The Hot Air story continues to put thoughts into Putin's head:

. . . for all the hype about Putin being a master strategist it’s hard to see how he’d gain more from invading Ukraine than he’d lose. The Russian army would take casualties, Putin and his country would face punishing sanctions and economic boycotts, and NATO might end up more united than it’s been in years.

White House sources fleshed that out in conversations with David Ignatius: “The sanctions that would follow an assault on Ukraine would make it hard for Russia to sell its energy abroad or to buy the technology it needs to supply its defense industry, let alone the rest of the economy. Russia’s financial reserves are large, but they would quickly be depleted as it sought to bolster its currency and pay its bills. U.S. officials reckon that under sanctions, Russia would be starved of inputs, and China, its only major ally, couldn’t fill the gaps.” To the extent that retaking Ukraine is a legacy play for Putin, maybe he realized that his legacy from this war wouldn’t be what he expects.

David Ignatius is a Washington Post editor and thoroughly vetted member of the Establishment, a graduate of St Albans School and Harvard, the son of a former Secretary of the Navy and president of The Washington Post. He has been a reliable CIA mouthpiece for generations. The pros and cons he outlines for Putin are entirely his own imputations, or more likely those of some deep stater in Langley, couched entirely in woulds, ifs, reckons, and maybes, but concluding that Biden was somehow the winner in a chess game that was entirely hypothetical.

On the other hand, if we go with the National Interest article theory I've cited, that Putin was responding to moves by Sullivan to push back Russian advances in Crimea and Donbas, it looks like he was entirely successful while reinforcing a picture of Biden as out of touch, unstable, and unreliable even with his Ukrainian and European allies.

It looks like there's a minor effort to make Ukraine look like Biden's Cuban missile crisis, following on an effort to create a wartime atmosphere a la Bill Clinton's desultory cruise missile attacks and intervention in Serbia, all designed primarily to distract attention from his scandals. It doesn't look like this will do Biden any equivalent good on the domestic front, either.

As far as I can see, Putin risked nothing, since he demanded nothing specific and likely never intended an invasion. Biden, on the other hand, created a crisis and set up an atmosphere in which, after much dither and disagreement with President Zelezny, he appeared to have been undermined with his ally and effectively stalemated with Putin. If Putin's actual message was, "Don't even think about Ukraine regaining Crimea and Donbas", then, with never even having to articulate it as a demand, Putin got what he wanted without even appearing to ask.

Ukraine And Intelligence

Here's what I still don't understand about what we're being told in the Ukraine crisis. The claim from National Security Handler Sullivan is that US intelligence says Putin is going to invade tomorrow, maybe, sorta. My first question is that with all the intelligence resources available to him, satellites, drones, signals, bugs, spies on the ground, and everything else, that's the best he can do? Maybe tomorrow? A sub-question to my first question is that the Ukrainians and NATO have equivalent resources, but they don't seem on board with the Sullivan version, especially not the Ukrainians, who are not dullards.

The second question is this. The normal policy with intelligence on when and where an enemy will attack is to conceal that you know it. In 1942, the US broke the Japanese naval code and learned they planned an attack on Midway. They secretly moved a carrier force to intercept the Japanese fleet. They last thing they wanted to do was to reveal that they'd broken the code or that they knew when and where the Japanese would attack. That would have forfeited the whole advantage of surprise.

So why is the US now loudly telegraphing just that? It seems to me that if there were credible indications of an invasion, the US, NATO, and Ukraine would all be strictly concealing their actual knowledge of troop concentrations and anticipated lines of attack, just as was done in the example of Midway.

There's another puzzle. US presidents, or their handlers, only very rarely make global moves while revealing intelligence. The best recent example is President Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, where he announced that Cuban overflights showed the presence of Soviet missiles aimed at the US. In that case, he turned out to be correct. But the other example that comes to mind is Colin Powell's 2003 address to the UN as George W Bush's secretary of state, where he relied on flawed intelligence that claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion of Iraq. This is almost universally regarded as a blunder.

Frankly, if I were a US president, I would not be relying on the predictions of the deep-state organs absent a thorough purge and reorganization. The alternative is simply to come out of it like Powell and Dubya.

As of yesterday, there was a brief flurry in the headlines with a claim that Ukraine President Zelensky had come around on the likelihood of the Russian invasion tomorrow, but this quickly disappeared.

“We are told that February 16 will be the day of the attack,” Zelenskyy said in a video statement posted on Facebook.

However, after his comments were taken by many at face value, his spokesman, Sergii Nykyforov, said that the president, who is a former comedian, was only saying what has been reported elsewhere.

“The president referred to a date that was spread by the media,” the spokesman told NBC News.

Some observers said Zelenskyy appeared to Ukrainian speakers to have been sarcastic when discussing the possible date of an attack.

But an alternate story seems now to be gaining momentum. As of yesterday,

In a televised exchange on Russian TV, the Russian foreign minister told Vladimir Putin that diplomacy still has some potential and should continue to be pursued before the military option for Ukraine gets ordered[.]

Surely this was calculated. And as of this morning,

Russia said on Tuesday some of its troops were returning to base after exercises near Ukraine and it mocked repeated Western warnings about a looming invasion, but NATO said it had yet to see any evidence of de-escalation.

Russia did not say how many units were being withdrawn, and how far, after a build-up of some 130,000 Russian troops to the north, east and south of Ukraine that has triggered one of the worst crises in relations with the West since the Cold War.

But the interpretation in the National Interest story I linked yesterday is that the crisis emerged as the result of a US policy overreach at the start of the Biden administration, where the intent was to push Russia out of Donbas and Crimea. Putin ordered the "exercises" as a warning of what would happen if the US followed through.

The result, it seems to me so far, has been an elaborate face-saving charade on the part of Sullivan and Biden, trying to sell a story that the focused and resolute President Brandon, with his key handler Sullivan at this side, faced down the reckless adventurer Putin. So far, it hasn't worked, but lame duck Speaker Pelosi has nevertheless signed on:

It's about diplomacy deterrence. Diplomacy deterrence. And the President has made it very clear: there's a big price to pay for Russia to go there. So if Russia doesn't invade, it's not that he never intended to. It's just that the sanctions worked.

No, as far as I can see, Putin made a calcutated set of moves throughout 2021 to get the Brandon administration to back off its own adventurist gamble, which Brandon's handlers did in an elaborate and clumsily handled charade.

This Ukraine Business Is Very Strange

Biden's national security handler Jake Sullivan seems to be wandering into Tom Clancy territory, writing thrillers about hypothetical wars:

Sullivan told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that Russian forces are positioned so that an invasion could take place before the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which end on February 20.

. . . Sullivan on Friday had warned Americans in Ukraine to leave and said that military action could begin with an aerial bombardment that could kill civilians.

He reiterated those calls to Tapper on Sunday, saying that a military attack would likely begin with missile and bomb attacks.

"Those are never as precise as the army -- any army -- would like them to be. We don't even know how precise the Russian army would like them to be," Sullivan said. "Innocent civilians could be killed regardless of their nationality. It would then be followed by an onslaught of a ground force moving across the Ukrainian frontier. Again, where innocent civilians could get caught in the cross fire or trapped in places they could not move from. So that is why we are being so clear and direct to American citizens that while commercial transport options are still available, they should take advantage of them."

So not only are the Russians about to invade, but hey, they're about to commit atrocities. Starring Jake Sullivan as Harrison Ford, or maybe Harrison Ford as Joe Biden. Or something. Meanwhile, nothing's changed in Ukraine:

What did we just witness? I refer to the two-month frenzy that seized the Western media, in which Vladimir Putin was massing 175,000 troops on Ukraine’s border for an invasion to begin right about now. The Washington Post led on December 3, 2021, with those big numbers and was duly followed by others. A gigantic massing of forces was taking place. Putin was threatening an invasion and had mobilized his forces to accomplish the final breakage of Ukraine. President Joe Biden was a believer, ordering evacuations from embassies in Ukraine and Belarus. He told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late January that blood would almost certainly flow in the streets of Kiev, the national capital; “prepare for impact” sometime soon, probably in February.

And then a surprising thing happened. The Ukrainian president, the guy whose lead we were apparently following, said, in effect, cut it out. Not true. You’re panicking people in Ukraine, hurting its economy, and besides the Russian troop movements were really nothing out of the ordinary.

. . . This contretemps between the leader of the Free World and the president of the Ukrainian “great power” was very disturbing to the Washington establishment. They thought that Zelensky had flubbed his performance. He was apparently unaware of his proper role. “We’re his most important ally and he’s poking us in the eye and creating daylight between Washington and Kyiv,” said a senior administration official. “It’s self-sabotage more than anything else.”

The story suggests the current manufactured crisis is the result of policy confusion created by Biden's handlers at the start of his administration:

The new team at the White House, closely following a script announced by the Atlantic Council, declared that Crimea and the Donbas must be put back on the table. That meant, explained a Biden official, a “very extensive and almost constant focus on Ukraine from day one.” In the view of Democrats, Donald Trump had been a shameless appeaser of Putin; indeed, he was Putin’s puppet. This narrative, to be sure, was dubious in the extreme, as Trump the ostensible appeaser surrounded himself with advisors—H.R. McMaster, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, James Mattis, and John Bolton—who regularly blasted Russia in scalding tones. But though the narrative may have been wrong, it was theirs. The Democrats believed it. Where Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken largely followed Trump’s line on China, they broke sharply with him over Ukraine.

. . . Russia’s callup of reserves—which both now and in April was interpreted by U.S. intelligence as reflecting plans for a gigantic invasion—was in direct response to . . . important developments: . . . a new U.S. posture toward Ukraine-related issues that was far more aggressive than Trump’s, and the declaration by Ukraine’s military that they were working on a plan to drive the Russians out of [Donbas and Crimea]. When Biden said in December that the United States would not commit forces to Ukraine in the event of a war, it took the legs out from under this plan.

So why keep stirring up a crisis-that's not-a-crisis? That seems to be what's going on:

Biden officials have repeatedly claimed for more than a month that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was “imminent,” prompting protests in the country from officials who complained that the reality on the ground on Ukraine’s eastern border did not match the rhetoric out of the White House and that the latter was tanking Ukraine’s economy – making an invasion more likely.

In early February, Biden officials appeared to announce a retirement of the use of the word “imminent” given the growing discontent in Ukraine, bizarrely claiming that the discord between Washington and Kyiv was a product of how the word translated into Ukrainian.

But there's been no consistency. The story continues:

“I used that [the word imminent] once,” Psaki said on February 2. “And then we stopped using it because I think it sent an — a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision.”

“I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, we said, ‘He could invade at any time.’ That’s true; we still don’t know that he’s made a decision,” Psaki claimed.

Biden himself said during the fateful “minor incursion” press conference that he believed Putin had decided to invade again.

At best, the explanation is incompetence. However, if no invasion takes place by the middle of this week, people need to start asking serious questions about who's in charge.