The Biden Conundrum Continues

Over the weekend, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Kuleba said of the meeting with US representatives in Warsaw,

"Today is a real opportunity to thank the United States for everything it has done for Ukraine so far. We thank every nation – not all assistance is reported in the media, but I know what every country has done, and we thank every one of them. But no one has done more for Ukraine throughout this time than the United States," the foreign minister stressed.

Yet Ukraine President Zelensky remarked on the same day,

NBC: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thinks Biden is “all talk" and lacks the courage to respond to Russia pic.twitter.com/2M4FxC0fSc

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 27, 2022

The story at the Red State blog observes,

That’s the correct take, regardless of whether one personally thinks the US should be more involved in Ukraine at the moment. If Biden weren’t trying to present himself as a savior, “uniting'” the world against Russian aggression, then Zelensky’s critique might be out of bounds. But what Biden is doing is what he’s always done throughout his political career, which is to pretend he’s in the thick of the action when he’s actually just falsely pumping up his ego.

. . . I can’t imagine how frustrating it is for the Ukrainian president to see someone like Biden playing celebrity on the world stage and taking credit for things he didn’t even do, while refusing to take direct action.

The contradiction may stem from the fact that foreign minister Kuleba and the defense minister met with their counterparts, Secretaries Blinken and Austin, without Biden being there. However, the red light-green light affair over sending Polish Mig fighters to Ukraine is an indication that Biden can cancel any prior agreement. On March 6, Secretary Blinken said Poland had a "green light" to transfer the jets to Ukraine; by March 10, Biden appears to have changed his mind:

“POTUS will do what the military advises here and the advice now is not to do this and instead send the Ukrainian government more things they can make good use of,” a senior administration official told POLITICO. Ukraine has “many planes they already don’t fly much because of Russian air defense.” The official added that it’s “not clear what sending more planes achieves.”

The takeaway, certainly from Zelensky's point of view, is that Biden is timid and unreliable. Certainly the implication from the "senior administration official" is that the Pentagon knows better than Zelensky what Zelensky really needs.

The problem is not so much that Biden said something like what Reagan said (though Reagan was referring specifically to the Berlin Wall in an apostrophe to Gorbachev, implying that Gorbachev should remain in power to tear it down, while Biden said something vaguely implying regime change), the real issue is that Reagan meant it, while Biden was bloviating.

Biden is simply the uncertain creature of his handlers, who themselves are not serious people. Putin read Biden correctly; the one both he and Biden completely misread was Zelensky.

Back To The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I had drafts for a couple of other posts prepared and ready to go today, but almost as soon as I put yesterday's post up, President Brandon let me know I wasn't done:

He came, he saw, he confused.

Joe Biden’s call-to-arms speech in Poland was long on soaring rhetoric about the virtues of democracy but woefully short on what more the West will do to help Ukraine defeat the Russian invasion. But by the time he got to the finish, most of that was forgotten.

What mattered most and what will be remembered for a long time was a single line the president of the United States said about the president of Russia: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

In the context of the speech and the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians, it’s impossible to understand that line as anything other than a call for regime change, a move that would dramatically raise the stakes with Russia at a time when Biden has been at pains to lower them.

I'm actually of two minds about this. President Trump was actually far more belligerent in his public challenges to renegade world leaders:

The US president used Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Day speech as the basis for his latest provocative tweet against the leader, whom he has previously referred to as “little rocket man”, saying the “nuclear button” in Washington is “much bigger and more powerful” than Kim’s – “and my button works!”.

It seems as though some people were even encouraged to see this tone from Biden:

President Joe Biden stunned pundits and politicians on Saturday when, at the end of a fiery speech in Warsaw, he seemed to endorse regime change in Russia, saying Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”

His speech caused a huge reaction, particularly among members of the media and public figures in areas of foreign policy and politics. That included a lot of people on social media comparing his commentary to Ronald Reagan’s historic “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Berlin in June of 1987.

, , , If it isn’t clear which part of the speech the verified users were reacting to, it was spelled out explicitly several times. They were reacting very directly to his saying that Putin cannot remain in power, which was widely discussed as meaning a call for regime change.

. . . However, after the White House walked that back, attempting to clarify that Biden meant Putin shouldn’t have power over neighboring countries, there were doubts about the comparison to Reagan’s speech. Some, like reporter Mark Knoller and pundit Larry Sabato, specifically moderated their own praise in concert with the White House response.

(Apparently, though, nobody saw any parallels to "my button is much bigger".) The bottom line here is that Biden seems to have decided off the cuff to depart from the teleprompter and insert his own version of "tear down this wall" without giving it much thought -- indeed, without giving it any more thought than he'd give to anything else. The difference here is that "tear down this wall" was written for Reagan (by a speechwriter who's built an entire subsequent career on having written it), and clearly the text was approved up the chain of command before Reagan delivered it.

Even "my button is much bigger" had some level of deliberation on Trump's part (or on the part of whomever else was at his side) before he sent the tweet. And of course, it worked; Kim immediately ended his nuclear bombast. The problem for Biden is that however justifiable and potentially effective his ad lib may have been, his staff was not on board with it, and they walked it back. Nobody who worked for Trump walked back the tweet about the button.

I realized early this morning that I've already posted about Biden and the Dunning-Kruger effect. According to Britannica,

Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. According to the researchers for whom it is named, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the effect is explained by the fact that the metacognitive ability to recognize deficiencies in one’s own knowledge or competence requires that one possess at least a minimum level of the same kind of knowledge or competence, which those who exhibit the effect have not attained. Because they are unaware of their deficiencies, such people generally assume that they are not deficient, in keeping with the tendency of most people to “choose what they think is the most reasonable and optimal option.”

As I noted yesterday, Biden has fequently made remarks dismissive of reporters' assumptions, as when he's insisted throughout the Russo-Ukraine War that he never intended for sanctions to deter Putin, even as his administration has repeatedly said it relies on them on the basis that they do. We must assume that Biden's national security handlers had been working on the assumption that he would not make remarks outside expected unprovocative parameters, when instead, without giving it any thought, he did so.

If this were Reagan or Trump (especially Reagan), the remarks would have been fully calculated; in the case of Trump, they carried a level of instinctive confidence that also turns out to have been justified. With Biden, they were sponanteous empty bombast that carried the extra disadvantage of needing "clarification".

Again, this is not a medical issue, and the Dunning-Kruger effect is not a medical condition. The issue is that Biden is so ignorant he doesn't know what stupid is. This is dangerous. Should this man remain in power?

Biden's Poland Performance

The hits just keep on coming. The most recent from President Brandon's visit to Poland was described as follows:

President Joe Biden was tragically felled by a slice of pizza topped with jalapeño peppers in Warsaw on Friday, Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt reported on Hannity.

. . . Biden . . . ate pizza with soldiers and afterward met with Polish President Andrezj Duda. As Biden spoke, he coughed and took a sip of his drink. He turned to Duda and said, “I was visiting our troops and I had pizza pie with hot peppers on it.”

. . . as b-roll of Biden eating pizza aired, Hurt said, “And there he is, defeated by a slice of jalapeño pizza.”

Biden is the first president to be “defeated” by food on foreign soil since George H.W. Bush threw up on the prime minister of Japan during a dinner in Tokyo in 1992.

That was the least of it. On Thursday, he insisted there was no reason to have imposed sanctions on Putin, or something like that:

President Biden suggested Thursday that sanctions were not meant to deter the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling reporters now that "sanctions never deter."

"Sir, deterrence didn’t work. What makes you think Vladimir Putin will alter course based on the action you’ve taken today," Biden was asked by CBS reporter Christina Ruffini during a press conference at a NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium.

"Let’s get something straight. You remember if you covered me from the very beginning, I did not say that, in fact, the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter. You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter," Biden responded.

Ruffini repeated the question, asking whether these actions could make Putin change course.

"That’s not what I said. You’re playing a game with me. The answer’s no," Biden snapped back.

. . . Biden's remarks come after weeks of messaging from key Biden administration officials – including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken – who claimed the sanctions placed on Russia were meant to deter the actions of Putin.

But this is completely consistent with the position he took a month ago, when immediately after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, he said “no one expected sanctions would prevent anything”, again to the amazement of the press:

CBS News' Margaret Brennan: "I thought that was so interesting when President Biden said, 'No one expected sanctions to prevent anything.'

"Actually, that's exactly what his foreign policy team said again and again, and it's what his secretary of state said to me on Sunday."

He was called out for "inconsistency" then, but as far as I can see, he's been completely consistent. As I said then, he really believes he's a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations. It's plain he regarded sanctions as kabuki from the get-go, an empty threat made for the benefit of the ignorant public, and I think the subtext as well was that he was going to avoid World War III by letting Putin roll into Ukraine, and the whole thing would be over within a matter of days anyhow.

The gaffe during his pep talk to the 82nd Airborne was of a piece:

“You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see — you’re gonna see women, young people standing in the middle in front of a damned tank just saying, ‘I’m not leaving, I’m holding my ground,’” Biden said.

A White House official quickly clarified that Biden wasn’t changing his stance on deploying the military into Ukraine.

“The president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position,” a Biden spokesman told The Post.

There's nothing new here; this isn't an issue of cognitive decline. Biden is aware of his surroundings; he isn't talking to people who aren't there; he's speaking as coherently as any dumb guy can. In fact, he was just running his mouth like any jerk in the corner bar. It's just that you can't take anything he says seriously, and in fact, he gets impatient with people who expect him to be serious.

President Zelensky And The Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations

I continue to think Ukraine's President Zelensky is practicing wartime national-purpose rhetoric at an Abraham Lincon or Winston Churchill level. Below is from his March 24 address in English to NATO:

I am addressing you from Kyiv, our capital, which has been fighting for a month already, just as our entire state.

Yes, it is true - we are not in the Alliance. Not in the most powerful defense union in the world. Not one of the 30 states under the umbrella of joint protection. Under the umbrella of Article 5. It feels like we are in the "gray zone". Between the West and Russia. But we defend all our common values. And we are bright people! And we have been defending all these values for a month now!

. . . And do you have confidence that Article 5 can work?

"Budapest" hasn’t worked for us already. Our Budapest Memorandum. Has not worked for peace in Ukraine.

And I will tell you honestly - today Budapest is not working for peace in Ukraine as well. Yes, we receive help from individual members of the Alliance. I am very grateful. Ukrainians are sincerely grateful for this. To each of you who gives what you have, supporting us.

But what about the Alliance? The question of Article 5 is fundamental. I just want you to know what we think about it. And I sincerely wish you that we are wrong in our assessments and in our doubts. I sincerely wish that you actually have a very strong Alliance. Because if we are wrong, the world is safe. But if we are at least one percent right, I ask you to reconsider your attitude. Your own estimates. And really take care of security, security in Europe and, consequently, in the world.

You can give us one percent of all your aircraft. One percent of all your tanks. One percent! We can't just buy it. Such a supply directly depends only on NATO's decisions, on political decisions, by the way.

MLRS systems. Anti-ship weapons. Means of air defense. Is it possible to survive such a war without it?

So when it's finally available, it will give us and you as well, one hundred percent security. And we need one. And the only thing I demand from you. . . After such a month of war. This is a request for the sake of our military. After such a war against Russia ... Never, please, never tell us again that our army does not meet NATO standards.

We have shown what our standards are capable of. And how much we can give to the common security in Europe and the world. How much we can do to protect against aggression against everything we value, everything you value. But NATO has yet to show what the Alliance can do to save people. To show that this is truly the most powerful defense union in the world. And the world is waiting. And Ukraine is very much waiting. Waiting for real actions. Real security guarantees. From those whose word is trustworthy. And whose actions can keep the peace.

This is actually a version of President Trump's line with NATO, that, effectively, in not budgeting adequately for defense, NATO is relying on someone else -- in Trump's case, the US -- to provide its security. Zelensky is making precisely the same argument from the other direction, that Ukraine has been willing to fight, and indeed to fight at a level that's at least equivalent to NATO, indeed to provide security to NATO, while NATO as an alliance hasn't been functioning very well and is effectively allowing Ukraine to provide its security..

In fact, I think Zelensky and Trump are similar populist, national-interest and national-identity politicians. This is an issue that the US right is currently struggling with; they don't trust Trump, and they don't trust Zelensky. Well and good, but who has a better idea?

It seems to me that Zelensky's argument boils down to this:

• Ukraine is outside of NATO and can't invoke Article 5 for mutual defense
• However, Ukaine has far surpassed expectations and is now actually protecting NATO merely by conducting a successful defense of its own territory
• NATO members who rely on Article 5 for their own defense from a Russian invasion are naive
• Other international agreements that theoretically protected Ukraine haven't worked
• So how much confidence can you really have in Article 5?
• On the other hand, we have protected you without the obligation Article 5 would have imposed on us
• It's in your individual interest to support us with active military assistance
• You owe it to yourselves to behave as if you're a trustworthy alliance.

The story of the Russia-Ukraine war has consistently been about underestimating Ukraine. I think, though, that Zelensky has an acute understanding of the situation on the ground. As Russia weakens during this war -- and as its actual weakness prior to the war has been revealed -- the strategic fulcrum in Europe must inevitably move east. The decision making majority will also move east, especially if or when Finland and Sweden join NATO.

However, the strategic reality, as Zelensky lays out here, is effectively that there is a parallel quasi-alliance that not only includes but is at least morally led by Ukraine and Zelensky. Ukraine as of now is neither in NATO nor the EU but as a practical matter is setting the terms for decision making in both. All are obligated to send Ukraine aid, notwithstanding any actual alliance, in their own interest. Some, like Hungary, aren't pulling their weight, but Zelensky is setting expectations.

It seems to me that this is a situation that Trump as president would endorse. If NATO had become complacent that the US would make up any defense budget shortfall among its members, Putin's invasion of Ukraine woke them up. Indeed, a recognition, as Zelensky puts it, that "NATO has yet to show what the Alliance can do to save people" ought to be prompting Europe to rethink what a functional alliance would look like. As a practical matter, this will have to include Ukraine, and Zelensky will be a major leader.

A footnote is that Biden and the US have been transitioning away from a leadership role in the new de facto alliance. The performances of both President Biden and Vice President Harris in Poland have been terrible. Beyond Zelensky's unexpectedly superb performance, Both Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron have shown far more initiative than Biden. For the sake of the West, it's good that others are stepping in.

In Other News

I've said here that the Russo-Ukraine War is just one theater of the larger Plebe War, although so far, there's been no actual shooting in the other theaters, like the US battles over transsexualism. An intriguing example is the photo above of the winners in the recent NCAA women's swimming championship. In nearly every case, the photo has been cropped by corporate media to focus on Lia, the fully intact, six foot four, cisgender male at left who identifies as a woman purely for athletic purposes, and it eliminates the runner-up women clustered far to the right, pretty clearly in protest at the outcome. Even so, Mr Thomas's victory grin seemes forced and equivocal.

This post at Instapundit, apparently from Twitter, shows the lengths to which corporate media will go to justify Mr Thomas's official standing as a female -- in the official corporate media photo, his facial features have clearly been retouched and softened. Well, of course. The guy has no intention of functioning as a woman once his athletic career is over, not to mention his 15 minutes of fame. The hormones were just to play the game, they'll wear off, but there's not going to be any surgery. Ever. Period. (I would imagine his hair and makeup are always done by his handlers, for that matter.)

I've already mentioned the peculiar case that the transsexualist battle is being fought over two figures, Mr Thomas and the even more absurd figure of Dr Rachel Levine, for whom the coporate media apparently hasn't even seen a need for handlers to do the hair and makeup. That's an indication of how much cynicism we're dealing with here. She's wearing a dress and a necklace. Isn't that enough? Salon characterizes her as "the highest ranking trans woman in government", which in effect is an argument from authority. The government says she's a woman. So shut up.

John Belushi used to get himself up in exactly that way on Saturday Night Live, and he'd get laughs for it. The whole kerfuffle over Twitter banning the Babylon Bee, a humor site, for naming Dr Levine Man of the Year is an indication of how seriously the gentry is taking this issue, I think because even the gentry when off camera can't suppress guffaws at Levine -- he's an ugly old fat guy in frumpy drag, and nobody can really cover that up. The. Plebs. Must. Not. Be. Allowed. To. Snicker. If they snicker at Dr Rachel Levine, who knows how many others they'll snicker at? The vice president? The speaker? Wouldn't a modern-day Belushi in drag do a better job playing either one than they do themselves?

This gets to the nexus of the trans campaign. On one hand, it makes the clear point that, like Mr Thomas, a man is actually just a better woman, and this is just another iteration of anti-feminism. On the other, if you announce that gender is nothing but a social consuct, you throw open the traditional question of same-sex attraction:

You can’t erase gender and simultaneously maintain the gains of the gay rights movement in western culture over the last 30 years. The status of identifying as a person attracted to the same sex depends solely on the notion of gender. To erase gender boundaries is to erase millions of gay Americans. Whatever your opinion of the gay rights movement, that is an immutable fact. There is no “gay” without gender.

The trans activists are quickly pushing themselves out of the LGB into a lettered category of their own making.

In other words, if you're a guy attracted to other guys because they're guys, you're transphobic. What about a woman who's been living a lie as a woman and now identifies as a man? Why not marry him? The writer goes on,

. . . These two movements cannot coexist peacefully. I say that as someone who has only ever been an observer. Right now, I am observing an exclusively progressive phenomenon fold in on itself. We might think our lesbian sisters are safe from the current thread of rabid misogyny running through pop culture, but we would be wrong. All women are the victims of this aggressive ideology. “Live and let live” is great, but only when both sides agree to let live. The all-trans-all-the-time mob isn’t willing to simply live their own lives and be happy with living in their own truth.

My basic question is, "Why are they doing this?" The trans movement is seeking not fully specified "rights" for a very tiny and not fully specified group. Mr Thomas as far as we can see doesn't have gender dysphoria, insofar as that is even a recognized condition -- outside the pool, he has no intention of living as other than a fully adjusted man and is apparently copacetic with that. He dates women and doesn't cruise gay bars. I would imagine that he doesn't even get off all that much at being in the women's locker room insofar as he might glimpse this or that.

He may, though, get off at the general unpleasantness his mere presence there causes. Misogyny is at the basis of this, perhaps not that far from the idea that rape is a power display more than sexual gratification per se. By the same token, Dr Rachel Levine posing as an absurdly frumpy woman is an act of misogyny, not self actualization.

But at bottom, it's a violation of natural law, in effect, as in other despotisms, a declaration that the government's law, even if in clear violation of natural law, is nevertheless the law of the land. This is problematic. This is the reason the trans battle is just another theater of the Plebe War.

Why Don't They Update The Maps?

I'm stumped. Above is this morning's map for the Ukraine theater of the Plebe War. As far as I can tell, the ISW site is the most prestigious ongoing assessment of the war's progress, but it's been misleading in important ways from the start.

First, I think it's generally acknowledged that the thick pink blobs that are said to denote "Assessed Russian-Controlled Ukrainian Territory" do not reflect the fact that the actual Russian controlled areas are really just thin lines along roads where Russian units advanced as of several weeks ago. The truth is Ukrainian forces operate freely within all the pink blobs and conduct attacks on Russian convoys at will there.

Second, the conventional wisdom at this point is that the Russian advances are "stalled" on all fronts except within Mariupol. For more than a week, the ISW assessments have consistently said nothing but words to the effect of "Russian forces did not make any major advances on March. . .", but they're now beginning to add, ". . . Ukrainian forces conducted local counterattacks northwest of Kyiv and around Mykolayiv."

In fact, there are increasing reports from different sources that Russian troops northwest of Kyiv are now encircled, for instance, here. The map key has a blue area to indicate "Claimed Ukrainian Counteroffensives" but in several weeks of following the ISW site, I haven't seen them add a single blue area for a claimed Ukrainian counteroffensive other than a tiny, almost invisible line northwest of Kharkhiv. But isn't a counteroffensive that cuts off the key suburbs northwest of Kyiv, "claimed" or not, eligible for inclusion on the map?

The same would apply to the area around Mykolaiv, which Ukraine has claimed to be recaptured. Per the Daily Kos a week ago,

Well, just a few hours ago, we got confirmation that Ukraine had taken Posad-Pokrovskote, which in itself isn’t a noteworthy place. What matters is where it is located: smack center between Mykolaiv and Kherson. That means Russia has been pushed back an incredible 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Voznesensk. More importantly, Russia has been pushed out at least 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Mykolaiv—out of range of most Russian artillery. Ukraine is now less than 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Kherson airport, which would be a massive morale boost. And the airport is just outside Kherson’s city limits.

Shouldn't there have been a blue dotted-line area from just north of Kherson to past Mykolaiv on the map? I mean, since a week ago? Instead, that area, which the best information seems to indicate is still in Ukrainian hands, is still listed on the map as a "claimed Russian advance".

Meanwhile, the retired US general talking heads are pretty much all gone from YouTube, which means they're also gone from network news. When they were on, they gave versions that ranged between defeatist to noncommittal on the prospects for Ukrainian success.

Eliot Cohen's question is worth asking: why can't the west admit that Ukraine is winning? It's a serious question, and the answer is non-trivial. For instance, I'm following the war with great interest and hungry for the latest information. But I'm a retired guy with lots of free time. Fine -- but the retired generals ought to know more than I do, except they don't seem to. The people at ISW are the professionals who do this full time.

I think deliberate obtuseness is one explanation for what's going on.

UPDATE: A report on a revised map from NBC News Chief Correspondent Richard Engel:

Ukraine making big gains around kyiv. I got a brief (with an unclassified map) from two top municipal officials pic.twitter.com/zASEbmISyJ

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) March 23, 2022

Why can't the ISW map be revised with these officially "claimed" Ukrainian advances?

"Why Can’t The West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning?"

There's been a flurry of leaked or blurted reports from the Russian side on its actual casualties in Ukraine. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Russia has lost almost 10,000 soldiers in less than four weeks in Ukraine, according to its own figures.

The death toll – an incredible tally for a war that the Kremlin believed would be over within days – was published by a pro-government website, but quickly taken down.

There was speculation that it was uploaded by a pro-Ukrainian employee. Russia had previously admitted to 498 deaths – but that was on March 2.

Although this estimate is at least deniable, this still exceeds the estimates of "more than 7,000" that have been the consensus in US media, apparently based on information from the Pentagon. However, another Russian leak gives an even bigger total.

A former internal affairs minister of #Ukraine @AvakovArsen shared the intercepted Russian military summary for March 18: Rus. Army troops killed 12,814. Private company Liga (former Vagner) troops killed 4,451. Total number ofservicemembers killed at war in Ukraine: 17,265. pic.twitter.com/TuSTIyHW5n

— Victor Kovalenko (@MrKovalenko) March 21, 2022

Ukraine's official current estimate of Russian deaths as of yesterday is "about 15,000", which is generally in line with the Twitter leak above.

This suggests to me that the Pentagon estimates on which the US media relies have been too conservative -- at this point, underestimating the real total by as much as 50%, which is enough to be seriously misleading. The only commentator to raise any question so far about this is Eliot Cohen, a deep-state Ivy Leaguer who was an architect of the failed Bush Jr policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has a current piece in The Atlantic, Why Can’t the West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning?

Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning.

Well, if he never had the right answers, at least now he's come up with the right question. He goes on,

So why can’t Western analysts admit as much? Most professional scholars of the Russian military first predicted a quick and decisive Russian victory; then argued that the Russians would pause, learn from their mistakes, and regroup; then concluded that the Russians would actually have performed much better if they had followed their doctrine; and now tend to mutter that everything can change, that the war is not over, and that the weight of numbers still favors Russia. Their analytic failure will be only one of the elements of this war worth studying in the future.

. . . The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. . . . Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective.

However, the simple arithmetic I've done here suggests that although the total Russian invasion force was maybe 150,000, the actual numbers in the combat brigades doing the fighting are more like 42,000. If Cohen's estimate of those taken off the battlefield is 30,000, then the Russian brigades have fallen well below simple combat ineffectiveness. Anecdotal reports of 80% casualties in some Russian brigades seem perfectly reasonable in this context.

It's worth noting that as of late last week, the few retired US generals who were still giving prognostications in the media were saying the Russian attack would "culminate" within ten to 14 days -- but as of the weekend, all the respectable open-surce sites were declaring the attack "culminated", meaningless as that term may be, at least a week ahead of projections.

So Cohen may well have a point. On the other hand, as a career deep-stater, his conclusions are remarkably limited:

Most commentators have taken too narrow a view of this conflict, presenting it as solely between Russia and Ukraine.

True, true. But who are the actual adversaries?

Like most wars, though, it is being waged by two coalitions, fought primarily though not exclusively by Russian and Ukrainian nationals. The Russians have some Chechen auxiliaries who have yet to demonstrate much effectiveness (and who lost their commander early on), may get some Syrians (who will be even less able to integrate with Russian units), and find a half-hearted ally in Belarus, whose citizens have begun sabotaging its rail lines and whose army may well mutiny if asked to invade Ukraine.

Oh, quack, quack, quack. He goes on,

The Ukrainians have their auxiliaries, too, some 15,000 or so foreign volunteers, some probably worthless or dangerous to their allies, but others valuable—snipers, combat medics, and other specialists who have fought in Western armies. More important, they have behind them the military industries of countries including the United States, Sweden, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.

But if you ask me, the US is half-hearted at best, and neither NATO nor the EU has been unanimous. The biggest problem continues to be Joe Biden, who was making big baksheesh from Ukraine until Zelensky was voted president in 2019 and finally fired Hunter from Burisma. Biden and his deep-state allies never liked Zelensky and even as we speak are doing everything they can to delay effective aid.

The fight is much more a coalition of broad bourgeois and working-class interests in Europe and the US against an established deep-state status quo that enabled Putin for a generation. This is why the US media and politically astute generals have been maintaining a generally defeatist line on Ukraine. I would guess that Eliot Cohen's heart is with the gentry as well -- his analysis is ultimately obtuse, almost deliberately so.