What's The End State?

I was watching a Ukrainian's comment about the war on YouTube, and he made a key point: various political leaders have worried about "starting World War III", but it's important to be realistic: we're already in World War III. Right now, there's a massive tacit allied effort to wage a new war against Soviet revanchism, with Ukraine as the proxy, but the tacit alliance recognizes to one extent or another that the fate of Europe hinges on its outcome. The only remotely clear policy statement on allied war aims so far has come from Secretary Austin, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

That should be at least relatively uncontroversial -- as Jennifer Rubin says in the link, "In reality, Austin simply stated the obvious." But what does this mean in context? I've already said here that the end of this war, even if its immediate cease-fire result is just a reestablishment of Ukraine's existing borders, will nevertheless mean some additional set of measures that will weaken Russia enough to keep it from re-invading Ukraine. That's the closest thing to an allied territorial war aim that we have for now.

This leaves aside the question of how Russians can be tried and punished for war crimes, which is also an expressed aim of many allied leaders. But an international authority with the effective power of the Nuremberg tribunal will be needed within Russia, able to override former national police power to the degree that suspects can be effectively located, arrested, brought to trial and subject to punsihment. This would place the existing Russian state or its successor under some type of superseding international control. This in turn suggests that a full achievement of allied war aims would involve a reconstitution of the Russian state similar to what happend in Germany and Japan after 1945, and proposals for a postwar Russia that fall short of that are unrealistic.

Allied discussion before the end of World War II addressed these same problems. France and Poland were liberated, but what would protect them from re-invasion if Germany were able to rebuild as it had been and reassert itself? After all, the evidence was clear that the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty had failed to accomplish the same objectives a generation earlier. The practical solution was the occupation of Germany, reduction of German territory, its partition into four temporary occuparion zones and two eventual successor states, and the political reorganization of those states under great-power supervision. These principles were agreed prior to and during the Yalta Conference.

It seems reasonable to expect that some type of international agreement similar in extent to Versailles or Yalta will need to establish conditions following the conclusion of the Russo-Ukraine war. On that basis, it's hard to assert that "World War III" hasn't already been started, and its resolution will lead to territorial relignment, as well as a new Russian constitution.

Unanticipated consequences following Yalta, however, were reification of postwar Poland under revised borders that awarded the eastern part of the country to the Soviet Union, which kept what Stalin had gained in the 1939 partition pact with Hitler, and which in turn transferred East Prussia and Silesia back to Poland from Germany. This will have serious implications that will now play themselves out in a new settlement with post-Ukraine Russia. Will eastern Poland remain Russian? What about Kaliningrad?

In thinking about a post-Ukraine War settlement, I discovered there are already numerous maps on the web from well before this year depicting potential partitions of Russia following a theoretical World War III. One goes so far as to represent itself as the outcome of the "2037 Treaty of Delhi". The one above is similar, though all these are fanciful and likely not predictive -- but they do reflect a consensus even before the current war that the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union would not be the end of the story, and a realistic assumption that World War III in whatever form would reflect a major revision to Russian territory.

One factor that I've already discussed has been the rise of Poland, which has been taking a leadership role in supporting Ukraine in this war, transferring its own tanks and other arms, as well as being a key transport corridor for other countries' contributions. In yesterday's post I discussed this issue at greater length.

But there are other territorial disputes that have been on the back burner since at least 1945 but would become pressing with a weakened Russia -- and again, a "weakened Russia" is now an implicit war aim for the US and other allies. Japan would almost certainly regain control of the disputed Kuril Islands and possibly Sakhalin. Stalin seized Karelia, several areas along the Finnish border, after the Russo-Finish war. Although Finland's policy has not been to claim these territories are disputed to avoid antagonizing Russia, its attitude appears to be changing, and a weakened Russia would be in less of a position to object to their return.

China and Russia have had a series of relatively minor border disputes, which have been at least theoretically resolved as of 2008. However, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, begun in 2013, envisions a series of possible rail connections between the Chinese rail network and Europe that could be economically threatening to Russia, especially considering the proposed route between China and Turkey running south of both the Caspian and the Black Seas. Both the Chinese and European rail networks, of which Turkey is a part, use the same rail gauge, which is not compatible with the Russian network. An international commission settling the Russo-Ukraine War could conceivably allocate Russian territory to China or other countries to allow completion of this standard gauge rail link, which would stimulate Eurasian trade while excluding Russia.

Other divisions of Russian territory, like those illustrated in the map above, more fancifully allocate wider swaths to China and even the US. At this point, they seem unlikely, put we simply don't know how the war will turn out, and we don't know what a post-Putin Russia will look like after a major military defeat. If, as in the map above, eastern Siberia is annexed by the US, this would make a Bering Sea rail tunnel a practical possibility, something that's been mooted since before World War I. Ths would, among other things, allow a standard gauge rail connection from North America to China, since both also use the standard European track gauge.

In addition, a weakened Russia and now a schism within Orthodoxy, along with a strengthened Catholic Poland, also means a renewed Catholicism in Ukraine. I don't think it's a coincidence at all that Pope Francis is increasingly involved in trying to settle the war.

Pope Francis said he has asked for a meeting in Moscow to help bring about an end to the war and warned that Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a key backer of President Vladimir Putin's fight against Ukraine, should not become Putin's "altar boy."

The pope's remarks came in an interview published on May 3 in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

In it, the pope revealed that 20 days after the war began, he asked the Vatican's top diplomat, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to communicate with Russia that Francis was ready to travel there in an effort to bring about an end to the conflict, which he likened to what took place in Rwanda 25 years ago. Although the pope did not use the word, the Vatican has recognized the 1994 violence by the Hutus against the Tutsis, which left more than 800,000 people dead, as a genocide.

"We have not yet had an answer and we are still insisting," the pope said of his request to meet with the Russian leader.

Francis has spoken with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky twice since the outbreak of the war and, in a break with diplomatic protocol, left the Vatican on Feb. 25, the day after the war began, to travel to Russia's embassy to the Holy See to register his concerns against the conflict.

. . . The pope also offered further details on his March 16 video conference with the Russian patriarch, saying that during their 40 minute discussion, "I told him: we are not state clerics."

Consider that Pope St John Paul had a major role in supporting Polish resistance to Soviet domination, the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Warsaw Pact. This in turn set Poland on its current course to become a regional power comparable to its position before the Partitions . I would guess that Francis sees a reason to continue the Church's role in the region.

Poland Will Come Out The Winner

I don't think it's a coincidence that Poland has beccome the second-largest supplier of weapons and other aid to Ukraine, behind only the US. (Canada, however, may have moved into second in recent days.) I'm starting to think their opportunity is historic. According to Wikipedia,

The Partitions of Poland were three partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that took place toward the end of the 18th century and ended the existence of the state, resulting in the elimination of sovereign Poland and Lithuania for 123 years. The partitions were conducted by the Habsburg monarchy, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, which divided up the Commonwealth lands among themselves progressively in the process of territorial seizures and annexations.

The wars of the 20th century severely weakened the successor states to Prussia and Habsburg Austria, while the collapse of the Soviet Union and the likely outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war have left a vacuum into which a resuscitated Poland will inevitably expand. Note that prior to the partitions, Polish-Lithuanian territory extended well into Ukraine, and it's clear that Polish leadership is already planning for new circumstances:

"There will be almost no more borders between our countries–🇵🇱and🇺🇦,"🇵🇱President Duda said in his speech to🇵🇱ppl:

"We shall live together on this earth, building&rebuilding our common happiness and strength, which will repel any danger or possible threat" https://t.co/2tY4Q85rq9

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) May 5, 2022

Ukraine’s PM Denys Shmyhal confirms that Ukraine has just signed an important defense deal with Poland.

“I can’t reveal its content, but it’s an important step towards providing Ukraine with special technology and special support in the field of security and defense.”

🇵🇱🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/r35L26hziN

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 6, 2022

Poland has also been making its own statements of policy objectives for the resolution of the current war, including that it will not support a settlement that does not restore Ukraine's existing territorial boundaries.

It had begun to occur to me, partly from listening to the YouTube presentations of Ukraine historian Rabbi Henry Abramson, that Poland (as well as Lithuania) had historical ties to much of Ukraine prior to the Russian annexation. According to Britannica,

Direct Polish rule in Ukraine in the 1340s and for two centuries thereafter was limited to Galicia. There, changes in such areas as administration, law, and land tenure proceeded more rapidly than in Ukrainian territories under Lithuania. However, Lithuania itself was soon drawn into the orbit of Poland following the dynastic linkage of the two states in 1385/86 and the baptism of the Lithuanians into the Latin (Roman Catholic) church. The spread of Catholicism among the Lithuanians and the attendant diffusion of the Polish language, culture, and notions of political and social order among the Lithuanian nobility eroded the position of the Orthodox Ruthenians, as had happened earlier in Galicia. In 1569, by the Union of Lublin, the dynastic link between Poland and Lithuania was transformed into a constitutional union of the two states as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At the same time, the greater part of the Ukrainian territories was detached from Lithuania and annexed directly to Poland. This act hastened the differentiation of Ukrainians and Belarusians (the latter of whom remained within the grand duchy) and, by eliminating the political frontier between them, promoted the closer integration of Galicia and the eastern Ukrainian lands. For the next century, virtually all ethnically Ukrainian lands experienced in common the direct impact of Polish political and cultural predominance.

If nothing else, a weakened Russia means a strengthened Poland in Ukraine. For now, based on the tweet above, it also appears that there now is a more or less secret military alliance between Ukraine and Poland, irrespetive of NATO or the EU. But this will probably make Ukraine's NATO membership inevitable, especially as the course of the war is leading to Ukraine's transition from old stocks of Warsaw Pact weaponry, either its own or supplied by Poland and other countries, to NATO weaponry.

A close military alliance with Poland would also make Ukraine a de facto member no matter what. Indeed, Ukraine's experience in successfully fighting Russia will make it an extremely valuable partner. Thus a trend in which Poland becomes a major shaper of NATO policy will likely continue. I'll have more to say on Poland's likely role in a postwar division of Russian territory in a Polish-Lithuanian-Ukraine alignment as well.

I'm intrigued by another potential footnote, the issue of the Russian railroad gauge. At the start of rail construction in Russia, it purposely adopted a railroad gauge, five feet between the rails, that was incompatible with the standard European gauge of 56-1/2 inches between the rails. Thus it would be impossible for either Germany or Austria-Hungary to invade Russia directly using rail transport. This proved only a mild impediment to Germany in Operation Barbarossa, but it's been an increasing obstacle to trade, especially after former Warsaw Pact countries joined the EU.

Indeed, the peacetime break of gauge at the Russian border has been a long-standing impediment to freer trade. Technological workarounds have never been more than uneconomic halfway measures. At some point, especially with Chinese efforts to complete a rail connection to Europe north of the Himalayas with their own rail network, also of the European standard gauge, will also inevitably isolate the Russian broad guage.

Like Ukraine, the Baltic countries adopted the five-foot gauge with Russia. But after the demise of the Soviet Union, the Baltic countries have been in the process of converting to the European gauge.

A close trade agreement with Poland, as well as closer cooperation with Romania as a result of the current war, suggests the same type of conversion will inevitably take place in Ukraine, probably in combination with the postwar rebuilding of Ukraine's rail infrastruture damaged in the war.

I think this will also reinforce a historic realignment. For historical context, it's worth noting that a delayed outcome of the US Civil War was a change in the southern railroad gauge to conform to the northern standard, which effectively finalized the absorption of the south into the northern industrialized economy.

Orthodox, Evangelicals, The US Right, and Putin

Since the Russo-Ukraine War started, I've been puzzling over why certain groups have been at best squishy over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There is apparently something of a schism among Russian Orthodox, the largest Orthodox denomination, since Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has been staunch in his endorsement of the invasion. On the other hand, there's been little intelligent reporting on this, especially on how Russian Orthodox outside Russia have reacted.

In fact, the general tendency in religious reporting has been to elide Orthodox and Evangelicals into a single group along with elements of the US fringe and not-so-fringe Right. Here's a typical take:

While many Russian Orthodox Church priests have condemned Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, the head of the church, Patriarch Kirill, a man who once called Putin “a miracle of God,” is firmly in the Russian president’s corner. Kirill is particularly concerned about gay pride parades in Ukraine’s Donbas region. He claims that the war is “far more important than politics,” adding that “if humanity accepts that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity accepts that sin is a variation of human behavior, then human civilization will end there.” Writing at The Bulwark, Cato Institute fellow Cathy Young noted that the patriarch mentioned “the evil of gay parades” multiple times in last weekend’s Forgiveness Sunday sermon but “did not say a word about fellow Christians under fire in Ukraine. . . .”

Christian nationalism is partly driving Putin’s holy war in Ukraine, much like Christian nationalism is at the heart of the Christian Right’s holy war in the United States. The only significant difference between these two religious wars is that one is a shooting war and one is not.

In opposition to the official atheism that defined the Soviet Union of his youth, Putin now believes that Russia is a historic Christian nation that is in danger of eroding into immorality and debauchery. He wants to prevent what he sees as the decadence of the West, a culture informed by autonomous individualism and sexual promiscuity, from influencing eastern Europe.

While I might stipulate that there's some group of people who are "Christian nationalists" in the US, if this means they somehow want to establish some flavor of Christian as the national religion, they have a tough row to hoe against the First Amendment, which specifically prohibits it. And it's worth pointing out that the US Catholic bishops have been taking collections to aid Ukraine in the conflict, Pope Francis has been clear that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a bad thing, and he has specifically engaged Patriarch Kirill in the matter of his endorsement of it. Yet Catholics are the largest Christian denomination in the US. Certainly the US bishops have no problem with the First Amendment.

The next problem goes beyond the war and into the question of how the media understands and defines "Evangelicals", which is a vague term covering everyone from main line Baptists to people who assert simply that they've been "born again" or "have a personal relationship with Jesus", but don't attend church services at all. This is an almost meaningless designation, and it certainly doesn't imply that any in this vague group automatically support Putin or are some sort of Christian nationalists.

Here's another, similar take:

[C]onservatives [have] been developing a political and emotional alliance with Russia for almost 20 years. Those American believers, including prominent figures such as [Franklin] Graham and Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice see Russia, Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church as protectors of the faith, standing against attacks on “traditional” and “family” values. At the center is Russia’s spate of anti-LGBTQ laws, which have become a model for some anti-trans and anti-gay legislation in the U.S.

Now, with Russia bombing churches and destroying cities in Ukraine, the most Protestant of the former Soviet Republics, American evangelical communities are divided. Most oppose Russia’s actions, especially because there is a strong evangelical church in Ukraine that is receiving attention and prayers from a range of evangelical leaders.

Er, what "anti-LGBTQ laws" that are "a model for some anti-trans and anti-gay legislation in the U.S."? The only ones I'm aware of in the US are meant to prevent sexual grooming of pre-teens in the classroom but have no bearing on private conduct outside of it. And this reporter seems not to know what most writers quickly learn: Google is your friend:

[T]he majority of Ukrainians (74%) identify themselves as Orthodox, 8% as the Greco-Roman Catholicism, 1% – as Roman Catholicism and Protestant and Evangelical churches. Just Christians consider themselves almost 9% of respondents, don’t identify themselves with any religious denominations 6%.

Regionally, in all areas of the most common is Orthodoxy, except Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv region, where more than half respondents profess Greek-Catholicism. Also, the Greek Catholics consider themselves almost 20% of the population of Transcarpathia. Roman Catholicism is more common than in other areas in the Carpathian region (7%).

Among those who consider themselves as Orthodox, the relative majority (38%) identified themselves as Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, 20% – to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1% – to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, 39% – consider themselves as just Orthodox.

As far as I can tell from Facebook, Protestant denominations across the board, as well as Jewish charities, have been making humanitarian appeals to support displaced Ukrainians. I've seen no equivalent appeals for Russia. And as I've said, US Catholic parishes have been taking up second collections at mass for Ukraine and including Ukraine in prayers. As the link indicates, there are far more Catholics than Protestants of any type in Ukraine. (As a more or less conservative diocesan Catholic, I have a small Ukrainian flag sticker on my car, and one of our friends at mass recently implored my wife and me to pray for Ukraine.)

As a result, I suspect Christian support for Russia from any direction in the US is overstated in the media.

What about conservatives who are less clearly religious? Tucker Carlson is the most prominent among these, but those with similar views quickly reach the fringe, like Reps Greene and Cawthorn -- joined at the other end of the spectrum by members of the leftist Squad. On the other hand, other conservatives like Rep Dan Crenshaw have a saner perspective:

Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea. You should feel the same.

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) May 11, 2022

Some remarks I've seen suggest that the fringe US Right feels the ruling class is in some sort of mutual deal with Zelensky to cement its control using Ukraine's current prestige as a cats paw, but it isn't clear exactly how this operates. The ruling class, in the form of President Biden, clearly dragged its feet over supporting Ukraine in the first weeks of the war, and commentators like retired Gen Jack Keane have made the point that the administration has completely reversed its earlier position since then. So precisely what position has the ruling class taken?

My own view is that Zelensky is a Jew and a Ukrainian who sees a strong religious identity, both Jewish and Gentile, as part of an emerging Ukraine. At this point, he's an independent force to be reckoned with.

What Is Musk Actually Up To With Twitter?

As I've already said here, my take on Elon Musk is related to what I've gleaned about earlier American industrialists like Rockefeller Sr, Edward Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould. They didn't get that rich without knowing something, and that included knowing how to make a buck. I'm starting with the assumption that Musk knows more than most people about how to make a buck, and making a buck is his main interest.

It's worth noting that his best-known early investment was with the predecessor to PayPal, which revolutionized checking by eliminating the float, the extra balance everyone could carry by waiting days for checks to clear the bank. Musk knew something and figured out how to make a buck from it. And oh by the way, along with the web, it transformed mail order.

As a result, his takeover bid for Twitter must not be just a quixotic gadfly gesture. He was able to get financing for his bid, which he wouldn't be able to do if Wall Street thought he was just playing games. He thinks he can make a buck out of Twitter, and not just a couple of token percentage points, either. As with making electric cars a high-end consumer good, he's going to transform an industry, or maybe even create a new one from scratch.

My own view from a career in tech is that every tech business or IT department is hugely inefficient. Tech has prospered mostly because it's less inefficient than what it replaced, i.e. paper processing, manual calculation, and multiple procedural steps to get things done. On the other hand, its innovation has reached a plateau. Tech organizations have an interest in maintaining or increasing their levels of inefficiency. This is the first insight Musk has expressed, warning Twitter of new expectations:

Elon Musk has warned Twitter staff they face 'extreme' workloads when he takes over - but insists he'll still graft even harder than them to make the firm a success.

The tycoon replied to an earlier tweet he shared about his plans for the social media network Saturday, and wrote: 'Also, work ethic expectations would be extreme, but much less than I demand of myself.'

His original tweet had outlined Musk's tech-focused approach to running the firm, and said: 'If Twitter acquisition completes, company will be super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware.'

A week ago, I noted his telegraphed intent to fire the company's chief censor and general counsel. My guess is that he wants to get Twitter entirely out of the censorship business, and I would say this is less because he supports free speech than that he can't see why Twitter is giving a valuable product away for free. But if Twitter drops its for-free censorship model, it will force Google, YouTube, and other platforms to review their own losing business models and transform an industry just like PayPal transformed mail order.

Consider the immediate move of the Biden administration to create a "Disinformation Governance Board" following Twitter's acceptance of Musk's takeover offer. In other words, the Biden administration, which we may presume is aligned with the deep state, sees "disinformation governance", i.e. censorship, to be a highly valuable service, one that Twitter had been performing up to now for free, and for which the deep state is clearly now willing to budget serious money if Twitter will no longer provide it.

Musk, as an entrepreneur at the Rockefeller-Harriman level, could even suggest he could provide a for-profit censorship service at a reconstituted Twitter for less than the government would spend itself and still make a buck -- and we can't completely rule that out as a future move. But there can be no question that Twitter's current censorship operation is running at a loss, because the company isn't billing anyone for it now, and the whole project may just not be an efficient use of tech anyhow.

But beyond that, Musk not only tweeted that there would be greater expectations of work ethic and that the company would be "super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware". If you think about it, that would put it much more on a traditional Silicon Valley path like Hewlett-Packard or even the traditional IBM, which in its days of greatness offered a full hardware-software architecture, as well as pioneering information security. This is beyond Microsoft, which is software only, or Apple, which offers a limited spectrum of product focused on the consumer and entertainment.

I spent the first part of my tech career working with "IBM classic", the comprehensive "360" architecture when the business rule of thumb was that you couldn't be criticized for going with an IBM product. But as a contrarian, I always resisted that mindset (and was sometimes written up for it). Once PC desktop architecture, Unix, and networking gained ground, IBM stumbled and stagnated. To my mind, though, in its day, it made a lot of money with that formula, and if Musk can come up with a new 360-type architecture that covers the field, more power to him.

If he was behind PayPal, I wouldn't put it past him, but he's clearly transforming the space industry with Space X, turning the stodgy and underperforming NASA on its head, but expanding into communications as well. Not for nothing does Russia see him as a threat:

The head of Russia’s space agency is threatening Elon Musk with consequences for supplying satellite internet to Ukraine with SpaceX’s Starlink system.

On Saturday, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, posted a message to his Telegram channel, condemning Musk for expanding Starlink’s service to Ukraine, which is facing an ongoing invasion from Russia.

In the message, Rogozin accused Musk of supplying the Starlink dishes to the Ukrainian military, which he described as “Nazis.”

Ukraine, or at least Space X's involvement there, is the least of it. Russia has been forced to scale down its own involvement in space, creating a vacuum Musk will fill. Remarkable and highly underrated guy, an Edison more than a Jobs.

Wartime Truth And The Bodyguard Of Lies

Winston Churchill said, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." We've had a couple of stories lately that are hinky enough that I keep thinking of Churchill. Let's take the unfortunate Russian frigate Admiral Makarov, which last Friday was briefly reported to have been hit and disabled by a Ukrainian missile. Then there were new posts asserting that the video being circulated of the burning ship was maybe sorta kinda almost certainly fake, the product of a video war game simulation. However, in response to questions about just which war game could have produced this video, the answer was it doesn't matter, they've all gotten real, real good.

For whatever reason, nobody then went to Ultra Real Super War Game Blaster 7.0 and recreated the video in question to prove it could be done just that way. We're just hearing it's "almost certainly fake", case closed.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby added to the skepticism, saying on Friday, “We’ve seen the reports [about the Admiral Makarov]. . . we’ve been looking at this all day and we have no information to corroborate on these reports.” But isn't this a little along the line of "the golden mountain does not exist?" What golden mountain? What were they looking at all day? I would assume that the US has real-time coordinates for every Russian ship in its navy, updated 24/7. Gosh, where could the Admiral Makarov possibly be? We've been looking for it all day, can't confirm a thing!

If anyone wanted to pooh-pooh the story, they could just point to some open-source unclassified photo of the Makarov intact and in port over the weekend. But then the story disappeared with no further confirmation or denial.

In fact, we have no information on exactly when the attack on the Makarov did or didn't take place. Now, I'm a skeptical guy, but I'm a skeptical contrarian. If everyone agrees on something, they're probably wrong. Nevertheless, let's go to Wikipedia's account of Snake Island's brief history on the world stage, interleaving this with other news on the Russian Navy in the area. On April 14, Ukraine sank the Russian Cruiser Moskva, its lead asset in the Black Sea. After that, attacks on Snake Island intensified:

From 26 to 30 April OC South claimed strikes on the Russian forces on the island left a control post hit and two anti-aircraft missile complex Strela-10 destroyed as well as 42 Russian soldiers killed.

On 1 May, Ukrainian Air Force Command South claims to have launched an attack on Snake Island that destroyed Russian equipment stationed there.

On May 2 at dawn near the Snake Island in the Black Sea two Russian Raptor patrol and landing boats were sunk by a Bayraktar TB2 drone. A video footage was released showing Russian Raptor multi-purpose boats being struck by guided bombs followed by explosions and fires on them.

On Friday, May 6, a Ukrainian missile is claimed not to have damaged the Russian frigate Admiral Makarov, which maybe wasn't even in the area, because why on earth would it be? And we don't know exactly when this didn't take place anyhow, since it didn't happen. Nevertheless,

On 7 May, Ukraine officials reported and displayed footage of a Russian Serna-class landing craft located in the Black Sea being destroyed near Snake Island by a Ukrainian drone. The same day, a pair of Ukrainian Su-27s conducted a high-speed, low level bombing run on Russian-occupied Snake Island; the attack was captured on film by a Baykar Bayraktar TB2 drone. Later, footage of a Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian helicopter on Snake Island was released.

As of late yesterday, the Institute for the Study of War authoritatively reported that "the US has no confirmation that Ukrainian forces recaptured Snake Island, off the coast of Odesa Oblast". There's just a whole bunch of stuff that ain't happening in the Black Sea. But I've got to think for it not to happen, a lot of things would have had not to happen to the Russian navy in that area, huh?

Let's go to the recent kerfuffle over whether US intelligence is helping Ukraine kill Russian generals:

The United States has provided intelligence that has helped Ukrainian forces kill several Russian generals since Vladimir Putin's troops invaded the country, senior US officials said.

The US officials said that of the approximately 12 Russian generals killed by Ukrainian forces, 'many' had been targeted with the help of US intelligence, reports the New York Times.

Or whether US intelligence helped Ukraine sink the Moskva:

Unnamed officials said Ukraine had asked the US about a ship sailing to the south of Odesa.

The US said it was the Moskva and helped confirm its location. Ukraine then struck it with two missiles.

But then, there came pushback from the Big Guy:

President Joe Biden was furious about leaks that said US intelligence helped Ukraine kill Russian generals and sink its warship, report says, The New York Times reported on Monday.

A senior administration official told The Times that after the reports of US involvement in the attacks emerged, Biden reprimanded several top defense officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the Director of National Intelligence Avril D. Haines, and CIA director William J. Burns.

Biden was concerned that the reports would further provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin, The Times reported.

Gosh, darn, this could all Start World War III! Cut it out! Oddly, though, Biden's profile on Ukraine hasn't been high, especially since he vetoed Poland's transfer of Migs to Ukraine, which it then seems to have taken Secretary Blinken some weeks to work past. His signature issues in recent weeks have been protecting the rights of minor children to have gender-affirming surgery and preserving Roe v Wade. I'm not sure if the issue is so much concern about provoking Putin as it is about doing what had to be done in World War II -- Allied intelligence had to conceal from the Germans that they were reading Enigma code. There were limits to what they could do if suspicious attacks gave away the source of the information. So what are we to make of this?

Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, visited the Donbas front in the Ukraine war last week, a Pentagon official said, but reports that he was injured in a Ukrainian attack could not be confirmed.

“What we can confirm is that we know that for several days last week he was in the Donbas,” a senior US defence official told journalists on Monday.

“We don’t believe that he’s still there – that he has left and he’s back in Russia,” the official said.

“We cannot confirm reports that he was injured.”

Nevertheless,

On Monday, there was a notable absence from Russia’s ‘Victory Day’ parade in Moscow: Valery Gerasimov, the Russian military’s chief of general staff, was nowhere to be seen.

. . . A senior military figure like Gerasimov would normally be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin in such an event.

Gosh darn, what's not going on here?

Not "Never Again"; Just "Again"

I continue to be both fascinated and inspired by the performance of Ukraine President Zelensky as a wartime leader. But since the reemergence of Israel as a nation-state after World War II, we've had a succession of Jewish wartime leaders comparable to Joshua, King David, and the Maccabees. Now we have a Jewish politician in Ukraine who's performing comparably, and he's going so far as to assert Jewish identity as a full component of Ukraine's emerging national identity.

This is a major theme in his May 8 address (or addresses) commemorating V-E day, of which a YouTube version with English subtitles is linked above. An English version is available in text here. However, he says things in the YouTube version that aren't in the official text, and they may in fact be entirely separate addresses. Near the start of the YouTube at 1:05 but not in the text is this important statement:

[W]e had no idea that our generation would witness the desecration of the words, which, as it turned out, are not the truth for everyone. This year we say "Never again" differently. We hear "Never again" differently. It sounds painful, cruel. Without an exclamation, but with a question mark. You say: Never again? Tell Ulkraine about it.

"Never again" is the Jewish motto referring to the Holocaust, but Zelensky is making the point that Ukrainian history can't be separated from the Holocaust. He certainly isn't unique; the Ukraine historian and YouTuber Rabbi Henry Abramson makes the continuing point that Jews generally fared better in Ukraine than in other parts of the Russian empire, and when much of Ukraine was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Jews and the dominant Polish Catholics in Ukraine got along especially well. In the text versioin, he says,

Today we celebrate the Day of Victory over Nazism. And we will not give anyone a single piece of our history. We are proud of our ancestors who, together with other nations in the anti-Hitler coalition, defeated Nazism. And we will not allow anyone to annex this victory, we will not allow it to be appropriated.

Our enemy dreamed that we would refuse to celebrate May 9 and the victory over Nazism. So that the word "denazification" gets a chance. Millions of Ukrainians fought Nazism and went through a difficult and long journey. The Nazis were expelled from Luhansk, the Nazis were expelled from Donetsk, and Kherson, Melitopol and Berdyansk were liberated from the occupiers.

The Nazis were expelled from Yalta, Simferopol, Kerch and the entire Crimea. Mariupol was liberated from the Nazis. They expelled the Nazis from all over Ukraine, but the cities I named are especially inspiring us today. They give us faith that we will drive the occupiers out of our own land for sure.

At 11:09 in the YouTube version, after enumerating Nazi atrocities in Poland, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and then-Chechoslovakia that parallel Russian atrocities in Ukraine, he draws another parallel:

And together, we are going through new, no less difficult battles. This is remembered by all Holocaust survivors -- how one nation can hate another. Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Danes, Georgians, Armenians, Belgians, Norwegians, and many others have not forgotten this -- all those who suffered from Nazism on their land and all those who defeated it in the anti-Hitler coalition. Unfortunately, there are those who, having survived all these crimes, having lost millions of people who fought for victory and gained it, have desecrated the memory of them and their feat today. The one who allowed the shelling of the cities of Ukraine from his land.

. . . Today, on the day of Remembrance and Reconciliation, we pay homage to all those who defended their homeland and the world from Nazism. We note the feat of the Ukrainian people and their contribution to the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition. Explosions, shots, trenches, wounds, famine, bombing, blockades, mass executions, punitive operations, occupation, concentration camps, gas chambers, yellow stars, ghettos, Babyn Yar, Katyn, captivity, forced labor.

He's incorporating the Holocaust in the overall Ukrainian and European experience of Nazism and making the point that, espcially as they apply to Ukraine, the experiences of Jews and Gentiles were not fully distinguishable. But he's also making the point that current Russian actions represent a full resuscitation of Nazism insofar as certain countries again are regarded as subhuman, without a right to separate existence.

And of course, especially in the YouTube address, he's wearing a T-shirt that says in English, "I'm Ukrainian", which stresses the global audience he's actually addressing.

Once again, I have to express my admiration for a masterful rhetorician who's operating at a Winston Churchill level of world leadership.

Depp, Heard, And "Narcissism"

Let's start with that strange word. I don't believe it was commnon in the language before the 1980s. and certainly by the time I reached aduldhood in the late 1960s, more Freudian terms like "neurotic" were in use. I don't recall the word appearing in Jules Feiffer cartoons of that time, for instance, and his characters were typically riddled with uncertainty and self-doubt (or should have been), anything but the conventional image of a "narcissist". On the other hand, narcissists are at least identifiable in modern literature, maybe most recognizably as Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. though Austen doesn't use the term, which didn't exist.

On the other hand, if you search YouTube for "narcissists" now, it's certainly possible to conclude "narcissists" are the dominant problem of our time. Typical subjects are "Understanding the Narcissist: Wny Do They Treat You This Way?"; "10 Signs You're Dating A Narcissist"; "How do you Get Beyond the Hurt a Narcissist Inflicts?"; and "8 Questions a Narcissist Simply Cannot Answer". But there's also "Everything you Need to Know About the 7 Types of Narcissists", because there are indeed grandiose ones, vulnerable ones, covert ones, antagonistic ones, communal ones, oblivious ones, and more -- lists of seven actually differ widely.

Our Roman Catholic pastor occasionally refers to an "epidemic of narcissism", but that implies a certain medical quality to the term, which isn't all that precise. The demotic term "narcissist" covers a range of intensely self-absorbed behavior that includes dishonesty, manipulation, hidden agendas, and betrayal, often accompanied by grandiose projection. But a problem arises when using the term connotes a medical or scientific sense of precision. Let's face it, if you call someone a "narcissist", you haven't actually accomplished anything, but you think you have.

But this brings me to the puzzle of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial. Vox sums up the conundrum:

This is a murky, perplexing trial. While it’s technically a defamation trial over a newspaper article — with Depp suing Heard — at its center is one big conflict. Amber Heard says Johnny Depp abused her. Depp says Heard abused him. So what’s the truth?

Strikingly for our post-Me Too world, it looks as though the loudest voices on the internet have overwhelmingly sided with Depp. While there’s compelling evidence that there was violence on both sides of this marriage, it’s not quite so clear that the evidence supports Depp’s story, or that he has much of a shot at winning this case.

So it's a trial in a court of law, which is prohibitively expensive, even for faded Hollywood celebrities. Depp is the plaintiff, and he's suing Heard for $50 million, which Heard doesn't have and never will. He's spending multimillions of his own on a case that he could well lose. Why is he doing this? For that matter, Heard could likely have headed this off years ago at minimal cost, at least in dollars, though retractions and apologies don't seem to be in her nature.

And neither Depp nor Heard is an attractive public person. What puzzles trial observers is that the whole narrative is a he said-she said covering useless lives wasted in a sink of depravity -- but somehow, one of the protagonists, Depp, has overwhelmingly achieved public support. This may well be what Depp intended with his investment in the trial, but in some ways it's as big an upset as Ukraine's victories against the Russians, or maybe Trump's defeat of Clinton in 2016, or maybe even Rich Strike's 80-1 win at the Kentucky Derby.

Here's what I think is going on. Both Depp and Heard are actors, acutely conscious of their public personas. Their presentations of themselves in the trial, not just to the judge and jury but to a national TV audience, are carefully managed -- Heard, for instance, maintains a minimalist, understated, WASPY, upscale, ice princess image, utterly controlled and tightly held together, buttoned up to the chin -- except when it suits her to get weepy and hysterical, which it always does. The public knows a narcissist when it sees one.

Depp is a stranger case. His long hair is pulled tightly back in a severe pony tail. Not only is he in a suit, but it's a three-piece suit with a display handkerchief matched to his tie, which isn't normal courtroom attire -- attorneys don't wear vests, and their suits are often loose and rumpled so they can wave their arms and ruffle through papers. But the sleeves of Depp's suit can't conceal the tattoos on his hands and fingers. Like the pony tail, they're always peeping out. But Depp's facial expressions are masterful. He normally conveys a furrowed gravity, but now and then, in reponse to one or another gaffe by Heard or one of her witnesses, he glances at his counsel with a genteel chuckle.

The odd combination of Depp's image, controlled and respectful of the forum even if the tattoos and pony tail peek out, against his prior reputation as an out-of-control hellion, reinforces the narrative he and his attorneys are telling, a changed man who doesn't deny the sins of his youth and earlier adulthood, but who now insists that Heard's allegations are over the top and false.

This is a problem for Heard, because even the teary testimony she gives is a tacit acknowledgement that she was in some way a willing participant in those years of depravity, despite the buttoned-up image she now tries to convey. The overwhelming impression is that she's a phony and a liar, everyone's nightmare of an ex they've all had at some point in their lives.

In contrast, the impression Depp puts out is that he isn't pretending to be other than what he is. In fact, his courtroom demeanor is something like an example of Samuel Johnson's dictum that a man's duty is to bear and to forbear -- and indeed, that applies even in the midst of testimony about him, addled with drugs, writing on the walls with blood from his own severed fingertip.

On one hand, it's an indication, with figures like Zelensky, that a certain type of manliness is in style this year, and maybe it's not a coincidence that this is in the wake of the 2020 COVID-and-BLM moral panic. And just maybe it'sd also not coincidental that narcissists and phonies, at least this year, are overwhelmingly out of style.

It doesn't hurt Depp that win or lose in the courtroom, the current public mood could support a resuscitation of his career, which I think is the basis for what could be a shrewd investment.