Vladimir putin

Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are reportedly massing on the edge of Kiev. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines. Is Vladimir Putin running out of Christians for his war machine? The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. Up to 7,000 Russian infantry have been killed since the invasion began, according to US estimates. That would put Russian casualties at more than the entire American losses in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 14,000 Russians may have been injured.

The Russian Defense Ministry held a briefing last week claiming that they have discovered US-led biological laboratories in Ukraine. Moscow stated that a rapid halt was brought to the facilities’ activities, adding that Kyiv and Washington had violated the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons. The Kremlin did not feel the need to provide evidence of its claims, par for the course in Putin’s Russia.

The books written about the tragedy of the Russo-Ukrainian War will be legion. In the meantime, there's another book that ought to have been written 20 years ago about a previous tragedy concerning Russia: how, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and with it the demise of the communist regime, Russia and the West failed to “converge” in some way. Why did the two did not come to embrace each other politically, economically, and culturally? The rivalry between East and West has since 1917 been fundamentally an ideological and not a nationalist one. Historically, before the Bolshevik Revolution, Washington had been on cordial terms with Moscow, from which it had purchased the Russian territory of Alaska in 1867.

One thing I have always found fascinating about Russia is that when they tell us they are going to do something, they usually do it. So when Moscow struck a military base near the Poland-Ukraine border that was a staging ground for arms shipments, we shouldn't have been surprised. They told us that was their next plan of action just twenty-four hours before they did it. But that’s just the beginning of what Russia likely has in store for the West, NATO, and the entire world if we aren’t careful. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plan seems simple: chaos on a scale that will extend far beyond Ukraine. You see, Putin is starting to come to grips with the fact that he can’t win the war in Ukraine — at least on paper — unless he destroys Ukraine.