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The Cornered Rat
What will Putin do next?
One thing is certain: no one could possibly have predicted the present situation in Ukraine. Prior to the Russian invasion, naïve, gullible, and endlessly complacent Westerners assumed Putin was assembling 190,000 men and materiel on three sides of Ukraine merely to threaten rather than invade — even as Western intelligence sources made it crystal-clear that the decision to invade Ukraine had already been made many weeks earlier. That small detail notwithstanding, everyone on all sides assumed that if Russian forces did invade Ukraine, they’d roll over whatever limited opposition the Ukrainians could muster and quickly install a puppet regime in Kyiv.
The reality, however, has astonished everyone.
Far from being a mighty beast, the Russian military machine has resembled a creaking rusty Soviet relic. Decades of rampant corruption from top to bottom has resulted in large amounts of equipment that is basically unfit for purpose, command & control systems that don’t work, and an incompetent mashup of tactical battle groups that blend horrific war crimes with astonishing military ineptitude. Russian forces were unable to reach their primary objective of Kyiv and their retreat left behind evidence of countless horrors inflicted on unarmed civilians, mainly women, young children, and pensioners. Meanwhile Chechen troops have…
