The issue today is that Russia is being beaten like a drum.

The 300 000 that are being drafted are getting zero training mostly because all the training battalions and their equipment were sent to the front. These conscripts have to supply their own equipment and armour and many of the tanks being sent in are from the 1960s.

The Russian army is on the bones of its arse and getting worse.

Despite the Russian apologists desperately seeking a silver lining in the military situation in the south, it now appears that Ukraine is indeed starting to make inroads in that sector as well.

They have made "rapid gains along the right bank of the Dnipro River. Smaller gains further west in Kherson threaten to trap a reported 2,000-4,500 Russian troops" although as with Lyman those Russians have the option of leaving their equipment and retreating with alacrity.

It got so bad that some of these troops took to social media to plead for help.

Things are going from bad to worse for the Russians. Putin's nuclear trigger finger must be twitching.

Yes, we are talking about Russia and Ukraine.

I (Y.M) sent two comments on Project Syndicate, Joseph Nye, Is Nuclear War Inevitable?, Sep.5.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/is-nuclear-war-inevitable-by-joseph-s-nye-2022-09

I said:
The nuclear deterrence theories are not made up of mathematics and logics. If so, we could be optimistic since mathematics and logics are truly universally applicable unless some leaders opted for mutual annihilation instead of for co-existence.
The theories are made up of empirical, not logical, propositions, that is, they do not have universal applicability such as mathematics and logics have. And the theories that we have are products born out of the West's experiences with Russia.
I do not know if the West could have come up with anything of mutual deterrence and stability like that with China. And if we could have, the theories would have been very different ones, for China has had quite a different world-view. (Margaret Thatcher and French President Chirac said openly that it was much easier to deal with Russia than with one Germany.)

If we wish to avoid a nuclear war with Russia, what is implied in this is that we must learn to accept living partly contented and partly discontented with Russia.

We are forfeiting co-operation from Russia for problems like climate change, nucear non-proliferarion, and etc.

Suppose the world is made up of three groups, the West, China and Russia with some followers, and the so-called developing countries. China is learning, thanks to the West's economic sanctions on Putin, to buy and sell with the Renminbi and with the rouble. Since the West cannot extend sanctions on the third group, the third group engages in trade with both the West and China/Russia; here the renminbi and the rouble can be converted into or from the dollar and the euro.
Some experts say we may be possibly witnessing the decline of the dollar and the euro and a relative rise of the renminbi.

We are talking about Russia and Ukraine, so we can also talk about Libya and Syria, etc.

US foreign policy toward Russia and that toward Syria, etc. are one and the same thing. It stems from the American historical but unfounded conviction of F. Fukuyama's "The End of History." History is not going to end in liberalism's victory. There is nothing in the world to suggest it as there was nothing to suggest that history would end with workers all over the world united.

The US leaders were sure in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse that the world would end in liberalism but the truth was that nations which did not identify with the West or the East (the Soviets) but idenitfied with themselves had been slowly on the rise.

Hi Michi,

It is a tragedy involving people. When Reagan and Thatcher met with Gorbachev their argument was that western democracies had more to offer people. As far as I know they didn't discriminate about the what sort of people would benefit, and I don't remember Gorbachev saying "No thanks. Slavic people are ethnically bred for cleptocratic autocracies, so it's gangsta rules for us!".

The interest for me is how the conflict will end. Russia has an inferior command structure and weapons, but lots of troops, weapons and ammunition. The question for me is "How many deployable BTGs does Russia have?". If they don't have enough tanks to protect the front line they have a problem, and I suspect that the rain and cold will only make the problem worse for them.

And whilst little Vlad celebrates his seventieth birthday in style, his invincible soldiers in Ukraine, when they are not getting drunk, murdering, looting, raping, torturing and destroying (have I missed anything?), are bravely fighting Nazis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7brzL5K0BOw