During the coup attempt (or whatever you want to call it) when Prigozhin's Wagner forces got within 270 km of the Kremlin, all we saw of Putin was a short prerecorded speech which was filmed at an undetermined location.

When genocidal Russian invaders were within 27 km of the government district in Kyiv at the start of the war, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other high ranking officials let Ukrainians know that they were remaining in town to defend the country.

Totalitarian bullies like to talk tough but they scurry away like cockroaches at the slightest sign of danger. We remember Trump hiding in the White House bunker during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020.

Several of Putin's oligarch buddies couldn't get out of Russia fast enough during the mutiny.

Billionaire Oligarchs’ Jets Flee Moscow As Putin’s Regime Plunges Into Crisis

Русский МIРЪ в поисках МIРовоззрения В поисках Мировоззрения Жизни

Улик Варандж «Imperium. Философия истории и политики» — долгожданная новинка от издательства «Русский Мiръ». Варандж (настоящее имя Фрэнсис Паркер Йоки) — философ-традиционалист ирландского происхождения, продолжатель идей О. Шпенглера, К. Шмитта, Х. С. Чемберлена. «Imperum» была опубликована в 1948 году и произвела эффект разорвавшейся бомбы. Йоки считал цивилизацию поздним этапом развития любой культуры как высшей органической фо��мы, приуроченный своим происхождением и развитием к определенному географическому ландшафту. Мысль о необходимости объединения Европы для противостояния большевизму и американскому либерализму проводилась Йоки с упорством, зачастую принимавшимся общественностью за проявление экстремизма. Динамичное развитие идей Шпенглера, подкрепленное остротой политической ситуации (Вторая мировая война), по свежим следам которой была написана книга, делает ее чтение драматическим переживанием. Резко политический характер текста, как и интерес, которого он заслуживает отчасти объясняется тем, что его автор представлял проигравшую сторону в глобальном политическом и культурном противостоянии XX века. 942 руб.

One of Putin's goals with his illegal invasion of Ukraine was to extend the cultural influence of the Russian world. That has been a bigger failure than his military disaster.

Ukraine's language situation is complex. But about 20% of the population is primarily Russian speaking and a majority of the population can understand Russian – a legacy of Soviet imperialism.

Russia used to be a major source of music. That changed bigtime in February of 2022. Putin has unintentionally created a boom in Ukrainian music.

Prior to February 2022, YouTube’s rankings in Ukraine were overwhelmed by Russian-language songs, which occupied up to 75% of top chart positions. Ukrainian-language music struggled for visibility, making up just 10% of the weekly top 100. But in the months since Russia’s assault began, homegrown Ukrainian acts have rapidly overturned this imbalance. They now account for 65% of YouTube’s top slots in the country, while Russian musicians have been largely purged from the charts, Ekonomichna Pravda writes.

січня = January квітень = April липень = July жовтень = October

The war appears to have enriched Ukrainian performers financially as well. Best Music, a Ukrainian publishing company, reported one its top artists earning 248% more from streaming services in the third quarter of 2022 compared to 2021. Other leading singers saw quarterly streaming revenues in the $18,000 range.

Russian language and culture have taken it on the chin in most parts of the world – but especially in Ukraine.

In Ukraine, you can now officially write Russia and words related to it in lower case.

Ukraine Allows Russia-Related Words To Be Written In All Lowercase

So presumably your Ukrainian spell checker won't ding you if you type росія instead of Росія (Russia), путін instead of Путін (Putin), or москва instead of Москва (Moscow).

Putin is doing for Ukrainian culture what he's also done for NATO.

Russian state media loves "Moscow Marjorie" Taylor Traitor Greene. They undoubtedly hope that her attempt to oust Speaker Johnson creates chaos and prevents the already overdo aid package to Ukraine from passing.

The Russian government is engaged in an effort to destabilize and weaken liberal democracies. Greene fits in nicely with their plans.

Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States. “We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.” The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.

Just a quick word to point out that Putin is under the delusion that his Axis of Authoritarians would have Russia as its head. China is stronger than Russia and will not kowtow to a country which has a GDP not much bigger than Italy's and is suffering enormous losses in a war with a country which has only a quarter of Russia's population.

Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.

In addition to old school revanchism, Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine is a test to see how far the liberal democracies will let Putin go.

For Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the longtime Putin critic who was once Russia’s richest man until a clash with the Kremlin landed him 10 years in prison — it is not surprising that Russia is seeking to do everything it can to undermine the United States. “For Putin, it is absolutely natural that he should try to create the maximum number of problems for the U.S.,” he said. “The task is to take the U.S. out of the game, and then destroy NATO. This doesn’t mean dissolving it, but to create the feeling among people that NATO isn’t defending them.” The long congressional standoff on providing more weapons to Ukraine was only making it easier for Russia to challenge Washington’s global power, he said. “The Americans consider that insofar as they are not directly participating in the war [in Ukraine], then any loss is not their loss,” Khodorkovsky said. “This is an absolute misunderstanding.”

Putin was taken aback by both Ukraine's fierce defense and by Western resolve to protect the independence of a European democratic state. He refuses to admit that he made an enormous blunder so he continues to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russians while hoping that his US servants like Greene, Gaetz, and Trump will rescue him.

This episode of Ukraine's True History from the Kyiv Independent deals with Russian attempts to suppress the Ukrainian language, and culture in general, for over 300 years.

Russia has been trying to wipe out Ukrainian identity for over 300 years. There is little difference between the tsars, the communists, and Putin. All have been imperialists with the aim of Russian domination.

There are some people, mostly Putinistas and ignoramuses, who claim that Russian and Ukrainian are the same language. For now I will hold off on a linguistic explanation of how they aren't. But if they weren't really different, why would Russia spend three centuries trying to wipe out Ukrainian?

«Suppose Russia – a nuclear power – is not punished for unleashing the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945. In that case, we will witness disastrous consequences for global security and the political-economic order for decades to come. The lessons China will learn from this conflict will encourage it to pursue its own revanchist ambitions. Global nuclear proliferation is likely to occur as the foundations of international law will be severely damaged for a long time.»

— Dr. Maria Domańska, senior fellow at the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), writing at the journal New Eastern Europe.

That paragraph in an extended essay on Russia's stability indirectly reminds us of a consequence of Russia getting its way in Ukraine.

In 1994 under terms of the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security commitments by Russia, the US, and the UK.

Obviously Putin violated the Budapest Memorandum in addition to other treaties and agreements regarding Ukraine's security. That raises the question: Would Russia have invaded if Ukraine still had those nuclear weapons? Almost certainly not.

Other countries with the potential to go nuclear may be thinking that the only sure way to preserve their independence is to develop nuclear weapons. However, if the Russian invaders are driven out of Ukraine then these countries would take notice of how a nuclear power was pushed back by using only non-nuclear weapons.

So a Ukrainian victory is crucial to prevent future proliferation of nuclear weapons.

«Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families, ferocious attacks on a "unipolar" American world with revived Russian imperialist aggression — all held together by the ruthless suppression of dissident voices and recourse to violence when necessary.»

– Journalist Roger Cohen, Paris bureau chief of the New York Times, with a short definition of Putinism. From the article "Putin’s Forever War" (archived).

All forms of fascism are personalized and Putinism is no different. Though promoting a sense of national victimhood is universal among fascists.

Putin's nostalgic pining for the decrepit Soviet Union distorts his view of the world. In a century where both China and the EU are stronger than Russia, he is psychologically stuck in the geopolitical world of circa 1970 when it was essentially just the US vs. USSR. Significantly, the tankies who parrot Putin's rantings are also wallowing in a Cold War mindset - but that's another story.

The apologists for Putin's Russia – both Trumpsters and tankies – say that Ukraine must "negotiate" an end of Putin's illegal invasion.

Those folks are either oblivious to Russia's recent history of negotiations or are intentionally ignoring that history for political reasons.

In the years leading up to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, diplomats lost their authority, their role reduced to echoing the Kremlin's aggressive rhetoric. BBC Russian asks former diplomats, as well as ex-Kremlin and White House insiders, how Russian diplomacy broke down.

This was four month's before the invasion.

In October 2021, US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland went to a meeting at the Russian foreign ministry in Moscow. The man across the table was Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who Ms Nuland had known for decades and always got along with. Mr Rybakov's American counterparts saw him as a practical, calm negotiator - someone they could talk to even as the two countries' relationship frayed. This time, things were different. Mr Ryabkov read Moscow's official position from a piece of paper and resisted Ms Nuland's attempts to start a discussion. Ms Nuland was shocked, according to two people who discussed the incident with her. She described Mr Ryabkov and one of his colleagues as "robots with papers", the people said (the State Department declined to comment on the incident). And outside the negotiating room, Russian diplomats were using increasingly undiplomatic language. "We spit on Western sanctions." "Let me speak. Otherwise, you will really hear what Russian Grad missiles are capable of." "Morons" - preceded by an expletive. These are all quotes from people in positions of authority at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in recent years.

If you are thinking that this doesn't sound like serious negotiating, you are entirely correct.

This attitude didn't begin in 2021, it's been ongoing since at least 2007.

The first signal that a new Cold War was beginning came in 2007 with a speech Mr Putin made to the Munich Security Conference. In a 30-minute diatribe, he accused Western countries of attempting to build a unipolar world. Russia's diplomats followed his lead. A year later, when Russia invaded Georgia, Moscow's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reportedly swore at his UK counterpart, David Miliband, asking: "Who are you to lecture me?" Western officials still thought it was worth trying to work with Russia. In 2009, Mr Lavrov and the then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed a giant red "reset button" in relations, and the two countries seemed to be building co-operation - especially on security issues. But it soon became obvious to US officials that their Russian counterparts were simply parroting Mr Putin's growing anti-Western views, says Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to former US President Barack Obama. Mr Rhodes recalls President Obama having breakfast with Mr Putin in 2009, accompanied by a folk orchestra. He says Mr Putin was more interested in presenting his view of the world than discussing co-operation and that the Russian leader blamed Mr Obama's predecessor, George W Bush, for betraying Russia. As the Arab Spring, the US involvement in Libya, and the Russian street protests unfolded in 2011 and 2012, Mr Putin decided that diplomacy wouldn't get him anywhere, Mr Rhodes says. "On certain issues - Ukraine in particular - I did not get the sense that [diplomats] had much influence at all," says Mr Rhodes.

The arrival of Maria Zakharova as spokesperson for Russia's Foreign Ministry in 2015 signaled another deterioration in diplomacy.

[W]ith Ms Zakharova's arrival, foreign ministry briefings became a spectacle. Ms Zakharova often yelled at reporters who asked her difficult questions and responded to criticism from other countries with insults. Her diplomatic colleagues were going the same way. Mr [Boris] Bondarev, who used to work for Moscow's mission to the UN in Geneva, recalls one meeting where Russia blocked all proposed initiatives, prompting colleagues from Switzerland to complain. "We said to them: 'Well, what's the problem? We are a great power, and you are just Switzerland!' "That's [Russian] diplomacy for you," he says.

Getting back to the eve of the invasion. (emphasis added)

Mr Bondarev recalls a dinner in Geneva in January 2022 when Mr Ryabkov, from the foreign ministry, met US officials. US First Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman hoped to avert the invasion of Ukraine through 11th-hour negotiations. "It was awful," says Mr Bondarev. "The Americans were like, 'Let's negotiate.' And instead Ryabkov starts shouting, 'We need Ukraine! We won't go anywhere without Ukraine! Take all your stuff and go back to the 1997 [Nato] borders!' Sherman is an iron lady, but I think even her jaw dropped at this. "[Ryabkov] was always very polite and really nice to talk to. And now he's banging his fist on the table and talking nonsense."

The war hasn't changed things.

Ukrainian authorities complain that Russia is once again offering ultimatums instead of compromises, such as demanding that Ukraine accepts the annexation of occupied territories. Kyiv has no intention to negotiate under such conditions, and its Western allies publicly support this decision. Russia seems set on relying on its military machine, intelligence services and geo-economic power for influence - rather than diplomacy.

Some people won't like hearing this, but the only way to end this war is militarily.

Judy Dempsey is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and editor in chief of Strategic Europe. At Carnegie Europe she writes:

Negotiations can only begin if Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is in a strong enough position to set the terms. Those terms are not just about restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity. They are about ensuring that Russia does not attack or threaten Kyiv again. An end to the war is about ending Russia’s imperial ambitions in this part of Europe. [ ... ] It is not enough for leaders and defense ministers to say ad nauseam that they will support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” or that Ukraine must win. How is that going to happen if the country is not provided with the essential military equipment? And if there are mutterings in some Europeans capitals and in Washington that the Ukrainian offensive has not been quick enough or effective enough, the reason is that Ukraine lacks the military support to achieve it. [ ... ] The war is a test for Europe in particular and the West in general. It is about security, conviction, and trying to uphold values based on the pursuit of democracy. Ultimately, that’s what the Ukrainians are fighting for. A fudged compromise will damage the West and appease—indeed embolden—Russia and its supporters.

Exactly. This is not just an unprovoked war against Ukraine, it's a war against the West and liberal democratic values.

Intelligence analyst and historian Mark Galeotti comments that Russia is using up its missiles faster than it can replace them. Though he did not estimate when Russia would would find itself at critically low levels.

Russia has started building knockoff models of Iran's Shahed-136 drones using underage and underpaid workers in Tatarstan. When Ukraine starts to notice these cheap knockoffs being used, that could be one indicator of Russia's supplies running low.

From @menefr1

How the mighty have fallen. Or maybe they weren't really that mighty in the first place.

Russia had been resting on its reputation. But then Ukraine and the West called its bluff.

Putin has nobody to blame but himself for this decline. Instead of vainly trying to restore the Russia of the 18th century, he should have worked to make Russia fit for the 21st century.

Putin never accepted Ukraine as an independent state. He then deluded himself into thinking that people in Ukraine would welcome a return to Russia and would cheer his invaders as liberators. Now Ukrainians want to have even less to do with Russia.

Rather than spread Russia's influence, Putin's invasion has prompted serious shrinkage of it.

The port city of Odesa has been the target of numerous Russian attacks recently. It has been engaged in a de-Russification campaign. The Russian empress, or rather her bronze likeness, used to stand proudly on a pedestal in the heart of the city that she founded in the late 18th century. Now she is here, locked in a box away from public view. The removal of Catherine (the Great), unthinkable before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, is a reflection of the mood in a city that is rapidly losing all sentimentality about the Russian-linked pages of its past as it comes under sustained fire from Russian missiles. [ ... ] Catherine’s removal is just one part of a programme of “de-Russification” that is going on all over Ukraine. It has a particular hue in Odesa, where it is not only the figure of Catherine that binds the historical and cultural landscape to Moscow. Many of the great Russian-language writers were from Odesa or spent time there, its residents largely speak Russian and its Transfiguration Cathedral was consecrated by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in 2010.

But now, President Putin is swiftly accomplishing something that 30 years of Ukrainian independence had previously struggled to do: he is turning Odesa into a proudly Ukrainian city. A barrage of missile attacks over the past two weeks, the first time the centre of the city has been significantly damaged since the start of the war, is likely to only accelerate this process. [ ... ]

One of the more visible elements of the battle against Russian heritage is a Ukraine-wide programme to rename streets, which have, over the years, reflected the frequent political upheaval that has come to this part of Europe. Catherine Square, where the monument to the empress previously stood, has been called Karl Marx Square and Adolf Hitler Square within living memory. Now, many names are to be changed again, with Russian-influenced names replaced by Ukrainian names or simply topographical markers. In Odesa, a local council committee has regular meetings to discuss where changes should be made.

Ukraine is even changing the calendar to stick it to Russia.

Ukraine moves Christmas Day in snub to Russia

Ukraine has moved its official Christmas Day state holiday from 7 January to 25 December, the latest move aimed at distancing itself from Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed into law a parliamentary bill that aimed to "abandon the Russian heritage of imposing Christmas celebrations". In recent years, Kyiv has been cutting religious, cultural and other ties with Russia, aligning itself with the West. This process escalated following Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Mr Zelensky signed the bill on Friday - two weeks after it had been passed by Ukrainian lawmakers. The legislation also moves another two state holidays, Day of Ukrainian Statehood, from 28 July to 15 July, and the Defenders' Day, which commemorates armed forces veterans, from 14 October to 1 October.

BTW: Day of Ukrainian Statehood (День Української Державності) is not the same thing as Ukrainian Independence Day (August 24th). Day of Ukrainian Statehood marks the official conversion of King Volodymyr the Great and Kyiv to Christianity in 988. Poland has a somewhat similar foundation story; Grand Duke Mieszko's conversion in 966 is regarded as the beginning of the Polish state.

Before anybody sheds tears for anything Russian, be aware that Russia has always tried to impose its language and way of life on countries it has occupied. That continues in parts of Ukraine under Putin's temporary control.

The Hardest Soft Power: How Moscow Forces The Russian Language On Occupied Ukraine

The whole point of the invasion has been to wipe out Ukrainian identity. There's a word for that: genocide.

Historian and anti-totalitarian writer @TimothyDSnyder on the situation in Russia.

Historians take the long view.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and pulled out of World War I.

Whatever happens now can't be great for Putin. He brought this unprovoked war upon himself and eventually he'll have to pay for it.

Putin isn't a titanic world leader, he's the RMS Titanic of world leaders.

In mid-August 1991 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev survived a coup by hardline (and apparently drunk) Communists. But by the end of the month, Ukraine declared independence and by the end of the year the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist. Before the decade was over, Gorbachev was doing commercials for Pizza Hut.

There's a torrent of unconfirmed reports. One which could be true is that Putin ally President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus has flown to Turkey.

EDIT: I frequently check in with this Telegram channel by a Russian student in exile in Georgia who fled soon after Putin's invasion. He still has contacts in Russia. His name for the channel "Russia Tomorrow" is a dig at the official Russia propaganda outlet Russia Today.

The historical significance of the 21st century is also that it could be awful, considering climate change and other global threats, but it could also be wonderful. A lot depends on the decisions we make. This war is part of that: The Ukrainians are basically giving us a chance to turn this century in the right direction.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder talking to the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

Putin's invasion may have altered our history – but not in the direction that the Russian dictator had wished.

Contrary to what certain ideologues claim, history is not a science. History is a narrative which has no predetermined direction. History is in our hands and we need to make wise and often complicated choices to keep things from going terribly wrong.

Ukraine's resistance to Russian fascism looks like it saved Europe from decades of subservience to an unpleasant eastern neighbor. And it made other bullying dictators think twice before launching disastrous invasions.

It's ALWAYS easier to do nothing in the short term. But we later pay for that laziness with usurious compounded interest.

Ukraine has done the West a bigger favor than we are doing it with our military, humanitarian, and economic assistance.

Putin isn't just waging war against Ukraine and the West, he's at war with the the concept of modernity. And in the process, he and his fellow oligarchs are filling their pockets while impoverishing most Russians.

In his column in the Washington Post which serves as a companion piece to his CNN vid above, Fareed Zakaria writes about how Putin's fixation on the past is having a negative impact on Russia.

In 2019 — before covid and the invasion of Ukraine — the World Health Organization estimated a 15-year-old boy in Russia could expect to live another 53.7 years, which was the same as in Haiti and below the life expectancy for boys his age in Yemen, Mali and South Sudan. Swiss boys around the same age could expect to live more than 13 years longer.

Yep, if you want to live longer, get out of Russia. But that's not all the bad news.

With huge numbers of well-trained people, especially in the sciences, Russia performs miserably in the knowledge economy, much worse than did the Soviet Union. In 2019, Russia ranked behind Austria in international patent applications, despite having 16 times the population. Today, it ranks alongside Alabama in annual U.S. patent awards (the gold standard for companies everywhere), despite having almost 30 times the population. All these numbers will likely get much worse given the hundreds of thousands of (likely well-trained, urban, educated) Russians who fled the country after its aggression against Ukraine.

Russia is on a par with Alabama in terms of new patents as well as having lifespans for its citizens on a par with Haïti; since COVID-19 and the war, Russia's life expectancy may have fallen behind that of Haïti. But Putin still gives his obsession with Ukraine a higher priority than a healthy citizenry.

Russia is essentially a corrupt mafia state run by the kleptocratic Don Vladimir.

A new book by scholar Alexander Etkind, “Russia Against Modernity,” makes the case that Putin has created a parasitic state that gets revenue by extracting natural resources rather than any creative production and that fulfills none of the functions of a modern state in terms of providing welfare for its people. Corruption is intrinsic to this kleptocratic regime, Etkind wrote, noting that post-Soviet Russia has seen the fastest rise in inequality anywhere in the world. After the anti-Putin protests in 2011 and 2012 (which an enraged Putin blamed on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), the Russian state became even more anti-modern.

So Putin blamed previous protests against his misrule on Hillary Clinton – of all people. No wonder he got along well with his vassal Donald Trump.

For Putin, modernizing Russia would create a more active civil society, greater demands for better health care, more opportunities for ordinary citizens and a less kleptocratic state. And so he advocates a traditional Russia, which celebrates religion, traditional morality, xenophobia and strict gender conformity. What does this all add up to? I am not sure. But it’s fair to say that Russia’s biggest problem is not that it is losing the Ukraine war but rather that it is losing the 21st century.

Russia will never start digging itself out of its deep hole as long as Putin or a Putin clone is in power. It needs to start behaving like a normal 21st century country before other countries can begin to trust it.

EDIT: Australia (population 26,461,166) has a GDP 94.4% the size of the GDP of Putin's Russia (population 141,698,923). If you excluded fossil fuel production from GDP figures for both countries, Australia with just 18.67% of Russia's population would find itself ahead.

Australia is a progressive liberal democracy. Russia is a repressive kleptocratic dictatorship whose current leader would like to see it permanently exist in an early 18th century cesspool.

Metaphors for Putin’s Russia

@nexta_tv provided us with a couple of views of Russia today.

The firehouse in Tula oblast catching fire while firefighters probably ask each other “Do you smell something?” reminds us of how a majority of people in Russia remain oblivious to the rot which their country is experiencing. 

The exploding fireworks truck in Moscow where authorities don’t seem to have sealed off the road to protect motorists shows how concern for the lives and safety of citizens is not a major priority for a government which sends tens of thousands of poorly equipped untrained soldiers to their deaths in Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

It’s unlikely that these incidents were caused by Ukrainian drones. There are more valuable targets inside Russia than firehouses and fireworks trucks. These are public embarrassments which Russia is easily capable of inflicting on itself.