There is a growing consensus among military experts that Russia has already lost the Ukraine War it had planned to have. This is not to say Ukraine is “winning,” but that the original Russian plan — a quick strike to topple and replace the government — is now irretrievably out of reach. So Russia now seems to be determined to bomb, destroy, and besiege Ukraine into oblivion. Once the cities are destroyed and most of the population has either fled or been killed, then the Russian boots on the ground can march and seize control of territory. See How Putin Bungled His Invasion of Ukraine at Foreign Policy.

And this is all because Vladimir Putin doesn’t dare admit defeat in his vanity war. Russian leaders who are defeated tend to get deposed.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said yesterday that the Russian invasion was stalled.

Austin shared his assessment during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that aired on Sunday. Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Austin said the situation has “had the effect of him moving his forces into a wood chipper.”

“The Ukrainians have continued to attrit his forces and they’ve been very effective, using the equipment that we provided them, and armor weapons and aircraft weapons. And again, significant resolve on the part of the Ukrainian people,” he added.

The U.S. Defense Department estimates that about 7,000 Russian troops have been killed so far, with tens of thousands injured.

It’s very frustrating to watch a mass atrocity happen and not do more to stop it, even though the reasons for standing back are valid. The Wall Street Journal reports that “The U.S. is sending some of the Soviet-made air defense equipment it secretly acquired decades ago to bolster the Ukrainian military as it seeks to fend off Russian air and missile attacks, U.S. officials said.” Well, that’s something.

The Ukraine War ought to have caused a whole lot of people to re-evaluate a whole lot of assumptions. But I don’t think it has. Instead, it has weirdly brought the pro-Putin MAGA heads and the democratic socialist Left closer together in the same ball park, although they’re sitting in different sections.

On the Right, you’ve got Christian nationalists who see Putin as an ally — he’s a homophobe, after all — and who think the Ukraine War is a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy (see Those Who Look to Big Daddy Putin). And you’ve got those in love with authoritarianism who want America to be led by a white macho dictator who will restore white male hegemony. And then you’ve got people who just reflexively use whatever is at hand to bash Democrats. War in Ukraine? It must be Joe Biden’s fault, because he’s weak. And even with all the atrocities and inhumanity being displayed in the news day after day, I don’t see them budging from those views.

What’s really terrifying is that Francis “end of history” Fukuyama was on teevee last week saying that no way would Vladimir Putin resort to nuclear weapons. This means it’s a good time to build a bomb shelter and stock up on iodine pills.

But I am also fed up with a lot of Lefties who believe that this war must be America’s fault, somehow. Before the invasion I heard people ask “Why is Joe Biden trying to start a war?” Huh? Apparently warnings from the administration that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent was “war mongering,” while the Russian troop buildup around Ukraine was not. I also saw much speculation that the CIA was somehow behind Russia’s invasion.

Many are still blaming NATO. I learned only recently that the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America for some time had called for the dismantling of NATO.

To me, the DSA official position on the Ukraine War just plain reeks of privileged naïveté.

There is no solution through war or further intervention. This crisis requires an immediate international antiwar response demanding de-escalation, international cooperation, and opposition to unilateral coercive measures, militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict.

DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict. We call on antiwar activists in the US and across the world to oppose violent escalations, demand a lasting diplomatic solution, and stress the crucial need to accept any and all refugees resulting from this crisis. Much of the next ten years are coming into view through this attack. While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to everyone, the ruling class is trying to build a new world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and war. Socialists have a duty to build an alternative. 

I want them to go stand in the streets of Kyiv and read that. See how Ukrainians react.

Eric Levitz writes at New York magazine,

Within the small world of self-identified American leftists, however, the DSA’s substantive positions are far from marginal. Indeed, a large contingent of prominent left-wing writers, activists, and organizations have argued in recent days for ending indiscriminate U.S. sanctions against Russia, withholding military aid from Ukraine, and immediately dismantling NATO. This contingent’s perspective deserves to be taken seriously. For one thing, its analysis spotlights many inconvenient truths that few other American political factions wish to acknowledge. As importantly, however, the weakness of some of its arguments reflect genuine pathologies within the U.S. left’s foreign-policy thinking — above all, an ideological rigidity that leaves American socialists ill-equipped to interpret the emerging multipolar world order, and therefore, to change it.

The “many inconvenient truths” appears to refer to the Maidan Revolution of 2014, which was either a U.S. backed far-right coup or the Ukranian people ousting an authoritarian pro-Russian government, depending on whom you choose to believe, I guess. I wasn’t there; I have no idea. It’s fairly clear that the enormous majority of Ukrainians don’t want to be part of Russia now, and that’s what I know.

And then there is NATO. NATO expansion is to blame, we are told. Poor Vladimir Putin didn’t have a choice but to invade Ukraine because someday it might join NATO. And it’s true that a lot of foreign policy experts way back in the 1990s warned that former Soviet nations joining NATO was unnecessarily provocative to Russia. Even the likes of Thomas Friedman and Henry Kissinger (and when did the Left listen to Friedman and Kissinger?) warned us about this. Eric Levitz continues,

It is perfectly natural for foreign-policy “realists” like Kissinger to disdain heedless affronts to Russia’s “sphere of influence,” or to insist that Ukraine must give Putin’s kleptocratic regime veto power over its foreign policy. But socialists do not generally recognize the legitimacy of imperial orbits, nor counsel acquiescence to relations of domination for the sake of conflict avoidance.

In particular:

Meanwhile, the notion that Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion was rooted in its “legitimate security interests” — as a segment of leftists routinely avow — is hard to credit. Surely, a nation’s only legitimate security interests are defensive ones. And Russia’s nuclear arsenal was always sufficient to deter the threat of an invasion (as we are now seeing, that arsenal is menacing enough to stop Western leaders from entertaining so much as a no-fly zone for Ukraine, never mind an offensive invasion of Russian territory).

In brief,

But if the Putin of 2022 believed that invading and occupying Europe’s second-largest country was a good idea, then there was no basis for believing that Western imperialism was the chief obstacle to a diplomatic resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Well, yeah.

America could not cajole the Zelenskyy government into suicide. If Putin wanted to install a puppet regime atop Kyiv’s ruins, then decrying “U.S. brinkmanship” and NATO’s “imperialist expansionism” would not qualify as a remotely serious response to the crisis. Thus, when the DSA IC condemned those forces in a late January statement — which included not a single criticism of the Kremlin — the committee also lambasted the “sensationalist Western media blitz” that was “drumming up conflict” through its histrionic predictions of an impending Russian invasion.

When Putin actually invaded, then, how did the DSA respond? It hasn’t changed its position blaming the U.S. and NATO at all. Eric Levtiz points out that many eastern European leftists “consider NATO a vital bulwark against their republics’ subjugation to a reactionary autocracy, a conviction that became difficult to dismiss once Putin launched a war of imperial conquest.” And by now it should be plain that Putin is the one with imperialist ambitions.

“Instead of grappling with these complexities, however, many leftists have simply pretended that they do not exist,” says Levitz. Further, “In the actually existing Russia-Ukraine conflict, however, it is a Russian military victory that threatens to plunge a nation into ungovernability and civil strife, irrespective of U.S. policy.”

To me, the “Russia had to invade because Ukraine might join NATO” argument never held water, for the simple fact that Ukraine has been trying to join NATO for a very long time, since at least 2008, and I don’t see that anything had changed that made a NATO membership for Ukraine any more imminent in 2022 than it was in 2009. What is different now from 2009 is that Donald Trump spent four years in the White House working to undermine NATO and kiss Putin’s behind, and according to much data Joe Biden is weak and unpopular. And Trump might very well be re-elected in 2024. To Putin, it probably seemed just the right time to do something he’d been wanting to do for years, which is take back Ukraine. It was now or never.

There probably is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether U.S. and E.U. attempts at using “soft power” to exert influence in Ukraine was a good idea. However, I can’t imagine Putin would have respected neutrality. He wants a pro-Russian government in Ukraine, or he wants Ukraine, period.

See also A Note from Finland at Talking Points Memo. The link should get you through the subscription firewall even if you aren’t a subscriber. The writer, from Finland, explains how Russia set us up to not get in the way of his plans.

I understand you would like to see your heroic country as the navel of the world and as the main focus of any operation, but I am sorry to inform that, in this case, you are only cheap tools. You had to be weakened (and Britain manipulated to Brexit etc) in order to facilitate invasions to Ukraine, Belarussia and a list of other neighboring pieces of land in Putin’s future Menu.

So, as a KGB officer would plan, they came exactly from the opposite direction than where they were expected. They professionally built an operation web among the rural redneck cowboys, evangelical christians, the NRA, the most republican of all republicans, your law enforcement, some military people, big business etc etc. They popped up to the surface from within the “core americans”, but their long dive before that was planned and had started from the Kremlin’s operation board.

They nearly succeeded with Trump/GOP in January 6th, by focusing and coordinating the heat of seemingly “spontaneus”, “random” protest movements and legal tricks and corrupt politicians like a welding flame to the same point and to the same moment. They just barely failed – for the time being!

Had Trump succeeded to keep in power, the march of Putin to various targets in the Eastern Europe would have been more like an easy summer parade. Nato would be partally paralyzed by his loyal friends in the White House (who likely would have got their personal share of the profits).

That’s not nearly as crazy as believing the invasion of Ukraine is part of biblical prophecy.