Ukraine Balance-Sheet

1. The New York Times announced this morning another Ukrainian victory in its Great Offensive:

While the recapture of Piatykhatky, in the Zaporizhzhia region, suggests that Ukraine’s forces continue to advance, it is not a significant military breakthrough. Like the others Ukraine has recaptured, the village is small — its name translates to “five houses” —but claiming them has come at the cost of Ukrainian lives and advanced Western equipment.

It would be a sin against the memory of my martyred family to mock the Ukrainian army.  War is an unmitigated disaster; its harvest to be reckoned a separate and discrete crime against humanity for every slain combatant.  Each single death on the battlefield is as Tolstoy immortalized Prince Andrei’s in War and Peace.  My old friend Allan Nairn, who has witnessed the murder of innocents close up many times, once said that each time a person’s eyes shut for the last time, the world is annihilated. May the monsters in Washington who brought on this war and then, in this latest “offensive,” hurled tens of thousands of Ukrainian youths to their deaths in a crazed hecatomb of vanity; may the murder industries who profited plenteously from the death-throes’ writhings of youth in its flower—may they all burn in hell.  Apologies, Cornel, but they’re not my “brothers.”

2. I refuse to speak of a silver-lining in this war.  I will therefore simply report objectively that the colossal defeat inflicted on the warmongers in Washington has, for now, rescued Humanity from a terminal war with China.  Gone are the days when, at the start of the Ukraine war, Ralph Lauren battleaxe Nancy Pelosi went on a junket to Taiwan in a provocative tease aimed at China.  Secretary of State Blinken is now in Beijing.  Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.  You decide who is the Supplicant and who the Master now.

This picture was posted in the morning Times.  It was quickly replaced an hour later by this:

 

Was the editor who posted the “wrong” pic shot?  In any event, it seems that Washington has put its war plans on hold.

3. Dr. West was aggressively interrogated on his Ukraine stance yesterday.  “Did Putin have a choice after the numberless U.S. provocations?”  Dr. West replied that he wasn’t persuaded that Russia had exploited every diplomatic option to resolve the conflict peacefully.  However, he left open the possibility that, were he convinced that diplomacy had been exhausted, then maybe the full burden of culpability fell on Washington.  Thoughtful and tempered, it was an excellent response.