The protracted, prolonged stalemates and (the small) prospects for breakthroughs on the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine War

Tim Judah opened an article on the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in 2015 as follows:

Last September [2014], a few weeks before Ukraine's general election, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, then as now prime minister, issued a pamphlet listing his aims. One was stark: "To get through the winter." Given that rebel soldiers in the eastern part of the country paint "To Kiev!" on their tanks, that Ukraine relies on Russia for much of its energy, and that its economy is in dire straits, it is nonetheless safe to say that he has succeeded. The rebels, despite inflicting two major recent defeats on the government forces, have not advanced significantly. Winter power cuts in regions unaffected by the war were short and survivable. Also, while the current cease-fire, agreed to on February 12, is not expected to last, Ukraine and its government have not collapsed, nor do they show any signs of being on the brink of doing so, as some of the Russian media keep saying hopefully. (1)

Suspicions that Moscow has in mind taking over the capital. Ukraine is economically weak. The pro-Moscow rebel advance is going very slowly, though their patron country Russia has a much bigger economy and military than Ukraine. The Ukrainians are bearing up under war-related hardships. The Russian media are exaggerating the progress of their partisans.

That part of the story sounds very familiar here in 2026, over a decade later.

A map accompanying the article shows Crimea marked to show that Russia had occupied and formally annexed, with the pro-Russian rebels controlling significant parts of the oblasts (provinces) of Donetsk and Luhansk. Since the war expanded with the overt Russian invasion of February 2022, Russia currently holds around 20% of Ukrainian territory, including large parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

Russia still claims Crimea as part of its own territory, although Ukraine has been very successful in drastically limiting the usefulness of the Russian Black Sea fleet that has based out of Crimea. They have also done some serious damage to oil refineries in Crimea, which is strategically significant in damaging Russia’s wartimes economy. Whether physically reoccupying Crimea would be a meaningful strategic top priority at the moment is another question. But Ukraine after more four years of an active Russian invasion still maintains control of the “fortress belt” in Donetsk (2), which is a major strategic defensive priority for them. Which is a sign of determination on both sides of the war of attrition.

As of Tim Judah’s 2015 report, Russia was pursuing a less aggressive advance than they adopted in 2022, seven years later:

On January 24 a salvo of missiles lasting less than a minute hit Mariupol, killing thirty. Then nothing happened. In theory the rebel forces could isolate and surround the city if they moved westward to link up to Russian soldiers moving out from Crimea; but this would leave the rebels and the Russians with lang supply lines and lang lines to defend. None of this is impossible, but it would be very difficult and for Putin a huge gamble. If they have not done it until now, then maybe they will never do it.

Whether legal or not, whether NATO countries accepted it or not, there is every reason to believe that their aim at that point to ensure that Ukraine did not become a NATO member state. NATO in 2008 had recklessly declared that both Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members of NATO, even though neither at the time were even close to meeting the criteria for NATO membership. Russia staged a military conflict in Georgia in 2008, which left them in control of part of what Georgia rightly claimed as its sovereign territory. The Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 and its illegal annexation as part of Russia, also put Russia in control of an important piece of Ukrainian territory, too. That in itself complicated any prospect of Ukraine becoming a NATO member, since it was not in de facto control of all of its territory.

There were other options available to Washington and to Moscow on how to proceed from there. The US could have recognized that Russia for the immediate future would not allow Ukraine to join NATO. Russia could have undertaken intensified preparations for a military conflict without annexing Crimea. That could have also made a reasonable call after they had annexed the peninsula that Russian control of Ukraine would limit indefinitely Ukraine’s ability to join NATO and foregone the at-first informal and later-official declaration that they considered parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson to be Russian territory.

Judah reported in 2015, “In Kiev, the mood is gloomy. Most people realize that they are in for a long conflict.” Sadly, we can still say that today. He continued, “Mykola Kapitonenko, an adviser to parliament's foreign affairs committee, said that suing for peace now would be tantamount to accepting a deal ‘in which Putin is offering, 'I stop the war and you come under my control’."

The most likely prospect here in 2026 looks very similar: an eventual armistice of some kind in which the lines of the current war of attrition are frozen in place. The formal resolution of the borders would then be punted to some unspecified future time. The Korean Peninsula is a reminder of how long such lines of demarcation can endure. But how long it will take for both sides in the current war to reach such a conclusion would be very hard to estimate at the current moment.

And this observation from Judah’s piece is a sobering reminder:

So Ukraine is in a race against time. If Putin's goal is simply to destabilize the country, rather than actually take more territory from it, then its angry people [i.e., keeping Ukrainian unhappy] suit his aim. His problem is that the longer the war drags on, the worse it is for Russia's economy and future too. Will he react by discreetly moving to help the rebels even more or by moving to delicately extricate Russia from the conflict? Only zealots who see Putin as some sort of messiah still believe that he is not fueling it. For the rebels themselves and their supporters, the reality is that militarily the campaign has stalled, at least for now.

(Also, how many Russians ever actually saw Vladimir Putin “as some sort of messiah”?)

That reminder of how both Ukrainian and Russian public morale had been holding up during the year after Russia’s seizure of Crimea is a caution about whether “morale bombing” on both sides is likely to bring any sudden resolution of the conflict here over 10 years later.

It’s worth noting that the philanthropist and democracy advocate George Soros (a major bogeyman for the far right) wrote about optimistically about sanctions, also in 2015:

The sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and Europe for its interventions in Ukraine have worked much faster and inflicted much more damage on the Russian economy than anybody could have expected. The sanctions sought to deny Russian banks and companies access to the international capital markets. The increased damage is largely due to a sharp decline in the price of oil, without which the sanctions would have been much less effective. Russia needs oil prices to be around $100 a barrel in order to balance its budget. (It is now around $55 a barrel.) The combination of lower oil prices and sanctions has pushed Russia into a financial crisis that is by some measures already comparable to the one in 1998. [my emphasis] (3)

That’s an important reminder that sanctions can cause real pain for the sanctioned country. But when the sanctioned parties see a particular conflict (rightly or wrongly) as critical to their national security and even their survival, sanctions often prove disappointing in the effects on the countries being targeted.

In the prolonged stalemate, the Russia-Ukraine War is starting to look like an excerpt from the 1993 film Groundhog Day, in which the same day keeps replaying itself over and over and over.

This is a worthwhile discussion of the war with the economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and a leading economic journalist, Wolfgang Münchau who was also a co-editor of the Financial Times Deutschland. Varoufakis brings up the Turkish attack on Cyprus in 1974 and the prolonged frozen conflict that followed as a relevant example to help understand the current situation in Ukraine. (4)

Varoufakis has been keeping an eye on the European trends with military industries in the current international situation which is creating strong pressures for European rearmament. We need to be hearing commentaries along this line. It’s another case that multiple things can be true at the same time. In this case, it can be true that Europeans have a realistic need to restructure and their militaries due to the distancing of the US from NATO; and that it will doing so will be expensive; and that shifting money from domestic programs could free up funding for more military spending; and that doing the latter instead of raising income and wealth taxes on billionaires is a really bad idea.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) posts weekly updates on the battlefield situation. Here are their eight relatively granular “key takeaways” for Saturday, July 11. (5)

1. The recent, intensified Ukrainian strikes against Russian seaborne gasoline tankers in the Sea of Azov have reportedly forced Russia to close some maritime routes.
2. Starboard Maritime Intelligence data indicates a possible 55 percent decline in vessels with active automatic identification system (AIS) transponders in the Sea of Azov between June 30 and July 11.
3. Intensified Ukrainian strikes against seaborne vessels may have prompted Russian vessels to alter their behavior in the Sea of Azov in any of several ways consistent with the Starboard data and AIS signal anomalies.
4. Russian consumer gasoline prices are skyrocketing amid Ukraine’s intensifying long-range strike campaign against Russian oil refineries and gasoline producers.
5. Russia appears to have been engaged in a hacking operation that targeted civilian cameras across NATO countries and in Ukraine.
6. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky authorized the creation of two new commands within the Ukrainian Armed Forces on July 10.
7. Russian forces launched six Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles, four Kh-59/69 guided cruise missiles, two Kh-31 anti-radar missiles, and 121 drones against Ukraine overnight.
8.  Russian forces recently advanced in the Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka tactical area, and Ukrainian forces recently advanced in the Novopavlivka direction. [my emphasis]

For anyone not already familiar with considerable detail about the military actions in the war, perceiving the implications of these items is pretty difficult. It’s helpful to be alert for phrases like “have reportedly,” “indicates,” “may have prompted,” and “appears to have been engaged in.” I’m not criticizing ISW for using such phrases; on the contrary, it’s good practice to indicate what is well-established and what has not been clearly confirmed. And their website includes more detailed daily information than the daily “key takeaways.”

Their eighth point doesn’t try to flag the Russian and Ukrainian advances as game changing observations. But it is consistent with the Groundhog Day nature of the war of attrition right now: small advances and retreats by both countries with heavy casualties.

ISW’s more expanded explanation of Point 5 about the hacking tells us the following:

The Telegraph reported on July 10, citing the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) and Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) that Kremlin-based hackers have been spying on NATO military bases in Europe by hacking into civilian cameras pointing at military equipment transportation routes to identify the types of weapons Ukraine received. The Dutch intelligence services reported that the Russian operation targeted European NATO members states, including the Netherlands, and Ukraine. The Telegraph speculated that hackers likely accessed civilian doorbell systems to monitor weapons transportation routes.

That all sounds plausible to me. But there is no indication how different that situation on July 11 may have been from what NATO and Russia are doing all the time. Of course, intelligence agencies try to hack each other. And sometimes the hacks may be very significant. But without more detail or collaborating reports, it’s hard to tell how serious they are.

Notes:

(1) Judah, Tim (2015): Ukraine: Inside the Deadlock, 18-20. New York Review of Books 05/07/2015.

(2) Beaumont, Peter et. al. (2026): Kill zones and drone nets: a journey through Ukraine’s fortress belt. Guardian 07/03/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/jul/03/kill-zones-drone-nets-journey-ukraine-fortress-belt> (Accessed: 2026-11-07).

(3) Soros, George (2015): A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine, 22-24. New York Review of Books 02/05/2015.

(4) The Ukraine comeback isn't what they're telling you. Econoclasts and UnHerd YouTube channel 07/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/BTix_mCIiWg?si=tGu5AfsYrgBtpdj_> (Accessed: 2026-11-07).

(5) Key Takeaways. Institute for the Study of War 07/11/2026. <https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-11-2026/> (Accessed: 2026-12-07).

More thoughts on the Graham Platner allegations

I don’t have any particular insight on the end of Graham Platner’s Democratic Senate candidacy in Maine. As of this writing, he has “suspended” his campaign and says he will formally end his campaign on Monday the 13th, the last day he can formally end his campaign and not appear on the ballot.

It’s safe to say that Platner has led a “colorful” life so far: prep-school kid, Marine veteran who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Army National Guard reservist, a security contractor guarding the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, local government activist, PTSD sufferer, an SS-Death’s Head tattoo, and troubled relationships with girlfriends.

His history of “sexting” other women when he was married obviously wasn’t the most discrete thing to do.

“Both-sides-do-it arguments” are often fairly tacky even when they are legitimate. But it’s also important to note that the current President and Republican cult leader Donald Trump is an adjudicated sex abuser (via the E. Jean Carroll civil case). And he himself claimed to have been the best friend of a guy named Jeffrey Epstein who is infamous for, well, everyone knows why he’s infamous.

The Nazi (?) tattoo

I’ve searched online for an image of Platner’s SS Totenkopf (“death’s head”) in its original form before he had it altered. I’ve come up blank so far.

This is the image that Platner himself displayed to the CNN affiliate WGME of the altered tattoo:

The only image I’ve found – a very blurry one -was this one of a screenshot from a Pod Save America report in a 2025 report from the Portland Press Herald: (1)

This is an image of an SS-Totenkopf from a newly-published Austrian book on rightwing extremism, which notes that it's a prohibited image under Austrian anti-Nazi laws: (2)

The dark image above of the earlier version of his tattoo vaguely looks like the same shape as to the image banned in Austria. But I honestly can’t tell. Before this controversy, I would have thought the image was creepy, and I would have wondered if it might be some kind of far-right political symbol. But I wouldn’t have immediately identified it as neo-Nazi image like, say, a swastika. When I think skull-and-crossbones, it’s more the classic pirate’s jolly roger image that comes to mind:

If anyone has a link to a clearer image of Platnner’s original tattoo, please post a link in the comments.

Euronews last year reported, “Platner said he got the skull and crossbones tattoo in 2007 when he was in his 20s and in the Marine Corps.” (3) Not being a connoisseur of far-right symbolism, I would have thought the banned SS-Totenkopf image above would have looked with a “skull with hands” rather than a skull-and-crossbones. But it’s creepy, as one might expect of banned Nazi symbols.

The abuse allegations

In a recent post, I linked to a discussion by Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti on the significance of the rape accusation from a former girlfriend of his that effectively ended his candidacy and quoted a mea culpa Bluesky post from Noami Klein for not having done “due diligence” on the earlier claims about Platner. Ken Klippenstein also posted what he a deliberately non-apologetic “apology” on his Substack, in which he wrote:

The allegations published yesterday that Senate nominee Graham Platner sexually assaulted a woman are different from the previous scandals.

For one, they’re credible, based on Facebook messages from well before Platner entered politics. They’re also the first time Platner has been publicly accused of sexual assault. That crosses a line that tattoos, sexting and Reddit posts just do not. (4)

My reaction was very similar, based on the fact that the assault allegations included contemporary documentation in the form of electronic messages, including to her therapist, who declined to comment to reporters on the matter.

Klippenstein also wrote about people apologizing for their earlier skepticism about the accusations against Platner:

All of these people took the present accusations against Platner seriously and promptly addressed them (and good on them for that). But it’s unclear to me what exactly they’re apologizing for other than not being clairvoyants able to foresee this week’s accusation before it happened.

I wrote earlier this year about publication accusations of rape that had been made against the late union organizer and Latino leader Cesar Chavez:

[C]ertainly the charges by Dolores Huerta, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas deserve to be taken seriously, as well. It’s also the case that claims of such crimes that emerge decades later are more difficult to evaluate than ones formally investigated immediately after the event. Murguia and Rojas were minors at the time they report the abuse began.

It’s worth remembering that Chavez teamed up in the late 1970s with the authoritarian Synanon cult headed by Charles Dederich, which was known for encouraging psychological and physical abuse. Not that it diminishes Chavez’ responsibility for his own actions, but it would be interesting to know if the claimed sexual assaults occurred before or after Chavez teamed up with the Synanon cult.

But the fact is that “oppo research” – looking for negative things to say about political opponents – is very much a part of today’s politics. And yesterday’s, too. In his 1884 Presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland had to deal with charges that he had fathered an “illegitimate” child by raping a woman, which the Republicans used as the basis of their campaign slogan, “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” (5)

The accuser, Nan Britton, later wrote a memoir. And Cleveland’s paternity has apparently been confirmed by DNA studies. (3)

Cleveland’s Presidency is remembered for instituting the federal civil service system, which was a good idea. But otherwise, he was a really reactionary President.

Graham Platner has denied the rape allegation publicly made against him. But his decision to drop out of the race could be taken as a tacit admission on his part. Although it is important to note that his accuser did not file rape charges at the time. That doesn’t mean her claim is false. It just means it has not been formally adjudicated.

Remembering the Al Franken case

It’s worth remembering that former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken denied sexual harassment accusations against him by a woman who had performed with him on a USO tour. (None of which involved rape accusations.) Franken even asked the Senate Ethics Committee to do a formal investigation. His fellow Senate Democrats Kirstin Gillibrand severely criticized him over the allegation. Franken decided to resign his Senate seat (2017), a decision he later said that he “absolutely” regretted. As the BBC reported:

"Differentiating different kinds of behaviour is important," [Franken] said. "The idea that anybody who accuses someone of something is always right -that's not the case. That isn't reality."

Ms Tweeden declined to comment to the New Yorker.

As pressure from his colleagues escalated, Mr Franken recounted a late-night meeting with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in which Mr Schumer issued an ultimatum: Mr Franken must quit or the minority leader would rally the entire Democratic caucus to call for his resignation. (4)

Franken had distinguished himself in the Senate as a “fighting Dem.” As Jane Mayer wrote in a long 2019 profile:

Only two years ago, Franken was being talked up as a possible challenger to President Donald Trump in 2020. In Senate hearings, Franken had proved himself to be one of the most effective critics of the Trump Administration. His tough questioning of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, had led Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election, and prompted the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. [my emphasis]

And she notes the perils of a public rush to judgment in such cases:

Franken’s fall was stunningly swift: he resigned only three weeks after Leeann Tweeden, a conservative talk-radio host, accused him of having forced an unwanted kiss on her during a 2006 U.S.O. tour. Seven more women followed with accusations against Franken; all of them centered on inappropriate touches or kisses. Half the accusers’ names have still not become public. Although both Franken and Tweeden called for an independent investigation into her charges, none took place. This reticence reflects the cultural moment: in an era when women’s accusations of sexual discrimination and harassment are finally being taken seriously, after years of belittlement and dismissal, some see it as offensive to subject accusers to scrutiny. “Believe Women” has become a credo of the #MeToo movement. [my emphasis]

Mayer’s article makes it very clear that not only did the accusations made against Franken fell far short of anything that most people (or prosecutors) would call physical abuse or even sexual harassment.

The point of all this is that facts matter. For the individuals involved on both the accused and accuser’s sides.

Notes:

(1) Billings, Randy (2026): Graham Platner says he will remove a Nazi-linked tattoo. Bernie is standing by him. Portland Press Herald 10/21/2025. https://www.pressherald.com/2025/10/21/graham-platner-addresses-tattoo-linked-to-nazis/> (Accessed: 2026-10-07).

(2) Kranebitter, Andreas et. al. (2026): Handbuch Rechtsextremismus in Österreich, 65. Falter: Vienna.

(3) Guilbert, Kieran (2025): US Senate candidate Graham Platner gets new tattoo to cover one with Nazi links. Euronews 10/22/2025. <https://www.euronews.com/2025/10/22/us-senate-candidate-graham-platner-gets-new-tattoo-to-cover-one-with-nazi-links>(Accessed: 2026-10-07).

(4) Klippenstein, Ken (2026): My Graham Platner Apology. Ken Klippenstein Substack 07/07/2026. <https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/my-graham-platner-apology> (Accessed: 2026-09-07).

(5) Serratore, Angela (2013): President Cleveland’s Problem Child. Smithsonian Magazine 09/26/2013. <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/president-clevelands-problem-child-100800/> (Accessed: 2026-09-07).

(6) Dotinga, Randy (2015): Warren Harding: the world takes another look at scandalous claims. Christian Science Monitor 08/19/2015. <https://www.csmonitor.com/Arts-Culture/Books/chapter-and-verse/2015/0819/Warren-Harding-the-world-takes-another-look-at-scandalous-claims> (Accessed: 2026-07-09).

(7) Ex-US Senator Al Franken regrets resigning over sexual misconduct claims. BBC News 07/22/2019. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49074194> (Accessed: 2026-07-09).

(5) Mayer, Jane (2019): The Case of Al Franken. New Yorker 07/29/2019, 30-45.

Are we in the era of NATO 3.0?

I don’t recall seeing anyone use the term “NATO 3.0” until now. Or maybe I heard it and didn’t pay attention to it until now when the Polish Foreign Minister is using it:

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and a former defense minister [and husband of the American-Polish historian and political analyst Anne Applebaum], outlined the transformation of NATO after it was founded in the aftermath of World War II.

“NATO 1.0 was a clear defense against Soviet aggression and expansionism, and NATO 2.0 was a post-Cold War search for purpose,” he said in an interview, with the alliance looking outside North America and Europe and after Sept. 11, especially, to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Russia was seen as a possible ally and certainly less of a threat, and some European NATO members effectively disarmed, he said.

But with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China’s rising ambitions and Washington wanting to shift resources to Asia away from Europe, Mr. Sikorski said, “NATO 3.0 will mean that Europe will take more of the burden for conventional defense and the U.S. will be more of a cavalry-over-the-hill kind of ally.” (1)

It’s true that for a time after 1989 NATO leaders actually did see Russia as “a possible ally.” The Kosovo War of 1998-1999 largely put an end to that hope. NATO formal declaration in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO finished it for sure.

The exclusively defensive nature of NATO has never been an entirely accurate description, even in the pre-1989 decades. The “Cold War revisionist” historian William Appleman Williams elaborated a more nuanced view long ago in his famous book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959).

The EU vs. Disinfo website, which is not so hot on the whole “nuance” thing, not surprisingly dismisses the idea that NATO may not always have been a “purely defensive” alliance. It even insists that the post-1989 expansion of NATO wasn’t really an expansion: “the claim about NATO ‘expansion’ misrepresents the process of NATO enlargement. NATO does not ‘expand’ but considers the applications of candidate countries that want to join.” (2)

NATO countries in blue, 1990 (CNBC):

NATO countries in blue and light blue as of 2022 (CNBC) – Finland became a full member in 2023 and Sweden in 2024:

So, NATO didn’t expand, you see, it just got bigger and added more countries – including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all three of which were former Soviet republics.

It is possible for officially government-sponsored information services to provide, you know, accurate and quality reporting. But EU vs. Disinfo sticks closely to sloganeering.

It’s not surprising that the Polish Foreign Minister would stick to the official position that, “NATO 1.0 was a clear defense against Soviet aggression and expansionism.” But, in yet another case where multiple things can be true at the same time, NATO did organize itself around a military posture of defense and deterrence of a possible Soviet invasion. It was also the single largest element of American “force projection” and American strategic political influence. The fact that the US-NATO confrontation over decades with the Soviet Union was called the Cold War is an indication that it was not entirely a peaceful and benign one on either side.

It is also true that the Red Army never came pouring through the famous “Fulda Gap” to conquer West Germany. The Berlin Airlift confrontation also never came to a shooting war, but that was before the formation of NATO. Despite various incident like the Cuban Missile crisis and backing different sides in what were sometimes called “proxy wars,” the NATO/Warsaw Pact confrontation stayed within the bounds of “peaceful coexistence.”

Deciphering the diplomatic reporting

I’m inclined to think “NATO 3.0” is a good name for the time since the Trump 2.0 regime took office in 2025. Though diplomatic conventions require some rhetorical dancing around even for the New York Times, it’s clear. One is that NATO members know that they cannot count on the United States to honor its mutual-defense commitments to them in case of military attack, even military attack by Russia.

Another is that the physically and mentally ailing Trump sees NATO as a kind of mob “protection racket” controlled by him. He made that clear in 2024 when he was running for President again:

Listen, NATO was busted until I came along. I said everybody’s going to pay. Are you still going to protect us? I said, absolutely not.

They couldn’t believe the answer. They asked me that question, one of the Presidents of a big country stood up, said “Well sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said, “You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?”

He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” [I said,] No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want! You gotta pay! You got to pay yuh bills! (3)

The NATO members do not pay a membership fee to hire the US to protect them. There are agreed-upon targets for national spending based on a percentage of their GDP, which is really an arbitrary standard in terms of military preparedness but easy to calculate. And since other NATO members and NATO war plans rely heavily on US weapons systems, US defense contractors actually do make a lot of money from European military spending. That’s a big reason why, despite Trump’s general hostility to Europe, the Times reports

Though, of course, we know from long experience now that Trump does expect to get personal profits for himself, his family, and his cronies from his actions as President. So he really seems to understand NATO as a mob-style protection racket. As David Cay Johnston says repeatedly, “Donald Trump is the third-generation head of a four-generation white-collar crime family.”

The confrontation with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House early in his second term was a major signal to NATO allies that he didn’t much care about their concerns. Even more so, the experience early this year of European allies finding themselves having to prepare in concrete and immediate terms to a hostile military invasion from the US directed at NATO ally Denmark to seize Greenland as American territory also focused European’s leaders’ attentions in a very sharp way. And Trump has renewed his military threats against Denmark/Greenland and Canada just recently.

As we see in the Times article, in diplomacy-speak, the NATO countries talk about reassuring Washington on NATO burden-sharing and keeping the US engaged with European defense. What’s actually going on is that know they have to make collective-security arrangements that do not depend on active US participation. That’s a big task, it’s very complicated, and it’s very expensive.

According to the report, many NATO members seem to be using 2029 as a key moment for which to prepare:

Time may be short to prepare. German and many NATO officials say a battle-hardened Russia would be ready for a war against NATO by 2029, so the pressure is on Europe to become more “war ready,” as the Germans say, and on the United States not to create unnecessary vulnerabilities in the meantime.

As always, diplomats and war planners have to consider both the capabilities and the intentions of potential adversaries. That date presumably has more to do with projected Russian capabilities. Of course, we are hearing constantly from Ukraine’s boosters that the Russians are faring badly in the current war, so we have to wonder how strong their appetite for an even wider war even three years from now really may be. And we are constantly seeing optimistic (and likely overblown) claims that Russia’s economy is being badly damaged by the war.

Claims like the following always deserve a critical look: “European armies do not have enough troops, U.S. and NATO officials agree. For example, the British Army is at its smallest since Waterloo in 1815, with fewer than 70,000 full-time, trained personnel.”

Figures like that don’t tell us much. Imperial Britain also had a huge navy at the time. But no air force, no satellites and cyberwar resources, and no drones. Comparison of raw numbers of active-duty soldiers between 1815 and now tells us nearly nothing about actually present preparedness. And, also speaking of Ukraine, haven’t we been hearing constantly over the last year how Ukraine’s drone technology is revolutionizing warfare?

This also caught my attention:

NATO has been built to be led by an American supreme commander, with simultaneous control over American troops in Europe. The continent has competent generals, but no clear European command, since each ultimately reports to their own country’s political masters, said Camille Grand, a former senior NATO official and director of the main defense industry trade body in Europe. Although European officials are normally either deputies to Americans or have an American deputy, overall command should remain with Washington, he argued.

“If there is only one American soldier left in Europe, it has to be” the American supreme commander, Mr. Grand said.

I’ll give the Times credit here for actually mentioning that “former senior NATO official” they quote is currently head of the biggest European defense industry lobbying group. It’s way too common for media not to mention when they are interviewing former generals that they are currently working for a defense industry or defense lobby.

And it wasn’t mentioned in the Times article. But Yanis Varoroufakis on Bluesky is not impressed with NATO’s decision to become have Peter Thiel’s Palantir play a major role in NATO operations.

The link he provides is to a July 7 article in the Times of London: Nato quietly puts trust in Palantir to move troops and identify targets.

Notes:

(1) Erlanger, Steven & Jakes, Lara (2026): In NATO’s Next Act, Can Europe Lead? New York Times 07/07/2026. Gift link: <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/world/europe/nato-trump-rutte-ankara-turkey.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wFA.Z4ci.DFJskr8GTkSE&smid=url-share> (Accessed: 2026-08-07).

(2) DISINFO: Claims that NATO is an exclusively defensive alliance are stupid and shameful. EU vs. Disinfo 07/01/2022. <https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/claims-that-nato-is-an-exclusively-defensive-alliance-are-stupid-and-shameful/> (Accessed : 2027-08-07).

(3) Donald Trump says he 'would encourage' Russia to attack non-paying Nato allies. BBC News 02/11/2024. <https://youtu.be/x7HE6bCe24g?si=oFwUApvvtDdQwtHM> (Accessed: 2026-08-07).

Quick hits: current politics, radical-right Catholicism, immigration, J.D. Vance and theocracy

Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti have a very good discussion on the latest turn in Graham Platner’s scandal in the Maine Senate election. They discuss the issues in evaluating the latest sexual assault claim against him and why there are good reasons to take it seriously, including how Platner himself responded to this latest development. (1)

Naomi Klein posted this on Bluesky the latest twist with Platner:

Woody Guthrie documentary

There is a recently-released documentary narrated by Rosanne Cash called “Woody Guthrie and the Ghost of Tom Joad Today.” The PBS link says it will be available there until 2029. TRIGGER WARNING: It’s very sympathetic to immigrants. Near the end we even see a banner that says, “God loves immigrants.” If you adhere to whatever the opposite of “woke” is supposed to be these days – Asleepism? – I promise you won’t like it! (1)

Russian saber rattling

This is part of the “new normal” with Russia and Europe:

In Swedish defence plans for 2025-30, a surprise attack on Gotland – either by air or sea aimed at setting up air and naval defence zones in the vicinity of the island – was named as one of seven potential situations that require prioritised planning. According to Swedish defence chiefs, from Gotland it is possible to control sea and air operations in the Baltic sea region and to control the entrance of reinforcements to Baltic states.

For now, there is not an immediate threat of a “conventional attack” [by Russia] on Gotland [an island that is part of Sweden], said [Swedish army commander in Gotland] Col. Andreas] Gustafsson, with espionage and sabotage more likely, but it cannot be ruled out. The island could be particularly vulnerable in the event of a ceasefire or peace deal with Ukraine, he said, in which case Russian forces could be quickly redispersed towards Finland and the Baltic states. “The risk is always that Russia becomes desperate. The more pressure Russia is under, the more desperate they can be as well.” (2)

Lincoln Republican Stuart Stevens on the perils of “consultant-itis” for the Democrats

Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican campaign consultant, is one of the Never Trumpers that encourage the Democrats to use aggressive messaging against Republicans and a framing that doesn’t stay mired in repeating lists of “kitchen table” issues. (3)

As I always say about the Republican Never Trumpers, they encourage the Democrats to be aggressive in their campaigning. That’s because the Never Trumpers are Republicans, and Republicans think it’s a good idea to fight for their own side. So when they switch to supporting Democrats, it seems normal to them that Democrats should also fight for their own side and not get caught up in bland clichés like “No Red America, No Blue America” (Obama) or “The fever will break” (Biden).

J.D. Vance and “Catholic integralism”

One rightwing Christian idea with which our Opus Dei Vice President J.D. has shown some sympather is called “Catholic integralism.” Frank Cocozzelli explains: (5)

Simply put, it is the anti-pluralist belief that the Catholic faith should be the basis for civil law. Taken at face value, its application often violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. Even the conservative writer George Weigel (whom I’ve often criticized) asked the question, “Haven’t we seen this before?” He then observed how this belief embodies the authoritarian of fascism.

Unlike Trump’s running mate, I believe in the separation of church and state. It is not because I am hostile to religion — far from it. I am a practicing Catholic, albeit one that dissents from several Church positions such as reproductive rights, stem cell research and prohibitions against married as well as female clergy. Instead, it is because government should not become the enforcer of any particular creed. That is the true essence of religious freedom.

Like with many such factions, there are variations. In this case “Neo-Integralism.”

This [Neo-Integralism], although itself a manifestation of [Catholic] Traditionalism, is strongly focused on the USA, distinguishes itself from the rest of the Austrian traditionalists in terms of personnel and is characterized above all by a more closed edifice of ideas, at the center of which stands the subordination of secular to spiritual authority - namely the papacy. Accordingly, Catholic Traditionalism is not based on a uniform ideology. But in its fundamentalist form, many of the actors [involved in it] nevertheless overlap, apart from Neo-Integralism in the core contents they propagate. (6)

To emphasize the main point, Neo-Integralism favors not just a “Christian Nation” but want secular governmental authority to be subordinated to the Catholic Church.

Someone should ask J.D. about this. I’m pretty sure there are quite a few American Christian Nationalists who support the Trumpist Republican Party who might have some concerns about making the Catholic Church the supreme governmental authority!

Notes:

(1) Dems ABANDON Platner After Devastating SA Allegations. Breaking Points 07/07/2026. <https://youtu.be/Xd1NfY1oOH4?si=M2G2n-pP1DEt-Quq> (Accessed: 2026-07-07).

(2) Woody Guthrie and the Ghost of Tom Joad Today. PBS 06/25/2026. <https://www.pbs.org/video/woody-guthrie-and-the-ghost-of-tom-joad-today-ynvxeh/>

(3) Bryant, Miranda (2026): ‘The risk is Russia becomes desperate’: the Swedish Baltic Sea island preparing for invasion. Guardian 07/05/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/05/gotland-russia-sweden-ramps-up-defence-baltic-sea-island> (Accessed: 2026-07-07).

(4) Stuart Stevens: Democrats Need to Attack Harder. Lincoln Square YouTube channel 07/06/2026. <https://youtu.be/91bWM44ZmFo?si=eG04-vZ1nK6CIl_2> (Accessed: 2026-07-07).

(5) Cocozzelli, Frank (2026): Catholic Integralism, J.D. Vance And Me, (First of Two Essays). Daily Kos 07/21/2024. <https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/21/2256324/community/Catholic-Integralism-J-D-Vance-And-Me-First-of-Two-Essays/> (Accessed: 2026-01-06).

(6) Reinfandt, et. al.: Religiöser Fundamentalismus und Rechtsextremismus. In: Kranebitter, Andreas et. at., eds. (2026): Handbuch Rechtsextremismus in Österreich, 359-360. Falter: Vienna. My translation to English.

Was the Boston Massacre just a narrative promoted by *conservative* Patriots?

Since American conservatives like to pose as the guardians of patriotism – to the exclusion of liberals, leftists, Wokeists, the Trans Menace and whoever else they’re hating on at the moment – they sometimes find it a challenge to celebrate the American Revolution as a revolution.

Of course, when it came to Trump sending a cop-killing crowd of armed supporters to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, even Republican Members of Congress who were there that day dutifully find ways to defend the mob action. And the “patriot militia” types who attacked the Capitol and their supporters were obviously happy to identify the mob’s actions with those of the American Revolution, because of the latter’s iconic status in American patriotic narratives.

A more honest analogy for January 6 would be the storming of Fort Sumter in 1861 by pro-slavery traitors determined to make the entire United States a slave republic. An 1861 Currier & Ives print of the time commemorated that event:

The basic stodgy conservative version of the Revolution – as opposed to others like the crassly neo-Confederate ones – is that it was a conservative revolution. Of course, conservative normally means anything but revolutionary. To use a polite definition, respectable conservatism is historically committed to “making haste slowly.” The Medicis of Italy adopted in the 16th century adopted that as a slogan and used images of a sailing tortoise to symbolize it:

So, to anoint the American Revolution as conservative, they have to ignore most of what the Revolution was about and portray it as just another American war against foreigners, in this case fought for the cause of low taxes on businesses and the preservation of slavery. Magna Carta, democracy, natural rights are just a lot of blah, blah, blah in that version.

Then there is the Pure White version of ghouls like Stephen Miller, in which the American Revolution was just one more great achievement of White Civilization. And as I write this, I immediately regret letting my mind focus on what Stephen Miller’s version of the American Revolution might be. Actually, since he’s a big fan of raw colonialism, he probably thinks the Revolution will all its blah-blah about freedom and rule of law and basic rights was a horrible tragedy for the White Race.

But here I want to mention an example of a conservative spin on the Boson Massacre in particular, which hopefully will push the thought of Stephen Miller out of my head for a while.

Historian Peter Messer published a scholarly article in 2017 on “the creation of the Boston massacre.” (1) The point of his argument is that the Boston Massacre wasn’t really a massacre. It was just that a bunch of lowlife colonials with no firearms, including the dark-skinned mulatto Crispus Attucks, were calling the pore redcoats names and even throwing snowballs at them, and so those British soldier boys had no choice but to murder five of them on the spot. (Messer doesn’t put it quite that crassly. But that’s a fair description of his claim.)

But he makes the convoluted argument that it was the Patriot leaders of the Sons of Liberty group in Boston that invented the narrative of a “massacre.” The Sons of Liberty was a American-patriotic group formed as part of the opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765 which created a new financial burden on the colonies to finance British colonial occupiers. Samuel Adams was the most famous among the group’s leaders. (1)

In his argument, the Sons of Liberty wanted to position themselves as something like the “Sensible Moderates” who were holding the rowdy radicals in check. The concept of sensibly moderate revolutionaries is kind of a strange one. But a popular argument among conservatives over the last 2 ½ centuries that the American Revolution was actually a conservative one. The concept of a Conservative Revolution was a favorite concept among German reactionaries like Carl Schmitt in the early part of the 20th century.

In Messer’s argument, the supposedly moderate Sons of Liberty used the violent actions of the redcoats to create the narrative of a “Boston Massacre” as a way to discredit the unruly rabble while positioning themselves as the responsible moderates who were constructively opposing the British. As he explains it, “how people remembered the deadly events of March 5th became important because versions of the events had begun to circulate that, for better or worse, identified the unruly actions of the crowd as the cause of the troops being removed from Boston.”

Messer winds up arguing:

In short, the patriots’ [i.e., partisans of the supposedly “moderate” Sons of Liberty] account of the events on March 5th created the Massacre. In the process, they equated legitimate authority with the power of observation and reason and portrayed the crowd’s violent actions as, at best, a false form of power or, at worst, an invitation to disaster.

In the end, Messer’s version seems similar to the kind of argument the “Progressive” historian Charles Beard (1874-1948) made in his account, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). It made a seemingly “left” argument that the 18th-century American capitalists arranged the Constitution to cement the power of the wealthy and suppress popular democratic impulses. In effect, promoted an image that the Revolution and the Constitution were a kind of cynical elite racket, downplaying the substantive class dynamics and the liberating historical effect of the kind of liberal democracy that the early United States represented. The United States of 1790 would not qualify today as a liberal democracy. But at the time, it was radical democracy in the world context of the time. And was widely understood as such.

Neil Longley York in 2009 presented a much more informative and sensible description of events and also of how the contemporary narratives of the events were constructed. (2) This is much more helpful than a contorted argument that the Boston Massacre wasn’t really a massacre – even though British troops gunned down civilians in the middle of a town when they were in no mortal danger - and portraying it as a massacre was a clever ruse by conservative Sons of Liberty leaders to discredit the unwashed masses of ordinary patriots.

York writes, "Later generations of Americans have remembered the 'massacre' more or less as the aggrieved Bostonians intended they should, as indeed those Bostonians themselves viewed it. To that extent, memory has been preserved rather than skewed with time.”

And he notes:

Even John Adams [a defense counsel for the accused British soldiers and later second the US President] went along with the "massacre" notion, saying on the one hand that convicting the soldiers of murder would have been a travesty of justice but on the other that calling the incident a "massacre" was acceptable because the soldiers should never have been in Boston in the first place.

Notes:

(1) Messer, Peter (2017): “A scene of Villainy acted by a dirty Banditti, as must astonish thePublic”: TheCreation of the Boston Massacre. New England Quarterly 90:4, 502-539. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/26405884?seq=1>

(2) York, Neil Longley (2009): Rival Truths, Political Accommodation, and the Boston "Massacre". Massachusetts Historical Review (MHR) 11, 57-95. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40345980>

Trying to decipher major Western reporting on Vladimir Putin

Marie Jégo reports in a new article for Le Monde English on Vladimir Putin’s wartime leadership. (1) It provides a good example of why critical reading is called for with such pieces.

Like other dictators before him, Vladimir Putin has his own television news programs. Every evening, after the 8 pm broadcast, teams from the official channel Rossiya 1 stay at their workplace and re-edit the news segments to deliver a carefully filtered version, stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president.

This system was described by Dmitri Skorobutov, former editor-in-chief of the channel's nightly news broadcast who has been living in exile in Europe since 2020, in an interview in June to The Moscow Times, an opposition media outlet in exile. Introduced in 2011, at the time of the major Russian protests against electoral fraud, the practice intensified after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the point that Putin is now said to be "completely cut off from the reality on the front lines," according to Skorobutov.

The fact that Le Monde is calling the Moscow Times “an opposition media outlet in exile” lends the latter credibility, though of course critical reading is always in order. AP News reported in 2024: “The Russian prosecutor general’s office on Wednesday declared The Moscow Times, an online newspaper popular among Russia’s expatriate community, as an ‘undesirable organization’.” (2)

But when we ask what those two paragraphs from Le Monde tell us, I would say it’s entirely likely that Putin has his own news summaries prepared. As presumably many other heads of government also do. (Trump’s practice of watching FOX News in the wee ours is not likely to the standard practice in most countries!) Are the news summaries for Putin “stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president”? That’s entirely possible. And Dmitri Skorobutov as former editor-in-chief at Rossiya 1 presumably has better sources for such reporting than most of us do.

But it’s also worth noting that not all actual and aspiring dictators insist on hearing only opinions and factual reports that fit their preferences. The British historian in his 1991 book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives argued that Joseph Stalin, not renowned for his patience with internal political opposition, actually made a practice of seeking out alternative opinions from his advisers on major decisions. He contrasted that with Hitler’s practice of much preferring advice that fitted his own self-presumed genius assessments of situations.

Is Putin "completely cut off from the reality on the front lines"? Who knows? He’s been the de facto head of the Russian government for over a quarter of a century, so it’s possible that he has an isolated bubble of his own, as Skorobutov describes. I’m not so convinced that the situation is as extreme as Jégo depicts it:

His own lies may have ended up convincing him. Stuck in the past, he is wary of the internet and new communication technologies. The president has never sent an email in his life and does not own a cell phone. His sources of information are limited to television news programs tailored to his point of view and reports from generals and advisers who are careful not to contradict him. "Those close to him tell him what he wants to hear," summarized Grantseva. "He has in fact indoctrinated those around him, who in turn indoctrinate him. It's a vicious circle that no one can escape." (3)

Putin is a former KGB officer, of course he’s wary of spying on his communications. Most government officials involved with national security issues tend to be. Although the US Secretary of “War” Peter Hegseth and his collaborators on Signal may not be. Trump himself has obviously not been as careful of operational security as one might expect of a President, e.g., classified documents stored in unsecured boxes in Mar-a-Lago bathrooms.

Putin’s government decided in May to release this obviously carefully-produced four-minute propaganda video – which in this version runs twice - to counter rumors that he was hiding in a bunker. So his government is sensitive to such claims: (3)

Le Monde also reports, “Russian forces lost ground in May, for the second month in a row, according to analysis by the Institute for the Study of War [ISW], an American think tank.”

May is a key word there. Jégo’s article was published on July 5. As I noted in a post just a few days ago, the ISW’s daily updates in June indicated that the Russian were advancing on the front lines, but very slowly. There have been massive laying of landmines on both sides of the lines of engagement, and drone attacks (especially from Ukraine’s side) are making advances to seize more territory very difficult. And I referenced the academic journal Osteuropa’s war blog and John Mearsheimer’s very recent assessments that both indicated the same thing.

This is primarily a war of attrition, despite all the publicity the drone war is generating. Ukraine at the moment has been successful in neutralizing much of the Russian fleet’s operations in the Black Sea, which depend on Russia’s use of ports in the illegally-annexed Crimea. And they may be able to isolate Russia from direct access to the Crimean peninsula. Ukrainian attacks on Crimea have been important in a strategic sense because it has impeded Russia’s access to Ukrainian oil. How much it would benefit Ukraine in the current war to completely retake control of Crimea while the provinces (oblasts) of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson remain mostly under Russian occupation is another question.

Jégo writes, “Isolated in this curated information bubble, the Russian president continually claims that his army is advancing ‘every day in all directions’ in Ukraine.” Making inflated claims is not the same as actually being self-deceived or isolated from uncomfortable information. Putin was a well-trained KGB agent, after all, so he has ideas about the kind of public propaganda he wants to express. And, we should give him credit: even his most dubious propaganda claims are normally much better crafted than the babble that Donald Trump spits out on a daily basis.

Jégo stresses similarities between Putin’s regime and the pre-1989 Soviet system. That there are some to be found isn’t terribly surprising since, you know, Russia is the largest and most powerful of the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Today’s capitalist, plutocratic, Mafia-like state is not politically organized like the Communist government of the USSR was. And his system looks pretty good to the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world.

Warning, you may experience reflexive eye-rolling at the next thing:

Could Ukraine become Putin's Afghanistan? The comparison needs to be nuanced. "In Ukraine, the consequences of the war go beyond those of Afghanistan, especially in human terms," recalled Kastouéva-Jean. "Russia is now losing more men there in a single month than the Soviet Union did in a decade of conflict in Afghanistan [1979-1989, between 15,000 and 26,000 according to Russian sources]."

It’s remarkable how many Western neocons and assorted commentators take it for granted that the Soviet war in Afghanistan was the primary cause of the fall of the Soviet Union.

While no one seems to doubt that the war was unpopular among the public, the actual evidence for such an effect is fairly slim. Particularly compared to the very consequential effects of the USSR having become a petrostate and all that entailed, and of the challenges of modernizing Soviet industry in the 1980s. But this idea became a key part of neocon dogma to justify inciting insurrections in countries they see as having unfriendly, uncooperative governments, like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq or the long-stand clerical regime in Iran. Now it’s a zombie trope that is obviously still stalking around the minds of interventionist-minded commentators. And we still hear it being used to argue that the current Russia-Ukraine War will have the same effect in Moscow. We see that reflected in Jégo’s report, as well.

Here it’s worth noting an anonymous article from the current Moscow Times on Russian experience with hardship in recent decades:

Two things we mustn’t forget tell us a lot. First, a number of major cities have faced high-profile attacks or tragedies in recent decades: the Crocus City Hall attack, the Volgograd train station suicide bombing, the St. Petersburg metro bombing, the Kemerovo shopping mall fire, not to mention the 1999 apartment bombings shortly before then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became president. Since 2022, many smaller cities and regions have been hit by drones, notably in the largely forgotten Operation Spider’s Web attacks.

Second, most ordinary Russians are accustomed to chugging along through economic difficulties in modern history. A shrug at the economy and an instinct to hunker down without fuss in tough times were expected. ...

I remember waking up on the morning opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was killed and feeling how tense it was. My spouse told me to be careful with what I posted online. I remember Putin disappearing from public view for a while and all the rumors people had heard. I remember getting emails from my employer in 2019-21 urging us to avoid certain weekend protests. My salary was briefly cut during Covid. As for February 2022, I just couldn’t believe it.

But each time, the country carried on. Friends told me repeatedly that this was a small crisis. Not because they were brainwashed by state propaganda about the 1990s, but because they had actually lived through harder times and come out the other side with a decent quality of life. Colleagues took great delight in explaining something about the Russian character: we’re good in tough times. (4)

This is related to the mistaken idea that bombing civilian areas will break the war morale of population being bombed and therefore push them to demand their government give up their war against, uh, the side that’s bombing them. We see a similar phenomenon with economic sanctions, which can be strategically useful in depriving a hostile country of very specific militarily-relevant goods. But sanctions that cause hunger or deprivation of critical medications don’t successfully convey a message to the affected civilians of, “We’re not against you, only against your government.”

Jégo’s article concludes with a factual observation about other “hybrid operations” by Russia against the West. I prefer the term “hybrid operations” to the often-used term “hybrid warfare.” Because it’s important to distinguish between annoyance and provocations on the one hand, and actual warfare on the other. It’s also common for xenophobic politicians to complain that asylum seekers and other irregular migration are tantamount to a military invasion. Immigrants may be inconvenient. But unless they are coming as part of an actual military operation, they are not an invasion. And immigration is not warfare, “hybrid” or otherwise.

Jégo puts it this way:

Western intelligence agencies are warning of an intensification of hybrid operations. "They relentlessly target critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust," warned Anne Keast-Butler, director of the British government's intelligence, cybersecurity, and security agency, in May. Aerial incursions, GPS signal jamming, sabotage of infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, repeated provocations at European borders: With no victory in Ukraine in sight, Moscow is relying more than ever on its capacity to cause disruption. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Jégo, Marie (2026): Vladimir Putin, or the loneliness of 'Homo Sovieticus'. Le Monde English 07/06/2026. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/07/05/vladimir-putin-or-the-loneliness-of-homo-sovieticus_6755172_4.html> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

(2) Russia declares newspaper The Moscow Times ‘undesirable’ amid crackdown on criticism. AP News 07/11/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/russia-media-newspaper-crackdown-moscow-times-9f6713ac4a880a57946ee9b7214b78f1> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

(3) Putin Appears In Moscow As Russia Rejects Reports Of Underground War Bunker Isolation. The Financial Express [India] YouTube channel 05/13/2026. <https://youtu.be/FZHIoU0F0cw?si=syh1WSQfuDUNUiev> (Accessed: 2026-06-07). The description on YouTube notes, “The video shows Putin casually driving a Russian-made SUV through central Moscow before meeting his former school teacher, Vera Gurevich, in what many see as a direct response to growing speculation about his security situation and isolation during the Ukraine war.”

(4) The World Shouldn’t Be Confused When Russians Shrug Off a Crisis. The Moscow Times 06/29/2026. <https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/06/29/the-world-shouldnt-be-confused-when-russians-shrug-off-a-crisis-a93120> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

The Ukrainian Fortress Belt and why it is a major focus in the forever war there

Michael McFaul is a Democrat, a former US Ambassador to Russia and still a leading Establishment foreign policy figure. He has been very hawkish in his enthusiasm for the Ukrainian side in the Russia-Ukraine War. Several points from a Substack article of his from June are worth noticing. (1)

He discusses his view of the Russian war aims: “First, Putin aimed to unite Russians and Ukrainians, whom he considers to be ‘one people.’ Ukrainians, in his view, are just Russians with accents. Regarding this war objective, Putin has failed miserably.” It’s true that Putin’s government has advocated a kind of Panslavic concept that sees Russia and Ukraine as somehow spiritually united. A conservative Orthodox Christianity heavily influences Putin’s rhetoric. And a popular narrative of Russia’s historical origins traces it back to the establishment of the “Kyivan Rus,” traditionally dated to the 9th century.

As far as I’ve seen, Russia has never officially and explicitly stated that they intend to conquer all of Ukraine. That would be an enormous undertaking and would create a chronic headache for a Ukraine that was formally absorbed as part of Russia. As we have seen for decades and especially since 2022, there are certainly plenty of Ukrainians who would really prefer not to be part of Russia.

McFaul also observes:

... Putin did not achieve his second war objective—regime change or what he oddly calls “denazification.” (Nazis do not rule Ukraine.) Zelenskyy, his security detail, and all Ukrainian warriors have prevented Putin from overthrowing the democratically elected president and parliament. In the first days of the full-scale invasion, Zelenskyy evaded multiple assassination attempts. Putin’s original dream of installing a pro-Kremlin puppet to rule Ukraine seems more fantastical today than ever before.

This is a far more plausible claim. There are actual neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. They don’t control the government, but they exist and are intensely anti-Russia. Volodymyr Zelensky’s government created an unnecessary headache for itself in pandering to admirers of that marginal but real trend:

Poland and Ukraine have a common enemy — Russia — but a dispute over massacres eight decades ago is increasingly being weaponized in domestic politics on both sides.

The historical feud began in May when Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named a Ukrainian military unit after the “Heroes of UPA,” which outraged Poland. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known as UPA, killed tens of thousands of Poles in World War II in an ethnic cleansing campaign in what is now western Ukraine.

On the Polish side, the heated debate about Zelenskyy’s move is already threatening to weigh on next year’s crucial general election — with the nationalist camp seeing an opportunity to score points against pro-EU centrists. [my emphasis] (2)

This was an “own goal” on Ukraine’s part. Especially since Poland, which has the biggest active-service army in the EU, shares and border with Ukraine, and has hosted millions of Ukrainian refugees.

McFaul notes that “democracy is still Ukraine’s form of government,” as the US expects its allies to at least pretend to be. The 2026 edition of the widely used Democracy Report from the V-Dem Institute notes, “There are many populous countries in the region undergoing autocratization during the last two decades, such as Romania, Russia, Ukraine, and until recently Poland.”

McFaul’s third main point is on firmer ground with his point that “after more than four years of fighting, Ukrainians have continued to deny Putin his revised, more limited war aim of annexing major chunks of Ukrainian territory.” In its categorization for 2025 rating countries in the four large categories of Liberal Democracies, Electoral Democracies, Electoral Autocracies, and Closed Autocracies, both Russia and Ukraine are included in the Electoral Autocracies slot, with Ukraine having moved more toward more authoritarian governance in 2025. (The US and the UK both fall into their Electoral Democracies category.)

Relations between nations can be facilitated by similar types of governance. But other factors drive international alliances. And international law on national sovereignty does not depend on the type of their internal governments. And that is also true of any ethical or religious version of the just war concept.

McFaul observes, plausibly, that the “Ukrainians thwarted Putin’s plan to kill Zelenskyy and install a Kremlin-friendly puppet.” The idea that Putin’s government would want a friendly and/subordinate regime in Kiev is far more likely than the assumption their intention was to annex the entire country. He also makes the sensible argument that Russia’s current goal is the “more limited war aim of annexing major chunks of Ukrainian territory.” Having Russia in de facto control of provinces of the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson would make it in practice much more difficult if not impossible for Ukraine to join with the EU or NATO. And it actually is reasonable to assume, despite the protests of Ukraine’s political partisans, that Russia’s concern, repeated consistently for years over NATO membership for Ukraine, was the main reason for its current war of aggression.

This is a brief explainer from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) of an important element of Ukraine’s defense called the “fortress belt” in the Donetsk province. (3) This is a militarily critical element in Ukraine’s defense, because Ukraine has successfully used it to block Russian advances. And if Moscow undertakes another effort to directly attack the capital Kiev, the fortress belt area would be crucial in blocking a ground invasion aimed at Kiev.

Notes:

(1) McFaul, Michael (2026): Ukraine is Winning. McFaul’s World 06/12/2026. <https://michaelmcfaul.substack.com/p/ukraine-is-winning> (Accessed: 2026-07-05).

(2) Kość, Wojciech (2026): How a bloody past is reshaping politics in Poland and Ukraine. Politico EU 06/30/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-ukraine-pis-party-volodymyr-zelenskyy-donald-tusk-karol-nawrocki-bloody-past/> (Accessed: 2026-07-05).

(3) Ukraine’s Fortress Belt: The Key to Sustaining the Frontline. Institute for the Study of War YouTube channel 05/22/2026. <https://youtu.be/7pDakmv6gaQ?si=AcxC76p_r70uEIuZ> (Accessed: 2026-07-05).

July 4, 2026

I just got back from a great Fourth of July gathering with good food and lively music.

The British Marsh Family singing group does quite a few inspired parodies on current evens. But this is a sympathetic (and sad) current tribute to the US on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. (1)

This is the message caption with it:

Wishing a very happy #4thJuly to our many friends and supporters in the USA. To mark the 250th anniversary today, we've re-adapted the British popular 18th-century song "The Anacreontic Song" which became the US national anthem the #StarSpangledBanner after Francis Scott Key wrote powerful and moving words to describe the survival of a fort under bombardment during the War of 1812 (against the British).

We've taken as our topic for the re-adaptation the current state of the United States in 2026 as seen against its majestic history, using the metaphor of a ship sailing. Lyrics below, with nods to some of the great speeches and moments in American history, and with hopes that the current distortion of its values and direction will not endure, but be another storm to pass through.

The "for 12 score and ten years" line is a nice touch.

Brandi Carlile’s new rendition of “American the Beautiful” is also awesome! (2)

 

And this is the 2026 classic patriotic song from The Boss, the best one I've encountered so far this year: (3)

Notes:

(1) "Star-Spangled Banner" - Marsh Family adaptation of the US National Anthem for 250th 4th of July Day. Marsh Family 07/04/2026. <https://youtu.be/eQ67oapo-To?si=wgiYsUq-KTu9Ago7> (Accessed: 2026-04-07).

(2) Brandi Carlile performs 'America the Beautiful' at the Statue of Liberty. ABC News YouTube channel 07/04/2026. <https://youtu.be/5LZOhEGG-_o?si=uMgfkgt1pNwXrW9J> (Accessed: 2026-04-07).

(3) Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Lyric Video). Bruce Springsteen YouTube channel 01/29/2026. <https://youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw?si=50uP-62areISoxyr> (Accessed: 2026-04-07).

Two wars with no obvious quick ends in sight

The US is facing huge risks from two current wars, one of whose risks are more immediate and acute for Europe. Both the Russia-Ukraine War and especially the US-Israel War on Iran would require at a very minimum competent diplomacy from Washington to resolve. And that factor is very much in short supply at the moment.

The Iran disaster

There is obviously a good chance that the negotiations with Iran will not lead to a permanent settlement or even an end to the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz oil traffic. The clock is ticking and it sounds like in three or four weeks, much more devastating economic effects of the oil blockade will be making themselves felt.

Klye Kulinski takes an 18-minute look at what the White House is putting forward this week on the US-Israel War on Iran. (Note: Kyle often uses not-appropriate-for-the-office language, though not so much in this segment.) And gives us a disturbing glimpse at what a train wreck the Trump 2.0 regime is on war policy. (1)

This war is certainly a joint folly of the Trump Administration and the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is also the case that Israel has been pushing for the war. And Netanyahu himself has been doing so for decades. But Donald Trump is the President, and he bears full responsibility for his bad decisions. Kyle speculates plausibly that Israel, among other things, is exercising blackmail against Trump.

Netanyahu's Israel is following an aggressive policy against its Middle Eastern neighbors with the goal of making and maintaining itself the unquestioned regional hegemon there, with Syria, Lebanon, and Iran reduced to failed states. They are currently pushing to have the Sunni Islamist government in Damascus fight on Israel’s behalf inside Lebanon against the Iran-allied Hizbollah. in It is also pursuing an expansionist policy in line with the explicit from-the-river-to-the-sea policy of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and his current governing coalition, including a continuation of the overtly genocidal policies against Palestinians Israel has pursued since the October 7 attack in 2023.

But, reckless and illegal as much of that policy is, at least Israel is pursuing a goal that is in their perceived national interest. That doesn’t mean that it fully rational. It’s not. The Netanyahu version of Zionism is highly ideological and religious. It also has huge inherent risks for Israel itself, not least of which that its prospects are dependent on the military and diplomatic support of the United States.

But the current US-Israel war against Iran carries huge risks for America, as we see in the current blocking of the Strait of Hormuz. And the economic damage to the US and the whole world is already serious (2) and may very well get much worse. Whatever substantive benefit the US might in some ways take from this is very hard to perceive at the moment.

The Trump regime’s current stance is looking awfully like a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis. That’s a better metaphor than, say, “sleepwalking.” Because everyone can see the train running full speed down the tracks directly in front of us.

The Russia-Ukraine Forever War

The war that began with the direct Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has gone on for over four years. By all accounts, the lines of conflict between the Russian occupiers and Ukrainian forces have not shifted in really significant way since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023. It’s still a war of attrition with Russian forces deeply entrenched in the four provinces (oblasts) of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The province of Crimea that Russia seized in 2014 has been subject to heavy and effective Ukrainian attacks. But the success of the Ukraine’s drone-based warfare against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, Crimea’s significant as the main base for that fleet is largely nullified for the moment. Even in the unlikely event that Ukraine establishes full control of Crimea while the other four provinces are still largely under Russian control, it’s hard to see how that would much improve Ukraine’s position in the war over the other occupied provinces.

John Mearsheimer, who has been often-depressingly correct about Ukraine’s position in the war since 2022, has also been pointing to signals that Russia has been signaling that it may stage a direct attack on a NATO country to pressure Europe (and the US, which is still providing some support for Ukraine) to limit its support for Ukraine.) How serious are they about the hinted threats? It’s hard for the public to know. But it’s not an entirely frivolous one. And though the Europeans are generally pretty hawkish in their rhetoric and have been hailing the Ukrainian strikes deeper into Russian territory, we have to hope and assume that they are paying close attention to their options for response in such a case. Because Ukraine is not part of NATO. Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are. As overused as the word “credibility” is in foreign policy debates, any direct Russian military attack on a target inside the territory of a NATO ally really would mean that the Western response would provide an important test of the alliance’s credibility.

Mearsheimer has recently been emphasizing that the US position in relation to Iran is remarkably weak. But he has also been saying that the Russians have been very slowly advancing on the front lines inside Ukraine recently. (3) The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has been doing daily updates on the military situation in the war.

And their recent updates seem consistent with Mearsheimer’s, like that he gives toward the end of this recent interview, which also discusses the Iran War. (4)

The German academic journal Osteuropa has also been keeping a war diary of the Russia-Ukraine War. While it tends to put an optimistic face on Ukraine’s prospects, they also reflect the view that of Russia making very slow progress in the war of attrition in Ukraine in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. A July 1 update finds:

Overall, the Russian army is thus continuing its summer offensive despite Ukraine's successful air strikes on the supply lines in the rear area. This is certainly possible because it has set up camps in the area close to the front that Ukraine has not yet discovered. Ukraine has also not yet succeeded in eliminating Russia's strategic bomber fleet, which continues to cover the Ukrainian army's offshore positions with a carpet of heavy glide bombs. The situation at the front remains tense. Ukraine has not yet outdone all of Russia's trump cards.

Russia's military bloggers are showing themselves to be extremely concerned about the situation of Moscow's troops in this area [in the Zaporizhzhia oblast]. They fear that they could not only have to give up the positions they took in January 2025 at the price of thousands of soldiers killed, but also lose Vasylivka [also in Zaporizhzhia], which has been controlled [by the Russians] since March 2022. (5)

There has also been a confusing spate of discussion recently about the supposed success of Ukraine’s drone strikes deeper inside Russia and the alleged weakness of the Russian economy. It’s generally true of humanity, despite our long history of armed conflict, that most people would really prefer not to have wars. And that ordinary people gripe about the deaths and lesser inconveniences that come with wars. There are exceptions, of course, like our Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth. But fortunately, most people are not drooling warmongers, despite the reflexive support that people tend to give wars being waged by their own country, at least in the early weeks of a conflict. (The majority disapproval in the US of the Iran War from its beginning on February 28 on is a dramatic exception. Maybe even an anthropological exception.)

But Russia is also having a military-Keynesianism moment, with boosted military production contributing to generally low unemployment. There are reports of shortages and hardships, but I find it hard to evaluate their significance for the Russian war effort. And Russia does have a far larger population and economy than Ukraine’s. Ukraine has understandably touted its success in striking targets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, including war-related infrastructure like oil refineries. And Ukraine’s partisans in the West seem to be convinced that those attacks are increasing public discontent against Putin’s government.

Of course, Russia is also bombing civilian centers in Ukraine, too. And Ukraine is still carrying on the war into its fifth year.

It’s really a remarkable thing how much faith so many pundits and people who generally should know better have in ability of attacks on civilian areas to “break the will” of the civilian population. Bombing from airplanes began in 1912 during the First Balkan War and was practiced by both Germany and Britain in the First World War.

After the war, an Italian named Giulio Douhet wrote a book called Command of the Air (1921), which was extremely influential on airwar theorists in the interwar period, in which he expressed faith in the effectiveness of deliberately bombing civilian targets on breaking the will to resist of the enemy’s civilian population. One could even say a religious faith:

A people who are bombed today as they were bombed yesterday, who know they will be bombed again tomorrow and see no end to their martyrdom, are bound to call for peace at length. It may be two weeks, two months, or six months, depending upon the intensity of the offensive and the stoutness of the people’s hearts. [my emphasis] (6)

Bombing to destroy the morale of enemy civilians was known as “morale” bombing during the Second World War. Now it is more commonly described as a “punishment campaign.”

The effect predicted by Douhet of such campaigns has never happened. (7) There was even experience already from the First World War to indicate that was a false hope. British and German civilians did make demands on their government after such attacks: demands to provide better protection from such attacks and to retaliate in kind on the enemy side. Seeing one’s neighbor wrecked and your neighbors and family members killed and wounded by enemy bombing doesn’t tend to make people eager to surrender to the side that dropped the bombs, even if they hate their own government for whatever reason. They also have maximum incentive to cooperate actively with their neighbors and their own government for civil defense purposes.

Without pretending to be thoroughly familiar with the war reports, it’s hard for me to imagine that the long-range Ukrainian bombing inside Russia is substantively affecting Russia abilities to fight along the front lines of the war of attrition.

Notes:

(1) Iran GHOSTS TRUMP As White House PANICS In War Briefing To Congress! Secular Talk YouTube channel 07/01/2026. <https://youtu.be/2yh4r8BFQsM?si=5zgMEY7aCxCM7Oug> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(2) The Iran War Broke The American Empire. Owen Jones YouTube channel 06/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/L_ucoGhwxCs?si=-XBHH9iemS_af2Q6> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(3) Mearsheimer DIRE WARNING On Russia/Ukraine. Breaking Points YouTube channel 06/23/2026. <https://youtu.be/Q-AiLUd4E8Q?si=ZnwQ1uclV1etSkD1> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(4) Prof. John Mearsheimer: Making Sense of Iran’s Victory Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom YouTube channel 06/30/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/XtINoZon8as?si=HGHWeDztZIcr-xA3> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(5) Mitrokhin, Nikolay (2026): Wechsel der strategischen Initiative. Osteuropa 07/01/2026. <https://zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/blog/wechsel-der-strategischen-initiative/> (Accessed: 2026-07-02). My translation to English.

(6) Douhet, Giulio (2019 [1921]): Command of the Air, 245. Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press. (1921 Reprint of 1921 edition)

(7) See: Pape, Robert (1996): Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Davis Biddle, Tami (2002): Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing 1914-1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press.