Russian roulette

As an amateur military historian, the one most important thing that I've learned about war from the books I've read and the lectures I've attended is that war is mostly about miscalculation management and the resulting unintended consequences.

War is also about death, destruction, horror, sorrow, famine, misinformation, collateral damage, displacement and cruelty among its many injustices.

As a species, we seem to be in a constant state of war, killing each other in droves somewhere or another on the planet at any given moment.

Found in Ukraine: Putin as Hitler.

 The latest miscalculation seems to be Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, now in its fourth day. Russian president Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and current Russian mafia oligarch, is waging a vanity war again his neighbor. He's fearful that Ukraine, a modern and Western-leaning sovereign state, will become a member of NATO, thus adding another country to what he perceives as an encroaching ring of democracy around Mother Russia.

Putin's assault is also history repeating itself, as if we needed another lesson. While falsely claiming the intervention is for the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine (there are no Nazi's in Ukraine. Here's Putin's misinformation campaign on full display), he is ironically mirroring the tactics of Adolf Hitler's land grabs in the late 1930's. We've seen this before. Putin is not fooling anybody.

So far, Putin's paranoia seems to be a huge miscalculation on his part. The set-piece battles so far have reportedly cost Russia 3,500 of its soldiers, 14 airplanes, eight helicopters, 102 tanks and one BUK missile. We are probably days, if not hours, away from seeing the war go urban. That will make it even more costly for the Russians. And that will not play well to those soldiers' mothers, wives and sweethearts on the streets of Moscow.

It seems Putin's less-than-lightning war is coming at an unexpected cost. Not only are there surprisingly high losses in men and material, but growing worldwide economic sanctions against a nation that has an economy about as large as Texas are becoming effective. Economic sanctions could hinder the Russian war machine as badly as Stinger rockets, and soon. It's costly to keep an army on the field, and costlier to occupy that country. Did they already forget about Afghanistan?

The real danger, of course, is how much of this humiliation can Putin stand? He's already bandied about the "nuclear" word a few times. Chernobyl, site of the nuclear power plant meltdown in 1986, could see the release of radiation pockets into the atmosphere, thus creating a European environmental disaster.

Clearly, Putin is a heartless, soulless megalomaniac, sheathed in lies and untruths. We've seen it for decades. How much more proof do we need?

Knowing that, why is former president Trump praising Putin as a genius while Ukranians die in the streets? Why is Trump's former secretary of state and former CIA director Mike Pompeo lifting Putin above the Biden administration in this conflict as Biden brings NATO together like never before?

Russia has been an opponent of the United States political system since the end of World War II and the ensuing creation of NATO. That basic political tenant has never changed, even when Trump was licking Putin's shoes in Helsinki a few years ago and apparently not comprehending that Putin was not his dear friend. It's astounding to me that the Republican Party, not long ago once a party of hawks against the Russian bear, has caved to the Russian point of view.

Maybe it's time to recalculate those miscalculations.