Two years ago this week, the United States shut down. Churches, schools and businesses went dark. Weddings, funerals, and birthdays went silent. City streets stood empty, with an eeriness closer resembling occupied Paris than the bustling hubs they’d been just days before.
Two years later, as the last of the mask mandates for school children falter and crack, it’s tempting to believe our nightmare is finally over. Just as the disease is going to haunt us a long while, however, so too will the effects of how we tried to fight it.
The answer may lie in his tactics in previous conflicts.
Geographically, Ukraine is the largest country in Europe (about the size of Texas and some 1800km across from west to east); it has a population of more than 40,000,000. The Russian invasion is being conducted along four axes: 1) from the north, out of Belarus; 2) from the northeast, along the Chernihiv-Sumy-Kharkiv axis; 3) out of the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine (with the help of the two Russian separatist republics of Luhansk and Donetsk); and, 4) out of Crimea in the south. In general, while the Russian assault has been significantly less effective than anticipated, Russian forces are still managing, deliberately and inexorably, to encircle and bombard key Russian cities and towns, e.g., the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Kharkiv (Ukraine’s second largest city), Mariupol. In the process, they have created the most tragic humanitarian disaster in Europe since the end of World War II, with more than 2,000,000 refugees now fleeing Ukraine.
What the Ukrainian Invasion has Revealed about Russian Military Power
If your bag of Doritos has seemed suspiciously skimpy on chips lately, you’re not alone. Frito-Lay confirmed that it decreased the number of chips you get per bag by five whole delicious triangles in 2021 in order to account for inflation, Quartz reports.
Fox News is the most watched cable news channel in America. According to figures for the fourth quarter of 2021, the network’s top show, The Five, pulled in 3.3 million viewers. The runners-up, Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity, were close behind. Altogether, Fox is comfortably ahead of the liberal news channels MSNBC and CNN.
However, the channel would lose its top spot if the Joe Rogan Experience was included on the chart.
Some Russians are risking everything to speak out against Putin’s invasion.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is facing fierce resistance – not just from the Ukrainian fighters defending their homeland, but on the homefront, too.
Since the invasion, the Putin regime has implemented strict controls on the media and has cracked down heavily on protests. A liberal TV channel and radio station have been forced to shut down. Any journalist caught contradicting the Kremlin line – that Russia has not invaded Ukraine, but rather is conducting a ‘special military operation’ – can face up to 15 years in prison, for the crime of spreading ‘fake’ information or disrespecting the military. But none of this has stopped Russians from speaking out. Far from it.
“This is a war about all the world.” -Volodymyr Zelensky
I can’t get the horror of the Russian atrocities in Ukraine out of my head. I keep hearing that cute little toddler crying out hysterically, “Daddy, Mommy is dead!” Her mother was killed in her apartment by a Russian bomb. The videos of teenage Russian conscripts burning to death in their tanks from Javelin missiles don’t make me feel much better.
Is there any point to all of this needless human suffering? “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Perhaps it is time to start reflecting on what Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will mean to future historians.
A flood of anti-tank missiles sent to Ukraine has potentially changed the course of the war, putting pressure on Russia to find enough capable troops for the grueling urban combat that is now more likely.
For some military analysts, the number of latest generation anti-tank missiles shipped to Ukraine in recent weeks is breathtaking, giving Ukraine’s soldiers an arsenal of these weapons that may be unprecedented in a major modern war.
Russians are not entirely without success…
#Ukraine: The Russian VDV troops showed the weapons recently captured from the Ukrainian forces near #Kyiv. This includes 8 FGM-148 "Javelin", a single NLAW and 5 Panzerfaust 3 anti-tank launchers, supplied from the West. 9K310 Igla-1 and 9K38 Igla MANPADS also can be seen. pic.twitter.com/Wds1HSH7EY
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 15, 2022
#Ukraine: The Russian army continues to use "Krasnopol" 152mm laser-guided artillery shells – this time two Ukrainian BMP IFVs were hit, which led to the detonation of ammunition inside. pic.twitter.com/rMFRTnwWxI
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 15, 2022
Conservative leadership candidate Patrick Brown launched an attack Monday on his opponent Pierre Poilievre, accusing the Conservative MP of supporting “discriminatory policies” that target immigrants.
Poilievre, the MP for the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton considered the front-runner in the race, pitched new policies Monday that he said will make it easier for skilled immigrants to practice their professions in Canada. He vowed to take on what he called “money-grabbing gatekeepers” who determine whether an immigrant is qualified to work in Canada.
I wonder if the CPC will see a sizable increase in Muslim members thanks to Patrick. Maybe it’s a good thing he wins. The CPC will never recover.
It might be thought that with the decline in the centrality of religion and the huge embrace of secularism in western society that there would be an equal decline in doctrine. We may see doctrine as being the great catalogue of dogmas: those “truths” you must believe, those you must never challenge and those that are to be passed inflexibly on to young people with all the force and efficiency of indoctrination.
The Senate on Tuesday approved a proposal to make Daylight Saving Time permanent, which if passed in the House and signed by President Biden, would mean Americans would never again have to set their clocks back an hour and lose an hour of afternoon daylight in the fall and winter.
If enacted into law, it would also mean that early risers lose an hour of daylight in the mornings in November, December, January and February.
Russia has empowered dangerous factions in Zelenskyy’s army
Like any war, but perhaps more than most, the war in Ukraine has seen a bewildering barrage of claims and counter-claims made by the online supporters of each side. Truth, partial truths and outright lies compete for dominance in the media narrative. Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia invaded Ukraine to “de-Nazify” the country is surely one of the clearest examples. The Russian claim that the Maidan revolution of 2014 was a “fascist coup” and that Ukraine is a Nazi state has been used for years by Putin and his supporters to justify his occupation of Crimea and support for Russian-speaking separatists in the country’s east, winning many online adherents.
China’s murky intentions regarding its Russian alliance and the Ukraine war are making headlines. Whatever the outcome, the next global conflict could well involve the deployment of Beijing’s growing technological prowess.
China has already surpassed America in several branches of quantum information science, which entails massive computations and nearly instantaneous communications — and in critical areas of artificial intelligence, all of which have military applications.
