The Thrill of Russian Roulette: Part II
In which America continues to pointlessly escalate a hopeless catastrophe for poor Ukraine; and joins Russia in flirting with the end of civilization itself.
Continued from Part I, this covers the spring of the second year of the war.
“That's enough, Vulic!” someone cried. … “What sort of a joke is this?”
“A stupid joke!” threw in another.
“I’ll wager fifty rubles to five that the pistol is not loaded!” a third shouted.
Fresh bets were made.
I got tired of this endless ceremony. “Look here,” I said, “either fire or hang the pistol back in its place and let’s go to bed.”
“That’s right,” many exclaimed. “Let’s go to bed.”
“Gentlemen, I beg of you not to move!” said Vulic, pressing the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead …
In January 2023, as we approached the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine war, Biden was asked if the United States would send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. He replied: “No.” His White House all that month was also refusing to share our flagship American tank, the Abrams M1, a 62-ton, jet engine-powered beast.
Well, that’s not a very exciting game of Russian roulette! How can you accidentally blow off your own head if you refuse to play?
We’d already in that first year of war (see Part I) provided Stinger missiles, seized Russian Central Bank assets, scuttled a promising Russian-Ukrainian peace deal, and bragged about helping to assassinate a dozen Russian generals and to sink the Moskva flagship; supported-then-disowned various Ukrainian terror attacks; supplied longer-range rockets based on a Ukrainian pinkie-promise to never-ever shoot them into Russia; blown up the Nord Stream pipeline (c’mon, you must know that’s true); rejected additional high-level, direct-to-D.C. Russian peace overtures we weren’t even told of; and plowed ahead with massive, dueling nuclear weapons exercises. Providing tanks would just be a teeny little escalation. Why not pull the trigger on that, too, and see what happens?
And suddenly, there it was:
In late January, the White House announced it had changed its mind and now would send 31 Abrams tanks. Why? Officially — this is not a joke! — because Germany lacked the nerve to play Russian roulette by itself! That’s right. We wanted Germany to send some of its Leopard tanks. But Germany was shy, and insisted that if we were going to start giving tanks, America had to go first. We said no, because our tanks, while obviously the most awesome, are also “very complicated,” and too expensive for Ukrainians, and really Germany should go first. The Brits then stepped up and offered 14 of their Challenger 2 tanks, as a gesture to shame Germany. But Germany with Teutonic obstinance said it didn’t care about Great Britain and would only go after America.
It would have been amusing if it weren’t all so tragic and mindless. The New York Times reported that “weeks of tense back-channel negotiations” about who would give tanks first had led to Biden’s “however reluctant” decision — which it described as “the latest in a series of gradual escalations that has inched the United States and its NATO allies closer” to war.
The counteroffensive disaster approaches
“Gradual?” “Inching?” Hardly.
We in the West might be getting more comfortable with this Central European bloodbath. It was familiar now. It had been around for a year — and despite all of the bummer talk about Armageddon, civilization hadn’t ended. If the Ukraine war was a Lermontov short story, this would be the part where bystander characters like us would be getting bored with the endless ceremony — “either point that pistol at your head and pull the trigger, or hang it back up and let’s all go to bed already!”
But even as we were growing numb to it, the war itself was becoming more terrible and dangerous. The spring of 2023 would soon see one of the most shameful and horrific episodes of the entire sorry spectacle: “the counteroffensive.”
Fighting on the eastern fronts had already killed tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian young people. Russia had retrenched and deeply fortified the area, including with landmines, and recruited vast reinforcements (from its far larger population). Russia’s ground forces in Ukraine were actually now larger than at the war’s outset (!), and were comfortably ensconced in the mostly Russian-speaking east — roughly the same territory that had rebelled against Kyiv nearly a decade ago. Consider, for context, some maps:
Ukraine, egged on by European and American armchair warriors, would now launch a completely hopeless, months-long campaign to “drive the Russians out” — even though the Russian forces were larger, were in fortified defensive positions, and controlled the skies. (The Ukrainian Air Force had perhaps 50 aging, Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets, for example, while Russia’s Air Force has more than 900 fighter jets, including hundreds of modern jets; each side also had thousands of aerial drones, although Russia seems to have more.)
Throwing a small force against a larger force in a fortified, land-mine-protected position, without air support — this was doomed.
Why do it?
One answer: Russian roulette is irrational. And nihilistic.
Another answer: Billions of dollars are in play, and those with an interest in keeping that money flowing have leverage over the U.S. political decision-making system. They also would not be doing any of the killing and dying. Heck, they wouldn’t even have to see or hear it. They would leave that grim fate to tens of thousands of far-off young people.
That said, a year’s worth of high-intensity war — even when it’s experienced only as a news story — gets hard to stomach. Soon, the American public was growing restless. Some were even questioning the wisdom of our empire’s latest expensive and blood-soaked foreign adventure. It was time for our leaders to reassert the political initiative by announcing a new escalation they promise will make everything better.
We saw this in 2007, when President George W. Bush declared a “surge” of 20,000 additional U.S. troops into his disastrous invasion of Iraq. (You don’t like the Iraq war? Well, buckle up for one last hurrah of massive spending!) We saw it again in 2009, when President Barack Obama — despite having been elected on a peace platform — announced his own “surge” of 30,000 troops into the doomed Afghanistan war.
Question: What did the Iraq war surge, the Afghan war surge, and now the Ukraine counteroffensive all have in common?
Answer: Each was a marketing slogan aimed at Congress.
It seems that whenever a war is privately recognized by insiders to have been a failed project, the moment is ripe to call for a final “spend-a-lot” escalation. A version of this plan will reliably emerge from all other competing plans out there. It might not make any logical sense. (Doubling down on a failed adventure rarely would). But it is what the defense contractors want. So, it is loudly taken up by defense contractor-funded think tanks; it is praised in Op-Eds penned by defense contractor-supported academics; it rapidly becomes the only topic of discussion on defense contractor-influenced cable news.
Peace talks? They never come up. There’s no money in that!
Instead, the only topic of discussion is the lucrative-but-doomed escalation. It is quickly brand-named: It is The Surge™, or The Counteroffensive™. This gives Congress members, White House officials, and lobbyists a sea shanty they can all sing in unison, as they methodically shovel billions of dollars, one last time, into the war ship’s furnace.
We even admitted it: We sent tanks only BECAUSE they wouldn’t help
“Hold on,” you might say. “This seems cynical. What if our leaders sincerely believed that Ukrainians armed with super-duper NATO tech could somehow rout the Russians?”
Well, first of all, we now know — thanks to leaked internal Pentagon documents — that our military leaders expected nothing good from the counteroffensive. Privately, they expected it would fail, even as publicly, they cheered it on, at a terrible cost in the lives of young Russians and Ukrainians.
In fact, to an attentive reader, those news reports in January 2023 about how the White House had “reluctantly” agreed to send U.S. tanks already made clear the breathtaking cynicism of it all: We were only sending tanks because we didn’t think they would help. If we thought tanks would let Ukraine win — that would be too likely to provoke nukes — so in that case, we would not have provided tanks. We sent tanks because it was good business, good optics on the home front — like another shiny Ukraine flag lapel pin — and otherwise, militarily wouldn’t matter.
How could they matter, after all? How could 31 U.S. tanks (with another 18 German Leopard tanks meekly bringing up the rear) turn the tide in a war that has seen about 4,000 tanks destroyed, with about 3,000 more tanks still in play, and hundreds more being manufactured or repaired by both sides every year?
From The New York Times again:
“While it is unclear whether [the planned tank deliveries] will make a decisive difference in the spring offensive that President Volodymyr Zelensky is now planning … European and American officials acknowledged that three months ago, it would have been inconceivable that [the West] … would have contributed such heavy arms. But over time, [Western officials interviewed have] argued, the battlefield has changed and they believed the threat that President Vladimir V. Putin would reach for a tactical nuclear weapon to eviscerate Ukrainian forces has diminished.”
Translation: A few dozen tanks — in a conflict involving many thousands of tanks — won’t help. We refused to send even that three months ago because our officials were privately terrified (see Part I) that the Russians might be on verge of unexpected and embarrassing military reverses, of the kind that might provoke use of tactical nukes. But now, “the battlefield has changed” — the Russians, now battle-tested and re-organized, and with something like 2,400 tanks among other things, have held on, strengthened their position, and are basically entrenched forever. Therefore, we can now safely deliver 18 German tanks, and 14 British tanks, and promise to eventually send 31 American tanks, and invite the world to admire our courage; while General Dynamics can contemplate with satisfaction this teaser deal.
Why don’t you hear this skeptical perspective more?
One reason is that criticism of our proxy war in Ukraine has been scrubbed from the internet.
An investigation by U.S. Congressional staff found that the FBI — working in tandem with the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU — has been sending spreadsheets to social media companies listing “thousands of accounts to remove.”
Let me repeat: the Ukrainian spy agency has been getting Americans deleted from Facebook.
Crazy, right?
One FBI e-mail to Meta, in March 2022, mentions having “a few more” Instagram and Facebook accounts the SBU would like reviewed for deletion — and then in an attachment lists 15,865 Instagram and 5,165 Facebook accounts.
You know, just a few more.
The Congressional investigators confirmed that real Americans targeted included a New York photographer, a South Carolina business manager, a Minnesota musician, a California professor and a Wisconsin children’s book author. The SBU not only asked that these accounts and thousands of others be removed, they also requested each account holder’s e-mail address, phone number, date of birth and so on. (Like all spy agencies, the SBU likes its files.)
Those targeted for deletion no doubt included some eccentric kooks and fake bots. That said, the FBI/SBU also targeted for deletion the Twitter account of, for example, journalist Aaron Mate, who has been an intelligent and vocal critic of the U.S. role in the war. The “international security state” also overwhelmingly focused on deleting the accounts of ordinary people living in Russia and Belarus — which, if you think about it, denies Americans an opportunity to hear from, learn from, argue with, and yell at the people on the other side of the war.
We’ve only seen glimpses of this secretive process, and so can only guess at its scope. But to illustrate what little we do know, the Congressional investigators offered a graphic of how often just in March 2022 the FBI/SBU were confirmed to have contacted a social media company with censorship requests:
Eight Creaky Old Jets to Flyby Salute the Coming Murderous Farce
In January, media from CNN to The New York Times were already gushing about the soon-to-be-amazing Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Washington Post took this to the next level of parody by trotting out retired General David Petraeus — he who 15 years ago oversaw the Iraq War Surge™ — to talk up the Surge’s™ Counteroffensive’s™ coming glories.
“[T]he big question [Petraeus explained] … is whether or not the Ukrainians can do once again what they did earlier in the war, which is to do better than Russia in … recruiting, training, equipping, organizing, and employing additional forces. And of course, this is where the latest very important announcement comes in — the Western contribution of German Leopard 2 tanks, U.S. M1 Abrams tanks, and also U.K. Challenger tanks …
This was an odd explanation. Russia began the invasion with a force of about 140,000 men. Ukraine’s initial resistance was truly heroic. (It reminded me of the Chechen resistance against invading Russian forces in 1994-1995, which I covered then for the Los Angeles Times). The unexpectedly firm Ukrainian defiance put the Russians onto their back foot. Obviously, the Kremlin had underestimated the task before it, which was embarrassing and infuriating. In response, the Kremlin simply called up literally hundreds of thousands of additional men.
General Petraeus says the war is going to come down to which country is better at fielding more men. I wonder, will that be the little country, or the big country?
Of course, the little country was getting outside help: NATO tanks, training and material (although, we’ve repeatedly been told, no soldiers). But this was all arriving slowly. It would be almost summer before the “spring” counteroffensive could begin. Meanwhile, a leaked internal Pentagon overview of the situation, dated February 23, already forecast — in boldface type — a “grinding campaign of attrition … likely heading toward a stalemate.”
While we built up toward that — with a plan to provide just enough additional weaponry to make it extra murdery-grindy without risking any actual military success — the winter and spring of 2023 grew ever more bizarre.
Poland and Slovakia abruptly each announced they would send their old MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. Poland offered four jets. Slovakia offered 13 — of which, it was later quietly clarified, nine had to be delivered by ground because they didn’t work (it was noted they could be cannibalized for parts).
So, eight flyable-if-ancient fighter jets to help Ukraine — against Russia’s 900-plus fighter jets. This was, again, more like performance art than help. American F-16s? Nope, still off the table — “too escalatory” — we can’t give anything that might actually help the Ukrainians win. (But we also won’t allow peace talks. America will proudly fight this war to the last Ukrainian! Heroiam slava!)
Both Poland and Slovakia announced an intention to replace those old Soviet clunkers with American fighters. In fact, it feels highly choreographed how every announcement of sending old junk to Ukraine is paired with a plan to replace it with a shiny new Western product. It seems a clever way to short-cut the annual political budget debates in these young democracies. I imagine Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk telling his people, “Yes, yes, I know you’re worried about pensions, and inflation, but we already gave away our planes, so ...”
‘Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!’
That same month of the eight rickety Eastern European MiG donations, a Russian fighter pilot rudely attacked a U.S. Reaper drone flying over the Black Sea. Our drone was minding its own business, just gathering intel for the war, when the Russian fighter buzzed it and dumped fuel onto it. Basically, they peed on our drone! Repeatedly! The Russian pilot then rammed it, so that it crashed into the sea. This was obviously unsafe and reckless — in fact, the White House fumed, it was “unsafe, unprofessional and reckless”.
Unprofessional? What exactly do some Americans safely home in America think is happening in Ukraine right now? Shouldn’t a hostile craft flying into a war zone expect to be targeted by hostile military professionals?
Or was the complaint about the contemptuous way this was done, i.e., by peeing jet fuel onto our stuff? This entire interaction — the crudely reckless and mocking Russians, the ridiculously offended and outraged Pentagon — was starting to feel like the scene in Monty Python’s “The Holy Grail” when King Arthur and his knights are taunted by the French:
For my part, I was just grateful it was an unmanned drone being downed by a Russian fighter — and not a surveillance plane filled with 30 people, as nearly happened days after Nord Stream in September 2022 (see Part I).
But where I saw cause for relief and gratitude, David Ignatius of The Washington Post felt indignation:
“[T]he Biden administration has been more risk averse than some allies — and more than seems necessary,” Ignatius wrote in April 2023. “Britain and France have sent crewed electronic warfare planes over the Black Sea while the United States has sent only drones. Why? The answer is that we don’t want a direct confrontation with Russia, like … in September [2022], when the Russians nearly shot down a British RC-135 …
“[A]re Biden and [Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin being too cautious? International law allows surveillance planes to fly 12 miles off the coast. Yet [the Pentagon] draws a wider 50-mile limit around Crimea, describing it as a ‘SECDEF Directed Standoff.’ Pentagon officials evidently decided that the intelligence gained from flying closer wasn’t worth the risk. But they should explain why to the public.”
Now that’s a guy who understands Russian roulette! When an unmanned aircraft more than 50 miles off the Crimean coast provokes a reckless Russian attack, he demands an explanation for why we don’t have manned aircraft flying 12 miles off that coast.
Next time: In Part III of “The Thrill of Russian Roulette,” everyone solemnly agrees we must arrest Vladimir Putin for kidnapping all the children — even as we doggedly persist at the world’s craziest game of chance, and keep winning, and winning, and winning …
Spitting truths infused with world weary humor mixed with wisdom of the ancients
Re: the Congressional choir (and fallen empires or yore) —
https://youtu.be/v8xfQwSloWs
Good job, Matt.