The headlines are still all-Ukraine all-the-time but there isn't really anything new, you know what I mean? The Times:
Russia Pounds Civilian Targets as War Enters 4th Week
It's a little difficult to sustain breathless outrage over four weeks. The lede could easily have contained "Continues to". They've been doing that for a week or two. What's "new"? Well, as the troika of Quasi reporters wrote yesterday,
But little appeared to have changed on the battlefield...The war...about to enter its fourth week, has become a grinding daily slog with little evidence of significant gains for either side......neither side can be said to have made much progress militarily.
Grinding Daily Slog--that's a grabbing headline, huh? We're in stalemate, even if only temporarily. The initial frisson is gone, reporters nerves are fraying, ennui is settling in, normal people are slowly turning their attention elsewhere. Some close observers are developing a little critical, I'll say cynical, distance. I think Volo's Grand Tour of the Parliaments is wearing thin. Accusations of "appeasement" to the EU; quoting Churchill and Shakespeare in London, Martin Luther King, Jr. in D.C. We ought to by now be able to get through his next without aid of tissue. It's become repetitive, predictable. You saw this in reporting by the Times and CNN yesterday: Zelensky is an actor, he is manipulative, he is all "gimme, gimme, gimme". His insistent, persistent pleading for his audiences to "do more", personally calling out President Biden, who, six weeks ago, he and his ministers were rebuking for stirring the Bear, is grating. Nancy Pelosi strained to compliment him on being "grateful' to Biden. He's not grateful. He's demanding. And in his constant demands, his shaming, he is ignoring the risks, yes, the existential risks, to the U.S. and NATO. It bears constant repetition: Ukraine is not a NATO member, it is not even an EU member. There is no doubt in the minds of Official Washington or Official Brussels that Vladimir Putin's true aim is at NATO and the United States, that Ukraine was just the supposed low-hanging fruit. It is those for whom Putin has a formidable nuclear arsenal, more potent than America's. Official Ukraine, an outsider in Europe, in NATO, to Russia, and in her own identity, is asking Europe, NATO, and America to do its fighting for her, to risk their existence for Ukraine's.
The entire West has done the once unimaginable, instantly united, and then immediately laser-focused the most catastrophic non-military weapons ever used in world history on one country, Russia, knocking the target reeling back if not to the stone age, at least to the brick cell phone and fax machine era of the last millennium, causing a flight of Russian citizens, not as extensive as those from Ukraine, admittedly, but nonetheless already a brain drain unprecedented in the post-Soviet era, leaving Russia as isolated as North Korea. And the West has done all of this for Ukraine at pain to itself. Supply chains will be disrupted further; the energy shortfall in Europe and America cannot be made up in the near-term. It will take years to build the nuclear reactors that would ween the West from the "Gas Station with Nukes." The economies of Europe and America will crater; inflation will eat more voraciously at the paychecks and savings of working people in the West. We have done an unprecedented amount at no small pain to ourselves. We should not be guilted into stepping over the nuclear tripwire with Russia.
