Victory Day: Russian ed.

Will Putin's next move mark a dark and more dangerous turn in Ukraine?

How far are we willing to go? In this conflict between Russia and Ukraine. This war. That’s what the experts are calling it. Guys like Ian Bremmer. Not just a war between Russia and the Ukraine. Not just a proxy war between Russia and NATO. But a “direct war” between Russia and the United States. And now, in his latest piece in The New York Times (which says many of the same things The Foreign Agenda has been saying for weeks—just sayin’…), Thomas Friedman warns, in the wake of several Beltway leaks describing US intelligence efforts that have enabled Ukrainian forces to kill dozens of Russian generals and sink the Moskva, that “boasting about killing…generals and sinking…ships, or falling in love with Ukraine in ways that will get us enmeshed there forever, is the height of folly.”

That’s an understatement. This whole mess—and the years of lead-up to it—have been one giant slow-motion train-wreck of a foreign policy disaster, the darkest of dark follies; and the notion that the United States, and certainly the poorly led and managed European partners in NATO, will suddenly transform into a well-oiled, precision-tuned machine of international diplomacy able to walk the fine line between war and peace simply because they have discovered a newfound unity in the wake of Putin’s despicable invasion, would be magical thinking of the highest order. The track record says otherwise—certainly in the context of US-Russian relations, and also US war-making over the last two decades in general (has the debacle of our withdrawal from Afghanistan already vanished into the the convenient ether of our collective amnesia?).

President Putin today attended Russia’s annual “Victory Day” celebration, marking the 77th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany with a massive military parade through Red Square showcasing the might of the Russian armed forces—though much fewer of those armed forces than in years prior, considering that a whole bunch of ‘em are busy getting their asses kicked in the meat-grinder of Ukraine. Troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers—and, of course, the mobile launchers that carry enough thermonuclear warheads in their intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy the world several times over. On second thought, perhaps the remaining order of battle—or what remains of it—doesn’t matter, after all.

Alex Holstein is the co-author of Warfighter: The Story of an American Fighting Man, due out May 25, 2022, from Lyons Press, and available for pre-order NOW at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  He holds an MSc in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies from the London School of Economics, where he wrote his thesis on the Soviet KGB.