A Giant Bear in a Tar Pit

 It is becoming increasingly obvious that when it comes to logistics and in the field tactics the Russian army resembles a giant bear wallowing in a tar pit. Let's face it, when someone at the top can't figure out how much gas it takes to get a huge armored convoy from the border to Kyiv, you know you have some command problems. 

Unfortunately for the Ukrainians what the Russians lack in military expertise they more than make up for in sheer brutality and two bit excuses. They shell a maternity hospital, then claim it was actually a militia headquarters. They bomb a theater which was so clearly identified it contained children seeking shelter you could see the signs via satellite, then say it was the Ukrainians who blew it up in order to gin up world support. 

This is nothing new for them. I once knew a woman who was in the first unit of American nurses to enter Berlin at the end of WWII. Their base was a former SS maternity hospital. Their first job was to clear it of dozens dead babies who had been  shot and stabbed. The Russians, who initially took the hospital, said all the horrible carnage was perpetrated by the Germans themselves. No one believed them.

Indeed, when it comes to waging war the Russians have never worried with subtleties such as winning the, "hearts and minds," of the civilian population. You don't have to if you just blow the shit out of all of them.. This, tactic, is especially helpful when your troops and armor are bogged down against an opposing army.

It has been reported the Russian army entered Ukraine on February 24th with 20 generals in the field. So far four of them have been killed. The reason 1/5 of the senior command has perished is thought to be the Generals had to move too close to the front to rally their soldiers and give them personal direction. 

In other words a whole lot of Russian troops don't want to be there in the first place and the ones who do can't figure out which fork in the road to take, or know how to deal with stiff resistance from an army that was supposed to have immediately caved in..

The Ukrainian miasma appears to have driven Vladimir Putin even battier than he was to begin with. He was on Russian TV the other night promising an, "internal purification," of, "bastards and traitors," at home. The ghost of Joe Stalin was proud and the word Gulag once again entered the lexicon of the world.

In the end the Russians will probably win this war through sheer numbers and Putin's willingness to commit any atrocity imaginable. That and as long as he is in power his ego won't let him pull out.

However, we now know why Mr. Putin was and is so quick to threaten nuclear war. His army might be huge, but it isn't very good.

Or as one navy vet put it. There isn't an American flight crew out there who wouldn't start salivating as soon as they saw that Russian convoy crawling through the Ukrainian countryside. 

3-17-22