Glory Days
Russia's quest for a return to their superpower status is failing.
It’s sad, really.
Putin and the old conservative cadre in Russia, the ones who regret the fall of the Soviet Union and seek to restore it to its former might, continue to face frustration after frustration. Like an old high school football star putting the uniform back on and running onto the field to get beat up by the youngsters, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is showing its age.
Since getting their fannies handed to them at the start of their invasion of Ukraine, they have gained almost no ground in two years. Ukrainian artillery repeatedly strikes deep into Russia to destroy ammunition, fuel, and troops. Russia’s vaunted Black Sea Fleet, hounded by drones, its flagship sunk by a single hit from a piddling, subsonic, Cold War remnant missile, has been chased to the extreme eastern end of the Black Sea by a country with far more limited resources and no navy. Often forced to use World War I-style human wave attacks, Russia’s resource, metal, and flesh losses continue to mount to staggering proportions. Ukraine, the country that is supposedly losing the war, was able to exploit holes in Russia’s border security and invade the homeland in Kursk Oblast, forcing Russia to ask a tiny foreign ally, North Korea, to help expel them.
The Russian war machine entered Ukraine on a wing and a prayer, all balls and bluster, but logistics and maintenence issues crippled it on the way to Kiev and elsewhere and resulted in catestrophic losses. Its air force hasn’t been able to maintain air superiority in the entire war. Only land mines prevented Ukraine from retaking Donbas in the years following the initial invasion.
Now, by smuggling in cheap drones that you or I could purchase on Walmart’s website, Ukraine has attacked airfields hundreds and thousands of miles inside Russia and damaged or destroyed a confirmed 14 irreplaceable, strategic military aircraft, rewriting the rules of asymmetric warfare, damaging its global nuclear readiness, and leaving Russia with a logistics nightmare to prevent such an attack from happening again. How will they continue to sell the lie to their people that the war is all but won?
How embarrassing for them. This is not how a superpower wages war against a smaller nation. Russia has clearly lost the ability to function as a superpower.
Globally, the Kremlin’s quest to slow the growth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) only resulted in its further expansion and Europe arming for war as the world increasingly sees Russia as an aggressor to be defended against.
Before the war, Russia rated dead last economically (in GDP, diversity, and other factors) compared to the U.S., Germany, China, and Japan. Now, after years of military conflict and economic sanctions, it isn’t even fair to compare it with those four nations, as Russia currently ranks 11th in the world economically.
No wonder their ceasefire conditions call for more Ukrainian land, because the rate they are going, they will never win that ground through conquest without the blood of hundreds of thousands more Russian soldiers and twice the resources Russia is capable of producing.
Go home, Russia, before Ukraine throws you out and takes a piece of you in the process.