RE: This is wickedness....Made in America29 Nov 2023 22:49
Farmers have joined in the blockade of the Polish border as they have also suffered from a loss of business thanks to copious and cheap Ukrainian imports.
This is not an official protest, but a grass roots thing, organised by small businesses that are paying a price for the EU’s support of Ukraine. You can call it Ukraine fatigue, but as everyone is admitting, that is happening at sovereign level too. As I said yesterday, there is a fundamental conflict here between the geopolitical goals of countering Russia’s aggression and the need to keep your people employed.
Things are going badly for Ukraine. Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg gave a speech yesterday saying that progress in the military campaign should “not be measured in square kilometres, but in the costs inflicted”. That looks a bit like grasping at straws, as a military campaign should absolutely be measured in kilometres. Especially, when your war goal is to completely expel Russian soldiers from your territory.
There have been several reports in the last days of “massive casualties” but this looks like spin to me. Russia is on the defensive where the casualty rates are much lower than when you are on the offensive, and Ukraine is clearly suffering shortages of both ammo and men. The manpower shortage is a serious problem. Kyiv has issued a plan for mobilisation and in the few comments coming out of Ukraine on this issue paint a bleak picture. Ukraine doesn’t report its death toll, but the reporting suggests that it's extremely high. The Russian death toll must be high too, but then that is the way Russia always fights: it has so many people it just keeps throwing men into the fight until it wins. As the Russians used to say: “Life is hard, but at least it is short.”
On top of that the weather has not only turned cold, but an extreme weather storm is raging over the whole region. Does this mean that the war could be stopped? I doubt it as the Ukrainians in general have nailed their flag to their mast, but with the Russian winter campaign of bombing the power stations just starting, Ukrainians are clearly going to have miserable time of it.
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