Mick Hartley

A brutal assessment from Terry Glavin:

Coffins will have to do, with dead Russian soldiers in them.

That was the remedy prescribed by Eliot Cohen, the Johns Hopkins University professor and former counsellor for the U.S. State Department, last Feb. 23. It should tell you something about Cohen’s prescience that he made that observation in the hours before Vladimir Putin’s full-force invasion began. “Only one thing, in fact, can cause Russia to rethink and even abandon its program of conquest: coffins.”

It’s nearly impossible to arrive at an accurate death count, but the estimates from a variety of sources suggest perhaps 20,000 dead Russian soldiers so far, and an almost equal number of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers. It’s a horrible thing to say out loud, but it has to be said. There haven’t been enough Russian coffins.

It has taken an unforgivable amount of time for the leaders of the NATO countries to wake up to the fact that Putin is at war with all of us, aided and abetted by China’s Xi Jinping, and some NATO leaders are only now shaking themselves from their torpor, and from the hubris of their diplomats and foreign-policy “experts.”

The good news is that finally, maybe, the European Union and the G7 countries appear to be listening to what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been saying all along: Close the skies. And no, that does not mean a no-fly zone, enforced by NATO. It means more Javelin missiles, more Stingers, and more advanced air defence systems to augment Ukraine’s own S-300 batteries. […]

Anders Ostlund of the Centre for European Policy Analysis is one of smarter observers of the existential struggle Ukrainians are putting up in defence of the democratic world, and he’s as clear-eyed as anyone about what it will take to bring Russia to heel.

Coffins, yes. But that won’t be the end of it. “There will be no end to the barbaric madness as long as Russia is around. The Russian state apparatus needs to be destroyed,” Ostlund says, “the Russian Federation dissolved, (and) Russia demilitarized for this to stop.”

The sooner the NATO countries, the European Union and the democratic bloc at the United Nations stop pretending this isn’t so, the better.

Hmm. The hope has been, I suppose, that at some point the Russians will realise what a horrendous blunder Putin made in invading Ukraine, and get rid of the bastard. Unfortunately it seems more than likely that if this should happen the coup will come from the right – from hard-line Russian nationalists who think Putin hasn't been hard enough – rather than from some kind of liberal faction. In truth, at the moment there's no such thing as a liberal faction.