Timothy Birdnow

Major power outage in Kiev as the war has worn out the power grid in the Ukrainian capital.

Russia has been fighting a war of attrition and this is what that looks like. You degrade the enemy's infrastructure and systematically grind them down until they lose the will to keep fighting. Power outages in the bitter cold goes a long way towards that goal.

The U.S. military planned for wars of attrition throughout the Cold War. It was only the rise of China that made us switch tactics; there were too many people to win a war of attrition that would include China. So went went with a more German approach, a tactical war strategy.

Russia knows they have the resources and manpower to win a war of attrition so that has been their tactic all along. Such wars tend to be slow (which is also why the U.S. stopped them - political pressure made them impractical) and claims Russia is losing by so many in the media and government was always a crock; Russia was playing the long game all alone. See, they didn't just want to take territory, they wanted to make sure there was never any more resistance. The taking of Crimea taught them that it was foolish to just seize the territory, they had to make the Ukrainians know they were defeated. Until then there would continue to be resistance. So Putin and his generals took the longer road. In the end Ukraine will be so softened up they may well allow themselves to be annexed. People who suffer and lose a long war often have no spirit left. That is what Putin is trying to accomplish.

These power outages will go a long way to breaking the Ukrainian spirit.

I personally regret it but see no way for the Ukrainians to win. Their best bet was to accept a bad deal from their perspective. Zelensky has been blowing smoke up their collective backsides because he hoped NATO would get directly involved. He was looking at the way Churchill maneuvered Roosevelt into WWII, or the way Lloyd George did Wilson in WWI.

This didn't work out for a variety of reasons. The American People just didn't care about some war in Eastern Europe where we had no real national interest (unlike both world wars which directly impacted us). Biden was biding his time, slowly moving us deeper and deeper into the conflict, hoping to get the American People to get on board via the boiling frog effect. Trump didn't want any part of it though and his election saw the U.S. cut back on our role there. Of course the U.S. had all manner of national issues that the public was more concerned with and that was a part of why Trump was elected, to end the "forever wars". Ukraine's timing was bad from their perspective. If we hadn't had the fiasco of the "New World Order" wars in the Islamic world Americans may have been bored enough to support such a war with Russia. Of course many Americans have forgotten that little detail, those shiny little spheres of Uranium or plutonium. But nobody wanted to risk it when there were other fish to fry.

So Zelensky has been conspiring with the Euroweenies to find a way to drag NATO into the fray, but without the U.S. which is the only nation that counts in NATO, it wasn't going to happen. Germany or France weren't going to risk lives and treasure on their own. They wanted Big Daddy involved or they were out.

Putin understood all this which is why he's been fighting the way he has. And it will work one way or another.

Meanwhile both the Russian and Ukrainian peoples are being hardened by this, and that is a serious problem down the line. The war in Kosovo, for instance, hardened the Bosnian Albanians to the point where they actually took over the Sicilian Mafia and are now the most dangerous organized crime outfit in the world. The Russians were already almost as tough and now will be tougher, and the Ukrainians will probably join their ranks. This is the same reason why the post-antebellum West was full of outlaws and super tough lawmen; the Civil War had hardened so many people who came out with skills that were only useful in war or in crime. So many turned to crime as a result. In fact, the first American organized crime syndicate was not the Italian Mafia or the Irish mobs but was a group called the Cowboys, who were all over the West and who robbed and rustled and stole as they pleased. It was this bunch that shot it out with the Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral, for instance. All of these people were hardened by the war,

We'll see that in the future in eastern Europe.

At any rate I doubt this war can continue another year, one way or another. Zelensky should have cut a deal while he still was in a position to do so. Not sure if Russia will accept much from him now. He may well have lost his whole country. It's a crying shame.

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