The Current Ukraine Invasion Explained

      My 30-year-old daughter is a very bright lady. She has a BA degree. She speaks several languages fluently. She is well informed. Last night she asked me the following question:

     "I don't understand anything about Ukraine and what is going on now. Please explain it to me."

Is Ukraine A Country Or Just Another Province of Russia?   I shall give a simple answer here. In my last corporate job, I got to go to a trade show in Hannover, Germany each year. I would always meet some great clients from Ukraine. I always went home with two or three bottles of superb Ukrainian brandy. One cold morning, one of the Ukrainians made a most-profound comment:

     "700 years ago, Kyiv was a sophisticated and advanced European city. At the same time, Moscow was just a group of log cabins on the Moscow River."

     I was always told by these people that Ukraine was a separate country from Russia, They considered themselves culturally superior to Russians. They felt that history "had dealt them a bad set of cards." Like Poland, they found themselves to be a buffer state between great powers. For a lot of their history, they were occupied and dominated by Russia.

Is Vladimir Putin a psycho like Hitler, Stalin, etc? No! I would compare him (somewhat) to the Russian czar Catherine the Great. He is a man of remarkable intelligence. He has a Russian mindset going back hundreds of years. It is paranoid fear of invasion and the need to have buffer states to protect Russia. He already knows that this invasion is going to be a lose-lose situation for Russia. His economy is going to "take a big hit." There will be a powerful Ukraine insurgency movement. Many Russian military personnel are going to die. A retired US general was interviewed on CNN yesterday. He had extensive experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He gave a great assessment of what comes next. He said that in order to continue to occupy Ukraine, Putin would need to keep an army in the country of 800,000. He said Putin did not have the troops to do this. He warned about the huge costs of such occupations. For example, the US spent $2 trillion to $3 trillion dollars in their unsuccessful occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why Aren't US Military Personnel In Ukraine Now Defending The Country Against Russians? People like my beloved daughter are the main reason. People in the US do not understand Ukraine or its complex relationship with Russia. People in the US are war-weary after 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Many of my politically conservative US friends are violently opposed to military intervention in Ukraine. In fact, a lot of them are on the side of Putin. President Biden knows that public opinion in the US is against any US military involvement. Friends of mine in Russia are now addicted to Fox News. Their heroes are people like Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, etc. What we might see is Turkey militarily intervening in Ukraine after secret payments of tens of billions of dollars from the US.

Will Putin Follow Through With His Threat To Use Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine If Any Foreign Power Intervenes? Probably no, and history is on the side of those who believe this. Russia has had nuclear weapons since 1949-almost 73 years. In my opinion, they have a much better record with nuclear weapons than the US. Russia has never used nuclear weapons in military operations. Contrast this to the hundreds of thousands of people killed and maimed in Japan when the US employed nuclear weapons. Russia has no published record of nuclear weapons lost from delivery aircraft. The US has a long record of mishaps with aircraft carrying nuclear weapons. To this day, there are 1-2 US hydrogen bombs not accounted for. In 1962, a submerged Russian submarine found itself surrounded by US Navy ships near Cuba. A decision was made to launch a nuclear torpedo. Three keys had to be inserted to launch the nuclear weapon. Two Russian Navy officers inserted their key. The political commissar on the submarine declined to insert his key to fire the weapon. In 1983 tensions were quite high between the US and Soviet Union. A Soviet ballistic missile radar beam bounced off the moon. It gave an erroneous report of 5 US ICBMs on their final attack trajectory to the Soviet Union. A Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Rocket Forces was skeptical of what his radar was showing him. He declined to inform Soviet leadership of an impending nuclear strike. Even if Putin gave the launch order for tactical nuclear weapons, I doubt that his subordinates would carry out such an order.