An Unspecial Military Operation

    Meet Olena Kurilo. She's one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.

   Olena is, I'll assume from her wry but gentle smile, a sweet, caring and loving woman. She's a 52 year-old schoolteacher in Chuguiv, Ukraine and this is how she looked not long after a large shard of a mirror fell and shattered on her face when Russia had begun its illegal invasion of Ukraine. All she wanted to do was educate kids before her world was, literally, turned inside out by a few well-placed mortars aimed at her apartment building.

     Vlad Putin vowed he wouldn't do such a thing. The pictures, videos and eyewitness accounts tell the exact opposite story. In one of the worst rebranding efforts since Freedom Fries, Putin had called this invasion (and thus far) failed occupation a "special military operation" aimed at "deNazification", despite Ukraine's president being Jewish and whose family had suffered at the hands of actual Nazis during the Holocaust.

    Wartime news is always a chaotic affair and the numbers tend to be either squishy, subject to constant revision or are outright wrong and fabricated. So, let's keep it abstract but factual:

     At least 3000 Ukrainians have died but obviously that number rises with each tragic hour. But on the Russian side of the front lines, the news is much more alarming. Several thousands of Russian soldiers have also been killed. To keep the press from seeing the bodies, they're immediately loaded into mobile crematoriums that "evaporate the bodies" so the families can't even say goodbye to them.

     Hundreds of tanks, planes, armored vehicles and trucks have been destroyed, stolen, abandoned or sabotaged by Russians unwilling to fight. Many more have been immobilized due to lack of diesel. Food is in short supply as is morale. Two, perhaps four Russian generals have died on the front lines, something unheard of these days. Will their bodies be "evaporated", too?

     And the Russian army, if they penetrate more deeply into Kiev, which is looking more and more problematic by the day, are about to run into a buzz saw called the Ukrainian people. Nationally, they're looking at an insurgency totaling over 40,000,000.

     Because the last thing an invading army wants to do is walk into a city before a surrender and the Ukrainians aren't very interested in surrendering. Now you're talking urban combat, a role for which armies, typically, aren't suited nor trained. You enter an occupied city before it's been pacified, well, now you're talking street to street, house to house and even, potentially, room to room combat.

     A French military expert recently said that in order to even have a chance of prevailing in urban combat, the occupying force needs numerical superiority of a factor of 10 to 1. In January last year, the population of the capital city of Kiev was estimated to be almost 3,000,000. That means Russia would need an invading force of 30,000,000 men, which obviously isn't going to happen.

     Then there's the easy access to the high ground the Ukrainians can use that's in abundance in modern urban centers such as Kiev. Tanks have historically been vulnerable to attacks from above and they don't maneuver very well in narrow city streets. Basically, an urban invasion, with 3,000,000 motivated and pissed off residents ready and waiting to kill you, is a nightmare that's waiting for you to close your eyes.

    We're also hearing stories, not from Ukrainian officials, but angry and worried Russian mothers telling stories about how their sons were beaten and/or threatened with legal action if they didn't submit to conscription. Many of the Russian soldiers being killed are kids just out of their teens or maybe even in their teens, with scant, if any, actual combat training.

    Roving journalists going through the smoking, twisted wreckage of what used to be Russian convoys tell other tragic tales. The trucks were civilian, with no armor plating. The tanks are old models that look like practice tanks. The Ukrainian Javelins, with a range of 8200 feet or about a mile and a half, that they're getting in great abundance from the US, Finland and other countries, would make mincemeat out of them even if they were top of the line. Javelins shred tanks. That's why they were invented.

    Add to that thousands of Stinger missiles, surface-to-air ordinance built to take out aircraft, and you have a better appreciation of how effectively the Ukrainian military, with the help of civilian volunteers, have consistently shot down Russian aircraft, including a transport helicopter, carrying Russian troops, that was downed by a Stinger over an empty field.

 

     Putin has simply underestimated everyone and overestimated his own ill-equipped military that's short on morale, money, food, fuel and top shelf equipment. He started out with 190,000 troops surrounding Ukraine's southern, northern and eastern borders. Most of those troops have been deployed into Ukraine, with little tangible results. Desperate for results, Putin and/or his generals that have yet to be picked off by snipers have ordered shelling of major cities, which is the last thing you want to do if you want a working infrastructure after your invasion, considering that's successful. Not only that, it's a war crime.

     What Putin has done, instead, is to unite the planet against him. Longtime NATO holdouts Finland and Sweden, are now making loud noises they want in, after all, just in case Putin prevails in Ukraine and starts coming after them. NATO is more united than it has ever been since they were formed on the ashes of the Second World War to prevent something like Hitler's invasion of Europe from happening all over again. In short, Putin was the reason why NATO was invented, which helps explain why he and Trump had spent their corrupt political careers trying to undermine it at every turn.

     Plus, as Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum recently said on CNN, 

   "I think Putin was listening to Trump's denunciations of NATO and he imagined NATO was permanently divided and wouldn't be able to unite again. I think he didn't count on what the sight of tanks rolling across a European country would do to people in Germany, people in Italy, people in France, people in Europe, and of course people in the United States."

    So, Putin was hobbled by two things regarding WWII: That, according to Alexander Nazaryan, he's looking at the invasion as Hitler had Stalingrad (In which Putin lost an older brother, Viktor) and the USSR in general while not factoring in the inherited memories of the Germans, Italians, French and other European nationalities to see how horrible are the optics of a Russian invading force in urban centers, old tanks or no.

    Lastly, he'd underestimated the resolve of the Ukrainian people.

    A short time later, after she'd cleaned up, Olena gave an interview to Euronews the day the invasion had officially started. Her statements proved that her iconic status as the face of Ukraine after her photo went viral was well-earned. In it, she said, 

    "I am just very lucky, I must have a very strong guardian angel for me to have stayed alive. I will stand up and go, I will do everything for Ukraine, as much as I can, with as much energy as I have. I will always only be on my motherland's side. Never, under any conditions will I submit to Putin. It is better to die."

     Which, since February 24th, is an attitude more or less stated 44,000,000 times.

     Which is why Olena, despite the cuts, blood and sloppy field dressing around her head, is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.