You Didn't Sink My Battleship!

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

On Thursday, April 14, Ukrainian ground forces hit the Moskva with two Neptune missiles, eventually sinking the vessel. This was more than a mere symbolic victory for Ukraine, although the symbolism and timing of it cannot be ignored. For starters, the Moskva was a guided missile cruiser. She was an old girl but newly refurbished and was the flagship for Russia's Black Sea fleet for good reason. She first got on the radar of most western news consumers as the ship that ordered 13 Ukrainian soldiers to abandon their post on Snake Island, with the Ukrainians famously replying in true Augie McAuliffe fashion, "Fuck you, Russian ship."

     Even more humiliating, the Moskva was obviously named after Russia's capital city.

     As for the timing of it, well... The Moskva was reputedly carrying with it a sliver of the True Cross, on which Jesus was crucified on Good Friday. The importance and more-than-symbolic value of it to those of the Russian Orthodox faith cannot be overstated. And the fact that the cruiser sank on the eve of Good Friday was a final Fuck You to the man who'd single-handedly created 51 days ago the worst humanitarian crisis Eastern Europe has seen since WWII.

   The Moskva was damaged, according to Russia's legendary disinformation machine, not by Ukrainian ground forces but a fire igniting munitions aboard the ship, which is hardly better than the actual truth. And it wasn't their fault that the Moskva sank. It was the "stormy seas" on a day in which the wind on the Black Sea was a mild 14 kph. Essentially, without its flagship, this will make it much more difficult for Russia to control the Black Sea and the Crimean peninsula that Putin had stolen from Ukraine in 2014.

    After nearly two full months, Putin and his once-vaunted military can't point to a single victory in Ukraine by either land, air or sea. The closest he can come to declaring any victory is in the cowardly long-range shelling of a missile factory in Kyiv, cities such as Mariupol and genocidal war crimes in Bucha and Irpin. To date, the bodies of 900 dead civilians have been exhumed from shallow mass graves.

    After the Moskva had sunk, Putin did what despots do in this situation and issued vague and toothless threats to the US Department of State to stop arming Ukraine with the missiles it swore didn't sink its flagship or else. This prompted CIA Director William Burns to issue a public alarm not to laugh off Putin's threat to use tactical or low-yield nuclear warheads. They're the only thing that keeps Putin from being laughed off the geopolitical stage and dismissed as just another third world tinpot dictator. As Lucian Truscott IV said today in his Salon byline,

     "Burns is a former ambassador to Russia who dealt directly with Putin while serving in Moscow and is the Biden administration official most familiar with his thinking."

     This sabre-rattling as echoed by Dmitry Medvedev, who comically said, "If Sweden and Finland join NATO, the length of the alliance's land borders with the Russian Federation will more than double. Naturally, these borders will have to be strengthened. Russia will seriously strengthen the grouping of land forces and air defense, deploy significant naval forces in the waters of the Gulf of Finland. In this case, it will no longer be possible to talk about any nuclear-free status of the Baltic."

     Which was a pretty ambitious threat to make considering Putin had already massed most of his army along Ukraine's northern, southern and eastern borders and that several tens of thousands of those troops have already been killed.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Of course, it's rhetoric and aggressive behavior like that that's the exact reason Finland and Sweden are doing an about-face and abandoning their famous neutrality and petitioning for NATO membership in a matter of weeks instead of months. The zeitgeist says that if Putin prevails in Ukraine, which is problematic, at best, then he will move on to the Baltic states and even Scandinavia. But all of Medvedev's and Putin's puling from his dachas has gotten them is ridicule from even tiny Lithuania. His threat to position nuclear weapons in the Baltic states is, frankly, ridiculous, as Lithuania said, because Russia already has nuclear weapons in the Baltic. Specifically, they're in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania.

    Specifically, Russia already has 6,250 nuclear warheads in the city, or about 100 kilometers from Lithuania's border. If Putin was going to use nukes in the Baltic, he would've done so already in the event that Lithuania's 20,565 troops spooked him enough.

     Again, Putin had failed on all three war fronts: Air, land and sea. His 40 mile-long convoy stretching from Belarus to the northern outskirts of Kyiv stalled primarily not from Ukrainian resistance but from the simple fact they ran out of fuel, making the tanks in the front sitting ducks for Javelins. When the generals come to the front to see what the problem is, the Ukrainian snipers pick them off.

    The air superiority that the pundits and mainstream media talking heads had already ceded to the Russians at the outset of the February 24th invasion? Never happened. Between the slow but extremely effective Turkish Bayraktar drones and the Ukrainians' skilled use of antiaircraft ordnance such as the Stinger missile have ensured that that wouldn't happen. And how are we and other nations getting them to Ukraine? Here's a clue- An average of 18 transport planes a day are landing in Ukraine at an undisclosed airstrip. So much for Russian air superiority.

     We've already addressed some of Russia's land failures starting with the 40 mile-long convoy still lying like a dead, bloated mechanized snake in northern Ukraine. Ukrainian defense officials have put the Russian death count at as high as 20,000 and overall casualties twice that, although it's difficult to confirm. Thanks to Western media, the sight of Russian rotting corpses in the streets of Ukraine are almost as common as Ukrainian bodies in Bucha and Irpil.

     The sea? One word: Moskva, which is currently sitting in Davy Jones' Locker.

    The bottom line is that Putin has not taken one major city. His main accomplishment is bombing hospitals, schools and apartment buildings filled with defenseless civilians then lie about it. In response, he's reportedly fired about 150 officials from the FSB, the successor to the KGB (and you thought Trump didn't trust his intelligence community). Because, in right wing minds, failure cannot be admitted to and, when that's unavoidable, blame others for your rash decisions.

    Meanwhile, Ukraine keeps mocking the Russians at every opportunity.