Russia invades Ukraine 3/30/22

 

Two Russian fighter jets that violated Swedish airspace earlier this month 'were equipped with NUKES with the aim of scaring Stockholm' after Putin had threatened military action if Sweden or Finland joined NATO

Four planes had taken off from Kaliningrad in Russia before flying over Sweden

The jets violated the country's airspace over the island of Gotland on March 2

Two of the aircraft - Sukhoi 24 attack planes - are now said to have carried nukes The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.

What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?

He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.

POLITICS

U.S. sends 100 killer drones called Switchblades to Ukraine

WASHINGTON – The U.S. included 100 killer drones in a colossal weapons package for Ukraine that President Joe Biden approved earlier this month, U.S. officials confirmed Wednesday.

Celeste Wallander, assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs, told lawmakers that Kyiv asked for the weapons, which are dubbed “kamikaze drones,” as it fights off a Russian invasion.

“We have committed 100 Switchblade tactical unmanned aerial systems to be delivered in the most recent package of presidential drawdown,” Wallander said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.