Happy to die for Dear Leader

Of the estimated 12,000 North Korean soldiers sent to Russia as cannon fodder in Putin's war, as many as 4,000 have already died or been wounded in combat with Ukrainian troops. Today the Wall Street Journal tells the story of one such youngster, killed with two comrades and leaving a diary behind. “Even at the cost of my life," he wrote, "I will carry out the Supreme Commander’s orders without hesitation. I will show the world the bravery and sacrifice of Kim Jong Un’s special forces.” It's a remarkable piece of journalism, including video from a drone chasing a North Korean soldier.

Drones launching drones

Ukrainians are revolutionizing warfare as they try to hold off their much larger and more ruthless neighbor. Oddly enough, the Ukrainian Navy has been especially inventive, building what seems to be the world's best unmanned surface fleet. Not much is known about these boats, which are entirely homemade. Recently the unmanned boats have been launching unmanned aircraft that have successfully "damaged or destroyed" two Russian mobile air-defense systems like the one that shot down an Embraer passenger jet on Christmas Day. See the video on Facebook as the aerial drone targets and slams into the huge truck-mounted system. And read the story on the Kyiv Independent -- and while you're there, do sign up for its daily email update! It's the first thing I've read each morning for nearly three years now.

Rest in peace, Ágnes Keleti!

Ágnes Klein was born in Budapest, and she died there on Thursday, five days short of her 104th birthday. To be born in 1921 meant living through the Second World War, to be born a Hungarian meant a life scarred first by Hitler's Germany and then by Stalin's Russia, and to be born a Jew meant ... the Holocaust. Hungary, comparatively speaking, was fairly protective of its Jews until near the end. Though a promising gymnast, Ágnes was forced off the country's Olympic team in 1941. She survived the next four years by acquiring the identity papers of a Christian and working as a maid in the countryside. Her mother and sister also lived through the war, but her father and other relatives were gassed at Auschwitz.

Postwar, she changed her family name to Keleti to sound more Hungarian and, though rather old for a gymnast, won gold medals at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 and again four years later at Melbourne, when she was 35. (She remains the oldest woman gymnast ever to win Olympic gold.) While their team was in Melbourne, Hungarians rebelled against the "People's republic" that Stalin had forced on them, until Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed the uprising. Ágnes was granted political asylum and coached Australian gymnasts until emigrating to Israel, where again she coached and taught. Five years ago she returned to Hungary, to become the country's oldest Olympian medalist the following year, and in 2023 the oldest anywhere in the world. You had a rich, interesting, and lucky life, Ánes; may you rest in peace!

Joy to the world ...

What a Christmas season Russia is giving the world! In the early morning of December 25, to celebrate the birth of the Christ child and the first day of Hannukah, Putin's jolly elves launched 184 missiles and drones against Ukraine with a special focus on hitting power plants and depriving civilians of heat and light as the winter intensifies.

Later in the day, Russian air-defense gunners targeted an airliner trying to land at Grozny airport, jamming its GPS system and probably hitting it with a missile, after which it was denied permission to land and sent on a dangerous path over the Caspian Sea. It was hit again once it reached the safety of land, making it the second civilian airliner shot down by the Russian Federation in its brief history.

As the week continued, a Russian oil tanker dragged its anchor over undersea cables in the Baltic Seas, much as a Chinese vessel did last month, and as many as 3,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed, wounded, or captured as Putin tries to erase Ukraine's lodgment in Kursk province.

Putin's "high tech duel" hits an unexpected target

The embassies of Albania, Argentina, Palestine(!), North Macedonia, Portugal, and Montenegro, were damaged yesterday morning in Kyiv. The embassies were all in the same building, and apparently nobody was working there at the time. However, one person was killed and twelve wounded elsewhere in the raid, which came a day after Putin threatened a "high-tech duel" against Ukraine and its Western allies.

There were five missiles in the barrage, either Russian Iskanders or North Korean KN-23s. Supposedly all were shot down, but of course the debris must fall somewhere. The Iskander has a payload of 1,500 pounds and a range of up to 300 miles. The newer Korean missile is similar but smaller. Flying at hypersonic speed and reaching as high as 31 miles (nearly 164,000 feet), the Iskander is believed to be nuclear-capable. Russian sources claim that Ukraine doesn't have a missile defense able to shoot it down.

These are not the lads of 1950

Seventy-four years ago, a North Korean army drove the South Koreans and a scratch force of Americans almost to the sea, capturing the whole of South Korea except the "Pusan Perimeter" in the far southeast. It took the genius of Douglas MacArthur and the guts of the US Marines to turn the war around.

The 10,000 North Koreans sent to Russia to expel the Ukrainians from their lodgement in Kursk province don't seem to have the fighting spirit of their grandfathers. For one thing, they try to advance in mass rather than in handfuls as the Russians have learned to do. For another, they apparently have trouble distinguishing Russians from Ukrainians, having reportedly killed eight men of a Chechen unit in a "friendly fire" incident.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press quoted a "senior [US] military offical" as saying that "a couple hundred" Koreans had been killed or wounded in their first few days of combat. And the Ukrainians intercepted a phone call yesterday from a Moscow nurse to her soldier husband in Kursk province, reporting that two trainloads of wounded Koreans had been brought to her hospital. "Yesterday there was a train with about 100 people," she told him. "Today there are 120."

Well, at least they're probably better fed than their families back home in North Korea....

434 days and nights in the tunnels of Gaza

On October 7, 2023, Romi Gonen was one of the hundreds of young Israelis enjoying the Nova music festival near the border with Gaza. She was shot in the arm, dragged by her hair and then by her wounded arm, jammed into a car and taken to the tunnels of Gaza. She was 23 years old; she turned 24 in August, deep underground, half-starved, her every moment under guard and liable to abuse. “These are monsters that are currently holding my sister," said Yarden Gonen, a nurse.

"They’re starving everyone, they’re mentally and physically abusing everyone, and they are sexually abusing everyone” -- men as well as women. “But girls can get pregnant, because terrorists rape them. We currently have 100 hostages, but maybe we have 101, 102, or more.”

Of the kidnap victims, Romi and nine other women are believed to be alive: Shiri Bibas, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy, Karina Ariev, Emily Tehila Damari, Liri Albag, Doron Steinbrecher, Arbel Yehud, and Agam Berger. Hamas murdered three other women (Inbar Hayman, Ofra Keidar, and Judih Weinstein Haggai, an American citizen) soon after they were kidnapped and has refused to return their bodies.

Bad news for the bad guys

It's hard not to feel some glee at the fall of Damascus and the flight of Bashar al-Assad, the second-generation dictator of Syria who blithely ignored Barack Obama's "red line" and deployed chemical weapons against his own people. Assad has been propped up for the past ten years by Vladimir Putin, while three successive American presidents did little or nothing to rein him in. (The US has some 900 troops in Syria, where they serve mostly as implicit hostages.)

The great winners here are Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli people, who have so degraded Hezbollah that it can no longer help Assad with troops and training, and who can hope Syria will cease to be a pipeline for Iranian rockets to reach Lebanon and from there be fired against Israel. Next in line is Recep Erdogan, the semi-dictator of Turkey, who has been supporting the rebels for a long as Vladimir Putin has been trying to destroy them, and who can now hope that Syrian refugees will no longer destabilize his country.

The Syrian rebels might also send a note of thanks to Volodymyr Zelensky and the gallant Ukrainians who have kept Russia bogged down in a war of attrition since February 2022.