NATO troops in Ukraine? The horror!

Really, Putin's spokesman has a future on Saturday Night Live. Talking to ABC yesterday, Dmitry Peskov "rejected the idea of deploying European peacekeepers in Ukraine," explaining with a straight face that "We cannot allow NATO's military infrastructure to get that close to our borders."

Really? In 2022, when Putin first began to encroach on Ukraine's territory, the only NATO countries on Russia's borders were Estonia and Latvia, with a tiny bit of Norway in the far north. Add the colony of Kalingrad, a German exclave that Stalin grabbed in 1945, and Lithuania and Poland are also neighbors. And now? Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted Finland to join NATO, more than doubling Russia's border with the military alliance. And the Finns are tough: when Stalin invaded Finland in the Winter War of 1939-1940, the Red Army was humiliated, much as it was when it tried to reach Kyiv in February 2022.

Making Stalin great again

Not content with nearly obliterating the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, the Russians have now graced it with a bust of Stalin inscribed "To the organizer and inspirer of the victory of the Soviet people over the Nazi invaders, Generalissimo of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, from grateful descendants." This was timed to celebrate Putin's (and Stalin's) bogus Victory Day of May 9.

To set the record straight: German forces surrendered to the Allies during the day on Tuesday, May 8, 1945, with the formal document signed in a French schoolhouse just after 11 p.m. that evening. It was 10 p.m. in London, 5 p.m. on the US east coast, and 2 p.m. on the west coast where the embryonic United Nations was organizing itself in the San Francisco opera house.

And it was one minute past midnight in Moscow, giving Stalin the opportunity to proclaim Victory Over Fascism Day on May 9, as if he and the Red Army alone had done the job. Putin of course keeps up the pretense, as he rebuilds the Russian and and Soviet empires of the past.

Along the same line, Putin recently renamed Volgograd airport as Stalingrad International, honoring both his murderous predecessor and the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. Volgograd bore the dictator's name from 1925 to 1961, and perhaps in a few years will be called Putingrad.

Leo XIV and the vernacular Mass

An American pope, how amazing! I wonder what Trump will make of him -- and vice versa! But mostly I wonder, as the agnostic son of two Irish Catholics, what language he'll use while saying Mass. I assume he knows Latin, though he was born after the church adopted the vernacular Mass, and he must be fluent in Spanish since he went to Peru as a young missionary and more recently served as a bishop there. Pope Francis brought him to Rome two years ago, so he likely speaks Italian as well. Truly, a man for our age!

The day we lost South Vietnam

Half a century ago, the Dutch photographer Hubert van Es stepped out on his balcony and snapped this photo of the Pittman Apartments in Saigon, which housed the offices of USAID and the Central Intelligence Agency in South Vietnam. The westerner in a white shirt is a CIA employee, who is stuffing Vietnamese men, women, and children into a UH-2 Huey helicopter. Eighteen lucky souls will make it, jammed into in an aircraft whose normal load is eight, and fly off to comparative safety on an American ship in the South China Sea. One day later -- April 30, 1975 -- North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, and Vietnam's long struggle to evict its foreign occupiers came to an end.

Fifty years ago! I find it hard to believe. And it was actually 61 years ago that I set out to become a reporter in Vietnam. In March 1964 I'd sold my first novel to Doubleday for an advance of $2500 -- a bit more than $25,000 in current dollars -- which I spent on a Volkswagen Beetle and a round-trip ticket to Saigon. Oddly, the only other customer at Horizon Travel that afternoon was a woman who was also flying to Saigon. And when I exited the travel agency with my paper ticket, the Strand Theater down the street was showing A Yank in Viet-Nam. I paid my fifty cents and watched the matinee.

I was in-country from May into July. I loved it -- the land, the people, and the soldiers, whether American, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), or Montagnard, as the French had called the Highland tribesmen. In the long run, the experience gave me three books: the novel Incident at Muc Wa which Burt Lancaster turned into a rather good flick called Go Tell the Spartans; The Only War We've Got, my journal of wandering Saigon and the countryside by foot, helicopter, plane, and junk; and Cowboy, about a young Montagnard whose short life personified the waste and gallantry of that long war.

In 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on his "secret plan" to end the war. His first term was given over to mollifying Bejing and Moscow while he strengthened the ARVN, reduced the American role, and negotiated with the North Vietnamese even as he bombed Hanoi. The last American combat troops left Vietnam in March 1973, though thousands of civilians remained. The US promised the Saigon government that our money and air power would prevent an outright invasion form the North. Gerald Ford, who became president when Nixon resigned in August 1974, tried to honor that pledge but was denied by the Congressional Democratic majority. North Vietnamese tanks came across the 17th parallel on March 10, 1975, and the South Vietnamese Army basically melted away. Seven weeks later it was all over except for the recriminations, the "boat people," and the reeducation camps. It was, we believed, America's first defeat in war. We little thought that it would become habitual.

An American dies for Putin

Every morning at 2 a.m., the Ukraine Daily appears in my mailbox, though I don't read it for a few hours later. This morning it reported that Putin has "lost" 947,610 soldiers in his unprovoked war against Ukraine -- that is, men killed, wounded, captured, or deserted since his invasion in February 2022.

And today we also learn that one of them was a troubled American named Michael Gloss, the son of a US Navy veteran and a deputy director of the CIA. Michael suffered from mental illness, his father told the New York Post. In an obituary, since deleted, the family wrote that “With his noble heart and warrior spirit Michael was forging his own hero’s journey when he was tragically killed in Eastern Europe."

He apparently studied "human ecology" at Middlebury College or a college in Maine. In an irony for the ages, he "hated fascism," and found himself in Putin's fascist army in order to obtain Russian citizenship. He seems to have enlisted with a group of mercenaries from Nepal in September 2023. (The interesting website IStories says that mercenaries from 148 countries have joined the Russian army, including hundreds from Nepal.) Michael was assigned to the 137th Ryazan Airborne Regiment and was killed in eastern Ukraine on April 4 last year. He was 21 years old.

"Vladimir, STOP!"

When Messrs Trump and Vance scolded the president of Ukraine in Our Cherished Oval Office last month, I complained that they sounded like angry schoolteachers berating a wayward fifth-grader. Now Mr Trump is at it again, only this time scolding the Russian dictator. "Vladimir, STOP!" he writes with his rhetorical all-caps. He's talking about Putin's salvo of 215 missiles and suicide drones upon Kyiv, the capital and largest city of an independent European country. (At least one of the missiles was manufactured in North Korea by another of Mr Trump's pals.) The Kyiv Independent counts the toll so far: twelve people killed and ninety injured in yesterday's raid. The wounded included six children and Donald Trump's pride.

Mr Trump boasted that he could end the war in 24 hours if he were president. Wednesday will mark his 100th day in Our Cherished Oval Office. To his credit, he's actually been in the office more diligently than his predecessor, but he still hasn't stopped the killing, despite preemptively surrendering to Putin's demands. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, another of the CRINKs is setting up a test of American resolve: the Chinese Coast Guard has been circling Kinmen, a Taiwanese island two miles off the Chinese coast. American special forces soldiers are stationed on Kinmen. No doubt Xi Jinpeng is wondering what Mr Trump would do if China demanded that the island be demilitarized. It must seem like a small ask, given what the American president has already conceded in Europe.

It's always the victim's fault

Lord Ismay was Churchill's chief of staff, NATO's first secretary-general, and the man who famously explained that the treaty's purpose was to "keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” How has that worked out?

Well, Vladimir Putin is rebuilding the Soviet Union, starting with Ukraine and making no secret that Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are next on the chopping block. The Germans try to keep their heads down, but they've been Europe's dominant economy for at least half a century. And now Donald Trump and JD Vance are doing their best to get the Americans out of there.

The Russians have always pretended that Stalin won the Second World War, and that Victory Day was May 9, though Germany surrendered to Britain and the United States the previous day. Watch for Trump and Vance to get it wrong! They've already decided that the present war is the victim's fault: "You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size," as Mr Trump explained it yesterday.

Putin celebrates Palm Sunday

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, in memory of the King of Peace entering Jerusalem on the first day of Holy Week. Putin celebrated it by sending ballistic missiles crashing into Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, killing 38 civilians and wounding 119 others. Two children were among the dead and nine among the hospitalized. Later in the day, Putin completed his worship of peace by sending missiles against Odesa, Kharkiv, Uman, Sloviansk, and Beryslav, targeting homes, shops, and auto repair stations. No comment from Our Cherished Oval Office.