$2,000 a month to die in Ukraine?

Putin's war reached a couple of turning points yesterday. First, Russian losses -- its soldiers killed, wounded, or missing (which usually means captured, though in this type of warfare can simply mean that no identifiable body was found) has passed 700,000. That's a Ukrainian estimate, but Western analysts generally accept it as fairly close to the mark. Indeed, the names of 75,382 officers and enlisted men have been identified and published by BBC News Russian and the independent site Mediazona as killed in action in Ukraine. "The actual toll is likely much higher," adds the BBC -- perhaps twice as high.

Second, the North Koreans recently recruited as cannon fodder have been confirmed in action in the Kursk province of Russia, recently invaded by Ukraine. According to Ukrainian reports, they now number 8,000 and are paid the equivalent of about $2,000 a month. (Possibly, like the Cuban doctors rented out to African nations, the money may actually go to their home government, rather than to the recruits or their families.) Yesterday, an official at Ukraine's National Security & Defense Council said on his Telegraph channel that the first North Koreans had "come under fire" from Ukrainian forces. Using these unfortunate youngsters in Kursk province enables Pyongyang to argue that its troops are helping to defend Russian territory rather than engaging in an aggressive war.

North Korea enters the war

Thousands of North Korean troops have joined Putin's attempt to conquer Ukraine. At least three thousand are already in the province of Kursk, where hundreds of square miles of Russian territory were seized in a Ukrainian counteroffensive this fall, and there are reports that Koreans have also been spotted in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. Thousands more seem to be training in Russia's far east.

"Putin has been throwing more and more Russians into a meat grinder of his own making in Ukraine," said the U.S. Secretary of State yesterday. "Now he's turning to North Korean troops, and that is a clear sign of weakness." Well, perhaps, though Mr Blinken is too young to remember the summer of 1950, when the grandfathers of those North Korean soldiers sent the US Army reeling back to the Pusan Perimeter on Korea's southeastern edge. It took the US Marines and the genius of Douglas MacArthur to salvage that near-disaster.

On Tuesday, does the apocalypse arrive?

I'm determined to look at the bright side: one of them has got to lose! And never, in my opinion, has a loser deserved it more. (I've already voted, as it happens. For a week I left the top of the ballot empty, thinking I might write in the name of the brain-worm guy, but on Saturday I gave up, inked a choice, sealed the ballot in two envelopes, and mailed it off.)

Ms Harris does have one thing going for her, after all: she's not Donald Trump. And Mr Trump has something going for him: he can only serve a single term, somewhat diluted by the fact that JD Vance could be with us until January 2037 ... and how does that make you feel?

Still, I can remember that April day in 1945 when we were called out of our elementary school classroom in Concord, Mass., to assemble in the schoolyard to hear the principal announce that President Roosevelt was dead, that Harry Truman was our president now, and that we should board the schoolbuses and go home. (They were, by a nice coincidence, ready to go, since it was four o'clock in the afternoon.) The girls cried; the boys babbled. For us kids, Mr Roosevelt was the only president the country ever had -- well, after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, of course. Mr Truman by contrast was a zero. Yet he turned out fine, didn't he? So I suppose it's possible that, in spite of all the auguries of disaster, next Tuesday might similarly bless us with a consequential leader.

'Mere cannon fodder'?

Somewhat conflicting notions of the North Korean youngsters joining Russia's war against Ukraine appear in a remarkable Wall Street Journal story today, confirming what I published last week. Using satellite imagery, the Journal confirms that the newcomers have been outfitted in Russian uniforms at a military base in the far east and are likely to go to Kursk, to maintain the fiction that they are aiding an ally to defend its own territory. They are "mere cannon fodder," according to one South Korean observer, though others say that the short, slender, and undernourished recruits are trained as special forces operatives. Ukraine, meanwhile, has apparently added a Korean-language staff to its "I Want To Live" hotline for Russian deserters.

The article confirms that Russian casualties now exceed 600,000 killed, wounded, and missing in action.

Putin's latest mercenaries

The Castro brothers used to finance their communist paradise by renting Cuban doctors to struggling nations. Now the Kim family is selling young North Koreans to Putin to use as cannon fodder in his war on Ukraine (and us). Accordng to the Kyiv Independent, 18 of them have already deserted to Ukrainian troops in the Russian province of Kursk.

And in that other war, Iran against Israel (and us), a hit to Bibi, whose troops caught and killed the terrorist mastermind Yahya Sinwar in his tunnel deep under Gaza. And a miss to Biden, who cheered the opportunity to "bring this war to an end," as if either Sinwar or his string-pullers in Tehran had any plans to do that. Why does our feeble-minded president, reading lamely from his teleprompter, treat every victory as a chance to surrender?

Nobody can live in Auschwitz

On October 6 last year, the kibbutz of Beeri marked its 77th anniversary, and dozens of former residents came back to the "shady, flower-filled oasis of tidy frame houses" to celebrate the commune's success.

Then came October 7, when the "men in black" murdered 132 people and dragged 30 others to captivity, making Beeri "one of the deadliest places on Israel’s deadliest day," writes Steve Hendrix in the Washington Post today.

With the same sort of courage that built the kibbutz in 1947, during civil war and before the British left Jews and Arabs to fight it out, some of Beeri's residents have now returned to their homes. One of their goals is to lessen the number of shrines that people have set up to honor the dead and kidnapped. “We need to have a memorial, absolutely,” one woman says. “But not on every street. Nobody can live in Auschwitz.”

Forever takes just a moment these days

I left my TULSI sticker on the Subaru's bumper until a few weeks ago, despite Ms Gabbard's complaints about "forever wars." Because yeah, the unpleasantness in Iraq and Afghanistan had gone on for a rather long time. But now it seems that "forever," in the case of Ukraine, is a couple of years, both on the dreamy left (see Noam Chomsky) and on the hillbilly right (see JD Vance).

As for the "Zionist entity," situated uneasily between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Mr Chomsky has had less to say, but his acolytes in our better universities are speaking for him. What is it about Americans, that we have so little staying power? Where were Mr Chomsky, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia when we were showering incendiaries and bunker-busters German women and children? I don't recall any pleading for ceasefire now! in 1944. Apparently we can afford to be noble only when it's Ukainians and Israelis who are dying on our behalf.

More drones, cheap drones, quickly!

David Petraeus, the now-retired general who did so much to shape the US Army's war-fighting style in this century, urges us in today's Wall Street Journal to return to the 1940s, when we churned out weapons in huge quantities and at bargain prices. (Adjusted for inflation, a WW2 Jeep cost $14,818, a third of what you'd probably spend today.) Ukraine should be our model: while the Pentagon hopes to deliver a $100,000 loitering munition at some time in the future, Kyiv intends to build a million drones a year, costing between $300 and $1000.