It's about time....

NBC reports that Trump is "pissed off" at the fuckwit in the Kremlin, or perhaps I should say his fellow fuckwit. It's about time he realized that Putin is playing him for a fool, using him to pressure the Ukrainians much as Hamas used Joe Biden to pressure the Israelis. For example, Putin is offering a "cease fire" at sea, since that's the frontier where Ukraine with its sea-going drones has managed to sink the flagship Moskova and drive the rest of Putin's Black Sea Fleet to hide in distant ports.

On the road to Mandalay

Poor Burma! Not only is it ruled by a thuggish gang of generals who prefer to call it Myanmar, but yesterday it was home to a magnitude 7.7 earthquake that toppled high-rise buildings and gold-topped Buddhist temples alike. The epicenter was near the fabled city of Mandalay. Tens of thousands of Burmans were killed, and the shock was felt as far away as Bangkok in Thailand and the city of Ruili in the Yunnan province ot China.

Ruili is also known as Juili, and I'm pretty sure was the site of the CAMCO factory and Flying Tigers base of Loiwing. Indeed, its main street aolmost certainly was the half-mile runway from which the Tigers flew off for raids upon Japanese airfields in Thailand. (One of those airfields, by way, was Chiang Mai, now the home of my virtual pal Hak Hakanson, who helped pinpoint the location of Loiwing. He assures me that the quake barely moved the leaves in Chiang Mai.)

Appointment in Samara

Putin is so short of troops (see below) that he's offering north of a million rubles to anyone who'll sign up, and nearly 4 million to the lucky young men of Samara. That's $47,600 in what Donald Trump no doubt thinks of as real money, and in a country where the average wage is $1,004 a month. Samara is a town in southwestern Russia, near its border with the former Soviet "republic" of Kazakhstan, and not to be confused with Samarra in Iraq, made famous by Somerset Maugham.

Putin has 900,000 fewer troops this week

Every morning at 3 a.m., an email from the Kyiv Independent pops into my inbox, bringing the news of yesterday's savage attacks on Ukraian's homes and power plants, along with a running total of Russia's troop losses in the three-plus years since Putin's full-scale invasion of the country. That figure today stands at 902,010 men killed, captured, deserted, and hospitalized. Yesterday's toll was 1,210. These figures are improbably precise, to be sure, and no doubt some of the wounded will return to the front lines. But Ukraine's figures have generally been confirmed by other countries' estimates of Russian losses.

Indeed, the British Ministry of Defence suggests that Russian casualties have not only topped 900,000, but "up to 250,000" troops have been killed in action. (That's nearly five times American losses in the Vietnam war, in one-third the time.) And the Russian anti-war website Mediazona has compiled the names and home addresses of 97,994 Russians known to have died in Ukraine, mostly from social media postings. It's a brave Russian family that would puncture the veil of secrecy imposed by Putin's dictatorship, so that figure is certainly much higher.

Ashamed to be an American

I sent an email the other day to the Hotel Leopolis ("Lion Town") in Lviv, western Ukraine, formerly Lwow in eastern Poland where my one-time girlfriend was born, a connection I celebrated in Poland's Daughter. I'd long wanted to visit Basia's hometown, and to knock on the door of 99 Chuprynka Street where she spent the first five years of her life. (It was then called Potocki Street, celebrating a Polish count. When the Germans took it over in the summer of 1941, they named it Siegfriedstrasse, and when Stalin took it back in 1944, he swapped out Siegfried for a Ukrainian nationalist and added it to the Soviet Union.) I booked a visit from March 26 to April 3.

But how could an American show his face in Ukraine, now that Trump and Vance betrayed the country and set out to make Putin its master? It's as if Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 had thrown in his lot with Hitler and paraded Winston Churchill through "our cherished Oval Office" to be scolded by his vice-presidential attack dog, "Cactus Jack" Garner. (And in fact, FDR came close to something similar in the Yalta Conference of 1945, when he sidelined Churchill in order to win favor with Stalin. Yalta, by no coincidence, is in Crimea, where Putin began to dismember Ukraine eleven years ago.)

So I canceled. Vladimir Putin with his rattesnake eyes -- now America's best buddy! It's sickening.

Well, that was a disaster

From what I can tell, it was JD Vance who blew up that meeting yesterday, though it's possible that his boss dragged him into our "cherished Oval Office" for just that purpose. And some blame should be attributed to President Zelensky for not remembering that any meeting with Donald Trump, as with the Pope, requires visitors to kiss the papal ring. Altogether, it was a shameful spectacle, and I apologize to the people of Ukraine that we have these men at the head of our government.

Trump and Zelensky may sign a deal

It appears that Ukraine has a lot of uranium, oil and gas, and "rare earth" minerals like lithium, and where we would be without batteries for our cellphones? Presidents Trump and Zelensky are supposed to meet in Washington today to sign a deal making us part owners of this trove. Unfortunately, it's still in the ground, nobody seems to know for sure where it is, and a lot of it is in the 18 percent of Ukraine that the Russian army controls and is unlikely to give up any time soon.

Mr Trump's positions are always hard to understand and apt to be rolled back tomorrow, but he has already agreed that Ukraine is not going back to its 2014 boundaries, before Putin's "little green men" seized Crimea and started nibbling away at the country's eastern provinces. (And formally annexed four of them, including parts stilled controlled by the Ukrainian army.) Coming on the heels of our shameful vote on Monday in the UN General Assembly, which put us in the company of Russia, Belarus, and North Korea (even China abstained!), I find this rather depressing. If we don't have the courage to label Russia the aggressor, on the third anniversary of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, what good are we?

Putin's war begins its fourth year

Is three years enough? Let's look at where we Americans stood in December 1944, after three years of war: The siege of Leningrad had been lifted. American, British, and Canadian troops had landed in France and begun to free Western Europe. Paris had been liberated. The US Army was fighting along the Rhine River in Germany, the Soviet Red Army in Ukraine, and the British Army in Burma. Mussolini had been deposed, Italy had surrendered, and Allied troops had captured Rome and were fighting the Germans at Monte Cassino. The US Army had landed in the Philippines.

And in New Mexico, atomic reactors were working, the design of Fat Man and Little Boy was settled on, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress was modified to carry them, and Col Paul Tibbets was tapped to command the 393 Bombardment Squadron which -- if the bombs actually worked! -- would deliver them to Japan. That would end the Second World War, three years and nine months after we joined it.