A thousand days of war

One thousand days ago, Vladimir Putin sent his tank columns, fighter-bombers, and special forces storming into the heart of Ukraine, whose only offense was hoping to be free of Moscow's rule. One thousand days of war! (Ten civilians were killed and 55 wounded in Odesa yesterday.) I looked at a calender and calculated that, measuring from the "date which will live in infamy" of December 7, 1941, it wasn't until October 2, 1944, that we had 1,000 days of the Second World War behind us. The US Army was approacing La Spezia in Italy, had actually crossed the border into Hitler's Germany, and was getting ready to liberate the Phillipines.

Like Joe Biden today, Franklin Roosevelt was barely able to function in the fall of 1944, but he would have scoffed at Biden's timidity. Only yesterday did Ukraine get permission to fire US rockets onto Russian territory -- but no farther than 300 kilometers! Putin of course is under no such restriction: Odesa is 581 kilometers from the Russian border.

A pogrom in Amsterdam

In the same city where Anne Frank hid from the Gestapo, Jews were hunted and beaten yesterday by first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants. The victims were in Amsterdam to cheer an Israeli soccer team, and for this several were hospitalized and others had to hide in their hotel rooms with furniture barricading the doors.

Antisemitism in Europe and North America has many roots, including the Roman Republic, Christianity, Tsarist Russia, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and now Palestinians and their Arab and Ivy League enablers. "We shall overcome," promised Martin Luther King, "because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

As Ernest Hemingway said in another connection, wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

A win for Israel, a loss for Ukraine

As in November 2016, it took me most of post-election Wednesday to absorb the wonder of Donald Trump's accomplishment. He didn't just win the presidency this time, but won it by something close to a landslide. (The New York Times of course disagrees.)

I'll leave the analysis to others. I'm more interested in what Trump's victory means for the two wars that erupted on Joe Biden's watch. I don't think we'll hear any "cease fire now!" pleas from Donald Trump, after every Israeli victory, and that's a relief. Iran and its proxies are the enemy; Israel is our friend, and it's the only functioning democracy in the Near East. Alas, Trump's attitude toward Ukraine is something else entirely, and his vice-president-elect promises to be worse.

But who knows? Perhaps Trump will astonish us again. There are advantages in being mercurial.

$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?