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.

The CRINKs at war

Thousands of North Koreans put on Russian uniforms and picked up AK-47s last year to help Putin recover Kursk province from a Ukrainian offensive. Now Chinese young men are joining them. That leaves only one CRINK country missing from the front line of Putin's war against the West, though Iran has supplied thousands of Shaheed drones to kill Ukrainian civilians. The Kyiv Independent has a fascinating video of two Chinese young men captured the other day, with one of them explaining that he'd never picked up a weapon before going into combat.

Ukraine says that scores of young Chinese are wearing Russian uniformas this month, lured by high enlistment bonuses.

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.