Ukraine did what I never thought possible; they hit Putin where he lives. Condoleezza Rice, a genuine expert, says that, as a result, Putin is getting "desperate". SCOTUS, with Kavanagh and Robert's joining the Liberal wing, won't review a Court of Appeals decision upholding Maryland's AR15 ban. Amazing!
Maybe he's getting desperate, but I'd need more evidence to believe it. I've heard this "expert talk" of the imminent fall of the Putin regime for a long time now. I am currently more inclined to believe experts like Dr. Andrew Michta on what it would take to stop him. Link: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/05/why-putin-believes-he-can-win-his-civilizational-war-against-the-west/ "The harsh reality of the war in Ukraine that Washington has yet to recognize is that the conflict is only a subset of a larger civilizational war against the West that Russia has been waging for over two decades now. This Russian war for empire—whether in a non-kinetic or ultimately its kinetic variety—will not stop until Russia suffers a decisive defeat that will pose a direct threat to Putin’s regime at home. This doesn’t mean that Moscow will not engage in a tactical pause in its war against the West from time to time, but we should always be mindful that such a peredyshka or “breather” will only serve to offer Putin an opportunity to rearm and rebuild. " "For Russia, this war has never been about conquering this or that piece of Ukrainian territory, about the language rights of the Russian minority living in Ukraine, or—as many critics of the war seem to believe—about keeping Ukraine out of NATO. Nor has the US policy of NATO enlargement into post-communist Eastern Europe and the Baltic States after the Cold War been the true casus belli for Moscow. From the start, for Vladimir Putin and his inner circle in the Kremlin, this has been a war for the restoration of the Russian empire, one that Putin, in effect, declared at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 when he rejected the security order the West has built, and when he later opined that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Taken in this context, the two invasions of Ukraine—the first in 2014, the second in 2022—must be understood not as the result of a Western blunder because the harsh reality is that NATO allies never reached a consensus to bring Ukraine into the alliance, but merely as another battle in this larger war, with the first campaign fought against Georgia in 2008." "The Trump administration’s policy of ending the war in Ukraine through a negotiated cessation of hostilities misses the mark because it views the problem through Western eyes, assuming that the horrific loss of life and the destruction of property that has been taking place over the last three years matters to Putin’s calculus—it does not. Since 2022, Russia has reoriented its economy to support the war effort, demonstrating that it can reconstruct its military faster than most Western analysts had thought possible."
Ukraine carried out another darling attack. https://ukrainetoday.org/breaking-news-a-locomotive-carrying-a-column-of-enemy-equipment-was-hit-in-the-south-the-occupiers-suffered-significant-losses-defense-forces/ Another news channel, I'm translating using Google Tranlate: "The Security Service of Ukraine reportedly carried out yet another large-scale drone attack today on a military train traveling between Donetsk-Zaporizhzhia in Russian-occupied Southeastern Ukraine, with hundreds of FPV drones said to have emerged from hatches aboard several grain hoppers, while the train was in motion, before striking the locomotive and then proceeding to strike over a hundred train cars carrying heavy equipment and supplies for the Russian Armed Forces. Operational Command South of the Ukrainian Ground Forces reports that Russia suffered losses amounting to roughly a regiment-sized unit worth of equipment and supplies, including: 1x Railway Locomotive 13x Tanks 7x Artillery Systems 103x Units of Automotive and Armored Equipment 10x Fuel Tank Cars, carrying an estimated 158,000–172,000 gallons of fuel The operation has since been confirmed by Russian channels on Telegram, who report a major drone attack by Ukraine against a train which resulted in the loss of a locomotive with tanks and “dozens of armoured vehicles.”"
