Summer is on its Way

But the war rages on as casualties pile up

It was a long weekend here. Warmer weather is moving in so you could sit in your yard taking in the sunshine, or you could go hiking. Well, I did both and with my youngest daughter I scaled the Lake Garibaldi hike which we normally do in the summer. Yesterday it meant dealing with thick layers of snow while hiking up to the icy lakes. Hard, but rewarding work, all six hours of it.

And yes it was also back to catching up reading, and in record time I zipped through (in Dutch) Pieter Waterdrinker’s latest book about his year in the post-Ukraine War world. The writer and his Russian spouse are cat lovers so I tweeted out a photo of me and our cat working through the book and the writer kindly retweeted it. What’s actually relevant in all this is that throughout the book - and the guy lived and worked in Russia for many decades - the recurring theme is how Europe will never be the same after the Russian invasion from Ukraine and that only Putin’s fall can end the war. And if he falls eventually, the collapse and split-up of Russia will bring many more years, if not decades, of violence and concurrent political turmoil. Russia is in its death throes and it is going down taking with it many more people and into the abyss.

This weekend we were notified of the fall of Bakhmut to Russia, by many analysts described as a pyrrhic victory given the city’s limited strategic value. The battle which has reduced the city to rubble and during which a reported 20,000 Russian soldiers have died has in any case further depleted Putin’s resources. This now may set the stage for a Ukrainian offensive, although it would be worthwhile getting some numbers around Ukraine’s overall strength by - among other things - assessing how it came out of the Bakhmut battle. We are not getting the best possible information as a lot of it is just being kept secret for very good reasons, but most analysts are pointing to the weak state of affairs for Russia right now, despite winning one medium sized city.

On the domestic front, Putin’s reign of terror continues unabated, this weekend his Deputy Science Minister who had been critical of the invasion died under questionable circumstances aboard an airplane making its way back from Cuba. Tallying the war deaths is one thing, the list of Kremlin officials and oligarchs who are making early and suspect exits from life on earth is growing steadily. As Waterdrinker notes in his excellent book (most of his work is actually translated in English if you are interested) it is the sickness of one man, and one man only, that is dragging down an entire nation while destroying another. If things escalate over the summer it could be an entire continent that can sink into deeper turmoil with global ripple effects. What makes all of this even more painful is that seventy-eight years after the last great war we thought had seen the last of deranged tyrants changing the course of history. Apparently not.