Tag Archives: russia

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I WANNA BE THE GOOD GUYS AGAIN

Superman fought for truth, justice and the American Way.

He’d be really confused now.

Not the truth and justice part. But the American Way has skewed off the highway and into a swamp.

That’s the grin-and-bear-it way to look at a tragedy – the betrayal of Ukraine by Trump and his henchmen. 

In his desperation to avoid a midterm election whomping, Trump reached a deal with the Devil – um, sorry, Vladimir Putin. He says the U.S. will lift its oil embargo against Russia, imposed since it invaded Ukraine four years ago. That comes with a deal to purchase enough diesel fuel to supply the United States for 12 hours.

Not months, weeks or even days. Hours.

Trump believes driving the price of diesel fuel lower will help mitigate the impact its surge has on inflation. Not that what he’s doing would actually help, but even if it did, the damage is done.

Most Americans don’t drive diesel-powered vehicles, so it’s not immediately obvious why diesel is such a big deal. Unfortunately, diesel powers those big honkin’ trucks cluttering your commute home and your leaf-peeping trip.

Imagine how big the tank is in one of those monsters. Now imagine paying $7 a gallon to fill it.

That money has got to come from somewhere. And if you’ve been to the supermarket in the last few weeks, you know where.

Four weeks ago, I bought cream cheese for my low-carb bagels. It was about $6.50 for a half-pound, which is about $1.50 more than I paid in 2024.

Two weeks ago, I bought some more. That half-pound cost me $9.

The same was true of my butter substitute and my fruit juice. $2 and $2 and $3 begin to add up – and although I’m not wealthy by any means, I’m in a slightly better position to pay that increase than a family of four struggling to get by.

So, yeah, Trump is desperate to get the price of diesel down. But he’s also desperate to bail out his old buddy, Vlad.

Trump bet on Russia. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, but neither does talking about the late, great Hannibal Lecter as if he’s a real human being. Or saying Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eat dogs and cats.

Russia is a failed state. It had a chance to become a center of European commerce, like Warsaw, or a center of Asian commerce, like Seoul and Shanghai. 

But Russia’s gonna be Russia – paranoid, belligerent, parochial, hateful. Putin has pulled those strings for most of the 21st century.

So bailing Putin out of an oil embargo bought into by the rest of the free world – an embargo sparked by a wide awake Joe Biden – is what Trump needs to do to protect his investment and satisfy his patron.

And, of course, in this scenario, we don’t matter.

Not just the fact that Americans overwhelmingly support Ukraine, that we overwhelmingly support President Zelenskyy, that we don’t think Russia under Putin is a potential friend and partner.

But our own freedom and pride matter not at all to Trump. Because if Ukraine, four years into a courageous fight against a bigger foe, can’t make it, it bodes ill for the rest of Europe and the West. We become shameful bystanders to the end of order.

Not just in Ukraine. Trump’s ridiculous demands in Greenland and Canada were meant to weaken the greatest military alliance in history and ease Putin’s path to dominance. The stupid war against Iran is meant to tie up American resources in the Middle East, an area where Obama and Biden wisely thought it best to disengage. The nonsense with Cuba and Venezuela is meant to underline the “zones of influence” theory that totalitarians promote.

We have always thought of ourselves as the good guys. Being respected means being admired, not being feared. When we lose the world’s respect, we’re just a bunch of spoiled brats on this side of the Atlantic and this side of the Pacific.

Few of us can leap tall buildings or bend steel in our bare hands. But we aspire to be like Superman, standing for truth, justice and the American Way.

When the American Way is the right way. Right now, with Trump blubbering around the White House like a malevolent blimp, it’s not.

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THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD

St. Petersburg, Russia, is 655 miles – as the drone flies – from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. It’s closer to Helsinki, Finland.

And yet, the home region of Vladimir Putin found itself under attack this week from drones launched by the Ukrainians.

If I had written that sentence four years ago, when Russia launched its war against Ukraine, expects would have said I was nuts. I would have thought I was nuts. There was no way Ukraine could outlast what was then perceived as one of the world’s two or three most powerful militaries.

Shame on the experts. Shame on me.

There are few things to feel good about in 2026. One of them is the valiancy of the Ukrainian people and their leader, the Winston Churchill of the 21st century, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They have survived far longer than anyone believed possible when Russia started rolling tanks across their border.

In fact, there are many experts who believe Ukraine is winning this war. The drone attack on St. Petersburg, undeterred by Russia’s supposedly impenetrable air defense, is a prime example. Ukrainian drones have struck Moscow and other parts of the vast country as well. Their range is growing.

And Ukraine has become a leader in anti-drone defense, franchising its technology to other countries looking to fend off unwanted attacks.

According to the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia has paid an amazingly high price for its aggression. The estimated death toll is something in the area of 300,000. By contrast, the United States lost 58,000 people in the Vietnam War – and we thought that was a disaster. Counting those injured, Russia’s casualty count exceeds 1 million.

That’s got to reach the point that it affects every town, village and hovel. Where almost everyone knows someone who has suffered from this debacle.

Russia’s economy is shattered. Its reputation in the world is wrecked. But just like in Pete Seeger’s song about Vietnam, “The Big Muddy,” the big fool – in this case, Putin – says to push on.

Not that Ukraine hasn’t suffered. Far from it. Many of its cities are piles of rubbles, resulting from aerial bombardment, missile attacks and drones. Way too many civilians – and way, way too many children have been killed or maimed. The scars of this will take generations to heal.

Ukraine has been bolstered by the help from the world’s democracies. Particularly the European Union, Canada and Japan, with unflinching support from London to Warsaw to Ottawa to Berlin to Tokyo to Rome. The bad guys in World War II are the good guys this time.

We used to be among the good guys. President Joe Biden and many in Congress, on a bipartisan basis, stood up for Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians. They were treated like the world heroes they are – Biden traveling to Kyiv clandestinely to show his support, Zelenskyy speaking before a joint session of Congress.

Now it’s hard to tell which side the United States is on. Zelenskyy is probably still smarting from the humiliating treatment he received from Trump and Vance when he came to the White House last year.

And Republican talking points on social media include posts bragging – bragging! – that Ukraine is no longer getting generous funding from the U.S. When I saw one of these posts on my feed recently, I was tempted to ask the poster what the weather was like in Novosibirsk.

Of course, Trump has been too busy causing trouble in the rest of the world. There’s the idiotic war against Iran, the grab for oil in Venezuela and the saber rattling against Cuba and – and this is even more confounding than thinking Ukraine would stand up to Russia – Canada and Greenland.

Hopefully, the midterm elections will change some of this trajectory. But November seems like forever away. Five more months of death, destruction and Trump still seeing Putin as some kind of model for world leader conduct.

As frustrating as are all the domestic debacles perpetrated by the second Trump mishegas, the fact that we are the wrong side in plain battles of evil vs. good is pathetic. When Ukraine wins its war against Russia – and I’m among those now convinced that it’s Zelenskyy, not Putin, who holds the cards – we will not deserve the credit and the gratitude that others in the West will garner.

Not from the country that, in 2026, is becoming the leader of the free world.

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38 – мужність

The mortal enemy of the United States on the day I was born was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

We were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. We were petrified that some nutty leader would attempt to nuke us into oblivion. 

In a few years, there was a space race to go with it. And the Soviets seemed determined to spread their influence around the globe.

But that nutty leader wouldn’t be Joseph Stalin, who died in 1953, the year before I was born. By April 1954, Nikita Khrushchev had assumed the important job of Communist Party Chairman. 

Any hope that Khrushchev would be a kindler, gentler Soviet leader were crushed in 1956, when he sent troops to end an anti-Communist uprising in Hungary, and vanished in 1961 when the Berlin Wall divided the occupied former German capital.

Every U.S. President from Truman to George H.W. Bush stood fast against the Soviets. In the case of John F. Kennedy, that meant taking us to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 when Khrushchev placed nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from this country.

It was during Bush’s presidency that the USSR crumbled. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet bloc states shed their totalitarian ways and there was a sense that the threat had abated. Now, we could focus on nut cases in the Middle East.

A former KGB agent – someone who was a toddler in Leningrad in 1954 – wended his way to power in Moscow. Vladimir Putin was a required to be a member of the Communist Party when he was serving the Soviets from New Zealand and East Germany. 

But, magically, he foreswore Communism for a form of Russian nationalism that included helping oligarchic capitalists and reclaiming territory that the Soviets controlled up until 1991.

And, from 2017 to 2021, it was no longer the United States standing up to the Russians. Putin had a buddy in President Donald Trump and laid the groundwork for further mischief.

There was however, one leader who was determined to stop him. A former comedian who ascended to the presidency of Ukraine – which had been the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office in 2019 – a year in which he had a very uncomfortable meeting with Trump, who was seeking dirt on potential presidential rival Joe Biden. The meeting led to Trump’s first impeachment, in which he was acquitted.

When Putin sought to expand his Russian empire by retaking Ukraine in 2022, Zelenskyy and the bulk of the Ukrainian people weren’t having it. Expected by the world to capitulate in days, the Ukrainians are still standing. Their courage – мужність in Ukrainian – should be an inspiration to all who believe in democracy and freedom.

It would have surprised my parents if you told them, in 1954, that a place supposedly part of the Soviet Union would stand up to the attempt to recreate something like it in the 21st century.

Here’s the part that would have stunned and saddened them – and most other adult Americans: With Ukraine fighting for its life, politicians in the United States – mostly Republicans following the Putin-apologist Trump – would work to stop providing aid to keep Kyiv fighting.

It goes to show that the Cold War was about fighting Communism, not the historically aggressive stance of the land mass that is Russia. When Russia turned to oligarchic capitalism, too many Americans were happy to support it.

My parents would be as angry as I am.

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