Day 756
Do what we say, not as we do
One message conveyed from Lindsey to Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv yesterday was: Get your forced conscription act together!
”I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can't believe it's at 27. You're in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line," Lindsey said.
"No matter what we do, you should be fighting," he said. "No matter what we do, you're fighting for you," he added.
We — I mean we in Ukraine — remain disappointed with what Team USA, including Lindsey, said it would do, but has not done and is not doing sufficiently, namely providing enough ammo and weapons.
The last time I checked, Trumpists like Lindsey and Speaker Mike were gumming up the works. Of course, Ukrainians presume on themselves. Failure to do so would mean certain death.
It’s too bad Lindsey didn’t chat up member of parliament Serhiy Demchenko (from the president’s Servant of the People party faction), who yesterday blurted out:
"I can say that really the maximum number of decisions are made by the president (Z), the maximum number of state bodies are oriented to the president (Z). Probably, the responsibility in full for the issues of war, international - 100% is on the president (Z). I think that for the country, for the people, dictatorship is definitely is a disadvantage always. But to win the war, perhaps it is a tool that can help defeat the enemy," - MP Serhiy Demchenko
Lindsey and Serhiy might bond over how great it is to live under a dictatorship and forced military conscription.
texty.org.ua has devoted an entire section of its website to mobilization, which is a gigantic mess. It’s Z’s responsibility under the Constitution (Article 106, Para 20) to adopt measures for clothing, arming and feeding recruits for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but he has delegated the task to parliament and the Cabinet of Ministers. A new draft law on mobilization has been passed in its first reading, but lawmakers have proposed more than 4,000 amendments to the bill. No one is leading the charge, so chaos.
Isobel at The Financial Times wrote a story about the mess last week. No one, excluding jornos at the FT, expects Ukraine to draft 500,000 recruits in 2024. A paywalled article appearing in the Cipher Brief, titled As Ukraine Fights For its Survival, Many Young Men Sit Out the War, is almost as misleadinng. There are bright spots in reporting on the mess, however, such as Siobhán’s piece in The Washington Post, titled In this Ukrainian village, almost no men are left.
On the Russian jacket, practicing philosopher Vladimir Pastukhov opines on what life will be like in Russian Baghdad:
Russia has received a new term of special regime. I don’t think it will reach the level of a punishment cell [ШІЗО — Штрафний ізолятор] although it’s already rather insane. All the pandemonium with the election of the head of the colony will soon subside, and attention will focus on long-term factors that will regulate life in the Russian zone for the entire term (unless, of course, God releases [Putin] on parole):
1) Russia, like a truck stuck in the mud, will constantly strive to get out of the war in the best possible way, and each attempt to get out will lead to the fact that it will get stuck deeper and deeper in this mud. Maybe Trump will put planks under the wheels, but then there is a risk that the roof of the car that has escaped from the rut will completely collapse.
2) The vacuum of political life will be filled with terror. Terror will increasingly be thoughtless and inertial. No one in any specific case will be able to really explain why the Kremlin needs this, but the stars will be extinguished one by one. The driver of terror will be not the top, but the bottom. They will press on the authorities and demand new bloody spectacles.
3) A mass slaughter of the sacred cows of a bygone era will begin. Privatization will be one of the first to be killed. This does not mean that everything will be taken away from everyone. But when they take away what is needed and from whom it is needed, the argument that it was “honestly privatized through backbreaking labor” will no longer work. Each “lucky” person will have to renew the contract with the gang on new terms. Private property will de facto eventually become collective, but not state property. It will all belong to the common fund and it will be managed according to the rules.
4) Obsessive “big ideas” will increasingly take hold of the collective unconscious of the aging Putin clan, which is why the overall vector of its evolution will become increasingly irrational. An attempt to save the situation by hastily integrating escheated ignoramuses into the management mechanism will only worsen managerial chaos and create a feeling of universal chaos. The time of early [current Prime Minister Mikhail] Mishustin will be remembered as golden.
5) In general, everything is going according to the standard historical plan. Continue to sleep peacefully, residents of Russian Baghdad.