Fungible Ukraine
Lurching towards victory
I spent most of Saturday listening to panel discussions at Munich Security Conference, where the inadequacy of Team USA’s response was on full display.
Put bluntly, over the course of a year, the collective west has failed to provide Ukraine with enough guns and ammo to vaporize Russian invaders and offers zero clarity of what Ukraine’s victory will look like.
Tony sounded like he was in a good mood, though, cheerfully agreeing with what Germany Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock was burbling about during their hour-long joint chit chat, titled Visions for Ukraine.
Tony said Team USA would agree with Ukraine’s decisions about how to end the war as long as the solution will bring durable peace and comply with international law.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, in turn, said victory is
full restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty,
reparations and
making sure Russia never again poses a threat.
“Everything before then will be a war, one way or another,” Kuleba said.
Annalena emphasized we should remember all that has been achieved since the full-invasion started. Tony said there is a commitment to provide Ukraine with tools (but not all the tools) it requires to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position in the years ahead.
“It’s not just the weapons systems, it’s the training, maintenance and making sure all these things are being used in a comprehensive way to be successful,” Tony said.
I decided to put some extra bandages and Celox in my EDC after watching this vid posted from somewhere in eastern Ukraine.
In other news, incomparable John Simpson, one more a harmless, affable British bumpkin known for a near-creepy obsession with himself (Those were the days working with Rory) has been pootling around Kyiv and has taken another drag-queen-on-poppers free-association bitch-lurch non-interview with Z .
We all remember John, don’t we?
Which brings back me to Seymour Hersh, who tangled us up in a TLDR fantasy last week.
Russia’s state wire service TASS quoted Hersh as saying that he based his Substack debut on information provided by “a person, who knows rather a lot about what is going on.”
One unnamed source. Let that sink in.