Update on War in Ukraine For March 27, 2022

        

A well-known Russian Lieutenant General who bragged before the invasion began that the “military operation” would be successfully completed in a matter of a mere few hours has been killed in Ukraine. Indeed, the apparently arrogant Lieutenant General Yakov Rezantsev is now reportedly the seventh Russian general to be killed in the war in Ukraine.  

Far from being successfully completed in mere hours, this war in Ukraine, begun by the invading Russians in late February, is just over one month into the conflict now. Not only has the Ukrainian resistance proven to be far stronger than most of the world believed, but the Russians have looked far weaker and more vulnerable than most people – especially the head honchos in the Kremlin – had expected them to be. In recent days, in a shift in priorities that many experts believe is actually a concession to just how poorly the invasion in Ukraine has been going for his invading forces, Putin has stated that the main objective is for Russia to secure the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, near the border with Russia itself. It is there that Putin contends the rights of Russians are being violated, and which he claims to want to protect the people there from persecution by Ukrainian national extremists. Putin has also claimed that Nazis are in control in Ukraine, even though there is considerable evidence to the contrary. 

Yet paradoxically, almost as soon as Russia said that it would focus more on eastern Ukraine, and especially the Donbas region, it launched an attack on L'viv. L'viv is, of course, the major city in western Ukraine, close to the Polish border. To this point, it had largely been spared the excesses of war, at least in comparison to other Ukrainian cities particularly Mariupol and Kharkiv. Some felt that it was actually more of a symbolic message to American president Joe Biden, who is visiting Poland, near the Ukrainian border. 

Biden himself seemed to call for regime change, and has stated more than once now his opinion that Putin is a war criminal. However, Secretary of State Andrew Blinken and other American officials have been rolling that comment back, suggesting that there is no American policy of regime change for Russia. Those words, "regime change," bring back far too many memories of another unpopular and largely unjustifiable war with that stated intention of bringing down a government, this one in Iraq. Americans ignored the sentiments of much of the rest of the world and went ahead with their invasion of Iraq back in the spring of 2003. It sure seems that White House officials are quick to kill any comparisons with that misstep, which led to a war that lasted far longer, and was also far, far more costly in almost every way, than Bush administration officials at the time had predicted. 

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Zelensky has said that the West needs to show more courage when it comes to supporting the Ukrainian war effort. 

Top Russian general who bragged invasion would only take hours killed in Ukraine Cami Mondeaux - March 26, 2022:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/top-russian-general-who-bragged-invasion-would-only-take-hours-killed-in-ukraine/ar-AAVwU9T?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&fbclid=IwAR38mDU2p5I30xayZKehHyRQ6Qnms4CUsSGRbJl7DKpafnXgmxJbXJpdFcc