A twentieth-century dictator fighting a twenty-first century war
A view of Ukraine, and Putin, from Chris James who lives and works in Poland. Not a happy read but an important one.
If you’ve ever read about the First World War and marvelled at how civilised societies tolerated their young men being flung at fixed machine gun positions only to be mowed down in their thousands, wonder no more. In 1914, military commanders adhered to nineteenth-century tactics, but it was a twentieth-century war with far deadlier weapons. And despite heavy losses, the generals could not accept that tactics they learned from the middle of the previous century and earlier had become redundant. In today’s idiom, they ‘doubled down’ and kept throwing away young lives.
Today, Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine carries a similar parallel: a deluded mind wedded to an outdated mentality that twentieth-century imperialism is right, where smaller countries are fair game for absorption or, if they resist, destruction. That the 69-year-old Putin is both strategically out of date and tactically incompetent matters little to the Ukrainian civilians currently dying under…
View original post 851 more words
