Russia is losing -- freedom is winning

It's becoming clearer and clearer that the tide is turning in the Ukraine war.  The most important factor in this is of course the courage and determination of the Ukrainians in defending their nation.  As for Western support, the recent shipping of more advanced and powerful weapons such as HIMARS is helping turn the tide, but we also should acknowledge the importance of economic sanctions.  Inevitably their effect is slow to manifest itself, but as time passes, we see how deep their bite goes.  This summary of the analysis I linked earlier explains the wide-ranging effects on the Russian economy.  Manufacturing is crippled, trade is shrinking, more than a thousand companies have pulled out, educated people are leaving, and the country is heading for a GDP contraction of 30% to 50% relative to before the invasion.  What surface stability remains is due to government interventions which are unsustainable in the long term.

Putin has retaliated by reducing natural-gas supplies to Europe -- but while this is indeed hurting Europe, it is hurting Russia even more, and other potential customers such as China and India are driving hard bargains.  It won't be easy to re-direct natural-gas exports where there is no network of pipelines already in place, as there is from Russia to Europe.  Europe's energy needs will increase in winter, but it is already working on freeing itself from the need for Russian gas imports.  It's hardly credible that such a wealthy and advanced region, with the full support of the US, will not be able to find adequate alternate sources of energy for heating.

On the military front, the UK Ministry of Defence recently posted this video on Russia's growing desperation and resort to old, obsolete equipment since so much of their newer material has been destroyed.  Here's some more detail.  Ukraine is using the advanced HIMARS system to devastate Russian bases and weapons stockpiles near the occupied city of Kherson, whose liberation is the main immediate goal (here's a video of what a HIMARS strike on a weapons warehouse looks like).  Russian missile attacks continue, but of one recent salvo of eight cruise missiles, the Ukrainians destroyed seven before they reached their targets.

(One weird, if trivial, oddity of the situation is that several right-wing US blogs I read not only support Putin but doggedly insist that Russia is actually winning.  Sorry, but I find sources like US intelligence, the UK Ministry of Defence, and the Institute for the Study of War rather more credible than some blogger who also believes that covid vaccines are causing mass deaths and that Biden worships Satan.)

Putin clearly believed that Ukraine would fall easily and that the other democracies would chicken out and take no serious action.  The ghosts of Hitler and Tojo could have told him how that kind of gamble tends to work out.  Evidently he chose not to consult them.  So now he is learning the lesson on his own.

Never forget -- however imperfect, our own democratic societies are free, advanced, rich, and pluralistic, and that makes them strong.  Gangster-states like Russia and China are brutal, corrupt, backward, intolerant of dissent, terrified of letting their own people exercise any freedom or initiative; and all of that makes them weak, no matter how impressive their armies may look on paper.  The mighty Russian military machine turned out to be mostly obsolete and ill-maintained junk, its leadership stunningly inept, its soldiers badly trained and unmotivated.  We've seen what China's civilian engineering standards look like.  Its ruling regime is even more totalitarian and corrupt than Russia's.  It's unlikely that its military is any better than Russia's.

We are the future.  The gangster-states are dead-end relics of failed ideologies.  They can be dangerous, the way a corroded old unexploded bomb is.  But the future belongs to freedom.