(Sept. 21) Never mind all those American news reports that Russian drone attacks are successfully weakening Ukraine and frightening Poland. The reality is that Ukraine actually is winning its defensive, existential war, and it just needs the United States to stop tying its hands.
That is the message from perhaps the United States’ most knowledgeable expert on Russia, who happens to be an adoptive New Orleanian of long standing — and he makes a compelling case.
S. Frederick Starr is perhaps best known as the founder and leader of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, as a prolific author on history and culture, as co-founder of the Greater New Orleans Foundation and as a former vice president of Tulane and president of Oberlin College. His academic field and decades of practical experience, though, always has involved Russian and central Asian affairs. He is the co-founder of the Kennan Institute for advanced Russian studies, and he has advised three presidents and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Basically, bluntly, Russia is definitely and unquestionably losing this war,” Starr told me last week. “And that’s why you see desperate acts like this attack by drones against Poland.”
Starr said the war has broken Russia’s economy, wrecked its military, greatly exacerbated its “huge demographic collapse” and weakened Russian President Vladmir Putin’s long-term hold on power.
“On the eve of Russia’s invasion,” Starr said, “Russia was riding high. It had $160 billion in its rainy-day fund; it appeared to be booming; and Putin had already seized part of Georgia … and he had also claimed Crimea.” Now, though, Russia has “completely spent that $160 billion … and the Russian state is literally bankrupt.” Some 1,200,000 young Russian men either have been killed in the war or “wounded to the extent that they can’t work,” and Putin “long since ran out of trained military … (In addition to the dead and wounded), tens of thousands are going over to the Ukrainian side. Meanwhile, he has had no money to repair roads, to keep the railroads going and so on … and there’s a huge gas crisis in Russia, enormous.”
With Russia’s trained troops mowed down, Putin has had to empty Russian prisons to feed the killing fields….. [The full column is at this link.]
