Julia on How Putin’s War Ends

Putin’s Woodchipper, S.B.F.’s Longshot Candidate, The G.O.P. Kingmaker

Welcome back to the Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to the latest reporting at Puck.

Today, Julia Ioffe offers an incisive snapshot of where things stand militarily after three months of war in Ukraine—a stalled-out Russian war machine, a Ukrainian army fortified by foreign aid, and a so-called “dynamic stalemate” obscuring any possible resolution.

Plus, below the fold, Teddy Schleifer explains how crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed effort to buy a Congressional seat presages a remarkable new era of election meddling. Then, he joins Peter Hamby on The Powers That Be to discuss Larry Ellison’s remarkable transformation from political centrist to G.O.P. kingmaker.

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Putin’s Wood Chipper

As we approach the three-month mark in Russia’s attack on Ukraine, there is plenty of cause for optimism—a “dynamic stalemate” in which Russia’s military is collapsing while Ukraine is fighting with discipline, valor, and Western aid. But as one Russian military expert told me, Russia is focused on grinding down the Ukrainian military. The word he used, though, was peremolot’, which can be translated to describe something that a wood chipper does.

JULIA IOFFE

Next week will mark three months since Russian forces invaded Ukraine—and stalled almost immediately. It didn’t take a military expert to understand that the Russian “special military operation,” as Vladimir Putin called it, was not going according to plan. Whole columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles sat burned out on Ukrainian roads. Ukrainian civilians, whom Putin expected to greet his soldiers as liberators, threw Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks and tried to stop them with their bare hands. The Ukrainian military fought so skillfully and bravely that Moscow soon had to abandon its hopes of taking Kyiv. And when Russia pulled back, regrouped, and launched what it called the second phase of its special military operation to “liberate” the Donbas, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that Russia, in fact, had suffered a major defeat.

Now, this second phase has also run aground. Russia has completed its brutal conquest of Mariupol, the Ukrainian city that broke the collective Western heart, but that is the only major achievement that Russia can point to in the last month. It has gained some territory, but lost territory elsewhere, including around the major cities of Chernihiv and Kharkiv. In the case of Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces have pushed the Russians back to the border, from which Russian artillery can no longer reach the city, Ukraine’s second largest…

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