OPINION: Thinking Out Loud: Aug.18, 2024

Let me briefly comment on some things that have happened during the last few days – the good, the bad, and the not-so-pleasant.

So here goes, re: Kursk, Putin, Lukashenko and Belarus. And I’ll leave Kamala Harris’s impressive progress in challenging Donald Trump, the continuing bloody deadlock in the Middle East conflict, and the struggle for democracy in Venezuela for others.

Vlad no longer "Puttin on the Ritz”

The Ukrainian successes in their stunning incursion into Russia proper – in the Kursk region – have rightly continued to dominate the headlines. Yes, as many are saying, this appears to have been a game changer, at least for the moment as the Russians keep pressing hard in the Donbas sector and hurling missiles and artillery shells at Ukraine.

Russia appears to be in shock, having been caught flat-footed militarily and propagandistically. But, the critical question is: How will the servile Russian public and Putin’s inner circle react to this major blow to their sense of arrogant pride and invincibility?

In the blind belief, at least on the part of a large part of the Russian population, in their modern-day, would-be, ever so complexed, tsar-conqueror, Vladimir, whom the former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili once aptly called “Liliputin” – referring to the miniature creatures of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Other Topics of Interest

N. Korean Troops Massed in Russia to Enter Ukraine War ’Soon’: Pentagon Chief

Austin said he had "not seen significant reporting" of North Korean troops being "actively engaged in combat" to date.

Ukrainians are not after Russian territory. They want the Russians to come to their senses and remove the cynical, bloody, megalomaniac and his cronies that terrorize us all. It’s the modern fascists in the Kremlin, not the purported neo-Nazis in Ukraine, as Putin and his criminal band would have it, that need to be removed.

Let’s not forget about the Belarusian factor

Meanwhile, Putin’s Belarusian vassal Alexander Lukashenko has, as always, resorted to his self-serving schizophrenia. Last week the bloated tyrant, while allowing his de facto colony of Moscow to be used by the Russians as a staging area and continually denouncing his Western neighbors, but perhaps fearing the way things are going, dared to tell Russian TV that the current war is not needed by Russia nor Ukraine.

Lukashenko also released a relatively small number of political prisoners, most of whom were in ill health or had agreed to admit their “guilt” as dissenters opposed to his despotism.

Some in the West have seized on this while ignoring that many more new political prisoners are quietly replacing those freed from among the 1,400 known cases still current four years after Lukashenko rigged the presidential election in August 2000 and with Russian help cracked down mercilessly on the nascent peaceful Belarusian revolution of dignity.

Belarusian democratic opposition movement leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has reminded us today: “This is the fifth birthday that my husband Siarhei spends as a political prisoner. Our children keep asking about him, but there’s been only silence for over 500 days. I know in my heart that he hasn’t given up & that our family will be together again.”

There is no excuse for us to overlook the continuing heroic struggle of the Belarusian people for their freedom, even if overshadowed by the Russian-Ukrainian war, and for President Zelensky not to openly support it.