Debellation has nothing to do with ringing out the old year

The war in Ukraine grinds on

Economic Principals has been a NATO-blamer since the mid-Nineties, but after three years of war in Ukraine, blame attaches about equally to all sides. Keeping up with events over the last decade has meant subscribing to Johnson’s Russia List, a perpendicular collection of twenty or thirty news item that arrives almost daily in EP’s in-box. It was through JRL that EP began following Fred Weir’s dispatches from Moscow.

Weir was a third-generation member of Canada’s Communist Party when he went to Russia in 1986 as a correspondent for a weekly communist newspaper. Mikhail Gorbachev had risen to power. Weir wanted to see for himself what might happen. He met and married a Russian woman, and has lived there ever since. Today he is a Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor who publishes side notes on Facebook. He may be the most dispassionate journalist working in Russia today.

Ten days ago, Weir posted this short item on Facebook:

Here is another excellent installment of "Big Serge Thought," which is actually extremely knowledgeable and competent military analysis. I wait for these occasional posts impatiently, because he has tended to be right about the main things since the beginning of the war and has a clear way of explaining the big picture, which often seems lost to me in the welter of daily reports. He exudes what sounds like a pro-Russian tone but, as I say, he's gotten it mostly bang-on right for the past three years, and you can't argue with that. So here's his synopsis of the state of the war at the beginning of 2025.