This will be a short post. I am trying to get my weekly schedule under control. However, there is continuing news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and there is therefore need to provide commentary to put it into context.
First, it appears that Vladimir Putin has begun to launch extra squadrons of flying monkeys in order to spread disinformation and to influence world opinion in his favor. Several thousand such monkeys organized a protest in Germany to oppose the German government's decision to send more effective arms to Ukraine to help drive out the Russian invaders. And the government of China's Xi Jinping has also tried to pressure the people of Ukraine into accepting a false "peace" which would do nothing to protect them from continued Russian aggression. There are also the usual highly-placed mouthpieces in the West who are trying to cast doubt on the rightness of the West's continued support of Ukraine. However, ordinary citizens in the West have begun to organize their own rallies to demonstrate their continued support of the people of Ukraine and their continued opposition to the thuggish Russian invasion. And Poland has begun openly supplying Ukraine with military aid.
The Russian government knows that if the West supplies Ukraine with adequate weaponry, the Russian invasion will be decisively defeated. Therefore the voices of Putin's flying monkeys may well represent a cry of desperation. For anyone who is genuinely confused about the character of Russia or of the thug named Vladimir Putin, please read the posts I have linked on the sidebar of this blog under the heading, "Russia."
P.S. I still need to do research before I write the next post in my series of posts on precarity and the precariat. In future posts in this series, I hope to illustrate the connection between the oligarchs who rule Russia and China and some of the oligarchs who have taken root in the West. Also, there is a bright bit of good news: the Russian invasion of Ukraine has motivated Europe to engage in a massive build-out of renewable electricity generation capacity. This has resulted in a situation in which today Europe produces more of its electricity from renewables than from natural gas. If Russia was hoping to use its oil and gas reserves as a tool to enslave the rest of the world, hopefully the Russians are now starting to realize that they have shot themselves in the foot.
