Just give Ukraine weapons — now

Russian T-72 tanks are winning big — at the glitzy tank biathlon competitions at Alabino, near Moscow. These are the same tanks that lack at the front.

There’s a special word for this is Russian: pokazukha. It means showing off. Pokazukha is essentially lying. Like the proverbial profusion of words for different kinds of snow in Eskimo languages, Russian language has an overabundance of terms that describe different shades of lying, particularly lying to superiors: pokazukha, ochkovtiratelstvo, tufta and lipa.

The only reason Putin’s regime went to war is because Putin believed his own lies. He was hoisted by his own propaganda.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Putin’s war was doomed. It was doomed the moment he acted on the belief that FSB infiltrated Ukraine with thousands of agents that would overthrow Kiev’s regime for him; it was all tufta.

It was doomed the moment Putin believed that he really has new wonder weapons. That was tufta as well.

Pavel Filatiev, 34, a Russian soldier who escaped the war and wrote a scathing memoir, described how the truck that took him to war had no brakes. The real condition of Russian tanks? One of my correspondents was a conscript back in 1980s. At that time, he told me, the tanks in his division were standing in their boxes in two rows. In the front row were the tanks that were able to start and exit the box on their own; the tanks in the second row were tied to the first by cables.

When the Russian army did not take Kiev and eventually rolled off, leaving behind the bodies of civilians with hands tied behind their backs, Putin regrouped and started a glacial advance in Donbas, falling back on Stalin’s tactics — barrage to scorch the cities before advancing the cannon fodder.

But this tactic is also doomed. When Stalin was razing the cities, he repopulated them later with peasants. Putin has no rural population to compensate. When Stalin used people as cannon fodder, he had an inexhaustible supply. Putin doesn’t: he tries to fight Stalin’s war without Stalin’s means.

The real goal of Putin’s Donbas campaign was to take control of the unique Donbas water supply system which comprises 16 miles of pipes over gullies and railways and is situated near Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. Without it, Donbas would revert to its pristine condition of arid steppe. The system is irreparablу wrecked, and right now Putin has no hope of taking it.

The troops have reportedly started faking it; for in the Russian army you are taught — to perfection — never to dispute an order from above, however insane it may be. You just don’t carry it out. “Russian commanders right now are busily imitating military activities, for the art of the fake is the key to survival in the Russian armу,” says Alexei Arestovich, 47, advisor to the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Why should you fight if you can lie?

The Russian army was shelling Ukrainian cities and claiming that Ukrainians were shelling themselves; and instead of hitting key military targets with precision missiles, it declared a military target whatever was hit.

It was tufta all over again, mingled this time with children’s blood.

They call Putin’s regime fascism. I would call it fakism. This sociopathic regime will never stop committing crimes — because it’s convinced it can ascribe its crimes to its victims.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian HIMARS supplied by the U.S. destroyed Russian ammo dumps, and the creeping advance of Ukrainian troops started to pose danger for Russians holding Kherson, the only big population center Russia seized on the right side of Dnipro.

Putin, still blinded by his own tufta, made a strategic mistake – he started sending in troops across the river to reinforce Kherson. The bridges were blown, and the troops were cut not in two, but in three, by the Dnipro and it tributary, as Oleg Zhdanov, 56, a military expert and a former member of Ukrainian General Staff points out. HARMs supplied by the U.S. took out Russian air defense — and then the Russian ammo dumps and airfields in Crimea started exploding. It was a wakeup call for Putin, whose propaganda calls Crimea sacred.

So why are the Ukrainian troops not advancing by leaps and bounds? The answer is simple. The Ukrainian army is still outgunned and has little armor. Before the war, Russia had over 12,000 tanks and 26,000 infantry fighting vehicles, and quantity is a quality of its own. The U.S. has not yet supplied Ukraine with a single tank or IFV; Europe sent about 300. It is hard to advance on foot in a 21^st century war.

As the authors of the recent joint letter to The Hill put it, “By providing aid sufficient to produce a stalemate, but not enough to roll back Russian territorial gains, the Biden administration may be unintentionally seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.” 

So, what is going to happen when Putin wakes up? The answer is dire — his regime is going to become even more paranoid, truly unsane.

There’s just one force that can prevent this scenario: the Ukrainian army. If it deals a decisive blow to Putin’s bloody tufta and takes back Crimea, the turbulence in the Kremlin will just become too great. The gap between the reality and the tank biathlon will swallow Putin.

Otherwise, the world will have to deal with an insane regime for another quarter of century.

Just give Ukraine weapons. Now.

Yulia Latynina, a journalist, worked for Echo of Moscow radio station and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper until they were shut down as part of the current war in Ukraine. She is a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Defender of Freedom award.