The fascists running the war in Ukraine are very different than the dumb kids recruited to pound out land mines with their feet. They'll keep suckering in new cadres of young people with promises of God, Glory, and Gold. And Russian mortar fire will continue to turn the rich black-earth fields of Ukraine into a blood soaked hell.

Zelensky sacking all his recruiters across the country suggests to me that they’re having trouble finding people. I can’t remember where I read this, but someone wrote somewhere that a factor in the October Revolution was the way that most of the tsarists in the military had already gotten themselves killed by charging German machine guns basically with their bare hands for years. This left nobody in the army except the liberals and the communists (and the tsarist officers).

Nobody is winning. Nobody benefits.

Contradictions in the global north (especially between the USA and France) are breathing new life into anti-colonial movements in West Africa. There are also intensifying contradictions between virulently Russophobic Eastern European (American puppet) states versus Western European states which just want cheap Russian oil and natural gas to power their economies. As various countries around the world smell blood in the water regarding the USA and NATO, they start reconsidering the seeming invulnerability of the West. By joining organizations like BRICS, the collapse of the dollar and the possibility of the end of the period of European colonization which began in 1492 (or even earlier with the first Portuguese slave raids in North Africa) becomes possible.