Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Parallels between the two wars abound, from the grinding nature of the fighting to the way new technologies reshaped warfare.   A Ukrainian soldier in Kostiantynivka, a city ravaged by drone warfare, in January. Credit... image by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Article by Constant Méheut Constant Méheut, who has covered the war in Ukraine since 2023, previously reported for The Times from France The New York Times , June 11, 2026 Updated 9:46 a.m. ET The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be “the last of the last” once seemed unthinkable. That is just what happened on Thursday. The war in Ukraine — which reached 1,569 days, or more than four years and three months — has now outlasted World War I. When President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent his troops into Ukraine in February 2022, he beli...

   from Quora Trevor Bacquet  ·  Follow History/geopolitics enthusiast  Apr 10 Why did Putin think he could win in Ukraine in just 3 days? Why wouldn’t he think this? Putin had a track record of getting what he wanted. When he went into Crimea in 2014, Europe condemned it, inflicted some symbolic sanctions, and called it a day. Crimea fell almost without a fight. No one did anything other than utter empty words when he instigated a war in Eastern Ukraine. Indeed, Germany increased its dependency on Russian oil and gas between 2014 and 2022. Prior to his full-scale invasion, EU leaders gave speeches about the “right side of history” and walked back even some of those condemnations when Putin used the threat of cutting off oil and gas to certain nations. At least on paper, Ukraine’s military should have been crushed. We’d assumed Russia’s military was as powerful as it appeared on paper. At the time, I listened to numerous fanboys claiming that Russia’s ground for...