This is hard to make sense of. But let me give you a brief update. A short time ago the Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article which cited official Russian military numbers of killed in action in Ukraine as 9,861. That is a mind-blowing number. In one month Russia would have lost 2/3rds of the soldiers it lost in a decade in Afghanistan. But then a very short time later the article was pulled and replaced by a 404 error. Then it was reposted without any numbers.
What lends some credibility to these numbers is that that is in the ballpark of many Western estimates for Russian fatalities. I’ve been watching expert Russia watchers debate this in real time on Twitter and they seem to disagree on whether this was a real number that was rapidly pulled or whether it was just a complete goof, a typo.
From the outset of the Ukraine Crisis, Ukraine’s relationship with Europe and potential integration into Europe via the European Union has been a, perhaps the, cornerstone issue. I got to thinking about this over the weekend since almost every European language originated in the country we now call Ukraine. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t argue that what I’m describing has any particular relevance to the current crisis. But it’s a fascinating prism through which we can look at our connections to the distant past. The language which I am now writing and which you are now reading originated on the steppeland just north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In other words, in the region we now call Ukraine and some adjoining parts of Russia and perhaps Romania. This is true of English — a loose hodgepodge language — but not only English. All European languages except Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque start there. (Maltese, an official EU language, is derived from Arabic, a Semitic language. Turkish is an Altaic language so it depends what you count as “Europe.”) And not just Europe. This is also the origin point for the languages of Iran, much of Central Asia and northern India (including Hindi and Urdu). This is not to mention the Spanish, Portuguese and French that are spoken in the Western Hemisphere outside of Anglophone Canada and the United States.
I mentioned last week that a significant part of high energy prices which have fueled inflation have been driven by the refusal of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies to increase supply and moderate prices. As we discussed last week, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, has been fairly open about the fact that he sees no urgency about cooling oil prices as long as the U.S. government has not provided him with immunity for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi or total support for its war in Yemen.
Just this morning, the Saudi Foreign Ministry put out more of what amount to threats if the U.S. doesn’t back its war in Yemen. From Al Arabiya …
I mentioned a few days ago that one of the most promising innovations of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. is the use of wastewater analysis to predict the ebbs and flows of pandemic waves. The technology isn’t new — it’s just testing sewage water. It’s not that no one had thought about it or done it before. But the society-wide crisis of the COVID pandemic has demonstrated its utility and potential in dramatically new ways. So two thoughts: We’ve seen the potential of these approaches already. Mandates and other interventions are now maniacally polarized. But the federal government should be using this strategy to create a simple and easy to understand forecasts of COVID prevalence. I knew that cases were likely to rise a week ago because I follow wastewater analysis trends and also follow patterns around the world. But it shouldn’t be that hard. It should be available in something like a weather forecast, done in a systematic fashion, made available to the public through all the logical channels. It could and should be like weather reports or the daily and weekly allergy forecasts you can find online.
