“The stunning success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive east of Kharkiv and the accelerating progress made toward Kherson in the south has, to astute observers, brought to mind a famous line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Drinking with his buddies, the character Mike Campbell—a kind of ‘proto-bro’—is asked how he became bankrupt. ... As Lawrence Freedman notes, the sort of collapse we’re seeing from Russia’s forces is familiar to military historians. ... Freedman analogizes Russia’s current conundrum to that of the Afghan National Army last year, but the story of the German Imperial Army in late 1918 is also worth pondering. After imposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks in 1917, German General Erich Ludendorff turned westward to try to defeat the Allies before American reinforcements could arrive in Europe in large numbers....”
A monument to the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Isaak Babel in Odesa.
