Programming note: Mark has given a rare post-cardiac interview. It's to his Mark Steyn Cruisemate Dan Wootton over at Dan's Substack. Tomorrow, Wednesday, Mark hopes to be back behind the microphone taking questions from Steyn Clubbers around the world at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time) for our latest Clubland Q&A. Hope you can swing by.
~Here's a cheery headline from the Russian press:
Markov: an attack on Russia's strategic aviation is grounds for the use of nuclear weapons.
That would be Sergey Markov, former advisor to Tsar Vlad, who admittedly is somewhat partial to nuke-rattling: in the early stages of the Ukraine war, he threatened to nuke the UK, for what reason I forget - the exciting new Islamic blasphemy laws? the paedo rape gangs?
This time, however, Mr Markov was responding to the weekend's Ukrainian drone strike deep inside Russia. By "deep", I mean Siberia. Which supposedly took out forty of Putin's 120 strategic bombers using drones smuggled into the country via trucks which then fanned out and parked within range of various air bases.
Which is brilliant and innovative, in the sense that Castro blowing up a third of the USAF during the Cuban missile-crisis negotiations would have been. Right now, the only thing standing between the planet and the Third World War is Vladimir Putin's forbearance. And, as all the smart people assured us in the spring of 2022, the Russian not-so-strongman was "dying" (Christopher Steele, sole proprietor of Dossiers R Us) or dead, either of which condition can make one's nuclear-war judgment a little erratic. Headline from the UK Daily Mirror, almost exactly three years ago:
Vladimir Putin may already be dead with body double taking his place, MI6 chiefs claim
That headline is 100 per cent accurate if you remove the words "Vladimir" and "Putin" and replace them with "Joe" and "Biden" respectively. Incidentally, analyse each nation's advances in body-double technology by comparing "Biden"'s ability to host a G7 with "Putin"'s ability to host a BRICS summit. That's the way to bet if it comes to World War Three. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R - Zakarpattia), was in Kiev to meet with Zelenskyyyy the day before Operation Bring It On. He had the affect of a chap who knew what was coming - although one notes he has yet to make good on his comparatively less ambitious pledge to sink Greta Thunberg's Gaza boat.
Forty years ago, everybody claimed to be super-worried about imminent mushroom clouds. A bestselling poster of the day:
Anyone care to remake the above with Senator Graham and Victoria Nuland, She-Wolf of the Donbass? Ah, but maybe it doesn't work as well with Deep State non-household-names in the leads. It's not so long since Lindsey was telling Zelenskyyyy to resign, but he's apparently back on board. And, more generally, most western media were happy to report the drone strike as more of a poke in the eye to Trump than to Putin. Headline from National Review:
Country That Allegedly Had No Cards to Play Keeps Finding New Cards to Play
This is in reference to Trump's jibe from February that Ukraine had "no cards to play". The question then arises: Where did Z find these "new cards"? When Pete Hegseth took over as US Defence Secretary, he quickly confirmed what every sentient creature had long suspected - that the Pentagon had been micro-managing Ukraine's end of the war for the previous three years. Are they still doing so? In defiance of their nominal commander-in-chief?
I am prepared to believe that Kiev could dispatch a crack team of its many fetching male models to firebomb Sir Keir Starmer's homes and former Toyota. I am less certain of the provenance of Sunday's operation. Meanwhile, Z is announcing at least another year of meat-grinding carnage. From The Spectator:
The Ukrainian president said this week he hopes the war will end by next June. Not this summer. Not this year. But in 12 months' time. Sanctions, he believes, and four years of gruesome war will finally hit the Russian economy, pushing it into a deep budget deficit. The IMF's latest forecast sort of backs this up. Russia's GDP growth is set to slow to 0.9 per cent next year, down from over 4 per cent in 2024.
So Russia's economy is set to sink to GDP growth of a mere 0.9 per cent? I thought the Russian economy had collapsed three years ago under the weight of what Biden called the toughest sanctions regime ever imposed. If that led to four per cent growth last year, the developed world should be lining up and begging to be given the Putin treatment. Annual GDP growth for 2024:
United States 2.8%
Canada 1.6%;
United Kingdom 1.1%
France 1.07%
Italy 0.7%
Germany -0.2%
So good luck banking on Russian economic collapse. As former Steyn Show guest Christopher Caldwell observes en passant:
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Joe Biden got another lesson in American decline. He attempted to bring the Russian economy to its knees with sanctions and boycotts, only to discover that the United States and Europe, even together, lacked the leverage to compel China and India to join them. 'Backward' Russia has manufactured more shells in the course of the war than the advanced West.
We went into rather more detail about this a year ago, via some perceptive remarks by Viktor Orbán on the reality that the Ukraine war had revealed. Three years ago, we were told that the world was united against Putin's aggression. In fact, the world is united against the west, and very much on Putin's side. The Kremlin body-double is wanted by the "International" Criminal Court, but, when he hosts a summit on Russian soil, China, India, Brazil, Iran, the Arabs, South Africa et al are happy to fly in for the group photo. So the Ukraine war has accelerated what Mr Caldwell calls "American decline", and the rise of the post-western world: The rest of the planet concluded over three years ago that it was not in their interest to permit Putin to lose. If Lindsey Graham, Ms Nuland and the others panting for World War Three actually get it, China, India and the rest will likewise conclude that it is not in their interest to permit America to win.
And yet the meat-grinder grinds on. Look at the photograph at top right that National Review used to illustrate their story on plucky little Ukraine kicking the arse of the Russian bear. It was taken by Marko Djurica for Reuters in late April, and shows two soldiers of Ukraine's 13th operational NGU Khartiia Brigade prepping a Vampire drone for a test flight. On the left is a boy; on the right is a man in late middle-age.
Ukraine cannot win this war for reasons that have nothing to do with Russian troops, Nato weapons, Victoria Nuland's blood lust or Macron's Pullman-car cocaine. Ukraine cannot win because there are now too few Ukrainians either to triumph on the battlefield or to rebuild the country after victory - and not just because all the fighting-age male models would rather firebomb Keir Starmer's homes than Russian tanks. Ukraine's existential crisis is not a sudden influx of Russians but a huge lack of Ukrainians.
In the three decades between the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the start of the war, Ukraine's population declined from 52 million to 35 million: that's a third smaller. A total fertility rate of 2.1 births per couple is necessary to keep your population not growing but merely stable. A TFR of 1.3 births is what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, from which no society has ever recovered: a lot of European nations have crossed that line in recent years. Yet, according to a report from the Ministry of Justice, Ukraine has halved that "lowest-low" threshold, with a fertility rate of 0.7 in 2023 headed for 0.6 in 2024.
This war is a disguised massive storewide-clearance sale of a dying country's remaining human capital. It will be the last war Ukraine ever fights. Other than Russia, which has demographic challenges not quite as severe, Ukraine is the largest country in Europe. Poland is half the size but with a bigger population; France is a little smaller but with more than twice as many people.
War till next June? What for? Even if Putin were to surrender everything he's taken, they have no Ukrainians to put in those towns. In the end, it's all demography.
~We thank you for all your kind comments on the beginning of The Mark Steyn Club's ninth year - and especially thank all our new members, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
