Dodge & Burn

 

Ellen Crosby came through Santa Fe a little while back, to promote her new novel, Dodge and Burn.  I’d met her some years previous, at the Edgars, and I wanted to show my support, so I went to her very lively chat and signing, and came home clutching a brand-new copy of the book. 

I’d read a couple of her Lucie Montgomery wine country mysteries – there are twelve, set in and around Virginia and DC, and wine-making is the underlying theme, the mysteries character-driven and on the edgy side of cozy; they steer away from graphic violence, but the consequences of that violence are full frontal. 

This is true as well of Dodge and Burn, the fourth in the Sophie Medina series.  Sophie’s a photographer, who’s spent time scouting war zones and natural disasters, and the fractures of domestic collapse.  Her husband Nick was a CIA covert officer, murdered in the line of duty.  Dodge and Burn, in fact, is more thriller than mystery, strictly speaking.  There’s a killer unmasked at the end, but the story’s really about Sophie’s moral doubts, and a climate of shifting loyalties.  There are moments when she’s in physical danger, yes, but the real danger is inward. Betrayal is corrosive; Sophie wants badly to trust, and her trust is too often treated carelessly.

Our tale begins with a dead guy out at Dulles airport, and his unclaimed baggage turns out to be a load of looted Ukrainian artifacts from behind Russian lines, ready for sale on the black market.  Then there’s the noted collector and philanthropist with an icon of the Virgin of Vladimir in his basement safe, who invites Sophie to take some head shots, later found dead on the floor with Sophie’s camera tripod the murder weapon, and the icon gone, putting Sophie very much in the frame.  And the half-brother Sophie never knew she had, a by-blow of her absent and long-dead dad, the brother a modern-day Robin Hood who steals back – wait for it – stolen black market artifacts, and he’s hot on the trail of the Virgin of Vladimir. 

I’m giving you the hook, and a little extra.  It’s worked out, more or less, but there’s a cloud of ambiguity at the end.  Good is served, but at what price?  Sophie’s left, to my mind, with an unsatisfactory resolution.  It isn’t tied together neatly.  Sophie questions herself, and she doesn’t come up with easy answers.  At least she knows to ask.

I was struck by the notion of how a different writer might write a completely different story, in fact a completely different kind of story.  We know the rule that you can only write your book, that it’s a book only you can write, so I’m in a sense comparing apples and oranges.  But if you take the initial plot element of Dodge and Burn, not its theme, or execution, you may see it develop in other directions.  If it were me, for instance, I’m pretty sure I would have leaned into the Ukraine end, and the war as enterprise, probably Wagner Group, and former KGB behind the looting.  Off the top of my head.  If it were a Don Westlake, it could be a comic caper, the Dortmunder crew, figuring out how to boost the stolen icon; or if it were a Westlake, but one of the Richard Stark books, it would be dark and nasty, and the gang would turn on each other, in a murderous circle.  This is what’s the most interesting to me, the way Ellen Crosby chose to write her book.  The conflict isn’t with Sophie Medina trying to foil the bad guys; the conflict is Sophie trying to figure out where she herself falls, on the moral spectrum.  Would she do the wrong thing for the right reasons?  And which reasons are those?  Sophie doesn’t have to choose, as it turns out, but she’s led to the edge, and she has to look over. 

Dead Man Walking: Prigozhin's Mutiny

For those of you wondering what the hell is going on, trust me, nobody else knows much more than you do. 

A cheat sheet. 

Wagner Group was founded by a Slavic fundamentalist  and neo-Nazi knuckle-dragger named Dmitri Utkin, a former GRU spec ops tactical who later contracted out in Syria as private security.  Back-door finance courtesy of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who maintained deniability while Wagner recruited from Spetsnaz, airborne, and OMON militia assault teams, along with other dedicated special warfare units.  Using regular army logistics and support, Wagner deployed into Crimea and the Donbas, and then to South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Mali.  Often suspected of war crimes, their general M.O. in Africa was to corner the export market in a given natural resource.  Uranium and gold, for example, in Darfur.  Profit aside, this allowed Wagner to maintain the fiction of a private contractor and independent business entity, although it’s common knowledge they operated out of Putin’s hip pocket. 

Prigozhin maintained his distance from Wagner until the war in Ukraine, when it began to suit his purpose to take credit for successes the mainstream Russian military couldn’t claim.  The problem, obviously, is that Prigozhin began to believe his own press – or his own podcasts.  When his enemies in the defense establishment, Shoigu and Gerasimov, effectively engineered a coup against Wagner, by requiring private contractors be subordinated to the Army chain of command (and Prigozhin’s supposed patron Putin signed off on it), the handwriting was on the wall.  Prigozhin moved against the garrison in Rostov-on-Don, and redeployed mobile units toward Voronezh – and Moscow.  It looked like a show of strength, but it mostly served to show Prigozhin had lost touch with reality.  It’s like the guy who climbs out onto the ledge of a tall building and threatens suicide.  If they call your bluff, the only thing left to do is jump. 

I doubt if Prigozhin is dumb enough to take refuge in Minsk.  Lukashenko would happily send his ears to Putin on a string, brokering the truce be damned.  His other options are limited.  He can’t go to any Western capital; it would only be a matter of time before the Hague asked for his extradition.  The former Soviet republics are out, or anywhere that has diplomatic relations with Russia.  And the Kremlin has a long reach, look at Trotsky, or Alexander Litvinenko.  Maybe the Saudis, or the Emirates. 

That’s the trouble with being an apex predator who loses his nerve, or thinks himself safe.  There’s always somebody lurking, in the deep water. 

Art theft: Churchill and Zelensky

Around December 2021 the famous Yousuf Karsh 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill was stolen from the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa and replaced by a forgery. The heist was about 2 months before Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russian invasion is not related to the photograph but also, very related.

The photograph is perhaps one of the most widely reproduced photos of all time. Prime Minister Churchill's belligerent expression exemplified the British resolve to win against Hitler, who many believed to be invincible.

Karsh at that time lived in the Chateau Laurier and was a friend of the Prime Minister of Canada - William Lyon Mackenzie King - and this is how he was able to take the photograph and why it was hanging in the Chateau Laurier.

The photograph is aptly titled ‘The Roaring Lion’. The roar behind the photograph has a story, some parts moving and some parts simply hilarious. Just prior to the photograph being taken, Prime Minister Churchill had given a rousing and defiant speech to the Parliament of Canada. In fact, if you look closely at the photograph you can see the speech peeking out of his pocket. It was a speech to an ally in Parliament but Churchill knew it was a speech that would be shared with the world. I picture him writing the speech by reaching deep within himself into places where hope and belligerence met.

After this speech, and probably carrying the mood of the speech with him, Churchill was brought into the Speaker’s Chamber. Here he found Karsh waiting, with his camera and lighting equipment. The Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hadn't told Churchill he was to be photographed so Churchill roared, "Why was I not told?” I suspect that the look captured on Churchill’s face was present at that moment. Churchill gave Karsh two minutes to take the photograph and this is how Karsh described the two minutes:

“Churchill’s cigar was ever present. I held out an ashtray, but he would not dispose of it. I went back to my camera and made sure that everything was all right technically. I waited; he continued to chomp vigorously at his cigar. I waited. Then I stepped toward him and, without premeditation, but ever so respectfully, I said, “Forgive me, sir,” and plucked the cigar out of his mouth. By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me. It was at that instant that I took the photograph.”

The title of the photograph came, inadvertently, from Churchill himself, who told Karsh, “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” So Karsh named the photograph 'The Roaring Lion'.

This photograph, as much as Churchill’s speech, helped bolster the resolve to continue fighting during those difficult days.

Almost 80 years – perhaps even to the day – after Karsh took this photograph, it was stolen. Then two months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Russia believed it would win the war quickly because it was a much more powerful nation than Ukraine. It felt invincible, just like Hitler did. However, Russia faced two potent forces: history and Zelensky.

History taught Europe and North America that appeasement doesn’t work and the only thing to do when one country attacks a sovereign country is to fight. Churchill’s photograph embodies this fight.

After the 1938 Munich Conference, then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared his appeasement of Hitler had obtained “peace for our time.” When Chamberlain resigned in disgrace, Churchill - who had argued against appeasement - became the Prime Minister, outlined a bold plan of British resistance and declared Britain would “never surrender.”

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky turned down an offer from the United States of evacuation from the capital city Kyiv, by famously stating, "The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride," and with that statement, Zelensky became a wartime leader and, his own ‘Roaring Lion’.

This is because human stories of history never stay in books about the past - they are relived by every generation.

Listening to Churchill’s 1941 speech in that Parliament of Canada and then, Zelensky’s 2022 speech to the Parliament of Canada - although they are very different - one can hear similar themes: both spoke to the courage of their people and the brutality of their opponent. Both were unbowed and pugnacious in their resolve. Leaders give speeches for their allies, for their enemies but, most of all, for their own people because of the personal costs of war. We see that now in videos of Ukraine. We know that more from stories of WWII. My mother-in-law told me half of the young boys she grew up with were killed in the war. I think of that incomprehensible loss when I see videos of the devastation in Ukraine. During wartime, leaders must be roaring lions to keep up the spirit of their people and play down the invincibility of their enemy.

Even though the original stolen photo, The Roaring Lion, has never been recovered, there are copies of this elsewhere, to remind us of a time back then and how easily back then becomes now. History never stays in books - as long as there are people, history is relived by each generation. Apparently, art continues to be stolen by each generation as well.

Holding Back the Tide (Putin's Folly, Pt. II)

The story of King Canute trying to hold back the tide by royal decree is sometimes framed as a fable of kingly vanity, but it’s in fact the reverse.  Canute was rebuking the flatterers in his court who pretended to believe the king’s powers were so absolute he could command the waters to obey.  Canute plunked his throne down on the shore and waited for the tide to come in, and of course got his feet wet.  His point being that only God had the final word, and the power of kings was for naught.

It’s nothing short of amazing that the vanity of princes keeps leading the rest of us to the precipice of doom.  Mitch McConnell clearly thinks Trump is a parasite and a clown, and a danger to the republic, but you won’t hear him say it, because Trump’s base are still useful idiots. A similar paralysis apparently holds sway in the upper reaches of the Kremlin apparat. Putin is dangerous to Russia because Putin has a dangerous idea of Russia, rooted in an imperialist, pan-Slavic, and imaginary czarist past. 

The clamor and the crazy don’t abate.

The voices on the Russian nationalist right are only getting louder.  I don’t know whether Ramzan Kadyrov, the puppet caudillo of Chechnya, or Yevgeny Progozhin, shadow commander of the Wagner Group, are trying to give Putin cover from the right wing by sounding crazier than he does, or positioning themselves as kingmakers for the succession, but their public rhetoric probably mirrors private sentiment, namely, Off With Their Heads, with no lack of fall guys.

Not that heads haven’t already rolled.  No fewer than eight one- and two-star generals have been killed in action this year in Ukraine.  This is a consequence of the Russian army’s institutional dysfunction: there is no professional NCO corps, and junior officers aren’t trusted to make command decisions; generals have to be on the battlefield, which gets them killed.  More to the point, the actual theater commanders are being relieved, retired, or packed off in disgrace.  Dvornikov, given ground command in April, was fired in June.  Serdyukov, commander of the airborne, shown the door.  Zhuravlev, commander Western Military District (responsible for the security of European Russia), got the boot last week. 

The new guy, and the first Russian general in Ukraine to be given sole command and complete responsibility, is Sergei Surovikin, known for tactics in Syria that included two months of airstrikes on Aleppo.  What this means for the war in Ukraine is anybody’s guess, but the Kremlin seems to measure success by the numbers of Russian dead.

Which brings us to the media hysteria.  It’s tempting to compare this to the MAGA bubble, the Fox echo chamber, but we’re not talking about Rupert Murdoch, we’re talking about Russian state media.  RT, Russia Today, is supposedly independent, but that’s a complete fiction, they channel the Kremlin id. Just today, after Russia went after dozens of targets across Ukraine, many if not most of them obviously non-military, Putin’s on-air cheerleaders were nothing if not gleeful.  Labeling the attack on the Kerch bridge an act of terrorism, they eagerly recommended a scorched earth policy, and targeting Zelensky and members of his government specifically and personally, to rid us of these “roaches.” 

I don’t know how to read this as anything other than panic. I think they’ve actually lost their marbles. Putin’s position, both inside and out, is now so weak that his stooges are using language that sounds like a parody of Kim Jong-un’s scripted praise.

I said this before, and I’ll say it again. Putin is a dead man walking. It can’t happen soon enough.

A Dagger of the Mind

  

Things in Russia are going from bad to worse these days, and don’t look likely to get better anytime soon, but I’ll go out on a limb.  I think Vladimir Putin is circling the drain.  This is more of gut feeling than a considered analysis; still, there are indications he could be forcibly retired, or assassinated, or simply disappear. 

As you might have noticed, an awful lot of people have been falling out of windows, lately.  Former director of the Moscow aviation institute went head over heels down a few flights of stairs.  Another aviation guy, Far East and Arctic development, washed up off of Vladivostok – shortly after their CEO died of a stroke, aged 43.  Chief executive of Lukoil fell out a hospital window.  Another exec with the same company died while consulting a shaman, in a room supposedly used for “Jamaican voodoo” rituals.  The story goes he was looking to buy a toad venom hangover cure.  An oligarch hanged himself in Spain; one of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  Both of them associated with natural gas production.  A stabbing death.  A suicide by hanging in the UK.  A second one at a cottage outside of St. Petersburg (he’d reportedly been badly beaten, the day before).  The  previous month, another suspicious death, the same village, different dacha.  Kind of a mortality spike.

These events have been this year, and most of them since the invasion of Ukraine.  Also, mostly in the energy or defense sector, which are related.  Were they depressed, or under a cloud, out of favor with the Kremlin?  No way of knowing.  Russians tend to look for conspiracies and plots, when a simpler explanation might suffice.  But if this sequence of accidents and despair turns out to be Expedient Demise, or circling the wagons, who benefits? 

Putin has always understood the efficacies of terror.  The clear historical precedent is Stalin.  When you go after enemies real or perceived with poisoned umbrellas or polonium cocktails, it echoes the murder of Trotsky.  And it gets easier; after throwing a reporter down an elevator shaft, it’s not that hard to flatten Grozny, or sacrifice schoolchidren.  Putin enjoys plausible deniability - not taking credit, but winking at it.  We know he’s got blood on his hands, and in point of fact, he wants us to know it.  His missing signature is more conspicuous by its absence. 

Now, in this context, consider the Ukraine war. 

What, exactly, was the object here?  A quick and brutal decapitation of the Zelensky government and the total annexation of Ukraine, an Anschluss, to demonstrate Russian resolve and its inevitable historic destiny, and to prove once and for all the debility and fundamental lack of purpose in the American and European alliance.  None of which worked out, and what we might call a fundamental lack of purpose in the Russian military and political establishment has been fatally exposed.  Interestingly, while we can applaud the courage of Russians who’ve protested the war on humanitarian grounds, the more serious threat to Putin himself is coming from the Right, who are taking him to task for not prosecuting the war more vigorously – i.e., scorched earth.  We might take note that this group hasn’t been arrested or harassed, and perhaps they’ve found sympathetic ears in the military and security apparat. 

Some years back, there was a political movement in Russia called Pamyat’, which means Memory, and also called the National Patriotic Front.  It was ultranationalist, and to nobody’s surprise, virulently anti-Semitic.  The movement has withered, but the sentiment lingers, not entirely on the fringe, either.  A few contemporary Kremlinologists have pointed out that in the past, coups in Russia (or the USSR) haven’t hinged on policy differences.  Whoever’s going to push Putin down the stairs won’t make major institutional changes; they’re simply elbowing each other out of the way for more space at the trough.  They might find it convenient, though, to play on the revanchist grievances of the Right, and then discard them afterwards, but a bargain with the Devil always ends badly.  In any event, I don’t think it’s a matter of if, but when.  The toadies and bottom-feeders around Putin are going to stick the knife in him.  It could result in a net benefit, but the worrisome thing is that they dig themselves a hole, and pull it in after them. 

Performance Anxiety

Talking to a guy I know – we’ll call him Mike – who was once upon a time in the same trade I was, and who still has skin in the game, I wondered what he thought about how badly the Russians have stepped on their dicks in Ukraine.  There were in fact two parts to the question: why Russia has underperformed so fatally, and why Western intelligence so overestimated their war-fighting capacity beforehand.

Mike happened to be on his way to Ft. Huachuca for a workshop, or a briefing, or a roundtable, at the least a guarded conversation with some other stakeholders on this very subject, so he already had his ducks lined up, and was ready to share them. 

The chief impediment is that Russian command authority is rigidly hierarchal.  The culture and doctrine are top down.  Initiative is career suicide.  And the weakest link is simply that there’s no professional NCO class, not in the sense that an American combat soldier would understand.  Russian junior enlisted are cannon fodder; their sergeants are brutal, indifferent, and corrupt.  Morale is clearly in the toilet, unit cohesion near collapse. 

Where, then, did the intelligence consensus come from, that the Russians were going to kick ass in Ukraine?  Mike had an answer for that one, too.  We put a lot of faith in the hardware.  That’s because intelligence analysis mirrors our own presumptions.  In other words, NSA looks at the performance specs for, say, the MiG-31, and the obvious question is how it stacks up against the F-16.  Same thing with tanks, or infantry weapons: the AK-47 is one of the most copied guns in the world.  Our attention is fixed on the platform.  Mike’s point being that less weight was given to the personnel, the existing skillset of the pilots or the tank crews or the ground-pounders, or in support.

Like a lot of things, once you hear the explanation, you slap your forehead and tell yourself it makes perfect sense.  Nor do I think it’s Monday-morning quarterbacking.  For me, it actually conforms to what I learned back in Berlin, in the 1960’s, during the Cold War, when our target was the Soviet occupying forces in Eastern Europe, and the Warsaw Pact.  Poland and East Germany and Hungary and the other satellites were being trained by Russians, on Russian equipment, so there was a lot of overlap. 

The reason we were there, if I haven’t made it clear before, or if you’re new to this space, was to provide a basic profile of what the Russians could throw at us.  In military vocabulary, it’s called an Order of Battle.  A specific example might be: How many aircraft are at Zossen Wunsdorf? - Are they fighters or ground attack? – And how many pilots? - What’s their readiness posture?  This is all numbing detail, but it kept the Cold War from going hot.

Here’s why I don’t think the Russians have learned anything in fifty years.  Back in the day, they had sophisticated systems and platforms, but they didn’t trust them, or they didn’t trust their people, which adds up to the same.  They scrambled fighters, for drills, using Ground-Controlled Intercept, or GCI.  MiG-21’s and Yak-28’s were fitted with on-board pursuit radars, and a ground station tracking their targets could transmit encrypted signals directly from the ground radar to the pursuit radar on the aircraft, and the radar would vector the plane to target, all done electronically.  Hands off.  Fire and forget.  We, meaning your humble servant and his crowd, were listening to the pilot chatter, we could image the Russian ground radar, we could follow the encrypted signals, we intercepted the frequency shifts from the aircraft’s radar and knew when it went from Lock to Launch.  In effect, we were in the cockpit, too.  And not a single one of those pilots, or their command structure on the ground, believed the system would work on its own.  Every instruction the pilots got, every course correction that was transmitted, over a secure network, the pilot would repeat, in the clear, on Voice.  “Roger that, turning to heading 270.”  At which point you watched him on radar, changing course to 270.  I kid you not.  And you wonder why Russian generals are getting blown out of their shoes in Ukraine?  They’re using open comms.

I think there are other reasons for what’s going on.  I think the Ukrainian defense is heroic.  Volodymyr Zelensky has bigger balls than Vladimir Putin.  And the resolve from NATO has been unexpectedly solid.  But at its most basic level, the Russian disaster is a character flaw.  Arrogance defeats empires.

 

The Fog

The light of the sun is barely penetrating the early morning fog. Some trees are visible, some are hidden. It should be a warm spring day but instead it’s cold and there are still patches of dirty snow on the ground.

This is the weather.

This is my mood.

The pandemic is still raging on despite those who try to hide the infected and dead behind the fog of words.

The war in Ukraine is raging on and those who declare it is just another war are trying to obscure what is at stake.

Even if we can see through the fog created by today’s chatter, none of us can see how the pandemic or the Ukraine war will end.

When the pandemic first hit, I was naively convinced that we could manage it well by following advice by scientific and medical experts and that vaccines would come rather quickly.

The vaccines did come quickly but their durability is still problematic. I’m certain we’ll get the better, more durable vaccines. However, the hit to science, to medical expertise, I worry may also be more durable.

The Omicron variant was first detected in Canada in late November, a few months ago. Since then, we have had 53% of deaths in people 19 or younger and 20% of all deaths from COVID-19. Long covid - a disease that impacts the brain, heart and many organs - will be worsened by the increasing infections we are seeing with omicron and its new variants. Yet the narrative that this variant is ‘mild’ reigns, so people are removing their masks, interacting in unsafe ways because they are convinced that the danger of COVID-19 is over.

How can the ‘mild’ narrative be so persuasive when the facts prove it wrong? One of the main reasons is that the anti-science, anti-expert movement has gained great strength during this pandemic by feeding on its favourite food: fear. When people are frightened, science, with its nuanced and new emerging facts, is less enticing than the strong, definitive anti-science narrative where answers are clear and unalterable because they aren’t true. It’s easy to make up a narrative when it’s immutable in the face of facts, and it is the very rigidity of the narrative that appears to make it strong and a haven for the frightened - fear is reassured by strength, even if it is false strength.

Now that some people have been convinced that science and experts are the enemy - we can only hope that the numbers of people convinced are fewer than those who recognize that the truth - even with facts that change as new evidence emerges - is a better alternative than lies.

The future of how this will play out is unclear: the fog is thick.

The war in Ukraine appears to be a very different animal than the pandemic but they rub shoulders in a very important way.

Right wing, authoritarian ideology has been nipping at the heels of many European countries. The pandemic seems to have worsened this, particularly in countries where restrictions limited the number of infections, they were “sceptical about their governments’ intentions behind lockdowns, and are most likely to accuse them of using COVID-19 as an excuse to control the public”

The pandemic has, “eroded young Europeans’ trust in the political system could have long-term consequences for the future of democracy. Research by the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University shows that – even before the crisis – today’s young people are the generation most dissatisfied with the performance of democratic governments. Members of this generation are more skeptical of the merits of democracy compared not only with the older generation now but also with young people polled in earlier eras.”

This merging of the distrust in science with a distrust in democratic governments is the birthplace of autocracy.

The war in Ukraine is a war waged by an authoritarian government against a democratic country. The suffering of Ukrainians has moved the world and also divided it. As Ursela Gertrud von der Leyen - the German politician, physician and President of the European Commission summarized during a visit to Ukraine:

“It is indeed a decisive moment … Will autocracy be dominant or will democracy be the long term dominant winner or will the right of might be the rule or will it be the rule of law. This is what is at stake in this war…it is these big questions that will be decided in this war.”

The rule of might is decisive and clear - a haven for those who crave certainty. The rule of law, like science, is nuanced and cumbersome, as evidence is weighed and considered. Justice, like science, is messy business but it is a crucial pillar of democracy. 

None of us can see how the war in Ukraine will end or what Europe will look like when it does. Nor can we see what the end of the pandemic will look like and what we will have become in response to it.

The fog.

It’s the weather.

It’s a whole mood.

The Power of Ukraine

On February 24^th, Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia expected to win the war in a matter of days since they are so much larger and better equipped than the Ukraine. What Russia did not expect was having Ukraine rally the world to help defend them.

Apart from the geopolitical importance of this invasion, one question is why are so many ordinary people gripped by the story of Ukraine? Because we are indeed gripped, watching the news constantly and protesting in the streets around the world. Something about this war has moved us all. It has moved countries to impose economic sanctions against Russia and send much needed military equipment to Ukraine.

One reason is that Ukraine’s plight is the universal story of the underdog fighting valiantly, like David fought Goliath, and humans are built to be moved by stories.

“The human mind is addicted to stories,” says Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal (how stories make us human)

“As you cross cultures and move around in history, you find the same basic concerns and the same basic story structure. The technology of story changes—from oral tales, to clay tablets, to medieval codices, to printed books, to movie screens, iPads, and Kindles. But the stories themselves don’t ever change. They have the same old obsessions. And that won’t change until human nature changes.”

This story - the underdog fighting valiantly - has been articulated by many Ukrainians but first and foremost by President Zelensky.

When Russia invaded, President Zelensky turned down an offer to evacuated from Kyiv. Zelensky’s now famous response was, "The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

This is truly the story of David entering battle with Goliath, because David did not have to fight but he felt it was his duty to defeat Goliath and, in doing so, save his people from becoming slaves. Certainly, if Russia defeats Ukraine in this war, Ukrainians become owned and subjugated by Russia.

Malcom Gladwell in his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, dissects the battle in a unique way. Gladwell explains that Goliath is huge and frightening but David has the upper hand because he didn’t have the cumbersome armour of Goliath and could be nimble. Most importantly, David had a sling that can kill a target from two hundred yards away.

David wins the battle by doing the unexpected – he runs towards Goliath, who is immobilized by a hundred pounds of heavy armour, and kills him by hitting him in the head with a stone with a  velocity of thirty-four meters per second. (122kmph or 76mph)

Gladwell’s perspective is that underdogs win by fighting in unexpected ways that make their opponent’s strengths useless. Goliath’s size, armour and weapons were no match for David’s nimbleness with his lack of armour and heavy weapons, nor was his bare forehead a match for David’s lethal stone sent at high velocity by a sling.

Just like David, Zelensky fought Russia from the start in very unexpected ways. He didn’t flee. More importantly, despite the famed strength of Russia’s information warfare, Zelensky won the information war from the day he refused to flee. He did this by not speaking like a politician. He spoke with the emotion of a man who loves his country and his people. Rather than speaking of strategy, he appealed to the emotion we all feel towards our own countries, our homes and families. He used the most unusual and unexpected tactic of all when fighting a large military power: he asked the world to see themselves in the plight of Ukraine.

Ukraine is smaller, poorer and ill-equipped compared to Russia. To fight a behemoth like Russia seemed impossible but President Zelensky fought by making us all feel like every missile, every tank and every soldier in Ukraine was like a missile, tank and soldier in our country. This sent people into the street to protest the war and moved countries to sanction Russia. How do you fight a rich country? By making it poorer with economic sanctions. How do you fight a better equipped army? By moving the world to send you military equipment.

We are two weeks into a war that Russia expected to win in days and now some are suggesting that Russia might lose.

I know nothing about military strategy, but I do know the power of stories. From ancient times they have shaped our values and the way we act. The story of Ukraine is one of the reasons that the world values Ukraine and wants to act to protect it. They are the underdog, our modern day David, and we too are Ukraine, the underdog, the victim of Russia’s aggression. Every hospital that is bombed, every child that is killed, feels like ours and we all suffer with Ukraine. As we watch David running towards Goliath, fighting a battle in unexpected ways, we suffer and we hope because that’s the power of stories.