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Notes -
New week is here, it is time for some more random culture (and kinetic) war news, sourced from various parts of internets via xitter.
1/ Middle Eastern issues, and general strategy, tactics, law and customs of war in the current millenium.
About half of US deployable air power is ready for Iran boogaloo 2.0. It would be very symbolic if it began exactly at 4th anniversary of three day special operation to desatanize Ukraine.
How it will start? As massive decapitation strike on enemy elite human capital.
An underrated change in modern warfare is the rise of “man hunting” - targeting of individuals, especially generals and other key personnel.
It is fascinating to see how something that was absolute NO in traditional rules of war "Generals do not take pot shots at each other" became normalized in the rules based order.
First organized crime bosses, then leaders of terrorist/freedom fighter groups like Al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah, and now leaders and VIPs of internationally recognized states as Iran or Venezuela. And not only uniformed personnel, but leading scientists are now fair targets too.
This tactic became prevalent, because the targets are completely unable to reciprocate.
US and Israeli high ranking officers are not so well protected, professional sleeper cells should be able to get at them, but there is no evidence that these cells exist outside of Tom Clancy novels.
The highest ranking Israeli person killed was minister of tourism 25 years ago.
True war of assassins is yet to come.
What would be long term results? Being general is not any more cushy job with spiffy uniform, only people who believe in their cause and are ready to die will strive for such positions. Do the forces of freedom have plan B for case when decapitation strike succeeds, all targets are elliminated, but the enemy still refuses to surrender?
It is important to always have plan B. ready.
2/ More Middle Eastern issues
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said in Tucker Carlson interview that "it would be fine" if Israel took over all of Middle East.
Angela Price Aggeler, US ambassador to Macedonia, so far hadn't commented whether Macedonians should take back all lands given to their ancestors by Zeus.
3/ Yet more Middle Eastern issues
Israeli ultra-orthodox revived ancient European tradition of burning cats and dogs alive as part of celebration.
Very based and trad pilled.
4/ Woke and also military issues
Ft. Bragg kindergarten teacher who identifies as trans wolf 'Lilith Deathhowl' was fired
It looks like story from 2021, as if celebrations were premature and wokeness hadn't perished yet.
5/ Epstein issues
Epstein before his ultimely demise hid his secrets in storage units. Good news, the whole sordid saga can be prolonged into infinity. At any time, mysterious storage unit can be opened and new Easter eggs rolled out for the eager public.
6/ Now, the thread connecting all issues of the day together
The subway question is again the hottest debate on Xitter right now:
Are homeless drug addicts peeing and pooping in public transport reactionary lumpenproletariat or progressive freedom fighters? Is shitting in New York subway the best way to defeat American imperialism and free Palestine?
This is a very bad characterization of what the link actually says. In fact, it explicitly says it is being done by teenagers (likely male - which are probably the most stupid and unhinged form of human existence, fortunately for most people it is temporary), it's not part of any "tradition" and nothing says the idiot teens doing this were part of any specific religious community, be it ultra-orthodox or not. It is also the fact Judaism strictly prohibits animal cruelty and causing any unnecessary suffering to an animal. Acts like burning cats or dogs alive are not part of any Judaic "tradition", being it orthodox or not, and can not be.
Also, the article is from 2017, and I am not sure why you are quoting it as something that is happening now. But yes, this is a phenomenon happening with teens across all humanity - cruelty to others, especially those who weaker and defenseless, is part of their nature, because their brains and moral senses are under-developed, and without proper guidance from their parents and teachers such forms of transgressive behaviors can result. Making it as some kind of specific Jewish ultra-orthodox problem is stupid and ignorant. Unfortunately, as casual search reveals, somehow it have become part of some bizarre campaign this year - I have no idea why they dug up a 7 year old story and reworked it into "Jews with burn your dog" but evidently that's a thing now too.
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Many Greeks would like a word with you about those Slavic poseurs of North Macedonia appropriating the legacy of invincible Ἀλέξανδρος. Then again, those Greeks have also abandoned Zeus, so maybe it's up for grabs.
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What unites Americans is Epstein. Just like how the previous generation, both sides or the aisle could recognize each other as American by claiming the other would gas thé Jews, now both sides can recognize each other by assertions that the other wants to rape and eat children. Our common ground is absurd partisan shitflinging.
Now thé Epstein files will keep being released because people like drama and gossip. We’re the land of The Learning Channel; trashy and nonsensical clearly isn’t a dealbreaker. In 20 years there’ll be another release of the Epstein files indicating then-current politicians went before they were born. Why? Because politics is entertainment now. How long before congresscritters step into the WWE? Who knows.
The extant Epstein files are just such a nothing burger. Meanwhile random lunatics are asking like it's videos of child sacrifice to Satan.
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This, but seriously. The only reason why there isn't a populist uprising against the paedophile-riddled establishment is that the person who was supposed to be leading said uprising turned out to be compromised. * Epstein is far worse than the Dutroux scandal (which led to a reorganisation of the Belgian political system) and although the sex crimes were not as bad as the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK, the complicity of elites is far worse. (This has not yet led to a reorganisation of the British political system, but it looks like it may do).
There is an obvious N-dimensional chess story where Qanon and Comet Ping Pong were a deliberate ploy to spike the future Epstein reveal by making paedo panic (a) low status and (b) sufficiently MAGA-coded that opponents of Donald Trump wouldn't jump on it as an issue. (The hypothetical conspirators know that Trump is lying when he engages in populist anti-paedo messaging because he is one of the paedophiles.) I don't think this is true - I think paedo panic is right-coded because the Anglosphere left have made being the defenders of sexual deviance (other than paedophilia) part of their core values, and the man in the street (mostly correctly) believes that other forms of sexual deviance are strongly correlated with paedophilia.
Right now it looks like the only Americans sincerely opposed to powerful men sexually abusing teenage girls are dissident right-populists like MTG, although I think the MeToo movement showed a few mid-rank figures on the feminist left who were also consistent on this point even when the perp was a Democrat.
* I am using paedophile in the dangerously loose sense the public do - what is relevant to the politics is the view of the typical low information voter, and normies don't care about the Hannaia/Tracey "words have meanings" argument. There were no prepubescent children involved, and accordingly nobody involved is a paedophile in the technical sense, and it is not clear whether or not Epstein trafficked the girls to the clients until they were over the local age of consent. But there was definitely sexual abuse of teenage girls going on.
I don't think so. I think Brits are too cucked to do something about it. They may push out Starmer and replace it with some other asshole, but the system will remain as it were, and will continue the course.
As for the Epstein story, the Swamp has been afraid stuff may come out. But it didn't. Whether it was because there were no records from the start, or because they were successfully destroyed, I don't know, but the result is the same - the Big Reveal is not happening. So, now the Swamp is just using this thing to its own purposes, because once there's no danger of the truth coming out, they can outlie everybody else - that's their specialty. Some small change players will fall due to orbiting too close to Epstein, but those people are replaceable and nobody cares if a bunch of corrupt small-change players fall, they'd be replaced by another set of small-change corrupt players, who would in time fall too, it's the cycle of life. In the meantime, if it can be used to smear Trump - or anybody else - it will be.
I don't believe it. I do believe she sees it as a topic to be loud about and farm likes (for Candace and Tucker it's Jews, for her it's pedos - and also Jews, of course - each has their own market) but I don't think she deserves the mantle of "only American that cares about teenage girls". A lot of Americans care about teenage girls, but I don't think using it as a cudgel to gain popularity and attack your political enemies has much to do with actually helping the actual teenage girls. I am not sure we could point to a single girl whose life had been made better because of anything MTG did, can we?
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There don't seem to be any "paedophiles" in the Epstein files, with the possible exception of Epstein himself.
No, regardless of your footnote, 17-through-19-year-old prostitutes don't count. There's a probably apocryphal story where Abraham Lincoln poses the riddle "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" and he gives the answer as "Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so." Well, same goes if you call someone who has sex with a 17-year-old a "paedophile".
I'm not even sure there's evidence of anyone (again, aside from Epstein) actually having sex with a 17-year-old. Yes, if you discard all the meanings of words and all the lack of evidence, there's something here.... but there isn't. A bunch of rich people partying with 17-year-old prostitutes (and I would guess cocaine also) isn't news -- "hookers and blow" is pretty much expected.
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It was serious.
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Of course, what will get an Israeli prime minister killed is agreeing in principle to not ethnically clense the occupied territories.
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I am not sure this is a good top level CW post. In large parts it is basically the format of Scott's link posts, each line with a link and a sentence or three of hot takes.
{{Citation needed}}. I will grant you that in medieval times, people were more likely to kidnap and ransom a noble where they would just have stabbed a commoner to death. But even in WW1, flag officers were killed quite frequently -- shells do not discriminate, after all.
I think that assassinating generals is probably the most humane way to wage war. After all, a general is much more costly to train than a squad of infantry, so it causes the maximum of monetary damage for the minimum of human suffering (apart from shooting down a fighter jet, perhaps).
It would however not work as a broader strategy in Western countries like the US. My estimate is that if you managed to magically kill the top 1000 US military officials, the effectiveness of the US forces would perhaps drop by a few percents, because the US has no shortage of people who are both competent and loyal.
Contrast this with an autocratic regime like Iran. Military coups are a real threat in such countries, so successful dictators engage in coup-proofing. You want someone who is loyal to you personally while also being competent. It is a dynamic not unlike that of vassalage (as seen in the Crusader Kings series, for example): you need to appoint a noble to manage some fiefdom you conquered, but how do you make sure he won't stab you in the back at the first opportunity? Often you pick someone who is family or has married into your family, or perhaps a childhood friend. Or at least a protege who is known to be in your favor.
The Iranian army will probably have plenty of people who are competent to lead them. It is much less certain how many they have whom the Ayatollah would trust with leading the army, though.
Per your link:
The way your source it describes it sounds more like a social media fad than an ancient tradition revived by the ultraorthodox. Why would the orthodox revive a cruel spectacle which was popular with 18th century's gentiles? Why not accuse the Jews of murdering Christian babies while you are at it? This seems especially pointless as Nethanyahu's idea of peace in Gaza remains clearly visible, the ultra-orthodox are quite bad without them burning puppies and kittens alive for religious reasons.
I for one vastly prefer it over posts that spend half a dozen pages to say what could be said in two paragraphs or, even worse, AI augmented slop employed as a sort of one man gish gallop meant to drown everyone who disagrees in pages and pages and fucking endless pages of text, as favored by one prominent poster here.
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My estimate is that the effectiveness would quadruple. The US has a very top-heavy system, shitloads of officers, most of which have fake jobs and don't do anything but create paperwork for other officers. We have enough officers that every four-man team in the entire military could be commanded by one. All but a few (like, double digits few) are impediments to military readiness and effectiveness.
If you managed to magically kill the entire officer corps, the US military would be vastly more effective, perhaps overly so. The officers aren't there to make the military more effective, they're there to make sure it isn't effective against the state.
See also: Rickover's suggestion to improve the DoD's efficiency by taking one third, have them do nothing but write long form letters back and forth to a second third, and let the final third actually do the job of running the military.
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X. At a certain point you do need people in charge of the whole thing, and I’m guessing that although there probably exist sergeants who could do it, there isn’t a system to immediately move those specific NCO’s into position, and this is likely true even if the median officer does nothing except require the rank and file to fill out extra paperwork indicating they’re up to date on cultural sensitivity training.
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Yeah, sounds more like 'general teenage cruelty and ignorance' than 'historic tradition amongst 18th century rabbis'.
Let me remember a similar incident from Christian sources, if I can. Yep, here we go and by coincidence it's from the 18th century as well!
Apprentices in London from mediaeval times onwards were also riotous troublemakers. I wonder if the Israeli cat-burning was inspired by someone reading about teenage French cat-killers?
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My feeling is that if Epstein was an Israeli blackmail operation, snd if he produced anything useful for them at all, now would be the time to burn it. Future Epstein revelations threaten to render blackmail material useless, the targets will be aging out of power soon anyway, and the left and right of the younger generation is increasingly anti-semitic. If I were Netanyahu, your prospects will only get worse from here. Smoke em if you got em
How do we know they aren't burning it? Given the current political situation, the principal target would be Trump personally. And given administration policy towards Iran, either Trump was totally lying about his foreign policy plans in the 2024 campaign (remember "No More Wars"?) or Israel and/or the Gulf Arabs have compromised him.
Dragging America into a forever war against Iran would, from an Israeli perspective, be more than sufficient to justify the whole Epstein operation.
[I don't actually think this is a particularly likely story - just the most likely conditional on Epstein working for Mossad].
Or, he's someone with no consistent or intentional worldview and he just does whatever he feels like depending on who flattered him most recently or what makes him feel most powerful at any given moment.
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This "decapitation strategy" seems like a function of the post-GWOT American toolkit, which consists of
It's a great strategy for creating the appearance of victory at a low cost against tribesmen with no air defenses. In terms of actually producing victory, however, as far as I can tell it has never worked except when some significant faction within the targeted regime is secretly working for the enemy. The Onion released an article all the way back in 2006 titled "Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead"; twenty years later, Al Qaeda is more powerful than ever with control over Syria and a significant portion of the Sahel.
If you prefer a more recent example, we've seen this whole song and dance before with Operation Rough Rider and to a lesser extent, Operation Prosperity Guardian. Trump issues dire threats, carrier groups moved into position, Yemen was obliterated with constant airstrikes for over a month, Houthi officials were assassinated yet the Houthi drone and missile capabilities remained intact and Trump ultimately backed down having achieved basically nothing.
If this sort of strategy went nowhere against Yemen then why would there be any expectation of success against Iran, which is larger, more powerful and more populous by several times?
US decapitation strategy goes back at least to WWII with "Operation Vengeance" killing Admiral Yamamoto.
As for Al Qaeda, they're not bothering the US any more and that's what's important to the US. Same goes for Venezuela; the commies are still in charge but they're not buddying up with China and Cuba any more.
The defeat of "Al Qaeda" (the professional terrorist organisation with global reach run out of a cave complex in Afghanistan that did 9-11) involved NATO and their local allies in the Northern Alliance conquering Afghanistan with boots on the ground. (The only reason "Al Qaeda" the meme which inspires Muslim immigrants to drive trucks into European Christmas markets isn't a problem for America is that you have fewer Muslim immigrants). I don't think you can defeat either the professional org or the meme by drone-striking enough "Al Qaeda number 2s".
If black-bagging Maduro out of Venezuela delivers on the Trump administration's goals it will be because (a) Delcy Rodriguez was already compromised and (b) the US can threaten a naval blockade to make sure she stays compromised. If they had done the black-bagging with no blockade the regime would be back in control by now (with Rodriguez either working with Maduro's people or replaced).
If those, specifically, are the people you're talking about, they don't run Syria so your original post was wrong.
We've got sufficient Muslims to do that; they used to. Far fewer lately.
"If". The US had the ability to blockade with Maduro there, it wasn't sufficient.
Not my OP - I don't think the US-backed Salafi-jihadi group that currently controls Damascus "is" Al-Qaeda, although it clearly includes people in senior roles who used to be involved with Al-Qaeda back when Al-Qaeda was a thing. On the other hand, I would make exactly the same statement with "Damascus" replaced by "Riyadh", and that regime is considered uncomplicatedly pro-American. Al-Qaeda the specific terrorist group led by Bin Laden is absolutely defeated (and had been defeated long before Bin Laden himself got taken out in Pakistan), but drone-strikes against large numbers of alleged number 2s were not sufficient to do so.
Agreed - to the extent that US operations in Venezuela are succeeding, it is a combination of a blockade that made capitulation the sane thing to do and a black-bag op to remove someone not sane enough to capitulate.
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Calling it a 'strategy' is rather far-fetched considering that no other Japanese, Italian or German general or admiral was ever a target of US assassination throughout the war, as far as I know.
Fair enough. But assassination was a move that clearly was not off the table.
Yeah, true in the case of rather negligent enemy OPSEC, which apparently did apply to Yamamoto's flight.
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The idea presumably would be that if you can degrade the IRGC's capabilities, since they act as kind of the internal suppression force (being a sizeable army/navy in their own right), the regime won't be able to maintain control over a populace in revolt. At least, that's my take on it.
Another take is that it's a lot easier to cause harm to a sophisticated nation like Iran than to a... less industrialized/urbanized place like Yemen. It's a lot easier to destroy (from the air/sea), say, the US Navy's nuclear shipyard in Newport News than it is to clear out a bunch of people in Appalachia with missiles being smuggled to them.
How would this work when IRGC (presumably) consists largely of true believers and their suppression capabilities are of the "we'll shoot you on the street", and not the "we'll use a highly centralized apparatus to eliminate key dissidents"? That is, when killing a bunch of leaders doesn't actually degrade on the street capabilities of the organization (unlike with the nuclear program or traditional state leadership).
IMO a lot of people question the IRGC is filled with true believers today. It’s been too easy for Israel to take out Iran leadership which implies there are a lot of snitches in the Iranian ranks.
And then you look at their former Presidents pinned tweet Ahmadinejad
He frequently says things that aren’t Iran Supremacy now. There is at least some belief that the Iran regime is hollow now. Sometimes people just keep getting up in the morning and doing their orders until the system changes.
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Since we had people having trouble telling if Trump is trolling about Greenland, Canada, or running for a third term, I just want to pre-register that this is clearly not-trolling, and how to tell the difference between the two is obvious.
"Trump isn't actually serious about annexing Greenland and Canada, he's just dismantling the entire web of alliances the US has spent the better part of a century for shits and giggles" isn't a very impressive take. It doesn't really matter if he's "trolling" or not, he's still being retarded.
Moving the goalposts. If you want to make the argument that he's tearing apart NATO, then make that argument, don't tell me he'll invade Greenland any day now, and switch the argument mid-flight.
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I'm fairly sure nothing's going to happen. My bet is Trump will get no concessions in negotiations, then he'll loudly make up something about how he got the IRGC to agree to a deal where they stop funding terror/their nuke program and rant about how he deserves the Nobel Peace prize, the Iranians will say they didn't agree to any of that and Trump just hopes everyone will forget the whole circus.
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Do you happen to have a source for that? I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just curious. To be, that would be fascinating if at some point in the past there was a norm against these sorts of attacks.
I can definitely imagine a norm against attacking senior officers under a banner of parley. But if the lines are drawn and the battle is ready to go, if one side has a sniper who can take out the other side's leader, I would have thought they would take the shot.
For a fictional example, I remember a samurai movie where a senior officer in one army is shot and killed by a sniper while he is playing the flute. As I recall, this wasn't presented as a violation of any kind of norm.
"Traditional" is perhaps putting it a bit strongly, but yes this was a real norm in real warfare. In European Culture. From around 1750-1915. So there are definite book-ends and caveats. The quote OP was referring to is, probably apocryphally, by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces, Seventh Coalition. Okay the last two are modern terms retroactively applied but the point stands. At Waterloo, 1815, Wellesley was told that his artillery had sighted Napoleon, and that he was within range, requesting permission to fire. Wellesley icily replied that:
Now the only source for this quote is from a book written in 1860, so there's reason to doubt it was ever said. But the fact that such a quote could be applied to a General of the time, and believed or was intended to be believed, probably suggests an existing norm. There's a story from the American Civil War about Grant at the Battle of Chattanooga, where he accidentally rode out beyond the Union pickets and came across the Confederate picket line. The Confederate troops recognized him, and called out a muster of the picket to... present arms and render honors to the commanding general. During the Atlanta Campaign, Confederate General Leonidas Polk was killed by Union artillery, which had been ordered to fire by General William Tecumseh Sherman. In his autobiography, Sherman took great pains to note that he didn't want to kill Polk! He was just trying to scatter the Confederate officers, and appeared to regret Polk's death.
There was, at the time, a feeling that officers and gentlemen (but I repeat myself) were necessary for not just the prosecution of a war, but its conclusion. As the quote from "By Dawn's Early Light" (1990) goes:
The fear of European officers, beyond simple self-preservation, was the idea of giant masses of leaderless armies scouring the countryside, despoiling everything in sight, clashing in titanic battles to no greater purpose than bloody-minded destruction. This fear was, to be clear, not unfounded. Warfare has a long and ugly history of bands of deserters doing just that. Roaming the countryside, raping murdering and pillaging, and occasionally (though rarely) fighting pitched battles to keep possession of a prime piece of looting real-estate. This was especially bad during the Peninsular Campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars, in which bands of deserters sometimes numbered in the hundreds.
Then of course you have to remember that the idea of even being able to target a single man before the proliferation of rifled firearms was functionally non-existent. You could send an assassin to poison him or knife him in his sleep or ambush him along a highway, but that was about it. You couldn't point at one man and say "shoot that guy in particular" from any distance of more than say 150 yards with a longbow, or 50 yards (realistically less) with a musket. It wasn't until rifling became prolific that you actually could target an enemy officer, and by the time European powers clashed in a truly existential struggle again after Napoleon... well... the Somme did not lend itself to Gentlemanly conduct.
Note that Wellesley had three horses shot out from under him, presumably to bullets intended for the rider - and he was an infantry officer so he was only on horseback later in his career when he was in field-grade and general officer positions.
Sniping enemy officers as SOP appears to date back to the invention of effective sniper rifles, given when troops stopped saluting on the battlefield.
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The Romans made a custom of using their artillery to target chiefs in particular when in small-scale sieges; thé ninjas were basically assassination specialists, thé historical assassins weren’t terribly mainstream but Islamic sources seem to be more upset about them being alawites than their mode of geopolitics. This is a very European custom driven by the medieval custom of ransoming high value captives- Hundred Years’ War era English armies actually funded themselves by doing this.
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This is interesting to contrast with American conduct during the Revolutionary War, where marksmen at Cowpens and Saratoga took particular aim at enemy officers.
Although I don't recall off the top of my head if I've ever read if the stigma trickled down to more junior officers. At Saratoga General Fraser was legendarily targeted, but the legend is of dubious provenance, and perhaps he was killed by a stray shot.
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There's a fun alternate-history series called Look to the West in which a British prince, disinherited and exiled to America as a viceroy in year 1727, overturns this norm in 1749 by having a team of rifle-armed Americans (winners of a shooting tournament organized by the prince) assassinate the rightful king (with a false-flag attack from a French-flagged fishing boat). This incident causes rifle-armed skirmishers/snipers to proliferate far earlier than historically.
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This must be an army thing because admirals get killed all the time. Nelson and Maarten Tromp were shot by sharpshooters. De Ruyter was hit by a cannonball. Lütjens went down with the ship (many such cases). Etc.
I'm not saying that Generals/Admirals/other high ranking officers didn't die, just that they were rarely specifically targeted for killing during this specific era and culture. And of course all norms have their exceptions. But I would argue none of the men you named were specifically targeted for death. Tromp was killed in 1653 by an English "sharpshooter" yes, but the British did not have any units with rifled guns until the 1750s, and didn't issue mass-produced rifled weapons to their troops until 1801. And of course the French only issued rifled muskets to their Voltigeur NCOs, and only for about 3 years before discarding rifles entirely until well after the Napoleonic Wars ended. The men who shot Nelson and Tromp were almost certainly equipped with smooth-bore muskets, perched on the rigging of a pitching and heaving ship (the effect of which was of course exaggerated by their being in the rigging), firing at probably a hundred or so yards. They were pointing in the general direction of the enemy ship and trying to hit one of those guys over thataway. De Ruyter certainly was not targeted for death so much as his ship was shot at by a canon, and Lütjens died well after the period in which "gentlemanly" warfare can be said to have died.
I mean, maybe you can say it's not specific targeting, but if the admiral is on deck and you're shooting muskets and cannonballs at the guys on the deck it's a far cry from the examples where the army specifically avoided killing enemy generals.
No? Those confederate armies didn’t expect the northern invaders to hold their fire because the general was leading from the front. Admirals kinda can’t get off a ship easily. Nobody was saying sufficiently high ranking officers were a human shield for the men. They just weren’t targeted specifically.
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Thank you for this.
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How do you mean? I find it hard to see the parallels between invading Ukraine and bombing Iran, other than both being terrible ideas. Russia’s invasion is of no particular historical significance to either US or Iran.
I doubt that Yamamoto or Nelson saw it that way. Decapitation strikes were historically limited more by capability than by “traditional rules.”
The rest of your links feel more like shotgun-spread booing. Wow, those outgroup members sure are icky today!
Or by the practical benefits. Assassinations in WW2 were rare in part because it was understood that they could easily backfire and lead to more capable leaders replacing those assassinated, with this understanding extending all the way up to Hitler himself. Assassination was reserved for unusually capable, dangerous and likely irreplaceable leaders like Yamamoto or Reinhard Heydrich.
You can see that in Russo Ukraine war - Russia is quite content with the way the war is going and is careful not kill any of the enemy leaders. Whereas Ukraine often targets generals in Moscow.
On the four year anniversary of their three day special military operation, it is all coming together according to keikaku.
It may not be according to their original intentions, but still be according to their current expectations. Four years are a lot of time, more than enough to settle for what you can have instead of what you originally wanted.
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"We should replace our Dear Leader"
"Why? Is he that bad?"
"Well if he wasn't, the Americans would have killed him by now. That's all the vote of no confidence I need."
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