Chandelier Neurons.

Cutthroat price wars.

“(News Items) is simply the best news digest out there.” — Joe Klein.

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1. Before the month ends Russia will probably suffer its millionth casualty since its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on current trends of about 1,000 soldiers killed or injured per day. Russia’s staggering losses—which far exceed those it suffered in all its wars since the second world war—are a testament to Ukraine’s stubborn defence against a far stronger power. Yet Russia’s ability to shrug them off and to keep recruiting men to throw into meat-grinder attacks ought to also pose sobering questions for NATO’s European members: how can democracies that value the individual deter an adversary so unconcerned about the lives of its soldiers that it will sacrifice them, year after year, in a punishing war of attrition? Russia’s human-wave attacks are “largely useless, grinding stuff” says Sir Lawrence Freedman, a leading British strategist. “But there are no signs of exhaustion, they are just carrying on.” (Source: economist.com)

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2. Foreign Policy spoke with George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA. Excerpt:

FP: Did this operation deal a significant blow to Russia’s nuclear triad?

George Beebe: I don’t think it’s a significant blow to Russia’s nuclear triad. It looks like the Ukrainians may have critically damaged or destroyed a half-dozen to a dozen strategic bombers. The Russians have many of those. In terms of really affecting Russia’s nuclear triad, I think the answer is no—this attack probably didn’t do that. But it did strike against Russia’s strategic nuclear triad, and that, in and of itself, is something that is quite alarming. The Russians recently revised their nuclear-use doctrine, and one of the things that they specifically said in there was that if there are attacks by an adversary on important state or military infrastructure that would disrupt responses, potentially by Russia’s nuclear forces, that is potentially a trigger for Russian nuclear use. And it went on to say that any kind of aggression by a nonnuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is considered their joint attack. Now, would those criteria fit in this particular situation? We need to be concerned that the Russians might believe that it does. They might well look at this situation and decide that this was a joint attack—that the Ukrainians could not have pulled this off without the knowledge and support of the United States or our NATO allies in Europe. Now, whether that is true or not, the danger here is that Russians might perceive that to be the case. (Source: foreignpolicy.com)