re: #216 Hecuba’s daughter

My guess is that Putin finally realized that Shoigu had been lying about the capabilities of their military forces. I still recall, decades ago, some GOP economist (Stockman?) saying something like the development of the “Star Wars” defense system between the US and Soviet Union was a race to see who would be bankrupted first and the Soviet Union won. We have more money to waste than any other nation on the planet (for military only) and so we can manage to create both useless technology and products that are truly advanced, and produce enough to effectively arm our forces.

See “The Strategy of Technology” by Jerry Pournelle, Stefan Possony