Many unspeakable things happen during any war like the one Russia's Vladimir Putin is waging against the neighboring people of Ukraine.
It's now in its fourth year of agony.
Everyday occurrences include the killing and maiming of hundreds of men and even innocent civilians. But many other deeds go on too that bystanders, as we are far away, never learn much about.
As it did during World War II, Russia, for instance, simply sends untrained troops to charge enemy positions. Many die before they get there. If they retreat, they are shot by their own side. The leadership does not care about individuals.
Russia does not provide medical assistance at the front to its own soldiers. So, if you get seriously wounded, too bad for you and your family.
I've seen drone videos of such Russian men writhing on the ground in filthy trenches littered with dead bodies. And they end up killing themselves with a rifle or grenade rather than die slowly alone in agony.
The thinking in news media is often that graphically detailed news coverage of such conflicts is too gruesome for viewers or readers back home. Often, they don't even show or describe dead bodies.
We should have provocative discussions about such unofficial censorship that sanitizes the horrors of war. Because that reduces the awful ongoing events basically to an imaginary game far away. Who's going to oppose war — or support it, for that matter — if they never see how bad it really is? I ran into some of this editorial opposition at the end of the Vietnam War.
This audio commentary is about one of the horrors of the Russian war against Ukraine that has received minimal coverage: I believe that's tragic.
While Russian forces are killing Ukrainian men in combat at the front lines (and thousands of civilians in indiscriminate artillery, bombing, and missile attacks on cities), other Russians are kidnapping children from Ukrainian homes behind the front lines. They are simply seizing them from their families — I call that kidnapping — and shipping them off to Russia, never to be seen again.
There, they are punished if they don't speak Russian. The goal is to erase from the minds of these Ukrainian youngsters the national identity that Putin maintains does not exist. Hundreds of thousands of children stolen from their families.
That is the subject of this new audio commentary.
This week's column describes the complete absence of leadership within the stricken Democrat Party, whose members are running around, bumping into each other while saying and doing silly things that pop into their minds.
But the post also takes a close-up look at one Democrat veteran with a varied field of experience, who is quietly positioning himself as a viable fresh candidate who could take on the Trump-led Republican Party in next year's midterm elections and then, he hopes, in the bigger White House contest to come in 2028 when Donald Trump can't run again.
The post also ignited quite a lively debate worth reading in the Comments.
The most recent audio commentary also reported on and analyzed a serious national defense issue smoldering on the sidelines: China's surge in naval shipbuilding that has put that communist country far ahead of the United States' fleet with important implications in the near term as Beijing eyes a takeover of Taiwan.
