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Great piece. Thank you. If I recall properly, the Soviet military’s treatment of their WWII vets is a testament to the brutality of that system. Conduct in Afghanistan and Chechnya only further illustrates the point.

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Fascinating interview. And I love the kicker. I’m not historian but I think he misspeaks on WWII. The Soviets faced far more German divisions, killed far more German soldiers, and covered far more ground than the US Army. FDR and Churchill were happy to let Stalin’s forces do the fighting and dying as long as possible. We like to think we “won” the war, and obviously D-Day et al were key to liberating Western Europe after five years of Nazi domination. But Soviet troops were barrelling to Berlin regardless.

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Jan 13, 2023·edited Jan 13, 2023

Col. Jacobs fills in many gaps in my understanding of a wide range of topics, especially the differences in U.S. and Russian military hierarchy and zeitgeist. I just saw a man-on-the-street video segment from Moscow that supports Jack's analysis- even when perplexed by the inability to produce a victory scenario, the interviewees deferred their judgements so as to favor the Lord High Executioner Putin. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the 1939 German invasion of Poland, is certainly the product of a diseased mind combined with concentrated absolute power.

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