Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today's Tuesday March 1st, 2022.

I'm John Puthortz, the editor of commentary magazine, inviting you to join us in South Florida on April 6th for a live taping of the commentary magazine podcast. I'll be there, able to be there. No, we'll be there. Christine will be there. We'll have special guests.

It's an exciting event. We did one in New York in 2018 or 2019 that was enormously successful and a lot of fun. If you are in or around South Florida or want an excuse to take a nice trip that week, please join us. You can find out more at commentary dot org slash live podcast. That's commentary dot org slash live podcast April 6th, late afternoon Palm Beach, Florida.

And those panelists right here right now executive editor, a Greenwald Hyab.

Hi, John, senior writer, Christine Rosen, high Christine.

Hi, John.

And associate editor Noah Rothman, high Noah. Hi, John.

So I made the mistake of saying just before we started that, you know, I wasn't quite sure where to begin with the Ukraine story, because like there was no fresh.

And I was like, I don't know real news like everything is still sort of like in it's like it's a coming everything is coming and Noah acted like I was a crazy person.

Because there's an immense amount of news. So I'm now turning the floor to know over to know to explain the immense amount of news.

Yeah, there's an exquisite amount of news. First of all, Russia has changed tactics.

And I think that the United Russian military doctrine have been positively confounded by how Moscow has approached this campaign by we can only assume that by not committing all its forces, not putting heavy artillery forward softening the ground ahead of an advance of mechanized infantry tank supported by mobile infantry.

And I think that that wasn't happening because they had anticipated a very quick victory. Want to occupy the country, country pacify the country and to level the ground would make that infinitely more difficult.

And that resulted in a stalemate to the point where Ukraine was experiencing quite a lot of profound victories, complemented by Russia's apparent neglect of its tactical and logistical preparations for an invasion with a long tail.

So they've changed tactics. And what we saw yesterday was a significant amount of artillery in population centers, particularly in the city of Karkiv, which is in the northeast of the country bordering Russia.

And we saw overnight a horrific missile strike on government facilities in the very center of Karkiv killing civilians, obviously quite a few. But we're targeting civilian infrastructure now we're targeting civilian population centers and experiencing some.

Weird, well, Russia is obviously if you're listening, you think we're a combatant in this war, we're not just a lady now.

And then we saw Russia achieve one of its first and only strategic victories, unconfirmed, but appears to be legitimate in the establishment of a land bridge between Russia proper all the way to the the Crimean peninsula, which would entail the sacking of cities like

the Littapol, which fell a couple of days ago and Maryopol, which is a very big port on the Sea of Izoth, from which they can introduce more maritime assets and Russian Marines and heavy equipment to augment the advance in the south.

The south, the advance in the south has been pretty effective. Likewise, we've seen the Western response only intensify over the course of yesterday.

From Western nations involving economic warfare and profound economic sanctions, some of which are happening organically we're not seeing interest in a very significant sanctions on the energy sector from any Western government, but we are seeing energy producers.

This is a disinvest, remove themselves from investments in Russian energy deposits, which is interesting. And then lastly, we're beginning to see some lawmakers embrace a profoundly stupid idea of intervening directly in this conflict in the form of a no fly zone, that's an emotional response to a very emotional moment.

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