A refugee in Germany. Shopping with the kids. Neocons, shut up and help end this.

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My friend Gary in Ukraine is a computer expert most of whose clients are in Germany. He has an apartment there. At his wife's insistence he drove his two teenage kids into Romania, where he was met by his client who took him back to Germany. The three of them are holed up in his apartment. He has a computer and is able to continue work.

For all the logistic support that he has there, he regrets having left Ukraine. For one thing the Germans will not let him into restaurants and some businesses on account of the fact he is not vaccinated. Germany has outlawed homeschooling, and makes vaccination mandatory to attend public schools. It will be hard to finesse the education problem if the kids stay there with him.

Meanwhile, his wife is active in the local self-defense organization here. They had some excitement yesterday when a small column of Russian tanks attempted to move north along the back roads through their suburb. They got properly liquidated by Ukrainian forces, though not without doing a little damage to some houses.

On Sunday I took the kids for a walk into Voskresenka to go grocery shopping. Although the store didn't have everything we wanted, we returned with as much as we could carry. Including some fresh milk – just as we were running out of the foil packaged, non-spoiling kind. It does the kids good to get out for some fresh air and sunlight. There were a fair number of people on the street.

Yesterday I bicycled down to the drugstore to finally get the rest of Grandpa Sasha's antibiotics. The pharmacy is in the same complex as the supermarket, so once again I filled up. The prices are outrageous, but they had most of what I wanted. The bacon at five dollars a pound tastes pretty good. It definitely should.

I asked what the line of 100 people in front of the store was all about. It turns out that there is a free shuttle bus from wherever they live. Bicycling away, I thought to myself, God bless the child who's got his own.  Mine was the third bike in the bike rack. Usually it is the only one.

The kids and I walked through the neighborhood yesterday afternoon. Oksana had heard that there was a place that had kefir, which we have not seen for a couple weeks.

What we found was not where she had heard it would be, and it was not what she said it would be. It is a checkpoint along a road up by the railroad tracks. It seems to me to be an unlikely place to meet the enemy, but then that applies to our whole neighborhood.

Whatever the case, there are half a dozen guys from the neighborhood just hanging out. They have a fire in a barrel to keep warm and an electric teapot so they have something warm to drink. Quite a bit to eat – they offered the kids a cookie apiece. Eddie, always curious, asked what they were doing and would do and so on. I’m glad he was there to speak Ukrainian. My Russian is increasingly out of vogue.

In addition to the Kalashnikovs some of the guys had their own weapons. I had investigated and thought that private ownership of weapons was rather difficult. Nope. Among these six we saw two pistols and a shotgun in addition to the rifles. The Second Amendment is alive and well in Ukraine.

The temperatures have been freezing since the start of the war, going down at times to 20°. This has to be harder on the Russian invaders than the Ukrainian defenders. The forecast is for more springlike weather starting in about a week. We have to get our garden in. More importantly, Ukrainian officials are strongly emphasizing the need for farmers to get on with their spring sowing despite the shortages of seed, fertilizer, fuel and whatnot. This has to be more true of Russia even then Ukraine. They have emulated Ukraine in banning exports of most agricultural products. This does not bode well for the rest the world.

American pundits are all over the lot on the war. Ron Paul seems to have the most rational take.  We need to just end this thing.  Another guy I like is the Z man writing on Takimag with a piece entitled The Last War for the Neocons.  He thinks, as I do, that the war party has overextended itself.  

Oksana and I argue about it. She says we can never give in to Putin's demands that we concede the People's Republics and Crimea, or that we change the Constitution to make Russia an official language. I respond that, realistically, Putin has done himself in. We should promise whatever it takes to end the war. He has ruined Russia for a generation. People here will speak whatever language they want, and teach in whatever they want, and Putin will not have the ability to do anything about it. After all, Russia breaks its promises all the time. As for the inhabitants of those three poor, benighted regions of the former Ukraine, let them be Russian for a while longer. They will hate it and will probably come back.

Putin's power will be so diminished – if Putin is around, which seems less and less likely – that he would find it difficult to resist a referendum on whether to belong to Russia or Ukraine. The Saarland had such a referendum to decide between France and Germany, and Austria to decide whether to be communist or part of the West. We need to gives Putin some room to wind this thing down without totally losing face.

Every major country in the world except the United States seems eager to help. China, Turkey, Israel, and even Belarus have volunteered to broker talks. The United States seems uninterested, hell-bent on arming Ukraine to the hilt and letting Slavs kill each other. Enough! Get rid of the warmongers in Washington, who started this thing in the first place. And by the way, now that Washington has stopped lying about the bioweapons labs, let's get rid of them as well.  Tucker Carlson wonderful piece about the labs. He was equally irate about the existence of the laboratories themselves, the multitudinous lies that the administration told to cover it up, and their nonchalant attitude about preventing the escape of dangerous pathogens.

Gary in London sent this link. He suggests that our president, Joe Biden, is so compromised by his shady dealings in Ukraine that he simply cannot afford to have this distraction end. This could not only be a political disaster for the Biden family, but a legal one as well. If true, they belong in prison.

As for my dear wife, she has a hard time accepting that we can ever trust the Russians.  They have never been trustworthy in the past.  They only recognize power.  власть. I counter that at some point they have to deal with reality, and the reality is that an entire generation of young men is being decimated by this war. As I wrote before, they will serve their country better as farmers than fertilizer. They need to get back to business.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men continue to reassure the good-looking women that we are out of the line of fire, and the above average children watched an above average amount of video yesterday. Eddie is singing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Graham