Dear Editor,
Peter Bergel writes in the April 26 Chronicle that we should tell the three presidents of Ukraine, Russia, and the United States to stop the war. This is pure virtue signaling in the same way driving an EV and recycling will stop climate change. It will feel good and do nothing.
Biden, or his handlers, promoted the Ukraine war by moving military operations closer to Russia through NATO. In times of peace major industry in the U.S. suffers, as it is built on perpetual war. The war in Ukraine is an economic development project similar to how covid vaccinations made Pfizer one of the richest corporations in the world. They both use big government to soak the productive class to benefit unnecessary business.
Taxpayers have no say in the billions spent destroying Ukraine or crippling healthy people with experimental drugs. But they are easily rallied around supposed existential threats.
Our representatives are beholden to their donors in the pharmaceutical and defense industries. Real journalists like Glenn Greenwald try to expose war crimes committed by western powers but they don’t make it into widely distributed conversation. The Air Force National Guardsman exposed documents that showed a much higher casualty rate for Ukrainians than Russian troops and that U.S. troops are on the ground in Ukraine. This information is detrimental to the military-industrial complex. It exposes a government that doesn’t care about the destruction of Ukraine and its people as long as it is profitable. And all the profits come from us taxpayers.
Letters I’ve written to our representatives elicit canned responses with little relationship to my inquiry. Presidents won’t care either.
alternativebyfritz 
All true. But it occurs to me that, given the pre-war comments and guidance, Russia should have been victorious by about the third month into the fighting. But the exact opposite has occurred with a protracted war and no end in sight. There’s no 4-D or 5-D chess being played here, not even 2-D. One wonders who is running the Russian side of the war. Is it Putin, the Kremlin, the Ministry of Defense, the field generals, a few oligarchs, or a changing command dynamic? Perhaps a lot of what we hear about poorly trained Russian military personnel, shortages of ammunition, poor Russia military morale, poor coordination among Donetsk/Luhansk militias, Russian military, and Wagner forces is all true. No wonder the U.S. and Western Europe feel comfortable in extending the war with the belief that Russia can eventually be beaten.