To travel north of Kyiv in Ukraine is to enter a graveyard of the Russian Army. When I was there in 2023, the battlefield had been largely cleaned up, and the villages were coming back to life. But the signs of mortal struggle were everywhere. Buildings were pocked with bullet holes, some were reduced to piles of rubble, and I could still spot the occasional hulk of a destroyed Russian tank.

A year earlier, the scene was different. Russia had just retreated, and bodies were lying in front of ruined homes. There were so many destroyed Russian tanks in the streets, The Associated Press reported, that their charred remains had left a “layer of black dust” that covered the suburbs. It was a scene of carnage more suitable for World War II than for a prosperous suburb outside a modern European capital.

It was all a monument to Russia’s colossal failure.

This was not supposed to happen. The Russian military had spent enormous sums modernizing its forces. It had enjoyed success in a much more limited conflict in Syria. In 2014,66jogo Cassinos Online Brasil it had taken Crimea while hardly firing a shot. The Ukrainian military was supposed to be outmatched and outgunned.

What happened? It’s a complicated story, but one lesson is clear: A military and intelligence apparatus organized around pleasing the boss is ripe for catastrophic failure. As a 2023 analysis in Foreign Policy found, President Vladimir Putin “sits atop an intelligence and policy machinery that tells him only what he wants to hear.”

So Putin walked into war thinking that Ukraine was more fragile than it really was, that Ukrainians actually wanted Russian rule and that the Russian military was more capable than it proved to be. But that’s what happens when a national security establishment prioritizes political loyalty over professional excellence — armies fail and many, many people die.

It’s a mistake to think of the Trump administration’s Signal scandal — in which top officials discussed sensitive military plans on an unsecured civilian messaging app — as merely a problem of competence or even a problem of corruption. It’s much worse than that.

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The amendment, Proposition 139, would establish a fundamental right to abortion and prohibit the state from restricting or banning abortion before viability — the point at which a fetus can survive outside the uterus, generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

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