This Is the War’s Decisive Moment | Putin’s Failed State | Russian Trucks as Metaphors, and more

U.S. Support for Ukraine Moves Further into Offensive Assistance  (Courtney McBride, Wall Street Journal)
A new American military aid package is intended to help Kyiv push back Russian forces.

US Troops to Give Ukrainians a Crash Course in Battlefield Weapons  (Michael Evans, The Times)
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Pentagon has supplied thousands of tons of arms but has carefully avoided referring to any clandestine training program for the Ukrainian army.

What Images of Russian Trucks Say about Its Military’s Struggles in Ukraine  (Brad Lendon, CNN)
Think about modern warfare and it’s likely images of soldiers, tanks and missiles will spring to mind. But arguably more important than any of these is something on which they all rely: the humble truck. Armies need trucks to transport their soldiers to the front lines, to supply those tanks with shells and to deliver those missiles. In short, any army that neglects its trucks does so at its peril.
Yet that appears to be exactly the problem Russia’s military is facing during its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, according to experts analyzing battlefield images as its forces withdraw from areas near Kyiv to focus on the Donbas.

Sweden’s NATO Decision Isn’t Just About Security  (Megan Gibson, New Statesman)
The Nordic country looks set to join Finland in applying for membership, but the debate in Stockholm is far from straightforward.

Vladmir Putin’s War of Delusions (Richard J Evans, New Statesman)
The Russian president is a prisoner of his own deadly misconceptions – and the echoes of Hitler are hard to ignore.

The Myth Far-Right Zealots Run Ukraine Is Russian Propaganda  (Alexander Ritzmann, Euronews)
As the war in Ukraine rages on, Europe’s international policy analysts and journalists have turned their attention to the Azov regiment, a former Nazi-insignia-carrying extreme-right street militia that has become integrated into Ukraine National Guard. Putin himself has claimed one of his reasons for the invasion was to “denazify Ukraine”. This claim is a lie, plain and simple. What Putin really wants is a Ukrainian government that obeys his commands. Nonetheless, western media has come to develop a sort of Azov obsession, buoyed by a complete lack of nuance in the reporting around this group. One key factor missing in all of the analyses of the Azov: the difference between the Azov movement and the Azov regiment. The West’s Azov obsession and the inability to properly understand the overall phenomenon has even led to the spread of damaging anti-Ukraine propaganda in the media. Certainly, the Azov movement is a dangerous key player of the transnational extreme-right. The movement has served as a network hub for several years now, with strong ties to far-right extremists in many EU countries and the US.

Putin’s Failed State (Andres Aslund, Project Syndicate)
Ukraine’s recent successes in repelling Russian forces have highlighted the sclerosis of Russia’s supposedly formidable military. Having bet everything on war and conquest, Vladimir Putin’s regime is now politically bankrupt, presiding over a modern-day Sparta that cannot even win on the battlefield.