I waited to post anything Urkaine-Russia until I was absolutely sure that a full-scale invasion was imminent. Total invasion is now undeniably in progress.
And what a great encapsulation of this era: One man doing his damnedest to ruin the lives of millions of people because nothing is ever enough for him.
Fuck Putin.
Live Updates w/ a map (does this work for non-subscribers? hope so)
I've got a group of friends from my time in Budapest who are high-quality journalists (Economist, Reuters, Independent, etc), members of the EU governing body, academics teaching courses on Russia, and others who watch Russia professionally.
Everyone is scrambling now and wondering about Putin's mental health. He may have had a mental breakdown ... this was all the standard Russian power-ploy that he pulls when the EU needs Russian natural gas to stay warm during the winter ... until they bombed Kyiv.
Grabbing the Crimea was all about getting a port that isn't iced over 8 months of the year. So annexing the rest of the southeast was kinda inevitable, and people always expected him to expand deeper into Ukraine.
But when you bomb the capitol city, that has no tactical advantage in his southeastern land grab... well, that is a full on invasion, with the intent of taking over the entire country by force. Not annexing a port.
So when he bombed Kyiv in the first hours of the attack, that CHANGED EVERYTHING. This is actual war.
One of my uber-conservative friends suggested the EU should take Kaliningrad. Immediately. Tit-for-tat.
And that's ... both scary and fucking clever. The EU (or anyone else) can take it by the same logic Putin is using, since it has only been a Russian protectorate (completely encircled by the EU) for 75 years. And it gives the EU a bargaining chip with Russia that has fuckall to do with the USA/Britain/etc.
We are in completely uncharted waters. I don't see any way out of this without an actual shooting war between the US and Russia. It may finally happen. Of course, the Russian military will be utterly wiped out quickly, because they are mostly a pretend army with mostly defective equipment.
Then again, Americans are, first and foremost, racist. And Ukrainians don't really register in our hierarchy of "who is worth saving". So...?
Completely uncharted waters, my friends.
Turns out that Russia's military might is based almost entirely on dumb weapons... bombs you drop and they explode wherever they hit. They have VERY few - and may have already used up their inventory of - smart bombs that can be precisely targeted.
That means their military might relies entirely on men in boots and tanks walking across hostile land because you cannot use dumb bombs in close proximity/support of your foot soldiers.
For a military force of 200k troops, facing a population of 40m who are REALLY GLAD not to be under Russia's thumb anymore, that's a slaughter waiting to happen.
Plus, Russia is ONE big city (Moscow) and three vacation towns. Landing even a single punch on Moscow would crumble the entire silly facade that is Russia.
Speaking of boots on grounds, what is an acceptable level of NATO/western involvement before Putin turns around and says "You have aided Ukraine against Russian forces, thus I declare war on you"?
Obviously, the west can't have soldiers inside Ukraine without crossing that line. But what's to prevent Putin from deciding that our UAVs flying around and feeding intel to Ukraine is over the line? (edit: besides nukes, I understand nuclear deterrence) I guess it's not much use pretending like negotiating this with Putin isn't a waste of time, because he's a serial liar.
I've been wondering if maybe Putin received something like a terminal medical diagnosis. Pure speculation, but might explain disregard for long term repercussions.
The weird thing is that he does seem to have Russian Greatness as one of his themes. So you'd think that self and national preservation would be top of mind. Declaring war on any NATO member is tantamount to declaring war on all NATO members, so you'd think it wouldn't come to that. But I didn't think it would come to this. So....
I also thought it was very possible that western intel was being intentionally misreported to force Putin's hand, but apparently not. Maybe the intel was correct, but forced the wrong hand? Personally, I doubt that, I think his heart was set on this USSR renewal bullshit.
Meanwhile, it's been pathetic to see right wing media pivot from "Joe Biden is full of shit, Russia would never attack Ukraine!" to "How could Joe Biden allow this to happen??" literally overnight. Or, taking things even further, Trump and Tucker backing Putin up. The Murdochs have an interesting history with the Kremlin:
- “The company’s activities in Russia are being looked at as part of a broader FBI investigation into possible violations by News Corp of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act… as part of their inquiry, the FBI will seek to consult with Russian authorities,” reported Reuters in 2012.
But, strangely, the investigation was never reported in the news media again.
Anyway, prepare for hyperinflation and sugar rations, I guess. And unless there's some miraculous turn of events over the next two years, prepare for Trump and/or DeSantis 2024.
Maybe I got some new converts to my church of Doomerism? Hope not.
There's this futile insistence on the left that the right will somehow be shown up by their own hypocrisy. They won't. They never will. For the left, it's all about reason. For the right, it's all about presentation.
HOT TAKE: Troops to Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, American first-strike hardware encircling Ukraine for the next fifteen years, AWACS, ELINT & SIGINT sorties just this side of the border 24-7 and deniable materiel support for the Ukrainian insurgency. Massive defense boost, mobilization of reserves and joint NATO exercises & FONAPs with Turkey in the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
I still think we're missing a beat with Kazakhstan. I think Putin could have taken Kazakhstan without firing a shot, gotten invited to suppress the uprising and ended up staying forever. I think the Chinese would have gone along with it if they got paid off effectively. Now? Now any move in Kazakhstan is going to be peril-frought and freakazoidal.
Trump has been making a bunch of foreign policy gaffes. The "base" won't care but everyone else is going to have a hard time endorsing spiteful hatred for spiteful hatred's sake if it's also demonstrably incompetent to the task at hand. DeSantis, meanwhile, gave a CPAC speech this morning that didn't even mention Ukraine. The dude is not going to survive debate season.
Serious people are debating Putin's mental health, now. This invasion was so poorly planned and executed, it's really baffling ... unless you add in Putin maybe not playing with all of his marbles.
Which, judging from the international humiliation the Russians are suffering in this fiasco, might lead a non-stable man to do something dramatic. Like actually use nukes.
I mean, everything he said he'd do, he has done so far. And now he says that he is activating his nuclear weapons arsenal in preparation, and making really nasty statements about raining down destruction on anyone who gets in the way of him peeing all over Ukraine.
I know I'm a drama queen and always looking for the worst, but this doesn't seem too far-fetched for the shambolic mess that the NKVD, Russia, and the ruling oligarchs have become...
Well, and debating his physical health. People who couldn't find Ukraine on a map last week are now yammering on incessantly about sunflowers.
We persist in this idea of "a button" that can be "pressed."
There is no button. There's a bunch of nukes, and there are a bunch of people with the training and control to turn them from implements of policy to weapons of Armageddon. I find it tiresome that the same people proudly posting Spetznaz raiding grocery stores because their supply lines are cut are the ones presuming as gospel truth that Putin can pick up a phone and end the world.
I agree there are a number of intermediaries that need to be convinced it's a good idea to push the final button to ignite the rocket with the nuclear tip ...
... but one would assume there are some similar checks and balances around deploying 200k baby-faced infantry to "exercises" on the Ukrainian border ...
... and further checks and balances before those kids are told to breach the border.
All of which has happened, with clearly little preparation or forethought. So while I do hope the nukes are better secured and harder to activate, I don't have much faith in the performance art troupe that is the Russian chain of command.
There's this whole "1982 = 2022" thing people are doing right now and I'm just not having it.
YOU CAN CALL TROOPS BACK. That's the whole point of the "nuclear triad" - you have bombers to spook the shit out of people, ICBMs to give irreversible first strike and subs to put fear into the hearts of people who think they might survive if they can take the other guy out first. There's a whole philosophy and policy to nuclear armageddon that no one running for election has had to think about seriously for thirty years so every fearful SOB automatically assumes no one has ever thought about.
We deploy troops all the time. Troops here, troops there, troops everywhere, often to ridiculous extremes. More than that, you can't parallel park a troop carrier without it showing up on Google Maps anymore. The level of situational awareness in this our current moment is un-fucking-real from a cold war perspective. I mean, look at this shit.
kk now check this out:
Dude went to jail for giving that to Jane's in 1984. The information landscape now, as compared to then, is no comparison at all. We know more about North Korea now than we knew about the Soviet Union then. STRATCOM entertained the notion that there were secret missile bases under Moscow. Serious nuclear physicists wrote books about the Soviets conducting secret nuclear tests on the far side of Venus. People keep not reading this:
...despite the fact that it's a story about how 20 years of nuclear policy were shaped by measuring the shadows on the fins of missiles as taken from space.
- TL;DR: we got one shot of a missile site we didn't understand before U-2 flights over Russia were grounded and as a consequence we increased the amount of warheads we deployed by a factor of ten over a Soviet anti-aircraft strategy to take out a bomber we never built.
You're assuming that rolling conscripts across a border you've already disregarded "has some similar checks and balances" with ending human civilization. It's not a safe assumption to make.
- WWIII
- The Day After
- Threads
- Red Dawn
- Wargames
- Sum of All Fears
- Hunt For Red October
- Dr. Strangelove
- Fail Safe
fuck even
- Spies Like Us
Take, as their fundamental impetus for nuclear armageddon, the coarse misunderstanding of simple events. That whole "red phone" thing is more than a trope at this point, it's a goddamn legend. It's also a myth - launch authority for Soviet missiles in Cuba was with the Cubans. The fastest nuclear readiness the Soviets ever had was about 28 hours.
A quarter of the Russian military is currently involved in Ukraine. This is a "demilitarization" operation from a Russian perspective, not a land war. Right now they're talking about "neutralizing intelligence facilities" while actually attacking civilian targets with cluster munitions. A big part of this is the Russian insistence that it's no big deal - which is exactly the opposite posture the Russians would take if there was a chance in hell of a nuclear attack.
Friedman's comments read as a "let's get along". Deripaska's out on a limb though. Not pulling punches. Probably highlights how close he is to America in relative terms. He probably figures of all the notorious oligarchs, he stands the best chance of permanent defection.
I would wager that 95% of the solutions within the American and European intelligence community go through the oligarchs.
The general public take on this is looking at all the sticks and refusing to see the carrots. I've seen no mention of American RQ-4s calling down attacks on Russian shipping outside of intelligence Twitter, for example, and my only question about these supposed 70 MiGs theoretically headed to Ukraine is "are they going to be replaced by F35s or Eurofighters?" People are very upset that Hungary won't allow offensive weapons through its territory without recognizing that the consensus view on Hungary was they'd be Soviet again in a heartbeat.
It seems to me as if the American intelligence community has been permitted to do their jobs. It makes sense; they were built against the Soviets so this is about as close to design intent as I can imagine. Someone pointed out that Biden is the first president we've had since Bush Senior with any foreign policy experience and it's kinda lookin' like American geopolitical infighting isn't going to be nearly as much of a factor as it has been recently.
I hope Sleepy Joe uses substantially all of his State of the Union to talk about the implications of Ukraine for the US and the world and shames the fuck out of the Tucker Carlson (who apparently gets featured on Russian State TV now) wing of the party. Then I hope that every democrat uses "Putin is a savvy genius" in every fucking TV ad this year. All politics isn't local when the threat is an ascendant USSR.
I dunno, Deripaska could be maneuvering in the hopes of a repeal of the U.S. sanctions specifically targeting him. I'm glad they managed to briefly mention that, good job, CNN. To first order, the oligarchs are simply reacting to their new economic predicament, surely.
Deripaska, who received 2016 polling data from Manafort, might be in a boat similar to Firtash, the guy Giuliani hoped would manufacture dirt on Hunter Biden. Serves as a nice reminder that the previous administration treated Ukraine like an extra-judicial sandbox where Putin and Trump's middlemen could play.
Whatever it is, it's certainly self-serving. That's the problem with leading a pack of self-serving billionaires. As soon as they don't see it as in their personal interests to play along, the jig is up. They all saw what happened to michael khorokowski back in the day, so clearly they think that staying silent at this point is likely to be worse than that. Which says a lot.
Anyone in 2022 still saying "Why shouldn't we allow multi-multi-multi-billionaires??" is either making a bad faith argument or a total idiot. It's economic autocracy mirroring political autocracy (and vice versa), it's no wonder the two coexist so often. Kneecapping or outright eliminating democracy is the best way to allow wealth hoarding. Hopefully we can find a domestic solution to American billionaires' seeing Trump as in their personal interests before it's too late.
The ruble absolutely cratered today in what must be one of the most dramatic one-day losses for the currency of a big country in modern times. That's not sustainable. Hyperinflation is all but guaranteed if that continues. As Lenin said, the easiest way to ruin a country is to ruin its money.
As a Finn I'm more than moderately worried that we're, if not next in line, at least in line for a demilitarization by Russia.
We're not a NATO member (mainly because our population is 90% idiots who can't understand that WW II was very different time), so there's a nontrivial chance that we'll get invaded just 'cause – and if we start talks to join NATO we're sure to get invaded just like Ukraine.
Russia is much like the US; their culture is so deeply sociopathic that their existence as a nation is a threat to everyone. Unfortunately there's no way to unfuck that particular situation without a nuclear holocaust, but at this point I'm not even convinced that'd be a bad thing. We're going to destroy the planet and ourselves one way or another, we're not nearly smart enough to not do that.
Perch Perspectives is worth reading
- Based on our analysis, we thought Russia’s troop build-up and military exercise on the border with Ukraine was an attempt to create political leverage over Ukraine to guarantee Kyiv’s neutrality and stop the Ukrainian government from becoming closer with the EU, NATO, and the U.S.. Russian expansion would be best served by political guarantee, not at gunpoint. We even featured two experts on our podcast – fan-favorite Cousin Marko Papic, and Russian geopolitical analyst Max Suchkov – both of whom thought a Russian invasion was outlandish. We set the probability at 70 percent chance of political resolution and 30 percent of a large-scale Russian invasion.
NYT had a 30% chance of Don winning the 2016 election. 30% is far from outlandish. It's actually pretty likely.
One thing I've found interesting in this saga is the extent to which the administration has kept the public informed on the latest intelligence, then seeing the predictions come to pass in real time. I don't remember the last time that happened.
Yeah but we suck at statistics and we generally assume people in charge got there by knowing what to do with authority. I certainly do.
Lev Bodorowsky doesn't quite editorialize with his choice of graphs and statistics but he skirts the line? And one of the factoids he dripped out this morning is that Iranian oil could more than make up for a Russian shortfall. And that even before this, most Americans would be fine with that. Meanwhile, it sure looks like China has chosen sides.
The Cold War Golden Oldies move is to fire up the Defense Production Act to cover Chinese shortfalls, mobilize the National Guard and fling troops into Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania ( we deployed F35s and AH64s there two days ago), bail out Turkey in exchange for closing the Bosphorus (they've been NATO members since 1952 and recently sold arms to Ukraine, sign a new nuclear deal with Iran that looks just like the old nuclear deal, crank up the mighty wurlitzer about a new "coalition of the willing" and get Toby Keith to sing about what an asshole Putin is.
I suspect that if you gave every follower of QAnon a choice between InfoWars or Yellow Ribbon stickers, QAnon would cease to exist within two months. The entire militia movement sprung into existence because of a noteworthy lack of foreign enemies; now that K-Tel is reissuing golden oldies we're likely to be back at patriots insisting the government can do no wrong, rather than the other way 'round.
Yeah, what do you think that’s all been about with making aspects of intelligence public in real time? I haven’t seen that at this scale before.
I thought the intel declassifications were a pretty loud flex. One subtext is "We have so many different avenues of discerning your next move that we don't have to worry about compromising our sources". But 4sure, Putin flexed back, with "Ok, cool. Try and stop me. You won't".
Biden seemingly getting the date "wrong" a couple of times might have prolonged the incursion for a week or so, which might help a little bit, especially if the weather warmed up in the meantime. I've heard (maybe 'bl00 can confirm?) Russian tanks are engineered to run optimally on permafrost. Having trouble googling to confirm.
Sorry, unsolicited take from me, would also love to hear others weigh in.
I have read 1000 hot takes about the Sudetenland and the Anschluss, but I have yet to read a single one about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Putin's ranting about the historical fiction of Ukraine mirrors Stalin's grievance about the independent republics that were created after WWI. To the Soviets, even Poland was a fictional country, so dividing it between Prussia and Greater Russia wasn't an act of war so much as it was righting a historic wrong. Putin's actions reflect the same Tsarist mentality that Russia has had for centuries, no matter what their government.
Nuclear war is the #1 threat to humanity, no matter what your feelings about global warming. Since the 1950s, we've lived every single day in a situation where the world could easily not exist tomorrow. With that in mind, we obviously need to tread carefully with respect to our response. But we should also remember that Putin's grand aims are nothing short of the restoration of the Russian Empire. That isn't hyperbole. He absolutely will go after the next country if this gambit works. And then the next.
I'm sure the administration is considering the feasibility of enforcing a no fly zone. That should absolutely be on the table. But for now, I think that whatever economic measures can be imposed, should be. No holds barred. And Chinese engagement on this is critical. I'm not one to give a lot of slack to the Chinese government, but we may need their help here, and you know they're not helping for free.
Anyway, sorry for the Putinesque rambling. Just thinking out loud, or whatever you call it in text.
- Putin's ranting about the historical fiction of Ukraine mirrors Stalin's grievance about the independent republics that were created after WWI.
China also used it as pretext to invade Tibet. Iraq also used it as pretext to invade Kuwait. For that matter, the United States used it as pretext to invade Texas, not to mention Hawaii and the Philippines. "We're not invading, we're just coming home" has been used since the Pelleponessian Wars.
The Russians do not have reliable first-strike capability. They never have. The situation is far worse for them than it was in the '80s, when bored amateurs can retask privateer surveillance satellites, where ECHELON has become the only legitimate SIGINT dragnet, where US ELINT capability has advanced with Moore's Law while Russian ELINT and ASAT capability is firmly mired in the Cold War. The Soviets would not have developed Perimeter, and the Russians would not have maintained it, if they figured they had a hope of pulling the trigger first.
As famously illustrated by Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet/Russian nuclear chain of command is a long way from iron-clad. There are plenty of people who can say "naah." Troops to Ukraine? That's a mobilization thing and everyone can see everyone else doing it. Lots of them are into it. Pushing the button? That's an individual act that a whole lot of individuals need to be on board for.
- Since the 1950s, we've lived every single day in a situation where the world could easily not exist tomorrow.
I have some strong emotions about this. That said, I believe that nuclear war is vanishingly unlikely. The Russian arsenal is much diminished from where it was, and their developments - contrary to popular opinion - have been largely symbolic. Putin has authorized all sorts of harum-scarum nightmare weapons but the actual quantity is low enough to be worthless - as you're fond of pointing out, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khruschev had what, three nukes? We've never seen a 3m22.. They were "virtual firing" them over the Mediterranean last week: line up, hit the pickle, but don't actually drop ordinance" - but yesterday Twitter was full of slow-ass subsonic not-quite Tomahawks lazily wandering over Donbas. If you wanted to spook the shit out of the west, wouldn't you, you know, use a couple of your nightmare weapons? Other despots do.
I’m prepared to be disappointed. If Western countries don’t cut Russia off from SWIFT, and if China isn’t enough onboard in a tangible way, then all that’s happening is theater.
We have never as a society (those of us under age 80, anyway) been asked to sacrifice for the national good (obviously some people younger than that were forced into service in Vietnam, but that's not really what I'm talking about). It would be interesting to see the response if the government said that due to China's hostility, we're cutting off trade with them, and we ask you, our citizens, to go without some things that you feel you need for some period of time until other manufacturing arrangements are made or China relents. We were asked to sacrifice some freedoms in the name of health and that drew, um, mixed reviews? So I don't know what the same in national security interests would do, but I can't imagine it would be much better. Sugar rations, anyone?
Yeah. He isn’t mincing words either. If allies attempt to fight back, nuclear on the table. This sucks.
Vlad is trying to "de-Nazify" a country run by a Jewish president.
Calling someone a Nazi means something quite different to a Russian than to an American. They celebrate VE day as among their biggest holidays, and they don't acknowledge the Holocaust as having anything to do with Jews. Nazis are anti-Russian to Russians.
Russian advances have ground to a halt in many areas, with Ukrainian forces holding out in several cities and also launching effective counterattacks.
Here are the latest developments on day 26 of the invasion:
Ukraine has rejected a Russian
<a href="https://vapebazaar.pk/"> demand to surrender .</a>
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the city of Mariupol
Heavy fighting is taking place in the city centre as shelling continues
Russian troops are trying to bring artillery to within range of central Kyiv
Ukrainian forces holding on to Kharkiv and repel an advance to the south of the city
Russian naval forces remain off the coast of Odesa in the Black Sea
Russian advances have ground to a halt in many areas, with Ukrainian forces holding out in several cities and also launching effective counterattacks.
Here are the latest developments on day 26 of the invasion:
Ukraine has rejected a Russian
basic linknew tab link:
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the city of Mariupol
Heavy fighting is taking place in the city centre as shelling continues
Russian troops are trying to bring artillery to within range of central Kyiv
Ukrainian forces holding on to Kharkiv and repel an advance to the south of the city
Russian naval forces remain off the coast of Odesa in the Black Sea
WSJ article on the first attacks, de-paywalled
- The Russian leader railed against the eastward expansion of NATO in the decades since the 1991 collapse, saying Moscow had been faced with “deceit and attempts at pressure and blackmail.” He issued a pointed warning against any attempt to stop Russia’s move into Ukraine, saying Russia was “one of the most powerful nuclear powers in the world.”