Ukraine war mega thread

[Switch]

Russia playing childish games - with other peoples lives. No matter how hard they try, western sanctions will not be reversed in their favour.
Russia will be made to take the blame for interfering in such pathetic ways regarding international matters of separate concern.
Putins War will fail, one way or another. You will be made to look even more foolish for supporting the Russian monster.

You should withdraw now, while you still can. No shame in admitting that you picked the wrong donkey, for now anyway.

Sanctions are clearly having the desired effect if this nonsense is the best they can come up with.

[bsnub]

Instead of just punishing Russian citizens, consumers in the west and the developing world will also experience economic pain.

No they won't.

Globalization itself is being interrupted.

Bullshit.

Just another one of your many garbage posts. The Three Stooges spamming the forum with trash.

[Iceman123]

Ffs I gave that video 2 minutes.

OhOh, if in your posts you are trying to present another view for debating purposes that’s fine.
However if that is your true position please get help.

[bsnub]

OhOh, if in your posts you are trying to present another view for debating purposes that’s fine.

He is not.

However if that is your true position please get help.

It is very much the lemmings true position. He is a complete loon, just like Backspin/skiddy.

[NamPikToot]

He would still be arguing Russian cause good when the Chechens stood him up against the wall

[Troy]

Two weeks ago, the Ukraine leader wasn't demanding nuclear weapons. Possible trigger.


Do you believe any other countries leaders? If so, which ones?


One may ask, have you seen the ceasefire document, do you have a link, from both countries?. Was the ceasefire including all the city, or limited to the agreed evacuation routes?

What evidence have you that Russia broke the ceasefire, not the Ukrainian army, and Russia attacked the agreed evacuation routes?

Reports are stating that people were gathered in the centre waiting for busses when the Russians restarted shelling just 30 minutes after ceasefire start. There was no time to start along the agreed routes.

Shelling was on the centre and not on routes that weren't agreed. There was no justification for the shelling.

This is from witness accounts that you will have to refute.

[bsnub]

Reports are stating that people were gathered in the centre waiting for busses when the Russians restarted shelling just 30 minutes after ceasefire start.

They have a long history of doing that. Russia flattened Grozny twice in the nighties. They literally turned that city into glass, causing massive civilian casualties. They still fight wars with an ancient military doctrine that dates to WW2, when civilian casualties were just part of the game. This is only going to get worse.

[bsnub]

Putins War will fail, one way or another. You will be made to look even more foolish for supporting the Russian monster.

Of that there is no doubt.

ou should withdraw now, while you still can. No shame in admitting that you picked the wrong donkey, for now anyway.

The clown is on the payroll.

[Bonecollector]

Some days old now bu the CIA guy got Putin's retort to sanctions spot on. Some interesting background info as well

Enjoy

[misskit]

What Russian Officials Think of the Invasion of Ukraine


A senior banker is "in mourning." Some members of parliament are thinking of giving up their seats. A translation of Farida Rustamova's insider report.


This is my translation of a March 1 report by Farida Rustamova, an excellent and super-well-connected Russian journalist. Her deep sourcing in top levels of the Russian government allowed her to paint the best picture I’ve seen so far the prevailing mood in the days after the invasion.

She’s got her own substack you can subscribe to. And if you want to support her in very difficult circumstances — she’s had to leave the country — you can donate on PayPal. I encourage you to do so.


By Farida Rustamova


Conducting sudden, top-secret special operations is the main pattern of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s behavior. As a former chekist [security official], he always wants to catch everyone off-guard, in order to frighten them and to impress on them that he can do whatever he wants. We witnessed this once again during the emergency meeting of the Security Council three days before the war. The stammering of foreign intelligence head Sergei Naryshkin, the confusion of deputy Kremlin administration head Dmitry Kozak, and the worried face of Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin were evidence enough. The most influential people in Russia sat before Putin like schoolchildren before a teacher who had suddenly announced an exam. And this meeting wasn’t even about a war — they were only discussing the recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.”


By the outbreak of the war, the Russian political space had been wiped clean to the extent that is possible. In the depths of their souls, officials and legilsators may disagree with the decisions of their leaders — but only in the depths of their souls. There are very few left who can contradict him out loud, directly to his face.


The official comments high-ranking officials are making during the war are uniform and echo what President Putin said when the war was declared: "Russia was left with no other choice," "our army is liberating the Ukrainian people from the oppression of nationalists," and so on.


In reality, the attitude toward the war within the corridors of power is ambiguous. I came to this conclusion after speaking with several members of parliament and officials at various levels. Many of them are discouraged, frightened, and are making apocalyptic forecasts. Andrei Kostin, [head of the largely state-owned VTB Bank], is "in mourning." Some Duma members are thinking of giving up their seats. Two days before Putin announced the start of the "special operation," one of my most ‘in-the-know’ friends thought that it wouldn’t come to war, because war wouldn't benefit anybody. I see that officials, deputies, and even journalists at government outlets who have left their posts are relieved that they no longer have anything to do with this, and are speaking out against the war.


Without any moral judgment of what my interlocutors are saying, I’ve decided to share what I’ve observed as an impartial journalist.


"They’re carefully enunciating the word cluster*ck.” That’s how one person I spoke to describes officials’ reactions to the war. In his words, the mood in the corridors of power is not at all happy. Many are in a state of near-paralysis.


"No one is rejoicing. Many understand that this is a mistake, but in the course of doing their duty they come up with explanations in order to somehow come to terms with it," says another source close to the Kremlin. Some officials aren’t associating themselves with what’s happening at all, viewing Putin's decision as a historical choice over which they have no influence, and the meaning of which no one will understand for a some time to come.


Did anyone expect Putin to decide to go to war? Everyone assures me they didn't. They thought that the president was escalating the situation in order to have more trump cards in negotiations [with the West] on security guarantees, and that everything would be limited to the recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” within their administrative borders.


“Everyone had some scattered information that did not provide an answer to the main question: will we start bombing or not?’ said one source close to the government. “Though some acquaintances in the presidential administration were sure that he had already made all the decisions. But everything is happening within one person's head.”


Most likely, my sources say, only the narrowest circle had been informed: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and the leaders of the counterintelligence service. For example, the head of the presidential administration Anton Vaino, whose role, unlike his more influential predecessors, is more akin to a private secretary, is not informed about such decisions, my sources say. In addition, Vaino has been suffering from a prolonged severe case of COVID-19 for several weeks.


At the enlarged Security Council, which took place three days before the war began, Putin said practically nothing about his decision to recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” a source said. The session itself was an attempt at improvisation, to present the image of a real discussion.


"That's why everyone there was fidgeting so much,” the source said. “If they had been told to firmly say ‘Yes, we support it,’ they would have done so.”


A brief digression: Communication with the members of the Security Council — mostly with the "small Council", that is, with the permanent members of the Council, which is about a dozen people — is what democracy in Russia has shrunk to. In my view, for at least the last ten years, this is how Putin has understood democracy: He talked once a week to the leadership of the security agencies, the speakers of the State Duma, the Federation Council, and the prime minister. And that's it — democracy has been performed — the people have been consulted. The security council session before the war an example of this Putin-style democracy.


The government and the Central Bank have been preparing for sanctions, and for some time the financial infrastructure will withstand the pressure. The Bell has reported that, shortly before the war, First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov had held several meetings to prepare for possible challenges, including disconnection from SWIFT and a ban on high-tech imports. And Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin let slip at the Security Council meeting that the government had been preparing for sanctions for the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk for several months.


However, the Russian economy is unlikely to quickly recover from the severe sanctions that were actually imposed — and no one was prepared for this, my interlocutors say. Moreover, the U.S., EU and UK authorities have begun to partially limit the Central Bank's access to international reserves. According to data from mid-2021, gold in the Central Bank vault accounts for only 21.7 percent of its reserves. Most of them, 63.6 percent, are invested in foreign bonds and deposits. Head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell said that about half of the Central Bank's financial reserves that are held in G7 countries will be blocked. As of February 18, the reserves reached a record $643 billion.


"If Russia considers itself an empire, why not become attractive to its neighbors by developing the country instead of by forcing their loyalty? Let's build good roads, quality health care and education, and eventually come up with the kind of technology that would allow us to be the first to colonize Mars. That would be quite empire-like," a high-ranking official said brokenly when I asked him what he thought of Putin's motives for starting the war.


Another source— let's call him a good acquaintance of Putin's — puts it this way: The Russian president has it in his head that the rules of the game were broken and destroyed not by Russia. And if this is a fight without rules, then it’s a fight without rules — the new reality in which we live.


“Here he is in a state of being offended and insulted. It's paranoia that has reached the point of absurdity," he says. According to him, Putin sincerely believes that, at least in the first years of his rule, he tried his best to improve relations with the West.


"On the one hand, there’s a really unfair state of affairs, where we are constantly being harmed year after year on various scales, and declared as enemies long before Ukraine,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s our inability to build and execute our policies intelligently, including publicly. And the third thing is Putin’s degradation from being in power for too long.”


“Putin now seriously believes what [Defense Minister] Shoigu and [General Staff chief] Gerasimov are telling him: About how quickly they’ll take Kyiv, that the Ukrainians are blowing themselves up, that Zelensky is a coke addict.”


So far, none of the officials have dared to object to what’s happening in the slightest public way, much less to resign. Among the richest Russian businessmen, only Mikhail Fridman, the founder of Alfa Group, who is now threatened with sanctions, has spoken out in a critical manner. His non-public letter to employees of his London-based company LetterOne was obtained by the Financial Times — but I think it’s more likely that he shared it with journalists himself. Peter Aven, chairman of Alfa Bank's board of directors, was at Putin's meeting with businessmen after the war was declared, and he looked quite unhappy. I was told that Yandex managing director Tigran Khudaverdyan did not want to go to the meeting at all, but in the end he went because of his responsibility for the company's employees, while Yandex's management did not express any position on what was happening even internally.


The president of state bank VTB, Andrey Kostin, is also rumored to be extremely disapproving of military action in Ukraine because of the heavy sanctions. “He is in mourning,” says an acquaintance of his. “He says he's been building the bank for 20 years, and now it's all down the drain because of some stupidity.”


Billionaire Oleg Tinkov spoke out against the war on the fourth day. “Innocent people are dying in Ukraine, every day, it is unthinkable and unacceptable! States should spend money on curing people, on research to defeat cancer, not on war. We are against this war!" - he wrote on Instagram.


Of the Duma deputies, the vast majority of whom have been sanctioned, only three dared to speak out, criticizing Putin's decision on their social media accounts. All three of them represent the second largest faction in parliament, the KPRF [Communist party], which for the past eight years has been insisting on recognizing the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” Oleg Smolin, first deputy chairman of the Duma committee on science and education and a member of the KPRF, published a post saying that he had been wrong in his predictions and was shocked when he learned of the invasion. Smolin believed that Russia would not start large-scale hostilities and that the situation would develop according to a much milder scenario of 2008, when Russia, he said, had only helped Abkhazia and South Ossetia defend their independence.


Another Communist, Mikhail Matveev, deputy chairman of the committee on regional policy, wrote that "the war must be stopped immediately.”


“When I voted for the recognition of the [self-proclaimed republics], I voted for peace, not war,” he wrote. “For Russia to be a shield so that the Donbass would not be bombed, not for Kyiv to be bombed.”


Retired colonel Vyacheslav Markhaev, who has criticized the authorities for persecuting the opposition, stated that the Duma deputies had been misled and the intention to wage war had been disguised. "I also condemn the Russian leadership, which began to use the same methods of double standards. Under the auspices of recognizing the [self-proclaimed republics], we concealed plans to unleash a full-scale war with our closest neighbor," he wrote.


Smolin, Matveev, and Markhaev are not among those deputies who have assets or property abroad — at least, the media have not reported this, and their fellow party members with whom I have spoken are not aware of this. In other words, with their statements what they’re trying to protect is their reputation. At the same time, the KPRF’s general line on the war with Ukraine is that the party shares Putin's concerns and understands the decision to launch a military operation.


The point of view of the three brave Communists is shared by other deputies of so-called opposition factions that I interviewed. They blame the Federation Council [upper house of parliament], saying that it was the senators who authorized the deployment of troops, while the [lower house] deputies only wanted to recognize the [self-proclaimed republics] and assist them in self-defense with a limited contingent. One of the Communists says that they really didn't expect anything like a full-scale war.


"No one thought that we would be right by Kyiv," another Duma deputy said. “At first you think it's all a crazy fake, but then it turns out to be real.”


According to him, he’s thinking of giving up his mandate, so as no longer to have any connection to the actions of the Russian authorities.


Translated by Ilya Lozovsky

What Russian Officials Think of the Invasion of Ukraine

[misskit]

TikTok Is Gripped by the Violence and Misinformation of Ukraine War

Bre Hernandez used to scan TikTok for videos of makeup tutorials and taco truck reviews. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the 19-year-old has spent hours each day scrolling the app for war videos, watching graphic footage of Ukrainian tanks firing on Russian troops and civilians running away from enemy gunfire.


“What I see on TikTok is more real, more authentic than other social media,” said Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles. “I feel like I see what people there are seeing.”


But what Ms. Hernandez was actually viewing and hearing in the TikTok videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks taken from video games, as well as a soundtrack that was first uploaded to the app more than a year ago. The footage and soundtrack were traced back to their original sources in a New York Times analysis of the videos.


TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app known for viral dance and lip-syncing videos, has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for sharing videos and photos of the Russia-Ukraine war. Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of videos about the conflict have been uploaded to the app from across the world, according to a review by The Times. The New Yorker has called the invasion the world’s “first TikTok war.”


The surge has put TikTok in a challenging position. For the first time, it is dealing with moderating a flood of videos — many of them unverified — about a single event that has captivated a global audience. That is leading it to essentially confront a large scale of misleading and distorted information that has long bedeviled more mature social networks and video sites, such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.


Many popular TikTok videos of the invasion — including of Ukrainians livestreaming from their bunkers — offer real accounts of the action, according to researchers who study the platform. But other videos have been impossible to authenticate and substantiate. Some simply appear to be exploiting the interest in the invasion for views, the researchers said.


In one example, Pravda, a Ukrainian newspaper, posted an audio clip featuring 13 Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island, an outpost of the Black Sea, facing a Russian military unit that asked them to surrender. The clip was then used in many TikTok videos, some of which included a note stating that all 13 soldiers had died. Ukrainian officials later said in a Facebook post that the men were alive and had been taken prisoner, but the TikTok videos have not been corrected.


“There are people who are, right now, seeing war for the first time on TikTok,” said Abbie Richards, an independent researcher who studies the app. “People trust it. The result is that a lot of people are seeing false information about Ukraine and believing it.”


TikTok and other social media platforms are also under pressure from U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to curb Russian misinformation about the war, especially from state-backed media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik. In response, YouTube has said it would block Russia Today and Sputnik in the European Union, while Twitter and Meta, the parent of Facebook, have said they would label content from the outlets as state sponsored.


TikTok has also banned Sputnik and Russia Today in the E.U., and on Friday said it would start labeling the outlets as state-sponsored in the countries where they are still available. The app also said on Thursday that it had dedicated more resources to monitoring for misleading content about the war.


“We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation,” said Hilary McQuaide, a TikTok spokeswoman.


For years, TikTok largely escaped sustained scrutiny about its content. Unlike Facebook, which has been around since 2004, and YouTube, which was founded in 2005, TikTok only became widely used in the past five years. Owned by China’s ByteDance, the app was designed to make one- to three-minute videos easy to create and share. It developed a reputation as a destination for addictive, silly and fun videos, especially for young users.


The app has navigated some controversies in the past. It has faced questions over harmful fads that appeared to originate on its platform, as well as whether it allows underage users and adequately protects their privacy.


But the war in Ukraine has supersized the issues facing TikTok, which has over one billion users globally.


The volume of war content on the app far outweighs what is found on some other social networks, according to a review by The Times. Videos with the hashtag #Ukrainewar have amassed nearly 500 million views on TikTok, with some of the most popular videos gaining close to one million likes. In contrast, the #Ukrainewar hashtag on Instagram had 125,000 posts and the most popular videos were viewed tens of thousands of times.


The very features that TikTok designed to help people share and record their own content have also made it easy to spread unverified videos across its platform. That includes TikTok’s algorithm for its “For You” page, which suggests videos based on what people have previously seen, liked or shared. Viewing one video with misinformation likely leads to more videos with misinformation being shown, Ms. Richards said.


Another popular TikTok feature lets people easily reuse audio, which has enabled people to create lip-syncing scenes of popular movies or songs. But audio can be misused and taken out of context, Ms. Richards said.


Over the last week, audio from a 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, was uploaded to several TikTok videos that claimed to show present-day Ukraine, according to The Times’s review. In another instance, a soundtrack of gunfire that was uploaded to TikTok on Feb. 1 — before Russia’s invasion — was later used in over 1,700 videos, many of which purported to be from the fighting in Ukraine, Ms. Richards said.


Removing such content is not easy, partly because of TikTok’s global nature. Once a video is uploaded, it is often recorded over and translated into dozens of languages. If the videos are not reported by users, they need to be independently found by content moderators proficient in those languages before they can be taken down.


“Video is the hardest format to moderate for all platforms,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook. “When combined with the fact that TikTok’s algorithm is the primary factor for what content a user sees, as opposed to friendships or follows on the big U.S. platforms, this makes TikTok a uniquely potent platform for viral propaganda.”


Dafne Atacan, 23, a Turkish national in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she was aware that she needed to fact check TikTok videos of the war. She said she had noticed that many of the videos appeared to be edited from news reports or were commentary from people in the United States who were watching Ukraine’s events from afar.


“I feel like lately, the videos I’m seeing are designed to get me riled up, or to emotionally manipulate me,” she said. “I get worried so now, sometimes, I find myself Googling something or checking the comments to see if it is real before I trust it.”


Ms. Hernandez, the student in Los Angeles, said she was surprised to learn from a Times reporter that some TikTok videos she had viewed about the war were misleading and unreliable.


“I guess I don’t really know what war looks like,” she said. “But we go to TikTok to learn about everything, so it makes sense we would trust it about this too.”


Ms. Hernandez added that TikTok remained her preferred platform for news. Most of what she sees on the app, she said, was real.

TikTok Is Gripped by the Violence and Misinformation of Ukraine War – DNyuz

[OhOh]

Alleged situation of forces and their areas of occupation and control, 05/03/22

[misskit]

Invaders thwart second attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol – Gerashchenko

The second attempt to provide a green corridor for the evacuation of civilians from Mariupol, Donetsk region, ended again on Sunday with shelling from the Russians, Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the interior minister, has said.


"You need to understand that because of the killing of civilian security guarantees by the occupying forces, there can be no green corridors, because only the sick brain of the Russians decides when to start shooting and at whom," Gerashchenko wrote on Telegram on Sunday.


According to him, the fighters of the special forces unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, the police and other units informed citizens about the danger of such road corridors. The adviser to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs also urged citizens to remain in shelters if complete ceasefire is not ensured.


"Fighters of the National Guard of Ukraine call on all of Ukraine to support and defend Mariupol!" Gerashchenko said.

Invaders thwart second attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol – Gerashchenko




I can’t help but to think the Russians are committing fratricide if they are shooting at civilians leaving Maripol. They can’t tell who is ethnic Russian and who is not!

[NamPikToot]

OhOh will be along to explain that its the Ukrainians firing on their own civilians, backed up by SoCal saying its some Nazi conspiracy.

[Backspin]

Ohoh

BREAKING: Russian Yamal-Europe pipeline halts all westbound gas supplies --flow from Russia to Germany has now been suspended indefinitely.

[Backspin]

So now Russia has covered the equivalent land mass of the UK in 10-11 days. It took 10-11 days for the US and UK to take Basra in Iraq.

This really is a special operation and not a typical invasion. Russia does not want to kill their Ukrainian brothers. They go into an area and negotiate. And when Ukrainian units don't want to negotiate , something suddenly appears out of the clouds and they all die.

[nidhogg]

^ you are such a fuckwit.

[misskit]

He thinks he is right on top of everything. His “breaking news” broke Friday. Sad, ain’t it?

Russia'''s Yamal-Europe westbound gas pipeline flows stopped on Friday | Reuters

[misskit]

“Nobody is under any illusions anymore. Russia’s use of its natural gas resources as an economic and political weapon show Europe needs to act quickly to be ready to face considerable uncertainty over Russian gas supplies next winter,” the IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement.

Russian Gas Via Yamal Pipeline Halts Flows To Germany | OilPrice.com

[NamPikToot]

Russia’s use of its natural gas resources as an economic and political weapon show Europe needs to act quickly

Well that was obvious from the moment the EU made its decision to shackle itself, staggering incompetence but she's left now.

[misskit]

There Are Many Things Worse Than American Power

If there was any doubt before, the answer is now clear. Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power—or, for that matter, Western power—is not a better world.


For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For those on the left, this was nothing new, and it was all too obvious. I spent my college years reading Noam Chomsky and other leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they weren’t entirely wrong. On balance, the U.S. may have been a force for good, but in particular regions and at particular times, it had been anything but.


Blaming America first became all too easy. After September 11, U.S. power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it was squandered on two endless wars made it convenient to focus on America’s sins, while underplaying Russia’s and China’s growing ambitions.

For his part, Putin understood well that the balance of power was shifting. Knowing what he knew, the Russian president wasn’t necessarily “irrational” in deciding to invade Ukraine. He had good reason to think that he could get away with it. After all, he had gotten away with quite a lot for nearly 15 years, ever since the Russian war against Georgia in 2008, when George W. Bush was still president. Then he annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened brutally in Syria in 2015. Each time, in an understandable desire to avoid an escalatory spiral with Russia, the United States held back and tried not to do anything that might provoke Putin. Meanwhile, Europe became more and more dependent on Russian energy; Germany, for example, was importing 55 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Just three weeks ago, it was possible for Der Spiegel to declare that most Germans thought “peace with Russia is the only thing that matters.”


The narrative of a feckless and divided West solidified for years. We, as Americans, were feeling unsure of ourselves, so it was only reasonable that Putin would feel it too. In such a context, and after four years of Donald Trump and the domestic turmoil that he wrought, it was tempting to valorize “restraint” and limited engagements abroad. Worried about imperial overreach, most of the American left opposed direct U.S. military action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the early 2010s, even though it was Russian and Iranian intervention on behalf of Syria’s dictator that bore the marks of a real imperial enterprise, not just an imagined one.


Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, in Europe no less, has put matters back in their proper framing. The question of whether the United States is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved. In the span of a few days, skeptics of American power have gotten a taste of what a world where America grows weak and Russia grows strong looks like. Of course, there are still holdouts who insist on seeing the United States as the provocateur. In its only public statement on Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America condemned Russia’s invasion but also called for “the U.S. to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” This is an odd statement considering that Russia, rather than the United States, has been the world’s most unabashedly imperialist force for the past three decades. But many on the anti-imperialist left aren’t really anti-imperialist; they just have an instinctive aversion to American power.


America’s low opinion of its own capacity for good—and the resulting desire to retreat or disengage—hasn’t just been a preoccupation of the far left. The crisis of confidence has been pervasive, spreading to the halls of power and even President Barack Obama, whose memorable mantra was “Don’t do stupid shit.” Instead of thinking about what we could do, or what we could do better, Obama was more interested in a self-limiting principle. For their part, European powers—content to bask under their U.S. security umbrella—could afford to believe in fantasies of perpetual peace. Europe’s gentleness and lethargy—coaxing Germany to commit even 2 percent of its GDP to defense seemed impossible—became something of a joke. One popular Twitter account, @ISEUConcerned, devoted itself to mocking the European Union’s propensity to express “concern,” but do little else, whenever something bad happened.

Suddenly, the EU has been aroused from its slumber, and the parody account was rendered temporarily speechless. This is no longer tepid concern, but righteous fury. Member states announced that they would send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. Germany, for the first time, said that it would ramp up its military budget to 100 billion euros. On the economic front, the EU announced some of the toughest sanctions in history. My podcast co-host, Damir Marusic, an Atlantic Council senior fellow, likened it to a “holy war,” European-style.


Sometimes, unusual and extreme events mark the separation between old and new ways of thinking and being. This week, the Berlin-based journalist Elizabeth Zerofsky remarked that the current moment reminded her of the memoir The World of Yesterday, written by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig as World War II loomed. In it, he recalls the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with an almost naive fondness. On the first day of the Ukraine invasion, I happened to be speaking to a group of college students who had no memory of September 11. I told them that they may be living in history. Those students, like all of us, are bearing witness to one of those rare events that recast how individuals and nations alike view the world they inhabit.


The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle?


In any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored why Biden was right and why authoritarians—and the authoritarian idea itself—are such a threat to peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.

MSN

[NamPikToot]

^ and China is loving the spotlight being turned away from them.

[nidhogg]

Fareed Zakaria was on CNN tonight. Laid out how for years the west (and the US) has just given a pass to Putin. State sanctioned poisonings, Georgia, Crimea and so on. Bullies never stop, but Putin is probably a bit surprise that people finally grew a bit of a spine. Mind you, with a less charismatic leader than Zelenskyy i wonder how it might have played out.....

[Troy]

Well that was obvious from the moment the EU made its decision to shackle itself, staggering incompetence but she's left now.

Germany has started to test its nuclear power stations in order to bring them back on line. Luckily it isn't too late to reverse their decision on nuclear energy.

[NamPikToot]

^ So I heard. I am no fan of nuclear as an energy source but the West was too quick to push it into touch until it has a reliable renewable mix. The UK was none too bright moth balling its main Gas storage site too - these so called leaders have been found wanting.