dagblog - Comments for "Catching up "

Mega super thread of analysis

artappraiser — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 22:30:07 +0000

Mega super thread of analysis by international relations guy Kamil Galeev, Galina Starovoitova Fellow at The Wilson Center (with lots of photo illustrations yet),

starts here, use the "read the full conversation on Twitter" link to get it all on one page

How Putin managed to derussify East Ukraine in just 8 years?

Discussion on the potential deescalation of the war in Ukraine with all security implications it has illustrates the difference between the goal- oriented and the system-oriented thinking pic.twitter.com/P8A4e94c9f
— Kamil Galeev (@kamilkazani) March 16, 2022

EmmaZahn — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 14:08:11 +0000

In reply to Catching up

#biolabsinUkraine

So we heard a lot about "#BiolabsinUkraine" and an alleged biological weapons program carried out in them funded by the US. A thread about which this is nuts and a look back in history. pic.twitter.com/N8TdcLhcB2
— Marc-Michael Blum (@blumscientific) March 15, 2022

Thanks for the links. I've

EmmaZahn — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 11:04:08 +0000

In reply to you might especially like the

Thanks for the links. I've added them to my reading list which is getting really, really long. Just so you know, if these are things you have already posted in other threads, they show up in my Feedly news feed so you can just @ me to them there if you want.

Tablet Magazine - No Quiet

EmmaZahn — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 16:08:06 +0000

In reply to Catching up

Tablet Magazine - No Quiet Place Left On Earth - March 10, 2022

Excerpts:

The fury of the Ukrainians has also hardened as it becomes clear that the West has categorically ruled out the no-fly zone for which President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pleading. The West has decided that the escalatory danger of direct confrontations between Russian and NATO planes in Ukrainian skies is simply too great. ...

...As for Zelensky, his rhetoric has become noticeably more intense and much more bitter over the last week. In the opening days of the war, he had taken pains to appear positive and was very careful to speak of “the enemy” without personally attacking the Russians. He is now no longer pulling his punches or employing euphemisms. Zelensky has already twice accused the West of abandonment in the most furious register possible: “If you will not give us the aircraft that we need to be able to protect ourselves, there can be only one conclusion: You want us to be slowly killed. That is also the responsibility of the world’s politicians, and of Western leaders. Today and forever.”...

...While Ukrainian air defenses have held up so far—mostly a testament to Russian military incompetence—the Russians have been able to dominate the air, and the Ukrainians have ceased flying what is left of their air force because those planes have often been knocked out of the sky. ...

... Moscow now needs to take the Black Sea coastline in order to push the Ukrainian economy underwater, as well as the major roads and power stations that will leave Ukraine with no practical means of importing weapons or ammunition from the Europeans and Americans, and no light or heat in the middle of winter.

Not sure about the above

EmmaZahn — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 11:35:13 +0000

In reply to Logistics Rule--look at the

Not sure about the above analysis. To my admitted amateur eyes, it looks like a siege. If Russia controls sea and ground supply routes to eastern Ukraine and can enforce a no-fly zone over it, why hurry troops to the middle and west.

Logistics Rule--look at the

EmmaZahn — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 11:22:12 +0000

In reply to Catching up

Logistics Rule--look at the map. You might be wondering why the Russian invasion of Ukraine looks like a group of almost equidistant road-linked thrusts stretching from Russian and Belarus into Ukraine. (thanks to @Nrg8000 for this) pic.twitter.com/VTLc0orqUb
— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) March 12, 2022

you might especially like the

artappraiser — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 20:54:47 +0000

In reply to just read most of this new

you might especially like the first paragraph of this excerpt which refers to something you mentioned on another thread; I think it's spot on:

[...] With Ukraine, we have the assumption that it could be a successful version of Afghanistan, and it wasn’t. It turned out that the Ukrainian people are brave; they are willing to resist and die for their country. Evidently, Putin didn’t believe that. But it turned out that “the television President,” Zelensky, who had a twenty-five-per-cent approval rating before the war—which was fully deserved, because he couldn’t govern—now it turns out that he has a ninety-one-per-cent approval rating. It turned out that he’s got cojones. He’s unbelievably brave. Moreover, having a TV-production company run a country is not a good idea in peacetime, but in wartime, when information war is one of your goals, it’s a fabulous thing to have in place.

The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation.

How do you define “the West”?

The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and nato, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.

If you assumed that the West was just going to fold, because it was in decline and ran from Afghanistan; if you assumed that the Ukrainian people were not for real, were not a nation; if you assumed that Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian, a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine—if you assumed all of that, then maybe you thought you could take Kyiv in two days or four days. But those assumptions were wrong.

Let’s discuss the nature of the Russian regime [....]

just read most of this new

artappraiser — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 19:51:55 +0000

In reply to Catching up

just read most of this new interview by David Remnick of historian of Russia & Stalin biographer, Stephen Kotnick; highly recommend it (there's also a video, I didn't watch and an 18 min. voice recording, I didn't use)

"The Soviet Union did not invade Afghanistan. It did a coup in Afghanistan, sending special forces into the capital of Kabul. It murdered the Afghan leadership and installed a puppet, Babrak Karmal, who had been hiding in exile in Czechoslovakia." https://t.co/93H0LdEqrw
— Sam Haselby (@samhaselby) March 12, 2022

going to continue reading it....

while the tiny nutwing Qanon

artappraiser — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 17:56:58 +0000

In reply to FUCKING AMAZING. No partisan

while the tiny nutwing Qanon party passionately soldiers on:

Russia's baseless claims about secret American biological warfare labs in Ukraine are taking root in the U.S. too, uniting COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, QAnon adherents and some supporters of ex-President Donald Trump. https://t.co/XrmslCYZIC
— ABC News (@ABC) March 12, 2022

FUCKING AMAZING. No partisan

artappraiser — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 17:52:23 +0000

In reply to Catching up

FUCKING AMAZING. No partisan gap. None.

There’s no partisan gap in views on Russia and Ukraine: https://t.co/0s38mSZzU6 pic.twitter.com/K8QTXFcE7B
— Conor Sen (@conorsen) March 12, 2022