ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

because he's like goebbels? he's the PR mouthpiece who provides a reason, if not a good one, for the masses (the most watched cable news show in the US, i think?), and they believe him no matter how little sense it makes? because he's one of the most prominent voices speaking in favor of Russia and against Ukraine, possibly in the entire United States? I won't speak beyond our horrible sphere. because trump will likely be president again in 2024, and ukraine and russia will probably still be countries then?

i'm just some turd, but what does it look like in jan 2025 with president for life trump withdrawing u.s. from nato? beats me, but that's about 3 years from now so yeah, the big loud angry fucking asshole asswipe face on the screen, tucker carslon, the loudhorn for all this shit, is VERY FUCKING RELEVANT

gonna fucking rip off my nipples in a second, jesus fucking christ

because he's one of the most prominent voices speaking in favor of Russia and against Ukraine, possibly in the entire United States?

ah got it, thanks

oh fuck, you got me groovemaan! it turns out there's more of a world than beyond these borders. i never thought of it like that

i mean, what does public opinion in the united states have to do with ukraine? nothing at all!

Zelenskiy’s speaking at the moment. He’s been consistently impressive over the last couple of weeks.

He addresses Russians in Russian.

"We are divided by a shared border of more than 2,000km. Almost 200,000 of your troops and thousands of military vehicles are standing alongside it. Your leadership has ordered them to move forward, onto another country's territory."

— max seddon (@maxseddon) February 23, 2022

Thread has a summary ^

Yes, never mind that guy, whoever he is, let's get back to the people matter, some cunt on American television.

thanks TOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

hes absolutely right.

how can that be argued ffs.

that Zelensky speech quoted in the Max Seddon thread is something

Yeah from my seat in the Great Satan Zelensky seems like a decent guy, at least as much as politicians can be.

this thread is so gatekeeper-y, might as well be a reddit channel

i’ve been reading a lot of twitter content and associated things written by people in russia-adjacent countries and just been trying to wrap my mind around things

that and reading the two minsk agreements. total clusterfuck

well, fuck. best of luck, Ukraine.

oh jeez

For real now I guess

Reports of heavy strikes from all across Ukraine

— Illia Ponomarenko (@IAPonomarenko) February 24, 2022

Looking like worst case scenario

Looks like Putin decided that the non-military responses that the US and NATO will implement, combined with whatever military response Ukraine will make, will not be damaging enough to offset whatever the fuck he thinks occupying Ukraine will gain him. War is always tempting when you are free to imagine a swift and decisive victory is within easy grasp. Speaking as an American who has watched this dynamic play out several times from my own government, reality has a way of overtaking such rosy imagined outcomes and delivering something much worse.

so uh what are the odds nukes are gonna be involved in this

I'd say tiny. Putin fully expects his conventional army will prevail over Ukraine's armed forces rather easily and using nukes in a guerilla war would beyond madness.

Dawn in Kharkiv

This is going to be like Iraq - initial invasion over very quickly, but then months and months of bloody guerrilla warfare

so glad everybody spent half this thread portending to know what was going to happen and shitting on everybody else and then the thing they said wouldn't happen happened

*pretending

yeah the whole "America/American media really wants there to be a war" thing not looking so great when Russia wound up doing exactly what US intel agencies said they were gonna do

As awful as it would be in terms of massive civilian deaths and protracted war, the Ukrainian government should be caching small arms, ammunition, land mines, mortars and similar armaments in small amounts all over the country. If the second half of the 20th century taught us anything about warfare, it's that nukes are useless as offensive weapons and any country willing to fight a long, bloody guerilla war is nearly certain to expel an invader.

otoh, civil wars are more of a toss-up. If there's enough pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine, Putin may well grab the prize he's reaching for. But what puzzles me most are the stakes he's hoping to win? What kind of valuable power will accrue to Russia if he succeeds?

wonder what China thinks of Putin's enthusiastic support for rogue breakaway republics

Open season?

strikes in Moldova too? is this confirmed?

a lot of false reports going around so who knows

China is salivating at the idea of doing the same thing to Taiwan, I’m sure. Situation is obv different in many ways but if the world rolls over on this, it might be open season

Flightradar shows a commercial flight taking off from Chisinau to Milan as scheduled so hopefully not

Either Russian tanks entering through Belarus or actual Belarusian military is joining in?!

Fox News (Ingram, Greenwald, etc. on the air) on the side of Russia is something else.

Yeah I’m kind of freaked out by that

Flight landing in Chisinau from Iasi so the Moldova stuff looks not to be true

Is fox all-in pro Russia now, or just some of the lunatics? Any chance this wakes some Americans up to what unhinged trash the network is?!

Well, the big guy called in:

Trump is angrily denouncing a President right now on Fox News, and it’s not Putin.

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) February 24, 2022

And this is Greenwald tonight. But you're right: it'll be important whether the Fox & Friends and other anchor follow suit, or tow the same line with this.

Glenn Greenwald on Fox News just now blames the “extremely unhinged conspiracy theory about Russia taking over American institutions” for spoiling US-Russia relations & ruining Trump’s opportunity to work with Putin. He thinks that’s to blame for Russia invading Ukraine. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/AwtG7mCJ8I

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) February 24, 2022

someone launch a full-scale attack on the fucker's laptop, please

what is cnn playing

A couple of good people to follow to get a sense of what’s happening:

@KofmanMichael - military analyst

@kgorchinskaya - Ukrainian journalist with Forbes

@shaunwalker7 - Guardian

@polinaivanovva - FT

ty

As I sit here in a nation bordering Ukraine I'm pretty darn thankful that (1) I live in a NATO country and (2) Trump is not US president right now. Scary shit.

That doesn’t just mean allowing people across the border. It means access to decent accommodation, swift asylum procedures and work permits; humanitarian and financial assistance. The kind of support we should have in place for everyone who needs it. https://t.co/ghrRzJBBEA

— Daniel Trilling (@trillingual) February 24, 2022

Something that Western governments should do.

thanks SV.

Reading this thread caused me to review my indexing on crisis from last year

Throughout this crisis, one key analytical divide (of several) has been between those analysts who focus on Russian domestic politics on the one hand, and military analysts on the other. I'm obviously in the former camp.

— Sam Greene (@samagreene) February 24, 2022

this is somewhat self-indulgent, given eg Sam Weller's post the immediate local crisis, as well as the wider global impact, but it is also, prompted by SV's post, a way of auditing how i get information and to what extent it should have attention paid to it - on ongoing thing about the importance of epistemic health in the digital age.

at christmas I had a lot of catching up to do generally as was woefully uninformed. the military analysis from sites like War on the Rocks was pretty powerful, i had it mentally high probability. this Tooze Chartbook in January was particularly useful, and the video there was fairly unequivocal (warning very 'military industrial analyst' vibe). more recently some analysis, like the lack of apparent media preparation, and the looooong build-up + difficulty of maintaining forces in place, made me reduce my percentages. In retrospect that was also because of some personal uncertainty about the validity of the military analysis - was this a case of deformation professionelle? james meek and paul rogers (a v good, all too rare left poltics military analyst), were being more cautious. before it sort of levelled out at a 60% level, with obviously putin speeches and more rapid additional mobilisation over the last week or so bringing it to a point of inevitability.

one thing i saw a lot of on twitter and elsewhere was people indexing on the likelihood on the basis of political and media rhetoric coming out the UK and US, heavily discounting warmongering speeches as discounting the likelihood of war itself. this seemed wild, nationalistically self-important, deny the importance of events to ukrainians and russians (rather than say, what does x person in US and UK think about) and to make putin's agency somehow a factor of parliamentary speeches and media noise.