ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

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.

Shit.

btw the linked video in my post is one of SV’s people to follow - Michael Kofman.

obviously all after the fact now but it was the single most useful thing i watched at the beginning of the year.

Kofman’s the best military analyst I’ve seen on the Russian armed forces and he has said this has been the likely outcome from the start.

I think there’s a danger in retrospectively agreeing that any turn of events was inevitable, though. The Russian Foreign Ministry was putting out troll posts about the US failing to provoke a war less than a week ago. I’m not sure how many of the inner circle knew we were going to be where we are today, let alone external commentators.

My view is that Russia probably expected Zelenskiy to cave to the pressure and go back to implementing Minsk II and the initial noise about moving troops back from the front was a response to some of the signs in that direction. When Zelenskiy said that was untenable, and couldn’t be squared with the idea that Ukraine was a sovereign state, Putin shifted to overt aggression.

"The Russian Foreign Ministry was putting out troll posts about the US failing to provoke a war less than a week ago."

The role of trolling/memes etc. in the build-up of this is something to look at.

.....sez himself

fwiw one of my work colleagues is Russian, and lived in the US for awhile, and is a die-hard The Daily listener, and said she has found the US media coverage of this bewildering, partic in the NY Times. She says it amounted to 'escalation', said it made her sick to her stomach, had to stop listening to The Daily, says that Putin probably felt like if he didn't do anything now after all of this he'd look weak. Obviously this is one person's non-expert view but thought it worth sharing. She never thought Putin would go beyond the disputed territories, if that. And she couldn't believe the hypocrisy of American media - "as if the US never invaded other countries!"

lol

I was like listen it's an American tradition maybe you wouldn't understand

I think there’s a danger in retrospectively agreeing that any turn of events was inevitable, though. The Russian Foreign Ministry was putting out troll posts about the US failing to provoke a war less than a week ago. I’m not sure how many of the inner circle knew we were going to be where we are today, let alone external commentators.

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.

Mr. Fizzles putting it a bit more eloquently than some of us have managed.

Sabre rattling

― mardheamac (gyac), Wednesday, February 16, 2022 1:06 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

As the Russian annexation of Ukraine escalates, reminder that the UK has been deploying troops along Poland's border with both Ukraine and Belarus to stop refugees entering the EU. This will only intensify as the military conflict does. https://t.co/aZQtNjZxFO

— libcom.org (@libcomorg) February 24, 2022

Sabre rattling

― mardheamac (gyac), Wednesday, February 16, 2022 1:06 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

The only people really going hard for war are the only people who always are, ie Atlantic Council shitheads and dopes like AA.

Brillant stuff

It’s good that this thread has reoriented to what really matters: settling scores on ilx.

I don’t think you understand the disputed regions, gyac.

none of this is about being right or wrong is it tho - it’s about the probability of outcomes changing over time. as SV has said it was surely likely thinking was contingent and uncertain in such a risky war for Russia. Seeing how the build up of pressure on the borders affected the international response - sabre rattling if you like - may well have been part of the process.

otoh given previous statements maybe this was a long term intent. we don’t know.

it’s possible that highly likely outcomes don’t transpire and vice versa: gotchas don’t really make any sense.

aka in hindsight it's easy to say things were inevitable. we have already had big essays explaining why brexit had to have unfolded the way it did, which is plainly bonkers as it could have gone a million different ways at a million different moments.

Agreed Tracer, but maybe don’t act like you know it all and demean other people’s worries and concerns.

SV and Fizzles, the solid sources are greatly appreciated.

@ChristopherJM looks like another fairly good one.

I don’t think you understand the disputed regions, gyac.

― Van Horn Street, Thursday, 24 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

The disputed regions understander has logged on.