ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

the Monuments Men but they're NFTs

On a related note, Denis Pushilin, head of the DNR, was big into this a few years back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company)

According to contemporary Western press reports, most investors were aware of the fraudulent nature of the scheme, but still hoped to profit from it by withdrawing money before it collapsed.

what the hell

.@reuters: UKRAINE PRESIDENT SAYS RUSSIAN OCCUPATION FORCES ARE TRYING TO CAPTURE THE CHERNOBYL PLANT

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) February 24, 2022

Yeah, was about to post. There was a passing report that Russians bombed a waste disposal site, too.

It’s a pretty straight line from Belarus to Kyiv through the exclusion zone.

So what happens if/when serious western sanctions hit/kick in and Russia calls that a further provocation and threatens more military action?

This situation might be worse than the Iraq War, starting with the fact that no opponent of the war defended Saddam Hussein; the dictator had no partisans on the most highly rated cable news show praising his strategic vision. Plus, instead of an army emasculated by the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions the Russian armed forces look formidable.

So what happens if/when serious western sanctions hit/kick in and Russia calls that a further provocation and threatens more military action?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, February 24, 2022 10:16 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Are you suggesting american imperalism? How dare you?

(From what I understand and I may be 100% wrong, the Red Line would be actual NATO countries)

I'm hearing from both Ukrainian and Russian immigrants I know irl and while the Ukrainians have the expected outrage, some of the Russians (even the ones who dislike Putin) are basically like, "Fuck the Ukrainians. They helped the Nazis murder my family."

Many xposts, but thanks for the links, SV. I added them all to my feed.

How far does anyone want to go back? Because fuck the Russians, they're why my family left what is essentially Ukraine around the turn of the (last) century, to escape anti-Jewish pogroms and conscription.

This situation might be worse than the Iraq War

I think the situation might be worse than anything we've seen since WWII. I can only think of a couple of outcomes: 1) an expanded armed conflict, worst case scenario as prelude to a broader war 2) expansionist-minded Russian occupation marking a return to cold war status quo, or 3) either or both of the above and the eventual election of a collaborationist US government that further bolsters Russia and accelerates or amplifies 1 or 2. Oh, and everyone is nuclear now, too.

to be fair to everyone itt nobody has come out with a take even comparably stupid to that of tracer hand's colleague

putin is a psychopathic gangster villain madman obv, a real end-stage symptom of the post-industrial tendency towards unrestricted technocratic feudalism, and the sooner someone (preferably one of his own) sticks a bullet through his head the better

wait a second, are we pushing the conversation to the new thing that definitely won't happen now

i think we need to round up the stagecoaches and maybe do some consolidating, maybe review the recent past and then do the hard work of moving the goalposts of previous 100% confidence predictions so that we can claim we were 50% right

the USA day shift is here; our thread police are the fucking worst and it's me

Many xposts, but thanks for the links, SV. I added them all to my feed.

― o. nate, Thursday, 24 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Kofman is a good follow. Really holds on from wider speculation as to where it's going, no comparisons to Iraq or WWII. We could use that here.

Anti-war protest in St Petersburg https://t.co/6eNQVPrQln

— Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) February 24, 2022

the USA day shift is here; our thread police are the fucking worst and it's me

― dig your way out of the shit with a gold magic shovel! (Karl Malone), Thursday, February 24, 2022 11:16 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Nah it’s not you Karl (it’s never you), and I do think posts of predictive nature is fine, if only because it helps with anxiety, it’s just that some will insult or demean people who don’t agree with their predictions and it’s gross.

Can't really square this feeling of seeing something historically atrocious happening with running victory laps c&ping posts that got it wrong but ok.

yes otm

thread police is not rly it lads its have a fucking word with yrself police which isnt policing its someone saying to u have a word with yrself

Another one to follow on Twitter. He's not an analyst or a journalist but he posted a very prescient thread back in December, correctly analyzing Putin's intentions (which I linked in the original thread revive):

https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch

KM and VHS, the discussion moved on a while ago and this is getting extremely tiresome

of all things, second captains had a decent intro focusing on putins speech taking a lot from a paper he published last year ito "justification" etc

k

I would really like to be able to use this thread to understand what's happening in Ukraine so it would be great if it were less petty/stupid here? I say as someone not knowledgeable about the topic.

Thanks for the twitter follows upthread btw, those are coming in very instructive.

Alperovitch thinks the West needs to be careful that severe economic sanctions don't provoke Russia into a broader conflict. He makes the counterintuitive suggestion that putting intermediate range missiles in the Baltics may be a better response and ultimately less destabilizing than sanctions.

Russia would need to believe they would be used, which seems unlikely, but idk.

On the analysis errors, it has been interesting to see everyone from Russian political scientists to EU security analysts and journalists to critics from / of the U.S. like Mark Ames and Gary Brechter, to the dope who runs RT’s English web service all taking the same line of ‘we were wrong and we don’t know why’:

Not just our rationality that failed us, but also Russia’s. Few among Russia’s expert class believed this would happen. Contradicts most things we know about the logic, aims and means of Russia’s foreign policy.
So I feel I was wrong together with the Russians, not with the West https://t.co/CLWioWxQFp

— Kadri Liik (@KadriLiik) February 24, 2022

I realise that's not the main point here, but: ppl use the term postmodern in the weirdest ways

Xpost

I just saw that thread on Twitter too, he did seem to be quite prescient.

james meek and paul rogers (a v good, all too rare left poltics military analyst), were being more cautious.

Fizzles were you also listening to a Mare Nostrum podcast on SC? After that Paul Rogers excerpt, the podcast queued up but I didn’t notice til it was over cause I had just been listening to my own ambient playlist (not on SC), with some of the same artists. Don’t think SC has embedded itself that deeply into my neurons yet?

I realise that's not the main point here, but: ppl use the term postmodern in the weirdest ways

Maybe "post-reality" would be a more accurate term. People choose to pretend aspects of the real world do not exist because acknowledging them would create too much cognitive dissonance.

Something I saw in passing which was like a real life #onethread was that the west/US was uncomfortable imposing the most severe sanctions (removal from SWIFT) not because they're worried about further provoking Russia but because it would weaken the dollar and boost crypto currency, which Russia could in turn use to circumvent sanctions (as if there were not another reason to hate or distrust crypto).

Fizzles were you also listening to a Mare Nostrum podcast on SC? After that Paul Rogers excerpt, the podcast queued up but I didn’t notice til it was over cause I had just been listening to my own ambient playlist (not on SC), with some of the same artists. Don’t think SC has embedded itself that deeply into my neurons yet?

I thought this was interesting/sad/scary:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine.html

On the country’s internet, still mostly uncensored, Russians saw their vaunted military sow carnage in a country in which millions of them had relatives and friends.

This missile attack is brought to you by Applebees!!

THIS is CNN... pic.twitter.com/JIUIhrQBHh

— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) February 24, 2022

I feel like the west has been laboring under the assumption that Putin may be powermad and a klepto, but that he's a shrewd, rational actor playing 4D chess or whatever

But maybe he's just a madman after all? All this talk of nuking anyone that steps in to assist Ukraine is pretty unprecedented

Maybe he's trying the "crazy uncle" approach that seems to have worked for Trump?

From that Times piece:

During the pandemic, analysts had noticed a change in Mr. Putin — a man who isolated himself in a bubble of social distancing without parallel among Western leaders. In isolation, he appeared to become more aggrieved and more emotional, and increasingly spoke about his mission in stark historical terms. His public remarks descended ever deeper into distorted historiography as he spoke of the need to right perceived historical wrongs suffered by Russia over the centuries at the hands of the West.

The political scientist Gleb O. Pavlovsky, a close adviser to Mr. Putin until falling out with him in 2011, said he was stunned by the president’s dark description of Ukraine as a dire threat to Russia in his hourlong speech to the nation on Monday.

“I have no clue where he got all that — he seems to be reading something totally strange,” Mr. Pavlovsky said. “He’s become an isolated man, more isolated than Stalin was.”

Ms. Stanovaya, the analyst, said she now felt that Mr. Putin’s heightened obsession with history in recent years had become key to understanding his motivation. After all, the war against Ukraine appeared impossible to explain strategically, since it had no clear resolution and would inevitably only increase anti-Russian sentiment abroad and escalate Russia’s confrontation with the NATO alliance.

“Putin has brought himself to a place in which he sees it as more important, more interesting, more compelling to fight for restoring historical justice than for Russia’s strategic priorities,” Ms. Stanovaya said. “This morning, I realized that a certain shift has taken place.”

I'd say the nuke talk is crazy, but it is calculated, too. The US/NATO will be heavily inclined to funnel aid to Ukraine via one or more sympathetic, smaller nations, as a less confrontational option; Putin's threat is designed to deter such vulnerable nations from pinning a target on themselves. He's daring NATO to push all their chips into the pot, by entering the battlefield. His calculation would appear to be that they never will.

that is frightening

xp

Well they’ve taken Chernobyl so that’s uh not great

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/chernobyl-power-plant-captured-by-russian-forces-ukrainian-official-2022-02-24/

i believe this will be bad for russia, soon and eventually. it makes no sense, why they're doing this, other than just empire building. so, in other words, shades of 2003 iraq invasion, which also made no sense for the united states, but happened anyway

i know nothing about war other than reading about them and playing videogames, but i would guess the significance of capturing a power plant is that the aggressor immediately gains the ability to cut off power or otherwise affect the regional grid (?), and also that the military can use the newly captured power plant as a forward base of operations?

xpost Well, they also had the Chechnya fiasco, and that didn't end well either

I assume Chernobyl has been offline for decades..?

That NY Times (the bit quoted) seems like nonsense.

Thus thread from December was a sober analysis, and pretty accurate, so far.

Quoting it from where he thinks it will go, and where it ends for Putin

He is unlikely to invade Western Ukraine but can relatively easily split the country in half along the Dnieper and establish a permanent buffer zone between Europe and Russia, as well as a land bridge to Crimea

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) December 21, 2021

The most rational explanation I’ve heard is that it’s a shorter route to Kyiv and if the Russians set up a base there you can guarantee no one will fuck with it