Please watch the 10-minute video below. President Zelensky: Day 17 of the war is over.
Zelensky’ late-night address: Day 17 of the war is over. “The Russian invaders cannot conquer us. They do not have such strength. They do not have such spirit. They rely only on violence. Only on terror. Only on weapons, of which they have a lot.” pic.twitter.com/N0DoBPyVmZ
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) March 13, 2022
I’ll happily pay more for gas for her. pic.twitter.com/MxUPgUnKYK
— bettemidler (@BetteMidler) March 11, 2022
This is an 18-minute interview with Alexander Vindman. Well worth your time.
“You and me, we are the same.”
That’s what he said to me. The fellow who was working at the counter of the restaurant that serves Greek food, gyros and Italian Beef. You and me, we are the same. He had asked me some question while I waited for my order, and I had answered. You and me, we are the same.
That’s what I am thinking as I watch what is happening in Ukraine, except they are rising to the occasion in a way way that I somehow doubt we would if this were happening here. We can’t even comprehend that it could happen here. Nothing is possible, until it is.
This war in Ukraine, for the survival of Ukraine, feels different. Listening to President Zelenskyy as he talks, I imagine that this was what it was like for people huddled around the radio listening to war news in real time.
Why does this war feel so different? Every war and every war possibility, starting with Vietnam, felt like a mistake. My reaction was always no, please, no more war mongering, get us out of that war, do not get us into this war. But this war isn’t about saber-rattling or oil or power for power’s sake. This war is the front on the war for democracy not autocracy. Ukraine is fighting for all of us.
Does this war feel different for you?
WaterGirl
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: We have added the charity that Alexander Vindman is using to get medical supplies and more to civilians in Ukraine to the Balloon Juice for Ukraine thermometer.
brendancalling
My ex’s elderly parents had to flee Kyiv. You damn bet it feels different.
narya
Part of why this feels different to me is that it’s clear that TFG’s antics contributed to the current situation, in ways that are obvious (withholding aid) and likely non-obvious ways as well. And this is the first time, in all of the years and wars I’ve seen, where I’ve felt like our leadership is trying to be on the side of right, with the rest of the damn world, which makes a difference. It also makes me angrier at TFG and the RWNJs, because so much destruction and bloodshed might well have been avoided w/o their vile actions.
Richard
Russia did ‘t have even a thin casus belli. Ukraine didn’t bring this on. It’s an act of obvious aggression in Eastern Europe and therefore people pay a lot more attention.
And…Ukraine didn’t fall. If they had fallen we would have moved on. They still stand against o e of the sources of evil in our modern world.
Also zelenskyy is great on TV.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@narya: Yes. And to me, this feels like the culmination of years of rising authoritarianism all over the world, including in the US. Still in the R party, for that matter. It’s like there’s all this pent up anger over that. The world was ready.
narya
@WaterGirl: I also donated $100 to WCK, but directly. Add it here or not, as you prefer. :-)
WaterGirl
@Richard: I agree that Zelenskyy is great. Not just great on TV, but a truly great man in many ways. He is an inspiration. It’s not that he is a soaring orator. It’s what he says, and it comes from the heart. And he is brave beyond belief. As are many Ukrainians.
cmorenc
It’s really just now sinking in to me how much more existential the war in Ukraine is, not just for Ukraine but for the future of the US and west in general. And that Putin has the same dangerous level psychopathic megalomania as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao did in their respective times.
I was on long flight yesterday with an older white man seated next to me who who spent the entire 3hr flight watching OAN on his seatback monitor, and wearing an extremist 2A-themed shirt, and his wife immediately across the aisle was wearing a “Lets’ Go Brandon” sweatshirt. I avoided engaging him except for a very civil exchange about some very rough turbulence the flight encountered en route. But clearly this man and his wife are exactly the ground troops for our own wanna-be Putin, Donald Trump, who would likely transfer their loyalties to the likes of DeSantis if Trump loses out in the upcoming GOP power struggle.
sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Who knows, but I think if we hadn’t gone into Iraq this wouldn’t be happening.
debbie
It feels different to me because it could be the war that definitively ends autocracy’s grip.
WaterGirl
@narya: Glad you donated! I don’t have the ability to add to the thermometers. What is donated through is what shows up.
WaterGirl
@cmorenc: Ugh. What is a 2-A themed shirt?
edit: answered. 2nd amendment. assholes.
cmorenc
@sab:
…which war (Iraq) was, like Putin’s Ukraine invasion, fueled by intelligence deliberately corrupted by what Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld wanted to hear, rather than actual objective facts and assessment.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
Second Amendment.
cmorenc
@WaterGirl:
It was mainly a big-font reprint of the 2nd Amendment, with bolded emphasis and CAPS on some key words gun-nut enthusiasts focus on:
RaflW
Are folks concerned about the guided missile attack 15 miles from Poland? I know we’d been expecting both that RU forces would probably step up use of such arms (though speculation is that Vlad doesn’t have a large supply) and that he has been frustrated by and vocally saber-rattling about Western resupply of UKR javelines and such.
Still, the risks of such provocation, as well as the shooting death of an NYT reporter (not specifically ordered by Putin but both a predictable and terrible consequence of his style of indiscriminate death-dealing) seems high and rising.
I suppose he want’s a hot war with NATO that the west ‘starts’. Even if 85% of the world would be clear that he started all this shit (in 2014 if not earlier!).
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: Second ammendment, pro gun?
zhena gogolia
@Richard:
Indeed. This is what enrages me. Everyone would have returned to their blissful ignorance. The whole thing could have been stopped before it started if people had been paying attention earlier.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@RaflW:
I think he’s going to push closer and closer to the Polish border, even with a few feints across “by accident”.
WaterGirl
@debbie: ah, thank you.
raven
@RaflW: He was not a New York Times reporter. He had worked for them in the past
Dorothy A. Winsor
@sab: There does seem to be a through line
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: yup, a ‘stray’ missile landing in Poland as a provocation
Eolirin
@zhena gogolia: Could it have been stopped? World condemnation hasn’t stopped it yet. When we removed the attempts to provide pretext by openly disclosing intelligence it didn’t stop it then either. Putin was going to do this regardless of what we did, I think. Unless we had shown a willingness to do things that we still aren’t willing to do, like put NATO forces on the front lines and dare Putin to fire on them.
WaterGirl
@RaflW: I missed the guided missile attack 15 miles from Poland. And the shooting death of a NYT reporter. Any details on either one?
edit: Raven supplied details for the shooting death.
CaseyL
I hear a lot of comments (some here) about how “Obama missed a chance in 2014 to stop Putin.”
Maybe so – but Obama’s focus was on achieving a non-proliferation pact with Iran. Russia was a crucial partner in that. I’m sure Obama’s calculations included not doing much of anything about Russia’s attacks in order to keep them in line for the Iran nuclear deal.
And the deal was made. It’s not Obama’s fault Trump and the GOP shredded the agreement the first chance they had.
You have to pick your battles and priorities. Obama’s was a nuclear deal with Iran.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia:
Can you say more about that?
schrodingers_cat
This feels different for the same reason that Churchill is lionized, unlike Hitler he committed a genocide by starvation of “those” people. Germany attacked other countries in Europe in World War I and World War II, if they kept the war mongering and killing outside Europe they would have gotten away with it like Britain did.
In addition to reasons mentioned above this feels different because Ukrainians are European. Empathy is easier when the victims look like us. For most Americans it is easier to empathize with Ukrainians than it was with say Syrians who were subject to pretty much similar tactics by Putin
Eolirin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: If it leads to better financial transparency laws getting passed in the US and UK we might finally start to be able to unwind a lot of bullshit, but I think even with all of this that’s still going to be a very heavy lift. Even more so in the UK.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Because we went to war on Iraq with phony reasons? Or are you referring to something else?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: Yes. The R administration was just determined to do what they wanted starting with putting W in office
Baud
@Richard:
Good lesson in not giving up when things look hairy.
trollhattan
@cmorenc:
God help them if they ever stumble across the WELL REGULATED bit. Until the current SCOTUS sees fit to translate that as BUGFUCK CRAZY MOB, they’re still stuck with those tricky words.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Totally agree with that part. It’s the same playbook.
But do you think that our doing that in Iraq had any impact on Putin doing this to other countries as he apparently wants to return to the USSR?
RaflW
@WaterGirl: WaPo: Russian strike on military site near Poland kills at least 35, injures 134
Yes it was a UKR military target, but the map in the story shows that the strike was 15 miles from Poland. Highly provocative, IMO.
Ksmiami
Putin and his brand of totalitarianism backed by nukes is an existential crisis. We need to obliterate him and all of his enablers.
Yarrow
This war is the war for democracy in a global sense. The war against what has been a rising tide of authoritarianism. And, as Adam has been saying for years, we’ve been fighting it since 2014, it’s just that most people weren’t aware of it. It’s had occasional hot bursts but now it’s gone full hot war in a country with a determined people and a tough, media savvy leader vs the guy and his oligarchs who have been the source of so many bad things over the last couple of decades. It’s as close to good vs. evil as you can find in a war.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s different. It’s here. We have to win this one because if we don’t democracy dies around the globe. It’s existential.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Agree in part. In the U.S. we have an interest in European stability that doesn’t have the same parallel in the rest of the world, except perhaps Japan and Israel. A lot of this is historical, and therefore necessarily racial too.
WaterGirl
@RaflW: I continue to believe that things like the attack on hospitals, the maternity hospital and this target are specifically designed to pull us into a hot war.
Taking a beating by Ukraine? Humiliating. Losing to NATA helps bring the Russian people together?
Thankfully Biden is too smart for that, and other world leaders as well.
KjsBrooklyn
I feel strongly that we only see this as different because of a failure of imagination. They look like us! They care about their pets and have puffy down coats and cell phones! Those people in Syria, whom the Russians bombed and destroyed, they don’t look like us at all.
schrodingers_cat
I don’t think Putin’s calculus regarding the invasion of Ukraine was dependent on US action in Iraq. But if the US was not bogged down in Iraq, Obama would have been able to focus on Putin’s threat better.
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: I’m sure the fact that they’re white Europeans helps some, but let’s not pretend that the situation here is actually comparable to Syria at all, okay?
That is a civil war, where the side we would be ostensibly rooting for are rebels, many of whom are fighting with each other as well as the Russian backed government, and all of whom have a pretty murky track record on things like human rights. This is the invasion of a democratic sovereign nation with no pretext by a (at least on paper) much stronger country. We all let it go when it was just Crimea too.
This is very different than the other conflicts in recent memory and it’s not just because they’re white people. Even our invasion of Iraq, which is the closest thing I can think of to this situation since the turn of the millennium, Saddam was a brutal human rights abuse committing dictator. Not a Zelenskyy. And we weren’t starving out cities with hundreds of thousands of civilians in them while preventing humanitarian aid and shelling their hospitals.
Yarrow
@zhena gogolia: Agreed. It’s infuriating. Ukraine is fighting this war because the west didn’t stand up for what was right when Putin crossed lines previously. We are making the Ukrainian people fight the war for us, which is shameful.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: In the famous words of Arundhati Roy, we are kind to our kind.
eclare
@cmorenc: Oh God, how enraging and disheartening.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: That I don’t know. I’m too ignorant even to speculate
RaflW
@Eolirin: The UK is possibly more intertwined in RU money, but the press over there is more used to actual adversarial reporting.
Our supine idiots will both-sides the hell out of any effort to root out money. I am deeply pessimistic about our journalamalisms here.
cmorenc
@trollhattan:
Late Justice Scalia viewed the “well regulated” clause as “precatory“, which is a weasely way to render inconvenient clauses in legal documents ineffective.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
That should be a rotating tag.
zhena gogolia
@Yarrow: I’ve already heard people say, “I’m not following it any more, I got bored.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodingers_cat:
Probably. But the question of addressing Putin’s aggression wasn’t, and isn’t, just up to the US, much less Obama or Biden. Even now, western Europe is dragging its feet on the oil embargo; I think the French said they have a goal of reducing RU oil imports by a third or half by the end of 2022. A cynic might say they are, or were, hoping that this would be resolved by the end of the year. The whole thing about the MiGs was the Polish government tossing the hot potato to the US, and I believe it was the Slovakian gov’t that also refused to give UKR their old fighter jets. Any action by NATO requires, IIANM, unanimous agreement by thirty governments, several of whom will see bombardments on their own territory if “we” decide to go hot.
The Thin Black Duke
You know what’s so damned odd about this situation? The under the radar tactics Putin was engaged in before he went Full Frontal Hitler on us was working. Why in hell did he decide to put a bull’s eye on his back and piss everybody else off?
Eolirin
@RaflW: It’s just that if we expand our Senate majority a little bit, and hold the house, neither of which are going to be easy, but both of which are possible, we might be able to get the numbers we need to pass something, given that doing so can now be framed as a national security concern.
It won’t be easy, but I can see a path to it. I can’t see a path to it with the Tories in power period. They’d need to start losing elections and that whole process will likely take long enough that the memory of the current crisis will have receded enough to remove any sense of urgency about it.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: Putin has been treated as a “normal” world leader for 22 years. He’s been brutal to his own people and to people in many other countries long before this. The first impeachment was precisely about helping Ukraine to defend itself, which was U.S. foreign policy ABROGATED FOR CORRUPT PURPOSES BY THE POTUS WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM OFFICE. Nobody cared. Only one Republican voted to convict. The news media failed miserably to articulate what was at stake. It was all about the horse race, baby. “Schiff is just grandstanding because the Senate will never convict!” It’s your job to explain why those Senators who voted to acquit are traitors.
KjsBrooklyn
@ESolirin: Sure, but how many Iraqi’s died because we invaded? At least half a million, probably more.
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia: Anyone who watched the first impeachment and the testimony of Taylor, Sondland, Yovanovich, et al. should have been able to understand the gravity of the charges. But they didn’t watch. They treated it as a political event.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zhena gogolia: the total lack of any mention of the fact that McConnell, when told of Russia’s active measures in the US election in 2016, said, “It’s good for us” is infuriating. He, and every other elected Republican including Cheney, Kinziger and (with one admittedly notable exception) Romney protected trump from the campaign through the trump tower revelations to Helsinki and the summit in Germany when Putin and trump had IIRC a one hour private meeting. Almost none of that gets mentioned
ETA: I had the timing wrong. The one-on-one, with just Putin’s translator, at the G20 in Hamburg, was in 2017. Helsinki was a year later.
Eolirin
@KjsBrooklyn: Yeah, and I’m not supporting that war. It was morally unconscionable. But it was also a lot easier to sell to people than this was ever going to be.
Is the same in Syria and most of the conflicts in Africa. It’s hard to really know who is “good” or “bad” or whether intervention makes sense. This is not ambiguous. At all. And that’s not just because these are white people.
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: You have missed the point I was making
Of course the situations in Syria and Ukraine are not exactly similar.
Since 2016 Putin has been our antagonist too. (Not the case during the Syrian conflict or when Putin took over Crimea)
That and the fact Ukraine is considered a part of the West makes us see this conflict differently.
I too have these blinders, we all do. Since I am from India I empathize more with people at the receiving of Modi’s policies much more than I do with the Rohingya at the mercy of the Burmese junta
I empathize with both at an intellectual level but what is happening in India feels more visceral to me.
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia: I guess part of what is pissing me off is the morally superior stance taken now by Americans and Europeans when they/we turned a blind eye as he consolidated his dictatorship. If ordinary Russians are responsible for this, so are we.
Yarrow
@zhena gogolia: You’re right. People didn’t watch. There’s a huge opportunity right now to tie the first impeachment to what’s going on in Ukraine. Beat Republicans over the head with it. Make it clear it’s Republicans who didn’t stand up for Ukraine, for what was right, when the time came.
RaflW
@zhena gogolia: I saw that Adam Kinzinger said recently that he ‘regretted’ voting to acquit TFG on the first (Ukrainian) impeachment. But I didn’t see if he offered any explanation? I really do think that letting off the hook was a signal to Putin that TFG wasn’t just his asset, but the whole GOP likely didn’t give a shit about UKR — or corruption.
eta: @Yarrow Yes yes yes.
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia: My admiration for Zelenskyy started with the first impeachment. Everybody can just idti na khui.
zhena gogolia
@RaflW: Absofuckinglutely.
KjsBrooklyn
@Eolirin: Yes, but. The fact that they are white people helps.
schrodingers_cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree with you. We do think that the world revolves around us. Putin’s attack on Ukraine comes from his own compulsions is unrelated to what “we” did or did not do.
schrodingers_cat
@KjsBrooklyn: Thanks that was my point.
Frank Wilhoit
It doesn’t matter whether it feels different to me/us. What matters is whether it feels different to our “leadership”; and it doesn’t, because it can’t, because their minds don’t work that way (or that well).
Someone elsewhere tried to make a point about the US military having better control of their basic craft than the Russians, because we have fought so many wars since whenever. “Wars” in scare quotes, please, because the last real war ended in 1945 — and broke us, irreparably, in the process. Look at the very next one, Korea, which was both the end of Congress and of the 1787 Constitution and the first modern example of Ledeenism. That was a human lifespan ago, during which no one has witnessed anything other than Ledeenism; so Ledeenism is all that there can be going forward.
Eolirin
@zhena gogolia: And if people had watched, and if there had been enough public pressure to force the Republicans to impeach and convict, would it have affected Putin’s decision making at all?
Because if not, I’m not sure how it makes a difference. The only way we would have had any agency here is if we were willing to commit NATO forces to holding the line. No one wants to do that, still. And as Adam pointed out, that’s about the only thing that has ever resulted in him backing down.
Yarrow
@Eolirin: A key in the UK is dealing with the First Past the Post electoral system. There seems to be an informal “non-aggression” electoral pact developing between the Lib Dems and Labour, which is what it will take to defeat Tories in many constituencies. The pact has got some news coverage in the last few weeks. That’s a good sign that it’s real and hopefully means it will be easier to get the Tories out.
schrodingers_cat
@Yarrow: Yes I would like to see that. Not holding my breath that the MSM is up to it.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Eolirin:
I defy anyone to tell me what social utility exists as to allowing anonymous shell companies to exist.
Jim Appleton
@Eolirin: The last time a war began explicitly to decimate broadly settled order, no one had the means to decimate the planet in minutes.
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Are we fucking awesome or what?
laura
This war feels different for so many reasons that I can only describe it as that crescendo at the minute and a half mark in A Day in the Life – it was all in place; Putin’s stated goals and his actions starting in Chechnya Syria Georgia and Crimea, keeping the Wagner Group busy in Africa; the disinformation that provides sweet empty calories to the body politic, Brexit and the elections in 2016, 2020. Because those who own the media decided infotainment was profitable and news was not a good investment for quarterly returns foreign reporting is just a misty, water colored memory; because we are so very racist in our policies and institutions, we do not consider the lives of non-white people to be of much concern and are outright hostile to the very idea of protecting them abroad or offering shelter or asylum to refugees no matter the level of suffering desperation or efforts to reach our shores. Technology in the hands of the people- social media and smart phones is different. Here in Sacramento County there are large Ukraine and Russian immigrant communities and I know that many work together, worship together and have family and friends on both sides of this conflict.
This feels different because the naked aggression is undeniable, the fascist authoritarianism so visible, the big strong daddy so appealing to way too many – you know who they are.
This feels different because it is geographically, euroculturally close so that white people and their “values” are recognizable in Ukrainians.
Just my two cents.
schrodingers_cat
@Jim Appleton: That too is a factor, no doubt.
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t think I missed it, I agreed with that part of it to start with.
But it’s also a lot more than just that and the way you were saying it felt like that was being significantly minimized in importance. I think the cultural affinity is important, but weaker than the immediate existential threat to NATO member states and the extremely clear cut “good guy”/”bad guy” dynamic which is usually missing in these kinds of conflicts.
It’s all of them at once of course. Being white definitely helps.
RaflW
@Frank Wilhoit: For those of us less eridte, what does Ledeenism mean? The closest my searching yields is “etiolate”.
West of the Rockies
@Ksmiami:
You keep saying this. What exactly do you propose? Do you ponder what a nuke would do to Warsaw or Prague?
trollhattan
@laura: The echoes of September 1, 1939 are strong. Wonder how that turned out?
Yarrow
@zhena gogolia: That doesn’t surprise me. War is hard to look at and it’s a place most people in the US don’t go. And right now Americans aren’t involved, save press and a handful of military volunteers (or “volunteers”). It may not be that they’re “bored” so much as it’s confusing and scary and people don’t know what they can do.
That being said, it’s the job of the current administration and Democrats in general to explain to people why this war matters. Why Ukraine matters. There was some scoffing in a thread yesterday about the idea of storytelling, but that’s exactly what this situation needs. Why does it matter to us? Tell the story. Hook people. Make them care.
Nice Marmot
“Does this war feel different for you?”
Seriously?
Jesus.
White people are being terrorized and attacked.
Not brown people.
That’s the difference.
“Feelings” always change.
Focus on the facts, please.
West of the Rockies
@The Thin Black Duke:
Good question. Mental illness? Realization of his mortality and a wish to leave his (skid)mark? His tiny peepee not getting fluffed anymore by Trump?
I’m offering glib answers but your question is a good one.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Not gonna find one from me certainly.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Had things gone differently on 1/6/21, Zelenskyy would already be dead, a puppet government in place in Kyiv. NATO would be effectively disbanded, and we’d be doing multiple bilateral pieces of ineffective alliances based on Trump’s transactional nature, just like the run up to the Great War.
I think that was the end game. Neither Stone nor Manafort nor Bannon nor Hawley nor Carlson have been waterboarded yet, but I’d advocate it.
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat:
I agree with both of those statements.
RaflW
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Are you suggesting that protecting the ultra-wealthy from the pitchforks of the hoi poli isn’t a social good? Unpossible.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Another question I keep asking – how many people are ruined or have died as a result of the punditry of Glenn Greenwald?
I think the number is staggering.
narya
@The Thin Black Duke: I think it was miscalculation on his part, tbh, across a number of domains. There may also have been some “now or never” to it as well. Finally, I do think he’s been in too much of a bubble to have information that would have mitigated his inclinations to invade.
Eolirin
@Nice Marmot:
@schrodingers_cat:
This is exactly why I responded the way I did, even though I don’t think you were making this argument, and definitely not to this extent.
West of the Rockies
@Nice Marmot:
Reductionist.
Ruckus
@narya:
This. A billion times this.
We have lived in a world where territory was more important to some than to the humans that lived upon it. A world where one man felt more important than anyone else, trying to compensate for his tininess, ignorance and hate. That world was never good or right in all our history but now it is worse, because there are so many of us, we have to get along or millions will die. Little men with ignorant ideas and ideals, adulation for themselves at the cost of millions of lives, it is a cliche of the powerful that they are the most important thing, them and their money, when what they are is hateful, selfish, tiny, pieces of shit. putin is the embodiment of this person. He isn’t the first, how nice would it be if he was among the last. The world, the people on it deserve better, far better. The little men who compensate with all the lives, trying to make themselves bigger, who never manage to, at the cost of everyone else.
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: I did say that..
Yarrow
@The Thin Black Duke: There is some speculation that he was so isolated for the last two years due to Covid that he’s kind of gone mad. You can see how far away he sits from people in all the photos. It doesn’t seem his isolation has changed much. He’s always been surrounded by yes-men, but add in significant isolation and it’s possible he just started believing his own propaganda and wouldn’t listen to anyone who who said otherwise. Even if this isn’t the only reason it seems likely it could be a contributing factor.
Jim Appleton
@schrodingers_cat: Also, the broadly settled order this time is a lot more settled than the 1939 version, though TFG did a bit of a number here and globally.
I agree with you that we tend toward racial and cultural assumptions here.
Splitting Image
@WaterGirl:
I definitely think it had an impact. Both in the sense that if the US got away with it, then Russia – equal to the US in Putin’s eyes – should get away with it too, and in the sense that Iraq and Afghanistan both eventually unravelled and Putin the Strong was going to show the rest of us how it was done.
This does feel different than other wars, though. It feels like the last domino from the Cold War is finally falling. Putin’s dream was to re-establish the Soviet Union and it is clear he is going to fail at that. The Russian empire may even break up.
It also feels like Putin and his cronies going down might lead to a larger defeat for autocrats across the globe. Many of them have been supported by Russian money and their popular support has been inflated by Russian troll farms. It remains to be seen how much this changes, if anything, but it seems like a major change is taking place.
As the Thin Black Duke said above, the question is why Putin chose to do this. His strategy of undermining Western unity and democracy was working. He switched tactics and is suddenly isolated and on the defensive. This is good, but it still seems strange that it is happening.
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: Just like I said that I agreed with you that it makes a difference. I think we may be talking past each other a bit. I suspect we are more or less in complete agreement, at least on the substance.
But I was also anticipating responses like Marmot’s. Sorry if that bled into responding to you excessively.
laura
@trollhattan: Repeatable I’m afraid. The round ups are getting organized, pregnant people and trans people and some voters first, enemies of the people next… guns for errrbody. Domestic eliminationists recruiting in the shadows, large truck enthusiasts.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia:
When people show you who they are…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@The Thin Black Duke: @West of the Rockies: Tom Nichols has said a few times, on twitter and on TV, that ultra-conservative priests have had an increasing effect on Putin’s thinking, and this piece in the NYT the other day mentions the religious fanaticism of one of the members of Putin’s shrinking inner-circle. I’m hoping Nichols, or someone, expands on this idea, but it seems credible to me. Radicalizing clerics from Saudi Arabia to Moscow to Florida.
Baud
@The Thin Black Duke:
@Splitting Image:
Agree. It seems like one of the biggest own goals in history (ironically, up there with invading Russia in wintertime.)
PJ
@The Thin Black Duke: Putin has another election coming up in 2024. I don’t doubt that Putin could orchestrate an electoral “win”, no matter what the political conditions, but:
1) Ukraine was an example to the people of Russia, a neighboring FSU state that was managing actual democracy (despite corruption) and moving closer to the EU;
2) Ukraine was getting more weapons from the West and becoming more resilient. With Trump out of office, Putin had no chance in the near future of arms being cut off or of the US leaving NATO;
3) Putin genuinely seems to believe that Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same, and the idea that they have that they should have their own separate state (not ruled by him) seems to have genuinely enraged him;
4) Putin thought Ukraine would collapse and it would be over in a week;
5) Putin’s MO when he feels he needs to bolster himself politically is to start, and win, a war – Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea. Those were all successful operations that helped cement his rule.
TL/DR: If the war had gone as Putin planned, it would be a huge boost to him with the Russian people and a huge blow to NATO and the West. He needed a military victory before the 2024 elections. The longer Ukraine persisted as a functioning democracy, it would be an example to Russians looking for another path, and a thorn in his side.
WaterGirl
@The Thin Black Duke: It does seem as though he felt an urgent need to attack. Whether that came from something internal in Putin’s own twisted mind or whether there was/is some other event coming up that made this look/feel urgent to him… that’s anybody’s guess.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia:
Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Exactly that.
RaflW
@Splitting Image: I generally agree, but I’ll say here roughly what I said in November 2016: If the 20th Century was the American century (not a slam-dunk assumption, but painting in a broad brush), the 21st C will be the Chinese century.
Putin’s miscalculation may well lead to the marginalization or even toppling of a number of authoritarian regimes. But not China. Their power will grow as Russia’s dissipates.
The US’s struggle to get or keep our shit together to me suggests that while a bi-polar kabuki will be maintained for quite a while, how true it will be by 2050 or later swings in part on wether we continue the Trumpist slide, or reverse course.
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: Our political media are gossip columnists and sports commentators.
No idea how to fix that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this woman is apparently incredibly popular with rally-going MAGAts, not unlike Tucker
PJ
@Splitting Image: Why does the scorpion sting the frog?
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Candace, where exactly would the world be without America in the financial world? //
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: When President Zelenskyy thanked the world for what we are doing and then said in the video that we are not doing enough, it felt like a good time to promote the thermometer again.
TonyG
@cmorenc: Actually, this dimwit chose to have his “2nd Amendment Rights” be infringed by allowing the TSA to prevent him from carrying his gun onto the plane. He could have, and really should have, traveled by driving or walking instead.
WaterGirl
@laura: Great comment.
I love the first two parts of this sentence, but I do not know who/what you are referring to as the big strong dady.
Yarrow
@RaflW: An unknown in this equation is just how much Russian money is propping up the Republican party and rightwing organizations. If the money goes, will they be able to do what they’ve been doing? Will the social media bots and trolls keep the party going if they’re not getting paid? Organizations like the NRA, rw think tanks, even religious groups – will they continue supporting Republicans to the same extent if there isn’t money coming in?
I don’t know how it’s going to work out, but it seems there could be a much bigger shift in politics in the west than most people are even considering. Since money = speech in the US, take away the money and can these people even talk where they’ll be heard?
topclimber
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Since Russia at the time was (2014) allowing us to use bases in their country to supply the Iraq-Afghanistan theater and the important Russian grab was Crimea, arguably vital to their defense, I don’t think Obama had much room to maneuver. What he started, and TFG probably rubber stamped in his day, was to rebuild the Ukrainian army.
RaflW
@debbie: There’s that. But there is also the track record of Saddam Hussein. His despotic evil didn’t justify Bush Jr’s war, but it (and his invasion that kicked off the 1990 Gulf War) did make him far more of a target than Zelenskyy. Not to mention that Volodymyr was democratically elected!
matt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Candace Owens sounding like Ward Churchill.
Splitting Image
@PJ:
That’s the point though. Putin’s a KGB guy. As Adam has said many times over the years, disinformation and kompromat are the way Putin works. It’s the way the system he grew up in always worked. Putin has been stinging the frog for years, because it was his nature, and has been very successful at it. He even got a puppet installed in Washington.
Now he’s decided he’s a military general to rival Napoleon, and is running into trouble. He’s not in a position to sting the frog anymore.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
They may be glib but often the simple answers of human behavior are the correct ones. We now live in an open world, one where the old ways can not work. They never did actually work but now the stakes are far higher and the only way to fix that is for the old ways, which putin is showing exactly, have to go. The world has effectively gotten a lot smaller, the concepts of country have changed, because of the numbers. There are too many people and far more communication and contact and too much destruction is possible/probable for the old ways – which didn’t actually work anyway. We have to figure out how to live and how to exist on this planet, not just in one country. All of us, language, color, sexual orientation, gender, they are all important but they can not decimate us, we have to understand that we all live here and one man with billions and the power to destroy is wrong. We’ve been doing this wrong for eons but now the sheer numbers make that which was always wrong, far, far worse.
RaflW
@Yarrow: There is so much f**king money from our own homegrown plutocrats/oligarchs sloshing about that while, yes, Russian money was additive, I doubt it was, nor it’s potential disappearance will be, definitive at all.
Among the policy responses we need (but will take time, if ever, to get) is to tax the god damned rich a lot more.
eta: I think certain actors, like the NRA, may be more wounded. And that’s OK if it comes to be.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Given who it is, I assume the question is being asked in opposition to sanctions against Putin. Seems like a question a Greenwald or a Carlson might ask.
Yutsano
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I mean…I know some of the main reasons. But I don’t get into dishonest arguments with bad actors. And Candace is her own level of vicious.
PJ
@RaflW: One thing the Ukraine invasion has brought to light is just how much corruption has corrupted Russia, and, in particular, the Russian military. They are going to lose this war, and Russia itself may fall apart, because of that corruption.
The other thing we have seen is that, if we want to, the countries of the world can unite to economically cripple a bad actor. Most predictions seem to be that Russia will fall apart economically by June, if not sooner.
China has a much more vibrant, better rounded (not just based on extraction) economy than Russia’s, but, if the world were to unite against it (which would be a lot harder than uniting against Russia), how long could it survive?
And how much does the CCP’s corruption affect its military, and the rest of the country, and what would we see if they went to war against a determined opponent? The last war they fought, against the Vietnamese, did not go well for them.
For me, the most important question is, how much does the corruption in the US, by Russian, Chinese, Saudi, and US oligarch money, cripple us here, and will we do anything about it? Can we turn this moment where we are seizing offshore accounts into one where we address the crippling behavior of our own oligarchs?
Baud
@RaflW:
Right. Not analogous, even though both wars were wrong from the get go.
The Thin Black Duke
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Uh, wasn’t Ms. Owens one of the loudest cheerleaders for Dubya’s “Shock and Awe” global tour?
trollhattan
@laura:
The specificity of their grievance list is eye-popping. Before the invasion I heard an interview with some Kremlin muckity muck who responded to a question about Russian antiwar demonstrators brushed them aside as “gays, lesbians and Trotskyites.” When that was followed by Putin’s claims that he was being forced to rid Ukraine of Nazis, I was pondering what century we are in at the moment.
If Putin overcomes the many military blunders and takes Ukraine, the neighbors know some of them are next. If said neighbors are in NATO then it sounds like open warfare from that point forward.
Yarrow
@RaflW: Russian money comes with a huge helping of kompromat, which is used to influence policy. They are the best at it. That’s part of what will change.
Mike in NC
A week after the Fat Orange Clown called Putin a genius, hundreds of MAGA scum went to the shithole city of Florence, SC to cheer him. Still trying to find out if Lindsey Graham showed up.
PJ
@Splitting Image: When he needs political support in a big way, his MO has consistently been to start a war that he can win quickly against a much weaker opponent – we saw this with Chechnya (which was started by FSB agents under his orders blowing up buildings in Russia), Georgia, and Crimea. I’m no authority, but Kamil Galeev (who seems to be one), says that these kind of “special operations” were and are a KGB specialty. These little wars, where the causus belli are a false flag operation, are his scorpion sting.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
She sounds super clever. “Why didn’t the US kick itself out of global banking, which is primarily in the US?”
prostratedragon
@The Thin Black Duke: Stupid, isn’t it? The main reason I’m not too surprised is that he and his cronies were positively tumescent with delight in themselves through the whole TFG period. That in itself inhibits good judgment. Then the election and its sequel might have increased both the isolation and the feeling that something had to be done right away to get back on top.
RaflW
@PJ: Can we turn this moment where we are seizing offshore accounts into one where we address the crippling behavior of our own oligarchs?
One can surely hope! I do wonder how long the pendulum swing towards the rich, while leaving 90% of the country behind in income and wealth, can be sustained. That level of inequality basically requires autocracy. It’s why the GOP is so invested in Trump – he has (had?!) the ability to ‘connect’ with (and con) people who are central to tolerating and mis-blaming that economic leaving-behind, while of course doing all he could to continue to concentrate wealth upwards.
I personally doubt DeSantis or any other pretender has the charisma and (TV manufactured but believed) sympatico with the MAGA chuds.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Another query – for this Anschluss to work, the occupiers desperately need cooperation at the municipal/local/regional level to work, and it requires a helluvalot more than “we’ll let you live”. What rebuilding assistance does the Russian Federation have available to offer? What food aid? Water? Heat?
”We’ll let you have access to the food stored we’ve already looted” won’t work, nor will “you can access that fire hydrant pool that opened up when a shell burst the main”.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: None of those are concerns if the end game is genocide. Which is where it looks like things are headed.
West of the Rockies
@WaterGirl:
Surely the Big Daddy is Putin.
Man, Tucker’s knees and jaws have got to be sore after so much kneeling and slurping.
Jinchi
I thought something weird was going on with Putin when he started conspicuously separating himself from everyone in the room. When he did it with Macron, I thought it was just to knock the French leader down a peg and visually emphasize just how far apart they were on the issues.
When he did it with his own leaders…., repeatedly…. I started wondering if he’s fallen into paranoid delusions. Like he thought he needed to demonstrate that he’s a tough guy. Maybe arrest or knockoff internal rivals to hold off internal assassins.
Since the war started, he’s deliberately avoided several de-escalation off-ramps in this conflict. He could easily have seized the breakaway regions and, with a bit more difficulty, established his land bridge to Crimea, then declared victory and ended the war. But he doesn’t appear to be taking that win, despite some significant losses.
Jinchi
@Splitting Image:
Maybe he’s right. Didn’t Napoleon make the same mistake? How’s that house on Elba these days?
Calouste
@topclimber: Also, I don’t think that in 2014 it was exactly clear in which direction Ukraine was going. They had just kicked out the Russian stooge Yanukovych, but he had been at the highest levels of power for a decade. He, or someone like him, might have come back.
Annexing the Crimea and the other Russian-majority areas might have been a strategic error by Putin. Without those, there was a clear pro-Western majority in the rest of Ukraine.
Cameron
@Yutsano: As far as I can tell, she’s Queen of the Antivaxxers.
Cameron
@RaflW: I wish I could agree with you, but DeSantis seems pretty popular here. I’m a FL newbie, though, so I would certainly defer to opinions from real Floridians.
Frank Wilhoit
@RaflW: Google “some crappy little country”.
Yutsano
@Cameron: If DeSantis can control who votes in November, he wins. If he loses that control in just enough jurisdictions, there is a possibility he loses a close election and decides to go all in on voter fraud. Right now I’m not making any guesses as to what’s going to happen here. I just have a feeling putting up Nikki Freid is better than trotting out a has-been like Charlie Crist. But I don’t live anywhere near Florida so very much YMMV here.
Magrat Garlick
Op-ed today in the NYT from a Beijing thinktank, noting the many ways the war is bad for China. Seems significant. Bio says the author advises the Chinese govt.
Cameron
@Yutsano: I agree with you about Fried as a better candidate, although I have nothing against Crist. Ms. Cracker and the other FL lifers have a lot more insight.
Jinchi
If you’re asking whether I think NATO should put boots on the ground and commit to fighting Russians openly in Ukraine? No. I think that would be a huge mistake.
I think the biggest mistake the US has made is the past is reaching for the big stick to solve conflicts. To assume that we’re guaranteed to win because we’re the most powerful country on the planet. I’m very happy that Joe Biden has tried an aggressive diplomatic and economic strategy combined with openly supporting military aid to Ukrainian defenses. I think too many people in politics, in the media and even some in these comments shrug it off when he clearly states that fighting head to head with Russia is the start of World War 3: a direct conflict between two nuclear armed nations that we’ve worked hard to avoid for the last 70 years.
We’ve drawn clear lines in this conflict: We believe in the right of Ukraine to exist. We believe in the right to aid their defense. We will do everything in our power diplomatically, economically and in battlefield intelligence to increase the price Putin will pay for his aggression.
But we’re not starting World War 3.
trollhattan
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I assume population displacement, repopulating with “good Russians” is
part ofthe plan. Not only is there plenty of precedent throughout the former USSR, IIUC that’s exactly what Stalin did to Ukraine previously. The plans are still on a shelf somewhere.But a broke Russia will not be rebuilding it quickly. They’ll go whole hog into resource exploitation before bothering to restore cities.
Gin & Tonic
Thanks for keeping the attention on this, WaterGirl, and thanks to all who have donated or will donate.
As you may know, this is personal for me. In addition to the everyday death and destruction, if Russia prevails, I have several good friends who – under the “best” of circumstances – will likely be facing 15-20 year prison terms. If worse comes to worst ….
Among those is my nephew. He knows what is at stake, as he has read and re-read the several letters his great-grandfather was able to send to his family in exile in Kazakhstan while he himself was dying in the Gulag. He’s heard the stories from his grandmother and his great-aunt about the Muscovites, and he will die for his country if it comes to that. There are many, many like him.
trollhattan
“People have told me” is working extra hard ATM.
“A partner.” Really. Show your work, you worthless bag of skin.
Gin & Tonic
@Jinchi:
I have bad news for you. It’s been underway for years now.
topclimber
Not sure this link will work, but it illustrates just how bad American TV is. Just one of a thousand examples.
US TV gave us Donald Trump. Ukrainian TV gave them Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Chetan Murthy
I read (ok, somewhat scanned) a lot of the thread. Like @schrodingers_cat: I feel quite acutely the sense in which part of why The West is reacting so strongly, is that UA’s people look so much like our neighbors. I grew up in America, and when I see these pictures, I see the people I grew up with and around. Even though I’m brown, even though I know that if I’d grown up in the Bay Area, I’d have more sympathy for that young Myanmar fighter (of whom I understand there is bad news). I can look at Afghan refugees and see people who look more like me, and this simply doesn’t elicit the same sympathy as these people who don’t look like me, but look like every person I’ve ever grown up around aside from my immediate family.
It is what it is.
BUT. As @Yarrow: (and Adam Silverman) put it, this is our war, too. We’ve been in it, unknowing, since at least 2014. We lost the first engagements for sure, and a big, big loss in 2016. We’ve been fighting back, and honestly, pretty poorly and we were on track to lose. But our enemy made a big mistake, overreached, and our brave allies in UA have taken up the fight.
Literally on our behalf. If Putin had just stood pat and waited, he could have taken out the United States, destroyed Our Republic, reduced us to a bunch of squabbling statelets, and then proceeded to make a meal of Ukraine, or the Baltics, or what-have-you. But he couldn’t and he didn’t.
I feel like a big part of why I’m so …. invested in UA’s struggle, in UA’s victory, is that if they lose, then I fear we will lose here in America in 2025.
P.S. Even if UA wins, I fear that the Quislings in our midst will demand the end of sanctions, and Russia will come flooding back in with propaganda and continue destroying our Republic. And unlike UA, we don’t have any governments organizing the Territorial Armies we need in our states and cities, to defend ourselves.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic: Russia is busy “disappearing” Ukrainian mayors now. The failed plot to drop in assassination teams in the first hours is back, only working at a much slower pace.
laura
@WaterGirl: the big strong daddy is just a convenient trope- the strong man, rules by fiat, keeps everyone else in line, they better know their place. Putin’s one, tfg imagined himself as one, bolsanaro, our local sheriff, so many big strong daddies to rule or ruin the rest of us.
Urza
I might be wrong, but I think he’s realizing his age. Wanted to finish what he started before Covid or an assassin gets him. Can’t be the greatest Russian ever if someone else has to finish the job.
Spanky
@Magrat Garlick: Well, it’s paywalled, but given your description, I would guess that China is trying to stay/get in the good graces of the West.
Also, there’s this, which is a Morningstar.com article that’s also paywalled, probably. Another reason to try to stay in good favor with the US:
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
Puts this country to shame. Your nephew and his compatriots are true warriors.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan: even for that whackjob, that’s some remarkable doublethink
Lyrebird
I want to thank you again G&T for what you’ve shared, I sure have learned a lot from you including back in 2016 or so about Manafort’s crimes against humanity. After what happened with the W administration and Scooter Libby and everything, I did not have many hopes that any justice would really be served.
I know more people from Afgh. than from UA. This war is only personal to me because the US is already involved, and US Senators and TV personalities are still promoting P’s agenda.
While there’s plenty of racism to be found in our US media and in US voters, I think that focusing too much on that [ETA: to explain our wish to do more] is a risk. A risk of not confronting the corruption and totalitariansim right here, like Zhena G and others have rightly pointed out. I agree with everything below assuming she is not talking about BJ in the “no one cared” part.
I think this right here is why the US has more obligation to respond than to some of the other equally wrong wars people have mentioned.
Why I am rooting so hard for UA personally is also because of what they have accomplished. They could be just like Belarus as a nation, and they elected Zelenskyy! Is the USA ready to elect a not very tall fellow, ordinary looks, named Jake Greenberg? This is just one example.
debbie
Anyway
Another reason for more empathy for Ukrainians is that many people in the US and Canada have grandparents or ggs from Eastern Europe. Even more immediate than “the refugees are white”.
Ukrainian refugees (in Europe) are going to be able to access many resources put in place for Bosnian refugees.
Spanky
@Gin & Tonic:
And probably well before 2014, given how our own population is seriously divided, nearly in half. I’d really like to know just what the relationship between Rupert Murdoch and the Russians ( and Soviets!) is/was.
Spanky
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Doublethink is easy when you’re just parroting someone else’s words.
Miss Bianca
@Chetan Murthy:
I’m with you. Certainly when people start meeping about “why is this war different from all others – what about Afghanistan/Syria/Yemen etc” all I can say is, “because Russia has been attacking the US for years and years, fueling hatred and dissent and support for authoritarian thugs worldwide, and finally, FINALLY, a critical mass of people both in the US and worldwide have been shocked into enough awareness of it that we might be able to actually take serious steps to combat Putin and Putinism.”
I’m just sick that it took a Russian campaign of wholesale destruction of Ukraine to wake people up to the threat.
Cacti
This war feels different because it’s about as close as a war gets to one side wearing the white hat and the other black hat.
Putin is unquestionably a malign force in world affairs, exporting Russian authoritarian nationalism at the point of a bayonet. At this point the real question is, to what extent is NATO willing to go to stop him.
Old Man Shadow
Probably feels different because it’s Europe, there are nuclear weapons involved, and a genocidal madman.
It’s easy to ignore war when it can’t possibly impact you. It’s easy to ignore war when it costs you nothing. It’s easy to ignore war when it happens far away to those people we don’t know.
Chetan Murthy
@Miss Bianca:
It’s more than a little sick-making, that we’re going to fight Putin to the last Ukrainian. More than a little. I’ve read Bret Deveraux’s explainer on now nuclear deterrence works, and I’m resigned to this. We will have a massive debt to repay to the Ukrainian people, after their victory. Hasten the day!
Chetan Murthy
A minor bleg: I know that donating money to good causes (like those in the thermometer) is better than buying merch. But I would really like a nice, well-made Slava Ukraini tshirt to wear, now that I can go out-and-about again. Anybody got any pointers ? I Googled around, and …. well, the ones I found (like the Saint Javelin shirts) were …. not so well-done. I’d rather just donate more money than buy those shirts (which I did, just now, thru the thermometer — thank you for including Vindman’s charity, WaterGirl!)
So if anybody knows of a source for such tshirts from an artist with excellent artistic sensibility …..
Jinchi
You keep telling yourself that.
But NATO is a defensive alliance. There’s a reason Putin’s latest missiles hit just on the Ukrainian side of the border with Poland. Americans can be pretty casual about committing the rest of the alliance to war and they assume the fighting will stay confined to Ukraine. But I don’t think our European partners are going to appreciate us escalating the conflict and blurring the red lines.
Once NATO is involved a lot of our partners will stop shipping weapons to Zelenskyy because they’ll be too busy shoring up their own defenses.
Kay
@trollhattan:
Two are out of the lawsuit- Powell because they don’t have jurisdiction and Pirro because the judge doesn’t believe she met the standard to go forward, but the lying Bartiromo is still in it.
I hope they get a billion dollars from the multi-millionaire Fox hosts. They destroyed that company for no other reason than to advance their careers. They do this because they’re paid very, very well to do it. I know they’ll never be held accountable in any real way that would involve real hardship for them, but I will be delighted if they have to pay some portion of the tens of millions of dollars they are paid to lie.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
‘trump endorsed candidate‘, but Biden sees Putin as a partner…
Urza
We need events like this to be a catalyst towards a true United Nations government. We could start with some easy principles that no one can have a legitimate argument about.
Wars of Aggression will no longer be tolerated. Anyone, even a member nation trying to occupy a member nation first will be retaliated against by ALL member nations. Even the USA would have problems with a large portion of the world united against us. And obviously if some nation attacked first occupation like Afghanistan would be on the table. Toss in various economic sanctions such that local terrorists and hackers would be dealt with by the locals for fear of what would happen if they don’t.
Begin transferring control of military assets of individual nations to a world peacekeeping force.
Harder but something to tack on as time passes, enforcement of democratic norms, laws that eliminate corruption. Something about sanctity of life and planet to continue providing life at an adequate level.
Chetan Murthy
@Jinchi: @Gin & Tonic: With respect, I agree with G&T. To paraphrase our excellent FPer Adam S., in 2016 Putin executed a successful decapitation strike on our executive branch of government, and nearly succeeded in destroying our Republic in 2020. He’s been perverting governments all over the world, and especially in Europe (UK (everybody, it would seem), France (Le Pen), Hungary (Orban), Poland (Law & Justice), and on and on).
He’s been destroying us from within, supporting traitors who would destroy our democracies and leave us in a rabble of infighting, prey to his armies.
We’re already in this war, we’re just not fighting it very well. Thank goodness we woke up and are starting.
P.S. And no, I don’t want us to enter active hostilities either. I have no children, but I want human children a century from now to not curse our names.
WaterGirl
@Jinchi: That’s where I am, too. But I keep hoping there is more we can do, short of hot war and boots on the ground in Ukraine. Not doing more is breaking my heart because Ukraine really is fighting for democracy in the world and they shouldn’t have to be doing it alone.
trollhattan
@Kay:
Too true. Hit ’em in the wallet because it’s a language common to all. Seldom have I rooted harder for some corporation than Smartmatic in their efforts.
Magrat Garlick
@Spanky: It says this:
“The longer the war goes on, though, China may find itself in a position of diminishing returns in its close relationship with Russia. This makes the argument for Beijing to take on an active mediation role even more compelling.”
And closes with:
“Beijing’s goal would be to find a solution that gives Mr. Putin sufficient security assurances that can be presented as a win to his domestic audience while protecting Ukraine’s core sovereignty and NATO’s open-door policy. Finding a landing zone for such an agreement is challenging but not impossible. Some creative diplomacy could solve this, such as a formula for NATO expansion that rules out Ukrainian membership in practice while preserving its sovereignty and NATO principles in theory.”
Seems to be suggesting status quo ante.
Makes me think of the “missiles out of Turkey” trial balloon in the Cuban missile crisis
Dangerman
It absolutely does feel different because we are watching it play out differently, otherwise it’s the same old shit.
WW2 was the news reels war.
Viet Nam, etc., brought it damn near live into your living room via Cronkite.
This one is being instagrammed and youtubed live by anyone with a cell phone.
The same old shit part of it is you have what I want and I’m willing to kill you for it. Crimea needed water. Ukraine has a shitload of natural gas reserves. Then you have the Lebensraum bullshit from an old KGB Cold Warrior.
Different yet the same.
Kent
And if you are some local “collaborator” who is an administrator running your little corner of Ukraine on behalf of the Russians, are you really going to feel safe drinking that cup of coffee from the local shop down the street or turning on the ignition of your car every morning?
Spanky
@Magrat Garlick: Thank you for the quote. And yeah, as I was reading it I was thinking “we’ve been there already”.
If “some creative diplomacy can solve this”, I’d sure like to see evidence of it.
Jeffro
He seems to have thought that he’d be able to kidnap or kill the UKR government’s leaders and local mayors and install his puppets rather quickly. He also seems to have thought the West would cave and/or be unable to bring itself to impose significant sanctions. Oopsie.
trollhattan
@Dangerman:
I appreciate that non Cold War kids don’t have the same visceral reaction to watching Putin try to reassemble the USSR militarily, piece by piece. This takes me back to duck-and-cover drills and crushing the Prague Spring. Nothing that happened in between got the same reaction, 9-11 included.
Ksmiami
@West of the Rockies: I’m not promoting nukes. I’m saying international planning should make it clear that there is no path forward for Russia on the global stage if they insist on keeping Putin in power and their oversized nuclear and chemical arsenal. That the future of Russia is dependent on making the right choices now, or face a future of isolation, impoverishment and powerlessness.
Cacti
One thing that has been a boon in this conflict is that Putin is quite clearly no military strategist, but fancies himself as being one. Just like Hitler before him.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Spanky: Yeah, I want to believe… but I don’t
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: I pray that they will be all right.
James E Powell
@WaterGirl:
The press/media have not gone after Republicans for their corruption, hypocrisy, or lying for 30 years. They are not likely to start anytime soon.
Reporters are either told or they understand without being told that putting any Republican in an awkward situation will end their careers.
Kent
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
‘trump endorsed candidate‘, but Biden sees Putin as a partner…
He is the MAGA dipshit that the Trumpers recruited to run against Jaime Herrera Beutler here in the WA-3rd where I live. She was one of the 8 GOPers who voted to impeach the second time around. Unfortunately for them we have an open “Jungle” primary here in WA and universal mail-in voting so every voter in the entire district get the same mail-in ballot so it isn’t like other states where the MAGAts can take over a closed primary.
Joe Kent is just the most egregious candidate running to Herrera Beutler’s right. He is a carpetbagger from Oregon who only moved up here a few months ago and has some sort of house or trailer in Yacolt which is the most backwoods redneck part of the district. There is also Heidi St. John who is a fundamentalist bible thumper and another MAGA state legislator who just entered the race. They will split all the MAGA vote and let Herrera cruise through the primary. Unfortunately we don’t have a prominent dem to rally around yet. Only a couple of low-profile types
I don’t think there is any chance Herrera Beutler loses this. She has an extremely good local media team and local presence.
David Collier-Brown
Does this war feel different? Yes, very.
We didn’t respond in 1938 when Hitler annexed Austria, or in 2014 when Mr Putin seized Crimea.
Unlike the fear and appeasement when Hitler marched into the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, we did not immediately capitulate when Mr Putin invaded the Ukraine. Not even to his threats of nuclear war.
What feels different is that we have chose to help the Ukrainians, instead of abandoning them like we did the Czechs.
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Vomit.
Nice Marmot
@West of the Rockies: Hardly.
Kent
There are those of us who remember watching “The Day After” and those who don’t know what we are talking about. It is definitely a divide.
Magrat Garlick
@Spanky: I took “creative diplomacy” to mean Xi threatening to leave Putin without a friend in the world.
The fact that the author “advises” the govt of China seems evidence of China’s attempt to pivot (?) I would love to hear what Chinese/China experts think
trollhattan
@Kent:
Oh goodie, looks like Frank Luntz has workshopped “Biden siding with Putin” and it’s a go. Look for more of same all week.
WaterGirl
@debbie: Heartbreaking doesn’t even cover it anymore.
Chetan Murthy
@David Collier-Brown:
Does anybody think about the differences in the Ukrainians, and the Afghans and Iraqis ? I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Remember when every time we tried to stand up an Afghan Army, it fell back down in squishy bits of Jell-O ? And yet, the Taliban had no such trouble assembling and deploying Afghan fighters with resolve and effectiveness ? And in Iraq, where (it seemed to me) our “trained” Iraqi Army fell down at the first hint of ISIS, but the Iranian-backed militias did no such thing ?
It seems like there’s some lesson there for us: that we need to be more discerning, more …. thorough in understanding our “allies”, in order to see if they’re actually committed to their fight, or are just taking us for every dollar they can grab.
P.S. To be clear, I’m not saying that Afghans or Iraqis were incapable of fighting. Rather, that somehow the ones we supported were pretty piss-poor at it, and somehow other forces with those same people were much more effective (and usually on vastly poorer budgets).
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kent:
Bingo.
Jinchi
Not sure where we disagree, you’re literally taking the same position I am.
gene108
@RaflW:
I don’t think that’s true.
The world will have many more centers of power versus what was there in the 19th and 20th century. China will be one of those centers of power, but not the main center, like the U.S. has been post-WW2.
They are a repressive authoritarian state. China does not have anything beyond transactional goals to offer other nations. The way the U.S. military umbrella allowed South Korea, for example, to become a prosperous nation relatively free from threats like communist China and North Korea, is not something China would do.
Also, China is a crappy neighbor. They have territorial claims on land of most neighboring countries. The ones it doesn’t have demands against acquiesced to its demands. Plus, maritime disputes with countries it doesn’t directly border.
China has transformed itself becoming a global economic power, but has issues with enough other countries that it will never be the pre-eminent global power.
Kent
Joe Kent is our local “male model” version of Marjorie Taylor Greene. He is trying to follow her path into Congress. For real. But this is only a GOP +2 (or so) district with open primaries so it won’t work.
Dangerman
@trollhattan: What’s fascinating to me (and Adam Silverman, if you’re hanging around, feel free to call me FOS) is how the nature of war has changed. Tanks aren’t worth shit anymore (if the US ever got it on with Russia in a non nuclear way, it would be over in time for an early dinner). Regarding the duck and cover thing, even that is changed; at one time, we needed the really big booms that took out cities because of targeting inaccuracy. Now, the missiles decide which window to hit.
Drones being piloted from hundreds or thousands of miles away is yet another wild development.
Geminid
@Kent: I think there were ten Republican Impeachers. One was Tom Rice, who Trump denounced last night since Florence in Rice’s Souh Carolina district. Kinzinger (IL) and Gonzales (OH) are retiring, and I think Katko (NY) is too. Meijar and Upton of Michigan are still running, as well as Cheney, Herrera-Butler, and a couple guys from California (I think).
Calouste
@Kent: I don’t think Ukrainians will suddenly unlearn how to make Molotov cocktails just because their new mayor is now a Putin-approved puppet.
PJ
@Magrat Garlick: The longer the war goes on, the worse it is for Putin. In two months, he will be toast. Ukraine should accept nothing less than withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, including Crimea and the Donbass, recognition of all pre-2014 borders and Ukrainian sovereignty, and reparations. Which Putin will never agree to, because that would also mean the end of his regime.
Kent
They are completely opposite scenarios. The correct comparison would be to 1979 Afghanistan where we definitely did pour money and weapons into Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan and Iraq we were the Russians.
Compare the number of civilian deaths in Iraq during Bush’s “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign to the reported civilian deaths in Ukraine during the first two weeks in both wars. They are not dissimilar.
Chetan Murthy
@Calouste: I’ve read that a big difference between Kherson and other UA cities, is that the UA government was unable to flood the city with small arms (b/c RU got there too quickly after invading). So the people of Kherson are pretty much disorganized and disarmed. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it would explain why there isn’t much fighting reported, and instead massive demonstrations. It’s the only tool they have. I sure hope somebody is smuggling in small arms.
Kent
So nice that you are willing to fight Putin down to the last Ukrainian.
There is another train of thought that a future Ukraine might be a much better place without Crimea and the Donbass as those are the most retrograde parts of the country. Sort of like imagining what the US would be like and US presidential elections would be like without the Confederate south continually dragging us back.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent:
Precisely. to reiterate, I do not want to impugn the fighting spirit and effectiveness of Afghans, but rather, our own inability to properly select and motivate the Afghans we chose for our side in that war (2001-onwards). The fault lies with us, in short.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: Tom Rice returned the favor
trump also went after Nancy Mace, so her groveling pilgrimage to trump tower didn’t pay off
Kent
@Geminid: Right. There were 10. Another one was Dan Newhouse from eastern WA who will likely cruise to re-election also due to WA’s jungle primary and the fact that he is pretty popular and pretty conservative in the western libertarian way
https://www.dannewhouse.com/
Chetan Murthy
@Kent:
Obviously we should/must support whatever UA’s government and people find acceptable. As an American, I can only hope that it’s sufficiently punishing that Putin is deterred from attacking our Republic again, but hey, that’s on us: we have every tool we need to shut down his attacks on our country, if we only chose to use them. It shouldn’t be on UA to do that job for us.
Kent
You mean all those 23 year old Heritage Foundation interns who didn’t speak Arabic and didn’t have any work experience of ANY kind, didn’t actually know what they were doing when they tried to prop up a government in Iraq? Imagine that.
WaterGirl
@Jeffro: I don’t know if anyone watched the 10-minute Zelenskyy video that’s up top, but he talks about collaborators in his address.
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy:
Afghanistan 2001 was an interesting case. We worked with various “warlords” and pretty easily routed the Taliban, who along with their horrors scurried into the countryside and to Pakistan. “Good riddance” if not a consensus, was at least a majority opinion and our military footprint there was a light one. The Soviet campaign had been the opposite of that, but broke the country badly before we arrived. Going forward, I will be surprised if Afghanistan does not break into multiple tribal regions, something like the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The current country seems inherently unstable.
Failing to use the resources needed to get Bin Laden was 100% on Bush, too busy readying things for Iraq to be bothered. IDK if we would have lingered two long decades had we finished Bin Laden then, but I expect our approach would have been different. Pakistan’s role in all this needs more scrutiny methinks.
germy
“It’s easy to see the faults in people, I know; and it’s harder to see the good. Especially when the good isn’t there.”
– Will Cuppy
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I offer you some respite comedy as Ted “First Tier Ivies Only” Cruz attempts to show himself as a man of the people with the Convoy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dangerman: I wouldn’t write off tanks and conventional artillery just yet. You are watching an army that is using them badly.
Dangerman
Time for breakfast, but I hope and pray we get back to people acting reasonably responsibly again. Both sides of the Atlantic.
Putin and his Russian enablers need to go away (and Putin will; he’s toast and charring).
The US needs two functioning political parties (and one of them right now is bug fuck nuts).
James E Powell
@PJ:
LOL. No.
In the middle of the gravest financial crisis of our lifetimes, Senator Dick Durbin – a supposedly powerful person – admitted that there was little the United States government – a supposedly powerful entity – could do to reform anything because the banks “frankly own this place.”
Cameron
@trollhattan: Christ. Straight-up Trump, no chaser: “Some people are saying…” “Many people are saying…” “I hear people saying…” Which people? Name ONE FUCKING PERSON.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Well, there was that time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan seems eerily familiar.
brantl
@KjsBrooklyn: Epidemiological methods for estimation put that at 1 million Iraqi dead, not a half. As rendered by an English scientific study.
brantl
If we fight in this war (and we should, if freely supplying the Ukrainians all we can, isn’t sufficient), it will be the first war in 40 years that we should have fought in, and did. We stayed out of many conflicts where the right side was obvious, and some where we fought on the wrong side, and that was also obvious. It’s time we did the goddamned right thing, for freaking ONCE. I would like to see my country commit to what is right, just once, simply because it is right. The last time we wholeheartedly did this, Truman was president.
Cameron
@James E Powell: You mean banks, that support…like (GASP)…. oligarchs? Here in Merka?
raven
@brantl: 40?
Omnes Omnibus
@brantl: How committed should we get in your view?
Brachiator
No.
This is not a war. This is a one-sided assault, but I don’t know what world leaders can do about it.
This is a variation on a theme of nation level aggression that is happening all over the world. Just because we have forgot about other places, or never paid attention in the first place, this does not mean that other wars, other crimes are not happening.
I honestly don’t know if the imposition of sanctions has been tried before on this level to try to stop an invasion in progress. I do not know what the next step should be if this does not work.
What is different.
I am old. I was a kid during the Kennedy administration. This is the first time in a very long time where I have heard American pundits and others ponder whether it might be okay to initiate a nuclear war with another nation. I don’t think I have heard this from any high ranking military official.
This is insane on so many levels.
What else is different.
Imagine how insipid it would have been to follow the US Civil War or World War 2 on Twitter and to speculate whether everything might be over after a week or two. To have the dumb commentary of armchair generals giving online advice to Grant or Patton.
What is not different.
The compassion and the attempts to help refugees.
The hope for a peaceful outcome.
Chetan Murthy
@brantl: Korea War was 1950-1953. Russia got the nuke in 1949. I don’t know at what point they were able to credibly threaten global destruction, but I’d guess it was a few years after 1949.
It’s easier to “do the right thing”, when you’re not risking the lives of billions.
Kent
Our 2001 Afghan campaign and the 1979 Soviet Afghan campaigns were more similar than you give credit.
Essentially the Soviets instigated a coup and installed their own puppet leader into Kabul. And then were forced to send in large numbers of troops to prop up their puppet regime.
The US essentially did the same thing. We quickly routed the Taliban and manipulated the succession process to install our own US and western-friendly leadership that turned out to be highly corrupt and incompetent. And then were forced to invest hundreds of billions into the country to prop up that regime. The main difference is that we sent more technology and weapons rather than troops. But that’s a distinction without a difference
Pakistan played the same basic role in both conflicts.
raven
“This is not a war. This is a one-sided assault, but I don’t know what world leaders can do about it.”
Yea because Japan didn’t just assault most of Asia and Germany didn’t just assault most of Europe.
realbtl
@Cameron: Back when Top Gear was actually funny, Clarkson saying “Some people say…” was a guarenteed laugh line as it preceeded some sort of obvious bullshit.
Dorothy A. Winsor
zhena gogolia
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Oh, too bad.
Gvg
@zhena gogolia: standing up for human rights doesn’t always work. The moment seems to be significant. Standing up works when a LOT of people see the same things and agree and all do it together. Standing up before those conditions just gets you flattened and forgotten. Of course not standing up also normalized the abuse and makes it harder for the not as perceptive to see. However, getting flattened too soon leaves the numbers available to stand up when the critical mass is reached smaller and takes more time.
A lot of the things that made me see Putin as a dangerous dictator were cumulative, and other people too. We couldn’t get enough countries to agree until he had done a lot of harm.
We have tried intervening pretty often really. It usually hasn’t gone well. Actually it depends on the Russians. We can’t solve Putin completely until they want him gone and stick to it plus they need to have a clue about curbing power and corruption.
we may be able to save Ukraine even if we can’t totally get Putin gone though.
So I don’t think we could have fixed this too much earlier. Maybe the years just after the USSR fell we had a window, but not since until now.
Chetan Murthy
@debbie: There a few people in the world, whom learning this news about them causes such immense outpourings of sympathy and prayer-equivalent thoughts. Of those people, President Obama is one of the few who is not in any position of power.
I also hope for his full and speedy recovery.
debbie
@Chetan Murthy:
Agreed.
Chetan Murthy
@debbie: And (knock wood, not this time, not any time) so would learning that about First Lady Michelle Obama, even though she has literally never held any position of power.
I used to say during his second term, that the Obamas were American royalty in the best sense of that term: an inspiration to us all by their lived example. I still believe that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
wait, what?
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Trump has endorsed Katie Arrington to run against Mace in the South Carolina 1st CD primary. Arrington spoke last night at the Florence rally, yelled that Nancy Mace is the “Liz Cheney of the South!” The crowd booed lustily.
Arrington is the tea party crank who beat Mark Sanford in the 2018 primary. She went on to lose in November, and Joe Cunningham became the first Democrat to hold that seat in decades.
Cunningham was one of the talented members of the Democratic Class of ’18 who did not get past their first reelection. Kendra Horn (OK) and Xochitl Torres-Small (NM) were two others.. Torres-Small now works in the Biden administration as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Rural Development.
Brachiator
@raven:
“This is not a war. This is a one-sided assault, but I don’t know what world leaders can do about it.”
Yea because America didn’t send just thoughts and prayers to Asia and Europe.
JoyceH
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, but… why would China want to help? What’s Ukraine to them? And I note that Russia has been asking for this assistance from the beginning of the invasion, which is now three weeks old. They also asked Kahzakstan (I think? one of those stans), who said Nope, for assistance, and Belarus was supposedly going to go in on Russia’s side two weeks ago. Don’t see a lot of on-paper allies willing to come out publicly siding with Putin.
JoyceH
@Brachiator:
And that’s what we’re doing with Ukraine? SERIOUSLY?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JoyceH: a lot of skeptical reaction to that news, which I hope is right. But what China has to gain is the weakening of the Western alliance/s.
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: Not what is happening. The US and the rest of NATO may not be as involved as G&T, Adam Silverman, and others may want, but it is far more than thoughts and prayers.
JoyceH
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
By coming in on the side of a global pariah? That’s going to weaken Western alliances? Seems to me the main thing it will do is piss off their richest customers.
Llelldorin
@Brachiator:
No, we sent military materiel via the lend-lease act and embargoed oil shipments—in other words, we acted very much as we’re acting now. We didn’t actually send troops until we were attacked directly.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JoyceH: Rachel Maddow used to do a regular segment called “Talk me down”, I’m hoping Xi looks at this situation as CEO of China, Inc.
And for my own mental health, I think I’d best step away from the doom-scroll machine
Geminid
@Geminid: A fun South Carolina 1st Congressional District fact:
Amateur botanist Joel Poinsett represented the district in Congress during the early 1820’s. He went on to serve as U.S. Consul in Mexico City. When Poinsett found a pretty flower while on a trip south of the capital, he sent it back to South Carolina for propagation. So this winter we can can thank (or curse) this Congressman for the Poinsettia.
The Mexicans call Poinsettias “Flor de Nochobuena,” Christmas Eve Flower.
Martin
Yes. As terrible as it will be for the Ukrainian civilians, the long term effects are probably going to be very good. Biden is patching the relationships strained by Trump, and then some. We have a unity toward democracy that we haven’t seen in a long time, if ever. We have an excuse to accelerate decarbonizing our economies. And in the end, Russia will run into a very weak state. It’s a high cost, to be sure, but it’s a net positive result for the rest of the world.
There’s a lot here for the US to process, though, and I doubt we will bother. The very reasons so many analysts believe Russia will lose this war also applied to the US in Iraq and Afghanistan – something we continually denied because we’re special. The open embrace of Ukrainian refugees stands in stark contrast to how we treat refugees from Central America and the Middle East and Africa. Often coming from the same type of conflict being inflicted by the same party.
Brachiator
@JoyceH:
@Omnes Omnibus:
True enough. My main point is that the assault is one-sided and the world appears to be mainly hoping that plucky Ukraine can hold out or settle in for a long drawn out struggle against Russia. Maybe they can.
The recent report that Russia is asking for Chinese military help may raise the stakes.
Some here with a military background have suggested that without the threat of nuclear escalation, more robust military assistance could have halted Russian advances into Ukraine.
Do you think that this is a reasonable assessment?
topclimber
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Don’t let the jackals get you down.
les
What I fear may be different about this war is it may be the one that confirms “if ya got nukes, you can do whatever ya want, as long as you don’t invade a NATO member.” I’m completely at a loss; not interested in nuclear war, old enuf to remember duck and cover, and so on and so forth. But it ain’t exactly clear to me that providing Ukraine w/mountains of man portable weaponry leads to anything better than scorched earth Ukraine; if “the West” does it’s best without “provoking” the Bear, and Ukraine is wiped out, every non-NATO country in the world–good, bad and indifferent–learns that they better ramp up the nuke machine, ‘cuz only NATO and China are safe. Non-proliferation is dead, maybe already.
Ah well, life sucks and then ya die.
Before the “what’s your solution” questions–dunno. Impressed as hell w/Biden’s ability to resurrect US/European solidarity after TFG. Thoroughly amazed at the levels of economic sanctions, mildly hopeful Russia’s economy is fucked. Still don’t think Ukraine survives w/out big ticket help–planes, drones, long range bangers, the stuff that screams direct conflict. Bummed, considering the stronger drugs.
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: If my grandma had wheels, she would be a tram. We can’t really do an analysis of what would happen without nukes because nukes are there.
Captain C
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe China can send Russia some more knock-off crappy tires.
West of the Rockies
@Nice Marmot:
Yup.
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I can’t imagine Xi will want to get entangled in the mess Putin created. ??♀️
Martin
@JoyceH: Yeah, it’s a complicated problem.
To start with, it’s important to look at economic competition and military competition as separate things, even though they in the end often manifest as the same thing.
The reason it’s important for the US to be in NATO is that it keeps NATO from being a military enforcer of EU economic policy, policy that is in competition with US economic policy. The US effectively de-fangs Europe militarily toward the US by having veto power over their military alliance.
So the big 3 economic players right now are the US, the EU, and China. Japan punches above its weight, but has limited overall impact. Brazil, Russia, India are all influential, but don’t have the ability to really steer the global economy. And the US/EU have just taken Russia out of even that category.
The big 3 military powers are the US, NATO and Russia, with China being in that influential but not global power category. You could argue India, Pakistan, Iran, Japan belong there as well, in various capacities. US and NATO are somewhat redundant, but if the US left NATO and the rest of the NATO powers kept the alliance, it would be a formidable one. US and Russia hold global vetos due to our nuclear arsenals. That’s why Putin has gotten away with as much as he has.
China’s challenge is that Russia has military but not economic power (that can rival the US). And China has economic but not military power. For both parties, pulling the US out of NATO must be of paramount importance, because doing so would allow NATO to align with EU economic goals and become a potential player in the world against the US. But as things are now, they cannot. The US and EU are forced to be relative partners.
China+Russia could be a similar counterbalance, but even there they aren’t strong enough, and now with Russia on the verge of losing half its military and a complete economic collapse likely within a month, that leaves China effectively alone.
In the same way that the west is viewing Ukraine as the golden opportunity to knock Russia down many pegs, Russia and China saw Trump as a similar opportunity. Had he pulled us out of NATO and continued to go isolationist, that would have allowed Russia/China to form an alliance and really challenge the other world powers. But in 18 months both that plan fell apart, and Putin fell into a trap of his own.
China is a rising power, and Russia a waning one. That alliance doesn’t favor China. It’s not enough to weaken the west, but it might be enough galvanize the west. China would benefit to reap their economic advantage and play nice with the west, bide their time and steadily build their military, but that would almost certainly require addressing their human rights situation. So domestically they might have some real challenges going this way.
And because they too have a leader for life, the ability of China to play their historically strong long game may not apply here if Xi can only view China’s future in terms of his own lifespan, much as Putin does. There’s a real benefit to having a leader that will have to live in the country after the point that they stop being a leader.
JoyceH
@Brachiator:
See, now, I see the situation COMPLETELY differently. Of course, what we see on the news is horrific, but most of the actual war fighting is taking place off camera.
My impression is that the two combatants in the war are very evenly matched, on paper – Ukraine has a standing military of a bit under 200K, not counting the irregulars that are currently springing up, and Russia invaded with a bit under 200K. Air forces are unbalanced, but UA has anti-aircraft that works surprisingly well. Need more of course.
But here’s the thing. If we take Ukraine’s figures, the Russians are receiving TEN TIMES the casualties the Ukrainians are. If we go by US estimates, it’s a mere four times greater.
I think what we’re learning (and the Russians are learning) is that what Russia had on paper is not at all what they actually had in real life. The equipment they invaded with is crap, the soldiers were misled and unwilling, they sent in conscripts against stated policy, and right now, as I see it – Ukraine is winning.
I don’t mean I think they’ve slowed down the eventual overrunning of their country. I think they’re winning. I don’t know why the media is presenting the case as hopeless, Poor Helpless Ukraine. The civilian situation is terrible, of course, but looked at as a war, Russia is losing rather decisively. And when they do commit atrocities, like bombing hospitals, they are NOT achieving a military objective. Bombing a cancer clinic is about as useful to overthrowing the Ukrainian government as bombing the OKC Federal Building was toward overthrowing the US government.
I hear people argue that Russia can reinforce what’s already in country, but really, CAN they? Did they really send their crappiest equipment and their rawest recruits to achieve a military objective that they expected to take in a week? If that’s what they sent, is what they have left any better?
(And BTW, it really irks me when pundits, to emphasize the hopeless nature of Ukraine’s case, call it a David and Goliath contest. Now, I don’t expect every bloviator to have read the Bible, but ANY Little Golden Book Of Bible Stories For Children would inform them that David WON that matchup.)
Uncle Cosmo
You’ve kind of missed the point of “duck & cover.” And it did have a point, however fleeting.
So long as the largest bombs available to the Commies were fission devices with yields up to ~150 kT, only deliverable by manned bomber, it made a good deal of sense. But those conditions only existed, if at all, for an interval of a few months. The Soviets had no means to drop any bomb on the continental US until the Tu-95 “Bear” entered service in 1956. Meantime, they had tested an air-deliverable true fusion device with a yield of 1.6 MT (scaled back from 3 Mt) late in 1955.
In the mid-1950s I attended elementary school about a mile outside the Baltimore city limits. If our teachers had had sufficient warning to pull down the shades on the classroom windows to block flying glass, most of those ducked & covered in classrooms on the east side of our 1920’s brick schoolhouse might well have survived a 150 kT detonation at the center of downtown (7 km distant). And might even have been able (with our teachers’ help) to make it to the basement to ride out the worst of the fallout. Heck, my parents’ brick rowhouse 1/4 mile closer to ground zero might have stayed mostly upright.
But a 3 MT device dropped at Baltimore and Charles Streets would probably have leveled our entire row-house suburb, with no survivors to be pulled from the rubble by the time anyone got around to it. So much for “duck & cover”, an idea whose time had come and gone in the blink of an eye. /tmi
Wapiti
@Chetan Murthy: Too often the US has chosen the more corrupt local leadership, and I think that was the case in Iraq (Chalabi?!) and Afghanistan. The US might often choose the more corrupt local leadership because the more righteous leaders have interests and constituencies besides US dollars.
In the case of Ukraine, they have a leader who refused the corrupt offer by the US (under tfg). I think fund raising is more useful when you’re sending to less corrupt actors.
CROAKER
WOW think some folks should take a time out.
CROAKER
@zhena gogolia: You were naughty early. Thank you for teaching me. :-)
Martin
@les: We’ll see how this goes. Right now Russia is losing non-trivial chunks of their conventional military power. The effort that has never really been tried before is the kind of economic armageddon that the west is waging against Russia. The Soviet Union never cared about that because its economy was almost exclusively internal, but Russia is very different. Russia can’t even replace their weapons.
In a sense, the US has two vetoes – one military through nukes, and one economic, which the USSR was immune to, but Russia is susceptible to. And we’re launching the economic ones and staying back of the military ones. Russia wants to play the military game it’s where their strength lies. The US wants to play the economic one, it’s where our strength lies.
Does it save Ukraine from carnage? Nope. But nothing does really. There are things we can do to save Ukranians but that would probably only serve to kill Polish or Finnish citizens, and certainly would kill Russian citizens. We can spread the pain around, but only Putin can stop it.
But that’s not the job of US foreign policy. The job of US foreign policy is to ensure that the US has more and better options tomorrow than we do today. And on that front, this is probably going to be a decisive win for the west and their allies. Hopefully we will take that victory for what it is and pay for it by rebuilding Ukraine and welcoming them into the fold along with other neighboring countries.
At some point here, we may find we have a strong enough hand that we can trade Russia giving up nukes for lifting of economic sanctions. A guy can dream, anyway.
Wapiti
@Martin: Significantly reducing US and Russia stockpiles after this is resolved would be a good thing.
RS in Budapest (for now)
Damn right it is different. If we don’t stand up to autocratic rule now exemplified by Putin, we will never. I just helped a familyy across the border to Hungary. Her husband had to stay behind. She has a two year old son. She is in tears every day because her mother is stuck in Chudnyiv and calls from her darkened apartment every night. My only wish is for someone to take out Putin. If people don’t recognize what this war is about — and it is not about NATO – then they should go cower in their basements. Slava Ukraini!
JoyceH
Hey, does anyone else think that Zelenskyy keeps asking for a no fly zone when he knows we’re not going to do it, in order to get us to cough up the bigger, oomphier anti-aircraft systems?
Martin
@Wapiti: It would. I’m not predicting this will happen, but it would be a great outcome if it did.
smith
@Martin: We have a cultural problem here where Americans’ first choice in dealing with a crisis is to act swiftly, preferably with guns. We see ourselves as the gun slinging marshals with a mission to clean up Dodge, so lots of people are getting very itchy. But as you say, we’ve already set off the doomsday machine against Russia, in the form of likely catastrophic economic sanctions, and we have to have the patience to let the fuse burn to its destination. It’s agonizing to see the suffering of the Ukrainians in the interim, and we certainly should do everything we can in the form of both humanitarian relief and abundant arms, but we also need to keep foremost in our minds that our adversary is not strategizing either rationally or with good information and might actually welcome an excuse to ratchet everything up several notches.
Martin
@JoyceH: He’s asking because it would legitimately help Ukraine. He’s just advocating for his country, as is his job to do, whether he thinks we will do it or not. At the very least his citizens deserve him to keep asking.
Geminid
@Wapiti: It would also be good to finally get a new JCPOA in place that would limit Iran’s nuclear program. Russia threw a wrench into the process last weekend. The Iranians still appear to want a deal, and the other nations want one also, although the U.S. and Iran have a couple issues left to resolve. The Chinese are keen to get an agreement, and I think they will get Russia on board.
WaterGirl
@RS in Budapest (for now): Welcome!
Martin
@watergirl
Another entry for the lexicon as I think it’s use will increase:
Standoff weapon. A standoff weapon is one which can be fired from sufficient distance or position that the operators are safe from counterattack, usually because they can move a sufficient distance before any counterattack can be launched. Basically a weapon that reduces the risk to the operator to near zero.
These are the kind of weapons that the US dominates at. We have very expensive weapon platforms (ships, bombers, etc.) and in a conflict, if you can destroy these faster than they can be built, eventually you’re going to win. This is why we were wholesale bombing cities in WWII, to prevent weapons from being built in factories faster than we could blow up the weapons. So the US specializes in very expensive weapon platforms that fire weapons from farther away than the weapon platform can be targeted.
A related term is ‘over the horizon’ operations. This is the ability to engage in targets that you don’t have visual range of, often VERY far away. One example of this might be a forward operator – infantrymen on the ground that are marking targets from the top of a hill or maybe a UAV doing that, while artillery or tanks or helicopters on one side of the hill fire over the top and strike targets on the other side, typically using guided missiles. The targets can’t see the attackers so they can’t easily anticipate the attack, and unless the targets have similar capabilities, they struggle to respond, buying the attackers time to reposition, retreat, etc.
These play into the concept of ‘fog of war’. Fog of war describes what you can and cannot see on a battlefield. That can be big things – an attack from Belarus when you didn’t know Belarus was in this conflict, or small things like a guy with a shoulder anti-tank rocket that can easily see the tank, but the tank can’t see him because tanks have very poor visibility. In a one-on-one, the guy with the rocket will beat the tank almost every time. The tank needs other things to clear the fog of war – air support and communications so an air unit can see the guy with the rocket with their infrared camera and radio the tank letting it know the guy is there, etc. A big part of US operations is clearing the fog of war – lots of eyes looking in lots of ways and lots of communication.
Those standoff weapons are designed to operate from where the enemy can’t see to where you can see. Same with over the horizon operations.
Martin
Russia asking China for military assistance. US tells China to think very carefully before doing that.
Looks like China has lost their 1-2 week neutrality window and needs to pick sides now.
WaterGirl
@Martin: Thanks Martin! Happy to add.
Should it be 3 separate entries?
– standoff weapon
– over the horizon weapon
– fog of war
Or are you thinking they should all go under Standoff Weapon?
WaterGirl
@Martin:
Is that a prediction or is there already news of that happening?
CROAKER
@WaterGirl: They have to go to China. Ordinance Load outs are spent. There is basically a shortage.
WaterGirl
@Martin: Did you watch the 10-minute video up top?
At one point, President Zelenskyy refers to “still born as DPR and LPR”. Right before that he referenced another 3-letter acronym, but I couldn’t see what it was because of the YouTube time counter that was right on top of it. Do you know what that was about?
les
@Martin: “Does it save Ukraine from carnage? Nope. But nothing does really.”
Therein lies my point. If nothing saves Ukraine, the world learns nothing saves them. If ya got nukes, you can do whatever you want.
At some point–and I don’t pretend to know if this is the point–somebody has to say “you can’t invade your neighbor/hereditary enemy/coveted source of stuff” and get away with it.” Even if you’re not threatening me at the moment.
les
So, at what point does this apply: “It’s a good thing FDR did not say, “We can’t help Great Britain, it might start WWII“
Yeah, I get, different circumstances, nukes, yada yada. So?
smith
So nukes yada yada will make what the Ukrainians are experiencing now look like Sunday in the park with George.
Carlo Graziani
Yes. No question. I believe that the reason we sense this war is different is that it’s the bookend that closes an era, whose opening bookend was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I wrote one of my logorrhouc posts about it at the tail end of a comment thread a couple of days ago — https://balloon-juice.com/2022/03/11/war-for-ukraine-update-17-friday-night-edition/#comment-8456295 — so I won’t rehash the whole thing here. The TL;DR is that there used to be an international architecture — amoral, but mindfully-constructed — for managing the Cold War, and when it became obsolete in 1991 it was not replaced by anything well-thought out. Rather, a smug elite “Davos Consensus” ruled, which one might capture in a phrase by “all that remains now is for the rest of the world to become as smart as we are, and everyone will get rich”.
Everyone did not get rich. Instead, a series of economic, military, climate, epidemiological, and income/wealth inequality-driven instabilities created massive global popular anxiety, which was exploited by nationalist populist demagogues with no commitment to the Enlightenment project, (Milosevic, Orban, Berlusconi, Putin, Modi, Bolsonero, Le Pen, Farage, Trump, among others). The Davos Consensus never deigned to notice the growing challenge, and at the same time undermined the West’s understanding of what it stood for. “Freedom” was right-wing nutter discourse, embarrassing in polite company. We talked instead about the importance getting rich.
By 2016, everything had turned to shit, and we could not understand how things could possibly have gone this apocalyptically badly. The anti-democratic challenge from the discontents of reason seemed unstoppable, at times.
Fast forward to “I need ammunition, not a ride!”
That would be Zelenskyy reminding us of our heritage. Of the fact that liberty is, in fact, more important than getting rich. Showing us what liberty really means, what it is worth, and what it costs.
That was the turning point. That’s why this war is different. Even the damn Germans would now prefer liberty to getting rich. Zelenskyy turned the war in Ukraine into the antidote for the intellectual toxicity of the Davos Consensus. He reminded us of our duties to our freedoms, and that “freedom” is not, in fact, a dirty word, however badly idiot truckers may abuse it.
Supporting this war is not “warmongering”. Rather, it signifies a return to the best version of our Western selves. We owe Ukrainians, and Zelenskyy in particular, more than we can ever repay them.
les
@smith: I get it. I don’t like it. I don’t know if he’s that crazy.
I do know what Putin considers ok–Syria. Absolute full on civilian slaughter.
I do know Putin wants Tsarist Russia back. He’s publicly said what’s next–Finland, the Balkans, etc. etc.
Do we just watch it all? I. Don’t. Fucking. Know. Are you comfy that if we let Ukraine die, we’re forever safe?
evodevo
@Kent: Or “Alas Babylon” – saw that on the teevee on Playhouse 90 in 1960. Really freaked me out, and I have never forgotten it…
smith
@les: We are not just watching. We’ve already touched off the dominoes that will mostly likely collapse an entire nation in a matter of weeks. It’s maybe not as cathartic as striding in with big guns, but it is very nearly the equivalent of nukes without explosives.
evodevo
@trollhattan: Just playing that old Karl Rovian tactic of attacking the enemy’s strengths with memes that are the exact opposite of the facts…
les
@smith: Dude, your lips to who/whatever may be listening. I doubt it–China letting it’s major source of oil just collapse seems a stretch–but if it works, I’ll love it and go back to the minor drugs.
This has been a low-hope day, doesn’t mean tomorrow can’t be more optimistic.
WaterGirl
@smith:
Ukraine or Russia?
If Russia, why are you so confident of a collapse in a matter of weeks. We are in the middle of week 3 right now.
smith
@WaterGirl: I’m talking about Russia and echoing commenters more knowledgeable than I about the likely impact of economic sanctions once they start to really bite. They don’t work instantaneously, certainly not in a couple of weeks, and we’ve put them in place to a large extent sequentially so some are quite new. It will take time before Russia experiences the widespread unemployment, shortages, and inflation that will really hurt, but not that much time. We are not talking years here. Meanwhile, flooding Ukraine with weapons they can use now, especially ones that can be effective against artillery, should buy some time for the sanctions to have a meaningful effect.
It’s horrifying to see the civilian suffering right now, but provoking a nuclear confrontation or even widening the scope of the current more conventional war would not quickly stop that suffering. Even if we swept in today with planes and missiles it could easily take just as long to get Putin to back down as it will take using sanctions and arming the Ukrainians.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@smith:
Yup. If we could take nukes out of equation– which as Omnes says above is like imagining your grandmother had wheels– going in hot wouldn’t mean fewer people would die, it would mean more people would die in more places in hopes that enough of them were Russian to make VVP, or the people around him, want to stop killing non-Russians.
PJ
@Kent: NATO military action would for certain turn what is, in the eyes of at least some “woke” Russians, a cruel and pointless Russian invasion of their smaller, weaker neighbor into a great patriotic war for the survival of Russia, a war that would last a lot longer than the current one and kill a lot more people. And that’s if it doesn’t escalate into a nuclear exchange, which is a very real possibility. I’m not willing to roll the dice on the lives of billions of people around the world and civilization as a whole.
If you are so hepped up about contributing American lives to the fight in Ukraine, you know how to buy a plane ticket to Lviv.
bjacques
@WaterGirl: KPR, I think, for Kherson People’s Republic, which a Putin stooge would presumably proclaim now that the Mayor has been disappeared. So, a warning to would-be Quislings.
PJ
@les: If you had paid attention in school, or ever read a history book, you’d know FDR did the same thing we are doing, supplying them with weapons and using economic sanctions. The US did not become militarily involved in WWII until Pearl Harbor.
PJ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I can’t believe the number of people who think that nuclear war doesn’t even rise to the level of “getting our hair mussed”, and that war between NATO and Russia would somehow be less destructive than what is currently happening.
PJ
@WaterGirl:
I am just an opinion haver on the internet, but people who seem to be a lot more knowledgeable than I seem to think Russia can’t last very long. Without imports, they can’t replace lost materiel. They can conscript more people to fight, but they won’t want to fight and won’t fight well. Failure to crush Ukraine will be the end of the Putin regime. See, e.g. https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501726393436196864 and related threads of his.
WaterGirl
@bjacques: Ah.
Then you may know what DPR and LPR refer to? Oh, those are probably the two areas that Putin proclaimed were going to be “independent”? As in independently Russia.
It seems impossible to keep up with everything. Have those areas cooperated with Putin?
WaterGirl
@PJ: Thank you for that, and for the link.
Noname
@Carlo Graziani: Yes! I can only hope that this horror is a turning point for the better. The whole world needs it.
Timill
@WaterGirl: Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, I would think.
Bunch of splitters, the lot of them…
WaterGirl
@Timill: Ugh.
Geminid
@PJ: Roosevelt was reluctant to cross the line between giving Britain material support and outright military intervention. He made a limited exception in the fall of 1941 for U.S. destroyers escorting British-bound convoys. U.S. destroyers were escorting convoys to the midpoint of the trip, where British destroyers took over.
Our warships were allowed to defend convoys from attacking submarines, but this policy was kept quiet until September of 1941, when a German submarine fired torpedoes that missed the destroyer Greer and Roosevelt announced a “shoot on sight” policy towards German subs. The next month a German torpedo damaged an American destroyer and killed 11 sailors, and on October 31 the destroyer Ruben James was sunk off of Iceland with a loss of 100 men. The day after Roosevelt said that he would not escalate militarily, but the undeclared naval war* continued in the western Atlantic until Hitler’s declaration of war followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.
*This undeclared war comes up at the end of the movie The Caine Mutiny. As the young naval officers celebrate their acquittal on mutiny charges brought by the addled Captain Queeg, their Navy lawyer confronts them with Queeg’s backstory: Queeg had lost his nerve after grim months in the North Atlantic combating German submarines, while the young officers were enjoying safe civilian lives. Their captain deserved understanding and support, the lawyer tells them, but instead they had treated him with indifference.
Jay
@Captain C:
they are actually cheaper Belorussian knock offs of cheap Chinese copies of Michelin tires.
JoyceH
@PJ:
That’s what you get when the writers of Post-Apoc stop writing about nuclear war because they’re too busy writing about zombies.
JoyceH
@PJ:
Found on Twitter, but for what it’s worth:
MEDICAL NEWS #1: In Russia, dental implants, crowns, dental drills were primarily imported from Germany. Russia ran out of all such consumables days ago. End of dentistry in Russia.
MEDICAL NEWS #2:
In Russia, surgeons can no longer perform surgeries that involve prosthetics because they were all being imported from abroad. This includes but not limited to hip and knee surgeries.
MEDICAL NEWS #3:
Russia has tried importing these medical prosthetics from China, but they turned out to be very poor quality knockoffs of the European products and are unusable.
Uncle Cosmo
@WaterGirl: I’d guess the putative “Kherson Peoples’ Republic” would be Xерсо́нская Наро́дная Респу́блика (Khersonskaya Narodnaya Respublika), abbreviated ХHP.
An abomination any way you cut it. But typical for Soviet leftbehinds: When the USSR in WW2 “liberated” the first major Polish city (Lublin), the Red Army refused permission for anyone from the London government-in-exile to enter the country. Instead they shipped in properly housebroken Polish Communists to form a “Lublin government” that would obey them, preparatory to shifting the whole country over 100 km west.
Marmot
@Nice Marmot: your nym is too similar.
WaterGirl
@Marmot: It is confusing!
May try to catch Nice Marmot again in a thread?
Even “the Other Marmot” would help so we don’t confuse the two of you. But I see that you have been here since 2008 so I doubt you want to change yours! :-)
For awhile we had a chris and a Chris at the same time, now that was confusing! Were you one of them?