Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We still have time to mess this up!

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

The revolution will be supervised.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

When we show up, we win.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War for Ukraine Update 46: A Brief Update for Today

War for Ukraine Update 46: A Brief Update for Today

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I’m going to keep tonight’s update very brief.

To update from last night, I’ve seen reports that Russian soldier Aleksey Bychkov has been arrested or detained in Russia. I’ve yet to see a legitimate news source in any EU country or the US confirm this yet. I’ll keep an eye out and update if/when more information becomes available.

Here’s the latest British MOD update:

And here’s the latest map of the theater by the British MOD:

Still not a lot of movement as both the Russians and the Ukrainians are racing to get their forces in place for the coming campaign in the south and east.

This is excellent news from the Lithuanians:

More after the jump:

Everyone’s favorite nutbag investor turned Internet troll, Elon Musk, has decided that in addition to trying to remake Twitter in his own image for fun and profits, especially profits, that he’d try his hand at war profiteering. From The Washington Post:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX to dispatch their Starlink terminals to the region to boost Internet access. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” Musk replied to broad online fanfare.

Since then, the company has cast the actions in part as a charitable gesture. “I’m proud that we were able to provide the terminals to folks in Ukraine,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a public event last month, later telling CNBC, “I don’t think the U.S. has given us any money to give terminals to the Ukraine.”

But according to documents obtained by The Technology 202, the U.S. federal government is in fact paying millions of dollars for a significant portion of the equipment and for the transportation costs to get it to Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it has purchased more than 1,330 terminals from SpaceX to send to Ukraine, while the company donated nearly 3,670 terminals and the Internet service itself.

While the agency initially called it a “private sector donation valued at roughly $10 million,” it did not specify how much it is contributing for the equipment or for the cost of transportation. Sometime after the announcement, the agency removed key details from its release. It now states that USAID “has delivered 5,000 Starlink Terminals” to Ukraine “through a public-private partnership” with SpaceX but does not specify the quantity nor value of the donations.

USAID agreed to purchase closer to 1,500 standard Starlink terminals for $1,500 apiece and to pay an additional $800,000 for transportation costs, documents show, adding up to over $3 million in taxpayer dollars paid to SpaceX for the equipment sent to Ukraine.

In a letter to SpaceX last month outlining the deal, the USAID mission director to Ukraine said the terminals would be “procured” and sent on behalf of USAID by a third-party contractor, which would “arrange for transportation and delivery of the equipment” from Los Angeles International Airport to Ukraine via Poland.

The letter said the nearly 3,670 terminals donated by SpaceX would come with three months of “unlimited data.” In addition to the more than 1,330 terminals that USAID confirmed it had purchased, the agency earlier agreed to buy a separate 175 units from SpaceX, according to the documents.

On Thursday, USAID spokesperson Rebecca Chalif said in a statement that the “delivery of Starlink terminals were made possible by a range of stakeholders, whose combined contributions valued over $15 million and facilitated the procurement, international flights, ground transportation, and satellite Internet service of 5,000 Starlink terminals.”

The agency declined to answer questions about how much USAID funding is going toward buying and transporting equipment for Ukraine, referring them to SpaceX. SpaceX did not return a request for comment on the arrangement and the specific financials of the deal.

It is also unclear whether the price the U.S. government is paying for individual Starlink units matches their typical market price.

USAID is paying $1,500 for each standard terminal and the accompanying service, documents show. According to the Starlink website, a standard terminal set costs $600, while the monthly service charge costs $110, plus an additional $100 for shipping and handling.

According to The Verge, Starlink recently unveiled a separate premium service that prices the equipment at $2,500 and the monthly Internet charge at $500, but it remains unclear whether that is what Ukraine has received. SpaceX did not return a request for comment on the pricing.

The revelations show that while SpaceX appears to have donated a significant sum to Ukraine’s cause, it has done so with public assistance.

The United States and other countries have paid to send much of the known equipment to Ukraine. The transportation costs USAID has paid to ship the 5,000 terminals exceeds $800,000, according to the documents. French officials confirmed they also helped with transportation.

Much, much more at the link!

I’m a defense and intel contractor/consultant. I understand how this all works. I have no problem with Musk donating a bunch. I have no problem with him also then turning around and selling a bunch of them when the donated number was insufficient. What pisses me off, what is absolutely waste, fraud, and abuse, is the charging the US taxpayer almost three times the price for the units compared to what would have happened if the government had just ordered them at retail!

The nicest thing you can say about Musk is that he’s not as bad as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jared Kushner.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader, and likely rightful Belarusian president, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is trying to bring down Lukashenko’s regime in Minsk.

It might have seemed that life could not have got any worse for the people of Belarus, long Europe’s most repressive country. Then, in February, their homeland was used by Vladimir Putin as a launchpad for his assault on Ukraine, turning them into unwilling accomplices in his bloody and increasingly disastrous war.

Belarus’s jails have since filled with even more political prisoners — there are now as many as 4,000 by some counts — while the brutal regime headed by Aleksandr Lukashenko, 67, in power since 1994, has taken to airing confessions by “saboteurs” beaten and even kneecapped by police.

Yet Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, 39, the opposition leader seen by many as the rightful winner of the rigged August 2020 election that gave Lukashenko a sixth term as president, sees cause for optimism amid the misery and bloodshed. The war, she believes, could give a final push to the veteran Belarusian strongman — helped by an underground “partisan” war that is beginning to be waged against his government.

“Lukashenko is in a very fragile and weak position,” the former interpreter and teacher told me last week from Vilnius, the capital of neighbouring Lithuania, where she is rallying opposition to his rule. “He’s a puppet of the Kremlin, a vassal; he’s an accomplice, a collaborator.

“For 27 years he played West and East, but now he doesn’t have a way out of the situation. He could have started talking with his own people and releasing political prisoners and together we could have resisted the pressure from Russia to use Belarusian territory for the invasion.

“Much depends on the outcome of the war,” she added, speaking by video link in the near-flawless English she first used when she visited rural Ireland as a 12-year-old, courtesy of a charity that arranged holidays for children from areas affected by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear plant that enveloped much of Belarus.

“But if the Ukrainians win, as we think they will, it will make his regime much weaker, and there will be a moment when he will have no way out but to give up. There could be different scenarios: people within the nomenklatura [the ruling elite] will see he has lost authority and there could be a coup d’état. Or there could be an uprising by the Belarusian people.”

Much, much more at the link.

Mariupol:

Hostomel:

Borodyanka:

Kharkiv:

Bucha:

Melitopol:

From The Guardian:

The sun was shining in Zaporizhzhia on Saturday and teams of city workers were out planting flowers on roadside borders. Market stalls were doing a healthy trade in everything from food and drink to electronics, and there were even a few cafes and bars open.

But the frontlines are barely a half-hour drive from this industrial city, and much of the region of which it is the capital is under Russian occupation. Underneath the calm exterior, most people here – and across the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine – are anxious about what lies in wait in the coming days and weeks.

The battle for Donbas will not just be a battle for that territory, it will be a battle for global security,” said Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, a city south of Zaporizhzhia that came under occupation in the first days of the war.

Fedorov, who was kidnapped by Russian soldiers and eventually swapped in a prisoner exchange, now works from an office in Zaporizhzhia. After a week in which news of horrific war crimes in Bucha and other small towns near Kyiv has shocked the world, Fedorov’s demeanour in an interview with the Observer was characteristic of a new Ukrainian resolve to continue fighting the Russian assault.

“We should not talk about half measures. Today, all the red lines are crossed. Thousands of peaceful citizens have been killed,” said Fedorov, frequently breaking off to field calls on two different phones about continued evacuations from occupied Melitopol.

He reacted angrily to a question about whether Ukraine should still attempt to negotiate a peace settlement: “Bucha has been obliterated, fucking obliterated. And you think we’re going to agree to half measures?”

This sentiment is widely shared and suggests the battle for Donbas could be long and bloody, involving a more focused and determined Russian attack force, as well as a rejuvenated and vengeful Ukrainian army, fighting on terrain where the war has been continuing for the past eight years.

Fedorov said cities such as Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro had the advantage of having time to prepare for a spirited defence. “Melitopol wasn’t ready,” he said.

The Russian army took control of Melitopol and a number of other cities in the south of Ukraine in the first days of the war without much of a fight. A few days after the Russians took over Melitopol, a group of armed men Fedorov assumed were from Russia’s security services arrived at his office and said he could keep working as long as he accepted Russian control over the city.

“They said Melitopol is Russia, and that we could keep doing what we were doing, but we should recognise that they are now in charge of the security of the city,” he recalled.

Melitopol is a largely Russian-speaking city and many people there, including Fedorov, have relatives in Russia. But he said the vast majority of the city is now solidly pro-Ukrainian, and this has only intensified since the Russian invasion.

Fedorov, and almost everyone in his team, refused to cooperate with the Russians, he said, leading them to become ever more irate, especially when demonstrators with Ukrainian flags began taking to the streets.

“These rallies were the final straw for the Russians and they decided to take me prisoner. In broad daylight, they came to the social assistance centre we’d set up on the first day, where we gave out food and clothes, tied my hands together and put a bag over my head, and marched me out,” he recalled.

Much, much, much more at the link!

I expect that not all of them will arrive alive.

I’m waiting for confirmation from Cole, but it seems that Steve may have joined the International Legion!!!!

And we’ll finish with this:

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

53Comments

  1. 1.

    lollipopguild

    I attempted to comment on the NYTIMES post and somehow my comment ended up on this post instead.

  4. 4.

    Medicine Man

    The Ukrainians have an edge in strategic pet videos. Truly they know how to fight on the internet as well.

  5. 5.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Elizabelle: I did not see it.

    The only things I watch on TV are rugby, hockey, basketball, reruns of DC and Marvel superhero movies, and shows about Bigfoot and lost treasure.

  7. 7.

    Rocks

    Adam:  1) “I’m going to keep tonight’s update very brief.”  If this is brief, please warn us before we dive into a lengthy one.  2) “The nicest thing you can say about Musk is that he’s not as bad as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jared Kushner.”  Harsh!  Absolutely true, but still…  Seriously, thank you very much for all you are doing to keep us informed.  May the Ukraine people prevail in Ukraine, and may democracies all over the world find ways to negate and destroy the Putin/Fox News/Trump sewage dump.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Elizabelle: I tried to watch Beat Bobby Flay, but I didn’t make it five minutes. Completely false advertising with that name. Not one person was beating the shit out of Bobby Flay at all. I did a keyword search and, apparently, no one ever does. I do not understand this.

  11. 11.

    Lyrebird

    Thanks for another wide-ranging and informative update for us jackals.

    the hearts of the living will always ache for thousands of innocent souls

    ..is what Google Translate gave for the words at the end of the beautiful animated video.

  12. 12.

    terry chay

    I was wondering if anyone can find a reference to something I read over a month ago.

    It was something to the effect that from 2014-2022, it was not in Ukraine’s interest to “win” the war in Donbas/Luhansk because advancing in the line of contact would likely draw Russia officially into that war. Obviously, that has changed now. (The assumption is Russia dip didn’t have the same game theory incentives: controlling Crimea prevents NATO expansion and they would feel that using Donbas/Luhansk to attrition Ukrainians against Ukrainians is a win-win to the, (it is also how they are using conscripts from that region today).

    The reason I ask is that with the war focusing in this region, and to the south, a lot of press and analysts are acting like it is a foregone conclusion that Ukraine will get their asses kicked because the terrain is open and their joint operaion is exposed and possible surroundabke. I feel (no direct proof) that this is a similar sort of “blood sells” stuff that preceded Jan 24, when it might be possible, like then, it won’t turn out this way. In fact, like then, quite possible the opposite.

    Here is my reasoning (again, no proof)

    – Russia pulled out of Kyiv. It is now looking that this was not to redirect operations since these forces according to the Pentagon and MOD won’t be brought back up to fighting strength for months. Instead, it looks like it was withdraw or get annihilated. Since a lot of capital is put in that so,who’s pulling out means that the south and east is better for Russia, the why there matters.

    – It looks like the best Ukrainian forces are in the east, not Kyiv. Rather around Kyiv the forces that won it for the, were the irregulars and the TDF which destroyed a lot of stuff in the rear. It’s scary to think the best trained troops for Ukraine are up where the action is supposed to be.

    – While open areas mean they are no longer restricted to the roads. Javelins are more effective there than in the suburbs and cities. Javelins require a lot of distance to arm safely and things like trees and wires make its top attack difficult.

    – Russia hasn’t shown any ability to conduct combined arms any any area in this war or in any previous one. All assumptions were based on the believe that they would quickly establish air superiority and later supremacy. If anything the number of sorties and missles has leveled off or decreased. Also their number of dumb bombs being used is increased, With the 2014 sanctions looking like it made a huge dent in things like PGM, it’s hard to imagine with this new round they are any better on this front.

    – Don’t see how they’re going to take Mariupol. It’s rubble which is a death trap to any armored unit.

    – You don’t missle a train station full of civilians if you think you are going to win. It doesn’t make sense from a game theory point. The only thing that makes sense is that you want there to be more civilians in theatre because you plan on hiding behind them like they did in the Kyiv suburbs. This means they really don’t have an offensive strategy.

  14. 14.

    Adam L Silverman

    @terry chay: I’ll start at the end first. War is NOT game theory. In fact very little in life is actually game theory. There’s a reason why real life people facing potential prison time don’t actually react the way the proof for the prisoners’ dilemma is written.

    Now back to your first point, I do not recall seeing that, but it is possible/plausible. After 2014 the Ukrainians needed time. They needed time to build up their military capability in terms of both personnel and material. They needed time to learn how to fight an effective defensive war against Russia. And they needed time to try to get the EU and NATO members to partner with them.

    Between 2014 and when Putin reinvaded, some 80,000 Ukrainians give or take, rotated into and out of combat with the Russians along the line of control along the Russian occupied areas in the Donbas. That combat experience has been invaluable over the past month and a half.

    The issue in the east, if it is an issue, is that the terrain is flat and largely open. This may make it difficult for the Ukrainians to do what they did in the defense of Kyiv. But it may not. Specifically because the Ukrainians have been preparing for this for eight years.

    We will all have to wait and see what happens.

  17. 17.

    Ruckus

    @terry chay:

    Russia is playing might makes right. And sometimes it does. But skill,  knowledge and effort can go a long way, especially against might that is in numbers only. Russia had to proceed to bombing cities/civilians  almost immediately because for a large part, their army is numbers over reality. Their air force segment is a bit better but even there they aren’t doing what their numbers suggest. Some of that is modern ground weapons, especially the modern day bazooka, more commonly known as shoulder mounted missiles. But most of this is to their leaders most often putting personal profits over anything else, like actually thought about more than their personal bank accounts.

  19. 19.

    Mallard Filmore

    @terry chay:

    a lot of press and analysts are acting like it is a foregone conclusion that Ukraine will get their asses kicked because the terrain is open and their joint operaion is exposed and possible surroundabke. I feel (no direct proof) that this is a similar sort of “blood sells” stuff that preceded Jan 24, when it might be possible, like then, it won’t turn out this way. In fact, like then, quite possible the opposite.

    You are not alone.

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/4/10/2091226/-I-think-Ukraine-is-going-to-go-on-the-offensive-right-now-And-Russia-is-in-big-trouble

    This is from General Wesley Clark – notice this — he is not talking static defense in the south and east —  he is fucking saying attack the entire line — north, south, east now. That they will fold here if we properly supply them — they are that weak. …

     

    … ISW makes the following assessment —

    US DoD statements that Russia retains 80-85 percent of its original mobilized combat power unintentionally exaggerate the Russian military’s current capabilities to fight.

    April 9 Assessment Highlight:

    There are likely few or no intact regiments or brigades remaining in the #Russian Army, Airborne Forces, or Naval Infantry. The Russians have no choice but to continue throwing battalions together into ad hoc formations.https://t.co/ckqLPzNZYQ

    — ISW (@TheStudyofWar) April 10, 2022

    The internal shortened link is from April 9 of ISW (Institute for the Study of War).

  21. 21.

    piratedan

    with the use of interior lines and resupply in weapons that have been taking place, could we be seeing a lull in an offensive sally by the UA forces and NOT the RU forces?

    If UA is able to go on the offensive and make gains… what happens next?  Does Putin escalate further?  Would he accept a tactical defeat if his forces are kicked out of Ukraine completely?

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    @Ruckus:
    Yup, think they’ve blundered into a campaign they believed they could run using an American-style and not the neo-Soviet military they actually have. Very 1940s.
    Now they know, and my money is on their reverting to protracted siege-style war where they can leverage numerical advantage and simply pound away until Ukraine either cedes territory or there’s nothing left to squabble over. They’ll be happy to occupy a sandpile, if that’s what it comes to.​

  25. 25.

    Kent

    @trollhattan: I’m not any kind of military expert.  I just read a lot.

    It seems to me that during WW2 armored battles the hand-held anti-tank and anti-armor weapons were very short range.  American Bazookas had an effective range of about 100 meters and the German Panzerfaust was more like half that.  So infantry troops screening armored columns on foot only had to range out a couple hundred yards at the most and could easily and quickly return to shelter behind their tanks.

    With all the precision-guided anti-tank infantry weapons that can take out tanks from miles away the idea of infantry screens are basically impossible.  First, the Russians have nowhere near enough infantry to begin to cover that much ground.  This isn’t WW2 with million man armies.  And if they tried to they would end up way out of sight and out of protection of the armored columns that they are supposed to be working with.

    If NATO actually got involved in this fight, one wonders how many tanks they would bother to even deploy as opposed to just attacking from the air until there is nothing left to attack.

  27. 27.

    Alison Rose ???

    Pretty sure if that cat got into the same room as Putin, only one of them would walk out alive. And it wouldn’t be the biped.

    Also good lord that dog video got me all verklempt.

    Thank you as always, Adam. Even your brief updates are very valuable for those of us whose mental state won’t allow us to sift through endless news and tweets ourselves. I imagine writing these every day has not been easy. I hope you’re doing okay tonight.

  29. 29.

    Ruckus

    @Kent:

    This.

    Ukraine knows this. It is why they have asked for help from countries like the US. Those with anything close to an effective air force could contain Russia. It would change the face of the world and likely the possibility of life though. vova has proven without a doubt that he is evil personified. He was the head of the KGB. Playing fair was never in his instruction manuals, other than – never do that. He plays to win and doesn’t give a rat’s fuck of how he does it. He didn’t become the, or one of the, richest men in the world by being shy and unassuming, not in Russia. I don’t have answers, just like most everyone else, other than we have to supply Ukraine with all the weapons we can, and they will be able to do the rest. Because in a world of 8 billion or more, any major war will likely kill lots of millions.

    I was hoping, when I was young and hopeful, that the world would figure out that endless wars every 20 yrs or so would not be possible any longer, no matter that conservatives around the world keep trying. That would be a nice thing to see before I kick off, but to keep that from happening sooner, I’m not holding my breath.

  30. 30.

    sanjeevs

    From FT on the battle for Kyiv

    Moscow’s forces were thwarted, too, by pieces of foam mat — the Ukrainians call them karemats — costing as little as £1.50. The mats prevent Russian thermal imaging drones from detecting human heat.

    “We held the karemats over our head,” said Konoko, explaining how his men moved stealthily in tiny groups at night. In that way soldiers armed with anti-tank weapons supplied by the US, Britain and others could sneak up on the Russians, fire their deadly and accurate missiles and then slip away.

    How Kyiv was saved by Ukrainian ingenuity as well as Russian blunders | Financial Times (ft.com)

  31. 31.

    Jay

    @Kent:

    6000 metres,

    “Modern” infantry screens using IFV’s, APC’s and drones, with encrypted comms reach out that far.

    Tank’s firing ATGM’s can also reach out that far, with precision.

    It requires a differnt level of training and interoperability.

  32. 32.

    Carlo Graziani

    @terry chay:

    – Don’t see how they’re going to take Mariupol. It’s rubble which is a death trap to any armored unit.

    Unfortunately, it is beginning to look as if the — heroic — resistance in Mariupol is nearing an end. There doesn’t seem to be any possibility of raising the siege, or of resupplying the defenders. And the Russians have just driven a wedge dividing eastern and southern sectors of the city, according to today’s ISW report.

    Those guys are doing their duty, grinding down Russian Army units that could be useful elsewhere, and fucking up the road net. But they are doomed, and they know it. Their heroism is all the greater for that knowledge.

  37. 37.

    trollhattan

    @Kent:

    Agree that in the battlefield things are completely different, especially compared to entrenched armies facing one another across a no-man’s land as in WWI and the US Civil War.

    But even today, city sieges I think are not so changed. In the case of Mariupol, cited as a top priority to seal Ukraine off of more of the coast and provide Russia with their desired land link to the east, they can shell, bomb and lob missiles from great distances with impunity, while holding the dwindling civilian population hostage. They laid siege to Aleppo and Russia just placed their Syrian mission commander in charge of Ukraine (IIUC).

    Also don’t believe they care how many of their own soldiers it will cost, since blitzkrieg didn’t work, bring out the grinder.

  39. 39.

    Grey Michael

    Long time lurker, first time commenter here. Hi all :)

    Hey Adam, I have a question for you. Once the war is over, do you anticipate we keep the sanctions in place, plus the plethora of other punishments? In other words, does this situation end with the war or is it more like when Putin is out of power in Russia?

  40. 40.

    RaflW

    @Kent: And I would think that Elon had to actually read and accept Twitter’s conflict of interest policies and fiduciary duties and was like, nope! See ya.

    Which is a good thing. Bye now (though he’ll likely fuck around as an ‘activist shareholder’ so we’ll see how brave Jack and the board end up being).

  41. 41.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @trollhattan:

    Also don’t believe they care how many of their own soldiers it will cost, since blitzkrieg didn’t work, bring out the grinder.

    Does Putin really want his own Vietnam? Because that’s how the US got Vietnam, complete with civil unrest.

  44. 44.

    Ksmiami

    @trollhattan: we need to send everything we have…fuck it defeat the Russians in Ukraine and destroy their ability to do this ever again. The west shouldn’t be so fearful-

  46. 46.

    wetzel

    @terry chay:

    You don’t missle a train station full of civilians if you think you are going to win. 

    It’s a spectacle. It was propaganda on Russia itself. Now all Russians know they live in terror.

    Bachelard’s existential philosophy of science, Renee Girard’s anthropology, and Piaget’s theories of cognitive development all give a different picture of the Russian subject.

    In Piaget, when you encounter a stimulus, if you understand it, that means your existing schemas are adequate, and you process the stimulus as factual information. If you do not understand, you have to develop new schemas. This is cognitive development, which Piaget calls accommodation.

    How does this work for the Russian who sees the agents of their own government perpetrating horror? How do they process the inhumanity of a missile launched by Russian boys with the words ‘for Ukraine’s children’. That was authored by FSB. I think they also allowed/encouraged the propagation of the child rape videos the day after.

    The Russian subject cannot assimilate this. They do not have the schemas to understand. How do you accommodate inhumanity? You cannot without losing symbolic consciousness. The individual comes into sync with the totalitarian unconscious, the end state in Ivan Ilyich’s phenomenology Hegel’s philosophy as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and man. Petroleum becomes a greater fuel than blood.

    I think it’s very important to understand how sophisticated FSB is. They are employing game theory like we do, but it has a different philosophical basis, in classical German philosophy, not analytical philosophy like the game theory of John Nash. They are catastrophic phenomonologists.

    Russia did missile that train state full of children to win this war. Atrocity in Ukraine is to establish terror in Russia so that Putin can reconstitute totalitarianism in Russia.

    Also, we will have the same cognitive difficulties, even the complicity. So many times we have said ‘Never again’. I believe FSB is disappointed they have not been able to stalemate control over a wide geography in Ukraine to make us watch the genocide. I believe they thought they could draw us in. A long proxy war in which the United States lives in terror of nuclear attack would transform us towards fascism. I think the transition from democracy to scientific totalitarianism is spontaneous in the thermodynamic sense in that it is irreversible.

  48. 48.

    wetzel

    I believe that if Trump had won in 2020, the United States and Russia were going to have a fake war. The global stakes involved, I think, go towards understanding absurd lengths taken by the coup plotters to try to overthrow the government Jan 2021.

  49. 49.

    lee

    I caught a video on reddit that is not for the faint of heart and it illustrates one of the issues with this war.

    A UA checkpoint waved up a tank thinking it was one of their own. The tank drove right up to them and then realized the troops were UA not RU and fired twice point blank into their group.

    I imagine something similar has happened on both sides.

     

    @Grey Michael: Welcome to commenting!!

  50. 50.

    West of the Cascades

    @Betty: any sport that features a position called “silly mid on” and takes five days to finish a match is OK in my book (I got hooked on cricket as a procrastination tool while living in Australia working on a master’s degree many years ago).

  51. 51.

    wetzel

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Hi Adam. Musk gets high on his own supply, and I’m sick of having American gods since I got attached to the idea of Ted Turner years ago, but given the funhouse world Elon Musk must be living in, I think he’s doing a pretty decent job not going bananas, or at least a good job concealing that he has.

    There is the idea that maybe enormous wealth might not necessarily ruin a person, though it usually does seem to. I don’t think Musk cares about the money with Starlink and Ukraine. That’s not how that guy motivates. I think Elon Musk wants to be important to making the world better. The problem with Elon is that nobody comes up to him. It’s like gravity is gone and he’s just floating.

  52. 52.

    RaflW

    @wetzel: “Atrocity in Ukraine is to establish terror in Russia so that Putin can reconstitute totalitarianism in Russia.”

    Putin has stepped up the methods and ‘patriotic duty’ to report on/rat out your neighbors. Part of the totalitarianism is creating the sense that all private acts are subject to detection, detention and a possible long stay in the gulag … or a firing squad.

  53. 53.

    Jinchi

    @wetzel: ​

    I believe that if Trump had won in 2020, the United States and Russia were going to have a fake war.

    Nope.

    We saw how TFG treated allies when he sold out the Kurds, and he clearly considered the Ukrainians adversaries. He parroted Putin’s justification for seizing Crimea. He praised Putin as “very smart” for “taking over a country, literally, a vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in”.

    He was giddy at the idea. Like Orban, if he had won re-election, he even wouldn’t have pretended to care.
    At best, he was simply going to let Putin roll over Ukraine. At worst he would have given Putin intelligence to take out Zelenskyy on day one. He certainly wouldn’t have rallied NATO or sent military aide to Ukraine. In the US, we would probably have been too distracted by all the chaos he’d cause at home to even know what was going on in Kyiv.​

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