Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Everybody saw this coming.

Please don’t feed the bears.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

No one could have predicted…

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

This blog will pay for itself.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

“woke” is the new caravan.

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War For Ukraine: Update 2

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War For Ukraine: Update 2

(Found at this link)

Just a brief house keeping note at top. If I keep doing these updates, I’m going to title them War for Ukraine from here on out with the update # after the colon. I am not going to retitle the first one I did two nights ago.

About an hour ago Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, warned that Russian forces are closing on the city:

President Zelenskyy has both tweeted out video of him in Kyiv to knock back Russian disinformation that he’d abandoned the city and its defense and tweeted that he’d had a discussion with President Biden about next steps:

Resupply of weaponry is continuing to flow into Ukraine:

About four hours ago, AMB (ret) McFaul, tweeted that NATO has (finally!) activated the NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VHRJTF)

The NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force is:

The NATO Response Force (NRF) is a highly ready and technologically advanced multinational force made up of land, air, maritime and Special Operations Forces (SOF) components that the Alliance can deploy quickly, wherever needed. In addition to its operational role, the NRF can be used for greater cooperation in education and training, increased exercises, support for disaster relief and better use of technology.

A powerful package

NATO Allies decided at the 2014 Wales Summit to enhance the NRF by creating a “spearhead force” within it, known as the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force or VJTF. This enhanced NRF is one of the measures of the Readiness Action Plan (RAP) agreed by Allies to respond to the changes in the security environment.

The enhanced NATO Response Force includes:

  • a command and control element: Operational command of the NRF alternates between Allied Joint Force Commands in Brunssum and Naples;
  • the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF): This NRF element – about 20,000 strong – includes a multinational land brigade of around 5,000 troops and air, maritime and SOF components. Leading elements are ready to move within two to three days. Allies assume the lead role for the VJTF on a rotational basis;

Rather than just give a run down of events, I wanted to provide a bit of analysis now that Ukraine has withstood the first two days of the invasion. That’ll be after the jump.

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Late Night Open Thread: Anti-Putin Protests in Russia

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: So It Begins

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Ukraine Update

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Apparently someone asked for an Ukraine update.

The NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) declaring a no fly zone for civilian aviation over eastern Ukraine went up about five hours ago.

This indicates that Russia is intending to do something offensive from that direction.

About seven hours ago Ukrainian officials warned of a Russian attack on a chemical plant in Crimea that was intended to be run as a false flag to be blamed on the Ukrainians.

A little over an hour ago Putin declared war on Ukraine:

This thread has full details on Putin’s declaration of war, but it boils down to invasion, occupation, pacification, regime change, and installation of a puppet government.

Forty minutes ago President Biden responded to Putin’s declaration of war:

I’ve seen reports on social media of explosions in a number of Ukrainian cities including Kyiv. Here’s a live feed from Kharkiv.

The Ukrainians are smartly protecting their airports:

This appears to be a full scale invasion, not merely a reinforcement of the occupation of eastern Ukraine. Unlike 2014, the Ukrainians are far better prepared. They have far better capabilities. They have 8 years of combat experience in holding off further Russian incursions. I do not know, however, if they can withstand a full fledged Russian invasion that intends to take and hold Ukraine. I am in complete agreement with the assessment that without significantly more assistance, the Ukrainians need to adopt an Unconventional Warfare approach rather than meet the Russians head on. They need to draw the Russians into the cities and turn this into a three block at a time war. To do that, the Ukrainians will have to be willing to absorb significant casualties.

Putin seems to have decided to go all in. The discussion of whether he is physically and/or mentally ill are irrelevant at this point. I think it is far more likely that he has simply spent every day for the past 30 years being consumed by his belief that the fall of the Soviet Union and the diminution of Russia was solely the fault of the US and its lackeys in the EU and NATO. And that after forty years of stewing over this belief it has finally consumed him.

So now we wait. We wait to see what Putin does. We wait to see what the coming dawn in Ukraine brings. We wait to see what President Biden and our EU and NATO allies are willing to do and able to do in response.

If you’re the religious type, say a prayer for the Ukrainians tonight. If you’re not just keep good thoughts. This is going to get far, far, far worse before it gets better.

Open thread!

PS: If you want a list of people to follow regarding what is happening in Ukraine, use the list that Gin & Tonic put together for us last month. It can be found at this link.

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Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Vladimir V. Putin, Not A Well Man

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He looks… tired. And bloated, not to mention listless. The sick man of Europe is an elderly cliche, but I gotta say: If this is the best Putin’s professional cosmetologists & media stagers can do before possibly the most important international speech of his career, there’s a reason for the rumors. Many people are saying!

Back in late January, at Puck, Russian expat Julia Ioffe asked Russian expert Fiona Hill:

… People I talk to in Moscow, as well as some in the U.S. government, say that some of this is a product of Putin’s COVID isolation for the last two years; that he barely sees anyone because to see him, you have to quarantine for two weeks; that he’s not getting good information. Do you think that’s plausible?

I think it could be, honestly. I really do think that there’s something strange going on there. He seems more emotional, more focused. Maybe he’s been sitting there, stewing the whole time about this. There’s a good case to be made for that because it’s very strange. There are many people, myself and others, who have followed Putin for his entire time in the presidency and we’re all sort of wondering whether there’s something else going on. Is something wrong? Has this made him confront his mortality? There are other changes around him. Lots of people did get sick around him. Does that make him feel that time might be ticking, in ways we would never have credited?

There are rumors in Moscow that, you know, he’s sick, and that’s one of the reasons for the isolation, that he’s had to have certain medical procedures—that aren’t Botox.

He could be taking steroids for inflammation. It could be anything And people around him are not well. This is speculation, but you know, there’s something going on there. Because often these things are driven by personal issues. You go back in history and there’s all kinds of things like that. Look at Yeltsin. We thought he had a cold when he disappeared in 1996, and he was actually on the operating table having open heart surgery and nearly dying. I think it’s very much worth considering.

Or maybe, Foreign Affairs suggested earlier this month, it’s just an occupational psychological hazard:

… Because personalist rulers are more insulated from the consequences of their actions, they can afford to be more violent and less risk averse than other kinds of autocrats. To repress domestic opposition and keep power, they staff their regimes with devotees from the military and the security services who are prone to aggression and whose hostile outlook begins to permeate foreign policy decision-making. As these courtiers compete for the ruler’s attention, they may leave out inconvenient facts and offer belligerent, eye-catching plans for how to deal with what they see as threats.

That doesn’t mean more violence in Ukraine is preordained. In the past, Putin has been pragmatic and sensitive to war’s costs. But the Russian president’s circle of trust has consolidated over time, insulating him from information that does not fit with his prior beliefs. His minions share his anger toward the West, and he faces no serious internal constraints. The future of Ukraine may hinge on a man ensconced in a bubble that both feeds his aggression and shields him from its consequences.

Authoritarian states are bedeviled by an inherent contradiction. To stay in power, autocrats desperately seek reliable information on the attitudes of their citizens, elite rivals, and foreign threats. But to avoid opposition, they establish political systems that make quality data exceptionally hard to obtain. Leaders suppress dissent, punish free expression, encourage personal loyalty, and divide their security agencies. They therefore struggle to understand both how their people feel and what other states are planning.

In a personalist autocracy, these problems are even worse. Government officials not only struggle to obtain factual information; they also face strong personal incentives to censor what they find… There is a reason, for instance, why personalist leaders have meek advisers. For strongmen, the consequences of losing power can be extreme—prison, exile, or death—and so they tend to surround themselves by sycophants. Their governing bodies can therefore descend into groupthink, and policy can lock onto a single path. This tendency is intensified by the fact that long-standing rulers become more confident in their abilities over time, ignoring or quashing opposition.

Perhaps no leader of a major power illustrates these patterns better than Putin. His advisers once held a range of perspectives, especially early during the first decade of this century, when he attempted to position the Kremlin as a partner to the United States and Europe. But over time, his security agencies came to dominate Putin’s attention, especially as he grew disappointed with the West. Now, Putin’s inner circle is almost entirely made up of the siloviki—members of his loyalist, hawkish security services. The FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB, is playing an increasingly visible role in foreign relations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by contrast, is now sometimes left out of decisions altogether…

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Vladimir V. Putin, Not A Well ManPost + Comments (83)

DJT picks a side…

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Trump gave an interview today to a pair of slobbering sycophants I’ve never heard of who apparently have a radio show? Anyhoo, y’all will be shocked to learn that Trump took the opportunity to lovingly and repeatedly lick Putin’s balls:

BUCK: Mr. President, in the last 24 hours we know Russia has said that they are recognizing two breakaway regions of Ukraine, and now this White House is stating that this is an “invasion.” That’s a strong word. What went wrong here? What has the current occupant of the Oval Office done that he could have done differently?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn’t be there and a man that has no concept of what he’s doing. I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.

So, Putin is now saying, “It’s independent,” a large section of Ukraine. I said, “How smart is that?” And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, “I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,” he used the word “independent,” “and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad.

Emphasis mine, and link to the extremely icky source here.

God, that’s just grotesque. I’m sure Trump said many other stupid and appalling things about many other topics during the “interview,” but I quit reading after confirming that Donald J. Trump is still Vladimir V. Putin’s star-struck cock-holster. What a shameful spectacle.

Open thread.

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Breaking: Putin Has Informed Macron and Scholz That He Will Recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics

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For those who have been patting themselves on the back that diplomacy was working so a military buildup for both deterrence and, if the worst should happen, response was not needed, well your diplomacy just failed!

What does this mean, well given the rhetoric and statements coming out of Moscow, most likely this:

We are going to have to wait and see what the actual recognition statement that Putin makes states, but if they recognize all of the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway territories, it would double the territory Russia has grabbed in eastern Ukraine and put the current line of control right in the middle of Russia’s two newest vassal states. From Putin’s perspective this would, of course, turn the Ukrainian military forces on that line of control into invaders of the sovereign territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. Territory that Russia has pledged to defend. This is the final, fabricated pretext for war.

What do the two diplomatic geniuses Macron and Scholz have to say for themselves?

Well that’ll put Putin in his place! And a lot of Ukrainians are going to die because of it.

As much as I like the way Biden and his team have handled things so far, especially the information warfare and PSYOP campaign that has gotten inside Putin’s information cycle and wrong footed him, Zelensky, in his speech to the Munich Security Conference, was not wrong about how the US, the EU, and NATO have handled this crisis. And not just for the past several months, but going back to at least Spring of 2014.

If the US and our NATO and non-NATO EU allies and partners wait until Putin escalates and reinvades/further invades to take actions to punish him then simply announcing you will won’t deter him. And as we’ve seen they haven’t deterred him! Especially if either we or our NATO and EU allies have already taken the most powerful tools off the table. We’re not going to cut Russia off from SWIFT. We’re not going to use every last bit of our FINCEN capabilities and our allies’ equivalents to scarf up or seize every last one of Putin’s assets, his family’s assets, and those of his oligarchs and their families. We’re not going to revoke visas and green cards. We’re not going to cut Russia off from the Internet. We’re not going to deny flight into or out of Russia and his vassal states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, or Chechnya or make it impossible for flight between them. We’re not going to put an embargo on ground and sea lines of commerce against Russia and Putin’s vassals.

While doing any of these preemptively might focus Putin’s mind, the reality is they are acts of war in and of themselves. So we won’t do them because waging a war for the right reasons, which engaging Russia to deter its aggression in Eastern Europe would be, is not something we can do because of Afghanistan and Iraq something something, harrumph.

We love applying sanctions because it sounds tough, but it never works. If it did Cuba and Iran would both be a democratic paradise.

And we’re sure as hell not going to put the military foot print in place to give him pause and by the time he does attack a NATO state, which will be Poland to connect Belarus and Kaliningrad where he’ll claim, despite it being bullshit, his actions are to protect ethnic Russians in the northeastern tip of Poland between the two who are being targeted because they’re ethnic Russians, we’ll be so far right of boom that the military response will be that much more prolonged and deadly because we’ll have to fight onto the objectives to clear them. And that’s provided we actually do anything and don’t remain frozen by Russia’s anecdotally articulated doctrine on using tactical nukes in conventional war despite it not being in their formal doctrine.

Russia has been waging war in Ukraine since 2014. They’ve been waging war in Georgia since 2008. They’ve been waging a low intensity and unconventional war against the US and our EU and NATO partners since between 2011 and 2014.

Perhaps reality will finally overtake wishful thinking. The time for the semantic games of whether what Putin has been doing and is doing is really war or is just warfare or something something cyber crime has long passed. Putin has made it clear by his actions and, often, by his words, regardless of what is or is not really motivating him, that he seeks to roll back everything that has happened within the global systems since the Soviet Union collapsed. And, if possible, the whole post World War II international order. Regardless of why, Putin is going to do what he’s going to do. Right now he is the driver of these events and we have to wait and see where he steers things.

The only question now is whether we have the will to stop him.

Open thread!

Breaking: Putin Has Informed Macron and Scholz That He Will Recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk RepublicsPost + Comments (296)