…so…you know that little number up above the gorilla, there…the one that skips you straight down to the comments…go on ahead & click that if you just need to get on about your thursday…or indeed your second wednesday…because I may have had not enough rest & possibly too much coffee…& there be scrolling ahead…for which I can only apologize & beg your indulgence…I wouldn’t hold myself up as an example of much…except perhaps as a cautionary tale of what can happen if you find yourself in receipt of what was once referred to as a classical british education & occupying unmistakably interesting times with a side-order of fallible news media that resembles a tidal wave
My prediction failed. For a decade and a half, Facebook resisted the fate of all the social networks that preceded it. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why: it cheated. The company used investor cash to buy and neutralize competitors (“Kids are leaving Facebook for Insta? Fine, we’ll buy Insta. We know you value choice!”). It allegedly spied on users through the deceptive use of apps such as Onavo and exploited the intelligence to defeat rivals. More than anything, it ratcheted up “switching costs.”
[…]
It’s different for Facebook. The company’s ascendancy coincided with an overall concentration in the tech sector, and, with it, laws that protected winners of the latest round of the interoperability wars from new challengers. Apple was able to reverse-engineer its way out of the Microsoft Office trap, but woe betide a company that tries the same trick on Apple – try to make a program that lets you run iPhone apps on an Android device, or read the media files you buy in Apple’s book, movie or music stores, and you will quickly discover that the law is now on the sides of the giants, not the upstarts.That same legal shift is how Facebook has kept its switching costs high. Fifteen years ago, it was safe to make a Facebook-MySpace bridge that would let you leave MySpace but stay in touch with your friends there by scraping your MySpace inbox and moving the waiting messages to your Facebook inbox. Try to build one of those bridges today – blasting an escape tunnel through Facebook’s walled garden – and Facebook will sue you until the rubble bounces.
[…]
Though most of Facebook’s users are global, its US users generate far more profit than users in the rest of the world. Losing a US user is expensive. Even more important: the US is Facebook’s home base, and its US user base is its main bargaining chip in resisting US regulation, and in securing US support in its regulatory battles abroad.Speaking of regulatory battles abroad: Facebook is on the brink of having its business model declared illegal under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Fending off that scenario will depend on vast capital expenditures and friendly European regulators, and Facebook’s running short on both. Oh, and Europeans are Facebook’s second most valuable users.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/24/ive-been-waiting-15-years-for-facebook-to-die-im-more-hopeful-than-ever
[…]
For 15 years, I’ve been waiting for Facebook to suffer the fate of every network-effects-driven success story – to experience the precipitous decline that is triggered by people leaving the service and taking the value they brought to it with them. Facebook now has to somehow retain users who are fed up to the eyeballs with its never-ending failures and scandals, while funding a pivot to VR, while fending off overlapping salvoes of global regulatory challenges to its business model, while paying a massive wage premium to attract and retain the workers that it needs to make any of this happen. All that, amid an exodus of its most valuable users and a frontal regulatory assault on its ability to extract revenues from those users’ online activities.
…but it’s become something of a cliché that a lot of people get their news via social media these days…which is notoriously a double-edged sword
…some people, anyway
Russian authorities have announced the “partial restriction” of access to Facebook after the social media network limited the accounts of several Kremlin-backed media organisations after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
[…] Roskomnadzor described its move as “measures to protect Russian media”. It said Russia’s foreign ministry and the prosecutor general’s office found Facebook “complicit in violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms, as well as the rights and freedoms of Russian nationals”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/24/ukraine-hackers-defend-against-russia
[…]
[Nick Clegg] later acknowledged in a tweet that Russia had restricted Facebook after it refused to “stop the independent factchecking and labelling of content posted on Facebook by four Russian state-owned media organisations”.
…& that’s without getting into the cyberwar angle…or trying to figure out what the likes of facebook ought to be doing
My disclosures validated years of alarms raised by advocates – that the Facebook algorithm harms children, stokes division, and weakens our democracies.
And as we enter the “fog of war” with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we are seeing in real time how Russia is weaponising Facebook to spread its outrageous propaganda.
Nick Clegg has the power now to right Facebook’s wrongs. This is how he should do it [Guardian]
[…]
I never wanted to be a whistleblower, but I realised that without the light of day on these insidious practices, we would never get the social media we deserve – social media that promotes our wellbeing and protects our democracies.
…which leads more-or-less-directly to something else I guess I’m an example of
With the Ukraine war unfolding on social media, parsing fact from fiction has never been trickier — or, for those involved, more urgent.
[…]
Over a year ago, Twitter launched a pilot of an ambitious project that was meant to harness the wisdom of crowds to answer just these sorts of questions on its platform, potentially across countries and languages, in near real time. Called Birdwatch, it lets volunteer fact-checkers add notes to tweets that are going viral, flagging them as potentially misleading and adding context and reliable sources that address their claims. By crowdsourcing the fact-checking process, Twitter hoped to facilitate debunkings at a greater speed and scale than would be feasible by professional fact-checkers alone.Yet after 13 months, Birdwatch remains a small pilot project, its fact checks invisible to ordinary Twitter users — even as its volunteer contributors dutifully continue to flag false or contested tweets for an audience of only each other. That suggests that either Twitter hasn’t prioritized the project amid internal upheaval and pressure from investors to grow faster, or that it has proved thornier than the company hoped.
As Ukraine misinformation rages, Twitter’s fact-checking tool is a no-show [WaPo]
…the peril of promises made in good faith that you subsequently can’t deliver on
There’s always something a bit grim about the State of the Union. A setpiece of American political theater, the annual speech by the president to a joint session of Congress is choreographed to eliminate any chance of accidental sincerity. The president speaks in carefully calibrated spin; every word sounds like it has been focus-grouped. Members of the opposition party make a show of their animosity, vamping for the cameras with either staid, dignified displeasure or ravenous hatred, depending on where they are running for re-election. No one’s mind is changed and little new information is delivered. By its nature, the speech is meant to describe the status quo. It is not meant to change it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/biden-state-of-the-union-opinion
[…]
Many of these proposals seemed less like Biden was putting forward achievable goals for the next year of his presidency and more like he was shifting through the wreckage of his disastrous Build Back Better negotiations with Manchin, searching for some workable leftovers. Many of the items he proposed had already been presented to Congress; none of them had been able to get through the obstructionism of the Republican party and the Manchin-Sinema block. These things would substantially improve the lives of Americans, but it was clear he had no plan for how to implement any of them.
[…]
In this way, the speech was a perfect summation of Biden’s presidency: good intentions, with only halting, sporadic, uncreative, and trepidatious pursuit of actually enacting them. Unlike his predecessor, Biden tends to stay on script, but the State of the Union speech featured several ad libs – a product, some suspected, of the multiple revisions the speech was subjected to at the last minute, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine placed new demands on the broadcast. The last of this was probably the most apropos: “Go get him,” Biden told the nation. Him who? Get him how? It didn’t make sense, but so little of this does.
Putin “thought he could divide us at home in this chamber and this nation”, said Biden, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and blue tie. “He thought he could divide us in Europe as well. But Putin was wrong. We are ready, we are united and that’s what we did: we stayed united.”
[…]
“But I want you to know, we’re going to be OK, we’re going to be OK. When the history of this era is written, Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger,” said Biden to a standing ovation.
[…]
For a moment it was the 20th century again, when partisan differences seemed small compared to the external, existential threat of the Soviet Union. There is nothing so unifying as a common foe.Then came a jarring gear shift. When Biden moved to the domestic area, and took a swipe at the Donald Trump administration’s tax cuts for the rich, Republicans erupted in booing. For a moment, it was almost a surprise, but then not really: the bloodsport of daily politics had resumed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/01/state-of-the-union-ukraine-biden-agenda
[…]
The president’s Build Back Better agenda has stalled but he pushed some of its components. Likewise he warned that voting rights were “under assault”. His nemesis on both counts, the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, sat between the Republicans Mitt Romney and Roger Wicker in an extravagant gesture of bipartisanship unlikely to charm liberals.
…you know…that joe manchin
Republicans and Joe Manchin block Senate bill to secure abortion rights
…I don’t mean to suggest that biden wasn’t sincere in the stuff he said in that state of the union…but as someone once said, “events, dear boy, events”…& in the case of a lot of that stuff one of the events that has to take place before it’s realized is passage through the same senate he had before the GOP remembered following putin’s lead might not be a clever thing for american politicians to hew to for lack of an actual political platform
The election of Trump played into Putin’s overall strategy. He knew that a Trump presidency would be crucial to moving his own despotic agenda forward if Trump was successful in weakening NATO — the alliance that has for so long deterred Russian aggression.
And how would Putin know that? Well, on the 2016 campaign trail, Trump expressed interest in withdrawing from NATO, previewing what his administration would be like if he was elected.
[…]
From when Trump entered office in 2017 to 2019, he had at least 16 private conversations with Putin. While these meetings alone are controversial, it’s how he tried to shield the public from knowing what was discussed that’s even more concerning. According to a 2019 Washington Post report, Trump went as far as to seize notes from his own interpreter after a 2017 meeting with Putin.[…] let history also note that Trump’s first impeachment was because he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate then-presidential candidate Biden and his son Hunter in 2019. As leverage, Trump placed a hold on significant congressional financial aid to Ukraine, which Congress had already approved. Undoubtedly, as the news of Trump’s attempt to strong-arm Zelenskyy became public, it only continued to play directly into Russia’s hands.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-crisis-showed-how-biden-cleaned-trump-s-nato-mess
Speaking with the conservative network Monday night, Bolton sat back as host Rob Schmitt listed Trump accomplishments that the broadcaster claimed helped hinder Russia from attacking Ukraine. All the while, the pro-Trump network displayed a chyron that read, “Trump was tough on Russia.”
But Bolton, who has become a vocal critic of Trump, denied that his former boss was tough on Russia, claiming that Trump complained about any sanctions on Russian oligarchs in the United States. Then Bolton, who said Trump “did not” do a better job with Russia than President Biden, went one step further about Trump’s knowledge of Ukraine.
“The fact is that he barely knew where Ukraine was,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/01/bolton-trump-russia-ukraine-newsmax/
[…]
During the interview, Bolton claimed that Trump once asked then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly whether Finland was part of Russia. The former national security adviser emphasized that the narrative on Newsmax regarding the Ukraine invasion was a departure from reality.
…not that the GOP is the only bunch tripping over their clownshoes on that score
While I haven’t called up every white nationalist group in the US and Europe for comment, it is fair to say the Russian premier has a fervent fanbase among the far right in the west. Why is this? They love what he has done with Russia. They love the way he has dismantled women’s rights. They love his attacks on gay and transgender people. They love his dismissal of western liberalism. Their values align perfectly.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/01/why-does-putin-have-superfans-among-the-us-right-wing
[…]
It is not just the racism, homophobia and misogyny that the right love about Putin: it is also his muscle. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from January found that 62% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents reckon Putin is a “stronger leader” than Joe Biden ; that number rises to 71% among those who name Fox News as their primary source of cable news. Putin’s bare-chested photoshoots have done their job, eh?
This weekend, British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr said on Twitter, “We failed to acknowledge Russia had staged a military attack on the West. We called it ‘meddling.’ We used words like ‘interference.’ It wasn’t. It was warfare. We’ve been under military attack for eight years now.”
As she notes, Putin’s minions were not only directing their attention to the United States, and included pro-Brexit efforts and support for France’s far-right racist National Front party. The US interference – you could call it cyberwarfare, or informational invasion – took many forms. Stunningly, a number of left-wing news sources and pundits devoted themselves to denying the reality of the intervention and calling those who were hostile to the Putin regime cold-war red-scare right-wingers, as if contemporary Russia was a glorious socialist republic rather than a country ruled by a dictatorial ex-KGB agent with a record of murdering journalists, imprisoning dissenters, embezzling tens of billions and leading a global neofascist white supremacist revival. In discrediting the news stories and attacking critics of the Russian government, they provided crucial cover for Trump.
In her 2019 testimony to House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, former National Security Agency staffer Fiona Hill declared, “Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified. The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart; truth is questioned; our highly professional expert career Foreign Service is being undermined. US support for Ukraine, which continues to face armed aggression, is being politicized. President Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter US foreign policy objectives in Europe, including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert political and economic dominance.”
[…]
Of course the most striking role of the Russian government in the 2016 US election was its many, many ties with the Trump campaign, including with Trump himself, who spent the campaign and the four years of his presidency groveling before Putin, denying the reality of Russian interference, and changing first the Republican platform and then US policy to serve Putin’s agendas. This included cutting support for Ukraine against Russia out of the Republican platform when he won the primary, considerable animosity toward Nato, and ultimately trying to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in 2019 by withholding military aid while demanding he offer confirmation of a Russian conspiracy theory blaming Ukraine rather than Russia for 2016 election interference.A stunning number of Trump’s closest associates had deep ties to the Russian government. They included Paul Manafort, who during his years in Ukraine worked to build Russian influence there and served as a consultant to the Kremlin-backed Ukrainian president who was driven out of the country – and into Russia by popular protest in 2014 (the Russian line is that this was an illegitimate coup and thus a justification for invasion is still widely repeated). Manafort was, during his time in the campaign, sharing data with Russian intelligence agent Konstantin V Kilimnik, while campaign advisor Jeff Sessions was sharing information with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Manafort, Donald Trump Jr and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner held an illegal meeting in Trump Tower with a Kremlin-linked lawyer on 9 June 2016, where they were promised damaging material on the Clinton campaign.
After being seated next to Putin while being paid to speak at a dinner celebrating RT, Russia’s news propaganda outlet, Michael Flynn briefly became Trump’s national security advisor. He was soon was fired for lying to White House officials and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. Jared Kushner allegedly directed him to make those contacts and as the Washington Post reported in May 2017, “Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/time-to-confront-trump-putin-network
[…]
The Republican party met its new leader by matching his corruption, and by covering up his crimes and protecting him from consequences, including two impeachments. The second impeachment was for a violent invasion of Congress, not by a foreign power, but by right-wingers inflamed by lies instigated by Trump and amplified by many in the party. They have become willing collaborators in an attempt to sabotage free and fair elections, the rule of law, and truth itself.
…so…remember, remember [that day in] november…gunpowder, treason & plot…I see no reason..why gunpowder treason should ever be fogot
…about those well-intentioned promises
An emotive speech to the European parliament on Tuesday, in which Zelenskiy had beseeched the union to “prove that you are with us”, won a long, standing ovation and a ringing endorsement from MEPs in a non-binding resolution that called on Ukraine to be given EU candidate status.
[…]
But there is significant concern in other EU capitals that this is an emotional reaction that will lead to disappointment and bitterness.
[…]
Today, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine is the second most corrupt in Europe, ahead of Russia. It is now waging a war. Its future borders are unclear. And the path to membership is arduous. If the Council of the European Union agrees, the European Commission will be asked to give an opinion, and that process can take up to 18 months. Ukraine will then have to absorb EU law over an indefinite period of transition.It is expected that EU leaders will be asked to discuss Ukraine’s application at an upcoming summit. There may be warm words. But Ukraine may be advised not to bank much at all on what could prove to be more empty promises.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/02/ukraine-bid-fast-track-membership-eu-likely-end-disappointment-zelenskiy
At the same time, the E.U.’s historic weekend announcement that it would fund and facilitate the sending of weapons and equipment to Ukraine — a move without precedent for the 27-nation trade bloc — appeared to be somewhat deflated on Tuesday, after it turned out the E.U. foreign policy chief had gone off script when he promised fighter jets.
Both developments underscored Ukraine’s vulnerability, as the world pledges support but leaves Ukrainians to do the fighting.
[…]
Bulgarian and Slovakian leaders have since said they do not plan to send fighter jets to Ukraine right now. And Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Tuesday that his country also did not intend to send jets to Ukraine, though he appeared to leave a touch of ambiguity about the possibility.“We are not sending any jets to Ukraine because that would open a military interference in the Ukrainian conflict. We are not joining that conflict,” Duda told reporters. “We are not going to send any jets to the Ukrainian airspace.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/01/ukraine-eu-membership-fighter-jets/
…& I left off on tuesday’s one of these with a sincerely-intentioned promise to butcher that today’s effort would clock in shorter than that one had…but sitting here at what even at this point is very possibly still nearer the beginning of it I can’t honestly say there’s more than a 50% chance of things panning out that way…it’s just plain hard to predict things these days…& that’s not just me making excuses
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell told lawmakers on Wednesday that as Russia’s war escalates in Ukraine, “the implications for the U.S. economy are highly uncertain,” adding to the Fed’s challenge of tackling inflation and shepherding the broader recovery.
[…]
“We can’t know how large or persistent those effects will be,” Powell said of the crisis in Ukraine. “That simply depends on events to come.”Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said on Tuesday that the war in Ukraine further complicated the picture of the economy, especially when it comes to energy costs and global supply chains.
“All of the turmoil we have today is just going to exacerbate that uncertainty,” Bostic said. “Our hard job just got a whole lot harder.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/03/02/powell-testimony-inflation-fed/
…partly that’s because somewhat predictably a shit load of stuff has gone on since I made the claim
The United Nations has voted overwhelmingly for a resolution deploring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called for the immediate withdrawal of its forces, in a global expression of outrage that highlighted Russia’s increasing isolation.
In an emergency session of the UN’s general assembly, 141 of the 193 member states voted for the resolution, 35 abstained, and five voted against. The only countries to vote no in support of Moscow were Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea and Syria. Longstanding allies Cuba and Nicaragua joined China in abstaining.
[…]
Speaking before the vote, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, compared the Russian invasion to the Nazi conquest of Europe.“A few of the eldest Ukrainians and Russians might recall a moment like this, a moment when one aggressive European nation invaded another without provocation to claim the territory of its neighbour, a moment when a European dictator declared he would return his empire to its former glory and invasion that caused a war so horrific, that it spurred this organization into existence,” Thomas-Greenfield said.
[…]
On Friday, Russia was the sole vote against a similar resolution in the security council, but because Russia is one of the five powers with a veto, the resolution was not upheld. So Ukraine’s allies referred the matter to the general assembly.It is the first time in 40 years the security council has referred a crisis to the assembly and only the 11th time an emergency session of the UN general assembly has been called since 1950.
UN votes to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calls for withdrawal [Guardian]
Senior Biden administration officials are preparing to dramatically expand the number of Russian oligarchs subject to U.S. sanctions, aiming to punish the financial elite close to President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine, according to three people briefed on internal administration deliberations.
Officials at the White House and Treasury Department are working on producing a list of names that is expected to overlap in part with the lineup of Russian oligarchs who were newly subjected to sanctions by the European Union on Monday, the people said.
[…]
America’s sanctions are expected to be more complicated than those imposed by the E.U., targeting not just the individuals but also their family members and companies they own, according to a White House official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations. President Biden said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night that the U.S. would join with Europe to “seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets.”“Tonight, I say to the Russian oligarchs and the corrupt leaders who built billions off this violent regime — no more,” the president said. “We’re coming for your ill-begotten gains.”
[…]
In addition to the sanctions released Monday by the E.U., Western leaders vowed this week to create a new “transatlantic task force” of law enforcement to help identify, and freeze, the assets of Russian oligarchs in violation of those sanctions.Russia’s billionaires control roughly 30 percent of the nation’s wealth — compared with roughly 15 percent in Germany and the United States — and have about as much financial wealth stashed in offshore foreign accounts as the entire Russian population has in Russia itself, according to a 2017 paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Many of them have served at high levels of Putin’s government, or played an instrumental role in providing financing either for the Russian president personally or the Kremlin’s efforts abroad, according to E.U. officials.
[…]
“It’s hard to express how massive a sea change this is for Western policy. The sanctions against these oligarchs are unprecedented in their scope and size; many of them were presumed to be untouchable,” said Paul Massaro, an anticorruption adviser to congressional lawmakers. “It will shake the rogue Putin regime to its core.”
[…]
At least in the United States, the effort to freeze or seize assets of Russians close to Putin is also likely to be stymied by a U.S. legal structure that allows anonymous actors, often using illicit funds, to form companies and purchase real estate and other assets under a strict veil of secrecy, said experts and transparency advocates.Further complicating matters is that some of the oligarchs oversee global operations the United States and European Union may be uneasy about undermining.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/03/02/russia-oligarchs-ukraine-america/
Experts say oligarchs can benefit from major disclosure loopholes in private equity and luxury goods.
“There’s this misunderstanding that you can just go out and seize these mansions, seize these yachts. For so many of them, it’s a complete black box,” said Casey Michel, the author of “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.”
“The U.S. provided all the tools of anonymity the oligarchs needed,” he said, and there’s no immediate executive action Biden can take to fix it.
Russian money has been pouring into the U.S. since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1999, Richard Palmer, who was the CIA’s Moscow embassy station chief, warned in congressional testimony that Russian kleptocrats and KGB officials had poured billions of dollars into private accounts across Europe and the U.S. in the dying days of the Soviet Union.
[…]
It has been a challenge for governments and academics trying to measure the scope of the wealth. By 2015, Gabriel Zucman, the director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that 52 percent of Russia’s wealth was held outside the country. The Treasury Department maintains a “report on oligarchs and parastatal entities of the Russian federation.” While the list of 96 oligarchs is public, there is also a much longer classified version that includes a deep dive into the finances of the oligarchs and entities, including their sources of income and exposure to the U.S. economy.
[…]
A 2017 Reuters review found at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought at least $98.4 million of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida. It found that at least 703 of the owners of the 2,044 units in the seven Trump buildings, or about one-third, were limited liability companies, or LLCs, which can mask the identities of properties’ true owners. Alan Garten, the chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, told Reuters at the time that it was an “overblown story.” Over the years, such purchases, along with the broader investments Russians have made, have proven more difficult to trace.More broadly, Teplitzky noted that most Russian buyers she has worked with have turned the cash they originally brought from Russia into what the government would characterize as legitimate investments, even beyond real estate.
“These are very smart people who have an army of accountants and advisers all over the world,” she said. “Many of them have businesses in the United States. But now they are legit American companies.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/russian-money-flows-us-real-estate
…& although he apparently has now offered to sell chelsea football club & “write off” some £1.5billion in loans made to the club during his tenure while he’s at it…although considering the reported asking price I don’t think it sounds particularly like a write off just yet…either way…given the unaffordable nature of things like football clubs it’s easy to forget we’re talking about a man with a staggering amount of putin-derived money that could easily be thought of as a slice of the embezzled national purse of russia…& playing about with the premier league wasn’t the only thing a certain roman has been shelling out on over the years since the paperwork put it in his name
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum, is embroiled in controversy after attempting to intervene in planned sanctions against Israeli Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, owner of the Chelsea Premier League soccer team and a longtime supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In a letter to U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides, Yad Vashem, together with the country’s chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau and Sheba Medical Center Director Yitshak Kreiss, asked that the United States not sanction Abramovich, a major donor to the memorial and other Jewish causes. They said that sanctioning him would cause harm to Jewish institutions that rely on him for donations, said Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan, who said that Abramovich was the museum’s second largest private donor, after the late Sheldon Adelson and his widow, Miriam.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/02/israel-russia-oligarch-yad-vashem-ukraine/
…still…there’s definitely a lot of steps being taken that might have seemed unlikely not so long ago
A few hours before President Biden’s speech, the chamber passed the most significant cyber legislation in history — including a mandate for companies in critical sectors to alert the government when they’re hacked or when they pay ransoms to hackers.
That measure narrowly failed to become law last year amid senatorial squabbling. But it zipped over the finish line this time — spurred partly by rising anxiety about Russian cyberattacks following the invasion of Ukraine and punishing sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/02/senate-is-finally-passing-big-cyber-bills/
[…]
First, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) wants to rapidly share big insights from the reports with other companies that might face similar cyberattacks. That can be especially critical during fast-moving events, such as a wave of Russian cyberattacks.
[…]
Second, the bill will give CISA broad insights into how many and what sort of cyberattacks are hitting U.S. companies each day. Those are questions that are frustratingly difficult to answer right now because of major gaps in data breach reporting laws.
On Wednesday, OPEC and other oil producers, including Russia, declined to raise output above what it had agreed to in July, rubber-stamping a 400,000-barrel-a-day increase for April. This increase was not considered sufficient to cool down prices, and comes after a release of emergency reserves on Tuesday by countries belonging to the International Energy Agency, including the United States, also failed to make a mark on prices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/business/stocks-bonds-oil-prices.html
[…]
The Russian stock market was closed on Wednesday, for the third consecutive day. And Sberbank Europe, the European unit of Russia’s largest retail bank, was ordered shut by the European Central Bank, which had warned two days ago that the company was facing collapse.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are increasingly voicing support for carbon border fees to weaken Moscow’s influence over Europe’s energy security.
It’s a notable shift on climate policy for Republicans, who in recent years have been mostly silent on carbon border fees, which would slap a tax on imports from countries that aren’t taking aggressive steps to cut planet-warming emissions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/02/republicans-are-embracing-carbon-border-fees-counter-putin/
[…]
How it works: Joint E.U.-U.S. carbon border fees, also known as border carbon adjustments, would levy a tax on polluting goods such as aluminum and cement from countries like Russia and China. They could eventually be broadened to affect oil, gas and coal imports.
[…]
Still, several other Republicans have responded to the Ukraine crisis by urging the Biden administration to lift restrictions on domestic fossil fuel production, echoing demands from the American Petroleum Institute.
[…]
In response, many climate activists have countered that the Ukraine crisis illustrates the need to transition away from fossil fuels toward a clean energy economy.
[…]
“Russia’s main weapon against Europe is its threat to cut off oil and gas,” tweeted the author and climate activist Bill McKibben. “So it might be wise to stop using oil and gas now that we have workable alternatives … Also saves the planet.”
…&…well
…another set of promises
The committee argued in its filing that Eastman’s claim of privilege was potentially voided by the “crime/fraud exception” to the confidentiality usually accorded attorneys and their clients, which holds that communications need not be kept confidential if an attorney is found to be assisting their client in the commission of a crime. They asked the judge deciding whether to release Eastman’s emails to privately review evidence the committee has so far gathered to see if he believes it establishes that Eastman was assisting Trump in criminal acts.
“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” according to the filing.
The court filing is the strongest assertion yet from the committee that it believes Trump and some of his allies potentially committed crimes during the effort to overturn Biden’s victory and by falsely stating repeatedly that the election was stolen.
[…]
Former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason called the filing “a major development” but noted that “this is only a civil proceeding concerning attorney-client privilege. To prove the actual crimes beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors would have to meet a much higher burden.”Still, Eliason said the significance of the filing “is that the evidence being uncovered points clearly in the direction of possible criminal conduct by Trump himself in connection with the efforts to overturn the election. We can be sure that the Department of Justice is in contact with the committee and is watching closely.”
Jan. 6 committee alleges Trump, allies engaged in potential ‘criminal conspiracy’ by trying to block Congress from certifying election [WaPo]
[…]
The brief not only makes the case against Eastman’s claim of lawyer-client privilege, but it also provides a review of the committee’s findings to date, including the panel’s belief that Trump and his advisers may have been involved in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
…at least of a sort…would be the swathe of predictions being made by all sorts of people about what the future promises
Even though they were adversaries, the Soviet and American pilots abided by a tacit code of conduct, rooted in patterns of predictable behavior. At the end of the day, everyone got home safely.
[…] as a Cold War historian, I fear that Russia’s invasion, regardless of its outcome, portends a new era of immense hostility with Moscow — and that this new cold war will be far worse than the first.
[…]
Another problem is how quickly we have spun back up to Cold War-like hostility. During the old Cold War, which lasted from the late 1940s until around 1989, settled patterns of non-engagement had time to evolve. Those patterns did not disappear entirely in the 21st century; during the conflict in Syria, for example, Western powers made extensive efforts to deconflict with Russia. But when the fighting is closer to home for Moscow, all bets are apparently off.
[…]
The longevity of the Cold War also gave both sides time and incentive to negotiate arms control agreements. Washington and its allies concluded a host of detailed treaties with Moscow that, while flawed, at least provided predictability and monitoring — all while serving to build a long-term relationship in managing nuclear danger.
[…]
In recent years, however, both sides rashly shed many of these accords, seeing them as outdated and inconveniently constraining. The New START Treaty is now the only restraint on the number and types of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons — and it expires in 2026, with little hope of renewal. Already gone are the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which George W. Bush abrogated in 2002, and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, from which Mr. Putin “suspended” Russian participation in 2007. And, most relevant to today’s crisis, in 2019 President Donald Trump abrogated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty over U.S. claims of Russian violations and Chinese arms buildup (though China was not a party to the treaty).
[…]
Even if Moscow can be brought back to the negotiating table, which seems highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, it would take years of painstaking talks to resurrect these treaties. Their disappearance is especially grievous in light of other losses — of military-to-military communication, expelled embassy and consulate staff members — and the development of new forms of weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and cyberwarfare. Two of the world’s largest military powers are now functioning in near-total isolation from each other, which is a danger to everyone.Another problem is cultural. The threat of thermonuclear conflict was omnipresent for those who came of age during the Cold War. Yet after decades of peace between the West and Russia, that collective cultural awareness has largely dissipated — even though the threat of nuclear conflict remains, and has, in the past week, ramped back up to levels unseen since the Cold War.
The Russian president has now definitively put an end to the post-Cold War era, which rested on an assumption that major European land wars were gone for good. It is abundantly clear from his invasion that Mr. Putin is not going to hold the geopolitical equivalent of a constant airspeed, altitude or course. If, following his reckless lead, his pilots again veer toward NATO aircraft or provoke any of the four NATO member-states bordering Ukraine — whether through showboating or on command — it could drag the West into combat. And not just in a limited way.
This time, the United States and its allies would have to contend with Russia along with the rising powers of China, Iran and North Korea.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opinion/russia-ukraine-cold-war.html
[…]
Becoming a historian requires the ability to develop a sense of periodization. I sense a period ending. I am now deeply afraid that Mr. Putin’s recklessness may cause the years between the Cold War and the Covid-19 pandemic to seem a halcyon period to future historians, compared with what came after. I fear we may find ourselves missing the old Cold War.
…which are kind of interesting
The sanctions imposed on Friday were a pale shadow of what the West did on Monday, when it took aim at Russia’s central bank and its fortress of foreign currency reserves. Putin’s hope for a lightning invasion, with only token resistance, has crumbled, and Russia appears to be preparing for a far more brutal campaign. Pressure will build on Biden and the Europeans to choke off Russia’s energy exports. Both the sanctions we’ve seen and the sanctions that may come will be felt, in America and Europe and elsewhere, as inflation.
Biden Has the Right Idea, but the Wrong Words [NYT]
…or perhaps morbidly fascinating
The second scenario is that somehow the Ukrainian military and people are able to hold out long enough against the Russian blitzkrieg, and that the economic sanctions start deeply wounding Putin’s economy, so that both sides feel compelled to accept a dirty compromise. Its rough contours would be that in return for a cease-fire and the withdrawal of Russian troops, Ukraine’s eastern enclaves now under de facto Russian control would be formally ceded to Russia, while Ukraine would explicitly vow never to join NATO. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies would agree to lift all recently imposed economic sanctions on Russia.
I See Three Scenarios for How This War Ends [NYT]
…in a few ways
The inescapable question, as the world watches Putin defy international law to hammer Ukraine, is whether he is a rational actor. Is he serving what he sees as Russia’s national interests, or is he a distraught dictator driven by an obsessive desire to force Ukraine into a neo-imperial dream?
[…]
U.S. officials believe that Ukraine for years has been Putin’s most sensitive issue — one where his normal political calculus doesn’t seem to apply. CIA Director William J. Burns warned at a business event this past December: “I would never underestimate President Putin’s risk appetite on Ukraine.” Putin broods about Ukraine, rages about its tilt toward the West, and schemes to bring it back under Russian domination, U.S. officials believe.
[…]
How does Putin see this confrontation? Judging from his writings and speeches, Putin might believe he launched a limited military war to enforce a Russian “red line” that he has expressed publicly for a dozen years. Rather than acceding, the West has responded with total economic war. Putin’s countermove has been to jump domains, invoking the nuclear threat.Putin’s behavior follows the script of Thomas Schelling in his classic 1960 study of brinkmanship, “The Strategy of Conflict.” Reckless behavior could be a useful bargaining tactic, Schelling argued. “A careless or even self-destructive attitude toward injury — ‘I’ll cut a vein in my arm if you don’t let me …’ — can be a genuine strategic advantage; so can a cultivated inability to hear or comprehend, or a reputation for frequent lapses of self-control.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/01/putin-fixation-ukraine-irrational/
[…]
As we think about ladders of escalation, America is near the top of its chosen domain of economic war. Putin has brought that devastation on himself; he has doomed his presidency, irrevocably. But in the weeks and months ahead, America and its allies will need to allow Russia an exit ramp to escape this folly — or face ever-rising danger.
…like the differences in who seems to be making what case & to who
As a balance of what’s plausible, pragmatic and humanitarian, [A swift cease-fire followed by peace on not-entirely-ideal terms] is the preferable endgame. The question, though, is whether there are terms the warring parties might currently accept, or whether Russia having battlefield superiority and Ukraine feeling that it has the full backing of the West will inspire a mutual maximalism that makes it hard to move from cease-fire to stability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/ukraine-putin-russia-endgame.html
[…]
Between those incommensurate views of the situation, is there a deal to be made? Or is the likely result only stalemate, a new frozen conflict, Russia isolated and wounded and dangerous, and preparations for the next war in both Moscow and Kyiv? And out of the varying options, which is the best outcome for the United States — the one that banks our strategic gains at the lowest cost in human lives and long-term dangers?
But now America must look at the world situation much more soberly and strategically, proceeding from these hard facts rather than ignoring them or wishing them away. Above all, our response must be strategic—it must match our response to the threats we face in light of our resources and the risks we are willing to take on.
The reality is that we face multiple serious threats in different parts of the world. The danger Russia poses, including to our NATO allies, is now very clear. But others have not gone away. We also must consider Iran, North Korea, transnational terrorists like al Qaeda, and, above all, the threat of a China that seeks first hegemony over Asia and then global preeminence. So far this is familiar.
Less familiar but absolutely critical is the fact that we do not have a military large or capable enough to fight major wars against Russia and China in even roughly concurrent timelines. It is true that Europe is mainly a land theater and the Western Pacific is mainly a maritime one. But many of the things our forces would need to defeat Russia or China are needed in both theaters […] These and other capabilities like them would be just as vital for beating back a Russian assault as they would be for denying a Chinese fait accompli against Taiwan—and are already in short supply.
[…]
In the coming years, then, we face what Henry Kissinger called “the necessity for choice.” We don’t have enough of the right military might to cover all the threats to our interests. So we must prioritize. This is far from unprecedented. The U.S. and Britain faced this dilemma in 1941, and elected a “Europe first” strategy, prioritizing defeating much stronger Nazi Germany before Imperial Japan.Similarly today, America must prioritize addressing the threat China poses in Asia. Asia is the world’s “decisive theater” and China by far the most powerful other state in the world. If China attains its goal of becoming dominant over Asia, it will control over half of the global economy. Americans’ fundamental liberties and prosperity will suffer grievously. This is the most dangerous outcome for Americans, and preventing it must be the priority of our foreign policy.
The U.S. Must Support Ukraine, But China Must Be Our Priority [Time]
[…]
And, crucially, this is a problem right now.
[…]
Denying Russian control of Europe is our secondary strategic goal. Europe is a large market area but much smaller than Asia and declining in global share; Russia, meantime, is something like one-tenth the GDP of China. Moreover, the rest of Europe is far larger in GDP than Russia, unlike Asia, where China dwarfs most of its neighbors. Accordingly, the threat of Russia establishing regional hegemony over Europe is less grave than China over Asia.
[…]
Our strategy to thread this needle should follow a straightforward logic: Short of direct military intervention, make it as difficult and costly as possible for Russia to consolidate its hold over Ukraine. And make it even more difficult for Russia to use military force against NATO, while continuing to make very clear to the Kremlin that we will defend our allies.
[…]
But we cannot rest our strategy on a fiction—that we can fight two major wars against China and Russia at anything like the same time. We need to have a strategy that accounts for that fact, not one that ignores it or wishes it away.
…because one of the things I’ve been wondering about is how hard it is to understand what this might look like from the other side of the looking glass, as it were
But if Kyiv falls, it will be the second geopolitical catastrophe the Biden administration will have sustained in barely six months. Republicans will say that the president has consistently been a day late and a dollar short and that this would never have happened on their watch. A growing number of Americans will believe them.
[…]
It can stop telegraphing to Putin what we are not going to do. Giving Putin every reason to believe that the United States is more afraid of him than he is of us provides him with additional incentives to ratchet up tensions and behave worse.
[…]
Long before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt understood that America could not be indifferent to Britain’s fate, even with the odds so overwhelmingly against it. At a meeting in Britain in January 1941, his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, used the words of the Book of Ruth to convey to Churchill the feelings the two Americans shared:“Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Then he added, “Even to the end.”
Biden ought to send Zelensky the same message.
Biden Must Not Allow Ukraine to Fall [NYT]
Televangelist Pat Robertson said Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “compelled by God” in his decision to invade Ukraine, suggesting that Russia’s attacks are a precursor to an end-times battle in Israel.
[…]
“I think you can say, well, Putin’s out of his mind. Yes, maybe so,” said Robertson, 91. “But at the same time, he’s being compelled by God. He went into the Ukraine, but that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately.”Robertson then cited verses from the book of Ezekiel that note how nations will come together to rise up against Israel, suggesting that Ukraine is merely a “staging ground” for an eventual Armageddon battle.
“God is getting ready to do something amazing,” he said. “And that will be fulfilled.”
[…]
As the invasion has unfolded, some Fox News personalities have been criticized for their sentiments on Ukraine. Before the invasion began, several Fox hosts wagered that the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine was manufactured to distract from the Biden administration’s domestic political issues. In a recent interview with former president Donald Trump, Laura Ingraham said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleading with Putin to not invade the country was a “pathetic display.” Tucker Carlson recently shifted his tone on Putin after he downplayed the invasion and asked Americans why they should hate the Russian president.The takes from her colleagues has led to Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin fact-checking her network’s hosts and pundits.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/01/pat-robertson-putin-god-russia-ukraine/
…& that’s just the other side of a US domestic political looking glass
There’s little to constrain Russia, which has always been impervious to western horror and condemnation. There’s little likelihood that Russia will be deterred by the prospect of outrage at home either, even if knowledge of what its military is doing abroad filters through to domestic audiences. Moscow has taken steps in advance to ensure the truth does not reach its population. The ban on the Russian media using the words “war” or “invasion” to describe the conflict with Ukraine builds on decades of preparation to secure Russia’s “national information space” against inconvenient facts.
And even as sanctions start to bite ordinary people hard and the Russian government scrambles to contain the damage to its economy, the scope for public discontent or protest to change anything has also been pre-empted. Russia has not only already shown its willingness to crush protest by its own people brutally, but has substantial capabilities in reserve for inflicting mass casualties on them should the situation require it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/ukraine-russia-vladimir-putin-medieval-levels-of-brutality
[…]
And this is not just an urgent challenge for Ukraine. The potential for Russian military success or failure is still, at this point, an open question. But one thing that is beyond doubt is that if current Russian tactics continue, it will create a humanitarian disaster on a scale Europe has not seen in decades. Together with rapidly rebuilding their conventional military defences, EU states and the UK must brace themselves for the social impact this will inevitably bring. The movements of population westwards will be comparable with those at the end of the second world war, as Russia reasserted its grip on the countries of eastern Europe. There’s little doubt that Russia will then be eager to exploit the flows of refugees to harm the west – building on its test runs in 2015-16 against Norway and Finland, when Russian organised crime was allowed to capitalise on the situation, and last year against Poland, when flows of migrants were manipulated and brutalised by Putin’s close allies in Belarus.
…but if it should somehow be the case that in a population exposed to a US educational system & the full spectrum of western media there should be the kind of proportion there is who are prepared to follow the path orange foolius tried at every turn to put them on
…it probably shouldn’t be surprising that as their currency crumbles & all signs point them towards a return to living in an environment with many of the hallmarks of the cold war soviet era, with all the privation, misery & oppression that might rekindle…at least that kind of proportion of russians are under the impression they aren’t the aggressors in this thing…which is no small feat
Never was there a better illustration of the alternative reality presented by Russian state media than at 17:00 GMT on Tuesday. As BBC World TV opened its bulletin with reports of a Russian attack on a TV tower in the capital Kyiv, Russian TV was announcing that Ukraine was responsible for strikes on its own cities.
So what are Russian TV viewers seeing of the war? What messages are they hearing over the airwaves? Below is a snapshot of what ordinary Russians would have picked up, on Tuesday 1 March, while channel-hopping across the country’s key TV stations, which are controlled by the Kremlin and its corporate allies.
[…]
On Rossiya 1 and Channel One – Russia’s two most popular channels, both state-controlled – Ukrainian forces are accused of war crimes in the Donbas region. The threat to civilians in Ukraine comes not from Russian forces, but from “Ukrainian nationalists”, says the Rossiya 1 presenter.
[…]
Events in Ukraine are not referred to as war. Instead, the offensive is described as a demilitarisation operation targeting military infrastructure or a “special [military] operation to defend the people’s republics”.Across state-controlled TV, presenters and correspondents use emotive language and images to draw “historical parallels” between Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany.
“The tactics of nationalists who use children to shield themselves have not changed since the Second World War,” says the presenter of a morning show on Rossiya 1’s sister channel, Rossiya 24.
[…]
While media in the West has been asking whether Putin’s assault has struggled to make quick progress, Russian TV portrays the Russian operations as very successful. Regular updates give numbers of destroyed Ukrainian hardware and weaponry. More than 1,100 Ukrainian military infrastructure facilities have been disabled and hundreds of pieces of hardware have been destroyed, morning news reports say. There is no mention of any Russian casualties.[…] by the afternoon edition of the news, NTV finally mentions the news event that has dominated hours of coverage on the BBC by this stage – the shelling of the city of Kharkiv.
However, it debunks any reports that Russian forces are responsible, calling them “fake”.
“Judging by the trajectory of the missile, the strike was delivered from the north-west where there are no Russian forces,” the presenter says during the 16:00 Moscow time edition of the news. Four hours later, a bulletin by Rossiya 1 goes further, blaming Ukraine itself for the bombing.
“To strike Kharkiv and say that it was Russia. Ukraine is hitting its own and is lying to the West. But is it possible to deceive the people?” it asks.
[…]
Roskomnadzor has ordered TikTok to remove military and political content in its suggestions to minors, complaining, “in most cases, these materials have a pronounced anti-Russian character”. It also demanded that Google remove what it describes as false information about the Russian army’s reported losses, and Reuters reports it has re-imposed a slowdown on Twitter’s loading speeds over “fake reports” of Moscow’s “special military operation”, and restricted access to Facebook.It has instructed media outlets to use information only from official Russian sources when reporting the invasion, demanding that they take down any reports referring to “a declaration of war” or “an invasion”. It has threatened them with fines and blocking if they do not take action. The websites of the independent TV channel Dozhd and popular liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy have been blocked for alleged calls for extremism and violence, and “systematic spread of false information about the activities of the Russian military”.
Ukraine: Watching the war on Russian TV – a whole different story [BBC]
…but also seems like something to bear in mind should we be lucky enough to find any way to bring the primary conflict in ukraine to a conclusion with any kind of alacrity?
…I mentioned the other day having briefly travelled to somewhere vaguely in that direction a good long time ago…long enough ago that it was before the internet was a thing & the media in the region…which was casual enough about piracy to run “cam” quality dubbed/subtitled bootlegs of movies at primetime without even bothering to crop the edges of the shot where the zipper from the bag the camera had sat in as it was filmed…& everything from tv to radio to the papers was largely understood to be just about entirely in thrall to russian propaganda…which people were about as savvy about as you’d expect having in many cases grown up immersed in it while living the evidence that swathes of it was clearly far from the truth…but there were still surprises from my point of view…back then I had several first hand accounts of some fairly significant bits of historical record that were presented very differently in soviet schools…to hear them tell it, for example, the solution to the cuban missile crisis was all a bait & switch since the shipment of missiles that caused so much consternation before turning around was, they were taught, not the first…& when the dust settled there remained nukes on cuba to be launched at the US if it seemed like a good idea…while russia laughed behind its fist so as not to embarrass the US by letting the rest of the world in on that part…& this was something they’d learned as children & still explained with every appearance of sincere belief in the same conversation in which they spoke of running jokes whose punchline was distrust of everything the state told them
Between those incommensurate views of the situation, is there a deal to be made? Or is the likely result only stalemate, a new frozen conflict, Russia isolated and wounded and dangerous, and preparations for the next war in both Moscow and Kyiv? And out of the varying options, which is the best outcome for the United States — the one that banks our strategic gains at the lowest cost in human lives and long-term dangers?
Looking for an Endgame in Ukraine [NYT]
…obviously putin & those with their hands on the reins at various levels of this invasion have a clearer picture of the reality than that…but I think it’s worth bearing in mind that as sanctions bite on the russian populous a good chunk of it won’t have twigged that they have vlad to thank
If you go back in history, there are plenty of examples of powers that enriched themselves through military prowess. The Romans surely profited from the conquest of the Hellenistic world, as did Spain from the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas.
But the modern world is different — where by “modern,” I mean at least the past century and a half.
The British author Norman Angell published his famous tract “The Great Illusion” in 1909, arguing that war had become obsolete. His book was widely misinterpreted as saying that war could no longer happen, a proposition proved horribly wrong over the next two generations. What Angell actually said was that even the victors in war could no longer derive any profit from their success.
And he was surely right about that. We’re all thankful that the Allies prevailed in World War II, but Britain emerged as a diminished power, suffering through years of austerity as it struggled to overcome a shortage of foreign exchange. Even the United States had a harder postwar adjustment than many realize, experiencing a bout of price increases that for a time pushed inflation above 20 percent.
And conversely, even utter defeat didn’t prevent Germany and Japan from eventually achieving unprecedented prosperity.
Why and when did conquest become unprofitable? Angell argued that everything changed with the rise of a “vital interdependence” among nations, “cutting athwart international frontiers,”
[…]
An aside: Isn’t it extraordinary and horrible to find ourselves in a situation where Hitler’s economic failures tell us useful things about future prospects? But that’s where we are. Thanks, Putin.I’d add two more factors that explain why conquest is futile.
The first is that modern war uses an incredible amount of resources. […]
Second, we now live in a world of passionate nationalism. Ancient and medieval peasants probably didn’t care who was exploiting them; modern workers do. Putin’s attempt to seize Ukraine appears to be predicated not just on his belief that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian nation, but also on the assumption that the Ukrainians themselves can be persuaded to consider themselves Russians. That seems very unlikely to happen, so even if Kyiv and other major cities fall, Russia will find itself spending years trying to hold down a hostile population.
War, What Is It Good For? [NYT]
…because among the takes I’ve come across there’s a fair few making the point that putin “can’t look like he lost” so whatever agreement might be reached will need to include some stuff he can point to as a win or two…& that leaves some possibilities on the table that make me uneasy…in as much as uneasy is something it’s possible to notice when there’s such a surfeit of things threatening to induce anxiety…& among the ways that could go include something that reminds me why I don’t think the picture I feel like I’m looking at quite lines up with part of the ones I think I’m hearing & seeing painted about how badly putin’s fucked up
His long-term ambitions for Ukraine are unknown. He denies seeking to occupy Ukraine and rejected a UK accusation in January that he was plotting to install a pro-Kremlin puppet. One unconfirmed intelligence report says he aims to split the country in two.
Why is Russia invading Ukraine and what does Putin want? [BBC]
…don’t get me wrong…I fully believe he has indeed fucked up on a cataclysmic scale…but I don’t think things going poorly is something he entirely failed to consider…& something a lot of russian approaches to offensive stuff seems to have in common is failure states that still concede advantage…it’s not an accident that a bunch of the troops running out of gas or turning themselves in to the ukrainians before plaintively phoning home to express their bemusement at having left for an exercise that became a “peacekeeping” assignment that it turned out was an invasion of their neighbors…& not the bits of the russian military that we know are a good bit more competent in ways that have proven effective elsewhere in the not-so-distant past
Russia’s armed forces entered the last decade trying to come to terms with a lacklustre performance in its short war with Georgia. Russia struggled with an ageing equipment inventory and remained over-reliant on conscription. It begins the 2020s with a recapitalised inventory, a successful military intervention in Syria and far greater numbers of professional personnel. The key aims of the modernisation and reform programme implemented over the past ten years have been broadly met.
The impact and implications of the Russian military’s modernisation and reform efforts are explored in the latest IISS Strategic Dossier Russia’s Military Modernisation: An Assessment. It recognises that while Russia’s armed forces today are far smaller than those of the Soviet era, conventional military capabilities are now at their highest since the Russian armed forces were formed in 1992. […]
While Moscow has willingly adopted ‘below the threshold’ hostile activities, including information warfare and the use of the cyber domain, it has by no means abandoned the traditional markers of military capability. Indeed, the Dossier suggests that from a Russian perspective this is not a binary choice. Rather, both sets of capabilities are seen as complementary and necessary to meet Russia’s defence and security requirements.
The Dossier notes the broad success of the modernisation and reform programme in the decade to 2020 but suggests that the coming decade will be no less significant. A defining feature of the equipment-modernisation effort supported by the 2020 State Armament Programme (SAP) is the continued reliance for the most part on existing designs.
Russia’s armed forces: more capable by far, but for how long? [International Institute for Strategic Studies]
…one of the things I read (you can listen to it but I went with the transcript) was an interview with alexander vindman…who for a variety of reasons seems to have a perspective on the situation that while not infallible (as he himself freely admits) is vastly better informed than I could hope to be
As you said, your family were Jewish refugees that fled Ukraine. You’ve spent your career studying Ukraine and Russian relations. You spent time in the military, significant time in the military and in the White House. And you were on the record early saying that an invasion was likely when other people were saying that it wasn’t or that it was impossible or that U.S. intelligence was incorrect, even as much as five days ago.
…& that helped clarify a few things for me
But what is amazing, what is shocking is the flawed assumptions of the Russian government. The Russian military is not incompetent. They’ve proven themselves in smaller contingencies. They’re professional. They’re exercised, which is different than being well-trained. But they’re pretty well-exercised. But they were operating on this very, very flawed assumption, that they would face little resistance, they may be welcomed in. And it looks like they rolled in as if they were going into a peacekeeping operation into a training area instead of rolling into combat.
And the resistance that they’re faced is fierce from all across the country. We’ll find out eventually how much of this is designed and how much of this is fortune. But I would imagine there’s quite a bit of design from the Ukrainian side. They didn’t fight every inch. They let the Russian forces funnel into major cities, many, many miles away from their logistics, many, many miles from safe haven, and then stalled them and started to destroy Russian forces, and then punish the supply lines to maintain those forces in the fight. And that’s something that is both a massive misjudgment on the Russian side.
And the fierce resistance from the Ukrainian side is not something that I think anybody really counted for. And that includes me, because I did actually think about resolve and the willingness of the Ukrainians to fight. And I thought that they would put up a valiant fight, but this is a whole different scale.
It’s a long way to go. And it’s a really, really precarious situation. It is day by day, hour by hour. But you can almost see Ukraine leaving this war with its sovereignty and independence intact, which is hard to imagine when facing, by all accounts, the second most powerful military in the world.
Question is, what does Russia do?
[…]
And I don’t like doing remote psychology, but can anyone be confident in our assessments of his decision-making? And what’s different about the version of Vladimir Putin that invaded Georgia, that took the region of the Caucasus, and this Vladimir Putin, in your view?
…& while vindman might not be the only person who thinks they have an answer…I’m pretty sure his is better than any I could muster
For Vladimir Putin, over the course of his tenure, he’s become increasingly belligerent. He thought he had Russian power on a side to achieve influence in his region. He tried to muck around in Ukraine’s elections, resulting in the Orange Revolution in 2004. Then he started to use his military force because economic coercion wasn’t working. Political coercion wasn’t working to retain a sphere of influence.
So he went to war in Georgia to substantiate that Russia deserves a sphere of influence. And over the course of the next, more than decade, he’s been increasingly, increasingly aggressive with little response. And the reason he did that is because he just wasn’t facing significant opposition. He basically believed that there was a lack of resolve to face up to him.
[…]
But we should also be mindful of the fact that there is deep precedence for this kind of behavior. There is deep precedence for the Soviet Union and Russia and for Vladimir Putin, who’s a Cold Warrior with a deep memory of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.[…]So the things that they can’t accomplish through force, they could accomplish through coercion. We need to be mindful of it. We need to take the proper posture. We need to make sure that we’re serious. But we also can’t simply buckle on the things that are so dear to us, because now this is not just a fight between Ukraine and Russia. This is a fight between good and evil. This is a fight between democracy and authoritarianism.
[…]
I wanted to ask about the economic question here, because we’ve seen Russia’s economy go into freefall before in the late 1990s. And as the ruble destabilizes, my concern here is that putting the Russian economy into freefall makes Putin all the more powerful in some ways.
[…]
But there is not much room for us to kind of backpedal. We don’t have a lot of room to reverse course. And we can’t do it under our fear of Russian provocation. What we need is some clarity and some signaling from Russia that they’re prepared for off ramps. Because we can start getting into our own heads and start offering things that may be meaningless.
[…]
It really does put everything in a whole new light. So it was always about national security. For me, there was no political angle, whatsoever. It was always about national security. It was always about the inevitable conflict of Russia against Ukraine, Russia seeking to retain control of Ukraine, to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence, and Donald Trump, undermining U.S. foreign policy, U.S. national security. Because I understood that this would be really dangerous for the U.S. for Russia to conduct a large war against Ukraine, and that the Ukrainians needed to be armed to defend themselves to deter Russian aggression.And when Donald Trump basically froze— I mean, not basically, when he froze security assistance, he was sending a signal to Vladimir Putin that it’s OK to attack Ukraine, that the U.S. isn’t resolved to protect Ukrainians’ interests, that Ukraine is isolated, that Ukraine is vulnerable. That sent a signal to Vladimir Putin, kind of incrementally adjusting his calculus. Is this opportunity real? Because the needs always have been there, right? He started this war in 2014. The need to hold Ukraine back in was there it’s the opportunity that was unclear.
And initially, he started to take the temperature checks certainly under the Trump administration. With the Ukraine scandal and the president’s corruption and abuse of power, when the Senate failed to hold Donald Trump accountable, that opened the aperture for opportunity. By the time you get to the insurrection, that’s it. That was probably right about the decision point. He knew that he wouldn’t have Donald Trump as president. He knew that he wouldn’t have Donald Trump willing to break NATO. There’s wide reporting now that Donald Trump was keen on pulling us out of NATO.
So that’s what Putin was looking for. And in the absence of that, the insurrection was probably— I mean, we’ll see. These things will have to get declassified eventually. But I think that was a big tipping point, because he saw an immense of vulnerability in the United States. He assessed that the U.S. was distracted, enfeebled, paralyzed, that the U.S. wanted to focus on long-term confrontation with China and was looking to normalize the relationship with Russia. And that’s when he started to build up. That’s clear.
He started to build up in the spring of 2021. And that this operation has been planned for more than a year. And he was taking the temperature of the Biden administration. And he is seeing if he could extract concessions from the Biden administration. There was a summit in December 2021. He started ratcheting up the pressure. And last thing to mention on this domestic politics, we are a superpower. What we say matters. What we say is meaningful, not just domestically, but around the world.
And when Fox News, when Donald Trump, when Mike Pompeo, when Tucker Carlson encouraged Vladimir Putin, encourage Russia, that’s meaningful. That’s meaningful, because it again opens the aperture of opportunity. It’s what drives Putin’s calculus to conduct this operation. And it’s what undermines deterrence.
[…] It’s like these folks, for some reason, missed all the telltale signs of the fact that they’re walking into an ambush. And that’s what they did. They walked into an ambush. They were touting and elevating and idolizing Vladimir Putin days, hours before the attack. And they’ll pay. They will pay for that at the election booths, absolutely. Because they own it.
I explained that Vladimir Putin was taking the temperature check to figure out if this is something you could do. And they gave all the signals, so they have blood on their hands. This war is on Putin, but they are in part responsible. And they will be held accountable. I think it’s hard to not see every channel, including Fox News cover this.
And this may be a way that it starts to lift the fog of Trump and Trumpism. At least I hope that it’s the case. I think this is actually a turning point maybe for us too.
We have this tendency sometimes, as Americans, to make everything about us. And to see everything as being secretly about us, that like Russia invaded Ukraine, because people use gender neutral pronouns. Can you de-Americanize this conflict? Is this as much about us or Trump or Biden or Obama’s action or inaction in Crimea, which is a separate point that I think is interesting about whether that gave Putin some sort of a green light in some way?
Is this as much about American involvement and America as we think it is? And can you help me calibrate the degree of responsibility America should have in this conflict?
[…]
So is this the beginning of a strategy by Putin to attempt to forcibly recreate the Soviet Union? We see the language that he’s using about what he believes Ukraine to be, that he does not recognize Ukrainian identity? Do you think that Ukraine would be enough for him?So it’s interesting. I mean, there’s a lot that we could learn from history. Frankly, the reason the Soviet Union looked the way it did with these 15 republics is in large part because of Ukraine and Georgia. There was a strong nationalist sentiment as in sense of self, sense of language, sense of culture. And Lenin had to accommodate that. And instead of recreating a communist empire, he established a Soviet Union to allow for space for that.
Vladimir Putin is not interested in that kind of enterprise, at least, not ultimately. And it’s hard to understand where he wants to end up. But he certainly wants Ukraine under his thumb within his sphere of influence. There is a small chance that he could have rolled in as a peacekeeper, put in a puppet regime, and rolled out. That was his objective.
And that puppet regime that would slowly kind of migrate Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence on the template of this like union state that Belarus and Russia have established, where it continues to get closer together until boundaries become so muddled and so transparent that it’s basically one state. So that’s part of the enterprise, because for Vladimir Putin, his ideology is greater Russia, followed by little Russia, which is Ukraine, followed by Belarus.
But it likely doesn’t end there, because if he’s successful in establishing that core, then irredentism and his desire for power would continue to manifest with acquisitions in Georgia at minimum, who’s been a thorn in his side. I mean, in the worst case scenario, Ukraine could still fall. It would be a catastrophe.
[…]
Yeah. So I’ll tell you that we’re in the fog of war. We’re not going to be able to get it all right all the time. I think, unfortunately, we need to get ready for a world where there are a lot more civilian casualties. There’s going to be more nuclear saber-rattling and threats. Because Putin, we have to remember, has not faced serious opposition for 22 years. His mind is kind of locked in into a particular direction. Now he’s facing it. And his instinct is going to be to double down.So we’re facing an acute situation. But our fight or flight reaction, we need to fight that urge to flee. Because the stakes are too high here. If we don’t hold our ground here, we are setting ourselves up for even more serious confrontation down the road that doesn’t have to do with Ukraine, something closer to home.
Alexander Vindman on Why It’s the ‘Beginning of the End’ for Putin
[…]
I would just lastly say, my thoughts and prayers go out to the Ukrainian people that are living this. They’re fighting for their homes. It’s tough to think about that, tough to think about the personal cost. But there are millions of people under threat right now. And they’re fighting for our values and our interests. Sounds hokey or something, but I think we’re all Ukrainians at the moment.
…but to get into what & how & why
I published a lot of articles as Moscow bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, but this is one story I never wrote: About the problem that began with that 2008 interview and unfolded gradually over years — slowly enough to create the illusion that nothing was happening.
Russian power has a tendency to work that way. You detect a suggestion of a threat, but then it just lingers, unrealized, until finally you shrug it off. What I learned reporting on Vladimir Putin and his Russia is that, maybe sooner but more likely later, it will happen. And once it does, you think: Just as promised, nobody made a secret of it.
In Russia, I Learned, Threats Were Always Real [NYT]
The physics of international politics sometimes tidily illustrate Newton’s third law of motion: When two bodies interact, their forces on each other are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. Vladimir Putin’s war has provoked opposite forces of more than equal magnitude.
NATO was created in 1949 to (said its first secretary general) “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Putin has provoked Germany to do what various U.S. presidents have fruitlessly exhorted it to do: stand up. That is, to embrace diplomatic and military roles commensurate with its European centrality and economic vigor.
[…]
In Scholz’s coalition government, the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, is from the generally pacifist Green party. She said Germany’s “180-degree turn” means “leaving behind a form of special restraint in foreign and security policy,” but “if our world is different, then our politics must also be different.” The coalition’s third party, the Free Democrats, stands for fiscal rectitude but called the increased defense spending “an investment in our future.” Credit Putin for this epochal transformation.
[…]
Eleven decades after Angell wrote, the ever-thickening fabric of globalization is still insufficient to prevent all wars. It might, however, enable noncombatant nations to coordinate the inflicting of economic pain severe enough to force even a barely developed nation, such as Putin’s ramshackle Russia, to buckle.Putin’s Russia might be, in President Barack Obama’s dismissive estimation, a “regional power.” But its region is Europe. And as Dominic Sandbrook, the British historian, says, “Fixated on their own modernity, obsessed with the here and now, many Western politicians seem unable to grasp that at the eastern edge of Europe, history really matters.” That they grasp it now is another of Putin’s self-wounding ricochets.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/02/putin-gets-a-lesson-in-physics-and-judo/
…would probably wind up imposing almost as much scrolling on you all over again
The Big Thaw: How Russia Could Dominate a Warming World [propublica]
…so I should probably quit this about here…& I need to find some sorry-I-suggested-you-read-all-that tunes to leave it with
That Bret Stephens column is the biggest pile of hot garbage, and it mainly serves to point out — while dishonestly presenting itself as immaculately conceived thinking — how the GOP is weaselling its way to erase its past support for handing over Ukraine to Putin and attack Biden for dealing with the fallout.
I think there is a value to reporting on GOP disinformation, but giving it a direct platform is repulsive. The Times has learned nothing from its Tom Cotton disaster, the management chaos revealed in the Palin suit is clearly still in effect, and the worst thing is the trend line there remains unbent.
I don’t think Stephens and the Times are direct agents of Putin’s disinformation campaigns in the way Fox and Carlson are. But as things stand Putin’s corruption of the GOP remains unbroken, and the Times management is a willfully ignorant partner in his project.
…it very much seems like the sort of argument where he back-solved from “biden can’t do something that would make it an article 5 NATO conflict scenario at his instigation” to “call for a course of action that can only be followed by doing exactly that” in hope of later being able to say it’s biden’s fault that bad shit continues to happen at putin’s behest
None of the GOP punditry want to admit that Biden’s policy against direct military confrontation was correct, so they are left with vague posturing about improper signals.
And the pseudo-liberal concern troll side the Times publishes will not mention it either in handwringing Opinion pieces about rising US-Russian tensions. The Times editorial leadership wants to box the Democrats in between hawks and doves, and will refuse to admit there is a meaningful path to steer between extremes, or any need for realism in the face of facts on the ground.
The problem for the Times braintrust is that GOP complicity won’t go away. The 1/6 case is expanding, as your links about the first seditious conspiracy case and the 1/6 Committee’s outlining of the case for Trump’s conspiracy point out. The connections between Russian disinformation, GOP politics, and Trump’s foreign policy are only going to grow.
So it’s not surprising that the Times has yet to report on the Joshua James guilty plea, even though competing outlets like the Washington Post and Politico have written at length. Their inner sanctum of political reporters like Schmidt and Baker simply can’t accept where this is going.
Sweetie.
…I know…I honestly am getting other stuff done & going out in the fresh air & not just shut up in front of a screen mainlining articles while chain smoking & drinking coffee like some kind of existentialist
…but I also have slightly more than the advisable number of waking hours out of a given 24…& my morning started unusually early today…so…here we are on another wednesday?
Whatever, amigo.
…I don’t wear a tie, so that can’t be me…right?
I can’t even criticize. Nothing fuels doomscrolling quite like the prospect of nuclear warfare.
It’s just like the early 80s, only with memes!!
I don’t see it mentioned in this story but I read somewhere else that RT was one of the most watched channels in all of Europe.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2022/03/01/ukraine-youtube-blocks-rt-sputnik-russia-owned/7011646154385/
So Deadsplinter family, can we pool our money & buy one of these when they start auctioning them all off?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/03/01/biden-and-allies-are-coming-for-russian-billionaires-yachts-forbes-tracked-down-32-heres-where-to-find-them/?sh=5c756b553dd7
…I don’t know about the regional proportions from country to country but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if RT didn’t get higher viewing figures than fox news pretty much europewide?
…& as for bidding on a bond-villain boat…someone somewhere was pointing out that the running costs for those things are a not-insignificant percentage of the amount they cost to build…which is basically crazy-money…to which someone (I thought quite reasonably) pointed out “which I’d care about if I wasn’t ok with it eventually sinking”…I think coral colonizes wrecks so maybe we should budget for a single cruise to some where with a reef that needs shoring up & scuttle the thing after the party before catching flights home?
I think those yachts would be a little toxic for the reefs but maybe we could just park them in a city that could use some homeless housing after we are done?
…so…malibu, then?
…maybe offer voter registration as a residents’ perk?
I saw this on Vice awhile back. I have sympathy for both sides of this but our ship would be a perfect solution!
I’m in. Maybe we could talk some of the other Gawker refugees to come along and we could invade thiel’s marine kingdom with it. Or at least ram it.
Yesterday I watched OzzyMan (yes, the Australian guy who reviews/narrates stupid internet clips) interview via zoom several Ukrainian Millenians/GenZ’ers. One had to abort the call due to having to take shelter rather urgently. But he did intersperse a couple clips of Russians talking about what’s going on, and none of them can even agree anything IS going on. They think it is overblown, or made up, or Ukraine started it, etc. Propaganda is a helluva drug.
i have nothing of note to add to the library up there
but i am quite charmed by this piece of wall art found in paris
i have some serious concerns about the fighting in Zaporizja
you know….it being home to the largest nuclear power plant in europe
..theres a lot of possible scenarios there i dont want to think about
I tried my best to make it through this DOT today. I worked on it off and on until 2:30 and was only 3/4 through. I failed.
…having better things to do with your time isn’t a failing?
…plus…I did apologize?