Speaking of Farces

The secret of his success is that it's a secret.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) August 17, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Speaking of farces, there's a story about the origins of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit that started circulating a week or so ago in the German tabloid Bild: in Steve Witkoff's August 6 meeting with Putin, he came away with the impression that Putin was proposing to have Russian troops "peacefully withdraw" from the territories they've partly occupied in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as part of a ceasefire agreement, in return for Ukraine leaving Russia in control of some territory they had held since 2014, maybe Donetsk: this would be the basis of Trump's claim on August 8 that there would "be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both."

Needless to say, this was not on offer; the best guess is that Putin said the Ukrainian troops could "withdraw peacefully" from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and the Russians wouldn't attack them as they left, and Witkoff heard it wrong. By the time Trump spoke on the 8th (one of his deadline days for dealing out the "consequences" that Putin was supposed to suffer if he failed to agree to a ceasefire), Witkoff had spoken with European officials that morning and understood that he'd been mistaken and there was no chance of a deal, but the invitations had already gone out and been announced on Russian media. 

But it's not clear that anybody told Trump about that; he went through with plans for a festive breakthrough meeting in Anchorage, with the red carpet and military flyover, the tête-à-tête meeting between the two with only interpreters present (first time since Helsinki!), the luncheon "in honor of his excellency President Putin", and a nice tchotchke for the Russian leader, the "desk statue" of a bald eagle, and schedule featuring three Trump interviews for Fox News.

White House Kayfabe

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill in "siren suit" visiting the White House in January 1942; photo by the Royal Navy's official photographer, Lt. C.J. Ware, via Wikipedia.

Trump may have been genuinely upset by President Zelenskyy's showing up at the White House in fatigues and sweat shirt instead of a suit and tie (he once slapped his eldest boy to the floor in front of everybody in the dorm for thinking it would be OK to wear jeans on a father-and-son outing—to see a baseball game, no less), but he can't have been surprised, since it's known that that's what Zelenskyy does, and intends to do until the war is over, by way of showing solidarity with his country's troops, as Winston Churchill liked to do in one of his special rompers outfits during World War II. 

So it's pretty clear that the incident on Friday was wholly staged kayfabe, from Trump's greeting as the Ukrainian president stepped out of the car ("You're dressed up today") onwards. 

The reporter who fired the first shot at Zelenskyy's clothing choices, Brian Glenn, was obviously planted for the purpose—he's from one of the new media joints the White House has chosen to replace the venerable AP in small-size press availabilities, the cable channel Real America's Voice, previously best known as a venue for Stephen Bannon's show after Bannon was thrown off of YouTube and Spotify, and had been selected to lead the press pool alongside CNN for the occasion (on Thursday it was Newsmax). Glenn is also said to be "dating" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), which sounds to me like an assertion that the two of them have regularly scheduled sexual relations, but you really don't want to get into that. (That's what she said, heh-heh.)

Joe Did What? Lake NATO

 

Erdogan 🇹🇷 à cours d’arguments, la Suède 🇸🇪 intègre l’OTAN et la Mer Baltique devient le Lac OTAN 👊🏻

Vladimir Poutine, génie militaire👊🏻 pic.twitter.com/6RzxrolXwP

— La Punchline de Yakovleff (@G_Yakovleff) July 10, 2023

Remember all those earnest realists explaining how the Russian Federation was literally forced!—forced, I tell you!—to march into Ukraine because of the increasingly threatening expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through the states of the former Warsaw Pact from the Balkans to the Baltic, as we kept hearing from Professor Mearsheimer and Messrs. Greenwald and Carlson and most recently Bob-Bob Kennedy. 

I wrote about it with some sympathy myself back at the beginning of February 2022, in the context of the argument I was making back then, that there wasn't going to be any invasion of Ukraine because Vladimir Vladimirovich couldn't possibly be that stupid.

It's not the fat lady singing, but the Orchestra is on the move

First Kadyrov's fighters already in Rostov pic.twitter.com/FYqbCbR5ye

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) June 24, 2023

Six weeks ago or so I wrote, with the strongest sense that what I was writing was completely insane,

I know it's absolutely improbable, but I can't shake the thought that so many irregular forces commanded from outside the Defense Ministry, unable to achieve their assigned objectives in Ukraine, and increasingly at odds with the Kremlin officials whose incompetence is getting them killed, are not a healthy phenomenon back in the motherland. Prigozhin has up till now been pretty careful about attacking Putin himself, but is that certain to last?

I'm really imagining a situation like that of China in the late 1920s, a warlord state, and the potential for real civil war, not necessarily ideological, but rather driven by the presence of too many armies, all struggling to feed themselves off the lands they occupied. Or even Russia during the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, torn among armies of the Polish-Lithuanian confederation, Swedish mercenaries backing one new tsar or another (the throne changed hands six times between 1598 and 1613), Crimean Tatars capturing civilians to sell as slaves, and forces loyal to one court faction or another.

Now we seem to have gotten there, with Yevgeny Prigozhin and 25,000 ex-convicts having left Ukraine, and, without a shot fired, apparently occupied the southwestern city of Rostov na Donu, Rostov-on-the-Don, which is the military post from which Russian forces have mostly run and supplied the Ukraine war. After (first) denouncing the defense minister for starting the war on a fake pretext to aggrandize himself

Ukraine: What If They Win?

 

The Battle of Orsha, 1514, when Ukrainian and Lithuanian troops under Prince Kostyantyn Ostrozky stopped the westward advance of the Moscovites, from Serhii Plokhy's Lost Kingdom: The Quest For Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, 2017.

Isaac Chotiner's New Yorker interview on the Ukraine counter-offensive with the war researcher Marina Miron—not one of his diabolical ones, when he utterly destroys the subject without their knowing it's happening—roused a lot of spite anyway, with her singularly lame-sounding comparison of the Ukrainian forces' situation, in whatever territory they succeed in taking back, to that of the American forces in Iraq around this time 20 years ago:

I’m referring back to Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. operation in 2003. The toppling of Saddam Hussein—the military part—had gone well. But the reconstruction part and governance itself was lacking, and that created a power vacuum. This is something that I think will also be needed in Ukraine once the Ukrainian troops hold those territories. They will need to hold those territories, and they will have to rebuild those territories.

I can imagine that the Russians who rule those territories have done quite a lot of psychological operations to sway the population, which speaks Russian and which is ethnically closer to Russia, to basically not mind being ruled by Russia, just as in Crimea. 

There was the question of what it means to be "ethnically close", and the question of whether linguistic affiliation is really such a vital issue—do we in the US want to be occupied by British troops? Does Ireland? A lot of people in Taiwan speak Mandarin—should that make it easier for Beijing to take over? Also, ethnic Ukrainians are substantial majorities in both Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts anyhow.

I suggested a Putinian argument for how to construct an analogy that might work:

War Between the Orthodoxies

 

This tanky website

Zelensky's war on Orthodoxy continues, as a priest is apprehended during a service in Chernivtsi, far West Ukraine.

Are these "Western values"? pic.twitter.com/GSbVWQnJs1

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) March 24, 2023

(where by "tanky", I mean "person who sees Putin as the heir to Stalin and thinks that's a good thing" for the world proletarian revolution, even if thinking so involves trying to think that a good Marxist is obliged to give deference to the Russian Orthodox church because "Western values") is engaging in some especially vicious propaganda, obviously not as bad as the continuing claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis, but in the same family. I think I've touched on this before, but I need to go through it in some detail, because it's just too wrong to be borne.

October Surmise

This is kind of weird (and gets much weirder below the fold)—a letter to President Biden issued yesterday from 30 members of the House Progressive Caucus urging him, very respectfully, and without any cheap bothsidesing of the respective positions of Ukraine and Russia, to work toward a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war, mainly reacting to the scarily increased risk of nuclear conflict:

Given the destruction created by this war for Ukraine and the world, as well as the risk of catastrophic escalation, we also believe it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict. For this reason, we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire. This is consistent with your recognition that “there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here,” and your concern that Vladimir Putin “doesn't have a way out right now, and I'm trying to figure out what we do about that.” 

We are under no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in engaging Russia given its outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine and its decision to make additional illegal annexations of Ukrainian territory. However, if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.

I wouldn't sign it myself—looks like a signal of doubt and disagreement among Democrats that I don't think it's helpful for Russians to see, and then I'm pretty confident that whatever negotiation with Russia is possible right now is being done anyway, not just by US but NATO as a whole, maybe with Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey) in the lead—but it's really hard to object to the substance of the thing, such as it is ("Mr. President, please do what I think you're doing"). But why, and why now?

Thy Hand, Great Anarch! Two kinds of stupid

 

I

Apparently President Putin has spent the last four days raining death and destruction on Ukrainian civilians not because it's some kind of military strategy—wrong, it's of no strategic value at all—and also not because he just has too much weaponry and is trying to use it up, like trad Catholics using up all the animal fat in the house on Pancake Tuesday, but out of fear of people in his orbit who are even more rabid than he is. It's the "more serious" response he was promising last month if Ukraine continued refusing to be conquered:

“Recently, the Russian armed forces have inflicted a couple of sensitive blows. Let’s assume they’re a warning. If the situation continues to develop like this, then the response will be more serious,” he said.

Though there's nothing serious about it, other than that he seems to be seriously afraid of his own puppets:

The Principle of Explosion

 

Classic XKCD.

A weird little detail on BBC this morning from their Moscow correspondent doing what Moscow correspondents need to do a lot of nowadays, watching TV: In re the sinking of the Moskva, state television is denying, as you'd expect, that Ukraine had anything to do with it (yes, there was an explosion of ammunition on board that damaged the ship's hull but more or less no attempt to explain what could have caused the explosion, and the ship sank after "losing its balance" as they were towing it back into port), but in the middle of this discussion some talking-head military expert says that this is an act of war for which Ukraine will have to be severely punished—not if this is Ukraine's responsibility, but making the unspoken presupposition that it is, sitting inside a conversation in which everybody agrees it isn't.

Reinforced by the subsequent news of the Russian bombing of the Vizar plant near Kyiv where the Neptune missiles, which as we understand actually sunk the Moskva, are made, which we're clearly meant to read as a very precisely targeted response to the sinking, but the Defense Ministry issues a very precisely targeted assertion that it is something else:

Realism

 

Bucha, Ukraine, photo by AP via Arab News.

When I said I'd "loudly opposed" every US war since before Michael Tracey was born, I wasn't being totally honest, and I think I need to revise that a little: I didn't make as much noise over Grenada or Panama as I probably should have, because I expected them to end quickly and didn't think a lot of people would get hurt, in which opinion I was basically right, though of course every death is a bad thing (and estimates of Panamanian civilians killed run anywhere from 300 to 3,000, which would make it a lot worse than the way I remembered it), and I really didn't oppose the first Gulf War at all, not properly speaking.

Clausewitz was exactly wrong, as I've said before: politics is war continued by other means, not the other way around. And when the situation comes back down to war, that's a regression—a failure of politics; at least one of the parties blundered, and it shouldn't have happened. The Reagan and G.H.W. Bush administrations made a series of errors in encouraging and abetting Iraq's long and disastrous war on Iran, which left Iraq in a dire economic situation, hugely indebted to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, even as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were working with the US to keep oil prices low; and the Bush administration made a crucial error in 1990, in failing to make it known to Saddam Hussein that seizing Kuwait would bring a war on. It was a mistake similar in kind, if not degree, to the mistakes the World War I Allies made with Germany between 1919 and 1938.

News From Russia

 

Lawrence Sheets, who used to be NPR's Moscow bureau chief 20 or so years ago, now president of Eurasian International Analytics LLC, whatever that is, has recently been holed up in Odessa watching TV—not Ukrainian TV, but Russian, the 9:00 national news show Vremya, which he thinks has been turning pretty weird. He offered up some observations on it last week in Politico, and showed up with a follow-up on the radio this morning.

He thinks the show is getting very frayed, not quite professional in production, and not coherent in message, and of course the coverage on the Ukraine "special military operation" is full of lies, but he thinks the message has been shifting in significant ways: the "Ukraine is run by Nazis" theme is falling into disuse, the theme of "Ukrainians are bombing their own civilians to make Russia look bad" is getting more play (indicating, I'd think, that more and more Russians are seeing video of the massive destruction in Kharkiv and Mariupol and so on, with their VPNs, and the authorities feel they have to provide some explanation for it).

And the paranoia is getting really baroque: it's now asserted that Hunter Biden and his laptops are or were personally in charge of the imaginary US-Ukraine program for developing biological weapons of mass destruction (remember when the word was that Hunter's simply getting a job was evidence of corruption, because he was obviously too incompetent to do a job of any sort? Now he's Dr. von Doom), and everybody's favorite Elder of Zion, George Soros, is of course behind it all. 

Which is also a big thing, I've learned from Twitter, among the American Putinists:

For the Record: Putin Is Not a Leftist, part 5,412

"During Fascism, photography, in synergy with the communications industry ante-literam, was an essential part of the construction of the cult of the leader that transformed the figure of Mussolini into an icon... The Duce, in anticipation of our celebrities today, did not hesitate to undress and display his torso in what Valerie Sperling calls ‘iconic public-relations stunts’ that were both exhibitionistic and voyeuristic." He even favored the baseball cap! From Alessandra Antola Swan, "The iconic body: Mussolini unclothed", Modern Italy 21/4 2016.

In his evident desire to restore the Russian empire in his own name, rather than some descendant of Rurik, Putin really resembles Mussolini, who was thinking of the same kind of thing for Rome, much more than Hitler. Moscow is, of course, theologically, the "Third Rome" of Orthodoxy, after Rome proper and Constantinople, and Putin's emergence as a kind of physical hero from nowhere, like the milkman in a porn film, is a kind of iconic thing too, with the same kind of precedent. Not sure that's been discussed before. 

I seriously can't tolerate any more treatment of Putin as some kind of "leftist", meanwhile, sorry, but it really upsets me, at least in part because of the way it keeps offering Republicans an excuse for not attacking fascism, because, as keeps turning up, fascism doesn't really bother them, as when they failed to respond one way or the other to Putin's campaign to "de-Nazify" Ukraine.

This is cool (from Ben Collins/NBC): In the runup to the war, Russian propaganda was centered on the "Ukraine is Nazi" theme, but it wasn't going anywhere with the international or American right--that's when Russians came up with the "bioweapons" canard.https://t.co/K8e8B7Ueo1

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 20, 2022

They only reacted to the threats of evil liberal government, in the form of Dr. Fauci and the Communist Party of China. The anti-government threat of Nazism doesn't bother them at all, and they're not interested in examining their views on whether somebody is fascist or not. But meanwhile, when I found this extraordinary thread on the current situation inside Russia (I'm not reproducing it, but check it out!), tweeps found occasion to associate Putin with communism again:

Really hghlights the devastating criminality of the communist era, throwing away millions of lives so casually. Putin could have arrested this demographic crime but instead but guns and got rich. He finished the communist work at mutilating the country.

— TralfamadoreStan (@zoffany90) March 21, 2022

I'm like no, that's not the point:

I grant that, except to say his is more a criminal despotism - KGB criminal. My point was more that these very characteristics that you have cited made him the worst possible style of leadership to resuscitate Russia from the demographic body blows of the 20th Century.

— TralfamadoreStan (@zoffany90) March 22, 2022

Not that I'm clear what a "demographic body blow" is

Yah, but the Okrhana was not really used in the Putinist fashion to gut the oligarchs & bend them to his will. Grandees in the Tsarist system were by real power centres of their own, not puppets by any measure. If anything was more a scourge of the intelligentsia, Old Believers..

— TralfamadoreStan (@zoffany90) March 22, 2022

He allows them freedom of speech because he doesn't fear them. He fears journalists and opposition politicians and street demonstrators. Just like the tsars. Even a radical like Tolstoy was allowed to do whatever he wanted on his estate, because he didn't matter.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 22, 2022

And now, interestingly, he seems to fear the FSB https://t.co/w1za0KNHBF

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 22, 2022

No. 1

From President Medvedev's vlog, via The Guardian, 25 October 2011.

Fred Kaplan of Slate, Rectification Central's go-to source of expertise on military matters, had a better-informed version of something I've been wanting to say, about old Willard Mitt Romney complaining in every quarter about how he deserves an apology, because when he said in 2012 that the Russian Federation was "our no. 1 geopolitical foe" and everybody made fun of him he was actually right. As a matter of fact he wasn't right, in the first place because he was ignorant or lying, as was the case with so much of what Romney was saying* during that campaign:

In his 2012 CNN interview [toward the end of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, a couple of months before Putin returned to the office in May], Romney explained his characterization of Russia as “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” by saying, “They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors”—and referred specifically to Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. In his recent Atlantic interview, he said, “They were opposing us at the U.N. whenever a critical measure came forward.” Both statements were simply untrue.

The fact is, quite apart from partisan bickering or revisionist history about the wisdom of Romney, the U.S. and Russia shared vital interests on a number of issues—and acted together to advance those interests, at least for a while. Medvedev and other Kremlin officials were also genuinely keen to bring Russia into the global economy—to diversify its economy beyond commodities like oil and gas, build up its tech sector, and expand its trade—which motivated them to build better relations with America and Europe.

More specifically, and more importantly in terms of the campaign, he was wrong to suggest that there was some deep defect in the Obama administration's treatment of the US-Russia relationship during the Medvedev presidency, the proof being in what he was able to achieve:

Note on Whataboutism

Protesters in Venceslas Square, Prague. Photo by AFP-Yonhap via The Korea Times. It's getting very international.

 

Wild day yesterday, starting with the radio news that President Zelenskyy had rejected a Russian request to start peace negotiations in Belarus (Belarus, he said, was contributing to the Russian invasion and wasn't a neutral country) and going on to the news that he'd changed his mind after a call from President Lukashenka assuring him that Belarus would not be sending any missiles, planes, or helicopters across the border as long as the talks went on: 

“I will say frankly that I do not really believe in the outcome of this meeting, but let them try to make sure that no citizen of Ukraine has any doubt that I, as a president, did not try to stop the war,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, Russia's diplomatic isolation continued to grow: Germany announced that it would reverse decades-old policy and start contributing lethal assistance to Ukraine—antitank missiles and Stingers—and the chorus of countries ready to cut Russia out of the Swift bank transfer system grew to include Japan and Hungary. Europe and Canada joined to ban Russian planes from their airspace. As I noted yesterday, important classical music figures like Putin's pal Valery Gergiev are unable to perform outside Russia; the national Polish and Swedish soccer teams are likewise refusing to play against Russia in the World Cup heats. Ukraine filed criminal charges against Russia in the International Criminal Court, and demanded Russia's expulsion from the United Nations Security Council (no, that's not going to happen). Switzerland—Switzerland!—has tossed its I-don't-know-how-many-centuries tradition of unbreakable neutrality and joined the EU in imposing financial sanctions on Russia, and may even be sending weapons. Oil monster BP is outright dumping a $25-billion stake in Rosneft:

What Did You Do in the War, Dad?

I won the war against Russian fascism last night, going to my first concert since 2019: brother-in-law's brother-in-law had tickets to the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and couldn't go, so he passed them to me, and I was feeling kind of funny about going, because the conductor was Valery Gergiev, longtime artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he became friends with the then deputy mayor, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in 1992, which has been pretty good for his career (he's been the third wealthiest Russian on the Forbes list of celebrities), but it hasn't been so good for his reputation internationally when he's appeared in Putin's campaign ads, denounced the members of the Pussy Riot group, or failed to address the Russian "gay propaganda" law of 2013 making it a crime to distribute "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships", which has led to protests when he appears in New York, one of which I witnessed a while back (I felt like I was crossing a picket line), as well as dark questions about the relationship between art and power, as Alex Ross (whose account I am shamelessly stealing from here) told New Yorker readers in reference to a 2013 Gergiev performance of Dmitry Shostakovich's 8th symphony:

We have read many accounts of Shostakovich’s life under Stalin, his terror-stricken accommodations with the Soviet state. How should we react when this composer’s music is led by a conductor who has entered his own pact with authority, who has even spoken approvingly of the politics of fear? There is no clear answer to that question. We have all made our compromises with power; everywhere, the noblest artistic strivings are circumscribed by social conditions that make them look hypocritical and hollow. But the historical ironies surrounding Valery Gergiev are becoming uncomfortably intense.

Anyway, in the end, I got to go to the concert and Gergiev didn't get to conduct it. I should have known—it was reported in The Times on Thursday: Gergiev is canceled. 

Vienna dumped him for the orchestra's current US tour, he's losing gigs in Milan and perhaps Munich and Rotterdam, and last night he was replaced by the genial Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera, while the very young Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho stepped in for the Russian Denis Matsuev (who has expressed support for the annexation of Crimea). It was a kind of schlocky program but one that goes beautifully with the famous warmth and richness of the Vienna band and the Carnegie acoustics, of the two most warhorsy of Rachmaninov's warhorses, the second piano concerto and second symphony, and it worked really really well.

It also started really late, I guess because we had to enter in single file in a line stretching almost around the block as everybody's vaccination status was verified, and it wasn't surprising at the end when Nézet-Séguin turned to the audience and said, "You want an encore? Come back tomorrow night!" It was a giddy, funny moment, and it honestly did feel like a feeling of victory for Ukraine, leaving us tired and a little punch-drunk but happy, as if we actually had been at a well-fought battle, against the grim forces trying to overwhelm us in this dark time.

From Psychopathy to Psychosis

Miniature from the 15th-century Radziwiłł Chronicle history of Kievan Rus', showing Vladimir I of Kiyiv threatening to kill his consort Rogneda of Polotsk, while their son Prince Izyaslav defends her. Via Wikimedia Commons.

We all know about Lord Acton and that thing that power does and absolute power does absolutely, which certainly applies to President Putin, but there's something even more dangerous than that: power gives you a false sense, overconfidence bias, that you know what's going on, absolute power makes you delusional. 

the sheer criminality aside, this practically guarantees all the things putin supposedly wanted to avoid: a stronger NATO, a vehemently anti-russian ukraine, and an isolated russia

— Seva (@SevaUT) February 24, 2022

Seva Gunitsky is one of the authors, with Adam Casey, of a piece that appeared three weeks ago in Foreign Affairs that I wish I'd seen before I started making predictions about Ukraine, "The Bully in the Bubble: Putin and the Perils of Information Isolation", the burden of which is that Putin, like Xi Jinping, Nicolás Maduro, Recep Tayyib Erdoğan, and a scarily increasing host of others, practices what the authors call a "personalist" rule, in which government proceeds not from an ideological framework or a particular power/interest structure but simply from one person, not just an autocrat, but one focused on acting out his own needs and desires, whatever they may be. Trump is inclined to be a personalist too, which is what his authoritarian party hired him for, but he's too personally incompetent to actually carry the thing out; Putin has seemed to us to be the super-competent opposite, a kind of Lord Vetinari, the skilled and efficient Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, trained assassin and polymath, master of detail, only much nastier of course. But on Earth, as opposed to Discworld, even the most able personalist ruler faces pitfalls that are nearly impossible to escape:

Literary Corner: Potato-in-Chief

Convinced Putin gave Trump this present just to force him to be photographed grasping an object with both hands, which always makes him look like somebody who has trouble using two hands at a time. Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images via NPR.

The brethren are pretty flummoxed by the Retired Emperor coming out to tell everybody, in an interview with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton (surely that's a bluegrass duo) about how "smart" and "savvy" it is of President Putin to go through with this invasion of territory he already controls and what a "genius" he is, making him sound like the bought-and-paid-for Russian asset we've been telling you he is for the past six years.

Of course that's unpossible! There must be some other explanation, of which my current favorite is the view that Trump's peculiar enthusiasms are irrelevant, since they had no effect on his foreign policy, which he had nothing to do with:

This view of Trump's "toughness" with Russia is identical to the one Trump's clowns kept putting out for four years. The focus of the White House was in fact to find every possible way of avoiding Congressionally mandated sanctions https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 23, 2022

Joe Did What? The Second Time Around

 

Imagery of a war scare.

Yesterday on NPR, when I was half asleep during an interview with the career diplomat John Herbst, who was ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and now runs the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, I heard a reference to something like "the last time Russian troops surrounded Ukraine and an invasion seemed imminent, in April 2021,"  and I was kind of wait, what?

Because that's less than a year ago, and I don't remember anything about it, and almost nobody else does either, as far as I can tell, and I really don't think it was widely reported in the US. When I finally got around to looking it up, Dr. Google sent me, not to The New York Times or Washington Post, but the Natsional'nyy Instytut Strategichnykh Doslidzhen' (National Institute of Strategic Studies, and I'm not sure I'm transliterating it right) in Kiyiv, which has an excellent report on "The Russian and Ukrainian Spring 2021 War Scare", in English, that tells me more or less what I needed to know: In March 2021 Ukrainian intelligence were alarmed by an unusual concentration of Russian troops and hardware forming along the Russian-Ukrainian border, and at the end of the month the US European Command raised its alertness leve from "possible crisis" to "potential imminent crisis". 

War News

 

Pine forest near Klavdievo, Borodianka Raion, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. Photo by Aymayna Khikari via Wikimedia Commons.

Practically the same thing, in other words. US should have learned from Russia not to invade Afghanistan, no doubt. Russia should learn from US failures in Vietnam and Iraq not to invade Ukraine. It won't end well for them.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 12, 2022

Ukraine Blogging

 

Weird message from Mr. Tucker Carlson a while back that was tagged by some observers, I think correctly, as of Russian origin:

This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 19, 2022

It's easy to call it propaganda, but I'm finding myself inclined to think of it as something a little bit different, really a message from Putin, one in the Whataboutist mode, seriously, asking for just a little understanding, bro—the Russian Federation really is kind of surrounded on its west, by NATO members some of which control nuclear weapons, all along the western borders of Russia or Belarus or Ukraine from Estonia to Turkey, from the north end of the Gulf of Finland to the eastern end of the Black Sea, members of an alliance that was specifically designed 70-odd years ago to thwart Russian movements in that direction.