my ear wanted to insert "the" before Ukraine. Is that ever a thing?
It was and is a thing to a surprisingly emotional degree.
There's no definite article in Russian or Ukrainian, so in those languages it doesn't matter*. But Ukrainians don't like people saying "the Ukraine", pointing out that other countries don't get definite articles, but regions of countries do; France, Germany, Japan - but the Midwest, the Highlands, le Midi. So, now that Ukraine is independent, we say "Ukraine". When it was part of the USSR, and the Russian Empire before that, people said "the Ukraine".
*The Russian distinction is between the pronouns v (in) and na (on). You are "v" a country - v Rossiye, in Russia - but "na" a region. They tend to wind the Ukrainians up by talking about being "na Ukrainye".
It's a hard habit to shake. I've known about "the" being an issue for probably twenty years, and I still say it wrong if I'm not thinking.
Yes. It's hard for me to stop but I'm trying because I don't want to sound like a Tuckeresque, Russian version of Lord Haw Haw.
It's traditionally had a "the" before it in English (see also Netherlands, Yukon, Sudan, Congo, Bronx, etc., and of course anything plural like the fucking united states), but Ukrainians got big mad about it for reasons that don't really make sense and so we've dropped the "the" because it's polite to call people what they want to be called. The government of Ukraine's official position is "the usage of 'the Ukraine' is incorrect, both grammatically and politically." My position is that I fully accept that it's politically incorrect and will not use it, but I WILL NOT BE LECTURED TO ABOUT ENGLISH GRAMMAR BY THE UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT.
(The main reason locations in English end up with a "the" is that they were originally named after geographical features, e.g. the Yukon river, the Bronx river, the Congo river, and then got shortened. The other main reason is when the word was originally plural or looks like it might be plural, this is definitely what's going on with The Netherlands and probably what's going on with Ukraine.)
I think it should be "The Brooklyn."
The invasion of Ukraine is a big deal in math, both because there's lots of ethnically Ukrainian mathematicians (and even more Jewish mathematicians from Ukraine), and because the big 4-year international math gathering (where they hand out the fields medals) is supposed to be in St. Petersburg this summer. The AMS (the US professional organization for mathematicians) just called for it to be cancelled. My gossip from my friend who is speaking is that at least a third of the speakers are going to announce a boycott. The question is whether it'll be rescheduled, cancelled, moved, or whether it'll be some mess where a rump event still happens where everyone skips it.
"Netherlands" is one of those things that should be in a high fantasy novel if only it wasn't actually real (Shadow Cabinet, House of Keys, Cape Wrath, Cape Fear, the Great Dismal Swamp and so forth).
I thought "the Bronx" was originally a possessive -- "the Bronck's estate" or farm or something. But I can't remember a source and haven't looked it up.
You could suggest they move it to Pittsburgh. We have hotels and such.
Lots of amphetamines if mathematicians are still into that.
Rumors are that the one in 4 years will be in Philly, I doubt they'd want two in a row in PA! Though that doesn't get announced until the congress actually happens.
It was already pretty controversial when St. Petersburg was initially announced, both because of the occupation of Crimea, because of LGBT-rights issues in Russia, and because there's a math graduate student who is a political prisoner in Russia. Paris was the other choice. If I were in charge (and I have literally no say or insight into what will actually happen) I'd move it to Paris and delay it a year.
The ICM was delayed by a year once in the past. It was supposed to be in Warsaw in 1982, but after the big Solidarity strikes there was a coup and imposition of martial law. This resulted in a one year delay until martial law was lifted and then was held in Warsaw in 1983. Of course it was also cancelled during the World Wars.
I bet we have more meth than Paris.
UK government is not being terribly impressive on the sanctions front, certainly not compared to the EU and US, but it's possible they will be shamed into doing more. US tech sanctions could have a much more catastrophic effect on Russia, which is heavily dependent on US-authored software in particular.
What's interesting is this question: have any Russian troops actually crossed into Ukraine (including Donetsk and Luhansk) yet? I know they've been ordered to do so, but have they done it yet?
8: It is true that it originates from a guy named Bronck and that the x sound comes from Bronck's turning into Bronx. But the old name for the area is just "Bronck's land" with no "the," the "the" comes via the Bronx river (which gets a "the" because river names take "the."
No one has more math than Paris. Not even Bonn or Cambridge, MA.
13.2: I thought I saw video at wapo of Russian vehicles rolling into Donetsk? Maybe I misread the headline?
It was this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/22/ukraine-russia-invasion-photos-videos-maps/
I suppose it's not easy to tell from a brief video at night whether those are official Russian troops or unofficial Russian troops pretending to be separatist troops
Yes, but The Gambia is also river-derived like The Bronx, The Congo (deprecated?), and The Yukon (I'm not sure whether that's deprecated?).
Aggressive war is bad.
Yeah, bring it, cancel culture! I need that sweet Substack money cake!
13: ISTR reading that the "militias" in the fake new republics are about 50% actual Russian soldiers. Unfortunately I can't remember where I read that. But I guess your real question is, have they moved in more soldiers since Putin's announcement?
One doesn't visit the Yellowstone. One rafts the Yellowstone.
I do not like to go to Missouri. I would enjoy canoeing the Missouri. (I've never done so, although I've canoed down to the Three Forks, which is near the town of Three Forks.)
If there's a rule, I'm not hearing it.
Driving up the Bitterroot, coming down from the Flathead, both would be understood to refer to the valleys, and not the rivers.
The Kansas City Airport is kind of fucked up but cheaper than Omaha. If you do want to visit.
Right, it's not that there's a rule that if a place shares a name with a river then the place takes "the", but it is nonetheless true that many place names that take (or took) "the" got that way because they their name comes from a river. The Amazon is both the region and the river, so is The Klondike. That isn't somehow negated by Missouri the state not following that particular pattern.
My theory on the Bronx is that it sounds plural. Plurals -- the Dakotas, the Carolinas, the Netherlands -- take an article.
26 I think it's the unspoken noun that would follow that draws the article, not the fact that it's a river. The Klondike gold fields, the Yukon territory, the Amazon basin.
27 should meet 24.2, in Three Forks. And canoe down to Great Falls.
The truly weird one is that old Britishism "The Lebanon." Here they say that's because it comes from the mountain "The Lebanon," but that's still weird because mountains don't usually take "the" unless the mountain happens to be The Matterhorn. If I understand right, saying The Matterhorn means you think Switzerland is actually part of Russia.
28: "The Yukon" absolutely predates the phrase "Yukon territory" by decades. You're just wrong here.
It's because "Matterhorn" is German for "penis."
Wouldn't British sports announcers say 'Great Falls are a small town with a big wind'?
And Lebanon doesn't take the definite article in Arabic (unlike Sudan)
The Yukon country? I just don't think it's because of the river, except I suppose people in Skagway were heading up to the Yukon river to travel down it.
I do agree that The Bronx could well be because it sounds plural rather than from the river.
Sudan and Yemen are supposedly because the names come from names of deserts, and deserts do often take "the" (The Sahara, The Kalahari, The Gobi, The Atacama, The Mojave but not The Chihuahua nor The Sonora where for whatever reason you say the Chihuahuan desert and you can't drop the desert).
And "The Great Basin" of course.
Reading Upetgi, I now understand the whole "The Ohio State University" thing. The school must be a state school that is named after a river.
mountains don't usually take "the" unless the mountain happens to be The Matterhorn.
Most Alpine peaks take "the". The Matterhorn, the Eiger, the Dru, the Jungfrau, the Weisshorn, the Grandes Jorasses etc.
38 Good question since it's from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Kingdom in Arabic here is feminine as are the following adjectives.
40 Sudan is called that because it's short for (in Arabic) the land of the Blacks. So it literally means "the Blacks." And Yemen means right hand side and traditionally the cardinal directions started facing the East instead of North so the right hand side would be in the South.
Last time we had a Ukraine thread we ended up talking about Passivhouses and this time it's definite articles...
43: Thanks! It's tricky because only Matternhorn of that list is a word in American.
Perhaps, a compromise can be reached -- in exchange for the return of Luhansk and Donetsk, Ukraine will permit the Russian President (when speaking English) to refer to their country as "the Ukraine". Putin can bask in his moral victory.
46 We could discuss Russian BTGs only the font of that PDF was too small to read on my phone (I'm going to read it at work tomorrow).
Isn't it the rule that mountains are preceded by either the definite article or "Mount"? I can't think of an exception, anyway.
43 seems to be about the names coming from German or Swiss German rather than being about Alps. Alps with singular names coming from French and Italian don't seem to take "the."
50: As Moby says there's lots of "peaks" or other similar words instead of "mount" (including borrowed words like "ben"). Also lots of names borrowed from other languages have neither "the" nor "mount": Denali, Haleakala, Lhotse, Aconcagua). There's the weird case of K2.
Honestly, I only ever heard of the one.
I was trying to think of anywhere I know of local to where I grew up which takes a "the", and I came up with two. "The Carse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carse - "of Forth" in my case), and "The Moss" by which people meant the local peat moss. Which takes us back to geographical features again.
Last time we had a Ukraine thread we ended up talking about Passivhouses and this time it's definite articles...
What else is there to say?
I guess we could argue over in which circumstances we'd want US or NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine (I can't think of any plausible future scenarios off the top of my head where I'd want that but I'm often insufficiently imaginative; I'll bet someone here can come up with something).
Or what combination of sanctions would actually get Putin to back down (maybe if they had seized his yacht when it was in non-Russian waters a few weeks ago?).
Or whether this issue of all things is what sane Republicans are going to effectively assert themselves over (probably not).
20. Gambia and Congo are indeed river derived and AFAIK the 'the' is still correct for the rivers. The Congo question is complicated by the need to differentiate DRC, aka Congo Kinshasa from RoC, aka Congo Brazzaville. The early modern kingdom is always spelled with a K, so at least there's that.
52: Alps with singular names coming from French and Italian don't seem to take "the."
I've definitely heard people talk about "the Dru" and indeed "the Aiguille du Dru" is how Wiki renders it. I'm sure it isn't the only one. The Dents du Midi is the only other one that comes to mind.
The Wiki list of Alpine peaks seems to indicate that pretty much all German alps, and most French alps that don't start with "Mont", have a "the", and no Romansh or Italian alps do. No one talks about climbing "the Piz Buin".
my bf's sil is ukrainian from e ukraine, lives in socal & has 2 v small children, hangs with local russian immigrant mums & is alllll in on the russian misinformation version of events. bf just grateful extreme antifascist grannie not alive to know about this. at some point i anticipate bf will develop persistent resentment at having held that apparently super fucking heavy crown aloft during a very lengthy wedding ceremony.
The chuppah is supposed to rest on the ground.
Dents is defintely plural though. Dru is sometimes Drus so possibly plural?
Even if there are some places with "the" that don't have this history, I think "the" does apply to a big enough slew of colonized/imperialized places and is reminiscent of that tendency to look at countries and just see land/resources that it makes sense to delete it whenever requested.
On the other hand: Muscovy!
oh and how could i have forgotten that sil & brother of bf declined vaccination, inevitably caught the fucking plague & gave it to their 3 yr old & newborn both of whom became quite ill.
65: I mean as I said, them asking is enough reasons not to use it. But I really think that the history here is what's in 1, that is that it's a spillover from an unrelated grammatical fight about prepositions in Russian, and not really about imperialism.
"Ukraine" in Russian and Ukrainian has its origins as a geographical term, meaning something like "at the border/edge/frontier." So it's actually a lot like "the Netherlands" linguistically. And the implication of using "the" (or the "na" preposition) is that it's a region not a state. So I think it's legit for Ukrainians to make the switch to eliminating "the" or using "v" rather than "na."
Shetland has a similar grammatical shibboleth (Shetland not The Shetlands) and there's no attempt to give a reason, it's just that Shetlanders call it Shetland so you should too. So I do!
They call an island "Mainland." They obviously aren't people you should listen to about language.
Counterpoint, they call Puffins Tammie Norrie and so they're exactly who you should listen to about language. (Seriously though, Shetland word of the day is a great twitter follow.)
I guess calling Great Britain the mainland is still calling an island the mainland. Britain should call France the mainland.
When I lived in eastern Ukraine in the early/mid-90s, most people said "v" but plenty of people hadn't made the shift or seemed a bit self-conscious about "v".
43, 52: The smallish peak that looms above AB's ancestral home at the western tip of Austria is der Pfänder; we always refer to it as such, but the Wiki page for it uses the English definite article.
I suspect that, to the extent non-German Alpine peaks are referred to this way, it's just extension from the many German ones. "I toured the Alps and saw the Matterhorn, the Jungfrau, and the Barre des Ecrins." It's irrelevant to the speaker whether the last one is correct usage.
Also, there's a folk song "Down in the Arkansas" that is referring to the place, not the river as such. That's one that AFAIK has entirely passed out of usage.
I thought "the Bronx" was originally a possessive -- "the Bronck's estate" or farm or something. But I can't remember a source and haven't looked it up.
I read this somewhere as a kid. As a result, when I was assigned to write some sort of faux historical journal as if I was a colonial American, I wrote about going up to visit the Broncks, and my teacher thought I'd misspelled it. The curse of the flagrantly precocious!
I have heard tell of an Intourist guide back in the Ukrainian SSR commemorating 1939 as the date Lviv was liberated from "centuries of Polish oppression."
I have a Victorian atlas in which Ukraine is labelled Little Russia,and Russia is Great Russia. I don't recommend bringing these back. Belarus is, of course, White Russia, although I understand that etymogically it should be White Ruthenia.
Bring back the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth!
Southern Ukraine was sometimes called New Russia, mostly around the time it was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. One of the ironies of all this Russian nationalist stuff about Kiev Rus and so on is that Ukraine was actually one of the last areas to become part of the Russian state in its modern incarnation.
Oops, misremembered: Polish occupation.
75: Looked The Bronx up in Stewart's Names on the Land which is generally definitive, but he breezily notes that it was known as where the Broncks lived so not a possessive*. However, most other sources have it from the river (including a guy at the Bronx Historical Society) and that makes sense to me as it seems to have really only been given its name long after the Broncks were gone. Wikipedia has a whole section on the use of the definite article. The county name does not include the "the" unlike the borough name, nor apparently do official Post Office addresses. There is some minor disagreement as to whether the "the" is always capitalized or not. Also learned that Broncks was Danish not Dutch as I would have assumed.
*Unlike Yonkers, which seems to have been "the Jonkheer's" (young gentleman's) but lost the "the" somewhere along the way.
Flushing Meadows was originally the drain field for a septic system.
82.* to me lends credence to The Bronx not keeping the article due to pluralphony to coin a word. And nerdinterestingly the original Yonkers land included a fair chunk of the Bronx (I think all of Riverdale).
On a cursory Google Books search, I found a 19th century book quoting a 1668 land transfer document making reference to "Hudson's river and Broncks river." Apostrophe after Hudson, but not after Bronck. So maybe it was eroding from descriptor into proper name that early, if that orthography is correctly preserved.
Trying to go through some borderline "the"/no "the" examples. The Everglades fits the description thesis, unlike say the Okefenokee Swamp which I don't think is generally called
The Okefenokeee."
Was thinking about The Piedmont (Both US and Italy) versus Appalachia. The latter seems a bit anomalous I suppose because of the word construction; Siberia is another. Or maybe not trying to think of other informal region names not having the "the." Down East I guess. Delmarva.
It looks like we're now just hours away from a full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. And they'll surely try to take Kyiv.
In an occupied SF Bay Area, invading troops will ride the BART to Frisco or march along the 80, the 280, or the 101.
86.1: I can't find it in a strip, but online discussions indicate that fans of Pogo refer to "the" (uncapitalized) Okefenokee.
And the swamp has a web site. (On the Internet, nobody knows you're a swamp.) It has language like this:
Your gateways to experience the unique ecosystem, wildlife, social heritage and natural beauty of the Okefenokee Swamp, the "Land of the Trembling Earth"
I have never once gotten so many visible insect bites as when I visited that swamp.
Apparently the comic-strip Okefenokee owes a lot more visually to the marshes around Bridgeport, CT the to the actual Okefenokee.
To be briefly serious, even from Russia's viewpoint this invasion is insane. I don't see what their endgame is. They can't occupy a giant country forever. They can't set up a puppet regime that has no support, because it'll get overthrown. And it's just going to make Russia even more unpopular in Ukraine and everywhere else. It's even stupider than invading Iraq.
Yeah, it's different from the US invading Iraq in that it apparently has 11% approval in Russia.
Maybe Russia will install a Hetman, just to really rub it in.
78: A greater share of the population could vote to elect the king of Poland than the British Parliament.
Why would Ukrainian people get to vote for the British parliament?
88: well once a year we are descended on by anti abortion marchers who are privately bused in, they don't take the train. & they just march on regular old city streets - not sure which ones bc i along with everyone else ignore them.
i suppose if we were invaded by socal denizens they'd maybe force us to use articles when referring to freeways?
Can the naming of Scotches help with a rule here?
Dalwhinnie; THE Glenlivet....a corresponding glen presumably exists, but no such "dal"?
98: can't honestly say I ever use the article for any whisky. Glass of Glenlivet, not "the Glenlivet".
And there is a corresponding place called Dalwhinnie, as for all single malts.
76: I have personally heard a tour guide say this in Lviv, to the stunned reaction of our Polish university group.
For Sainsbury's Blended Scotch Whisky there's a Sainsbury.
The occupation thing, not the oppression thing.
Yeah "the" in Scotch names doesn't really mean anything. It seems to mostly be a Speyside thing (The Glenlivet, The Macallan, The Balvenie, The GlenDronach), but not all Speysiders (Aberlour, Glenfiddich), and then there's The Dalmore in the northern highlands for no obvious reason. It's just a marketing and I expect you see places add or remove a "the."
As far as I can tell, and this is very difficult to Google because every webpage has "the," the history seems to be:
1) Glenlivet got very popular.
2) Other distilleries also in the glen of the livet called their whisky Glenlivet. This wasn't trademarkable at the time because it's a geographic name.
3) So the real Glenlivet changed their name to "The Glenlivet" and trademarked that.
4) Other places that wanted to appeal to people who liked The Glenlivet also added "the" to their names.
But I'm not at all confident that's the whole story.
Ah, here's a better summary of 1-3: https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/ask-the-professor/17898/why-are-other-distilleries-called-glenlivet/
Give me a minute. Just washing my hands.
so it's exactly as legit as "THE Ohio St University!"
I am a graduate of a university that is commonly and insufferably known as "The (name) University of (city), (state)." I only refer to it that way when outlandishly appealing to my own authority in conversation with people who I am sure know I'm joking when I say, "as a graduate of the (name) University of..."
Also, Ukraine: shit's fucked.
111.last Hard to know what's accurate, but the rumors about the attacks on Ukraine are really concerning.
Definite articles are super duper interesting for sure, but can we shift to posting news sources to follow on what's happening? I haven't been habitually following news from Russia or Ukraine, and I don't have a list of specialists ready to hand. I'm just looking at the NYT page of live updates and dreading what I will find elsewhere. I don't mind slowly reading Russian sources. Doug? J, Robot?
Josh Marshall (TPM) and Noah Smith (noahpinion) have posted lists on tiger Twitter feeds.
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1496708477233901571
BREAKING: Ukraine's Interior Ministry confirms "missiles have just struck at the center of the Military Administration, airfields, military depots, in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro." Also artillery shelling at border areas.
If you're not reloading the news but for some reason reading these comments, there are reports of explosions in both Kyiv and Odesa as of now. From the NYT link above: "Besides those from Kyiv in the north, reports of military engagements extended to Odessa in the south, where Russian troops were said to be landing."
How do we rate the Ukrainian military's ability to hold a defensive line? It seems to me there is a lot of local memory about how this kind of warfare works.
116 I'm sure that they'll try to protect Kyiv but this is a war of maneuver and if they try to hold a defensive line they'll get crushed.
I guess fighting on the steppes kinda sucks for defense.
This link that ajay posted is somewhat encouraging about Ukrainian effectiveness against Russian BTGs https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/issues/2017/spring/2Fiore17.pdf
Here indeed is a link to the brief discussion (comments 40-47) of that article in the cursed thread. We should just graft them over here.
I've been pondering 92, about what is actually Russia's endgame here, and the best I can come up with is that they're hoping to rerun Georgia in 2008. That also came in the context of serious talk about NATO membership and also had separatist fake republics involved. As far as I know, the point of Russian military action beyond those republics was to destroy Georgian equipment and briefly occupy a number of cities, from which they then withdrew as part of a negotiated end to hostilities that 1) left them in unquestioned charge of the separatist regions, and 2) took the prospect of Georgian NATO membership off the table. Tanks in Kyiv would be terrifying and disastrous, but is there any way they could actually stay long term?
US/UK did give Ukraine a lot of Javelins which are state of the art ATGMs* but I don't think they got much in the way of anti-air assets.
*Anyone know how many?
I think we'll see Ukraine in NATO eventually as a result of this idiocy.
https://twitter.com/armscontrolwonk/status/1496729494744297473?s=21
Tanks are just rolling down from Belarus right now.
"Holding a defensive line" may ne the wrong way to think of it - if you read the very good "Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century" by Anthony King, he argues convincingly that armies are now so small that urban fighting is inevitable. Compare the huge 1991 war with lots of manoeuvre in the open desert and cities largely untouched, with the 2003 war fought almost entirely in and for cities.
122: at least 500 Javelin missiles and 180 launcher posts from the US, 2,000 NLAW from the UK, unknown quantities of Javelin and Stinger from the Baltics.
Apart from Stinger, though, surface to air missiles are tricky because they take a lot more training to use effectively, also NATO doesn't have many as it prefers to use aircraft.
I guess now we get to find out whether all this active defence stuff they hang on their tanks really works.
113: My Twitter feed has been sufficient to keep me overrun with information, so I haven't gone and sought out more lately. My handle over there is @bagatsen, and you can easily see who I follow. In this particular context, Michael McFaul (Obama's ambassador to Russia, now back at Stanford), Sam Greene (London), Tanja Maier (no affiliation, but a Russian-speaking Arizonan in Vienna, the kind of informed and smart weirdo who would fit in here), Anna Wieslander, Claire Berlinski, to name a few ... plus all of the people that they retweet.
In 2014, I wrote that Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporizhia would be to this conflict what Poland was in 1939: "The great powers would not be able to overlook the dismemberment of a major European state. They wouldn't be able to stop it, either." That was in the context of Russia seeing what else they could collect after snarfing up the Crimea. (What do we think about that definite article, btw?) Today looks like the start of a full-on invasion for the whole enchilada.
The thing is, though, that Ukraine is big. Like big even by European Russia standards (though not by Asian Russia standards). East to west Ukraine is wider than Texas, if its eastern point were in New York its western point would be in Illinois southwest of Chicago. North-south it's Toronto to Raleigh, North Carolina. Whatever progress we see Russian forces making in the next few days -- and it's likely to be shocking -- there's still a lot more Ukraine. To say nothing of urban resistance.
Then there's the matter of trying to rule an occupied territory. In the eight years since Russia grabbed the Crimea and attacked eastern Ukraine, attitudes toward Russia have shifted a lot. I don't think a puppet regime would fare well, and attempts at direct rule would be worse.
It's all just so terribly sad and unnecessary.
Forgot to add -- a lot of the 1920 Poland-Russia war was fought in what is now Ukraine. Norman Davies wrote a good book about it called White Eagle, Red Star, and I wrote a passable review of it so you don't have to read the whole book if you don't want to.
Here's a key passage: "It is pointless to speak of 'long lines of communications' or Tukhachevsky's 'contempt for space'. These are not explanations. The lines of communication between Russia and Poland cannot be shortened. The vast space of the Borders is a well-known fact, which every general must first accept then ignore; a strategist who treated the expanse of the Borders with due respect would never fight at all."
A war of maneuver will look great for the invaders at first. That's not the true test of fighting in this part of the world.
It's all just so terribly sad and unnecessary.
Yes, so sad and with no realistic possibility of ending well for anyone whatsoever, very much including Russia and Putin.
127 I saw video of armor convoys a couple of days ago with some kind of wire cage contraption hanging off the back but NLAWs and Javelins are top attack missiles so I'm guessing that shouldn't matter.
128.1 Apparently I've had you confused with the Canadian journalist Doug Saunders for years (unless he comments here too).
Other reading: I have already mentioned Anthony King's book and the paper on defeating the Russian BTG. The Modern Warfare Institute at West Point has some good articles on Ukraine and Russia, and their Urban Warfare Project is interesting. Googling "Resistance Operating Concept" will provide a few pieces on the doctrine that the US Special Forces have been working up over the last ten years or so on how to defend the Baltics; much of it will apply to Ukraine. Jonathan Eyal's piece https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russia-takes-another-bite-ukraine is the latest in a series of good stuff coming from RUSI.
Here indeed is a link to the brief discussion (comments 40-47) of that article in the cursed thread.
Ajay, earlier this month: "I wish something would happen to get everyone to want to talk about armoured warfare instead of being horrible to and about trans people!"
(monkey's paw twitches)
133 genuine lol
This looks good but I don't have a subscription
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-02-21/russias-shock-and-awe
What's striking here, among other things, is that all the hybrid warfare/grey zone business has just been set aside in favour of "lots of armour". Papers like this https://mwi.usma.edu/dangerous-myths-ukraine-and-future-of-great-power-competition/ from two years ago now look a bit out of date.
And, given the BTG concept's reliance (Fiore) on proxy forces as a screen and for flank protection and rear security, it is worth noting that Russian occupying forces in DPR/LPR have been going door to door to conscript any men they find, including boys down to the age of 15. A lot of BTGs will need a lot of proxy militia to screen them, and the DPR/LPR population has been harvested for recruits many times before over the last 8 years. Plus, Donetsk militiamen may have been happy fighting in Donetsk under the Russian artillery umbrella, but it's going to feel very different when they're forced to march westward.
Great paper that (Fiore). That raid by Zubrowski in 2014 was impressive af
Thirty years ago, when the Cold War ended, I remember feeling a weight I hadn't even known was there removed from my life. Now it's back.
137: indeed. And that was eight years ago. They've been learning since then.
Puts the lie to the claim that countries that both have McDonalds branches don't go to war with each other, but I feel like that's always been bullshit.
To be fair, McDonald's has been going down in quality.
It's ok I'm sure Tom Friedman will use this to highlight some new superficial bullshit that sounds deep to dumb people. Maybe it will be based on Starbucks or Sbarro's.
In an act of desperate procrastination I'm going to ignore the big topic here and focus on:
the big 4-year international math gathering
It is very weird to me that a field as enormous and varied as "math" can have one big international conference that is generally perceived as the big conference. There's no such thing in physics. There is not even such a thing in most subfields of physics. String theorists have the big Strings conference, and it always strikes me as kind of pathological, because there is so much politics in deciding who speaks and it's often viewed as defining what the field is, at the same time that many people complain about the dominance of a small number of people in making that determination. Having something similar for "math" just seems very fraught to me. I wonder how the existence or not of "the" conference in a field correlates with the larger culture of the field, and in particular if it correlates with the idea that a few great geniuses dominate the field and everyone else just makes minor contributions around the edges.
For some reason, I am finding it so entertaining to see "This is a serious blog" over and over in the sidebar.
133: lol
140: I remember someone somewhere (Crooked Timber?) posted a pointed side-by-side of Moscow and Tbilisi McDonald'ses in 2008.
140: it's been bullshit since 1999, when NATO went to war with Serbia
I mean, it was bullshit the second Friedman wrote it, whenever that was. But NATO & Serbia proved it in 1999.
Most of the talks are chosen by committees for various subfields. There's a lot of speakers too (I think 150 or so?). It's definitely seen as a huge honor, but it's not just for "geniuses." My to 40 dept of 40ish people usually has 1 or 2 speakers each Congress. Of course there's politics (the bar is higher if you're American for example, there's always debates about how to divvy up fields into committees, etc.), but generally if someone has a great result then they'll get invited to an ICM. There's never been any controversy about speakers during my career that was well-known enough for me to be aware of it (unlike Fields medals where I know a few controversies).
Of course the Congress is over a century old and the field was a lot smaller when it started.
Thank you all so much for the links. I'm at a loss for words. Still trying to tease out the various contexts of "de-Nazification" -- not just Great Patriotic War nostalgia, or a mask to put on any existential enemy of Russians... maybe an allusion to East Germany in particular? (Twitter has been all over the irony of Zelensky being descended from Holocaust survivors, but it seems like more than flat irony to me.)
149: One of the Russian talking points about 2014 has been that the Maidan and the overthrow of Yanukovych (who was advised for years by future Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort) were somehow a neo-Nazi effort. Thus all of the governments since then are, in this view, also neo-Nazis. Facts be damned, obvsly.
So Putin & Co are trying to co-opt a historical explanation for their plans in Ukraine. Over on Twitter I've seen some speculation that if Russian armed forces do capture Kyiv, they will try to re-install Yanukovych at the head of a quisling government. He is presently living in exile in Russia.
Got it, thanks. Did he just pull that out of thin air, or was there some specific back story? Have "neo-Nazis" been used routinely as bogeymen in other contexts?
Presumably, it goes back to the Hiwi of World War 2, whatever else happened since.
Also US-Panama 1989 (first McDonald's in Panama 1971). Friedman may be too craven to think that a war.
150: Seems crazy if you're Yanukovych, you have to know if you do this then the next time the revolution comes you're going to get killed instead of allowed a nice exile.
Maybe he gets killed now if he says no.
Putin seems just plain evil to me in a way that I wouldn't have considered late-Soviet leaders to be.
156: I miss Gorbachev. He seemed to believe in the rule of law. Post-Soviet, Yeltsin seemed more of a strong man and buffoon but definitely less sinister than Putin.
I don't really have any sense of how leaders develop in these one-party states. Like how did Gorbachev mange to come to power? It seems like he must be a terrible person to have managed to get to his position, but he seems not so bad. When the party picked Xi did they know they were picking an evil bastard compared to previous leaders? Why did they decide to go in that direction? I guess I sometimes feel the same way about Deans, like why would the higher administration pick someone if they weren't evil? But then some Deans seem to be basically decent people and others assholes.
Couldn't feel much besides sadness as Biden described the effects of the sanctions on (implicitly) ordinary Russians. Such a clusterfuck.
Apparently Russian forces have captured Chernobyl. Source. Seems like a good staging ground because who would want to counterattack? But it's a little too on the nose for a supervillain's evil plan.
158: It's almost like interviewing is a skill independent of holding the job.
152: some of the people who took part in the 2014 revolution and later fought in the Donbass are a bit keen on dodgy insignia and historical Ukrainian rebels who were close to Nazism. This is a fairly common whataboutery trope.
149: There are plenty of neo-Nazis in Russia: RNU - Russian National Unity, the Azov group, etc. Some of these are active in Ukraine as well. Sad to say, being an anti-Semite or White Supremacist is pretty widespread in Russia and not really considered an out-of-bounds political/social belief. Xenophobia is rife. When Putin talks about "de-Nazification" he is referring to any group or person that opposes him. If by some mischance the target is an actual Nazi or sympathizer it's a coincidence.
This is a fairly common whataboutery trope.
Sorry, I meant specifically to ask whether this was used by Putin against other political and military adversaries, like in the Caucasus --
When Putin talks about "de-Nazification" he is referring to any group or person that opposes him
-- that is: is it just in Ukraine, or elsewhere?
I mean he's only talking about de-Nazification of Ukraine, right? I'm not sure I understand the question.
This Vox piece is good on the background of Putin's "De-Nazification" rhetoric. It is specific to Ukraine and taps into a Russian nationalist view that Ukrainian nationalism originated from pro-Nazi, anti-Soviet partisan groups during WWII.
In which the father of Putin's man in Ukraine, Medvedchuk, had been involved.
151: (In addition to what other commenters have said.) The transition from Maidan to revolution to interim government is murky to me, though I have the sense that at least some of the first people who had arms against Yanukovych were from the far right. That's been built into a self-serving mythos by Putin. And I think it's specific to Ukraine; that is, there wasn't really any talk along those lines when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008.
I think 155 is a good answer to 154.
158: There's a good and newish biography of Gorbachev by William Taubman, who previously did a really good one of Khrushchev. I haven't read much of the Gorby book yet, but I remember in the introduction G. refers to himself in the third person and says "Gorbachev is difficult to understand." When I get around to it, I will definitely be interested in how he wound up as the generational lead within the Politburo.
129.1: I've been trying to read that. It's just very hard for me to follow.
The book is hard to follow. The review was clear, which is why I bought the book.
Whoops, sorry Moby. Someday I will no longer lead you astray about books. I still feel a little bad about Mort.
(I haven't re-read the Davies since I wrote the review, so I have no idea if I would still find it possible to follow. Then-me also read both volumes of God's Playground, which is either an explanation or a warning.)
It's just Russian/Slavic names. I can't separate them in my head. I had the same trouble with Crime and Punishment.
I typed a whole thing about the contemporaneous preposition change and then confirmed a hunch that this had been discussed upthread by someone, someone who LIVES IN MY HOUSE.
You need to stuff steel wool into any cracks in the wall.
"Crime" and "Punishment" are very different names, Mobes.
The definite articles with freeway numbers thing is one of those things that just grates eternally but it's mostly a bitch-eating-crackers situation.
I think I remember enough of Armageddon Averted to remember it having some explanation of Gorbachev's rise, but not enough to remember what Kotkin actually said. I do recommend it.
Long time lurker (maybe since 2008?), first time poster (I think). People might be interested in three brief articles that I read last night that helped me to gain some understanding of Putin's motivation and goals. Two are by Greg Yudin, a sociologist at the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences -- Why is Putin's Russia threatening Ukraine? and Putin is about to start the most senseless war in history -- and one is an interview from 2012 with Gleb Pavlovsky, who was an advisor to Putin from 1999 to 2011 before being dismissed -- Putin's World Outlook.
My takeaway is that as ex-KGB, Putin laments the loss of the Russian empire and is going to do his damnedest to get as much of it back as he can, fighting using conventional and non-conventional means all under the safety of a nuclear umbrella. If Pavlovsky is correct, Putin basically longs for the "bad" aspects of the USSR (national security state, military mobilization) without any of the attempted "good" ones (greater social equality, support for poorer countries). He seems to admire the stability of liberal/bourgeois democracy in the USA and western Europe, but fears that Russians (the people or the mafia oligarchs) won't peacefully accept transitions of power between two parties and instead might always threaten violence against outgoing leaders. Ceaușescu and Gaddafi are probably always on his mind, which makes him paranoid and very dangerous (obviously).
Depending on how this all shakes out in the short and medium term, I wouldn't be surprised to see Sweden join NATO and public opinion shift in Finland. NATO troops will probably bolster the Baltics. There might even be action in the Black Sea. Of course, Putin's days in Russia could be numbered too, who knows.
Nice to have you unlurked, Fargo.
It seems like the part about Putin's days in Russia maybe being numbered somehow makes him even more dangerous. If he feels his back is to the wall his incentive will be to escalate.
181 is barely even satire, there was a retired American two-star on the Today programme a few days ago saying exactly that. More or less verbatim "I commanded a division in 2003 and even though the actual invasion went really quickly, we still had a terrible time afterwards, and that's what may well happen in Ukraine".
It's darkly funny because it's true.
Putin basically longs for the "bad" aspects of the USSR (national security state, military mobilization) without any of the attempted "good" ones (greater social equality, support for poorer countries)
The USSR had greater economic equality but not greater social equality. Generational social mobility seems to have been similar to that in Western countries. And the USSR was an officially stratified country, with "nomenklatura" and to a lesser extent Party members and ethnic Russians allowed opportunities - for promotion, for travel, for access to luxury goods and housing - that were legally forbidden to members of lower classes.
178: Oh, I even have that one upstairs! I can check tonight. Have you read his Magnetic Mountain? I keep getting interested, and then I keep getting deterred by the price. Academic publishing, grumble grumble.
Welcome Fargo, those look like good links
Seconding 186 - more like that please!
And agreed on this:
Depending on how this all shakes out in the short and medium term, I wouldn't be surprised to see Sweden join NATO and public opinion shift in Finland. NATO troops will probably bolster the Baltics. There might even be action in the Black Sea.
Given that Putin made a speech saying "it was a great mistake for Lenin to let all the Empire go" and part of that Empire was Finland...
It looks like Zelensky is working on Finland:
https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1497128614676123648
And yes, 186, excellent articles!!!
Aside from NATO, I wonder how this will affect European integration -- those who have been arguing for a European army and a real single foreign policy will certainly feel their hand strengthened, and it seems crazy these days to rely purely on NATO (eg America) for common security.
189: the US and NATO seem to be doing pretty well, but it's noticeable that collective action on things like sanctions is still difficult. Things like weapon supplies can be done unilaterally (unless you're unfortunate enough to have bought your weapons from the Germans; the Balts did that, and then tried to send some of their arty on to Ukraine a few weeks ago, and the Germans said no).
way back at 131: He's been in Berlin from time to time, but despite the shared name and near certainty of some mutual acquaintances, we are not the same. He's in Toronto just now, I see from Twitter.
Even more annoyingly in not-me, I am not the Doug Merrill who was once CIO of Google and came away with buckets of money.
190: sure, but under President Trump?
Continuing with the search for silver linings, this looks to be doing more to put pressure on shifting away from gas in Europe than the last years of climate campaigning combined.
Welcome Fargo, those look like good links
Agreed, especially the third one. There's a lot there that's worth thinking about.
193: You mean, what we call "natural gas" in the US as opposed to gasoline/petroleum. That's why the last one turned into a discussion of passivhauses. Geothermal is the wya to go...
Follow-up on the peaceable hunter-gatherer on the veldt conversation: https://twitter.com/johnhawks/status/1496966099820322827
"17 out of the 20 known skulls have healed depressed fractures, a total of 57 observed across all individuals...this suggests that this population was subjected to numerous episodes that caused nonfatal blunt impacts throughout their lives"
It is striking that we've been hearing for decades about "isn't it amazing that we find all these prehistoric skulls with healed trepanation scars, how sophisticated their medicine was, how well they looked after their injured" without wondering "wow, trepanation is what you do for a blunt force head trauma... how on earth were they all getting their heads banged so often?"
You'd think the conclusion would just hit you between the eyes.
No glasses, so they ran into trees while skiing.
The definite articles with freeway numbers thing is one of those things that just grates eternally but it's mostly a bitch-eating-crackers situation.
This drives me nuts, too. Back when I used to binge-watch NCIS reruns, my least favorite part (besides the justifications of torture, copaganda, etc) was that characters would refer to "the I-95," "the 495," despite the fact that no one in the DC area talks like that.
Outside of CA I've only ever heard definite articles used when the road has a non-numeric name (the beltway, the Mass pike, the thruway).
200: Cassandane does, but she's from California, so this is the exception that proves the rule. If anything she's rubbing off on me rather than the other way around.
The alley that's a shortcut to the beer distributor.
Back when I used to binge-watch NCIS reruns
You, too?
189: NATO will need to get its act together as the next targets of Russian imperialism will be Latvia and Lithuania, which have similar percentages of native Russian speakers to Ukraine's. Whether this happens before or during the coming invasion of Taiwan remains to be seen.
200: there's, I think, a moment like that in Silver Linings Playbook where Jennifer Lawrence's character says "the 76" --you mean the Turnpike?
201: in the US, I think that's so. In Canada, I hear people refer to "The 401".
Tom Waits informed me that, "The eights go east and the fives go north"
206 is horrifying.
201, 207: Yes, Canadians-- or at least the ones from Ontario and parts east, I don't know about Westerners-- use the definite article in front of highways with numeric names. It's "the 401" and "the 102". If the highway has a single digit number, though, it's often "Highway 7" rather than "the 7".
209 is correct.
It's amazing to me that screenwriters could get this wrong--it's not exactly a secret that the rest of the country thinks it's funny that Californians talk that way. I don't mean that they should feel ashamed or change or whatever, just that it shouldn't be hard rule to bear in mind: "Unless this show or movie is set in California, don't use 'the' in front of numbered highways."
It would be like a Southerner putting "y'all" in the mouth of a white Yankee.
Ona related note, AB has apparently been training Iris not to use Pittsburghisms when she goes off to college. There's no discernible accent to tamp down, but Iris is genuinely surprised that other people don't say "nebby."
Am pretty sure we had a discussion of definitive article and roads here some time back. Pretty sure Halford was involved. Not Finding it however. But in searching for it I did happen upon the classic "Hobo consultants" thread.
211: all califirnians most definitely do not put articles in front of freeway numbers. this is an exclusively so cal phenomenon.
The cops have been lookin' for the son of a gun
Who's been rippin' the tar off the 401
I think this post is a pretty good summary of the Russian invasion.
214: I actually thought that might be the case, but it wasn't worth checking. Anyway, that just furthers my point: how fucking solipsistic do you have to be to put your provincial verbal tic in the mouths of the 310M compatriots who absolutely do not share it?
216: That is an excellent post, and I enjoy his writing more generally, but it's frustrating to read that comment section: there's just enough additional thoughtful content to justify exploration, but there's also tons of bad faith bullshit and rightwing nonsense that it's aggravating.
Anyway, the question I'd ask is about cyber options. Russia's cyber capabilities are well-known, while the US deploys cyber rather more judiciously. Is it simply the case that cyber has become a MAD situation, or do they outclass us in that realm?
218.1: I only read it on my phone and the nesting makes the comment section basically unreadable.
220: Nonstop. I just went out and took a little walk to try to clear my head and reduce the stress a little. I think it helped.
Zelenskyy says the big push to take Kyiv is happening now, this is it. It's 12:25 a.m. there.
Yeah, I can't really focus on anything.
It's truly bizarre how Zelenskyy got to this situation. He's literally a comedian, and now he's probably going to end up murdered defending his country as president.
221: my brother!
I usually post about this presidentially, but fuck it: I checked in with an ex-colleague to see if she had word of the Kyiv office, but it sounds like not. It is really fucking with me to have that layer of "people you worked with (indirectly, usually) every single day for years are in the middle of this," on top of the obvious world-historical horror. Before I left, they/we hired this incredibly charming young woman in Lviv, with dyed red hair that made her seem vaguely like Pippi Longstocking. I overlapped with her for a month or two. I told my ex-colleague to give her my best wishes: "I hope she can take solace in the fact that Ukraine seems like a nation of badasses. ... I mean, you don't have to say that." No, she said, I think I will tell her exactly that.
"I hope she can take solace in the fact that Ukraine seems like a nation of badasses.
I have no idea how to process something like this: https://mobile.twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1497322211400634374
I don't know anything about Zelensky, but I read an op-ed in the NYT the other day that basically said, "Zelensky isn't up to this job because he's a comedian. It's true that there's nothing he can do about any of this, but he's still just a comedian." Here's that piece.
It's so dumb and superficial, you'd think it was about a subject that the NYT isn't serious about. It read like a piece about American politics.
I've been following the Kiev Independent and a couple of its writers on Twitter (yes, doomscrolling, with maps) and this is what the author of the NYT opinion piece had to say today:
"President Volodymyr Zelensky has made many really bad mistakes, and I'm sure will make many more, but today he's showing himself worthy of the nation he's leading."
https://mobile.twitter.com/olya_rudenko/status/1497162295981584409
I'm gonna have to start using CBT to stop doomscrolling.
My right thumb could've made it to Kiev by now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-kyiv-video.html
Have you read his Magnetic Mountain? I keep getting interested, and then I keep getting deterred by the price.
I haven't, though I found a more affordable used copy many years ago. I remember mentioning the length to a Russia history specialist who said, "Yeah, but the last 300 pages are just the endnotes."
Maybe more relevant to this thread, this was the book to read twenty years ago if you were interested in an English language history of Rus that isn't a Russian nationalist interpretation.
Kyiv seems to have made it through the night, so there's that. Ukrainian defenses do seem to be remarkably robust so far, or maybe it's that the Russians are fucking this up to an unexpected degree. Or both.
218: a giant DDOS has flattened British Airways' internal IT systems to the extent the whole short-haul flying programme is cancelled today, so there's that!
So, David Frum's twitter feed links to condemnation of Russia by an office related to the Japanese Prime Minister. It also appears that a Russian missile hit a Japanese-owned cargo ship off the coast of Ukraine. Umm, not a direct attack, but this is pretty terrifying.
I also can't tell how much the neocons are trying to encourage US military involvement. That's also terrifying. And I have no idea what policy we should pursue.
232: That looks good! For a later period and for non-specialists there is the "trilogy" of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas and Alexandra. The first and last by Robert Massie* and the middle one by Henri Troyat (translated from the French). Peter the Great is a fascinating read.
*Massie got interested in N&A because he had a child with hemophilia. Queen Victoria's genes have a lot to answer for.
In addition to doomscrolling, I've been intermittently watching cable news for the last few days, which I usually only do for bad weather. It feels impossible to focus on anything else.
I can't turn on cable news because we don't have cable, plus I keep saying that I don't even own a TV, so someone else has decided it's their's for using the Xbox.
Kyiv Independant is excellent if you want some incredible inspiration with your doom:
https://kyivindependent.com/
And one of my favorite jewelry artisans lives in Kyiv:
https://www.instagram.com/kolyada.t/
Yesterday, she apologized for not posting jewelry and of course we (her followers) were all "don't apologize-- give us news"-- so now she does. I check in the morning, see that Tanya still has electricity & internet, and it gives me hope :-)
Kyiv Independant is excellent if you want some incredible inspiration with your doom:
https://kyivindependent.com/
And one of my favorite jewelry artisans lives in Kyiv:
https://www.instagram.com/kolyada.t/
Yesterday, she apologized for not posting jewelry and of course we (her followers) were all "don't apologize-- give us news"-- so now she does. I check in the morning, see that Tanya still has electricity & internet, and it gives me hope :-)
Kyiv Independant is excellent if you want some incredible inspiration with your doom:
https://kyivindependent.com/
And one of my favorite jewelry artisans lives in Kyiv:
https://www.instagram.com/kolyada.t/
Yesterday, she apologized for not posting jewelry and of course we (her followers) were all "don't apologize-- give us news"-- so now she does. I check in the morning, see that Tanya still has electricity & internet, and it gives me hope :-)
oops-- apologies.
Best possible endgame? The Russian military stages a coup and throws Putin out.
Seems like the Russian military couldn't stage a picnic.
The best endgame is a Russian military coup and Tucker Carlson choking to death on Donald Trump's severed dick.
246:
The latter half of that is OUR best possible end game-- not Ukraine's.
It would probably make them feel at least a little bit better.
92 etc.: endgames---
The best possible endgame for "Russia" (Putin) is to occupy and subdue Ukraine. Putin's claim that Ukraine isn't even a country indicates his goal is to recreate the RUBK state. (Allah only knows how the K got in there.) Then Putin can go after the Baltic states.
The best possible endgame for Ukraine short of a magical Russian change of heart is that the Russian military (particularly the infantry) realize that they were lied to ("You will be greeted as liberators") and lose interest in being Ukraine's overlords, leading to a collapse of the Russian occupation regime. Maybe Putin gets couped as in 246 as a bonus. This might also be the best possible endgame for Russia (as opposed to Putin).
The best possible endgame for the rest of the world (especially small states) is that the Russians take the biggest imaginable pratfall and get out. Why? No one stood up to Putin's threat to go nuclear. A Russian victory means that any country with nukes can conquer any country without them, because no one will help, not even nuclear armed NATO states. This will trigger a rush to nuclear weapons in any country that can make them, and tempt countries with nukes to take on their main non-nuclear enemies before the window closes (I'm looking at you, China: we know why you're building up your nuclear arsenal).
I think the highest likelihood is that Putin gets the best endgame.
It's early yet, obviously, but for now the Ukrainians are certainly outplaying Russia on the propaganda front. Which is a significant asset in preventing Russia from installing an effective puppet regime. If Russia was expecting something like Crimea or the Fall of Kabul, it has miscalculated.
Hey, how is it that Russia didn't subdue Georgia 14 years ago? Is is because they were only playing for the breakaway regions?
I think it's because of the huge damage done to NATO and the credibility of the United States over those years. If there was a former president of the United States and a Congressional opposition willing to behave like their counterparts are today, Georgia would have been puppeted.
Is a hand-painted white "Z" the only insignia on a Russian tank or am I missing something?
Reddit is weirdly optimistic, making it sound like Russians are ridiculously underprepared and it's going really badly. Are they just being a GameStop untethered echo chamber? or is there reason to feel hopeful?
It is going worse for the Russians so far than most people expected, but it's still very early. The Russian army is huge and there's a lot more forces they haven't yet deployed.
That's my guess, but I don't know anything more than the Reddit people. But the Russian military has a long history of falling to shit and winning anyway. But almost always on the defensive, which isn't the case here.
Three days in and the Russians don't seen to have captured a single city or town. And it's not like they haven't been trying. It seems impossible for Ukraine to keep this up, but what they have done already seemed pretty impossible too. Russia did manage to blow up a big fuel storage facility in Vasylkiv and the last I heard it was threatening the local population, but they just don't have many successes.
Zelensky-- and the entire country-- are doing a superb job of messaging and rallying support around the globe.
Yeah, these early days have been impressive but I think this is not going to go well for Ukraine, going forward, unless/until there's a ceasefire. Also... can people cheer me up by mentioning engagements like this where there weren't plentiful atrocities on both sides? Anglophone Twitter is starting to fill up with Zelenskyy memes and pro-Ukraine cheerleading, and it makes me increasingly uncomfortable. Russian morale anecdotally seems bad, as it fucking well should be, but it's still a horrible situation. And you probably don't need much in the way of morale to blow up an oil field or gas pipeline. (These are not deep thoughts. I am very sleep-deprived.)
I ended up reading the account of a skeptical self-proclaimed Marxist, who made a few good points about credulity and wartime propaganda before going way off the rails into ideology-land. In that respect "war in the age of social media" is just like war in the age of any mass media.
I don't know how much to make of speculation that Russia doesn't have the supplies (food, fuel, rockets, ammo) for an extended fight. But the longer things drag out the more supplies Ukraine is getting, and that just doesn't seem like it'll be true for Russia.
Did Ukraine blow up 56 Russian tanks and kill General Tushayev? That sounds promising, but I don't know how to know what's true.
I love this guy-- "outstanding anti-tank effectiveness"
https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1497670726891020294
And Zelensky's twitter feed sounds like an NPR telethon-- constantly calling out thanks to his supporters and donors, while he works the phones relentlessly.
Turns out that footage of the Russian tank taken out by a banana in the tailpipe was fake.
The Russian driver was using the banana to test if it was safe to fuck GG the tailpipe when the Ukrainians reached in and took the keys.
Kyiv is still holding out. Russian troops have entered Kharkiv (the second-largest city and largest in the Russian-speaking east) and are encountering heavy resistance in the streets.
Seems likely that we're in for a long slog of brutal urban warfare.
There are reports from several cities that the Russians are firing missiles at residential apartment buildings.
i read somewhere that since the "shock and awe" isn't working Putin is going for sheer brutality and it sure looks like it.
The Bucha-Irpin bridge has been blown up to stop the Russian advancement toward the NW corner of Kyiv. It looks like there is a military hospital there.
My favorite Kyiv Insta jewelry artisan hasn't posted in over eight hours and it is daytime there.
From the Kyiv Independant:
"⚡️A referendum on constitutional amendments in Belarus, held today, on Feb. 27, is set to allow Russia to place nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus.
The vote will take place amid the Russian military presence in Belarus which it uses to attack Ukraine from the north."
This morning my favorite Kyiv insta artist has posted so she is alive, has electricity and internet.
Ukraine is not Russia and I am not worried about atrocities from their side.
I dunno. Did you that sunflower seed lady? Straight up massacre.
It's in Ukraine's interest to treat the POWs well, and at least going by their propaganda they know this.
I suspect at this point Putin has learned his invasion is failing and their forces will collapse within days, and now fears an imminent coup (whether or not one is coming) and thus has raised Russia's defcon level and is headed to a bunker.
Havoc cried, dogs of war slipped and all of that. I feel even less confident than usual in any predictions I might come up with.
Putin has put "nuclear deterrent" forces on alert.
270: The sunflower seed grandma is first-ballot Badass Hall of Fame material.
251: Hey, how is it that Russia didn't subdue Georgia 14 years ago? Is is because they were only playing for the breakaway regions?
Yes. They had split the country in half and were an hour's drive from Tbilisi. There would not have been significant resistance because it all happened so fast.
But they decided that a war of conquest and actually ruling Georgia were not worth the bother.
Christ NPR just played like thirty seconds of a horrendous electronic screeching followed by silence. Not the time to do that.
They should wait until like 2:00am.
Remember when Hawaii messed up and issued an alert for a nuclear attack? It's really good that didn't happen now.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cae3W0TDipo/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin_khuylo!
Report that Putin has fired Military Chief of Staff. I'm taking everything with a grain of salt at this point.
He should probably learn to code. Lots of jobs that way.
I'm curious to see independent confirmation of Elon Musk's Starlink claims, since he's notorious for bullshitting about stuff like this. Were there some terminals already in place?
279: I don't remember heebie telling that story. How old was Hawaii?
I'm getting the sense that targeting the palace in Gelendzhik, at least with spray paint, would be broadly well-received.
Alexander Vindman seems to be taking this seriously:
"⚡️Russian Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, reportedly fired today. Gerasimov was very highly regarded, the most important military leader of the past generation, & the architect of today's Russian Armed Forces. He's served as the head of the military since 2012."
Goes on to say:
"Either way, the situation seems to be unraveling, quickly. The next military leader will have even less cache to pushback on bad ideas. Putin seems a cornered animal, increasing desperate. It won't end well for him. The question is at what cost with what collateral damage?"
https://twitter.com/AVindman/status/1498007949104533508
Still praying for a coup/defenestration of Putin . . .
I think that's still just a rumor.
For serious analysis on twitter I'm liking https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael who has been prescient and insightful. Also https://twitter.com/RALee85 is good, area and military expertise, posts a lot of video but i've yet to see a fake or old repurposed video on his feed.
I fear Ukraine is about to "go through sime things" as its heavily -armed neighbor reacts to various initial humiliations. Not sure it ends well for Putin, but am sure he feels he really needs a quick decisive "win" now more than ever.
Ukraine is in for a very bad time. They very clearly winning in the court of public opinion, though.
I started a little cut and paste list of things to be grateful for-- things that flat-out amaze me. Here are a few:
Swiss President @ignaziocassis: 'Very probable' that Swiss will freeze Russian assets
Alfa Bank's Mikhail Fridman and Rusal's Oleg Deripaska have cautiously started to speak up against war at this point
remarkably, anti-tank rockets and Stinger missiles from Germany, are heading to Ukraine
⚡️ Ukraine is "one of us and we want them in the European Union," Ursula von der Leyen has told Euronews.
European Union to supply fighter jets to Ukraine: Russian-made ones, from Bulgaria, Slovakia and Poland
The head of the Russian delegation at a major U.N. climate meeting apologized Sunday for his country's invasion of Ukraine, telling government ministers and scientists that "those who know what is happening fail to find any justification for the attack."
BREAKING: Kosovo asks the US for a permanent military base and requests NATO membership
⚡️German Chancellor Scholz announced on Feb. 27 that Germany will build two port terminals for LNG to reduce its energy dependency on Russia.
The unanimity and resolve of the European response has been really striking and heartening. Including some really unexpected developments: Sweden sending weapons, Switzerland imposing sanctions, etc.
You know, I'm really not interested in funding a permanent American military presence in Kosovo.
Turkey is closing the Bosporus to Russian warships.
I hope they still have the same chain.
291: They probably pool the taxes of a bunch of different people for something like that.
But minimizing entanglement in the Balkans seems good.
Okay, it really was just a list of stuff that really surprised me-- us military in kosovo is not something to encourage , , ,
Turkey closing the Bosporus to Russian warships, in contrast, is both surpring and good,
Okay, it really was just a list of stuff that really surprised me-- us military in kosovo is not something to encourage , , ,
Turkey closing the Bosporus to Russian warships, in contrast, is both surpring and good,
Damn. That was me. twice. Apologies again.
Apparently, the chain wasn't across the Bosporus, but just the Golden Horn.
The "West"'s failure to lift a finger to help the many, many people protesting and fighting tyranny in Belarus for the past 12-18 (?) months now seems pretty unfortunate. I would include myself in this number, but it's kind of stupid to point out specific failures within my general failure to have a political engagement strategy of any kind other than posting comments here. I definitely feel acutely aware that I failed to give enough of a shit, though. Loads of information was out there.
Social media is starting to bum me out more, but the two guys in 286 are solid.
Also Bellingcat attempting to track the cluster munitions.
I'm giving up social media for Lent/preserving the lingering scraps of my sanity. Especially the Herman Cain Awards, because it's managing to make me both really smug and vividly afraid of suffocation.
Okay but we can make sure you binge-read the worst of the worst until 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, right? (Also, you've got 48 hours to make an exceptions list of serious people! That Rob Lee guy is really going above and beyond for a grad student. Just typing that sentence gave me a literal flashback to one of my grad school anxiety dreams.)
I was planning an exception list for puns.
We just watched a documentary on the Maidan thing on Netflix. It's quite something, and I bet a read of the archives would embarrass a bunch of us for not getting the magnitude of what was happening.
That's probably true of like 90% of what's in the archives, though. Not sure I want to go down that road...
I did read and appreciate Masha Gessen's The Future is History recently, and I'm particularly thinking of its account of Nemtsov's assassination on this anniversary.
303: Where's the link to Rob Lee?
I have a dental appointment this morning. My hygienist is Ukrainian. Her Mom was going back and forth for a while. I'm really hoping her mother is here right now.
You know, I'm really not interested in funding a permanent American military presence in Kosovo.
Spike, old fruit, I think now may be the wrong time to start arguing that there's no real problem with Russian-backed ethnic militias wanting to expand into other people's countries, and that the US certainly shouldn't be doing anything to deter it.
A couple of 30-something-year-old Russian lads I know say that their friends in St P are flaming livid about this, but the majority of the population buy the official line because they believe what they see on TV. Sounds depressingly familiar.
Also reported: the parade of heavy military vehicles through Chernobyl has stirred up a load of dust and caused a massive radiation spike. Congratulations to whoever thought that would be a good idea.
Noticeable, but not massive. IAEA: "The IAEA assesses that the readings reported by the regulator - of up to 9,46 microSieverts per hour - are low and remain within the operational range measured in the Exclusion Zone since it was established, and therefore do not pose any danger to the public." https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine-25-feb-2022
That's about 90 mSv per year. (The US occupational exposure upper limit is 500 mSv per year.) The exclusion zone is still not a good place to be, hence it still being an e
There are things to worry about in Ukraine, but this probably isn't one of them.
Shout out to the journal that sent spam this morning with the subject line "Can life flash before our eyes when we die?"
295: The Serbian part of Bosnia is rattling sabers about the non-Serbian part. Serbia has irredentist designs on Kosovo. The Balkans, as always, are a hotbed of hotheads. Some EU/US/NATO presence might be worthwhile in both Bosnia and Kosovo. It's a risk but a lot depends on the ultimate outcome of the Russian invasion.
As an aside, we went to an outdoor rally for Ukraine yesterday. Our Ukrainian friends spoke very eloquently; there were quite a few Ukrainians in the crowd. One of the speakers has a daughter (granddaughter?) who gave birth in a subway shelter in Kyiv a few days ago.
The fact that what are judged to be among the most severe sanctions on Russia are pretty much in line with what has been imposed on Iran illustrates the utter batshit insanity of the treatment if Iran. Deal was one if the few relatively unalloyed foreign policy good things if my lifetimes and it was blown up by assholes.
Fucking bonkers. And utterly counterproductive.
Biden's institutionalist instincts aren't serving him well on Iran. Huge disappointment. Thought the sanctions would be gone early.
But he and his team are handling this masterfully.
I started a new Ukraine thread.
Turns out the experts, who were all saying R could adjust, were right, damn it.
314, 315 This is the biggest let down and fuck up of the Biden administration. But I have to give him props for how well he's handling this.
320 should add in foreign policy.
The Serbian part of Bosnia is rattling sabers about the non-Serbian part. Serbia has irredentist designs on Kosovo. The Balkans, as always, are a hotbed of hotheads. Some EU/US/NATO presence might be worthwhile in both Bosnia and Kosovo.
I think an EU presence in Kosovo would be a fine idea. Its a multipolar world again, and time to stop relying one former superpower to do all the work.
I understand the history of how we got here and why it made sense, but in the long run it doesn't seem very sustainable to recognize Kosovo as an independent country but not Srpska.
But at any rate, more EU involvement in both is good. What you want is a situation more like pre-Brexit Northern Ireland where people can identify nationally however they want regardless of which side of the borders they live on, and on a day-to-day basis it doesn't matter, and there's no threat of military action.
I think an EU presence in Kosovo would be a fine idea. Its a multipolar world again, and time to stop relying one former superpower to do all the work.
Spike, please, stop. Take a moment to look up KFOR, realise that the US is providing a grand total 635 troops out of a total strength of 3,770, then realise that the commander is Hungarian and EU member states are providing virtually all the rest of the force, take a deep breath, and stop sounding like Trump. There's really no excuse for not knowing this stuff before throwing the opinion tackle into gear and starting to yanksplain.
Apart from anything else it just makes you sound so old. Like one of those guys on the news who stopped taking in new information about the world in about 1974 or so.
325 That is the second highest total of all the countries participating (and it's almost tied and Italy has historical ties to the region).
There's no need to jump down anyone's throat. The headline being responded to was "Kosovo asks the US....."
There's no need to jump down anyone's throat. The headline being responded to was "Kosovo asks the US....."
326: Spike spray paints "US Out of North America" on the walls of the high school.
I would prefer the US stay in North America. North America has the benefit of two very large oceans on either side that provide almost all the defense we actually need. Everything else is just freelancing and I think the record has shown that its attempts to play world policeman have been more destabilizing than otherwise.
Its also been hugely expensive, has empowered giant shitheads here at home, and is one more reason we can't have nice things like healthcare.
332: North America has the benefit of two very large oceans on either side that provide almost all the defense we actually need.
Yeah, but some day other countries will have ICBMs and missile-capable submarines.
If other nuclear weapons states want to turn us into a smoking ruin they can do it - and we can do it to them - but it seems like a Red Dawn-style invasion is very much off the table.
Swayze is dead. I refused to even see the new one for free on streaming.
Don't you want to know what happens when North Korea invades Colorado?
You can get good Bi Bam Bop in Vail?
I would prefer the US stay in North America. North America has the benefit of two very large oceans on either side that provide almost all the defense we actually need. Everything else is just freelancing and I think the record has shown that its attempts to play world policeman have been more destabilizing than otherwise.
I apologise. It actually sounds like you stopped taking in new information about the world in 1911 or so.
I would prefer the US stay in North America. North America has the benefit of two very large oceans on either side that provide almost all the defense we actually need. Everything else is just freelancing and I think the record has shown that its attempts to play world policeman have been more destabilizing than otherwise.
I apologise. It actually sounds like you stopped taking in new information about the world in 1911 or so.