On the subject of geopolitics, you might be interested in this:
10 Likes
https://twitter.com/s_khytrenko/status/1591415230571085825
https://twitter.com/simonmontefiore/status/1591387100733394946
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1591349789391982593
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1591439412474556416
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1591190234108252160
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1591424405535862785
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1591153819265945600
https://twitter.com/CovertShores/status/1591446332350267392
Melnikov said the village was originally home to 1,000 people. Between 300 and 400 stayed after the Russian takeover. He said: “We asked them why they had come. They replied: ‘To make your lives better.’ By the time they exited we had gone back in time 30 years. We now have no electricity, gas or water. Everyone is broke and there are no jobs. Instead of waging war, Putin could have fixed the roads and hospitals in his own country.”
17 Likes
It’s cute how the ‘worthy descendants of great ancestors’ have a list of what their ancestors did; but just quietly fail to mention anything they’ve done to qualify for ‘worthy’ status.
7 Likes
16 Likes
https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1591544511062237188
https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1591544514757660672
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1591756499604627457
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1591757665071693824
https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1591382336595120128
https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1591515037101068288
https://twitter.com/azamatistan/status/1590846401675919360
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1591723943068680193
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1591488510804262912
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1591525688942772227
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1591713928157233152
Kherson humanitarian situation ‘severe’ amid water and medicine shortages – mayor
Russian forces destroyed key infrastructure in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson before retreating, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said.
Before fleeing from Kherson, the occupiers destroyed all the critical infrastructure: communications, water, heat, electricity.
Kherson’s mayor said the humanitarian situation was “severe” because of a lack of water, medicine and bread, as residents celebrated their liberation in what Zelenskiy called a “historic day”.
Reuters also reported that the mayor, Roman Holovnia, told television:
The city has a critical shortage, mainly of water. There is currently not enough medicine, not enough bread because it can’t be baked: there is no electricity.
Zelenskiy said authorities had, in their efforts to stabilise the region, dealt with nearly 2,000 mines, trip-wires and unexploded shells left by the departing Russians.
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1591472331368861697
13 Likes
the clearest statement of russian policy in Ukraine I have seen articulated by anyone, official or unofficial. It reads:
“To everything happening in Ukraine, there are two response: (1) It didn’t happen, and (2) They deserved it. Both are correct.”
The Narcissist’s Prayer re-stated once again by a fascist.
From the azamatistan thread:
The view of Russia as a big brother bestowing its blessings on the lesser people around it is ubiquitous among Russians of all political persuasions. In this narrative, Russia’s neighbors are perpetually indebted to it. The relationship is always unequal.
[…]
A central part of this worldview is a refusal to accept that nations formerly under Moscow’s control could have agency of their own. Attempts by Kyiv, Astana, or Tbilisi to set a course diverging from that of Russia are seen as a result of manipulation by great powers elsewhere.
Combine all of the above with the brutality and thievery on display and we see Russia reduced to the status of an abusive and gaslighting husband who also thinks he’s God’s gift to the world.
14 Likes
Some of us may find the themes familiar in this excellent thread.
A country that sees its imperial aggression as inherently good, and that its actions always save or liberate its victims.
A country that sees its military as bringing prosperity, not occupation.
A country that sees its “allies” as eternally indebted to it, and isn’t afraid to bring this up time and time again. “You wouldn’t even exist without us” being their constant refrain.
A country that sees any local agency or disagreement with the Empire’s desires as unnatural and always the fault of outside agitators.
Yeah, who would think that a country like that would launch a doomed aggressive war. Only someone with a memory stretching back to around 2001 or so.
17 Likes
9 Likes
Amurica:
14 Likes
9 Likes
8 Likes
raccoons as a replacement.
9 Likes
9 Likes
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1592090565142790144
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1592098313431822338
Zelenskiy visits newly liberated city of Kherson, thanks Nato and allies for support
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has visited the newly liberated city of Kherson, days after a Russian troop withdrawal from the southern Ukrainian city after months of occupation, a Reuters witness said.
“We are moving forward,” he told troops. “We are ready for peace, peace for all our country.”
He thanked Nato and other allies for their support in the war against Russia.
In the end, Stremousov might have stepped too far out of line.
As his public profile grew, so did his confidence. Lambasting Russian military defeat in the Kharkiv region, he publicly suggested in one of his daily videos that the country’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu – a close friend of Putin – should shoot himself.
“Indeed, many say, if they were a defence minister who had allowed such a state of affairs, they could, as officers, have shot themselves,” he said.
His murky death, whether indeed a genuine accident or the result of a Russian security services plan to get rid of an inconvenient loudmouth no longer useful to the authorities, will likely remain a mystery for the foreseeable future
https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1591333381828218880
https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1591551891955388417
https://twitter.com/peterfrankopan/status/1592106788018884608
https://twitter.com/BBCSteveR/status/1592138798435033088
Short thread:
https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1592102437539975168
10 Likes
8 Likes
The translation of the Russian in that Lavrov post:
Lavrov has a brand new Apple phone and watch, and a T-shirt with the name of the iconic American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a heroin overdose at 27. The fairy tale about the “holy war with the West” is for Russian depth explorers* who are now dying in the trenches near Luhansk.
[* I assume this means conscripts, the lowest status troops]
10 Likes
Shouldn’t he be worried that the CIA has pwned his iPhone?
10 Likes
For me that’s the aspect of Russia that has me most puzzled about how exactly to describe it:
On the one hand it is locally governed and absolutely mainlining bellicose nationalism; but in other respects it actually looks a lot like a colonial zone:
There’s no presence of a colonizing power’s military forces, obviously; but there’s a local elite that, in its willingness to run extraction industry substantially on foreign expertise and local labor and environmental sacrifice(then sell the proceeds for slush money to launder in London and spend on European luxury goods and foreign educations for their kids), looks a lot like the local elites commonly set up or co-opted by imperial powers who recognized their inability to handle all the oppression and extraction purely with direct military force and so came to some sort of power-delegation agreement with a picked local group; and it also has a lot of the effects commonly imposed on colonized areas(massive offshoring of wealth, comparatively low local investment in human capital and value-added industry and technology; high tolerance for human and environmental costs incurred in the production of export commodities.
It absolutely talks the talk; and is pretty keen to walk the walk wherever it can, of being an imperial power; and its leadership’s legitimacy, such as it is, is founded on a narrative utterly incompatible with being someone’s colonial extraction zone; but that same leadership, in economic terms, is substantially the local enforcer and extraction overseer for ‘the west’ that they so stridently dislike and do a lot of chest thumping about being strong and independent of.
I don’t know what to call this somewhat curious combination of what’s essentially an economically colonial local elite whose legitimacy is, perversely, founded on the rhetoric of strength and imperial glory that their willingness to plunder the present and sell the future to allegedly hostile powers in order to launder the proceeds with those same powers and indulge in their luxury goods.
Compare to China, where they were(and to some extent still are) willing to provide cheap labor and environmental sacrifice zones; but, if not from the very beginning, pretty early on started treating Western offshoring/outsourcing enthusiasm as a means to an end, and aggressively moved to acquire technology and expertise in order to move up the stack and supplant the people they were formerly low-value subcontractors for; rather than just building local rackets dedicated to selling the future for scrap and laundering the proceeds in London. Certainly not free of people enthusiastically laundering proceeds when they can get them out; but both aggressively against, and on a fairly plausible path to avoid, remaining an economic colony.
13 Likes
I know exactly what you’re talking about, and agree that it’s a novel and unique enough phenomenon that it’s hard to put a name to it. One of the distinctions here is that those elites most co-opted – the billionaire oligarchs – don’t have any real political power in Russia. Lavrov is a borderline case, someone who’s risen high enough in the kleptocracy’s political elites that he’s also a billionaire who’s developed their addiction to Western luxury goods. He’s a gangster, so unless he falls out of political favour with his boss he feels he can show up like this with no consequences.
7 Likes
