Too Much Power

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Elon Musk ordered that Starlink service to the Ukrainian be slowed.

The fact that one person has the unilateral power to do this is almost as concerning as the fact that the specific person with this unilateral power a paranoid delusional white supremacist hypocrite.

What is interesting here is how quickly this story came out.

It seems to me that it is highly the WSJ reporters already had their hooks into the Musk organization when the Starlink issues arose.

There is a very real possibility that there is a Theranos style exposé in the works.

Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said.

Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.

Musk and Trump discussed the Starlink decision in a call soon after the slowdown became public, while the president was campaigning last week, two of the people said. One of the people also claimed Musk and Trump discussed the matter prior to the decision to throttle Starlink.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s public complaints—namely that Ukrainians could die if the unrestricted service wasn’t restored—led to widespread confusion about who ordered the slowdown, and to an informal investigation inside the White House.

During the uproar, SpaceX representatives called White House counterparts seeking a unified understanding and subsequent message that the company and Trump administration coordinated ahead of Musk’s directive, the people said.

The only question here seems to be whether it was Elon Musk or Donald Trump who is really behind this.

My money is on both.

I'm a bit of a tankie, but I hate Musk more. 

Here is hoping that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ burns for this.

Fake News

It turns out that the drone strike on Yandex servers in Russia did not take out right wing troll bots all over the world.

While it might be nice if it were true, it simply isn't.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

The claim quickly picked up speed, and gained specificity: that following the Ukrainian strikes, all kinds of internet users were suddenly less present online, including MAGA accounts, those supporting Reform UK, and ones supporting AfD, the German ultra-right party. A Polish political scientist shared claims that bot activity supporting AfD had dropped by 56 percent, a post that was viewed millions of times and has since been deleted. As Radio Free Europe has reported, a Czech politician shared a similar claim, writing, “So much talk about German patriotism…then the connection from Russia goes down.”

The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.

The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.

Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign.

………

The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.

“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.

The evidence is transparently false, which says nothing about the origins of right wing bots. (My money is on Elon wot done it) 

There are Yandex bots, just like there are Google bots, and Bing bots, and Baidu bots.

Search engines crawl the web.  It's just what they do. 

Massive Self Own

Trump has announced an agreement between the Ukraine and Russia to stop strikes on each other's infrastructure.

Zelenskyy has stated that he was unaware of any such deal, and the the recent Russian drone strikes imply the same from Moscow.

Donald Trump has announced an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, apparently without consulting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said the deal to stop long-range attacks was “news to me”.

In a social media post, the US president claimed the two sides had reached an agreement. “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!” he wrote on Truth Social.

He offered no further details. Zelenskyy said he was surprised by the announcement but would agree to it if Vladimir Putin did the same. “If President Trump negotiated it with Putin – please tell us when the ceasefire begins. We are ready and we will accept it,” the Ukrainian president told the Axios website.

Earlier, Zelenskyy rebuffed Trump’s demand made on Saturday that Kyiv stop bombing Russian oil refineries. Zelenskyy said Moscow had to first halt its own “brutal” attacks on his country’s energy infrastructure.

………

There was no sign that the Kremlin was observing Trump’s ceasefire. According to Zelenskyy, Russian drones took to the sky “throughout the day” on Sunday. There were also “unfortunately” several airstrikes, he said, including on energy infrastructure.

The Ukrainian president said the Russians hit thermal power station No 5 in the eastern city of Kharkiv – the latest of more than 200 strikes this week against electricity generation and transmission facilities in Ukraine. There were another 17 hits on gas and oil facilities, he added.

The fast-moving row between Washington and Kyiv began on Friday when Trump announced he was lifting sanctions on Russian diesel exports. He said the move would reduce global and domestic fuel prices before next month’s US midterm elections.

I'm not sure how much of this is a ploy to drive fuel prices down before the midterm elections, and how much is Donald Trump losing touch with reality.

It does not really matter. 

Gee, You Think?

Iran has struck a number of clandestine CIA sites in the Persian Gulf area recently, leading some to wonder if Russia is providing targeting information to Tehran. 

Gee, you think?

The US has been providing extensive real-time intelligence and extensive mission planning assistance to the Ukraine since the war there began.

Why would anyone think that Russia would not do the same themselves for their ally?

When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov on Thursday in Manila, on the margins of a summit of Southeast Asian nations, Moscow’s war on Ukraine was officially the top agenda item.

But the meeting between Rubio and Lavrov was held under the shadow of fresh reports suggesting that Russia might be playing a more active role than it has publicly acknowledged in Iran’s attacks on United States military sites in the Middle East.

Reports of Iran targeting sites belonging to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) first emerged in the early days of the US and Israel’s war on Iran. Three days into the war, on March 3, The Washington Post reported that a CIA station in the US embassy in Riyadh had been targeted, according to two people familiar with the matter. On March 6, CNN reported, citing US intelligence sources, that Moscow had been helping Tehran locate US personnel and aircraft in the Gulf.

Now, more recently, the Reuters news agency on Wednesday reported that Iranian drone attacks on CIA facilities, specifically on the embassy in Saudi Arabia, had prompted US intelligence to investigate possible Russian involvement, suggesting that the strikes’ effectiveness and precision could suggest possible evidence of support.

I would make a number of points here, first I'm pretty sure that Iran's organic intelligence capabilities in the region are pretty good, and locating covert CIA facilities is probably well within their capabilities, and second, this is a foreseeable and measured response to similar American actions in the Ukraine.

You mess with the bull, you get the horns. 

 

 

It Turns Out That Humanity is Worse than Radioactivity

At least if you are a wolf.

Despite the radiation, the wolf population surrounding Chernobyl has increased 7 fold.

The most expensive nuclear disaster in human history turned 40 on Sunday, but the consequences have been almost perversely benign for some of the region’s wildlife.

………

Environmental scientist Jim Smith at the University of Portsmouth, who has studied this “Chernobyl exclusion zone” (CEZ) for over 30 years, told The Guardian last week that wildlife in this would-be radioactive wasteland has improved even as it’s become surrounded by war.

“Wolf populations are seven times higher than they were before the accident because there is less human pressure,” according to Smith, who noted that populations of elk, roe, deer, and rabbit have also flourished in the zone.

“The ecosystem in the exclusion zone is much better than it was before the accident,” Smith opined. “It’s been a very powerful demonstration of the relative impact of the world’s worst nuclear accident, which is not so big, and the impact of human habitation, which is devastating.”

Humanity is not good wolves, or other living things. 

………

Evolutionary biologists at Princeton discovered something unique about this gray wolf population, which likely helped these predators carve out their new niche in the exclusion zone: mutations that appear to make Chernobyl’s wolves more resistant to cancer. 

This is not particularly surprising, though it is likely that there was a f%$#-ton of cancer on the way to this outcome. 

oshit

The Ukrainian drone attack on Putin's residence was never likely to change the situation in the Russo-Ukraine war, but now it appears that it could have, and could still make things far worse, because it was also arguably an attack on Russian nuclear command and control infrastructure, which is defined under Russian law as justifying a nuclear response.

Thankfully, nothing nuclear has happened ……… Yet.

A drone attack carried out against one of Putin’s residences was also an attack against a Russian nuclear command and control center located at the residence, according to the ex-adviser to the office of the President of Ukraine, Alexey Arestovich, and a military expert interviewed by Sputnik news and Tass.

This is yet another drone attack that attempted to kill the Russian President; the first occurred when Putin was traveling to Kursk in his helicopter and was attacked by a drone swarm. This second drone attack against Putin’s residence was also an attack against a component of the nuclear triad (the nuclear control center in the residence), which under Russian law and military code, justifies a nuclear response.

Do I think that this attack will lead to a nuclear response?  No, for whatever my opinion is worth.

Do I think that further attacks increase risk?  Yes.

(update) 

Scott Ritter has a similar analysis up.

Well, That Was a Thing

Just in case you are wondering, the fact that this went down at a meeting where Zelensky was supposed to acquiesce to Trump's demands to loot the Ukraine is a whole special kind of nuts.

I'm not sure if Trump ambushed Zelensky, or Zelensky ambushed trump, or Trump is just experiencing the neurological effects of tertiary syphilis, (if I had to choose, I would choose the latter) but this is unprecedented.

US military support for Ukraine hangs in the balance and talks over a minerals deal have collapsed following a disastrous White House summit in which Donald Trump warned Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he was “gambling with world war three” and told the Ukrainian president to come back “when he is ready for peace”.

Zelenskyy left the White House early, and a press conference to announce the minerals deal was cancelled, after Trump gave Zelenskyy a dressing-down that followed an ambush led by vice-president JD Vance to shatter the fragile relationship between the two leaders.

The US president received the Ukrainian president on Friday to discuss a controversial mineral resources deal that Trump has said is the first step towards a ceasefire agreement he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.

I should note here that this sort of exchange is not unprecedented in foreign relations, but it occuring during a f%$#ing photo op for the press is.

What's more, to quote (not) Talleyrand, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake."

Fighting to the Last Ukrainian

It appears that the United States has been pressuring the Ukraine to lower its draft age to 18, because the White House wants more bodies to throw in the meat grinder.

There is an African proverb, "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffer."  This appears to be the case here.

In case you are wondering, the US motivation for this entire clusterf%$# is geopolitics, not the rule of low or peace, or anything else:

Ukraine should consider lowering the age of military service for its soldiers to 18 from 25, a senior U.S. administration official said on Wednesday, putting pressure on Kyiv to bolster its fighting forces in the country's war with Russia.

Speaking to reporters, the official said Ukraine was not mobilizing or training enough new soldiers to replace those lost on the battlefield.

"The need right now is manpower," he said. "The Russians are in fact making progress, steady progress, in the east, and they are beginning to push back Ukrainian lines in Kursk ... Mobilization and more manpower could make a significant difference at this time as we look at the battlefield today."

Russian forces are making gains in Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of the 2022 invasion, taking an area half the size of London over the past month, analysts and war bloggers said this week.
In April Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed into law legislation to lower the mobilization age for combat duty from 27 to 25, expanding the number of civilians the army could mobilize to fight under martial law, which has been in place since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Lowering the draft age might seem to be the sensible thing at first glance, but it does not reflect the realities on the ground.

………

A source in Zelenskiy's office said the country did not have what it needed to equip the troops it was mobilizing now.

"Right now, with our current mobilization efforts, we don’t have enough equipment, for example armored vehicles, to support all the troops we are calling up," the source said. "We cannot compensate for our partners’ delays in decision-making and supply chains with the lives of our soldiers and of the youngest of our guys.”

Seriously, the Washington foreign policy Blob seems to define infantry as an army of infants.

These psychopaths never seem to realize that there are real human casualties as a result of their pursuit of a, "Great Game."

The North Korean Deployment to the Ukraine

A lot of people are looking at this as a sign of desperation by Russia, but the best evidence that the situation is reverse.  Pyongyang is looking at this deployment as payback for the materiel it has supplied Moscow during the conflict.a

The DPRK's military has not had meaningful modern battlefield experience in many decades, and they are looking to learn by participating in this conflict.

Truth be told, this lack of experience in modern near-peer conflict could be said to apply to almost any military in world, with the possible exception of India and Pakistan.

Most other conflict has been some variant of colonial or counter-insurgency conflict, what Captain Edmund Blackadder would describe as a, "Viciously sharp slice of mango," type of war.

Ever since the possibility of North Korea assisting Russia in its war effort emerged in the Summer of 2022, quantifying exactly what that would look like and its downstream effects have been challenging. Now, as indications point to North Korean troops wading into the direct fighting, one aspect of this major geopolitical shift beyond how it impacts Ukraine couldn’t be more clear — North Korea getting real-world combat experience on a modern battlefield alongside a well-versed ally is a very unwelcome development for South Korea and the United States.

The experience aspect of North Korea’s involvement in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is one we have stressed repeatedly, but it’s often overlooked, with the focus being more on the immediate impact an influx of troops could have for the Kremlin’s cause. This is understandable as Russia has experienced heavy losses and Ukraine has as well. Any major infusion of able bodies into the fighting from an external source could erode either side’s ability to compete on the battlefield.

………

With one of the largest standing armies on the planet and the need for cash, energy, and technological know-how for weapons development, North Korea has excess supply to offer when it comes to exporting fighting men in exchange for what it needs and wants. Add security guarantees from the world’s largest nuclear power and technological assistance in advanced weapons manufacturing and it’s clear that Kim Jong Un has every reason to provide Russia with whatever manpower it thinks it needs to turn the tide on the battlefield.

But the fact that under such an arrangement North Korea also gets real-world combat experience is an offering Russia could not provide the Hermit Kingdom during a time of relative peace. North Korea’s isolated forces could use this experience badly.

………

The massive and as ‘realistic-as-possible’ combat exercises South Korea executes alongside its American partners are far more advanced and actually combat representative than anything North Korea is capable of emulating. This is on top of the relatively poor standards of combat training for North Korean regular forces as a whole. So, being able to train with Russian forces and then fight in a real war with the threat of things like standoff guided weaponry, kamikaze drones, electronic warfare, night vision and thermal optics, and so much more, against a very battle-hardened enemy ground force, is arguably a priceless opportunity. The fact that the Ukrainian battlefield has direct similarities with what would exist during a war on the Peninsula is an even bigger plus.

 Foreign and military relations are confusing, neh?

Of Course They Did

I did Nizi that coming The State Department has announced that it will lift the aid ban on the Neo-Nazi Azov Brigade in the Ukraine.

I'm not surprised, but I am a bit disappointed.

Given the US support for Pinochet, and the Somosas, and the Pshaw of Iran, and Syngmun Rhee, and Park Chung Hee, and Chaing Kai Chek, it seems that supporting fascism is baked into the bureaucratic culture there.

Given that one of Moscow's main talking points is that the Ukraine is infested with Nazis, and given that there are other units to which aid could be given to, this seems to be a rather egregious unforced error.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, this is worse than a crime, it is a mistake:

The State Department announced that it has lifted its ban on the use of American weapons by the notorious Azov Brigade in Ukraine, an ultra-nationalist outfit widely described as “neo-fascist," even "neo-Nazi."

The group was initially formed in 2014 as a volunteer militia to fight against Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists in the eastern Donbas region, and later incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine, under the purview of the Interior Ministry.

“After thorough review, Ukraine’s 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade passed Leahy vetting as carried out by the U.S. Department of State,” according to a statement by the Department which referred to the “Leahy Law” that restricts American military assistance to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights."

The ban was first put in place in a federal 2018 omnibus government spending package, citing that it was an ultranationalist outfit that openly invited neo-Nazis into its ranks. In addition, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported on “credible allegations” of “torture and other egregious abuses” by Azov and other volunteer units. U.N. human rights officials have also accused the group of humanitarian violations.

To be fair, extreme human rights abuses and fascism have been aggressively supported by the State Department and the CIA since the Truman administration, so this is not really policy shift.

Still, it is depressing as F%$#.

Meanwhile in Georgia

The Parliament there has passed a law requiring disclosure of funding sources of foreign NGOs operating in the former Soviet republic on the Black Sea.

The supporters of the bill say that NGOs funded by foreign governments meddle in the politics and the elections of Georgia.

Opponents of the bill say that this is in direct contravention of one the core principals of the EU, and that it would make any bid for EU accession harder.

They are both telling the truth.

NGOs funded by Brussels and Washington are used to manipulate the internal politics and elections in many nations, both within and outside of the EU, and the use of these NGOs to meddle in the internal affairs of nations nations, (including EU members) is a core EU principal.

What the law says is that organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from foreign nations must register and report these contributions.

It's a lot like §§611-621, Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is the law of the land in the United States:

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA requires certain agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities or other activities specified under the statute to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.  Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents. The FARA Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the administration and enforcement of FARA.

I get that the Europeans, and the US government want to fund more color revolutions, but seriously, at least be honest about it.

Shorter Version, the French Are Bastards

Emmanuel Macron's recent statements regarding the deployment of regular French military forces to the Ukraine have a context, and this context is a neocolonialist plan for to continue looting their former colonies in Africa.

Specifically, the CFA Franc currency allowed the existing colonial economics to continue, where this allowed France to extract raw materials and import them at below market cost, and allowed them to sell finished goods at above market prices.

This was compounded by the installation of puppet governments post colonial independence, sabotage and destruction of infrastructure of uncooperative governments, and configuring corporate deals which would mean that all the profits (beyond what bribes went to corrupt leaders) ended up in France.

This looting has been central, arguably essential, to France's post colonial economic success, and the economic failures of these former colonies.

As a result of this, the coups in in the former French possessions in the Sahel have been aggressively anti-French, and have eagerly accepted Russian offers of security assistance.

Needless to say, the French, particularly Emmanuel Macron, who has waxed rhapsodic over Frances one-sided economic hegemony in Africa, consider this to be a severe threat to France and the French economy.

This conflict is what is driven Macron's bellicose pronouncements.

The video below is rather long, 48 minutes, but explains this context in exquisite detail, and is well worth the watch.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

“Have you all lost your minds?”.

Amazing and terrifying speech by @SWagenknecht on the folly of Germany’s warmongering approach to Russia. pic.twitter.com/wfOV1ebzoO

— Thomas Fazi (@battleforeurope) March 17, 2024

This is a good demonstration of why Sarah Wagenknecht left Die Linke (The Left), and why Die Linke got hammered in recent elections.

If they had any central governing principles it was rolling back the military and leaving NATO, and they sold that out to have a (VERY) junior role in the current coalition government.

A Deal with a Vampire

The Ukraine has cut a deal with literal vampire* Peter Thiel to use artificial intelligence to clear mines.

When someone says that they have an application for AI in a safety critical application, I am dubious.

When Thiel is involved, all doubt is removed.  This will be bad:

Ukraine has turned to a company founded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel to clear thousands of square miles of mines and explosives.

The deal will see Palantir supply Ukraine with its artificial intelligence (AI) tools to organise and accelerate its demining efforts.

Ukraine is hoping to decontaminate 80pc of its potentially mined land within 10 years and bring it back into economic use, freeing up millions of acres of farmland. Roughly a third of the country’s landmass is thought to be hazardous owing to mines or unexploded ordnance.

I'm having a flash of prophecy.  I'm seeing, a booming market for artificial limbs in the Ukraine.

^*I really mean that literally. Thiel is trying to extend his life span, and one of the schemes that he invested in is a startup proposing the use of the blood of young people.

Why am I Not Surprised

In news that should surprise no one, it turns out that most of the money being spent on aid for the Ukraine never leaves the USA, because it is diverted to the US Military Industrial Complex.

Mark Thiessen, one of the more loathsome OP/ED writers at WaPo (no small feat) argues that this means that we should spend more money, because it makes American war mongers richer.

No, it still is a waste, and it still costs all of us and makes the United States a poorer and crueler place.

Sending money to Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, and Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, and the rest of them is, to quote Dwight Eisenhower, who actually served in a war, who said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

The fact that a small portion of our futures is returned to legislators in the form of campaign donations does not make spending on our dysfunctional war machine any less of a waste.

Consider the Source

About the only time to place any credence to the Wall Street Journal OP/ED page is when they print something so diametrically opposed to their normal line that it signifies a shift in thought behind the scenes.

That is the case with the OP/ED published from two members of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace describing victory for the Ukraine in its war with Russia as "Magical Thinking." 

The authors are, "Eugene Rumer, a former national intelligence officer for Russia at the National Intelligence Council, is director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Andrew S. Weiss, who worked on Russian affairs in both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, is Carnegie’s vice president for studies."

The Carnegie Endowment is a Neocon organization, chock full of former CIA officers and slavering war mongers like Robert Kagan, so this counts as a statement against interest:

As Russian President Vladimir Putin looks toward the second anniversary of his all-out assault on Ukraine, his self-confidence is hard to miss. A much-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive has not achieved the breakthrough that would give Kyiv a strong hand to negotiate. Tumult in the Middle East dominates the headlines, and bipartisan support for Ukraine in the U.S. has been upended by polarization and dysfunction in Congress, not to mention the pro-Putin leanings of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump.

Putin has reason to believe that time is on his side. At the front line, there are no indications that Russia is losing what has become a war of attrition. The Russian economy has been buffeted, but it is not in tatters. Putin’s hold on power was, paradoxically, strengthened following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed rebellion in June. Popular support for the war remains solid, and elite backing for Putin has not fractured.

Western officials’ promises of reinvigorating their own defense industries have collided with bureaucratic and supply-chain bottlenecks. Meanwhile, sanctions and export controls have impeded Putin’s war effort far less than expected. Russian defense factories are ramping up their output, and Soviet legacy factories are outperforming Western factories when it comes to much-needed items like artillery shells.

The technocrats responsible for running the Russian economy have proven themselves to be resilient, adaptable, and resourceful. Elevated oil prices, driven in part by close cooperation with Saudi Arabia, are refilling state coffers. Ukraine, by contrast, depends heavily on infusions of Western cash.

The rest of the article talks about the necessity of containment, says that Putin is bad, and that Russia and Putin are in many ways succeeding beyond the West's wildest expectations.

They also say that we can win this because ……… The Aristocrats!!!!!

If at any time over the past 30 years our foreign policy establishment had allowed even the smallest amount of sanity and reality penetrate their collective blob mind, rather than getting drunk on triumphalism and the "End of History", the entire world would be in a far better place than it is now.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

In the Ukraine, Major Gennadiy Chastiakov, a senior aide to Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian military General Valery Zaluzhny, was killed when a hand grenade among his birthday gifts exploded.

My first though was, "Great, another assassination," but it turns out that these grenades were actually intended as a birthday gift.

Who the f%$# gives live hand grenades as a birthday gift?

A close adviser to the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s army has been killed after a grenade amongst his birthday presents exploded, according to officials.

“Under tragic circumstances, my assistant and close friend, Major Gennadiy Chastiakov, was killed … on his birthday,” Gen Valery Zaluzhny posted on Telegram on Monday, saying that an “unknown explosive device detonated in one of his gifts”.

Chastiakov’s death was initially reported as a suspected assassination using a booby-trapped gift until further details emerged. Ukraine’s interior minister, Igor Klymenko, released a statement saying Chastiakov had been showing his son a box with grenades inside that he had received as a gift.

“At first, the son took the munition in his hands and began to turn the ring. Then the serviceman took the grenade away from the child and pulled the ring, causing a tragic explosion,” Klymenko said.

Police had identified a fellow soldier who gave the gift, said Klymenko, and seized two similar grenades. An investigation was under way.

Ukrainian police said the 13-year-old son was also seriously injured. Ukrainska Pravda reported Chastiakov’s wife as saying the grenade was in a gift bag her husband brought home. Some reports suggested the real grenade was amongst novelty gifts shaped to look like grenades.

So, a member of the Ukrainian military did not know the difference between a gag grenade and a real one?

I think there may be a minor problem with training and inventory procedures in the AFU.

Quote of the Day

Vlad's a bastard, he did it, but Vlad didn't emerge suddenly on February 24, 2022

—Duncan "Atrios" Black on the failure of the US foreign policy establishment in the Ukraine

Russia has been declaring red lines since before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The arrogance of the US foreign policy Blob did not allow them to hear this.

And In Slovakia

The leftist populist Nato and Euro skeptic Robert Fico and his Smer party have formed coalition government and become Slovak PM for the 3rd time.

His coalition includes Hlas party, which hived off from Smer in 2020, and the ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party. 

He terminated arms aid to the Ukraine, as he had promised during the campaign, though commercial military deals will continue.

The freakouts are beginning already, particularly from the Baltic States.

In addition to the Ukraine and relations with Russia, turning away from the previous government's neoliberal dismantling of their social safety net appears to have figured prominently in this election.

In terms of the war, withdrawing military aid is int particularly significant, the contributions were never large, and Slovakia's military inventories are already depleted, and there are no indications that they would prevent the transit of 3rd party weapons to the Ukraine.

I do think that populists in general, and right nationalist populists in particular are likely to make gains across Europe.

Both the stresses of war, and the pushes by Brussels for austerity create a Petri dish for political extremism, particularly given the EU's largely anti-democratic structures making other alternatives politically non viable.

A Different Kind of War

I know that this is from the Torygraph (Telegraph) but this anonymous quote from an anonymous senior military official constitutes a statement against interest.

He said that the UK has run out of weapon stocks to the Ukraine.

This is a kind of war that no one in the West has fought in more than a generation.

Britain has run out of defence equipment to donate to Ukraine and other countries should step in and shoulder more of the burden, a senior military chief has said.

The comments come after Ben Wallace revealed that he asked Rishi Sunak to spend £2.3 billion more on support for Ukraine before he resigned as defence secretary last month.

Mr Wallace warned that the UK had been overtaken by Germany as the biggest European military donor to Ukraine as he called for the 50 per cent increase on funding that the UK has committed so far.

The Western alliance has suffered a series of blows in recent days, with support for Ukraine dropped from a US stop-gap budget bill, election success for a pro-Russian party in Slovakia and rows between Poland and Kyiv over grain supplies.

On Monday, the Kremlin claimed that Western fatigue with the war “will grow”. The White House replied that Vladimir Putin was wrong to think he could outlast the pro-Kyiv alliance.

Last night a senior military source told The Telegraph that the onus should not be on the UK to provide the “billions” Mr Wallace has called for.

“Giving billions more doesn’t mean giving billions of British kit,” they said, adding that the UK had a role to play in “encouraging other nations to give more money and weapons”.

“We’ve given away just about as much as we can afford,” they added.

This is what near peer wars look like, and the US and NATO are completely unprepared for this.