Russia-Ukraine thoughts, week 2

Jeff St. Clair's Roaming Charges last Friday at Counterpunch nails it: I can call out the US, and US nationalism, NATO expansionism, etc., and yet still decry Putin's reaction to it by invading Ukraine. As for librulz who say that's old news, and insinuate, or say out loud, that Putin probably would have done this anyway? You don't know that. He may well not have. And certainly, before the quasi-coup (still not ready to call it a full coup) at the Euromaidan, other alternatives were possible. And, yes, it's scary as shit that 35 percent of MeriKKKa, including many furious Peloton-peddlers in Madcow Maddow's audience, are willing to up the US military ante even at the risk of nuclear war. St. Clair says, largely rightly, that this type of thought is similar to the mouth-breathing FreeDumb people over COVID.

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Speaking of? Russ and Pam Martens, who regularly have all sorts of goods in calling out JP Morgan and the rest of Wall Street, are batshit crazy mouth-breathers over Ukraine. Sad when I agree with the Koch Bros more than them, but they're right. This is of ZERO threat to US national security.

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Over at Tex-ass Monthly, Forrest Wilder takes an easy target, 27-year-old Rachel Blevins, to smear all RT content, (hey, Forrest, Lee Camp has also said RT didn't try to "handle" him) to apparently insinuate that not only are current Russian claims of Ukrainian genocide in the Donbas a false flag but any claims ever are (I tweeted him that someone as mainstream as The Nation reported on the 2014 genocide in Odessa), and to ignore that the election of the Jewish Zelensky hasn't displaced the Azov Battalion's place in the Ukrainian National Guard. Hey, Tex-ass Monthly? Next year, give yourself one of your bum steers.

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Brian Klaas at Atlantic is just one of many who rightly challenges Putin's claim that Zelensky turned Ukraine into a neo-Nazi state (with many saying "but Zelensky's a Jew!") while ignoring the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion remaining inside the Ukrainian National Guard, other neo-Nazi militias not being explicitly disavowed, etc.

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The "but he's a Jew" Zelensky can ban pro-Russia political parties but not far right ones like Svoboda, Mark Ames observes. More here, as I'll take Indian "non-aligned" media as a backup to a Ukrainian Pravda (which has no connection to the Russian, AFAIK, and which said it was sourcing an address by Zelensky) in what Ames quote-tweets and American media that may have just cursory coverage. Quick Googling shows that not all of these are pro-Putin. Indeed, the original Opposition Bloc opposed Putin's annexation of Crimea. Plus, per who Ames quote-tweets, Zelensky is even banning parties that oppose the Russian invasion. Per one person in his response thread, he's also forced all remaining TV stations (he closed others both after AND BEFORE the invasion) into one mega-channel. And, Zelensky, like Putin, is arresting human rights activists. And, Twitter responses to some of this had a shitload of Zelensky apologetics. That includes one British nutter who won't admit he had the "wrong" Pravda when trying to play "gotcha" on Jeet Heer, who like Ames, had quote-tweeted Ivan Katchanovski, who had the Ukrainian Pravda link.

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At the Atlantic, Eliot Cohen, a fellow at the warmongering CSIS, thinks the mainstream media is engaged in suppressing the "fact" that Ukraine is winning. Beyond that conspiracy theory, of course, his claim that Ukraine is winning. Now, they're not getting crushed, which Vladimir Putin had surely expected. But, as for what's on the ground? Helluva definition of "winning." And, the reason why he thinks this is the case is in the title of his book listed in the biographer's blurb at the top of that Atlantic piece. 

Beyond that, Twitter had trending yesterday that Ukraine had recaptured a Kyiv suburb. Helluva definition of "suppression."

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Showing the huge power of motivated reasoning, or something, UnHerd and Foreign Affairs can have definitely different pieces on the eventual result of what the economic sanctions against Russia will do to the Western nations applying them.