Ukraine: The Putin endgame and result?

For important background reading on how we got here, first read my story on broken promises on NATO expansion (plus the history of Ukraine as a nation-state, or not), and then the violation of Minsk Agreements by all parties involved.

People who actually think outside of boxes better than Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté are appalled by Putin. This analysis is very good, noting that Putin had won most of what he sought without firing a shot, but then went off the rails. But comments there note that new fiscal sanctions will probably do little more than the ones already in place. Russia has much more oil than, say, Iran, has little debt, has a more robust general economy and had even, during the past few years, become a food exporter.

James Dorsey, whose thought I greatly respect, offers a stellar take, not calling Putin mad, unlike that UnHerd link, but maybe ... "truculent"? He also differentiates Putin's endgame from Xi Jinping's. I think this is a better take. Putin's not mad. This is calculated, as his "the only nationalism is Russian nationalism in the lands of the former USSR and Tsarist. Russia" have the same take on Kazakhstan as Ukraine. (Dorsey offered this opinion before Putin opted for a more "general" war.)

Dorsey, in line with the comments at UnHerd, notes Putin has amassed great amounts of reserve currency and cut dollar-denominated trade in half. Plus, oil is fungible.

As for sanctions and their effectiveness in general against authoritarian governments? Dorsey references Iran. Pre-invasion Iraq might be another example.

That said, I've said in the past I don't know what Dorsey's big political stance is. That is, how much does he align with the US bipartisan foreign policy establishment? Quoting Anne Applebaum may provide a clue. 

Meanwhile, pivoting from that to the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in general? The WSJ notes how misunderstanding and underestimating Putin has been a long bipartisan affair across multiple presidencies.

Simon Sebag Montefiore called Stalin the "Red Tsar." Maybe, using "Black" not in the sense of anarchism nearly as much as European-type libertarianism, we should call Putin the "Black Tsar."

He's a tsar who does go back pre-Stalin in another way: Caesaropapism appears to be part of his drive. This UnHerd piece notes his appeals to religious nationalism. It also notes Ukrainian Orthodoxy declared itself autocephalous in 2019, backed by Constantinople but rejected by Moscow.

At the same time, other allegedly independent thinkers can be worse than Blumenthal and Maté. At Counterpunch, Patrick Cockburn thinks this will turn out for Putin like invading Kuwait did for Saddam Hussein. I find that more unlikely than likely. Cockburn is right, that American military aid to Ukraine has perhaps gone down a deeper hole than in Afghanistan.

And, with Putin opting for a more general war, the outcome may not be so good. Daily Beast reports that basically "green" draftees are being put in the front line. What's to stop them from deserting, like in World War I of the actual tsars?  Unlike the Red Tsar, Putin doesn't (yet, at least) have the equivalent of commissars at the front, shooting not only deserters but anybody who doesn't give 110 percent. Related to that, the story notes that Russian troops have "regrouped." "Marching to Georgia," either from the Sherman-era original, or Putin's previous intervention in the Caucausians, this is not, perhaps. Related to that? We have to remember that, even though Putin has revitalized the Russian economy, it's still a nation that had entered population decline until 2010, though Putin may have temporarily fixed that, with increased immigration in the last decade. That ain't lasting, either. See here for details.

At the same time, those vaunted sanctions? A day or two after their imposition, they looked like a mix of toothless / aid to big banksters. (Update: Since then, they seem to have more teeth, but still not necessarily THAT much more teeth, even as Putin laughs all the way to the bank with oil prices climbing 50 percent in less than a month.)

In the Army ... and in the union!

Cue up that old Village People song, even though it's about "In the Navy."

The Justice Department last month greenlighted the right of national guard troops to unionize while on state duty, saying that, during that time, they're state employees, not members of the military. Strangely, Strangeabbott has been silent about this, even though the Texas National Guard has been a leader in this push because of Strangeabbott keeping them called up on long terms for Operation Lone Star, then kicking them in the nads in various ways.

The first meeting of the Texas State Employees Union’s Military Caucus is set for this week.

Update: They have met, are officially organized as part of the Texas State Employees Union and met as the Texas State Employees Union's Military Caucus. Since the meeting, the Texas Military Department has moderately addressed two of the concerns Guardsmen had. 

And Military News profiles Hunter Schuler, the man behind the unionization drive. Also, per this piece, while TMD may have moderately addressed a couple of Guardsmen concerns, it has at the same time gone into anti-union demagoguery and more, all surely at the beck and call of Strangeabbott.

Question: Where's R.F. O'Rourke, aka Beto-Bob, on this? As of a day or two ago, I saw nothing on his Twitter feed after direct questioning about his stance. Per that update, it's clear that many Guardsmen think they're being used as political pawns. Open, outright and vocal support of their unionization would seem to be a no-brainer. That said, per the Military News link, at least in the past, Democrats haven't looked on military unionization much more favorably than Republicans.

Texas Progressives have more elections news

 Dan Patrick tried to get Rick Perry — the real one — to challenge Greg Abbott this year. Sadly, as Texas Rethuglicanism gets harder core, his pride likely will not go before a fall. Whether the party cracks up after his possible 2027 retirement is another issue. 

And, there will surely be an academic Texodus, and not wingnut-beloved secession, if Patrick gets his wish in the next Lege and ends tenure as we know it at public universities. Question: IF this did happen, would the Southern Association refuse to certify Texas universities?

SocraticGadfly offers up a trio of politics and voting posts from last week. First, nationally, he called out a major Green Party person for hypocritically mocking the Movement for a People's Party. Second, regionally, he wondered why North Texas Dems couldn't round up a challenger to Michael Burgess. Third, locally, he talked about how one leftist of some sort does his primary voting in a semi-rural "red" county.

That rightward surge of Hispanics in the Valley? Led by Latina women, the Monthly reports. Per the story, the surge was already happening 4-5 years ago, so can't all be blamed on Biden's empty talk rhetoric about cutting back on fracking. Also, some of the women, like Mayra Flores, are repeating Trumpy baseless claims of election fraud. The Monthly's author does come off as a bit of either condescending or clueless — legal Hispanic immigrants from Mexico, in all four Southwestern border states (but least so in California) have long had solid levels of support for tightening border controls. That said, many still are proud to identify as la raza, even if they don't use that word, which means they still don't totally fit in today's GOP. In turn, that means they're not "Lost" to full-on Republicanism.

Al Green is set to represent Brazoria County in 2021, formerly represented by goldbug racist Ron Paul and bugman Tom Delay, among others. Brazoria County White folk reportedly aren't so happy.

The Rethug primary to try to unseat Wayne-o Christian on the RRC gets more interesting.

Off the Kuff informs you that Ken Paxton has added another State Bar of Texas complaint to his collection.

Dredging Port Lavaca should be a warning about doing that again to the Houston Ship Channel, or doing any other reshaping work to the channel as part of an "Ike Dike."

The Trib, contra other recent polling I've seen, claims Gohmert Pyle trails Pee Bush and Eva Guzman in the bid to unseat Kenny Boy Paxton. Color me skeptical.

Wrongful death suits re Winter Storm Uri could start picking up speed next month.

Robert Rivard ponders DeLorean's future in San Antonio.

Texas 2036 shares the results of their fourth Texas Voters Poll.

Murray Newman reviews the contested criminal court primaries for Democrats in Harris County.

National and global

Who is Q? Or was? Machine learning says two people, first Paul Furber, then with a sort of hijacking, Ron Watkins, did it. Both, especially Watkins, have "good" reason for denial. 

The arrests in Ottawa picked up. Tamara Lich was arrested. Oh, and the Toronto Star, I guess trying to represent allegedly mainstream, non-Candice Bergen Conservatives (but, if a majority of the Conservative caucus tapped her, she's "mainstream" now, right?) says Trudeau invoking the Emergencies Act wasn't needed .... even as it admits it "wasn't clear" that he had bank-freezing powers without it.

Ukrainian President Zelensky spoke in Munich. Of course he did. Symbolism pitch! That said, re Munich, has he discussed how his own government remains at least partially co-opted by neo-Nazis, including militias like the Azov Force?

Ukraine: It's "on," but what is "it"?

"Russia looks poised to launch an attack on Ukraine" ... doesn't that Wednesday headline mean that the invasion Biden claimed happened Tuesday HASN'T HAPPENED YET? OOOPS.

That said, it has now reportedly happened. Beyond that, there's lots of "framing" involved. That's by Russia, by Ukraine, by the US and others.

Yeah, Status Quo Joe has ruled out US troops going there. But, most Americans (even if they don't know the facts about Ukrainian history, NATO promises broken and more) don't want him to do much of anything. Fortunately, he won't be dumb enough to engage in a cyberattacks battle with Putin. Russia and China both have hardened their cybersecurity much more than the US.

As for what "it" is? I put 3-2 odds in favor of Putin crossing the lines of control in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, but only if he things the native rebels can't take over all of both oblasts on their own. For more on the territories involved, go here. For more on recent duplicity by all parties involved over the Minsk Agreements, go here.

I put odds of him invading elsewhere in Ukraine, other than a few miles beyond the Donbas border, at 1-3 against. No, Ukraine is not Afghanistan, but even with his continued work to muzzle public dissent, Putin knows that coffins from Kyiv won't play well in Moscow, St. Petersburg or Volgograd. A subvariant, invading strongly Russian areas within "left-bank" Ukraine, but still staying well short of Kyiv, a possibility broached by the likes of Anatol Lieven in a great piece that fits in Eric Levitz' Category 7 below. Odds of that I'd currently put at 2-3 against, or maybe 50-50.

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Update, Feb. 24: I appear to have been wrong, as it looks like Putin has set on a larger invasion. And, he's lost a fair amount of whatever semi-sympathy I had. But, not all of it. And, per Kevin Rorthrock, it's already drawing antiwar protests inside Russia.

And, with Putin opting for a more general war, the outcome may not be so good. Daily Beast reports that basically "green" draftees are being put in the front line. What's to stop them from deserting, like in World War I of the actual tsars?  Unlike the Red Tsar, Putin doesn't (yet, at least) have the equivalent of commissars at the front, shooting not only deserters but anybody who doesn't give 110 percent. Related to that, the story notes that Russian troops have "regrouped." "Marching to Georgia," either from the Sherman-era original, or Putin's previous intervention in the Caucausians, this is not, perhaps.

Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation reminds us that, when he ran for office, current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promised to pursue a peaceful path on these issues, but after elected, officially reneged on Minsk.

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At the third time, because history is often overdetermined, though not deterministic, Russia does have a history of meddling in Ukraine. Remember the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko? (And, how Putin likes poisoning in general?)

That said, in the big picture framing that I've presented throughout the week, Eric Levitz at NY Mag, as is his wont, notes the many different ways this can be perceived. I'm not "FAR" left, but I'm left enough that I fall in stance No. 3 overall, with the asterisk that I reject the Euromaidan being a coup. That probably precludes me from being far left. I think it reflected the real stance of a fair amount of everyday Ukrainians incited to mob pitch by the likes of Svoboda without any US help of any great degree, though there was a certain amount of US fiscal squeeze, per  Counterpunch's 2014 timeline. There's a pinch of No. 7 in me, a pragmatic left-liberal but not far leftist, as well. And, his No. 9 is internally contradictory, as Turkey is not in the EU and Russia of course is not in either the EU or NATO, and I don't think EU membership has ever been even lightly broached to Ukraine.

Finally, if Ukrainians really want to invoke nationalism? What happens if Polish rightists oust a generally pro-West government and want "Lviv" back, and of course, renamed to "Lvov"?

Many people are quoting Biden's CIA head, William Burns, a former ambassador to Russia in the BushCo era, for what he told his boss, Condi Rice. I'm linking to a particular Substack:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

I link there for two reasons. One, Nonzero calls out the Munich bullshit, started in this case by Zelensky himself quite willfully speaking there. Two, he links to Peter Beinart, who has more insight, including noting that Burns wasn't alone in his thought. Bonus: A commenter at Nonzero notes that even Teapot Tommy Friedman says the US and NATO "aren't innocent bystanders."

Ukraine: Minsk Agreements, Donbas separatists, warmongers on both sides, more

In a blog post on Monday, I covered a great variety of issues related to the current stand-off in Ukraine. Much of it was about broken promises by the US, followed by the UK then other allies, lining up, ot to expand NATO eastward. 

(Note: I have now written up a massive longform piece about all the intellectual and plain old dishonesty of twosiders — and even beyond twosiders — over this war.)

Well, the chattering class of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment found other things to fixate on that they claimed showed the utter evil of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Now, I don't claim that Putin is a saint. Per John McCain's bon mot riposte to George W. Bush, you probably can look in his eyes and see "KGB." But, you could look in Schmuck Talk Express McCain's eyes and see "uncashable checks about NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia," as well as many other things.

But, as noted, I covered most of the NATO issues Monday. 

I do want to add here one thing that was a late add there.

Many people are quoting Biden's CIA head, William Burns, a former ambassador to Russia in the BushCo era, for what he told his boss, Condi Rice. I'm linking to a particular Substack:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

I link there for two reasons. One, Nonzero calls out the Munich bullshit, started in this case by Zelensky himself quite willfully speaking there. Two, he links to Peter Beinart, who has more insight, including noting that Burns wasn't alone in his thought. Bonus: A commenter at Nonzero notes that even Teapot Tommy Friedman says the US and NATO "aren't innocent bystanders."

So, now, the Minsk Agreements.

They arose, per this CNN article, when separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk areas (oblast is the term for local government administration areas in Ukraine, similar in size to large counties in western states in the US) ... well, started working for separatism and eventually declared their independence.

So, representatives of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France started talks. And eventually agreed to a ceasefire and other items. Most of said items have NOT been implemented, and the fault is NOT all Russsia's!

The bipartisan foreign policy establishment won't tell you that Ukraine was supposed to write a new constitution as part of the Minsk agreements, officially recognizing decentralization and Donbas rights. In reality, it's still running on its 1996 Constitution with early 2000s pre-Minsk amendments. Reuters notes "violations by both sides," which Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, Noah Smith etc won't tell you. Full text in English here. The CNN piece notes that Ukraine's 2015 prime minister tried to implement amendments, but massive rioting inside Ukraine put paid to that. The US bipartisan foreign policy establishment won't tell you that, either. Nor will current US Secretary of State Tony Blinken, when he said:

"Ukraine's been approaching this in good faith. We have not to date seen Russia do the same."

Bullshit. And, Tony, you, as representative of a US class, haven't approached this in good faith, either. You haven't challenged Ukrainian nationalists to stand down. You haven't called out neo-Nazis among them. Etc., etc.

There was more bullshit in his previous comment at that CNN page:

"Minsk does not spell out some issues of sequencing when it comes to the steps that the parties need to take."

Yeah, Minsk is only "sequenced" when it's to American advantage. We got it.

Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation reminds us that, when he ran for office, current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promised to pursue a peaceful path on these issues, but after elected, officially reneged on Minsk. Let's not forget, per what happened at the Maidan in 2014, arguably a coup, that the Azov Battalion isn't alone as a neo-Nazi type group. The Nation has more on that, too. Zelensky is, per that piece, surely today letting US aid reach Azov indirectly. There's also the question of just how much the Ukrainian diaspora supports it, Right Sector, Svoboda, etc. More here a year later than that piece.

We must also look at what's involved, per the map that's part of the CNN story. (March 9, 2023: Screengrab, as the cheap-asses have embedded it in a non-linkable way.)

See how small a portion of Ukraine is involved?  When you go to the pullout of the entire map, we're talking about 3.5 percent of the country in the two separatist areas, and maybe 1.5 percent under separatist control. And, Tuesday night, Joe Biden monged war by claiming this is "a big chunk of Ukraine." Of course, that was probably only the second-biggest lie of the speech; the first was claiming that Russia had invaded. Russia said it hadn't. Good thing that several nations have satellites these days, and we don't have to rely on Russia or the US. India has enough, and has no dog in the hunt,  unlike China, indirectly, so maybe it has one good enough to show us some pix. Beyond that, one of Biden's own allies undercut him, per news Down Under, as Australia warned Tuesday night US time that a "full scale invasion" could occur within 24 hours (my emphasis), and Aussie PM Scott Morrison also weaselly said that an invasion had "effectively already begun." Full quote:

“The invasion of Ukraine has effectively already begun,” Morrison said. “Russia is at peak readiness to now complete a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that is likely to occur within the next 24 hours.”

Yep, that's weaselly. (And, last I checked, Australia isn't a NATO member anyway.)

And, that's not totally Ukrainian anyway, hence the drive for separatism. And, to get behind that, we need Russian history and another map.

Czarist Russia was a traditional empire, and, other than the late addition of the largely Turkic-language Central Asian lands being administered separately, it did not have separate ethnic or linguistically based administrative divisions. It DID have internal lower-level administrative divisions, but not ethnic or linguistic ones, unlike the USSR.

Indeed, a map of 1914 Czarist Russia at Wikipedia shows that except for Poland (a separate kingdom ruled by the czars before 1864 — it was really Russian internal territory after that, legal fictions aside) and Finland (a separate grand duchy), governates, the main administrative division below the imperial whole, did not follow ethnic or linguistic boundaries at all.

As for Ukraine? No such country existed at the time its current lands were acquired, in a series of wars and other actions, by Moscow. In general, the Crimea and chunks of eastern Ukraine, the "Wild Fields," were held by khanates that were fragmentary descendants of Genghis Khan's Mongol world, along with various free-roaming Cossack groups. Northwestern Ukraine was part of the Poland-Lithuania commonwealth. Bits of southern Ukraine belonged to the Ottomans. And, as shown above, no such region called "Ukraine" existed afterward.

As far as ethnic and linguistic boundaries, or linguistic ones? Much of the northeastern portion of today's Ukraine was Russian-majority pre-1918. Russian emigration to "left-bank Ukraine" started in the 1800s. So, tankies and western imperialists alike can blame Commissar of Nationalities Uncle Joe Stalin for drawing bad borders. They can also blame Nikita Khrushchev for adding Crimea to Ukraine when he was premier. (That said, the Donbas area, with its two small separatist "republics" just recognized by Putin, has had a plurality, if not a majority, of Ukrainians by ethnicity, but a Russian majority by language. And, to riff on a Counterpunch piece, said recognition by Putin would seem to be an anti-confidence building measure.)

In short, there hadn't been a Slav-led (or quasi) "Ukraine" as an independent country between the last days of the old Kievan Rus and the breakup of the USSR. And, even Kievan Rus only extended to a limited area of today's left-bank Ukraine, most of which at that time was non-Slavic, plus, until its breakup, even if they spoke Slavic first, they were still Vikings by descent. Where we're at, in one sense, is something halfway akin to Sarajevo 1914.

Of course, a Hahhhvahd like St. Julian-Varnon will blithely ignore the NATO meddling issue,and also pretend that ethnic or linguistic Russians in Ukraine don't exist, and not even look at larger framing issues, after claiming in a tweet that this was never about NATO. I quote-tweeted to say that I'd accept it never was SOLELY about NATO, but never about NATO period? Wrroonnnggg.

With that, back to the Minsk Agreements. I support elections in the separatist areas before Ukraine takes control again, but, with the rebels setting aside their arms at the same time. That means the UN as well as the OSCE patrolling the separatist areas. And, it means election observers that aren't totally NATO/EU biased — but ones that Putin can't reject without massive hypocrisy, either.

At the same time, people who actually think outside of boxes better than Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté are appalled by Putin. This analysis is very good, noting that Putin had won most of what he sought without firing a shot, but then went off the rails. But comments there note that new fiscal sanctions will probably do little more than the ones already in place. Russia has much more oil than, say, Iran, has little debt, has a more robust general economy and had even, during the past few years, become a food exporter. James Dorsey, whose thought I greatly respect, offers a stellar take, not calling Putin mad, unlike that UnHerd link, but maybe ... "truculent"? He also differentiates Putin's endgame from Xi Jinping's. At the same time, other allegedly independent thinkers can be worse. At Counterpunch, Patrick Cockburn thinks this will turn out for Putin like invading Kuwait did for Saddam Hussein. I doubt it, especially if he doesn't move troops beyond the Donbas. Cockburn is right, that American military aid to Ukraine has perhaps gone down a deeper hole than in Afghanistan.

When will it be "pitchers and catchers" time?

On my blog post about "Quo Vadis Albert Pujols," Dave Minn (reinterpreting, I think it's Dave M in NJ) asks when I think the MLB season starts, among other things.

And, here's an extended version of my answer there.

As I told him, MLB Trade Rumors had a "betting window" open, in early January if I recall. I picked March 29 as the date for a settlement.

That's as the owners have said a settlement must be made by the end of the month to avoid delays to a full spring training and start of the regular season. The start of spring training was already postponed last week, and any further postponement will mean a delayed regular season, if everybody wants a full regular season.

Update: Owners said this afternoon if there's no settlement by Monday, regular season games will be cancelled and NOT made up. Players say if that happens? No expanded playoffs, period.

Now, I'm wondering if that wasn't too early for Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina to lead the pitchers and catchers, let alone position players like Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado.

On the issues? I think both sides have room for major compromise.

My tentative ideas for how it should be solved are that  the teams need to go higher on the lux tax, and ideally, ditch arbitration entirely. They also agree to greater revenue sharing.

In turn, the players agree to a salary scale at least vaguely similar to the NBA, or NFL, a real team salary floor as well as lux-tax ceiling and a couple of other things.  By what I mean on at least vaguely similar to the NBA or NFL, there's a rookie salary scale, then a second contract scale, then in the NBA, a third contract scale, etc. The NBA is less flexible in some ways, but also has guarantees for Rookie of the Year, MVP, etc., as shown with new contracts for players like Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid. However, it's also got a cap. It would be hard to implement a full-on version of this in MLB. Ditto for the NFL. As the desert Cardinals and the threatening to revert to Mistake by the Lake Browns show with Kyler Murray and Baker Mayfield, especially, the dead weight of quarterback salaries makes the tiers beyond rookie contracts tough to negotiate at times, even without NBA-type baked-in guarantees.

Back to the calendar. If I am right on that date? We're talking about May 1 for start of season, even with abbreviating the season. ...

That will lead to other problems. The longer this goes on, there will be additional battles over how many games to squeeze in, who "eats" how much on games that are cut, the possibility of extending the season, the possibility of everybody eating all the missed games in exchange for another one-off eight-teams per league playoffs and more.

And, as for whether Phat Albert Pujols should be part of the team, whenever the season starts? That's the subject of another blog post.

Coronavirus week 98B: Ioannidis takes himself out to the trash

John Ioannidis finished the process of taking himself out to the COVID dumpster with total bullshit in which he talks about Freedom House talking about America's decline in liberties over the past few years and attributes it ALL to COVID, and can't even mention Jan. 6, 2021. One will also noted that Ioannidis doesn't actually link to the Freedom House report. I did. It has two main areas of concern with the US briefly mentioned in a graphic near the top. One was public violence, almost entirely, of course, by antimaskers.

Further down, in the section specifically about the US, it mentions the Trump administration's "fog of misinformation." As I emailed Ioannidis (he responded when I called him out 8 months ago), that would go beyond direct fog to what Trump abetted, like the herd immunity etc. that Ioannidis touts. I told him he was a cherry-picker at best. I also said I'd alerted the likes of Massimo Pigliucci and Dorit Reuss to just how far he had fallen. ("Shockingly," Ioannidis hasn't responded to my second email. He did within 48 hours, if not 24, on our first exchange.)

Showing just how wankers Ioannidis is, he also, in a paper in the BMJ, cited the Kardashian Index (and non-satirically, it seems) for saying that John Snow Memorandum signatories are trumped in the world of actual non-celebrity science by Great Barrington signers. No, really.

I know John Horgan told me months ago, when I first blogged about Ioannidis' slipggage, that, based on Ioannidis' past reputation, he just couldn't throw him under the bus. Throw away, John. Orac blogged about the stuff in the paragraph above, and from there, directly takes look at Ioannidis' skeptics-lauded past to see if there weren't warning signs to be noticed sooner, pending what quack train Ioannidis might jump on. (I was reasonably charitable to Ioannidis in the original, but he will get none of that now or in the future.)

It is an ad hominem writ large, no doubt. But, Orac has his own history of ad hominems, including on COVID with his continuing to call the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory.

And, what IS it with Tablet? Multiple COVID contrarian pieces by Vinay Prasad as well. Like this nuttery. He also doesn't note that correlation doesn't NECESSARILY imply causation, but can, and that in social science work in general, including public health, multi-faceted correlation and causation can intertwine.

Coronavirus week 98A: More on moving to endemic; Omicron BA.2

Last week, for the second time, I talked about the transition from pandemic to endemic on COVID (and talked about possible politics being involved on this and related issues).

At the Atlantic, Benjamin Mazer says, when we do move in that direction, COVID still won't be like the flu: It will be more like smoking.

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States.

Interesting thoughts. Mazar goes on to compare demographics of the still-smoking and the unvaccinated. And, despite elite Green horseshoers and such, they match up to a fair degree. (They're not a great correlation, though, either.)

Sadly, a certain amount of Arlie Russell Hochschield type librulz still, I think, don't want to call it a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

==

Meanwhile, the Omicron BA.2 subvariant could maybe be as bad as Delta? If so, either put "endemic" on hold or else see just how much politicians (including unelected ones) will play midterm politics.

The Fifth Circuit, through a per curiam, has put a twist in United Airlines' vaccine mandate re religious exemptions. See this Twitter thread for receipts on teh stupidz. Reminder: Neither the pope, nor the leader of any major or semi-major Protestant church, nor leaders of Orthodoxy, nor any Jewish or Muslim leader of note in the US, has said there's a religious problem with the COVID vaccine.

Why WON'T the CDC release to the public most the data stockpile it's hoarding, which includes information on booster shot effectiveness, COVID by demographics and more? The "not ready for prime time" claim is bullshit; GET IT ready for prime time if it really needs work. Beyond that, as noted, a lot of this parallels work the CDC has done for years with influenza tracking; there really can't be that much new, can there? What you're doing now is fueling conspiracy theories as well as hamstringing local and state governments.

Notes on Ukraine for Wilsonian interventionists and Putin-haters: history, Minsk Agreements, more

(Note: I eventually broke out some of the bottom half of this piece, and added specific new material, for a second blog post focused on the Minsk Agreements. Note 2: I have now written up a massive longform piece about all the intellectual and plain old dishonesty of twosiders — and even beyond twosiders — over this war.)

Ukrainian President Zelensky spoke in Munich at the start of the week. Of course he did. Symbolism pitch! That said, re Munich, has he discussed how his own government remains at least partially co-opted by neo-Nazis, including militias like the Azov Force allegedly part of the state guard, but in reality having co-opted it? Of course he hasn't. Let's not forget, per what happened at the Maidan in 2014, arguably a coup, that the Azov Battalion isn't alone as a neo-Nazi type group. The Nation has more.

The easy place to start would be James Baker's pledge (not actually Poppy Bush's) to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward, a formal pledge tied to German reunification, since West Germany was a NATO member, and besides, Helmut Kohl was ambiguous about staying in NATO. That said, Poppy himself never rejected Baker's "not one inch eastward," and all NATO foreign minsters in 1990 signed off. George Washington University has a long read about the full backstory. The backstory has been reported elsewhere besides that Guardian piece linked first, like at mainstream political blogs such as Washington Monthly.

Brookings, "shockingly," spins the hell out of this and cites Gorby in a legalistic fashion. It doesn't tell you that, even if taken at face value, things like stationing missiles in Poland has violated even the "no NATO military force moved eastward," let alone a broader "no NATO membership moved eastward." And, Gorby's successor, Putin, understood the broad meaning, per the Guardian. Besides, what Steven Pifer won't tell you at Brookings is that we the US as leader of NATO, with the Shrub Bush-crafted NATO missile defense agreements, violated even that narrow Gorby version. Beyond that, the fact that each new NATO member has armed forces that have participated in NATO exercises, etc., show just how much the likes of a Pifer are spinning. (The one and only good thing in this Beeb piece is showing the number of such troops in post-1997 NATO countries.)

Update: MUCH more on the NATO expansion issue, and the lies of the lies of Anne Applebaum, at Boston Review.

Update: Per Covert Action, Biden's Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Zelensky just last fall that the US still officially backed its joining NATO.

But, really, you need to go back to pre-1918.

Czarist Russia was a traditional empire, and, other than the late addition of the largely Turkic-language Central Asian lands being administered separately, it did not have separate ethnic or linguistically based administrative divisions. It DID have internal lower-level administrative divisions, but not ethnic or linguistic ones, unlike the USSR.

Indeed, a map of 1914 Czarist Russia at Wikipedia shows that except for Poland (a separate kingdom ruled by the czars before 1864 — it was really Russian internal territory after that, legal fictions aside) and Finland (a separate grand duchy), governates, the main administrative division below the imperial whole, did not follow ethnic or linguistic boundaries at all.

As for Ukraine? No such country existed at the time its current lands were acquired, in a series of wars and other actions, by Moscow. In general, the Crimea and chunks of eastern Ukraine, the "Wild Fields," were held by khanates that were fragmentary descendants of Genghis Khan's Mongol world, along with various free-roaming Cossack groups. Northwestern Ukraine was part of the Poland-Lithuania commonwealth. Bits of southern Ukraine belonged to the Ottomans. (And other parts of it, for at least part of this period, were the Khanate of the Crimea, which was often under some degree of Ottoman supervision.) And, as shown above, no such region called "Ukraine" existed afterward.

As far as ethnic and linguistic boundaries, or linguistic ones? Much of the northeastern portion of today's Ukraine was Russian-majority pre-1918. Russian emigration to "left-bank Ukraine" started in the 1800s. So, tankies and western imperialists alike can blame Commissar of Nationalities Uncle Joe Stalin for drawing bad borders. They can also blame Nikita Khrushchev for adding Crimea to Ukraine when he was premier. (That said, the Donbas area, with its two small separatist "republics" just recognized by Putin, has had a plurality, if not a majority, of Ukrainians by ethnicity, but a Russian majority by language. For example, Mariupol is split almost exactly even on ethnicity, though a large Russian majority by language. And, to riff on a Counterpunch piece, said recognition by Putin would seem to be an anti-confidence building measure.)

Don't believe me? See this map from Moon of Alabama about the expansion of Ukraine, including left-bank Ukraine.

Oh, read the post, too.

Here's a good map of language pluralities in Ukraine's regions, from Wikipedia's article about that:

In short, there hadn't been a Slav-led (or quasi) "Ukraine" as an independent country between the last days of the old Kievan Rus and the breakup of the USSR. And, even Kievan Rus only extended to a limited area of today's left-bank Ukraine, most of which at that time was non-Slavic, plus, until its breakup, even if they spoke Slavic first, they were still Vikings by descent. Where we're at, in one sense, is something halfway akin to Sarajevo 1914.

Re the neo-Nazis? Let's not forget that during the Russian Civil War, the then-area of Ukraine was a hotbed of Whites. World War II saw the Vlasov Army and other things, of course.

And, neo-Nazis aside, as this actually good story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette testifies, Ukraine, like Russia, has its share of corrupt oligarchs.

(Of course, a Hahhhvahd like Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon will blithely ignore the NATO meddling issue, and also pretend that ethnic or linguistic Russians in Ukraine don't exist, and not even look at larger framing issues, after claiming in a tweet that this was never about NATO. I quote-tweeted to say that I'd accept it never was SOLELY about NATO, but never about NATO period? Wrroonnnggg. 

And, try this analogy on:

Imagine both NATO & EU crumbling badly after the Great Recession. Putin offers bailouts to not only Balkans but Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal. Promises not to revive Warsaw Pact, but does so 5 years later & expands it. This is what the bipartisan foreign pol estab won't talk abt

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) February 22, 2022

You can thank me later.

You also won't be told that Ukraine was supposed to write a new constitution as part of the Minsk agreements, officially recognizing decentralization and Donbas rights. In reality, it's still running on its 1996 Constitution with early 2000s pre-Minsk amendments. Reuters notes "violations by both sides," which Julian-Varnon, Noah Smith etc won't tell you. Full text in English here.)

At the same time, contra Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté and the other allegedly outside the box stenos who actually come off in many ways Putin-stanners, Putin himself, before invading Crimea, did pledge not to violate Ukraine's territorial integrity. That one's in writing, too, albeit pre-Putin, of course. And, that pre-Putin? 1994 was also pre-NATO expansion, both in terms of expanded membership and definitely the narrower planned or actual troop presence. So, Putin, with that agreement theoretically being tied to larger Eastern European security issues, can argue the US and UK broke it first. Or, he can argue that the US has broken that Budapest Accord via economic bullying, also specifically verboten.

Steven Pifer either knows all this and is duplicitous, or he doesn't and he's an idiot above his pay grade.

Many people are quoting Biden's CIA head, William Burns, a former ambassador to Russia in the BushCo era, for what he told his boss, Condi Rice. I'm linking to a particular Substack:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

I link there for two reasons. One, Nonzero calls out the Munich bullshit, started in this case by Zelensky himself quite willfully speaking there. Two, he links to Peter Beinart, who has more insight, including noting that Burns wasn't alone in his thought. And, in a petard moment, Beinart notes that ... Steven Pifer called Bush's statement that Ukraine would eventually join NATO "a real mistake." Bonus: A commenter at Nonzero notes that even Teapot Tommy Friedman says the US and NATO "aren't innocent bystanders."

 

Now history doesn't actually rhyme, whether as farce or tragedy. It's also neither cyclical nor determinist. So, because Ukraine has barely existed in the past doesn't mean it shouldn't exist today. But, it does mean that the issue of what Ukraine is, is not so cut and dried as most Americans may think.

At the third time, because history is often overdetermined, though not deterministic, Russia does have a history of meddling in Ukraine. Remember the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko? On the second hand, that happened after the first expansion of NATO, in 1999, and after its second expansion, earlier in 2004. That's not to "justify" Putin, as I don't in general. But, it IS to offer background.