Video on Reddit of a young lady that says she and her mother went to get grociers in Kharkiv. Russians attacked their car. They fled into an ally. Two Russian troops pursued them. A third Russian soldier stepped in and told the men not to shoot the women they were unarmed. The other two shot anyway, killing their own comrade and the girl's mother. (She laid on the floor dead under his body to survive.) She has posted a video online that shows the dead body of the solider and her mother who was shot in the head.
100% agree. This is what I said back in January: I think putting a few hundred NATO troops would have been interesting brinksmanship, but I'm also not the one responsible if they die. I think insurgency is still the way to extract a cost on Putin, but now I'm also a fan of the SWIFT and chip bans immediately. This whole "keeping it as a last resort" stuff was a mistake. They misjudged Putin thinking he was bluffing and should have Implemented sanctions proactively and said the sanctions would lift when he moves troops off the border and automatically go back into effect if troops move back to the border (obviously more complex in practice than I suggest). The other mistake was waiting - didn't Ukraine just activate its reservists yesterday? This should have been in the works long before. It feels like Ukraine got caught flatfooted to a large degree.
Great post (and call-back to your earlier post), but I think to Zelensky's credit, it's not entirely flat-footed. I think they were in this awful kind of catch-22. Calling up reservists or other maneuvers would have been called the last straw by Putin on the other side. I'm wondering if Z was prepping all he could without big prep actions, just to make sure history would record the first move as clearly as possible. (But what do I know.)
Yeah the Ukrainian comments have been odd to me, routinely projecting this aura of calm and acting like an invasion wasn't going to happen.
I disagree that it is overrated. You are correct that it wasn't online yet, but Russia has already been sinking money into getting it going in an effort to ensure future revenues which are now cut off. Germany has cut itself off from future revenues, especially since they have moved away from Nuclear energy. As other sanctions take place, removing income from Russia hurts them more. Surely Russia had some plans to deal with increased sanctions that they knew would be coming. However, they may not have prepped for this elimination of future revenue. They would be even less likely to expect it given the willingness of Merkel to work with Putin so much up until this point. I'm on board with removing Russia from SWIFT. Yes, that is an additional step. I would like to see it. It would mean more than just reduction in energy for a lot of Europe but also their Wheat imports. However it is a crippling move. It was the removal of Iran from SWIFT which caused them to come to the table regarding their nuclear program. I don't necessarily expect it to happen, but I have some bit of hope that the allies can made deals regarding resources of wheat, gas and other products to help lessen the damage done by Russia's removal from SWIFT. We'll see. It is a highly effective measure but would require a willingness for people to sacrifice and pay more for many products.
Sounds a lot like war. More and more blood on Putin's little hands. More and more angry local insurgents born on the hour.
Agree - but I think it's just another form of appeasement. Let's not prepare for an invasion in the hopes that this will convince Russia to not invade. This is where I think everyone misread Putin in thinking it was a bluff. He's a dictator and bully and the more we signal we're not willing to suffer any consequences (military or economic), the more emboldened he gets. That's where I think SWIFT would change the calculation - if the west is willing to pay a price to stop Russia, maybe he has to reconsider. But right now, we're only willing to do things that are not hurtful to us, meaning they aren't super-hurtful to Russia. We basically need to reinstate an economic version of mutually assured destruction that prevented actual war during the cold war.
The problem for the US in this proposal is that if Biden (for example) went this route it would almost assuredly cost him the presidency. His replacement, likely Trump at this point, would undue it. It's hard for the European countries to get on board as well when they see the support for NATO becoming a political issue in the US, something it had never been before.
Agree 100% with this. But this is also what emboldens Putin knowing that all of this is the case. Which creates a huge mess for everyone. Another idea is for NATO to respond by adding Sweden and Finland (if they want it - not sure they do). Unlike the Ukraine, these aren't corrupt fledgling democracies and would fit right into the core of NATO. But again, it's brinksmanship and who knows what Russia would do.
Shout out to you guys that rather blame a Democrat then I don’t know, the evil dictator that is actually invading Ukraine.
Right which is why he invested so much in Trump and the misinformation campaigns of the last decade. Putin couldn't have imagined he would have been this successful as disrupting the global order, but here we are. Yeah I don't know the situation with Finland and whether they'd want NATO. Sweden seems less likely? Historically neutral country. Russia did publicly say today they would attack either country if they tried to join.
This is a strange invasion -- everything is generally calm with reporters standing on quiet streets telling us about artillery, missiles, etc they've heard then a cut to sites that have been hit on repeat. I'm really surprised the Ukrainian government didn't start preparing their reserve before the invasion seems to be a major error. Meanwhile Russia is just slowly grinding forward -- when the tanks started rolling out of Belarus I really expected them to be parked in Kyiv by now.
