War
You have woken up to a different world.
Russian forces rain fire on cities in Ukraine, land, troops on its coast … Putin demands surrender …
Threatens hypersonic missiles…
Putin will “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine” …
Thunderous explosions over Kyiv …
Fears Putin will deploy Russia’s terrifying thermobaric rocket launchers that can ‘explode’ enemy’s lungs …
Russian state TV hails “historic” day ...
Fear, fatalism and defiance ...
Putin’s long-feared attack on Ukraine will rock America and the world …
Mass Text operation terrorizes Ukrainians as Russian troops roll in ...
TRUMP: LET'S GO, PUTIN!
EU vows to break free from Russian gas ...
Pummeled by cyberattacks, government sites knocked offline …
“WORST CASE SCENARIO ” …
Oil prices jump as stock markets slump
“Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history.”
Ukraine asks Turkey to block Bosporus and Dardanelles ...
NATO in emergency session …
The lamps are going out
As I write this, it is nearly 0400hrs in the Ukrainian capital. Sunrise there today will be at 0650hrs. If there is to be a dawn attack, it comes soon. Judging from the scattered reports of shelling in Mariupol plus the phony Donbas “republic” requests for Russian intervention in the putative whole of their territories, it is coming. The whole dreadful wait reminds one of Sir Edward Grey’s famous quote: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He uttered it on August 3rd, 1914.
We wait for the curtain to descend and the new era to be born. It is the return of great-power war in Europe, the very specter our grandfathers thought they ended, not petty squabbles in erstwhile Yugoslavia but tanks on the steppe, whole divisions overrunning whole countries. We are transported from the thoughtless idyll in which we grew up, stupidly ungrateful for the privilege of driving from the English Channel to the Black Sea without a single visa shown, without a suspicious glance from an armed gendarme, back into the world chronicled by AJP Taylor and BH Liddell Hart. The long peace was by no means an unalloyed good, to be sure. It facilitated dissolution, decay, and forgetting alongside prosperity and utopian fantasizing. But it had one signal virtue: it was peace. …
Something as an open question. How many people here know what TARGET2 is? My personal opinion today is if you don't know what it is you have no business talking about sanctions which means that myself and one other person on Twitter apparently from Hamburg, Germany have any business talking about economic sanctions.
**In general I have been noticing dozens of so-called sanctions and national security policy experts that have no idea what Target 2 is on the Twitterverse today.
What we are witnessing in Ukraine is the legacy of Angela Merkel.