Chris Hayes explains Putin’s strategy in Ukraine. He identifies Putin’s enablers in the U.S., starting with Paul Manafort, who reaped millions as a lobbyist for Ukraine’s pro-Putin president.
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No one country is perfect…so stop portraying Putin as the devil and the US as the saint.
This ongoing xenophobia is reminiscent of the pogroms against the Jews during WW 2.
Peskyvera: I was just wondering, how much does the Kremlin pay you to intrude its propaganda on genuine discussion in the US? Most of us read your book and know who wrote it.
My only complaint is that it took so long to understand it. But, alas, civilized minds tend to project their civility onto Neanderthal others, long past when they could/should have realized otherwise. Sigh . . . . CBK
Well said, CBK!
Huh? Your comment makes no sense, is without merit and sets up a false argument that does not even exist. There has been plenty of criticism of the US and its botched wars of choice on this site. No one here has ever portrayed the US as a faultless saint, so stop your lying and obfuscating. There is a horror show going on in Ukraine NOW as we speak!!! Innocent people are being slaughtered by the Russians. News flash, the Ukraine did not invade Russia and the Ukraine is not bombing Russian cities. And who initiated and is orchestrating this continuing massacre of innocents………..Putin. This is his war of choice, he’s a monster, he is reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble and targeting civilian areas.
My above comment was for peskyveratroll and Putin acolyte.
peskyvera,
You compare the horror expressed towards Putin as “reminiscent of the pogroms against the Jews during WW 2.”
Let me unpack this.
The pogroms against the Jews were specifically committed by Russian Cossacks in the early decades of the 20th century.
The Holocaust was not a pogrom; it was an extermination program in which Nazis sent six million Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.
Putin is no victim. Putin is an aggressor. Putin has sent his military forces to crush the people of Ukraine.
Ukraine, not Putin, is the victim.
Putin is a monster.
He is very likely to do to Kiev what he did to Grozny in Chechnya in 1999: He utterly obliterated the city.
No words can express my revulsion for this inhuman monster.
Amen
Expressing disgust for someone who invades a sovereign nation and murders its civilians is equivalent to perpetrating pogroms and the Holocaust?
That has to be the most insane (and sickening) thing I have ever read.
We have a winner, folks!
Having made a catastrophic miscalculation, Putin is now trying to pull it out by turning to pummeling civilians from the air. It’s utter madness, and many, many, many thousands will die and be forever mangled–blinded, crippled, disfigured. None of this matters a whit to him beside his pride. What a loathsome creature.
Wow! This video really connects the dots. I tried to share it with my daughter, but it was removed from youtube.
Retired teacher, the video has not been removed. I just opened it.
The Chris Hayes video
It is back up now, but it was removed shortly after it was posted. Maybe it went through some type of review for misinformation, which it isn’t. It is history with an emphasis on “cause and effect.”
Maybe it crashed due to many people trying to see it at same time
Bill Barr said in a recent interview about his book that if Trump was the GOP candidate in 2024, he would vote for him. Barr opposes a “progressive” agenda more than he fears Trump leading the free world.
Every government official, elected or appointed, should swear an oath to democracy over rule by man’s interpretation of “the Word”.
Sorry to be inconvenient, but: The U.S. government and media think Nazis in Ukraine are a myth. It wasn’t always the case, as Robert Parry reported in 2015: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/06/robert-parry-when-us-house-saw-ukraines-neo-nazis/
We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Dienne, it is a shame you are so poorly informed about the history of the Soviet Union. You really should not waste valuable space on this blog posting ignorant comments. We are not at war with Eurasia. We are in an alliance with most of the nations of Europe, which is called NATO. We are also allied with nations in Asia.
And since you are so uninformed, let me help you out here: We have Nazis in this country. We had them in the 19th century (they were called Know-Nothings). Even during the Civil War, there were attacks on Black people in New York City by racists. We had (and possibly still have) the Ku Klux Klan. Actual Nazis marched in northern cities in the 1930s. Neo-Nazis burned crosses in front of homes lived in by Blacks. White supremacists killed civil rights workers and Black people. Alex Jones and Donald Trump have stirred up the Neo-Nazis and tried to bring them into the mainstream. Remember when the Neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville in the first year of the Trump regime–they chanted, “the Jews will not replace us..”, and he said there were “fine people on both sides.” There were not fine people on both sides.
You take any excuse you can find to shield Putin from criticism for war crimes in Ukraine.
Both Dienne and PeskyVera are like Republican policymakers insofar as they mirror in their thinking the idea that, for instance, because some people on welfare are cheaters or just want handouts, then all government policy should be written with ONLY cheaters and lazzies in mind. (Usually, others get lip service, but only that. I’ve heard this argument over and over again.)
Dienne’s ideological absolution/black/and/white thinking has been obvious for a long time. As for peskyvera working from the fascist playbook, she SAYS that “no country is perfect,” but then BUILDS THE STRAWMAN argument by claiming that WE should stop portraying Putin as the devil and the US are saints. But as others have said here, on principle, NO ONE is doing that. WE KNOW no country is perfect, but neither are all countries founded on democratic principles. And there’s the foundational rub. (The use of false equivalence is in the fascist rulebook.)
. . . but wait! what about the here-and-now evidence? **Who is actually on a rampage killing children and old people and razing cities as we speak . . . merely because others disagree with him, they don’t want him as the neo-God that he thinks he is, and he doesn’t like the way they think? And who is shutting down the “also not perfect but still vibrant” media?
Putin reminds me of a wife-beater who, when the wife decides to leave, he kills her because he cannot own her. “If you leave Russia, I’ll raze your cities and kill all your people.” Putin’s ideology and lies (at its service) have destroyed any intelligence he might have had in the first place. If you cannot truck questions, your mind is dead. (“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”) And to realize the personal, if you tell the truth, you die.
Here’s a possibly useful metaphor: If you are crossing a bridge and get into a civilized argument about X, that’s one thing. (We all keep benefitting from the bridge.) But if the other person starts cutting down the cables that keep the bridge up (Putin), then it’s not just an argument between otherwise reasonable people. It’s foundational. Cable-cutting is NOT EQUIVALENT to either of the arguments on the bridge.
TOTALITARIANISM is not equivalent to DEMOCRACY. Power at the top (authoritarian), power emerging from the bottom (from the people). The two political positions are antithetical from the get-go.
Putin is a totalitarian . . . he wants to cut the cables out from under democratic/civilized life.
Also, Putin is about the political which is a kind of neo-xenophobia:
Only it’s not race, gender, or anything the like. In true fascist fashion, these are cover lies for what the real problem is. And so, when you see those people being bombed who are carrying children across rivers, and his own people uprising in the streets being jailed for 15 years, or acidified or killed, think of those people as carrying the virus that Putin wants to eradicate: the neo-virus is democratic thinking and Putin is trying to kill all of it, regardless of who is carrying it. CBK
Brookings disagrees with your assertion that Yanukovych was a Putin-puppet Diane. Here’s what they said about his election. “Yanukovych was elected president in 2010 as the result of an electoral process that domestic and Western observers found to be free, fair and competitive. Some observers credited it as the best election process in Ukraine’s history.” They said he tried and failed to achieve a balanced foreign policy between Russia and the West, but failed to do so by falling back into authoritarianism.
But he was a Putin puppet. When faced with a popular uprising, he fled to Moscow. Not Warsaw, not Bucharest, not London, but Moscow. He was the kind of complicit leader Putin admired. A puppet.
Steven Pifer did think that Yanukovych acted like a puppet during the uprising Diane. Pifer also said that the support for the uprising was very difficult to gauge, but polled at 50 to 58 percent, so it probably only had a slight majority. Here’s his take. https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/why-did-ukraines-yanukovych-give-in-to-russian-pressure-on-eu-deal/
Protestors turned out against Yanukovych day after day during the bitter cold winter of 2013-14. They didn’t take a poll. They wanted a leader who would turn to the west, not to Putin. Yanukovych hired Paul Manafort to do PR for him, millions of dollars.
The former ambassador to Ukraine said—in 2013–“He — turning back towards Russia is going to cause even more disquiet on the part of the Ukrainian public and the Ukrainian elite and also on the part of Ukrainian business. So, he’s limited on that point.
“And, also, I mean, I think he’s now seen he can’t use force. One of the reasons why you have such a large number of people out on the streets is because of the use of force on Saturday. So, again, his options are becoming narrower and narrower.”
Another commenter insists that the street protests in 2013-14 were not genuine. They were, and they represented 50-58%. Probably a large number who didn’t approve were neutral.
I meant to say “did not think that Yanukovych acted like a puppet” Diane
Why did he flee to Moscow, not to Berlin or Warsaw or another nearby Capitol?
Diane, Yanukovych probably fled to Russia for protection from the far right in Ukraine. The Right Sector threatened revenge for the killing of their leader Oleksandr Muzychko.
CBK,
I feel as if your truly excellent comment got lost and I wanted to tell you that I thought it was brilliant. Thank you for writing it.
D-77: Robert Parry is dead, this is an article from 2015. How the hell is it relevant to what is going on now with the invasion of Ukraine and the slaughter of innocents? How does this excuse Putin for crimes against humanity? So the fact that there are some neo-Nazi nuts in Ukraine justifies Putin’s massacre of the civilians. I’m pretty sure that Ukrainian babies are not neo-Nazis. D-77 and peskyvera = propaganda trolls.
Dienne, no one thinks that there aren’t neo-Nazis in Ukraine or in the United States for that matter. And everyone, with very, very few exceptions, knows that Putin’s various claims concerning why he invaded Ukraine are transparently bulls**t. Ukraine has a freely elected government, led by a Jew whose family members died fighting the Nazis. You aren’t being “inconvenient”; you are being ridiculous. And breathtakingly shameless. Children are being murdered by Russian invaders as you read this, but you keep serving up apologia for the murderers.
Because dienne77 is a troll, not a real person.
Bob, do you think any parent could be this cold and indifferent to the suffering in Ukraine? I no longer believe dienne77 is a parent.
NYCPSP, Dienne is a real person. I met her at an NPE conference.
Diane,
Are you sure the person you met at that conference is the same person posting under this name?
You also noticed earlier that dienne77 won’t criticize Putin or Trump no matter what. ALL of her criticisms for 6 years has been repeating Republican talking points (about the impeachment, exonerating Trump and defending Putin). I haven’t seen any of that from real folks on the left. Lots of young people on the left are extremely anti-Democrat, but they are also critical of Putin and Trump – they don’t defend them and pretend they are victims of some evil Democrat-directed plot against them. But right wing Republican QAnon folks – true believers in Trump and Putin – do post like that, so it is possible that dienne77 is simply a QAnon right winger.
I say that as someone who actually bothers to go the links dienne77 posts to read them. The ones from legitimate known left sources are extremely critical of Biden and Democrats but also don’t pull their punches with Trump and Putin. It makes no sense for dienne77 to be this unwilling to criticize Putin.
You recall that dienne77 was bashing all of us as idiots in the lead up to the invasion, claiming that it was propaganda that Putin wanted to invade.
Then, when Putin did invade, dienne77 acted as if all her previous posts never happened, and just immediately started posting about how Putin was justified because he was going after Nazis or some such nonsense.
Again, I know people on the left who hate Democrats, but they don’t constantly pivot to some new reason to defend Putin. If you are on the left and hate Democrats, you also hate Trump and Putin.
I know people who are rabid Trump supporters and that is what dienne77 sounds like. Not like anyone on the left. There is a difference in tone. Even the most radical folks on the left can criticize Putin. dienne77 can’t. She will defend him one way, and when that way is proven to be false, immediately defend him a new way that is also false and absolutely act as if she never defended Putin the previous way. Talk about “we have always been at war with Eastasia”.
dienne77’s posts are a case study in what Russian propaganda looks like, including trying to gaslight all of us into believing that we didn’t actually read any of the posts she previously made. Accusing us of doing what she does. That isn’t normal. It isn’t a conversation. It is simply a non-stop posting of dishonest propaganda to defend Putin (or in the past, Trump).
At best, it is what brainwashed right wing Trump supporters believe and if you think dienne77 is a brainwashed right wing Trump supporter, that could be true. But she is just not posting like real, Democrat-hating folks on the left. Those folks are not afraid to criticize Putin, dienne77 is. And she always pivots and tries to gaslight us, which is also what right wing folks do. Her modus operandi is classic far right, not classic far left.
I think it is incredibly insulting to the admirable leftist movement in this country to even consider dienne77 as representing what they stand for. She represents what QAnon and Republicans stand for. I don’t even understand why she is on this blog, as she also bashes teachers for not teaching throughout the pandemic and keeping schools open.
Nice use of the Orwell, Dienne. I will give you that. Ofc, it’s Putin who thinks himself Tsar of Eurasia.
Here’s what you are making excuses for, Dienne:
In 2016, it became obvious that there was some connection between Trump and the Former Soviet Union. I recall thinking: “well, that is it. No candidate for dog catcher with ties to a communist is going to get enough votes to even clean an office, let alone be elected to one.” But I was wrong. What ever Putin was as a communist has somehow become fine for the American Republican voter. Trump went in in 2016, elected by an electorate that thought more of a huckster and a former KGB agent than they did of an American political figure.
Now these same voters give Putin more credit than Biden. Amazing. Breathtaking in its silliness. Perhaps Manifort is the connection.
Most of us know what the Always Trump for Life supporters will say. That video is Fake News even though it is based on historical facts that cannot be proven wrong.
Trump’s MAGA zombies will just shout “Take News!” repeatedly drowning out anyone that attempts to point out that everything in that video was based on actual irrefutable facts.
Anyone that refuses to stop attempting to point out the truth will eventually have AR-15s pointed or shaken at them by the same type of Trump zombies that invaded the capital on January 6th..
It appears from his tweets that Ryan Girdusky wants JD Vance as Ohio Senator to replace Portman.
March 1 tweet. “Vance’s hard core opposition to U.S. military involvement in Russia-Ukraine crisis seems extremely popular with GOP voters.”
I speculate Ukrainians (and, those who are objective) would describe what Russia is doing differently than Vance did.
Opinion from WaPo Plum Line
“Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance suffer a moment of self-doubt over Putin”.
A skeptic might say the polls about American views didn’t go they way Carlson and Vance thought they would or, the way they thought the right wing machine could steer them.
Vance said, “Who cares what happens in Ukraine?” Carlson has been a Putin puppet.
Just some stray, unconnected thoughts-
Are journalists looking for connections between political libertarian billionaires and Putin?
Was JD Vance identified by the network of a king maker while he was at Harvard?
If I was Vance and I was my own man I wouldn’t want my reputation linked to Carlson or Girdusky.
(PR watch described Carlson’s show as funded by Koch.)
Daily Beast reported about Parents Defending Ed, a group that hired a law firm that formerly represented Trump. PDE’s president founded Speech First. Daily Beast reported “extensive ties to the Koch funding conservative donor network.”
Diane, regarding the JD Vance quotation, one thinks it’s like saying, “Who cares what happens in Appalachia.”
A a result of Russian defectors, more info. about Putin’s strategy to foment a race war in the U.S. will be known. Some American influencers may find themselves in uncomfortable positions.
Close the skies above Ukraine!!!!
I recently saw a much-disseminated picture of Tsar Vlad, Defender of the Faith, stripped off in freezing temperatures and taking a dip in cold water as a mortification of the flesh on Epiphany. Yup. You can almost always count on fascists to draw upon religious symbolism (think Trump holding the Bible upside down or talking about Two Corinthians). This was, ofc, another of the many staged propaganda pics of Putin the Dishy Don, and I thought of what Shakespeare’s Falstaff says of Mistress Quickly in Henry IV, Part I: “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.”
That’s a metaphor. The stewed means drunken. The prune is a reference to a portion of the male anatomy that it resembles. The faith is dependability.
Putin likes to project an image of masculinity and virility. He’s like Trump that way, but Trump does it with words, never showing his flabby body.
I just came across the Democratic Socialists of America’s statement on the Ukraine war.
https://www.dsausa.org/statements/on-russias-invasion-of-ukraine/
The DSA condemns the invasion and “urges” Russia to withdraw from Ukraine. Then it says this:
Flerp Interesting quotation, especially this: “DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.”
Are they really equating “imperialist expansionism” with the “spread” of democracy? Perhaps they confuse our oligarchs’ predatory thinking with the fundamental idea of democracy?
the thing is, on principle, democracy as a political power base cannot be imperialist.
But then, we know we are in the midst of upside-down history when the fascist leader of Russia can refer to the Jewish leader of Ukraine as a Nazi. Anyone else here reminded of “The Scream”? CBK