Tag Archives: Ukraine

After reaching Lviv, I visited the Georgian legion’s new base in nearby Dubliani to meet with Commander Mamuka Mamulashvili. His legion also accepted many other foreign fighters, among them a good number of Americans. I walked through a checkpoint of soldiers strapped with AKs alongside a Georgian fighter. I asked him how it felt to be going to the front on behalf of another country. “It’s like sacrificing yourself for something, but splitting your heart 50/50,” he told me. Mamulashvili’s...

After reaching Lviv, I visited the Georgian legion’s new base in nearby Dubliani to meet with Commander Mamuka Mamulashvili. His legion also accepted many other foreign fighters, among them a good number of Americans. I walked through a checkpoint of soldiers strapped with AKs alongside a Georgian fighter. I asked him how it felt to be going to the front on behalf of another country. “It’s like sacrificing yourself for something, but splitting your heart 50/50,” he told me. Mamulashvili’s...

For a Russian opposed to the war, and helpless to do anything about it, the horror is not that incomes will fall 10% this year, nor that unemployment will double, or that inflation will be 30%. Rather: in order to get out of this fall – not just to go to growth, but at least to restore it, you need not just make the decision “the war is over” and start negotiations on the gradual lifting of sanctions. We need to repeal dozens if not hundreds of laws passed in the last ten years. I would...

For a Russian opposed to the war, and helpless to do anything about it, the horror is not that incomes will fall 10% this year, nor that unemployment will double, or that inflation will be 30%. Rather: in order to get out of this fall – not just to go to growth, but at least to restore it, you need not just make the decision “the war is over” and start negotiations on the gradual lifting of sanctions. We need to repeal dozens if not hundreds of laws passed in the last ten years. I would say...

…grassroots efforts have been snarled by inexperience with the complex web of regulations governing the international shipment of such equipment. Kellgren, who has dealt with such red tape for years, managed to connect through a Ukrainian neighbor with a diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy who helped him secure a federal arms export license in just four days. That process can often take months. This week, as Congress debated whether to send more advanced weapons and defense systems to Ukraine,...

How a Putin lookalike banded together with a Kim Jong-un impersonator to smuggle a Zelenzky doppelgänger out of Ukraine [Kim Jong-un impersonator] Howard X told the Daily Star: “When the war started, I thought of Umid because I know he’s living in Ukraine.” “I got in touch with him and told him ‘you need to get out of here’ because who knows what will happen if Russia gets hold of a Zelenskyy double.” …grassroots efforts have been snarled by inexperience with the complex web of...

Recently we have learned that the Russian military is vastly less capable than anyone imagined. Also in three whole weeks Ukrainians have markedly reduced the capabilities of the Russian military. Therefore, naturally many governments (including the German government) have decided they must spend more on their militaries to face the Russian threat. This makes no sense. To deal with Russian Germany needs liquified natural gas terminals and...

I should stop posting about Ukraine, since I have no expertise and not much ability to judge the credibility of things I read.  But I keep reading and want to share some twitter threads about Russian logistics that I found interesting.  I had assumed that the Russians would eventually get their logistics problems more or less ironed out, or at least they could “solve” them by throwing enough men and material at the Ukrainians, but it seems like at...

In a broad-ranging discussion the other day about the path of political and economic policy over the last decade, I found myself returning again and again to events in 2014. Events that were apparently unrelated: Bulgaria's banking crisis, Moldova's banking fraud, the collapse of Banco Espirito Santo, the election of Syriza in Greece, the first Scottish independence referendum, UKIP's success in two Westminster by-elections as well as local and European elections. And in Ukraine, the...

Fascist Traditionalism And Putin’s Invasion Of Ukraine  About a half-century ago I was urged by my oldest friend to read a book by Fritjof Schuon (1907-1998) written in 1953, The Transcendental Unity of Religions. The book’s title basically tells its message: that while each religion has its own exoteric forms that differ from those of each other, there is a core to all of them that is the same, a transcendental unity of cosmic truth and...