Sam Greene Profile picture
Feb 24 12 tweets 1 min read
As best I can tell, Putin is declaring war on live TV at 05:45am Moscow time.
Drawing a series of parallels -- Chechnya, Crimea, Syria, Donbas. "We simply haven't been given another option to defend our people other than the one we are forced to use today."
"The People's Republics of Donbas have asked for our help. ... I have decided to launch a special military operation. ... We will seek to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine."
"We do not intend to occupy Ukraine. ... Our policy is based on freedom -- the freedom of choice of all people to choose their own course."
To Ukrainians: "Crimeans and Donbasians decided in 2014 to return to their historical motherland. We could do nothing but support them. ... We have no choice but to defend them against the threats they face."
He is effectively calling on Ukrainian citizens and soldiers to lay down their arms or turn them against their government.
Ok -- not effectively, directly.
"The full responsibility for any bloodshed lies with" the Ukrainian government.
"To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history. All relevant decisions have been taken. I hope you hear me."
Is he threatening nuclear war?
"To Russian citizens: Only the readiness to fight is enough to support our sovereignty."
And that's it. As always, no clarity whatsoever about exactly what he's going to do.

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More from @samagreene

Feb 24
One more thread today, and then I'm going to take a break and decompress for a while. This one's about protests and Russian public opinion.
Per @OvdInfo, there have been ~1700 arrests at anti-war protests across Russia today. Given the propensity of these numbers to lag, the actual number is probably higher.
We don't know how many people came out to protest. It may not have been very many, but it will likely have been 10-20 times the number who were arrested, at least.
Read 17 tweets
Feb 24
Reading between the lines on sanctions, it's a decidedly mixed picture.

What has been announced thus far is very clearly not the full package of sanctions that had been on the table. Exactly why that's the case is a question worth discussing.
To be clear, these sanctions will hurt. Quite a bit. Together with the falling ruble, the financial and banking sanctions will sap Russia's reserves and raise its capital costs.
The sanctions on the offspring of oligarchs are more interesting. These are designed to sharpen the focus of the entirety of the Russian elite on the future, and to force them to reconsider whether they're willing to let Putin mortgage their kids' futures.
Read 13 tweets
Feb 24
Throughout this crisis, one key analytical divide (of several) has been between those analysts who focus on Russian domestic politics on the one hand, and military analysts on the other. I'm obviously in the former camp.
By and large, with notable exceptions, analysts of Russian domestic politics thought war was possible, but unlikely. We generally came to that conclusion based on the risks that a war entails for Putin domestically, and a general assumption about the primacy of domestic politics.
We can debate those conclusions and assumptions later, but we were obviously wrong.

Military analysts generally looked at the scale of forces arrayed against Ukraine and said this was too big to signal anything but war. It certainly looks like they were right.
Read 9 tweets
Feb 24
A bit of analysis, with the caveat that I am struggling to hold it together right now. People in my line of work aren't supposed to be affected by this stuff, but we are. Sorry.

The strategic ambiguity, as always, remains, but it is looking increasingly like cover for a war.
I am trying very hard to find a way to read "de-militarization and de-nazification of Ukraine" as anything but full-scale invasion. I'm failing, but hoping someone better than me succeeds.
Putin declared a war by another name -- a "special military operation". He also said there would be no occupation, but if you can have a war you don't call a war, I suppose you can also have an occupation that you don't call an occupation.
Read 15 tweets
Feb 22
I'm seeing a good deal of ire and snark about UK sanctions, and while I'm usually up for a good deal of ire and snark, I'm not sure it's entirely deserved in this case.
If you missed it, here it is, targeting the assets and operations of key banks and billionaires.

bbc.com/news/uk-politi…
Yes, it feels like small beans, compared to what the EU and the US are doing. But then the UK _is_ small beans compared to the EU and the US, which can, if they want, entirely upend the Russian economy. London can't.
Read 9 tweets
Feb 22
Again, maintaining the ambiguity — but we look set to avoid a shooting war for now.

What comes next depends on your interpretation of why Putin made his move yesterday.
If you believe he’s after Ukraine in whole or in part, then expect Putin to wait and see how Kyiv reacts viz military posture, and how US and EU react viz sanctions, and then re-calibrate his risk-reward model before deciding how far and how hard to press on.
If you believe he’s just after DNR/LNR and has written off the rest of Ukraine, then expect gradual creep to secure key infrastructure (see Georgia’s ever-shrinking borders), but probably avoiding major war (and major sanctions).
Read 7 tweets

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