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Feb 27 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Question for those who actually understand these things: @LawDavF @james_acton32 @CameronJJJ @KofmanMichael — When Putin orders nuclear forces on “special preparedness”, what does that mean in practice? And what impact does that have on the posture of US forces?
The rhetoric is one thing — and entirely subject to interpretation. But presumably these sorts of orders also have a technical side to them, which can have its own consequences. Trying to understand that.
Apologies if you’ve written about this already and I’ve not been able to find it.
(And if you’re not a nuclear weapons and/or strategic deterrence expert, please sit on your hands for this one.)

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More from @samagreene

Sam Greene Profile picture
Feb 28
So, as always, mixed signals, with basically two avenues of interpretation: either things are about to get better, or they're about to get a lot worse.
Here's what we know. The Russians and Ukrainians met, talked at some length, released very similar statements confirming that talks would continue, and returned to Moscow and Kyiv for consultations.

unian.ua/politics/u-zel…
But that's only half the story. The other half is that Kharkiv came in for the most brutal air and artillery assault of the war to date (as best I can tell), attacks on Kyiv renewed, and Russia continued to mass troops and equipment outside the capital.
Read 22 tweets
Sam Greene Profile picture
Feb 27
Anti-war protests in Russia do not appear to be waning. Per @OvdInfo, a further 2700 arrests today in 51 cities, bringing the total number of arrests since the invasion to nearly 6k.
Protests appear smaller than the Jan/Feb 2021 protests around Navalny’s arrest, but maybe not by much (good numbers are hard to come by). And the more frequently we see scenes like 👇, the bigger they’ll get. Image
The real question, though, is when scenes like the one above begin to interact with scenes like the one below, where people queue to get money out of their bank accounts: Image
Read 7 tweets
Sam Greene Profile picture
Feb 27
This is what scares me at the moment. The war was already killing civilians, but the pace seems to be picking up.
I’m not here to supplant the analysis of military experts: if you want to understand the ins and outs of the war, and of how Russia fights wars, follow @KofmanMichael @RALee85 @LawDavF and others. But let me take a moment for a bit of politics.
When Putin announced the war, he talked about the invasion in the same breath as Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Syria. As @KofmanMichael mentions in the thread above, those wars were brutal. That’s one of the things that was so frightening about the possibility of war in Ukraine.
Read 7 tweets
Sam Greene Profile picture
Feb 27
Sanctions have very rapidly escalated, as transatlantic consensus has consolidated. Two key things to note now:
1) Escalation is proactive, not reactive, for the first time since 2014;
2) Moscow has not responded.
It’s important not to exaggerate here. Economies, like wars, aren’t fully predictable. Putin may not have calculated such a rapid response, but he will have known that these kinds of sanctions were on the cards.
Moreover, Russia has a highly skilled central bank and finance ministry, who will have contingency plans. At best, though, those plans will slow the impact of sanctions, rather than eliminating it.
Read 14 tweets
Sam Greene Profile picture
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
Sam Greene Profile picture
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

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