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Nov 7 • 62 tweets • 29 min read
Well hallelujah. After my many threads debunking his Ukraine lies—about the Euromaidan, the Donbas war, “NATO’s proxy war,” etc., etc., Maté finally responds to one of them.

In doing so, however, @aaronjmate reveals just how far out of his depth he is. Let’s take a look.
@aaronjmate Graciously, he does offer an explanation for his silence. First, he says, my threads are too long. And you know what? He’s right.

But in my defense, that’s what tends to happen when you actually care about such trivialities as PROVIDING EVIDENCE.
@aaronjmate Excessive length is hardly Maté’s only complaint. He also takes offense at my use of the term “tankie” to describe people like him. True enough; it is an insult. But it’s one I think is well-deserved, as I explain here:
@aaronjmate Maté’s final reason for never responding to me is that he objects to the format.

Do not doubt it, folks: He’s got some absolute scorchers just locked and loaded if only I take the words and evidence from my threads and put those same words and evidence into a Substack post.
@aaronjmate Seriously, @aaronjmate, that’s some weak-ass shit.
@aaronjmate To the uninitiated, allow me to provide some background. Maté’s responding to a thread I wrote on the Minsk accords of 2014-15. These agreements sought to end the Donbas war between Russia and Ukraine that began earlier that year. Here’s the thread:
@aaronjmate After Yanukovych fled Kyiv in Feb. 2014, Russia occupied Crimea. It then tried to foment a rebellion in eastern and southern Ukraine. That failed.
@aaronjmate Putin then dispatched Russian irregulars to create a fake rebellion. That failed too. So he sent in the Russian army.

Receipts:
@aaronjmate The entry in Aug. 2014 of thousands of Russian troops turned the tide against Ukraine, forcing a stalemate and allowing the Kremlin to establish the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine.
@aaronjmate In reality, the two Donbas statelets were Kremlin proxies.

Receipts:
@aaronjmate With a weak and emaciated military thanks to Yanukovych’s looting, Kyiv had to sue for peace. The result was the Minsk accords. There were actually two of them, the first signed in Sept. 2014 and the second, dubbed Minsk II, following in Feb. 2015.
@aaronjmate To crudely summarize, Minsk’s key provisions called for an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of forces, the decentralization of power to Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively known as the Donbas), and the holding of local elections in the two regions.
@aaronjmate Crucially, the elections were to be carried out under Ukrainian law, with Ukraine’s involvement, and under international monitoring by representatives of the OSCE. As you might imagine, that’s…not really Putin’s kind of thing.
@aaronjmate With that out of the way, let’s get to @aaronjmate’s response. It starts with the absolute howler (left) that Russia wasn’t a signatory to Minsk.

I kindly replied with a screenshot of the Minsk II agreement revealing…the signature of the Russian ambassador to Ukraine (right)
@aaronjmate Then, after frantically googling “did Russia sign the Minsk II agreement?” @aaronjmate came back with another doozy.

On the left: Maté saying “ok so Russia did sign Minsk II but not Minsk I.”

…and on the right: A screenshot of the Russian ambassador’s signature on Minsk I.
@aaronjmate Here’s a link to the original copy of the Minsk I agreement, complete with the Russian ambassador’s signature: osce.org/home/123257
@aaronjmate Yeah bud, we know.
@aaronjmate What Maté’s trying to do here is claim that the Minsk accords were solely between Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. In fact, Russia was also a signatory—to both Minsk I and Minsk II.
@aaronjmate Maté’s embarrassing ignorance of these Wikipedia-level basics isn’t even the biggest problem with his account. Rather it’s that, in an effort to obfuscate his own indefensible position on the issue, he bases his entire rebuttal of me on something I never said.
@aaronjmate Take a look below. Do you notice a difference between what I said in my original tweet and what Maté, in his quote-tweet, claims I said?
@aaronjmate Did I say that Ukraine is “not at fault” for the failure of the Minsk accords? I do not. I said that Ukraine isn’t the *only* side that’s at fault. You don’t have to be a master logician to understand that I’m actually acknowledging Ukraine’s role in Minsk’s failure.
@aaronjmate Why do I consider it important to note that Ukraine isn’t alone in having violated the Minsk accords? Because Maté has repeatedly stated otherwise.
@aaronjmate You see, by insisting Russia’s invasion could have been avoided—and that peace can still be achieved—if only Ukraine complied with Minsk is Maté’s way of gaslighting people into believing the moral onus for the war falls on Ukraine instead of Russia. It doesn’t.
@aaronjmate In his response to me, Maté again places the burden of implementing Minsk on Ukraine. In doing so, he’s mindlessly repeating Russia’s own propaganda on the issue, which is that Minsk’s failure to explicitly mention Russia means Russia has no obligations to ensure compliance.
@aaronjmate Russia and, in turn, Maté, want the world to think that Minsk merely aims to resolve an internal conflict between Kyiv and the two “separatist republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. As for Russia itself, Maté contends that it provided only “limited support” to these entities.
@aaronjmate Here’s where Maté makes that claim: mate.substack.com/p/by-using-ukr…
@aaronjmate As I’ve repeatedly shown, the idea that Russia’s support for its Donbas proxies was “limited” is demonstrably false.
@aaronjmate Being that Russia established, financed, and controlled these “republics” from the start, Ukraine insists Russia actually is a party to Minsk—and it has a point.
@aaronjmate The key thing about the Donbas war is that it was an interstate conflict masquerading as an internal rebellion. Minsk grants autonomy to the Donbas “republics.” But since Russia controls them, “autonomy” would amount to Ukraine’s partition. Hence Ukraine’s resistance to Minsk.
@aaronjmate To be sure, it wasn’t *only* an interstate conflict; there was real albeit limited separatist sentiment in the Donbas.
@aaronjmate But even Russia’s own commanders on the ground admitted that the “rebellion” could have never lasted without Russia’s money, organization, and troops.

Receipts:
@aaronjmate That Ukraine hasn’t fully complied with Minsk is not some big secret. Minsk has been a giant clusterfuck from the start—13 provisions to be completed in sequence, starting with a ceasefire. Neither side respected the ceasefire, so you can imagine how it went from there.
@aaronjmate Anyway, not that it matters, but I ought to correct the inaccuracies in the rest of Maté’s response.
@aaronjmate Maté is correct that responsibility for the failure of #5 and #11 in the table below rests with Ukraine. But he’s wrong to say that Ukraine alone deserves the blame for #7 and #8.
@aaronjmate It is plainly false for Maté to suggest that Ukraine bears sole responsibility for obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid to Russia’s Donbas proxy statelets (referenced below as NGCAs, or Non-Government-Controlled Areas). Russia itself has blocked delivery routinely.
@aaronjmate Sources for above screenshots:

humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.huma…

swp-berlin.org/en/publication…
@aaronjmate Second, contra Maté, both sides, not just Ukraine, have obstructed the restoration of full social and economic links with the affected areas. humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.huma…
@aaronjmate As for holding local elections in Russia’s Donbas proxy statelets, let’s get real. Russia *could* adhere to Minsk by holding elections under Ukrainian law, with Ukraine’s participation, and under OSCE monitoring. But it will never, ever do that. Want to know why?
@aaronjmate The reason Russia hasn’t allowed free elections under international monitoring in its Donbas statelets is because it’s afraid—justifiably, I’d add—that it will *lose* those elections.
@aaronjmate Since there’s never been majority support in Donbas for separating from Ukraine, any elections there that were actually free, fair, and verified as such by the OSCE would very likely yield the wrong result as far as Putin’s concerned.

Receipts:
@aaronjmate If you haven’t noticed, Putin isn’t a big fan of free and fair elections. He won’t allow them in Russia proper, and he sure as hell won’t in the Donbas, either. Russia *has* held elections there—repeatedly and in violation of Minsk. But they were shams. osce.org/cio/126242
@aaronjmate Finally, Maté can spare me the pearl-clutching over Ukraine’s non-compliance with Minsk. The only reason Minsk exists in the first place is that Russia, by invading in 2014, broke *its own* past promises to abide by Ukraine’s sovereignty.
@aaronjmate Russia, and, evidently, Maté, would like everyone to forget that it pledged to respect Ukraine’s internationally-recognized borders—yeah, including Crimea—when it signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty.
@aaronjmate (taps sign)
@aaronjmate Look, I know I spend a lot of time debunking Maté’s Ukraine nonsense. It’s not just that I take offense to the atrocity-denial and the unmerited blame-shifting. It’s because, compared with most tankies, he’s actually pretty good at what he does.
@aaronjmate Like his fellow travelers, Maté aims to muddy the moral waters around the war by making otherwise reasonable people think that Ukraine is at least as culpable as Russia. The whole idea is to inject moral ambiguity into a situation that demands moral clarity.
@aaronjmate But unlike, say, Hinkle, Maté doesn’t overtly cheer on Russia’s colonial war. Unlike Blumenthal, he’s not a conspiratorial crank. Unlike Tracey, he’s not an idiot. He knows how to mask his lies beneath a veneer of credibility. And so reasonable people might buy into them.
@aaronjmate So I’ll continue to call out Maté’s gaslighting. He’ll mostly continue to ignore it. When he doesn’t, he’ll opt to argue with a strawman instead of me. Because let’s face it, when your positions are prima facie indefensible, you don’t really have other options, do you?

/end
For those interested, here's a compendium of my various threads that debunk Maté's arguments about Ukraine, either directly or indirectly.

Receipts provided, as always. /1
No, the Euromaidan was not a coup. Nor was it engineered by the U.S. Nor was it dominated by the far-right. It was a popular revolution against ruler who had eviscerated his own legitimacy through his authoritarian, violent conduct.
Here, I debunk the specific claim by Maté and others that Victoria Nuland supposedly engineered the Euromaidan.
On Russia's "Novorossiya" myth, the staged annexation "referendums" in late-September, and the lack of local support in eastern and southern Ukraine for either independence or joining Russia.

Oh, and how Max Blumenthal is actually an imperialist shill.
On the Donbas war and the Minsk accords:
More on the Donbas war, Russia's 2014 occupation of Crimea, and the anemic support in eastern and southern Ukraine for joining Russia.

Oh, and how tankie Ukraine discourse is basically an idiotic game of telephone among grown-ass adults.
On the "NATO provocation" thesis about the origins of the 2022 war and all the inconceivable things you'd have to accept in order to believe it.
On why it's ridiculous to refer to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine as the "NATO proxy war on Russia," as Maté often does.
On demonstrably false atrocity-denial by Maté and his Grayzone buddies:
On demonstrably false atrocity-denial by Maté's Grayzone buddies (cont'd):
At some point I'll do a big thread on Ukraine's far-right. Yes, it's a problem. No, they neither control the government nor dominate the military. And it's kind of silly to constantly talk about Ukr Nazis without noting the far-bigger Nazi problem Putin's fostered in Russia.
For now, you'll have to make due with this:
And note, in particular, this:
I also recommend this thread on the sundry Nazis and white-supremacist scumbags the Kremlin sent into eastern Ukraine from 2014 onward.

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More from @neil_abrams

Neil Abrams Profile picture
Nov 3
He’s seen people on here, including myself, disprove these lies about supposedly “pro-Russian” areas of Ukraine and about Ukraine’s culpability for the failure of Minsk.

And yet he continues to peddle the same bullshit.

Call him what you will, but “journalist” he ain’t.
Read 8 tweets
Neil Abrams Profile picture
Oct 27
A couple weeks ago I caught some flak from Caitlin Johnstone since I didn’t offer any evidence when I pointed out the nonsense in her Ukraine essay.

You wanted receipts, @caitoz? Well, here are your receipts.

On the “moronic cynicism” of Caitlin Johnstone: A thread:
This thread doubles as a short course on the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2014-21. It covers Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea and subsequent invasion of the east, namely the Donbas (the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk). It also examines the leadup to the 2022 invasion.
The sheer number of delusions and falsehoods in this one paragraph by @caitoz is such that they can’t be untangled in a single thread. So this will have to be a two-parter. Part I examines the onset of war in 2014. Part II will address NATO, Zelensky, and the 2022 invasion. ImageImage
Read 57 tweets
Neil Abrams Profile picture
Oct 21
A common Twitter exchange:

Tankie: Stop arming Ukraine!

Reasonable person: What exactly do you suggest instead?

Tankie: Pressure Ukraine to implement the Minsk accords!

So what are the Minsk accords, and why is the tankie line on Minsk ridiculous?

A thread.
Tankie propaganda on Minsk is an attempt to shift blame from Russia, where it properly belongs, to Ukraine, where it doesn’t: “If only Ukraine implemented Minsk, we wouldn’t be in this situation!” It’s straight gaslighting. To simplify things, I’ll call it “gasminsking.”
I’m gonna keep this as short as possible, since explaining the intricacies of the Minsk process is only slightly more alluring than the thought of blowing my brains out. But it’s important because tankies, when pressed for details on a “peace deal,” use Minsk as their trump card.
Read 53 tweets
Neil Abrams Profile picture
Oct 5
I hesitate to call it a “mask-off moment” since, to have a mask-off moment, you need to actually wear one in the first place. But the tweet below is revealing of a fundamental truth about the man: @MaxBlumehthal—I shit you not—is an imperialist shill. A thread.
It’s despicable, albeit predictable, for @MaxBlumenthal to pretend that last Friday’s staged annexation “referendums” in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk & Luhansk were somehow free and fair. But the “Novorossiya” line takes Blumenthal’s nihilistic depravity to another level.
Let’s start with the preposterous notion that 87% or more of these regions would ever vote to join Russia. Do you know what % of their respective populations is actually made up of ethnic Russians?
Read 18 tweets
Neil Abrams Profile picture
Sep 23
According to tankies, the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, in which Ukrainians rose up and ousted kleptocratic dictator Viktor Yanukovych, was a “coup” by the U.S. acting in cahoots with Ukrainian Nazis. Was it?

Short answer: No

Long answer: Also, no.

Let’s dig in.
This thread, on the Euromaidan, is the first of three debunking tankie claims about Ukraine. The next two, respectively, will address the Donbas “rebellion” of 2014-21, which was actually a covert Russian invasion, and the far-right’s influence in post-Maidan Ukraine.
The tankie narrative about the Euromaidan actually consists of three separate assertions: (1) that it was a “coup, (2) that it was engineered by the U.S., and (3) that it was carried out by the Ukrainian far-right. We will consider each in due course.
Read 81 tweets
Neil Abrams Profile picture
Sep 16
I think this guy is arguing in good faith. But to believe that depriving Ukraine of weapons constitutes an “anti-imperialist” stance requires also believing Russia’s invasion *isn’t* imperialist. That, in turn, requires believing a number of things that are untenable IMO.
The notion that opposing arms transfers to Ukraine is anti-imperialist hinges on the view that Russia only invaded because it was provoked by a (supposedly) imperialist NATO alliance. But consider the things you’d have to accept in order to think that:
It requires believing there are legitimate reasons why Putin barely raised a fuss over Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO yet viewed the prospect of *Ukraine* joining NATO as so real and so dire that it necessitated a full-scale invasion.
Read 16 tweets

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