Still seeing a lot of magical thinking, denial and people desperately clinging to comments of various Cabinet officials in the hope that the relationship between Washington and Kyiv can be salvaged. Here are some hard truths:

1/4 1) There is nothing Zelensky could have said or done that would have gotten a better result from Trump
2) There is not now, nor has there even been, a realistic “peace plan” devised by the Trump administration

2/4

Bomb threats called in to polling stations in Navajo County, AZ – which contains parts of the Apache, Navajo and Hopi nations. Appears tied to earlier threats originating in Russia as per FBI.

Y’all Russians really don’t have a clue the kinda people you’re f***ing with, do you?

https://twitter.com/jenafifield/status/1853921571833876511

Like y’all Russkies think some bomb threats are gonna scare off the Apache?

Stop the Navajo from voting?

Just clueless interference attempts. Y’all need to fire somebody over there at SVR.

Quick reminder that things generally explode (eg, experience a rapid expansion of gas from a chemical reaction or incendiary) because they have explosives inside.

Real life isn’t Star Trek, where electronic consoles explode due to “sudden power surges.” Re: exploding pagers, to call this cyberwarfare misses the mark.

As per buddy with expertise in explosives:

“The Israelis would have had to refit actual pagers with a small piece of DetaSheet and a flat bridge-wire detonator, and then gotten them into Hezbollah’s supply chain.”

As Ukrainian troops continue to advance in Kursk – the first foreign invasion and occupation of Russian soil since WWII – the military challenge the situation presents for Putin is in some ways equalled by the internal political challenge.

A thread 🧵 First, consider reading my latest story in @RollingStone, a glimpse into how the war is shaping daily life across Ukraine this summer – which has been difficult – and a look at how the unfolding operation in Kursk puts the initiative back in Kyiv's hands.
rollingstone.com/politics/polit…

Twelve years into the conflict in Mali, and it looks like Russia is getting an accelerated version of the hard lessons the Touareg, the French, the US, and three successive governments in Bamako learned before them...

https://x.com/SaladinAlDronni/status/1817317126522450279

On Thursday, Feb 1st, at approx 1430 local time, two aid workers from the Swiss humanitarian aid group HEKS/EPER were killed in an attack by Russian drones while operating in Beryslav, Kherson Oblast, on the right bank of the Dnieper River.

Some important details and context: I am aware of some of the details of the incident, and want to highlight a few things which should be relevant to any international aid groups, foreign journalists or other parties operating in areas near the line of contact (LOC).

The Russian landing ship Novocherkassk, hull no. 142, was built at Stocznia Gdańsk – at the time known as the Vladimir Lenin Shipyard – in the People’s Republic of Poland, in the mid-1980s.

The ship’s history offers a window to understanding the 30+ year road to now... It was at this same shipyard that the trade union Solidarność, or Solidarity, was founded in 1980.

The establishment of Solidarity marked the beginning of effective organized resistance to communist rule in Poland – and the eventual end of Soviet rule over Eastern Europe.

“Видно мастера по работе” – an expression best matched in English by the idiom “By the work one knows the workman” – and when it comes to ruthlessly maintaining his power, Vladimir Putin is a master craftsman.

My latest dispatch for @RollingStone

rollingstone.com/politics/polit… Over the course of his 24-year career at the highest levels of power – since he first became prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in 1999 – consider the many enemies Putin has eliminated, the obstacles he has demolished, and the many world leaders he has manipulated and outlasted.

Imagine being at a secret meeting where everyone is planning to insert a team of divers for a clandestine underwater operation & instead of choosing to send the USS Jimmy Carter, they say “Let’s use a Norwegian minelayer in the middle of a massively observed military exercise.” Like, the Navy literally sunk (haha) $880 million+ into creating this very specific capability (undetected underwater special ops insertion) but the powers-that-be decide instead of using it they’ll just come up with some 1970s-era multinational sheep-dip Rube Goldberg bullshit.

I just spent some time in various parts of the vast front surrounding Severodonetsk, where Russian troops are massed in an effort to capture the last major city in Luhansk held by Ukrainian defenders.

My latest dispatch for Rolling Stone is here: rollingstone.com/culture/cultur… The outline of the situation is familiar to those following the war: Russian forces possess local superiority of numbers againstUkrainian troops. While some analysts assert Russia is using overwhelming firepower to more accurately target defenders, the evidence shows otherwise.

Recently spent time in the field with Ukrainian marines.

My latest story for @RollingStone is here:

rollingstone.com/politics/polit… The marines shared with me a handful of photos and video clips illustrative of several interesting details, which I will include in this thread along with materials previously declassified by Ukraine's Defense Ministry, from a specific battle in question.

For the past several weeks I have been in Ukraine, shadowing a group of battle-tested American former military officers who quickly organized a “Resistance Academy” with Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces.

rollingstone.com/culture/cultur… “Some of you may have never thought you’d be in a position like this. But more than anything… I want you to know that you have the advantage when the enemy comes here. Because this is your home. It is not a matter of if the resistance wins, but when.”

broke: multistate reciprocal ccw permits

woke: texas "constitutional carry" law

bespoke: a new set of federal highway administration regulations permitting me, personally, to arm a fleet of toyota hiluxes equipped with heavy weapons systems and roam the countryside at will you guys can laugh all you want

right up until i seize your oil fields

listen

people like Bison Man, T-Shirt Nazi & Lt Col Livestream are some of the more visible faces of all this

but as someone there all day

the crazed conspiracy nuts & vast bulk of obvious rioters were not the most insidious threat

there were organized teams of individuals there were tens of thousands of people at the rally and subsequent march & it would be difficult to categorize all of the various groups & their ideologies accurately in the absence of a wide-ranging survey of participants

thought we were done for the day

but there is a bit of a kerfuffle between opposing protesters at the capital hilton next to blm square

police forming a cordon between about two dozen pro-trump activists and maybe 100 anti-trump protesters police in riot gear have staged around the block

don’t like the maudlin stuff

but known some good dudes

[that feeling when you are trying to beat a dude who is twice your size with your baton and he doesn’t seem to notice]

https://twitter.com/pdxzane/status/1284726088187310080

“I need your clothes, your boots and your unmarked minivan.”

Read the thread below.

In a country such as the US, there is an absolute need for highly trained, well-armed federal tactical teams. With an abundance of external and internal threats, and easily available firearms, this is simply a question of public safety.

https://twitter.com/silver_shots/status/1284271516528582657

I have a high regard for such officers; I know many personally as good people, highly professional, who perform extremely dangerous jobs.

We shouldn't blame the officers in Portland for making the practical choices needed to do their job: we should question their leadership.

it hardly seems accidental that the federal officers in portland who seem unfamiliar with law enforcement in a constitutionally protected civil context

are from agencies - CBP & US Marshals - least likely to conduct law enforcement in a constitutionally protected civil context last time i checked these were border police and fugitive hunters

why should anyone think they are appropriate for policing american streets?

There’s a story which may well be apocryphal: at an art exhibition in the 1880s the Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin took General Helmuth von Moltke (the elder) on a tour of the gallery.

There he led the general in front of his painting, “The Apotheosis of War,” (1871). The general was not pleased. It’s easy to imagine that lanky, austere Prussian - a man so erudite and reserved he was once described as “silent in seven languages” - perplexed by the painting, in particular its dedication:

“To all great conquerors, past, present and to come.”

In 1992, all the kids I knew took to the streets when the KKK came to town to confront a peaceful march through downtown Denver on Martin Luther King Day. It ended in riots. That was my first experience of street violence. All through my high school years, gang violence was common: drive-bys a regular occurrence. North Side Mafia and a hodgepodge chicano gangs on the West-side; Bloods and Crips on East Colfax and biker gangs downtown… you could pick and choose your flavor.