Believers in the “NATO expansion” myth often characterize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “the most preventable war of all time,” implying that if Ukraine had abandoned its ambitions to join the alliance then Putin would not have opted for war. /1 (Another variant holds that NATO should have flatly told Ukraine that it could never enter the alliance, and that alone would have been enough to dissuade Putin from choosing war.) /2

What’s fascinating about this -and I’m sure we’ll be getting an essay-long treatment of it in Quincy- is that it actually doesn’t really back up the “NATO expansion” theory at all. /1

https://twitter.com/kadmitriev/status/2003945509158113570

First is the obvious point that Western leaders gave Putin what he wanted in 2008: Ukraine was not offered a MAP to NATO accession and was nowhere near one in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Elsewhere, Putin asserts that, in the end, Ukrainians should decide. /2

People like Sachs and Mearsheimer are accustomed to the "rules" protecting them from being called out as liars and shills publicly and to their faces, and when it happens, they don't really know how to respond. /1

https://twitter.com/Ander_Bruckes/status/1981710482257100805

Sachs is obviously being melodramatic for the cameras here to try to distract how he's been casually unmasked in a way he's not used to ("how DARE you?!"), but the truth is that people like him an Mearsheimer, the entire grift rests on an appeal to their own supposed authority./2

The distinctive thing about this narrative, as with all Russian propaganda narratives, is that it absolutely requires the audience to believe in a host of other lies in order to be accepted as true.

/1 You can see the same phenomenon among westerners who believe the propaganda, too: they’ll deny the Holodomor and cheer “dekulakization”; they’ll talk about non-existent “guarantees” that NATO wouldn’t “expand”; they’ll scream about genocide in the Donbas, etc.

/2

It’s remarkable how western leftists shift the blame from the ACTUAL NAZIS onto relatively small numbers of Eastern European collaborators.

Thus, Babyn Yar becomes a specifically Ukrainian crime, Auschwitz is a “Polish death camp,” etc. /1

https://twitter.com/sokoy14/status/1942972322954269158

For these people, Eastern Europeans are uniquely and genetically evil and they justify their present-day loathing of the region and its people with an exaggerated focus on collaborators, who never amounted to more than a tiny fraction of their respective populations. /2

This person is gushing a “story” about “unlimited energy” from an ACP account masquerading as a “news outlet”

Looking deeper, the “story” turns out to be just a press release about normal science stuff.

This is a pretty clear example of how propaganda works to shape perception

Lots of people have very atrophied critical thinking skills and zero media literacy, so this stuff works on them (BC is doing it deliberately, though, and we can only speculate as to why): the ACP “news” post is literally just a blurb. With no link.

Ok no. Hanania does not get to do this. He spent the early days of the war literally reposting Russian propaganda from Telegram channels (down to the word) along with a bunch of other noxious stuff.

Absolutely no way this is an actual person.

Reflecting on my recent engagement with that “communist” streamer bro, as well as on the young, digitally active “marxists” that are so prevalent on this platform and in socialist orgs like DSA, it occurs to me that this is a movement that is, at its core, fundamentally cruel and anti-human.

It’s a cultish meme culture that seems primarily concerned with venerating and defending a long dead empire that was, materially speaking, monstrous and uncaring, concerned mostly with the exercise of power and perpetuating its own existence.

One thing that really bothers me is how, for a lot of people, from carnival barkers like MTG to preening dilettantes like JD Vance, right on down to dollar store “revolutionary socialists” and random anime pfp misanthrope, Ukraine has become nothing but a trope. /1 It’s something that these people, who don’t care about it in the least, much less know about or understand, trot it out at literally every opportunity to use as a foil to complain about something else. /2

I’ve been taking a a Twitter break, partly due to illness, partly to exhaustion, and partly due to other factors.

However, Russia’s escalation-attempting to render Ukraine uninhabitable by destroying electricity infrastructure-has me worried /1 particularly since its allies have largely abandoned it to its fate (I hastened to edit my post to not say “us” because, though I live here, I don’t want to portray myself as an authentically Ukrainian voice). /2

Your formula for “peace” is essentially to grant Russia’s lesser war aims - neutralization of Ukraine and its territorial dismemberment.

These ideas are not new and were naive even in 2022. In 2024 they can only be interpreted as indifference. /1

medium.com/@geogvma/anoth…

https://twitter.com/andreas_bieler/status/1776152764055187857

Chomsky and others have been mouthing these sorts of proposals for a long time but have been unable (or unwilling) to answer their critics, who point out that accepting them would consign millions to genocide, torture, and rape.

This has become even clearer since 2022. /2

I think one of the strangest things about anti-Ukrainian posters on both the left and the right is how disinterested and nakedly performative it all is. None of them really even seem to believe what they're saying. Some are being paid; others are likely bots. But the rest are /1





just posting about things they don't actually care about and don't really know much about: it's like they're just saying the words they imagine they're supposed to say, their whole script supplied by memes and posts.

The whole thing is empty theatre, and I find it bizarre. /2

A little Ukrainian vignette: I had to move apartments today. The new place let me check in a bit early and the cleaning lady was still there. We chatted a bit. She asked if I was Polish for some reason? I told her, in broken Ukrainian: no, American. /1 I said my Russian was better than my Ukrainian but I was doing everything I could to speak Ukrainian, for obvious reasons. She smiled and said “yes, I’m Ukrainian, but the Soviets forced us to speak Russian and now I only think in Russian. It’s hard.” /2

FWIW when I was at UOregon the CREEES curriculum was almost 100% russocentric. Many amazing professors, but we got fed "Great Russian Culture" from day one. Maybe it's changed since then. Kansas was different - relatively strong Ukrainian curriculum, Tajik & Uyghur language, etc.

https://twitter.com/joelw_762/status/1671642490426871808

That said, I feel like even at KU the russocentrism was still pretty prevalent and, as someone who was focusing on Central Asia at the time, I usually felt pretty marginalized and peripheral. Since I got my PhD the academic job market has only reinforced that perception.

The reason it never engages with that counterfactual is because it’s not an argument being made in good faith. It’s a cheap and easy, ready made argument emanating from Russian propaganda narratives that have no interest in engaging in counterfactuals.

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1671608801269522434

It’s a substitute for real analysis, which is why it’s so readily deployed by “anti-imperialists” and “realists” alike, few of whom have any actual knowledge of the subject. In both cases it’s easily tailored to whatever argument is being advanced.

The best argument against the "debate me bro" discourse is that Ukrainians and other experts have been consistently saying "no, you're absolutely wrong" to contrarians who don't know shit about Ukraine for literally years and they've all been ignored. "Debate" doesn't work. Seriously, it's surreal to see Nathan Robinson, of all people, maintain that "debate" is meaningful in any way when he himself just adopts whatever position Chomsky takes and refuses to budge an inch even when it's clear he's just hopelessly out of his depth.

Last time I posted something about the left re:Ukraine many people got angry at me, so I think it's worth mentioning that I consider myself on the left and I know many people on the left, many of them from E. Europe, who are clear-eyed and morally consistent on this issue. /1 And yes, I do realize that the right, especially, though not exclusively, the MAGA wing, that are just as bad as the "anti-imperialist" camp on the left. So please don't waste my time getting mad at me in my mentions for somehow being unfair to the left. /2

I think one thing that emerges very clearly from the furious reaction to the furious reaction to the UCU debacle is that there are an awful lot of people who, because they are generally morally right on the problem of American imperialism, imagine that they must therefore /1 must be definitionally morally right in all instances. Their politics and identities are completely tied to the aesthetics of "resistance" that, when faced with the general "normie" consensus that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a genocidal crime, they cannot concede the point /2

Russian documents literally recommended pushing a trio of propaganda points intended to justify dismembering Ukraine and shitbag propagandists like Rob Rousseau, Glen, Mate, and all the rest dutifully repeat them to this day. And this was in 2014 before any of these hacks and liars knew where Ukraine was.

I’ve said it numerous times: they’re bad, dishonest people making money covering for imperialism, war crimes, and genocide. At this point they cannot claim to not know the truth but they carry on.