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.