Up until the end of WWII, when wars of aggression were deligitimized, countries aimed at projecting strength by any means. Afterwards, aggressive countries started to intentionally project weakness so as to justify their aggression through victimhood.

https://twitter.com/DimitarBechev/status/1789248733911077371

How else can one explain Russia publicly expressing its fear of not only Ukraine, but of small countries such as Georgia and Moldova. Imagine a dominant actor in the region feeling threatened by its much weaker neighbors, the notion is absurd, but it's a tool, not reality.

Today a want to talk to you about love. Love as an instrument of politics, that is. Inspired by the Balkan experience of the Eurovision contest (I'm deadly serious).

A🧵 It's easy to imagine any center of power, such as the one of the state, to manipulate the masses through hate and resentment. These are powerful collective emotions for certain, but only through love, do the masses feel good about themselves while engaging in aggression.

Today is May 9th. On this day, Russia regularly tries to legitimize its foreign aggression by claiming sole victory over Nazism. Instead of theorizing about the two totalitarian regimes of Stalinism and Hitlerism, it's better to listen to intellectuals who took part in the war. Bulat Okudzhava was a Soviet poet, songwriter and performer. Certainly one of the most popular during the 1960s. His parents were staunch communists and were repressed during the 1930s. His father was executed and his mother sent to the Gulag, twice.

An excerpt from his journal:

Looking at the numbers, Russia is now far more economically oriented towards Asia, in every aspect, than to Europe. This is not a passing trend, since Russia's economic ties with the West can't and won't be repaired in years to come. Cultural and civilizational factors aside, Russia is politically and economically become an Asian country, a choice made by its militarized elites. This has serious geostrategic and geoeconomic consequences which will reverberate throughout our century.

History doesn't repeat itself, humans possess repetitive patterns of behavior. At times when many factors coincide, humans make the same errors as in previous similar situations. The radical left sanctimoniously goes after the center, ignoring the threat from the far right. It's all black and white, so simple for those burning with self-destructive fervor.

It's easy to overlook the consequences of the transition of Russia's economy towards a war mode, coupled with a controlled deprivatization trend, on the long-term structure of Russia's elites and its political system. This is a strategic shift, which exceeds the scope of the war. This means, even if the war against Ukraine were to end tomorrow, with all the Western security guarantees in place and on the current lines of conflict, Russia simply cannot snap back to the previous political balance of power and the level of trade with the democratic world.

A post-communist European phenomenon - people who were once ardent communists, or were raised in such families (stretches across several generations), and turned radical nationalists in the last few decades (1980s onwards). The dogmatic, one-sided, authoritarian way of thinking, combined with normalized political violence, creates the people who committed the majority of war crimes in the Yugoslav wars and we can now observe the same behavior in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

No wonder that Trump's strategy towards Russia resembles the approach of a carpet seller in a Mideastern bazaar - Putin annexes 5 Ukrainian regions, Trump offers him three. That's the kind of savvy businessman he is. However, Putin can't simply be bought off by a piece of Ukraine. He needs an open-ended conflict with the West, since this can be framed as an existential and civilizational struggle - a perfect legitimization for his now totalitarian regime.

Any populist movement, which manages to gain power in a country, must transition the political system into an autocratic state or it will sooner or later be defeated in an election. This fact makes populist movements that more dangerous and unpredictable. Another mechanism being - the more successful a populist movement is in gradually capturing the institutions of the state, the riskier it becomes for the same movement to lose power, because of the threat of legal action against its leaders that might ensue.

News coming out of Far Eastern Russian town of Blagoveshchensk, where a Russian extremist shot at and burned down a news stand where migrants worked. It's a hard sell that Ukraine and not Islamism is behind the terror attack in Moscow.

t.me/sotaproject/78… Fragile unofficial non-aggression pact between the ever-present racism in Russia and its large & exploited Muslim minority is put to the test.

Examples of the democratic Russia of the 1990s direct military involvement outside of its borders and against armies of sovereign neighboring countries: - July 3rd, 1992: the Russian army launches a massive artillery strike against the Moldovan army, aiding the Transnistrian separatists. Moscow claims it wants peace and to protect civilian life.

General Vladimir Zarudnitsky, head of the Russian Military Academy of the General Staff:
"The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine - from the expansion of participants in 'proxy forces' to a large-scale war in Europe - cannot be ruled out."

A 🧵 Maybe those who doubt that Russia is contemplating further aggression, up to a point of continental war, should on occasion read what the top brass of the Russian military write in their own publications.

The populist prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, complains that Italy will withdraw the SAMP/T anti-air system from the country and that Slovakia's nuclear power plant will remain defenseless.

t.me/suspilnenews/2… Fico has on multiple occasions assured the world that Putin won't attack other European countries, so there's no worry, right? Besides, Musk says that NATO doesn't have to exist without the USSR as the main antagonist, thus his words will keep Slovakia safe for sure.

After two years of total war, Putin has resorted to acquiring armaments from North Korea and Iran, total casualties of his army surpass 300k, the Black Sea Fleet is finding it risky to venture into the Black Sea, oil depots on Russian soil are constantly being blown up, his army of paid peasants and lumpens needs half a year at best to capture any small urban area with artillery superiority, a new wave of mobilization is necessary to keep the war going, but it bears political and, more importantly, economic risks,

A post which should've opened with "FSB agents around the world, unite!" and then won the hypocrisy of the century award.

What about Assange though? A not-so-long 🧵

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1759939789615136920

Because of the unbearably high level of the polarization of the party system in the US, Assange is being persecuted for the wrong felony. It is a part of the journalist profession to publish even classified documents from credible sources, if it's in the interest of the public.

On the importance of democracy - a 🧵

First of all, the democratic order is not a natural state for human beings. Aggregating conflicting group interests through peaceful, rational and institutionalized means is not a default way of building political relations. Force is. Democracy is akin to a great work of art. It took generations of evolving ideas and principles, centuries of building up what we consider civilization to realize it. If democracy is not cultivated and sheltered it will give way to force as the dominant instrument of politics.

By blaming Poland for the start of WWII, Putin is not only signaling to the German far right that he will support this narrative in the future, but he also demonstrates that he doesn't really care about the most important idol of the Russo-Soviet pantheon - WWII heritage. Don't think for a second that this isn't tipping the hat to Germany's and Austrian's far right. AfD is currently taking a beating in the polls (its secret meeting discussing the "final solution" to the immigrant problem was discovered), but the Austrian FPÖ is doing quite nicely.

What do Maxim Gorky and Tucker Carlson have in common?

The famous Soviet writer and propagandist, Maxim Gorky, visited the Solovki gulag in 1929. His task was a mundane one - to demonstrate that Stalinist concentration camps constituted a pleasant living and working environment. The atrocious place of torment - Sekirnaya Gora, where the punishment cells were located, was spruced up just for Gorky and the prisoners given newspapers to show that they were working on their intellectual growth in tandem with slave labor.

Observing today's performance of a few dozen mobilized soldier's relatives in Moscow, poses a question - why were soldier's wives and mothers a lot more loud during the Chechen wars compared to the low level of publicly expressed dissent among their current counterparts? For one, Russia was a lot freer in the 90s then it is today. By no means a stable democracy, freedom of the press and free expression of thought undoubtedly existed. The public could actually exert pressure on the state and the state felt this pressure.

As the Zelensky vs. Zaluzhny saga is in the headlines once more (there's no confirmation of Zaluzhny resigning), we should take a look at the activisation of the political sphere in Ukraine at this stage of the war. For a year and a half, basically up until the end of the Ukrainian spring-summer offensive, which did not bring the desired outcome, the political sphere in Ukraine was put behind the military domain.

Just as with EU support package to Ukraine, which will be approved on a central or combined individual level, I belive that Biden's administration will find a way to continue aiding Ukraine.

politico.eu/article/eu-thr… Once the struggle is entered, it becomes a geopolitical imperative to not abandon Ukraine. This doesn't mean that Ukraine will get everything it needs to win, this has been empirically proven in these two long years. But there's a lot of grey space between abandoning and winning.