katanning15

@broseph_stalin Rent controls means less tax revenue. The homeless and those living with parents are not contributing to the gov coffers

Breaking news: The United Arab Emirates has said it is leaving Opec, dealing a significant blow to the oil cartel and its de facto leader Saudi Arabia ft.trib.al/08BCZA3

The European Union has warned Israel that it is ready to impose sanctions on those aiding and abetting the trade of Ukrainian grain stolen by Russia in the occupied territories, after a new ship loaded with the cereal arrived in the port of Haifa. l.euronews.com/safl

More than a hundred academics who consider themselves “experts on Eastern Europe” have issued a warning against my colleague @I_Katchanovski and his book The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins: From the Maidan to the Ukraine War (Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature, 2026). Apparently, they detected the unforgivable crime of “overlap with Kremlin propaganda” — namely, the suggestion that the causes of the Russia-Ukraine war may be found not only in the Kremlin, but also in the West. The alarmed scholars further warn that the book could lead to a “reduction of Western aid to Ukraine.” In other words: certain arguments are not wrong because they are false, but because readers might find them (in)convenient and stop sponsor corrupt regime that sends its people to the kill zone against their will. Let me note three things. 🖍️Anyone who has seriously studied the war in Ukraine already knows that Katchanovski’s arguments about Western co-responsibility are neither “manipulations” nor “fantasies.” They echo assessments made by others, including Stephen Kinzer in Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine, Scott Horton in Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, and many others. 🖍️I would venture to suggest that the signatories are especially nervous about those sections of the book exposing the role of neo-Nazis in this war — a subject Western discourse handles with all the grace of a man trying to hide an elephant under a tablecloth. Particularly notable here are specialists on the far right such as Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovtsov. Because once the average Western taxpayer learns that he/she is helping bankroll figures linked to Azov, RDK, Right Sector, and similar networks — groups said to have “deradicalized” or “depoliticized” themselves by means known only to PR consultants — then the tidy morality play begins to wobble. 🖍️The signatories fear that Katchanovski’s book could undermine Western support for Ukraine. If so, I would humbly recommend they improve their own propaganda craft — an arena in which they have become genuine virtuosos in recent years, especially in the collective harassment and bullying of colleagues guilty of dissident or insufficiently patriotic scholarship. Nothing says “defenders of academic freedom” quite like organizing a mob against a book before too many people read it.

The European Union has warned Israel that it is ready to impose sanctions on those aiding and abetting the trade of Ukrainian grain stolen by Russia in the occupied territories, after a new ship loaded with the cereal arrived in the port of Haifa. l.euronews.com/safl