Ed M

Reality of most Ukrainian cities for the last 600 something days. You do your job & live your life - until you don’t. Video from a postal center in Kharkiv that was destroyed by a 🇷🇺 missile last night. #StopRussia

“Musk hasn't given the voiceless a voice, he's just dragged us all down into the swamp, and the only people who truly benefit are shameless grifters.” wired.trib.al/jq3gDLR

“Sorry! bought a Tesla before I knew Elon Musk was an asshole”

This is your regular reminder that russia does not hide the fact it’s fighting an imperial war of genocide and doesn’t intend to stop at Ukraine. At least, it doesn’t hide that to russian audiences who, according to polling, clearly identify ‘territorial conquest’ as the whole point of their war. This is Yevgeny Balitsky, the russian-installed so-called governor of the temporarily occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast. He’s been a key collaborator enabling the illegal annexations. During the subsequent ceremony, he was on stage clasped hands with putin when they did that cringe ‘russia’ chant. People like Balitsky don’t bother with the various excuses for russia’s war that are offered to its useful idiots abroad. Russia is exactly what the Baltic countries long warned the world that it is. Listen to us now. Give Ukraine everything it needs for victory as fast as possible. Set up the Special Tribunal now. The whole world will pay a much bigger price in future if we again delay recognising the reality of russia.

OTD in 1951 second wave deportations of Operation Osen began. In this wave, 16400 Lithuanians were forcibly deported to Siberia as USSR continued to "liberate them from fascism" 6 years after WW2 ended Imagine mass deportations happening today...

Obviously not pleasant to have this filth calling for my murder, but I suppose it’s a compliment they see me as a threat. But Ukrainians are murdered every single day because Putin sees their democracy & freedom as a threat. It’s the fight of all our lives, so I see no choice. 🇺🇦

I can confirm that I liked this tweet and the like disappeared. Why is @elonmusk trying to suppress free speech on Twitter? @Support Try it for yourself. Also, please RT the tweet below to overcome Musk's censorship.

In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a South African-American(!) businessman and social media figure, Elon Musk (@elonmusk). He's best-known for being the wealthiest man in the world, running Tesla Inc., SpaceX & Twitter, and for parroting Kremlin's propaganda narratives. 1/24

Ситуация в Твиттере следующая:

If authoritarian regimes like Russia are so great, why doesn't Elon Musk move his companies there?

@NewStatesman @thephilippics it’s a complete pseudo intellectual BS from someone who has no clue about reality of Ukrainian Russian relationships, history, and the current war context.

The terrible truth of the Ukraine war is that it is precisely its simulated character, its hyper-reality, that makes it so bloody, writes @thephilippics. #Echobox=1695629167-1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">newstatesman.com/international-…

The Kremlin regime is constantly increasing its budget for propaganda and for creating war fakes about the war in Ukraine. Journalists from Meduza, IStories, and The Bell have conducted an investigation into a Russian autonomous non-profit organization (ANO) that creates fakes about the war. ANO Dialog, which is run by Kiriyenko, the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, will receive $93 million. ◾️What is ANO Dialog? ANO Dialog is an autonomous non-profit organization that was created as a tool to promote voting for amendments to the Russian Constitution in the summer of 2020. Officially, the entity had two tasks: supervising government websites, starting from official pages to kindergarten accounts, and collecting complaints on social networks. With the start of the full-scale invasion, ANO Dialog employees began analyzing social media reactions to war-related news hooks and later creating fakes. "Ukrainians are given pills that increase aggression," "The Ukrainian armed forces sell their awards on eBay," "German Muslims call to expel Ukrainian refugees from Germany," - these and similar fake news are written by 60 people in the Dialog's Moscow office and distributed to their own and friendly publics, allegedly on behalf of their subscribers. Contractors include so-called "military correspondents", Solovyev's channels, and War on Fakes. Employees of the Telegram channels Readovka and Mash visited the office for meetings. ANO Dialog is engaged in information support of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The organization is headed by Vladimir Tabak. He is said to be a close associate of the First Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Sergei Kirienko. 🎥 - IStories

This is a critical point made by Zelenskyy #Ukraine's own public opinion is completely overlooked by those pushing for an end to the conflict because continuing it would lead to "more suffering". They refuse to see Ukraine and the Ukrainians as sovereign actors who can make decision as to what they consider acceptable or not. In doing so, the self-portrayed "supporters of peace" are (deliberately or not) aligning themselves with Russia's position, which is that Ukraine "does not exist". But it does, and their president can do no less than act upon the people's will - which is what the leader of a democratic government does.

Yes, especially with the slow approval process for giving UKR what it needs. Surprisingly linear thinking. Don't have to remove 200K. Liberate Crimea and Donbas won't matter. It will take ‘a long time’ to remove Russian troops from Ukraine, Milley says stripes.com/theaters/europ…

"Everything Musk thought he was making better, he made worse. Since then, Musk has doubled down, spreading the very Russian propaganda that made him a dupe, and moving closer to a common fascist position with Putin." theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

I called out Musk’s moral idiocy and ignorance of Russia in his calling for a pro-Kremlin "peace" before he bought Twitter last year. Even my thread from yesterday needs an update, as he has now proudly confessed to sabotage on behalf of the Russian military. 1/4

This is disgusting. Basically aiding the slaughter of civilians.

It's hard to overstate how utterly incompetent the Obama admin was on foreign policy. Syria and Ukraine are his legacy. And he still likes about them, even going so far as to repeat Kremlin talking points.

We honestly don’t mock “realists” enough for getting absolutely everything wrong about reality - especially regarding russia’s war. I’m no academic, but we can all spot a grift as blatant as “realism”. Realists say they just describe the world as it is - shaped by “great powers” - yet are constantly angry that the world isn’t how they’d like it to be - and that people in smaller nations actually have agency too. In a desperate attempt to prove their analysis, they’ll cheer on and collude with a so-called “great power” in the hope it can destroy international law and the rules-based order of co-operating sovereign states that is so inconvenient to their analysis. Hence they still publish pure delusions like this, written as if it’s Ukraine that’s invading russia (at the West’s behest) and has the luxury of giving up the war. It throws out every Kremlin line in a weak attempt to discourage resistance to russia’s genocide. Articles by realists encouraging a deal with russia that would reward its aggression always suddenly increase exponentially when russia needs to pause Ukraine’s momentum. It’s so predictable. The obscured face on the cover of this article is an accidental reflection of how they prefer others unseen. The article focuses in on analysing Ukraine’s counteroffensive by summarising every critical western report over recent months, alongside analysis from western realists. Out of the many people who provide their analysis in this article, there are ZERO Ukrainians asked for their perspective. Only one anonymous Ukrainian official and a tweet from Zelenskyy are quickly referenced to support her narrative. The article has ZERO consideration for the reality of Ukrainians under russian occupation who face mass murder, mass repression, mass deportation, torture, sexual abuse and the elimination of their culture and nationhood. Lynch’s main argument means that Ukraine should settle for this - yet addressing this reality never crosses her mind. Out of thousands of words, there is one reference to “many atrocities” from someone’s quote but in a paragraph with vaguely conspiratorial analysis of the media controlling the narrative. “Scepticism” has been “suppressed” says Lynch. Lynch is using carefully worded atrocity denialism. And we see through it all. We remember how bad all their past predictions were - from their mockery of people concerned about the invasion to their expectation of a swift victory for russia. Instead, we see the hubris of a “great power” and the agency of Ukrainians determined to fight for their own future. Ironically, realists just can’t compete with reality. I don’t think these realists are as dumb as they pretend to be. They could structure a proper argument and write a half decent article if they wanted to. They know an article analysing Ukraine should have Ukrainian perspectives (especially when using their bodies for the click bait cover). They know it would be more credible to at least address the “counter argument” about what happens when a genocidal invader is unopposed. They choose not to because realism is - let’s get real about this - just an ideology focused on denying agency to people deemed not to live in “great powers”. Reality is so disappointing to them.

I like this meme. It’s just so revealing in its admission that the soviet union was a colonial empire whose apologists will use the same lame excuses as apologists for any other type of imperialism. In reality, russian imperialism (of both the tsarist and soviet brand) used our resources for their purposes. And it’s notable that russian colonists arrived in the Baltics with significantly lower levels of education, literacy, and living standards than those here they sought to rule. (The same is true for russians invading Ukraine today.) When russian colonists first arrived in Estonia and Latvia, their first priority was to lower all those things to russian levels. Educational access for peasants was rapidly rolled back and they were re-enserfed under harsher conditions. The University of Tartu was shut down. During the soviet occupation, the Baltic states were used by Moscow as a Potemkin-style showcase of the soviet union to impress key international visitors. Why the Baltics? Because living standards were higher here than in russia precisely because we’d been free from Moscow and more exposed to the West. It’s like if you’re interviewing a potential employee and you ask to see examples of their work then they specifically choose projects where they’ve contributed the least. Yes, the problem is them. It’s not a coincidence that the Baltics returned to rapid growth when they returned to freedom from occupation. Every imperialist thinks their imperialism is uniquely noble. Even the Scramble for Africa was dressed up as a humanitarian mission. It’s all bullshit, of course. Africa too would be far better developed today if the imperialists left them alone to choose their own future. Memes like this are helpful for showing that so many people around the world have been dealing with the same bullshit, dressed up in different ideologies, whether it’s the Scramble for Africa or the nazi-soviet pact. The “multipolar world”, as promoted by russia, is just more of this crap. It’s a rebranded age of warring empires. The world has tried imperialism. And the world has tried a rules-based order of cooperating sovereign states. The results are not in doubt. Now we all have to defend the one we like - and keep decolonising.