US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
Second? Crimea was the first, this is second.
Russia is hoping third time is the charm
Aaaah shit man I forgot how many times they’ve already done that, my bad. Like, remember that time when they signed a sovereignty agreement with Russia in exchange for their nukes post 1991? I remember that, in that they said that, the agreement was that, give up the nukes to Russia, and you won’t be invaded.
Then they got invaded.
Twice?
Am I still off by the count? Because I seem to recall something from the 2nd World War where they starved the country to death but I’m drunk so forgive me if my memory is foggy I’m sure someone will set me straight
prior to 2014, trump has flynn working for the russian backed ukrainian PM at the time too.
Not WW2, but in 1930s there was a massive famine caused by Soviet fuckups. One could argue whether it was intentional or mismanagement (or intentional concealment of mismanagement), but either way, a whole lot of people died that didn’t have to.
The best way to get the truth is to confidently tell a falsehood online.
Slava Heroyam.
Yeah, it’s a well known Murphy’s law
This has been going on since russian empire was not afraid to call itself that. The label changed multiple times, the imperialism did not.
In before ML claim that only the west can be imperial. There’s a reason all of Russia’s neighbors are Leary of them. And that former conquered states abolished most of the Soviet iconography placed in their states. And are fighting tooth and nail to stay separate. The USSR was one of the most imperialistic colonizing countries of the 20the century. Colonizing and conquering most of their neighbors.
Look, as much as a genuinely hate Russia, maybe talking about imperial conquest in the 20th and 21st century is not a fruitful line of argument when it comes to comparison with the USA. Just saying. In a perfect world, Russia, the US, and China simultaneously collapse, and also India and Pakistan, and most other countries, and out of it springs a new epoch of civilization where we distribute resources fairly and equitably, and we come to our senses, and decide on societal goals that we want, instead of letting the market decide what we get, and explore the solar system and have nice robots that take care of us while we smoke weed and bask in the Utopia that we have within our reach if we so but decide to grasp it.
But that’s just fucking me.
Nah not just you. For the record I trend anarco communist ideologically. There shouldn’t be offices with any more concentrated power than mayors. And plenty of them should still have less power.
Reddit astroturfs and whitewashes for western oligarchs generally. The fediverse has it’s own whiney whitewash crews. And it’s important to acknowledge and push back against. Fuck the governments, power to the people.
Then we’re similarly aligned.
I’m just thinking, at the end of it, sounds like more or less a return to a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Which I’m personally perfectly fucking fine with. But like, we don’t have to abandon knowledge. Just the system that is destroying our planet and our societies. Capitalism and humanity don’t scale.
And, if we’re speaking freely with one another, I think that there is no case where this machine won’t be coming crashing down one way or another in the short term. People say “people have said that since millennia”, and they have, and guess what, a lot of the times they got fucking destroyed, not everyone is still around right? To me the writing has been on the wall for some time, friend, at some point something in this massive global intricate mechanism is gonna go POP, and the whole fucking machinery breaks down.
Remember back in, what was it -97, when an electrical failure blew out most of Northern America for like 10 days straight or something? I don’t, I’m probably wrong about the dates and duration, and one could argue that we have “better redundancy” today, but just look at Texas back when- power grid failed, people froze to death.
I don’t know really where I’m headed with this, I just know this- if capitalism “succeeds”, then that is the end of our run, because the only end game for capitalism is more, like a cancer. And if it fails, well, same boat. In either case, we are going to hit a fucking brick wall, or drive off a cliff.
Workers of the world, unite. Get a gun and a shovel, both are gonna be needed.
Oh, it’s not about abandoning knowledge or being nomads or anything like that. Not that it’s wrong if people want that sort of thing. But more about flat granular, answerable government. You can and still should fund and encourage research and science under a system like that.
It’s about not having a large government or business telling you that you are to be sacrificed. Tough luck as they dump the negative externalities onto you. More star trek less 1million BC.
But human nature and society has a lot of evolution to do before then. So until then, it’s important to keep concentrated power to a minimum. That’s the one thing most abusive governments share. Unanswerable people at the top, sending down commands according to their whims or ideology. Regardless or especially because of who it hurts. See trump and immigrants or Xi an uhygers/Tibetan’s/hongkongers or democracy advocates in general.
It’s like that saying, I don’t know if it was Carl Sagan or who it was who said it, and I paraphrase- our technological development vastly outpaces our cultural development.
These old power structures cannot hold 8 billion people in a modern society run on digital communication, they were never designed for it. We need a new system, a whole new model, and then some way to spread that model organically, grass roots like. I have been thinking about it a lot.
Thanks for sharing- if I may ask you, what kind of society do you envision? What form and shape would it take? Do you have a realistic idea of what you would want to see?