Biden's visit
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Taleb’s comment on the visit:
This is perhaps the worst humiliation. Vladimir Vladimirovich was imagining himself walking around in Kiev in March 2022, just as Hilter and Churchill toured Paris and Berlin, respectively, the type of thing that makes a conquest a conquest.
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And yet...
US informed Russia of Joe Biden’s Kyiv visit hours before departure
The White House notified the Kremlin of Joe Biden’s intention to visit Kyiv hours before he departed for Ukraine, it has been revealed, as the details began to emerge of how the US president pulled off his high-profile diplomatic coup.
Meticulously planned over several months by a tight circle of key advisers, Biden’s visit was described as “unprecedented in modern times” by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on the grounds that it was the first time a US president had visited “the capital of the country at war where the United States military does not control the critical infrastructure”.
“We did notify the Russians that President Biden will be travelling to Kyiv,” Sullivan said. “We did so some hours before his departure for deconfliction purposes, and because of the sensitive nature of those communications I won’t get into how they responded or what the precise nature of our message was, but I can confirm that we provided that notice.”
The US informed Moscow to avoid any misunderstanding or misjudgment between the two nuclear-armed powers, according to accounts from Washington.
Were the sirens a welcome?
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There are very good reasons to let the Kremlin know in advance of the visit. Top of the list being “don’t do anything rash or stupid Vladimir” to just being in Putin’s face because Biden and Zelenskyi can.
@Renauda said in Biden's visit:
There are very good reasons to let the Kremlin know in advance of the visit. Top of the list being “don’t do anything rash or stupid Vladimir” to just being in Putin’s face because Biden and Zelenskyi can.
Absolutely right. Totally prudent.
Why the sirens?
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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There are very good reasons to let the Kremlin know in advance of the visit. Top of the list being “don’t do anything rash or stupid Vladimir” to just being in Putin’s face because Biden and Zelenskyi can.
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@Renauda said in Biden's visit:
There are very good reasons to let the Kremlin know in advance of the visit. Top of the list being “don’t do anything rash or stupid Vladimir” to just being in Putin’s face because Biden and Zelenskyi can.
Absolutely right. Totally prudent.
Why the sirens?
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@Mik said in Biden's visit:
Very plausible. I suspect it doesn’t take much to raise an alarm.
Fox News is reporting that there were no air strikes anywhere near Kiev today, not in several days. No sirens either.
The siren mysteriously sounded just as he came into camera view.
Nobody looked up when it sounded. How could nobody look up?
I assume they spent several hours rehearsing.
