The Ukraine war thread

[Mik]

I think you're quite right that financial shenanigans would be much more likely.

[Wim]

The claim that Kazakhstan tried something on Trump in 2017 was -at least for me- a new element.

[Renauda]

New to me as well but, all the same, not at all compelling for the simple reason it places too many people in the know.

[Renauda]

WTF, is he talking about?

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump on Tuesday said Ukraine had "better come to the table fast."

Trump has previously signalled his impatience with the lack of swift progress in solving the four-year conflict.

I wonder why, the lack of progress?

Wait a minute…..

Anne Applebaum gets it. Why can’t the WH narcissist demagogue?

[Mik]

Insanity.

[Renauda]

Cleese cuts out an important portion of the interview - an even better short of the interview with Applebaum:

[Axtremus]

Yeah ... quite likely the alternative will put in a better team to deal with this. (And yes, I also saw the AOC thread.)

[Renauda]

Indeed, Nikki Haley would have had professional diplomats and security specialist take the lead. Nor would she have let Putin con or intimidate the US.

[Axtremus]

NYT's news analysis starts leads with this headline:

Trump Bets on Diplomacy Without Diplomats

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/us/politics/trump-witkoff-kushner-diplomacy.html

[taiwan_girl]

Four years ago today.

[Renauda]

@taiwan_girl

Arthur Dron is a 22-year-old graduate student of journalism at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. In 2020, Dron published his first collection of poetry, Dormitory №6, which has been translated into Lithuanian, English, Polish, Italian, and Belarusian. However, now, instead of visiting lectures and receiving awards for his work, he is protecting Ukraine on the battlefield and writing poems about the experience of war. Despite the gentle quietness of his poems, Dron’s voice is loud in the sphere of modern Ukrainian poetry both in Ukraine and abroad.

First Letter to the Corinthians

Love is patient. Love is kind.
It is not jealous, is not pompous.
Love is terrified like a beast
but it perseveres.

Love could give up and abandon it all
but it perseveres
Sometimes, love has gunshot wounds to
its legs or bullet fragments lodged in
them.

Tourniquets squeeze love’s legs,
or it has no legs anymore.
Then love’s friends carry love.

Love digs trenches and lives in them.
It gnaws ice from the bottle cut in half
when it gets thirsty at negative four.
Love takes up combat duty,
gets into position
with hernias, fevers, prostatitis,
with blast injuries,
asthmas and allergies,
with a high probability
of not making it back,
with thoughts about
the most significant one.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things!

Love can distinguish by ear
the shots of rocket launchers,
the strikes of mortar shells, and
the movement of tanks.
Love’s eyes hurt when it stares into the
thermal imager for too long.
Love wakes up at night
when the mice in the dugout crawl
under its field coat.
Sometimes, love vomits long in the
trees after heavy combat.
Every now and then, it closes the eyes of
its friends.
Love wraps them up in sleeping bags
and carries them away.

Love never fails!
But where there are prophecies, they
will cease;
where there are tongues, they will
be stilled;
where there is knowledge, it will pass
away.
For sometimes, the shelling is over,
and friends close Love’s eyes,
wrap it up in a sleeping bag,
and carry it away.

And then it passes to the living.

Background and analysis:

https://nanovic.nd.edu/features/the-first-letter-to-the-corinthians/