#tim mak

[tomorrowusa]

Why Zelenskyy Stood Up to Trump-Vance

During the Oval Office meltdown, Zelesnkyy said a ceasefire with Russia was pointless without security guarantees. Why? Ukraine tried that b

Ukraine is totally correct not to fall for phony agreements with Russia. Russia has a long history of not keeping its word – maybe that's why Trump is such a Putinphile..

Russia's invasion violated at least three major international agreements.

The 1945 United Nations Charter [Article 2, Section 4].

The 1975 Helsinki Final Act [1. (a) III and 1. (a) IV] by the CSCE which in 1990 became the OSCE.

The 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

Why should anybody trust Putin's Russia to observe any new agreements?

Tim Mak is a journalist working in Ukraine. He was formerly with NPR and The Daily Beast. This is from his Substack The Counteroffensive. He and two colleagues spoke with diplomat and international attorney Oleksandr Merezhko who participated in negotiations with Russia of previous ceasefires known as the Minsk agreements.

"I believed that [the agreements] could be implemented with good will... but Russia did not even try to achieve a result, they just wanted to use it for purely propagandistic military purposes to destroy Ukraine," Merezhko said. As February 2022 approached, when the full-scale invasion began, Oleksandr began to suspect that Russia was planning something more significant. After all, Moscow was increasingly spreading information online that Ukraine was violating the Minsk agreements. "Russia was looking for an excuse to abandon the ceasefire, accuse Ukraine of violating it, and then its hands would be free for full-scale aggression... We did everything to prevent Russia from having a chance to say that even if it was aggression, an attack, it was provoked by Ukraine," Merezhko said. [ ... ] The main problem is that the Russians were uninterested in a ceasefire and negotiations. They comply with rules and requirements only when it is to their advantage. "The Minsk agreements have once again confirmed that we cannot have anything to do with the Russians, because they are liars and never keep their commitments, or keep them only when it is in their interest. When [their] interest disappears, so do the obligations," Ukrainian diplomat and former foreign minister Volodymyr Ohryzko told The Counteroffensive. The main conclusion to be drawn from the Minsk agreements is that to negotiate anything with the Russians is to disrespect oneself, said Ohryzko. Therefore, the main argument in talks with Russia is strength.

Anybody who believes that Russia would observe a new agreement without Ukraine getting solid security backing from the West probably attended Trump University and bought a year's worth of Trump Vitamins.

The Russian word показуха generally means "window dressing" but can sometimes be used to describe a staged event. In that sense, that's what the Trump-Vance hissy fit in the Oval Office was.

I suspect that somebody told Trump that Ukraine got the better end of the minerals deal. The only way Trump could weasel out of it was to have a temper tantrum to keep it from being signed as scheduled.

As for Ukraine not being grateful, fact checkers pooped all over Trump's lies about that.

Fact check: 33 times Zelensky thanked Americans and US leaders

How often does Trump thank people? He probably never thanked the doctor who faked the diagnosis of a bone spur to keep him from getting drafted.

Back to 1994 for a moment. In the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons for secure borders. Now that Ukraine's territorial integrity has been violated, does that mean it's okay for them to have nukes again?

[transpondster]

[lostinhistory]

There's a reporter, Tim Mak, who reports from Ukraine. I subscribe to his newsletter, The Counteroffensive, and I have been give three subscriptions to give to friends, so if you want one, let me know. He does good work.

[the-cosmic-slop]

Fired Over Too Much Tupac? A Rap-Loving Bureaucrat From Iowa Says He Hopes Not

The former head of Iowa's Department of Human Services says that, ideally, his dismissal will lead to "having open discussions about race and what we have in common, instead of what separates us."

[frontpagewoman]

[tomorrowusa]

Is it a coincidence that the election night map on TVN24 in Poland used the colors of the Ukrainian flag to designate which party was ahead in each województwo (province)? 🙂🇺🇦🇵🇱

In any case, here are the final results from the official election authority the Państwowa Komisja Wyborcza.

The official results in the number of seats per party were amazingly close to the exit polls. While the specific number of seats per party differed slightly, the Sunday night Ipsos poll and these official results both give the three pro-democracy parties a total of 248 seats.

The official turnout (74.38%) was more than a percentage point higher than the already high exit poll estimate. This is the highest turnout since the 1989 election which saw the end of communism in Poland.

When you vote, you win.

People who have lived under authoritarianism don't need to be prodded into voting.

Tim Mak is an American journalist in Ukraine. He tells about Marcin Banasiak, a Polish citizen who is doing humanitarian work in Eastern Ukraine. Long story short: Just to vote in Sunday's election, Marcin spent 26 hours traveling from Kharkiv to Warsaw. That required traveling almost the entire length of Ukraine and then over to Warsaw via the border city of Chełm.

Read Tim's account of Marcin's vote quest at Mastodon.

If Marcin can spend 26 hours (traveling one way) to help rescue democracy in Poland, we should not complain about the minor inconveniences related to voting in the US.

American historian and journalist Anne Applebaum lives in Poland with her husband Radek Sikorski who happens to be an MEP and former cabinet member in the previous Donald Tusk government. In The Atlantic (archived) on Monday she wrote about what led to the pro-democracy victory at the polls.

[A]bout 73 percent of Poles voted across the country, far more than the number that voted in 1989, and in some places the turnout was higher than 80 percent. In Warsaw, Gdansk, Lublin, and Wroclaw, as well as some European cities, voters stood in line for many hours, polling stations ran out of ballots, and some people were able to vote only long after the polls had been scheduled to close. At one Warsaw polling station near midnight, an election worker wept on live television, thanking her compatriots for showing up in such large numbers. How did they do it? Anger is a powerful emotion, and over the past year, PiS made a lot of people angry. Repeated PiS corruption scandals—corruption being one of the inevitable results of politicized judges, police, and prosecutors—certainly helped the opposition. So did high inflation, partly created by PiS’s decision to spend heavily on social programs as the election approached. So did the decision by PKN Orlen, a state-owned oil company, to lower gasoline prices in advance of the vote, thereby causing shortages around the country, as well as general mockery. But this turnout was produced by positive emotions too. Donald Tusk, the leader of the Civic Coalition, pointedly used the language of civic patriotism rather than angry nationalism. Thousands of volunteers came together to organize election-monitoring teams. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in two major demonstrations in Warsaw, carrying Polish and European Union flags; others joined a series of big public meetings around the country.

The new government, when it assumes office, won't be perfect – because no humans are perfect. But it will be enormously better. And similar to Democrats in the US after Trump, the presumed three-party coalition in Poland will spend a lot of time repairing democratic institutions degraded by PiS.

[gwydionmisha]

Ukraine may be in for a 'multi-generational conflict': American journalist on the ground in Kyiv

[democratz]

Amongst a lot of folks on the right they feel like they are being victimized. Despite the fact that the right does control most of the political power in America today. That they control the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House, the Supreme Court, they control most Governorships, a lot of State Houses, they are in the driver's seat in a lot of ways. But I think culturally they fell they are not at all in control. They don't feel like they are in control of things like Hollywood, or what they see on television, of what they see in the newspaper. And that's why there is so much salience with an issue like Diamond and Silk. They're thinking why don't we see more people that agree with us in pop culture, in the news, on television, and things like that. So, this gets to a broader point about how conservatives feel right now.

Tim Mak,  NPR Politics Podcast, More On Mueller, Zuckerberg And Landscape For 2018 Elections, April 12, 2018

I want to mark a contrast. Look at this stance of “appreciate me because I do all of this for you”, and “I wish you would praise me” in response to my being in charge. Then next we will look at how this is born of willful ignorance. 

So this is a victimization feeling born of ignorance over how having control does not mean you always accomplish what is just and fair for all. Instead it is often just a reinforcement of a broken culture, a broken power structure.