13 February 2022
Keeping tabs on Vlad
Going to start contributing back to this blog on a regular basis, starting with weekly for the foreseeable future.
I did not know about this website until the other week, but it’s a pretty cool dashboard that provides some organized quantitative and qualitative info about conflicts globally.
Couldn't agree more with the central point of this Atlantic piece: “...but this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy, it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination; a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly.”
Leaked document that may give some idea as to how the U.S. see’s negotiations toward de-escalation moving forward, if at all, with Russia.
Worth reading a piece that Putin wrote about six months ago about Russian-Ukrainian relations. It’s long, but just skim the last five or so paragraphs.
Thrilling book about what it’s like to go against Russian oligarchs: Red Notice. Spoiler alert: they don’t play by the rules.
Here is also a reminder of what Russia wants:
