Gytė

[Rebecca Aguilar (on Blue Sky & LinkedIn) @RebeccaAguilar]

Everyone COPY this video, share it far and wide. Paramount Skydance billionaire baby David Ellison can’t handle that Stephen Colbert is getting millions of views . @Youtube we will cancel our subscription as we did when we dumped @paramountplus.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The Wrong Side of History Has a Very Specific Smell

By Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Ben Hodges is not a man who wastes words. The former commanding general of US Army Europe has spent the better part of three years telling anyone who would listen that Ukraine was going to win, that Russia was going to lose, and that the only real question was how much unnecessary dying would happen in between. He has now added a postscript, and it is not a comfortable one: America, he says, is going to deeply regret what it failed to do.

He is, of course, absolutely right.

Ukraine is not merely surviving this war. It is industrialising it. The country that Russia expected to fold in 72 hours has spent three years building one of the most sophisticated drone warfare ecosystems on the planet, developing long-range strike capabilities that have genuinely rattled the Kremlin, and producing battle-hardened soldiers who have forgotten more about modern combined-arms warfare than most NATO generals have ever learned. When this war ends, Ukraine will not be a grateful, shell-shocked recipient of Western charity. It will be the single most capable and battle-tested defence industry in the World. Full stop.

And the United States, which spent the last stretch of this conflict flirting with the aggressor, slow-walking ammunition, blocking long-range strikes, and sending its president to Mar-a-Lago to take phone calls from Putin like a middle manager hoping to avoid a performance review, will have precisely zero claim on any of that.

Now imagine the day it ends.

Imagine a billion people in the streets. Kyiv, Warsaw, Tallinn, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Seoul, every city that understands what it means when a free country refuses to die. The flags, the tears, the noise of it. The sheer, thunderous relief of a world that held its breath for years and can finally exhale. It will be one of those moments that gets burned into the collective memory of a generation, the kind that people will tell their grandchildren about with the particular pride of having been on the right side.

And America will watch it on television.

Not as a liberator. Not as the arsenal of democracy, the role it once played and once deserved. It will watch as the country that looked at the greatest struggle for freedom in a generation and decided, at the critical moment, to see which way the wind was blowing before quietly backing the wrong horse. The Stars and Stripes will not be waving in Maidan that day. Ukrainian children will not be naming their sons after American presidents. The defence contracts, the partnerships, the strategic relationships, the soft power that the United States spent eighty years accumulating as the world’s indispensable nation: all of it auctioned off for nothing.

There is a particular kind of shame that comes not from doing something terrible, but from failing to do something obvious.

The historical record does not grade on a curve, and it has no sympathy for anyone who says they were confused about which side was which.

Russia invaded. Ukraine bled. The rest of the world chose.

America, under its current management, is choosing badly. And when that billion people starts dancing, the silence from Washington will be the loudest sound in the room.

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@TasteAtlas We add scallions to šaltibarščiai in Lithuania.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Lithuanian composer and conductor Mindaugas Piečaitis, directs his orchestra on the notes of Nora the cat playing the piano.

She earns a standing ovation.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

There is a particular kind of American politician who, upon achieving high office, feels compelled to announce publicly the things he is most proud of.

It is, when you think about it, a remarkable instinct – the urge to share, unprompted, the moments you consider your finest hours.

JD Vance has decided that one of his proudest achievements is cutting off military aid to Ukraine.

Not, you understand, brokering a ceasefire. Not negotiating anything at all, really. Simply stopping the flow of weapons to a country that has been defending itself, with considerable tenacity and very little outside help, against the largest land invasion in Europe since 1945.

That is the thing that makes him proud.
It is worth pausing on the word “proudest” for a moment, because it does a great deal of work in that sentence.

Previous generations of American leadership had, by most accounts, a somewhat different set of things to be proud of.

George Marshall, who served as Secretary of State after World War Two, oversaw the reconstruction of an entire continent.

He didn’t do it because Europe asked nicely. He did it because he understood, with the particular clarity that comes from having watched the alternative, that democracies left to collapse tend to produce outcomes nobody enjoys.

Dwight Eisenhower, who had seen rather more of war than most people ever will, spent the rest of his life trying to prevent the next one through alliances, commitments and the steady accumulation of trust between nations.

These were not perfect men. But they grasped something that appears to have been entirely lost in the current administration – that American credibility is not a renewable resource.

You spend it once. You don’t get it back.

Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and JD Vance have, between them, the collective historical memory of a particularly inattentive golden retriever.

They have confused loudness with strength, grievance with principle, and the act of abandoning allies with something they have inexplicably decided to call realism.

Vance flew to Budapest recently, had what was described as a warm meeting with Viktor Orbán, and returned apparently satisfied that something useful had occurred.

Vance flew to Budapest, embraced Orbán warmly, and flew home.
Three weeks later, Orbán lost the Hungarian election in the most decisive repudiation of his rule in twenty years.
The Midas touch, in reverse.

The men who planned the Normandy landings – who coordinated seventeen Allied nations, crossed the most heavily defended coastline in history, and did it in bad weather with inadequate maps – would have found the current American foreign policy apparatus quite difficult to explain to their grandchildren.

Proudest, he said.

There it is, I suppose.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@U24_gov_ua @TimothyDSnyder he is from Lithuania. The competition took place in Norway.

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@DarRamesnis ar idėja yra, kad visi ne lietuviai turėtų palikti Vilnių? ar mums nereikia nei užsienio investicijų nei turistų?

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

NATO members know that Donald Trump would not value their contribution if they became involved in the Strait of Hormuz, @anneapplebaum argues: “What you’re hearing from America’s European allies is not cowardice. It’s a calculation.”

Read the full article here: https://t.co/9SVv4gNxQP

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@FutLituanoArg this is in Birstonas:)

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@igorsushko you are posting bs

[Marika Mikiashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @Mikiashvili_M]

Again, I know that Magyar needs to win and that Hungarians have been subjected to years of Orban-only media, but it is still deeply tragic that there's no pro-Ukraine opposition in a protected, NATO and EU country that has formerly experienced Russian occupation itself.

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@Oksii33 💯

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

“Intercepted phone calls and messages from senior Russians ridiculing Trump have been shared by the British with the Americans. ‘We have continually shown them intelligence that shows the Russians are lying,’ a senior security source revealed. ‘The Russians are privately mocking Trump over his naivety about Putin’s intentions. Putin doesn’t want to end the war.’” https://t.co/WR2yNg2cpk

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@ArtSash love u too 🫶🇱🇹

[Gytė @Gyte_tweet]

@Microinteracti1 Very accurate. 👏

[Edward Lucas @edwardlucas]

This week's column, in praise of Lithuania https://t.co/KVA8EVNJmx

[Branislav Slantchev @slantchev]

What do you know, @FT went ahead and published my little letter to the editor.

[Andrius Kubilius @KubiliusA]

Our response to geopolitical security crisis - more 🇪🇺 unity.

Unity starts w collective leadership to discuss most important defence issues.

We need to discuss setting up European Security Council, 1st proposed by President Macron & Chancellor Merkel ⬇️
https://t.co/6X0iInkgDt