Arne

[Keith Kellogg @generalkellogg]

This attack tonight on the Monastery by the Russians in Kyiv makes no sense. It has a parallel with the bombing of London’s St. Paul’s in 1940 by the Germans. It won’t work. Someone tell me the military necessity of the Russian attack. There is none.

[Arne @ArneTimke]

@MichaelPeckman Und deswegen ist er nicht mehr Deutscher? Russophob sind übrigens nur die wenigsten, aber Russlands Vorgehen als das zu brandmarken was es ist, nämlich unzivilisiert und verbrecherisch, ist völlig sachgerecht.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Europe Wins Again. Obviously.

Armenia went to the polls yesterday. And the results are exactly what you’d expect if you’d been paying attention for the past five years, rather than wallowing in Kremlin nostalgia like a damp sock.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared victory on Monday, with his Civil Contract Party leading with 52.5% of the vote.  Armenia, a landlocked country the size of Belgium that Russia has spent decades treating as a vassal state, has looked at its options and made a decision that required roughly the same level of intellectual effort as choosing between a Michelin-starred restaurant and a skip fire.

They chose Europe.

This election was less a routine vote than a referendum on Pashinyan’s post-2020 course reducing dependence on Russia and moving toward an explicit European orientation. And Russia, naturally, did everything in its power to stop it. According to Reuters, citing Western intelligence officials, the election faced heavy Russian covert interference, including disinformation campaigns and a plan to transport Russian Armenians into Armenia to sway the vote. One analyst collective described it as one of the largest state-backed disinformation campaigns in modern European history. And Armenia still told them to get lost.

Putin had already warned Armenia it would face economic consequences for drifting westward, and introduced restrictions on Armenian agricultural exports in the weeks before the vote.  Threats, propaganda, economic blackmail. The full Russian toolkit. Result: irrelevant.

Now, Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance would like you to believe that Russia represents some superior civilisational model. A proud, white, Christian fortress holding the line against the Muslim hordes supposedly swamping Europe. It is a compelling narrative, in the same way that flat earth theory is compelling if you ignore every single fact available to you.

Here is one such fact: between 10 and 15 percent of Russia’s own population is Muslim. Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis. Millions of them. Russia is, by its own demographic reality, a multi-ethnic, multi-faith state with a larger Muslim population than most of Western Europe. But you’re not supposed to know that. It complicates the story.

Meanwhile, the Muslim share of the EU population sits at around 5 percent. But the Tucker Carlsons of the world need you frightened, so the numbers get quietly shuffled off stage.

So Armenia joins the queue. Behind Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and every Eastern European country that isn’t currently run by a Slovak who seems to have wandered in from a Moscow focus group. The pattern is not subtle. Every country that has actually experienced Russian influence in practice is sprinting in the opposite direction. The only nation currently moving toward Russia’s orbit is the United States, which managed to elect a man whose foreign policy instincts were apparently shaped by a property developer’s admiration for strongmen with good buildings.

The world watches America and hopes it finds its way back. Most people think it will. Eventually. The damage, however, is already considerable, and democracy, like a soufflé, does not always survive rough handling.

Armenia made its choice. The right one. Obviously.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[L’Atlantista 🇮🇹🇺🇦 @Latlantista]

Non ho mai scritto a riguardo della raffineria di alluminio ad Aughinish in Irlanda; pensavo erroneamente: quanto alluminio può mai produrre l’Irlanda per la Russia?

Mi sbagliavo. La raffineria di Aughinsh, posseduta dal colosso russo “Rusal” (posseduto dall’oligarca Deripaska) produce un terzo di tutto il (poco) alluminio ancora prodotto in Europa. Tutto questo alluminio è trasportato in Russia dove viene usato per nutrire lo stesso complesso militare industriale che rade al suolo le città ucraine facendo stragi di civili.

Ma lo scandalo è ancora maggiore di quello che potrebbe sembrare: che le sanzioni europee non siano affatto complete e permettano ancora tali follie non era una novità. Quello che personalmente mi ha scandalizzato è il modo in cui i politici irlandesi, incalzati dal bravissimo reporter Caolan, neghino che la raffineria abbia una qualche connessione con il complesso militare russo, nonostante tutto, a partire dalle insegne fuori dalla struttura, porti a tale conclusione.

Questa roba deve finire all’istante. La raffineria va sanzionata, chiusa e basta.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

Irish politicians are avoiding questions about Aughinish. Patrick O’Donovan refuses to answer my calls. The refinery is in his constituency

He says the Russian owned plant is not connected to Russia’s war machine, without showing evidence. They want this to blow over. It won’t

[Nicolas Tenzer @NTenzer]

We must constantly share with the widest possible audience the stories of all those who have been, with a sadism that no normal person can imagine, tortured, tormented, raped, and murdered by the russians—tens of thousands of them.
These countless cases are all well-documented.

[Rep. Don Bacon 🇺🇸✈️🏍️⭐️🎖️ @RepDonBacon]

Russia is losing on the battlefield and in the Black Sea. Its economy is in tatters. All it can do is bomb Ukrainian cities and civilians. This is why we must pass Russian sanctions and military aid to Ukraine. The House will vote on this in two weeks.

[Olga Patlyuk 🇺🇦 @OlgaPatl]

Look, world. Please look.
This is Kyiv today after another russian attаck

[Mikhail Khodorkovsky @khodorkovsky_en]

It is nearly impossible for a European to comprehend the psychological reality inside Russia. It is not just "fake news." It is a total deconstruction of reality.

Let me try to immerse you in the world Russians live in [1/9]

[JBANC Baltics @JBANCchatter]

🇺🇸🇵🇱 The Polish American Congress expresses its deep concern regarding last week’s meeting between members of the U.S. House of Representatives and a delegation from the Russian Duma, which included sanctioned individuals and vocal supporters of Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine.
Particularly troubling is the participation of Vyacheslav Nikonov—an outspoken imperialist and the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, a key architect of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that led to the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II.
In response, the Polish American Congress has issued a formal statement and will be communicating it directly to all Representatives who participated in this meeting.
At a time of continued Russian aggression and growing security concerns on NATO’s eastern flank, such engagements raise serious questions and demand clarity and accountability.
@Pol_Am_Congress

[Arne @ArneTimke]

@cvcoelln Der Wolf ist nicht mehr aus der Einkaufsmeile herausgekommen und voller Panik gegen die Glasscheibe gerannt. In dem Zusammenhang hat er gebissen. Eine solche Konstellation dürfte im Wald eher nicht vorkommen. Daher keine übertriebene Panikmache.

[Sir Duke🇺🇸 @SirDuke64052381]

@RepDonBacon @RepKnott @HouseGOP
Discharge Petition #8 needs one more signature to force a vote on helping Ukraine and placing sanctions back on Russia. Trump and his administration may support Russia and it's evil war crimes, a large majority of Americans do not! #StandWithUkraine

[Donald Tusk @donaldtusk]

The news that Orbán’s people inform Moscow about EU Council meetings in every detail shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. We’ve had our suspicions about that for a long time. That’s one reason why I take the floor only when strictly necessary and say just as much as necessary.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Nico Lange @nicolange_]

Wir alle sollten aus 2014 und 2022 gelernt haben und das russische Playbook "Volksrepublik Narwa" jetzt nicht einfach ablaufen lassen. Wenn wir erst wieder wie bei "Aber der Donbass!" in ein "Aber Narwa!"-Hintertreffen geraten, wäre das ein Sargnagel europäische Sicherheit. /END

[Nico Lange @nicolange_]

Achtung! Das ist keine Übung! Seit einigen Tagen verbreiten Kanäle in Sozialen Medien Symbole und Ideologie einer "Volksrepublik Narwa", die eine separatistische Bewegung innerhalb Estlands suggerieren und anleiten sollen. Das Playbook ist bekannt. 🧵

[Community Notes & Violations @CNviolations]

The most entertaining two minutes I've watched today.

[Chuck Schumer @SenSchumer]

Donald Trump is Putin’s puppet.

Always has been, always will be.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Lawrence O’Donnell: "We can take them at their word." Trump's clown of the day, Steve Witkoff, says we can take Putin's word that Russia has not been helping Iran target attacks on American troops.

Trump's breathtakingly incompetent real estate developer buddy Steve Witkoff appears stupid enough to actually believe Putin and say on television that he believes him.

They have no idea what they're talking about. None. 🫳🎤

[Churchill MGᵀᴹ 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇸 @ChurchillFella]

This is Ukrainian girl Anya, 14 years old. She was killed in her house by Russian bomb, along with her mom, aunt and her dog.
Never forget. Never forgive.