nope

Bartender in DC

[Sulkhan Metreveli @Sulkhan]

‘We can’t send that — it would escalate.’

Four years of this sentence. Time to audit it.

They said it about Stingers. About HIMARS. About tanks — German tanks heading east, unthinkable. About F-16s. About ATACMS. About any strike on Russian soil.

Every single time: the weapon arrived late, the red line evaporated, and the promised apocalypse failed to attend. Today Ukrainian drones work a thousand kilometers inside Russia, routinely, and Moscow’s response is to lie about the fires.

So here is what actually happened: the most powerful alliance in history deterred itself, with a bluff its opponent never had to call, while Ukrainians paid the interest on our hesitation in blood.

Putin escalates against exactly one thing: weakness. He has never once escalated against resolve — because resolve is the single opponent his system cannot afford.

The escalation we feared was fiction. The escalation we caused by hesitating fills cemeteries.

Self-deterrence is still deterrence. We simply aimed it at ourselves.

[Sulkhan Metreveli @Sulkhan]

The Kremlin’s propagandists woke up to a real problem this morning, and it isn’t Drapatyi.

Their entire model rests on one axiom: all governments are the same. Everyone lies, everyone steals, protest changes nothing — so stay home and endure.

Then Ukrainians spent six days in the streets, and their government listened, argued, and obeyed.

That footage is now moving through every Russian-language channel, and no censor can fully stop it. Not weapons. Not sanctions. Just the spectacle of a neighboring Slavic nation replacing its top general because citizens demanded better.

Putin is 73. His system has no mechanism for succession, correction, or even honest bad news.

The most subversive thing Ukraine exports to Russia isn’t drones.

It’s proof.

[Roman Sheremeta 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @rshereme]

I made a post yesterday about socialism and naturally every highly educated progressive showed up to tell me that I don’t know what real socialism or communism is.

First of all, I really don’t know where we would be without all of you college educated geniuses that have never left America or lived anywhere else. Thank you all for your wisdom. That third tier community college degree from San Bernardino is really paying off for you.

While I may not have the benefit of your incredible educations (actually I do) what I do have the benefit of is having actually lived under communism for close to 12 years. I’ve experienced the ��warmth of collectivism”.

As a 10 year-old, I regularly stood in lines for 4 to 5 hours to govt owned grocery stores simply waiting for a food truck to arrive so they could stock the fully empty shelves with bread and milk. I am talking 1920-s Great Depression style food lines, in the dead of winter, freezing my balls off.

The picture you see here is of a food ration card issued to my mother and food coupons which we had to exchange along with money for food at these incredible government owned grocery stores. (Yes I saved these when we came here in 1992)

I've lived in crappy government built housing tenements because that's literally all that was available as no private enterprise existed to build/offer alternatives.

I've experienced a society that was in decay because, despite promises of equality and a good standard of living, all the wealth and power was amassed at the top by communist party leaders and their cronies. (Yes - in this way communism is no different than capitalism in that power still gets accumulated at the top. Just by different means).

So maybe before you start lecturing others about what socialism really is or being arrogant enough to think that even though it’s failed every single time it’s ever been tried in real life…. It can work this time because you are smarter and it “just hasn’t been done correctly” maybe listen to the people who have actually experienced it first hand. I’m talking real socialism/communism. Not the fake shit from Scandinavia.

Oh and I don't want to hear anything about how socialism isn't same as communism blah blah blah. Yes - they're the same thing. Even your idol Marx didn't hold any real distinction between the two.

Source: text of Daniil Kleyman

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

A European capital is on fire because Russia spent the night firing missiles at civilians in their beds.

Kyiv is full of smoke. People are buried under rubble.

This is terrorism.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Someday, despite everything we already suspect, we’re going to be absolutely floored — when we finally learn just how truly colossal the sums were that the Kremlin poured into this war, bankrolling entire armies of useful idiots, “philosophers,” “independent thinkers,” “citizen journalists,” outright political influence agents, high-ranking corrupt officials, collaborators, and every other kind of the 21st century info war criminals from one end of the world to the other, all of them spending years pumping out terabytes of the lowest-grade disinformation and propaganda against Ukraine.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

So why are Russians screaming and shrieking in every video now that Ukrainian cruise missiles and massive swarms of drones are finally flying back toward their cities?

Weren't they the ones who spent decades happily consuming kilotons of the Kremlin's warmongering propaganda in everything from the daily news to films, TV series, and even cartoons?

Weren't they the ones who enthusiastically echoed their permanent regime's slogans of "We can do it again!!!" and spent generations indulging in fantasies of a glorious war against the "decadent gay West," provided they could stay comfortably on their couches, consuming triumphant war reports and the sound of military marches on television?

Weren't they the ones dreaming of putting those "stupid khokhol swines" in their place, cheering with delight when Ukrainians were "punished" for their pro-Western democratic revolution through the criminal seizure of Crimea and the unleashing of the bloody war in Donbas?

Weren't they the ones who for years swallowed the revanchist pseudo-historical ravings of their KGB bio-robot in the Kremlin, shouting "On to Washington!!" and "On to Berlin!!" while dressing their own little children in military uniforms and putting them into toy tanks and cardboard missiles?

Weren't they the ones who erupted in euphoria at the launch of the "Kyiv in three days" operation, only to then flock by the hundreds of thousands and millions to kill Ukrainians as mercenaries for peanuts and to work for Russia's military-industrial complex, counting their blood-soaked profits?

Weren't they the ones who descended into complete moral savagery as a people and as a country, watching with their own eyes as horrific war crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians were committed every single day, from torture and beheadings to the destruction of entire cities and nighttime missile strikes that brought apartment buildings down on top of the people inside?

Weren't they the ones who celebrated every mass killing of Ukrainians on social media, gleefully fantasizing about "leaving Europe without gas" and "freezing the khokhols in the dark this winter"?

Weren't they the very same people who loudly applauded and shouted "THANK YOU!!!" to the Wagner mercenaries in Rostov-on-Don three years ago?

Aren't they still happily consuming nonstop propaganda about the "Kyiv junta," "Ukrainian Nazis," and the "former so-called Ukraine," while listening to state propagandist Solovyov and Putin's officials calling for Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv to be wiped off the face of the earth with nuclear weapons because they refused to submit and fought back?

So what is it? Do Russians no longer enjoy the "sacred war" now that the time has come to answer for that entire orgy of hatred, chauvinism, revanchism, militarism, the cult of death, totalitarianism, and the cynical exploitation of the memory of World War II to justify new wars of conquest?

Now the Ukraine they despised so deeply and looked down upon as inherently inferior -- has survived this war, rallied the support of the free world, armed itself to the teeth, and is now systematically breaking the very backbone of their inhuman war machine.

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

Zelensky increasingly looks like the man holding the West’s future in his hands

Financial Times columnist Edward Luce argues that Volodymyr Zelensky has found himself in a unique position: simultaneously confronting Putin, facing pressure from Trump, and yet remaining one of the most recognizable and influential political figures in the world.

According to the author, Ukraine is playing an increasingly important role in shaping debates about the future of the EU, NATO, and European security. And with Europe’s largest and most battle-tested army, Kyiv now carries significant weight in those discussions.

While many Western politicians shift their positions according to polls and election cycles, Zelensky has spent the last four years defending the very values the West often claims to stand for.

[nope @lalaimpala]

@0TulsiGabbard2 We all know you're employed by the kremlin. Fuck off. To think I actually thought you were cool once upon a time.

[TeinaPosts.🇪🇺 @RafaMorgan64]

When Lavrov says Ukrainian land was always theirs, he's admitting that russia never planned to uphold the multiple agreements they signed ratifying Ukraine's 1991 borders.

It's another reminder that agreements with russia are worthless. Remember that.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

I just watched priests trying to save crucifixes from a burning monastery.

This is what russia is destroying.

The Kyiv Lavra is one of the holiest Orthodox sites on earth. A UNESCO World Heritage site.

Moscow calls itself “Christian civilisation.”

It’s literally barbarism.

[Brahmbeere 🇺🇦 @Brahmbeere]

"Do you trust the Russians?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because they broke every agreement they ever made with me."

— Harry Truman

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

The fact that Elon Musk’s father is actively carrying water for the Kremlin in Moscow is a national security blind spot for the United States and its allies.

Errol Musk is a heavily compromised liability, and his relationship with Russia leaves the West exposed to unprecedented blackmail and espionage risks.

Errol Musk has returned to Russia to praise the regime and enjoy his life on the Kremlin's terms. Given his dark history of abuse and scandals, Russian handlers have likely collected an arsenal of kompromat on him. The FSB does not hand out luxury treatment to foreign elites for free, since they expect a return on their investment, and Errol’s value lies entirely on who his son is (no matter if they are close or not).

This arrangement poses a direct threat to Western security. Elon Musk is a vital contractor for the US military, holding immense power over critical capabilities. He is also a volatile figure who frequently acts on impulse and exhibits highly questionable ideological stances. If Moscow decides to tighten the screws on Elon by exploiting his father, no one knows what will happen, making this entire situation deeply troubling. The US should never have put itself in this situation

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

Today is the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression. For Ukrainians, this is a painful reality that has become part of everyday life.

Since 2022 alone, Russia has killed 707 Ukrainian children, injured 2,548, and left 2,318 missing. The youngest victim was just two days old - born and killed in a maternity hospital.

These figures may be far higher, as the full truth about what has happened in the temporarily occupied territories remains unknown. In addition, at least 20,470 Ukrainian children have been deported to Russia or forcibly displaced.

Eternal memory to all the children whose lives have been taken by Russia's aggression...

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Aggressive propaganda, intimidation through the total terrorization of civilians, and blackmailing the West with threats of nuclear holocaust are, to a certain extent, effective tools of an aggressor state. But even those tools have an expiration date and grow stale over time.

I mean, you can wave your “Oreshniks” at the world all you want, scream hysterical curses and roll your furious eyes on Telegram all you want, foam at the mouth and portray yourselves as deranged suicidal fanatics whom the West must immediately appease. All you want.

But sorry, when in the 5th year of your 3-day blitzkrieg to take Kyiv, you are still smashing your head against the wall for months and years over the ruins of remote Donbas towm, people stop listening and simply continue working toward your defeat.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

By the way, want to know where this idiotic “Zelensky snorts cocaine” narrative actually comes from?

Its roots go back to early 2019, when Ukraine’s presidential election campaign was in full swing. The claim that “Zelensky is a drug addict” was aggressively pushed at the time by then-president Petro Poroshenko, who was seeking reelection, along with his massive media machine.

The strategy of discrediting Zelensky and his presidential ambitions through drug allegations was widely attributed to political consultant Moshe Klughaft, known for running highly aggressive election campaigns in different countries, whom Poroshenko’s camp was reportedly bringing in to save his collapsing ratings.

The whole thing descended into completely absurd territory. As many remember, both leading presidential candidates publicly took urine tests in laboratories to prove they were not drug addicts, and Poroshenko then spent weeks almost literally waving around his test results on television. (In fact, that complete lack of restraint in black PR, hysterical self-promotion, and increasingly deranged campaigning was one of the reasons Poroshenko ultimately lost the presidency in 2019.)

Throughout all these years -- before and after 2019 -- there has never been a shred of actual evidence that the demonstrably athletic and health-conscious Zelensky uses drugs.

But after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Putin and Russian state propaganda eagerly adopted the old smear campaign for themselves (“…that bunch of drug addicts and neo-Nazis who seized power in Kiev…”)

And now Tucker Carlson is running around repeating it like a fool, unaware that he’s parroting a seven-year-old Ukrainian election dirty trick and making himself look like a moron in the process.

[Kateryna Lisunova @KaterynaLis]

You should also understand Ukrainian psychology - grain is deeply sacred to Ukrainians, especially since the Holodomor. Trading with Russia using stolen Ukrainian grain is not only illegal and financially fuels Russia’s war - it is also deeply offensive to the Ukrainian nation.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Reminder that Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian accounts on this platform systematically get shadowbanned and our engagement is crucial to keep their voices heard

[nope @lalaimpala]

@PM_ViktorOrban Omg you're still talking, VATNIK???

[Johnny FD @JohnnyFDK]

What Trump promised: "I'll end Russia's war in Ukraine in 24 hours if you elect me."

What Trump did: "I tried to force Ukraine to capitulate and give Russia everything they want.

When that didn't work I ended all financial support to Ukraine, lifted sanctions of Russia, rolled out the red carpet for Putin, and doubled oil prices so Russia can have more money to continue the war."

[Igor Sushko @igorsushko]

European intelligence knew Orban intended to invade Ukraine and partition the country with Russia in Feb 2022. Hungarian T-72 tanks and artillery staged on the border, led by Lt Gen Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi.
Mission aborted because Kyiv didn't fall.
https://t.co/RgwU1wWWPo