Day 1079
Europe's bible belt
I know who took this picture, but I’m not saying. Some 150 POWs, some held in captivity for years, returned to Ukraine yesterday.
Riding the wave of anti-wokism, Charlemagne suspects I am/have been in league with USAID. No, sorry. I worked for DoD and the State Department for eight or nine years, then Merck, then Soros. My only connection with USAID is temporarily closing down their grant-giving ops in the region in the late 1990s during my insane period.
Disclaimer below.
Anent yesterday’s post ridiculing Donald and Bibi, someone sent me this1.
I have never been to Gaza and have no intention of visiting.
From 2010 to 2013, however, from Kyiv I picked out the juciest bits of zillions of hours of moving pictures documenting cross-border attacks in souther Israel near the Egyptian border, IDF’s Operation Returning Echo in response to the outbreak of violence in the region and the 2012 Gaza war. The work involved patching together feeds of raw footage from AP, Reuters, AFP, et al and own sources, scripting them, voicing them over in six, seven, eight languages and disseminating widely.
Not a fan of Donald. Not a fan of Bibi.
Doxxing active service CIA agents is a bad look. Intelligence sharing with Team USA during its Golden Age is ill-advised.
Keith has announced he will visit the Munich Security Conference on February 13-15. Maybe he will visit Kyiv before/after the beano.
As of this writing, the framework for a ceasefire agreement brokered by Team USA looks like this:
Ukraine agrees to stop fighting to recapture 20% of occupied areas,
Team USA provides some kind of security guarantee,
Ukraine agrees to hold elections.
Z’s political fate has become one of the key points of the arrangment being discussed by Voval and Donald. The issue is not the Kremlin’s invented illegitimacy of Z, but Vova’s intolerance of him. A ceasefire linked to immediate elections, then a stable peace agreement with Ukraine’s new political leaders is one scenario.
In an ideal world, Z would be un-reelectable, but we live in Ukraine. As soon as people learn Z’s removal as president is one of Moscow’s main demands, people will vote for him. The last thing we want is a new old Z as Ukraine’s next president, but this remains a possibility, that is, unless Donald & Co. decide to unclassify info about Wagnergate, Oman, Belarusian bitumen and various self-enriching schenanigants.
That’s a decision Tulsi will help Donald to make based on her almost complete ignorance of the region and inability to discriminate between accurate and wildly inaccurate intelligence reports about Ukraine.
And, finally, this:
Andy and Lara write about how religious some Ukrainians are, leaving out the part about Z conversing with an all-powerful cosmic entity when his back is against the wall2.
To Keep Aid Coming, Ukraine Appeals to Trump Allies: Conservative Christians. A Ukrainian delegation to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington will make the case that Russia threatens the religious freedom of Christians who don’t follow the Russian Orthodox Church (The New York Times, February 6, 2025)
Soros got $260 mil from USAID so .... ya self-identifying?