Day 34, Phase 2
Separatist underpants
I forgot to take my passports with me yesterday. Two kids with machine guns thought I looked suspicious and asked for ID at a checkpoint. Instead, I pulled out my dog tags and did a couple of magic tricks. They let me pass.
Daniel at Bloomberg via Starts & Stripes tells us Tiger Team will share more military secrets with Ukraine.
What separatist groups? The separatist groups in Daniel’s underpants?
Cora at The New York Times also writes about separatists.
Sorry, there are no separatist groups or separatists. It’s Russia-occupation forces, all the way down1.
I’m not happy with CNN’s analysis, either. Both the NYT cand CNN cite military analysts from Fred’s Institute for the Study of War, the same dream factory that in December 2021 gave us “strategic misdirection,” assuming Putin would act within the bounds of rationality, as if he were rational.
Using terms like rebels, separatists, breakaway regions and insurrection to describe the crisis serves no purpose of diplomacy or journalistic balance. It is a failure to serve the public interest. Russia’s war against Ukraine should be described as what it is: an armed conflict instigated and sustained by Russia’s armed intervention. Day 30. Mass Deportation (March 25, 2022)