Separating Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Uncle Joe and Xi Jinping with a comma and publicly urging them all to attend Global Peace Summit on June 15-16 is arguably not a great idea.
All three are unlikely to attend, although Team USA promises to send a delegation. The world is not as multipolar as Z and his foreign policy advisors want us to think.
Yuiry presents his after-action review of preparations by the Armed Forces of Ukraine to defend areas of northeastern Kharkiv region. What a mess.
As of Monday morning, small groups of Russian groups were reportedly sneaking across Ukraine’s border in Sumy region.
In keeping with the continuing sluggishness of international press, the transcript/translation of Z’s pow wow with The New York Times was finally published and illustrated by a photo of Ukraine’s president gesticulating.
It seems already to have evaporated from foreign press acounts, but the snippet below is continuing to make the rounds:
[Putin] is an irrational person. Because a rational person cannot unleash a full-scale war against another state. He’s irrational, or he knew that there would be no consequences for him, which means there was discussion with other countries. And I don’t even want to think about it because then it’s not partnership, it’s playing behind each other’s backs, and it’s betrayal, complete betrayal. So let’s say that he didn’t have any agreements, and he’s just an irrational person who decided that nobody would defend Ukraine and he could invade and destroy us. - Z
There is obvi a problem with this translation1. (Не)адекватный человек does not speak to Putin’s irrationality/rationality, but to his unreasonableness/reasonableness.
Irrational refers to something that is not logical or rational, violating quantitative or mathematical expectations.
Unreasonable refers to something that is not reasonable or sensible, violating qualitative expectations.
The terms are related but distinct - irrational things are not necessarily unreasonable, but unreasonable things may be irrational.
We all remember the Institute for the Study of War’s loopy strategic misdirection counterfactual from December 2021.
Putin is and remains a rational actor who is not less well-grounded in reality than most world leaders. ...He will not intentionally take actions likely to risk the survival of the Russian state or his own rule, although... No “bounded rationality” is necessary to explain Putin’s decisions or actions.
Bounded rationality bullshit about Putin abounds. It is cited from another 60-page unsearchable ISW pdf, titled “Confronting the Russian challenge: A new approach for the US.”
It’s one thing to believe that Putin is a morally compromised person, but it’s quite another thing, and completely unacceptable, to blurt out that Ukraine could have been completely betrayed after being warned privately and publicly that Russia’s invasion was imminent and inevitable.
The last time I checked, Putin has been a bloodthirsty maniac since, er, at least 2008, when he lost his mind and authorized the invasion of Georgia and slaughter of innocent civilians. Maybe he was rational thinking he could get away with it?
Lost in Translation. Imminent inevitability in Ukraine’s underpants (February 4, 2022)