In case you’re just catching up, yesterday there were reports that French President Macron may have brokered a Biden-Putin summit that would deescalate the crisis. That didn’t happen. Today President Putin of Russia gave a long speech in which he insisted that Ukraine is not a real country and is merely a phony state created by the decisions of the Bolsheviks a century ago. It’s a speech that will be studied closely as it openly and aggressively touted the revanchist, neo-Imperial vision which Putin has long been said to harbor but has never stated quite so openly. He then recognized the “independence” of the two separatist puppet states Russia set up in eastern Ukraine during the 2014-2015 crisis. The leaders of these puppet states then immediately requested Russian “peacekeepers” to come into their purported territory. It was a request Putin — surprise, surprise — rapidly acceded to.

So over the course of the day Russia has executed an invasion and what amounts to a de facto annexation of Ukrainian territory but without — so far — firing a shot.

As I’ve noted recently, I’ve usually been in the ambivalent/skeptic camp when it comes to NATO enlargement. There were many good reasons, from the U.S. perspective, to oppose NATO enlargement back in the 1990s and in the subsequent smaller expansions in the last quarter century. The U.S. has very good reasons not to extend security guarantees with what amount to existential implications to every country bordering Russia or adjacent to its borders which is or feels threatened by Russia. So you can say NATO expansion was dubious policy. Or you can claim, though the evidence for this is murky at best, that the U.S. broke some “deal” it made with the Soviets/Russians at the end of the Cold War. But all of these points ignore a basic foundational question: why did or do all these countries — Poland, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, et al. — want to join?

One of the uncanny things about what now does appear to be an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine is that so much is visible in real time. I’ve seen people saying we can’t take American claims of a military buildup or invasion at face value. And skepticism is always warranted about any government’s claims during a crisis. But in fact, between social media and commercial satellite imagery most of the story is unfolding before our eyes. If we’re smart and diligent, we can even fact check a lot of it from the privacy of our own homes.

I’m putting together a twitter list of accounts to follow the unfolding situation. You can view it here. It’s what I’m now using to keep track of events.

The leader of one of Russia’s puppet statelets in eastern Ukraine announced today that he is organizing a mass evacuation of civilians out of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and into Russia. As far as I can tell there’s no independent confirmation that this is happening. There are a few different possibilities. One is simply that this is an effort to pull civilians out of what will soon be a warzone. But it is being portrayed by Denis Pushilin, the self-styled leader, as a last chance to escape a coming invasion by Ukraine and what Vladimir Putin and his Donbas region puppets have been predicting will be a “genocide” of ethnic Russians carried out by Ukraine. In other words it looks exactly like the kind of agitprop and confusion campaign Biden, NATO and basically everyone who’s not in active sympathy with Russia has been predicting all along that Russia would use as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

There are actually two subvariants of Omicron COVID. The one that upended the world in recent months is BA.1. There’s also BA.2, so far considered a subvariant of Omicron, and it’s been spreading around the world at BA.1’s expense. There’s seems to be little debate that BA.2 is at least somewhat more transmissible Classic Omicron (BA.1). But a study released today in preprint out of Japan suggests it is also more pathogenic. So more transmissible than Omicron and on a par with Delta when it comes to severity of disease. (Not good!) But a separate study out of South Africa, reported yesterday, says that BA.2 is on a par with Classic Omicron when it comes to severity of disease.

We remain in a period of intense flux and uncertainty. Part of making sense of these periods is having an eye out for shifts that seem to be happening even if we don’t know precisely why they’re happening or what they’re building towards. For example, we keep getting hints that Donald Trump’s power within the GOP is waning. Not collapsing, certainly — nothing dramatic. The GOP is not moving in a Never Trump direction. But he has just a bit less sway and dominance day by day.

Like last week, we will be publishing this week’s edition of The Josh Marshall Podcast tomorrow, Thursday the 17th. We should be back to the regular Wednesday release starting next week.

This morning we got an email from TPM Reader SI about the Trump document shredding. Can it really be the case that the government lacks electronic copies of these documents Trump tore up or flushed? I answered him as well as I could, noting that paper documents are often marked up by the President or aides and thus become unique documents in their paper form. But I confessed I didn’t know the precise answer myself. So we had Josh Kovensky dig into this question and he found some very interesting answers. See Josh’s report here.

On its face, the current Ukraine crisis is over the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. Russia wants a binding commitment that that will never happen. The U.S. and NATO refuse to offer such a firm and binding commitment. What’s easy to miss if you haven’t been following this story over the last two decades is that Ukraine has never gotten an invitation to join NATO. Not even close. There’s really no reason to think such an offer is or would have been coming any time soon. Successive U.S. Presidents have not been willing to take that step, even as they’ve worked to support Western-leaning governments in Kyiv. It’s been seen — rightly, I think — as just a bridge too far for the reasons I noted yesterday. Indeed, the backdrop to the current high stakes brinksmanship over whether Ukraine will be allowed to join NATO is that it’s a discussion of such a highly notional possibility. That fact must come up again and again in high level discussions.

I usually let notes from TPM Readers speak for themselves. But TPM Reader JE’s note made me think JE both didn’t know the extent to which he and I agree or where I get my news. It also gave me an opportunity to address a few issues I’ve been wanting to discuss.

First, JE …