Editors’ Blog

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.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Russia-Ukraine situation, and some chaos reigning right here at home as Texas prepares for its first-in-the-nation primary under a new voting law.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

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.

If we’ve learned anything about the former president, we know that accountability for his various wrongdoings are often a far-off pipe dream. He tends to find various loopholes to endlessly delay legal proceedings or politically squirm his way out of repercussions.

But today there were two bits of news that suggest he might soon have to answer for at least a fraction of his alleged financial misconduct over the years.

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.

The MyPillow Guy was def just trying to tend to the weary and spiritually malnourished. It was def not a stunt, and how dare you insinuate such a thing.

The details: The MyPillow CEO and Big Lie Guy Mike Lindell, a videographer, an American truck driver and a truck full of “10,000 pillows” were reportedly stopped and denied entry to Canada last night after attempting to cross the Port Huron-Sarnia border into Ottawa. According to the conservative Canadian news outlet The National Post, Lindell was attempting to deliver a bunch of “pillows and Bibles” to anti-vax trucker protesters in Ottawa, but was turned away because he himself is not fully vaccinated and he didn’t have proof of a negative PCR COVID-19 test with him at the time.

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.

It’s hardly a surprise: More than half of the funds donated on at least one crowd-funding website raising money for protesters involved in the Canadian anti-vax trucker demonstrations came from U.S. donors.