Editors’ Blog

TPM’s Josh Kovensky spoke on MSNBC just now about Vladimir Putin’s cryptic decision-making, the impact of U.S. sanctions on Russia, and how to think about the possibility of a retaliatory cyber attack on the U.S.

We have two big developments this morning. The first is that in a televised exchange with his top military leaders, President Putin ordered the country’s strategic nuclear forces on alert in response to Western sanctions and what he called “threatening statements” from leaders in Europe. That means as little and as much you think. It underscores that while the punishing sanctions unveiled yesterday are merited this is nevertheless a spectacularly dangerous international crisis. Not just dangerous in Ukraine but for the whole world. At the same time, Russia and Ukraine have agreed to hold peace talks near the border with Belarus. They are talks without preconditions.

One curious feature of social media is that we actually have lots of detailed and close up imagery and information about particular military engagements. But it remains hard, at least for me, to get a clear view of the overall picture of what is happening right now in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government has released a number of figures about alleged Russian combat fatalities, which are very high. But it’s hard to know what to make of those numbers. Combat armies have a notoriously hard time estimating their adversaries’ casualties and fatalities. And the Ukrainians, involved in an existential battle, have plenty of very understandable incentives to make those numbers high.

I’ve had a number of TPM Readers ask me via email today who they should be following on Twitter for real time updates. This is the list I’m following on Twitter. It’s a mix of just under a hundred reporters, diplomats, heads of state and region experts I put together and am following.

President Zelensky is saying publicly that Turkey has agreed to shut down transit to the Black Sea for Russian warships.

Apparently Zelensky and Erdoğan spoke by phone today. So far as I can tell, Erdoğan has not confirmed this potentially important news.

In our first installment of The Judicial Review video series, TPM reporter Kate Riga breaks down the latest SCOTUS news: President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court Friday.

There must have been many moments over recent days when President Zelensky said to himself, “How the fuck did I get here?” As most of you know, Zelensky was a comedian and an actor. His presidency was kind of a lark. My memory my fail me here but I believe his big claim to fame was a show in which he played a fictional President of Ukraine. So his whole candidacy had a meta/absurdist tinge to it and likely was only possible in a country in which much of the population regards the political class as hopelessly corrupt. And yet Zelensky now finds himself in a position in which he will either preside over the dissolution of the independent Ukrainian state or, if things go very differently, probably be regarded as something like a founding father of it.

As we’ve noted in our live coverage of Russia’s declaration of war and subsequent full-scale military attack on Ukraine in the last 24 hours, there is a schism growing in the Republican Party on whether Vladimir Putin is a mortal enemy, or a brilliant friend. The wildly divergent thinking within the GOP has been on display repeatedly in recent days and weeks.

I wanted to note this report that Ukraine has essentially opened its armories to civilian volunteers. They claim to have given out up to 10,000 automatic weapons today to citizens willing to fight as home guards or essentially paramilitaries and irregulars. This makes perfect sense for how this conflict is evolving. It is clearly an existential battle for the Ukrainian state. But I just wanted to focus in on what this means. This means giving out machine guns to any Ukrainian citizens who are ready to kill Russian soldiers. This is an invitation to the kind of merciless and bloody urban warfare that insurgents and irregulars excel at and which regular armies struggle with. Don’t get me wrong. If I were running Ukraine I would be doing this too. Watching ordinary Ukrainians, in various ways, put their lives on the line to fight back against this entirely unprovoked aggression inspires me. But I just want to focus in on how dark and desperate a situation this is. This is to-the-death kind of fighting. Where who is military and who is civilian is totally blurred. It’s a level of ferocity you don’t easily come back from.

Earlier today TPM’s executive editor David Kurtz and Ukraine specialist/TPM reporter Josh Kovensky hosted a live conversation on Twitter. Here is the link in case you missed it: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1jMJgeAEYrYKL