Editors’ Blog

Thank you to everyone who has joined us so far in this year’s annual membership drive. We just added our hundredth new member for the drive this morning. So we’re off to a solid start for day one. If you’re a new or returning member, thank you! If you’re considering membership, please consider making today the day. Just click right here. It’s very important for our organization. We try to keep reminders and pushing as limited as possible. But don’t let that make you think it’s not really important, critical, to our operation. You can read my broader pitch here in yesterday’s kick off post.

Also thank you for all the thoughtful and insightful responses to the two questions I asked yesterday of existing members. More soon on that front.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov says Ukraine and Russia are now discussing “concrete formulations, that are close to agreement.” He says that potential agreement is on the basis of a Ukrainian proposal of neutrality on the model on Sweden or Austria, in which Ukraine forswears NATO membership but has its own military and independent foreign policy and is free to seek EU membership and whatever other ties with other countries it wants. This seems in line with what I mentioned yesterday that President Zelensky appears to have been telegraphing. He’s made a series of statements in recent days saying he’s soured on NATO, that NATO’s never going to accept Ukraine, etc. That may be true as a prognostication and I’m sure he’s not happy about it. But the logic of saying it seems aimed at softening the ground for including non-membership as part of a peace settlement. Take it off the table yourself, accept it through your own agency rather than as a diktat. This part about Zelensky is my interpretation. But I’m pretty confident this is correct. I also suspect these negotiations may be much closer to fruition than people are thinking.

A few other points.

☀️ I will not rain on this bipartisan parade.

Let me share a few observations on the situation in Ukraine. I’ll put most of this under the fold since I really want you to read the posts below about our membership drive. Please sign up!

Hey, a big thank you to the new members who’ve signed up so far. We really appreciate it. If you’ve been considering becoming a member, please make today the day. Just click right here. And thank you so much for your emails answering my questions below. If you haven’t had a chance to read our drive launch post I’d truly be in your debt if you’d take a moment to read it. It’s just below this post or you can read it by clicking here.

(To all the members who wrote such thoughtful replies to the questions below: seriously, thank you. I’m going to be reading through all of them personally. It will take me a while as I’m trying to work several stories too. But I will be making my way through them all. Some will be published and all will figure into our planning and internal discussions. Seriously, thanks.)

Okay, enough warnings and preparation. Today we launch our annual TPM membership drive. Even if you are a member, I would greatly appreciate if you would give this a read. It’s really important. If you’re not a member or if you’re a lapsed member, would you consider making today the day you join us? A basic Prime membership is really cheap. Just $5.99 a month and a bit less if you sign up for an annual membership. You’ll barely miss that cash and in exchange you’ll get access to everything we publish, a cleaner and less cluttered reading experience and a lot more. But at least as important is that your membership fee — along with those of over 33,000 other TPM members — make this operation possible and sustainable. This isn’t just chatter and words. We’re not owned by a big corporation or funded by some foundation. It’s not one revenue source. The overwhelming percentage of the funding that pays for the salaries, health insurance, rent, web hosting and everything else comes from those membership fees. (Like over 80%.) And we really need a chunk more of the people who regularly visit the site to become members. It’s really important. Are you convinced? Just click right here to sign up.

Over the coming days, along with bringing you the latest on the big land war in Europe, the hopefully subsiding global pandemic and the struggle to preserve democracy in the United States, I’m going to be telling you some of our plans for the near and long term here at TPM, how we plan to expand and deepen the way we bring you the news every day. For members and non-members alike, I hope you’ll join me for that discussion.

For now, I have an ask of members too. Why do you read TPM? And more specifically, what do you get from TPM that you don’t get from other news sources? This might sound like we’re fishing for compliments. And in a way we are. I’m asking Readers and Members to write in with their answer to these questions and I hope to publish some of them as part of our pitch for others to join. But it’s not only that. It’s also audience research. This drive is also combined with a number of projects and efforts this year to improve and evolve the site. (There’s no standing still in digital news. You’re either busy being born or busy dying.) And to do that we need to be in constant dialogue with our Readers. We do that in a lot of ways every day. But here I want to do it in a focused and concentrated way.

As a digital native news organization, we’ve always approached what we do and viewed ourselves as a news operation that is part of an ecosystem of sources where you get your news. This isn’t just humility (yes, they probably do go to other news websites sometimes…) It’s a way of thinking about the practice of journalism as one that is in relationship to other news organizations that operate in different ways, with different perspectives, with more long or short term focuses. So as we figure out how to evolve in response to the ever-evolving news environment, it’s critical that we understand where we fit into the mix for our current Readers.

So, that’s our to do list for today. Not a member? Seriously, can you sign up today? You’ll make about twenty of us really happy and at least one of us a bit relieved. If you are a member, can you drop me a line answering those two questions above? Just send it to talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com with the subject line “Why TPM?”

And thank you. Thank you from all of us.

Former long-shot presidential candidate and congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is just the latest U.S. politician to seize on debunked, Kremlin-backed conspiracy theories about the supposed existence of U.S.-run bioweapon research labs in Ukraine.

But she’s the first high-profile Democrat to do so.

What started as an InfoWars talking point has been embraced by the Russian and Chinese state media and has morphed in recent days into a full blown right-wing effort to place the blame for President Putin’s deadly war on Ukraine squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. right’s usual cast of enemies, including President Biden and, of course, Anthony Fauci. Kate Riga digs into the madness here.

We’re coming up on our big annual membership drive. So keep your eyes out. And if you’re not a member, we would so appreciate it if you would choose to join as a member during this drive, which kicks off tomorrow. The stuff you get is really great. And in addition to that transactional part of becoming a member, you also make TPM possible. When I see we need your support, I don’t mean it in a notional way: I mean we need your support. We need more of our regular readers to become members. If you’re already a member, well, we’re going to have fun for you to. We’re going to talk about TPM and we might even throw in some small contests. So get ready for tomorrow and thank you all in advance.

One of the many fascinating dimensions of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is rooted in language. When this story moved to the center of our news in the United States almost a decade ago I had the rough and incorrect sense that Ukrainian was something like a deep regional dialect of Russian — distinct but certainly mutually intelligible. But this is not the case. One of my guides in learning about this has been our Josh Kovensky, who is a fluent Russian speaker and lived in Ukraine for three years working as a journalist before coming to TPM. He’s described it to me as more like the difference between some of the more proximate Romance languages, like Spanish and Italian. He describes being able to get some of the gist of what someone is saying in Ukrainian. But it’s imperfect at best. Basically it’s someone speaking a different language. I have also heard it compared to the difference between English and Dutch — two closely related West Germanic languages which are not remotely mutually intelligible.

RUSSIAN NEGOTIATORS TODAY SAID that they’re making progress in ceasefire negotiations with Ukraine and expect to sign a document in the next few days. On its face, that’s not very credible given what we see unfolding in the country. Even more so because it is hard to imagine what terms both sides would currently agree to for a ceasefire or end of the conflict. What complicates the picture though is that one of President Zelensky’s top advisors, Mykhailo Podolyak, who is involved in the negotiations posted a short video today saying something broadly similar. Podolyak said Russian negotiators are no longer making ultimatums and are “looking far more properly” at the situation on the ground. He says he thinks “concrete results” are possible in the next few days.

Again, who knows what that means. But it’s similar enough to the comments from the Russian side to make one think there may be some movement forward.