It’d be eye roll-inducing if it weren’t so darkly nauseating.

A woman named Lia Thomas won the NCAA Division 1 national championship for the 500-yard freestyle swimming race last week. Thomas is the first transgender athlete to earn this title, beating out Tokyo Olympics silver medalist Emma Weyant, who won second place at the NCAA tournament.

For years I’ve been corresponding with TPM Reader BF. He’s in the national security world, whereas I’m just an outside observer. He’s prone to intense responses to events whereas I’m characterologically more cautious. But this is his field not mine. So in recent days I was struck to see that he thinks I have the Ukraine situation totally wrong and that notwithstanding its battlefield embarrassments and mishaps Putin is on the verge of getting everything he wants and Ukraine is on the verge of what amounts to surrender.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate talk about new revelations into what major Republican players were doing during and around the insurrection.

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

From TPM Reader JJ …

Years ago I worked for a building trades union. I once had a car ride with a fellow staffer, an older Catholic guy who I’d once heard express opposition to abortion.   I thought I’d ask him about it.

I assumed I’d hear a version of the Catholic take on it. Instead, he was refreshingly honest–

“These c**ts have gotten out of control.”

I was offline for a few hours and I came back to the news that ex-President Trump is calling on Vladimir Putin to help him unearth dirt about Joe Biden. I had been thinking it was going to be important going forward to remind people that Trump has repeatedly worked with Vladimir Putin to intervene in U.S. domestic politics and subvert U.S. elections. After all, it seems like Putin is getting less popular in the United States of late. But I guess that won’t be as pressing a need as long as Trump continues to re-collude out in the open on an ongoing basis. So here we are.

QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) recently endorsed “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance’s bid for the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Senate race. And as he continues his descent into Trumpian madness, he’s welcoming the far-right lawmaker’s support — and all the white nationalist ties that come with it — with open, orange-tinted arms.

It’s quaint now, but I wrote a bit here about my impression of Vance from the perspective of a young person living in a small conservative town in the Midwest at the time. I was once cautiously stirred by “Hillbilly Elegy” for what it did to seemingly usher-in a new wave of nuance surrounding conservative intellectualism. But I was also deeply skeptical of his approach to Republican values; a style that seemed far too generous to the GOP during an era in which the conservative movement largely shrugged off the vile and racist rhetoric overpowering the party.

If you follow reports closely, you’ve heard that the Ukrainian military has incrementally been reclaiming territory from Russian forces in the north of the country and parts of the south in recent days. The situation is different in the east and southeast, in parts of which Russia has continued to consolidate its possession of territory. There have also been reports of Russian withdrawals. But it’s been hard to disentangle which of these withdrawals are more like retreats in the face of counter-offensives, or simply redeployments to find more defensible positions, or actual withdrawals. All that’s been clear is that in substantial parts of the country Ukraine has been retaking control of territory that had been occupied by the Russian Army.

Today though Russia’s deputy defense minister said that Moscow would “fundamentally cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernigiv” in order to “increase mutual trust for future negotiations to agree and sign a peace deal with Ukraine.”

I’m trying to make sense of how big a deal this is, how new this is and frankly just what to make of it. I was even put slightly on my guard since the reporting is in part from Bob Woodward and it is so reminiscent of the notorious 18 minute gap in Watergate tape recordings. But what the Post and CBS News report this morning is that in the records turned over to the January 6th committee there is a roughly eight hour gap in the record of the President’s actions and calls that maps almost exactly to the period of violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.

I am of course just speculating, but that ^ might be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) current internal debate after Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) flailing around on Fox News this weekend.

As head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Scott put out an “11-Point Plan to Rescue America” last month to attempt to give Republicans some sort of safe-space to coalesce around heading into the 2022 Midterms — as the party seemingly does not have a broader legislative agenda, beyond letting the right-wing media rile the base into a frenzy over faux culture wars.

A new article (sub req) in the FT says that Russia and Ukraine are discussing a ceasefire agreement in which Ukraine would agree not to join NATO but also get NATO-like security guarantees from major European powers and the U.S. Ukraine would also be free to join the EU. This essentially amounts to armed neutrality and likely an agreement not to host foreign troops on its territory. A key element appears to be an agreement to leave the question of the territories Russia held as of February 24th as a matter to be discussed in subsequent negotiations. So an agreement to disagree for the time being essentially.

The unknown in these negotiations and the reported draft agreements they are working on is that no one on the Ukrainian side — and I suspect in the U.S. as well — is clear at all about whether Russia is actually seriously considering these potential agreements or simply using them to stall for time or keep the Western powers from imposing more sanctions.