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

Through my writing over recent weeks I’ve tried to keep up a secondary focus on the decisions the U.S. made about the Soviet Union, Russia and NATO during the 1990s. I think this is only a secondary part of the story. But it’s a part. In those debates we hear about Russia’s security concerns about NATO enlargement. I think it’s important to be specific and clear about what these security concerns really amount to.