Status Updates From War

"The way you usually win wars is they run out of people, they run out of money, they run out of weapons," [Lindsay] Graham said “So who's going to run out of people, money, and weapons first”

Ukraine was Russia’s buffer separating it from NATO, which has expanded over the last three decades to include over a dozen former Soviet and Soviet-aligned republics

“We can’t have good relations with Russia if they are invading the neighbors, like Ukraine, Georgia”

[says Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to Trump, who in turn was/is president of a nation that overthrew virtually every single one of his neighbors in the American continent. Maybe that is why they insist on calling themselves “Americans”]

President Obama had provided Ukraine with more than $120 m in security assistance but refused to send lethal weapons. Trump was the first president to approve the sale of U.S. lethal weapons to Ukraine, including Javelin antitank missiles.

[this stuff is what Putin argues brings NATO to his doorstep]

“Our untel officuaks arr competent in what they assess” Blinken added, “but we need to make sure that our intelligence services are linked ip so that we’re dealing with the same set of information”. Part of diplomacy had become covert salesmanship

[goes both ways]

Some of it is dressing up a conviction, which is mostly at its core about power and what Russia believes it is entitled to do, he [Bill Burns] said. Then you dress it up with a lot of history selectively

The investigation went nowhere. On February 13, 2021, Trump was acquitted. While a majority of senators, including several Republicans, voted to convict the former president, they failed to reach the two-thirds needed for conviction. It was merely symbolic since Trump was no longer president