KYIV, Ukraine — In a brazen attack that caught Russia off-guard, Ukraine’s military has sent a large ground force across its border and into western Russia.
The Ukrainian soldiers crossed the country’s northeastern border Tuesday and now appear to be several miles inside Russia’s Kursk region, where they are operating in several villages.
Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, said in a Kremlin briefing Wednesday that some 1,000 Ukrainian troops were taking part, backed by dozens of armored vehicles. Russia has sent reinforcements in an attempt to drive the Ukrainians back across the border.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin listened to the assessment with a look that appeared to be a mixture of impatience and disgust. He called the Ukrainian incursion a “large-scale provocation.”
Ukraine has previously backed Russian exiles who carried out limited cross-border raids, but has never conducted its own operation on such a scale.
Ukraine is not commenting on the current developments, and many details remain sketchy. In an interview with NPR, Mykhailo Podolak, one of the top advisers to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, declined to provide any specifics.
But in general terms, he seemed to provide the rationale for the operation, saying Ukraine needed to drive Russia away from border areas where it’s launching so many attacks.
“We have to push them back in some areas if we want to make those areas safe for us. We are creating this buffer zone," said Podolyak.
Yet it’s far from clear that Ukraine can carve out and hold a buffer zone on Russian territory.
…that was a joke, but today’s Morning Memo features a NYT article about Walz’s Machiavellian rise (archived link), which reports that Walz began using the “Weird” word last February!
It just so happens that on February 3 Joe Ragazzo wrote this:
Something I wonder about a lot is if there is, for lack of a better term, a Weirdness Threshold, beyond which a political movement just dies. It seems like there is but it moves a lot. It used to be that just one erratic yell could do the job. There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the Dean Scream. Taylor Swift seems to be provoking a lot of right wing operatives into testing the Weirdness Threshold. And I wonder what, if anything, it means, for the weirdness of the online right to be exposed to a mainstream audience.
[gives examples of MAGA Swift/Kelce weirdness]
I could be wrong, but I don’t think most people ever think about these things. They think it’s weird shit. They also think it’s kinda weak and loserish. It may be the case that the online right is immune to being too weird, but it also may be the case that Taylor Swift helps inadvertently highlight just how crazy things are getting over there to people who otherwise wouldn’t believe it was possible.
I attended UW-Madison for over 7 years – I was having so much fun (actually, I worked full time, and went to school half time.) Never went to a football game. Never gave a shit about football. However, I lived a block and a half away from Camp Randall, where they played. Every game day Saturday, we’d set up a keg or two on our front porch and sell “to go” cups of beer to people walking to the game. We made enough for a semester’s worth of books (and science and medical books are pretty expensive.) I also had a Sunday paper route, and one year, drove a public school bus.
On Wisconsin, meh.
Damn it, I stopped watching when Stevie started talking about what he and Ari could agree on. Kept watching for another couple of minutes – Stevie never answered Ari Melber’s question. So I decided that watching Team Handball on USA was more productive.
It’s excellent news. We didn’t defeat Germany by merely tossing them out of France.
Tying their hands and allowing russia to freely stage and operate behind what is clearly a weakly-defended border and only “allow” fighting on Ukrainian soil was never going to free the occupied lands all on its own.
A gal I knew in high school won a fencing scholarship to, as we used to joke, University of Ohio in Iowa City, Idaho. I can’t remember where she actually went!
I ordered a Paper Cut at Sylvain’s on Chartres St. in NOLA. I saw Pisco in the description of that drink, and was all over it! It was the best mixed drink i ever had! If it was up to me, i’d order Paper Cuts all day long!
The Daily Beast paywalls me… I watched Ari’s interview with Stephen Miller but turned the sound off when Miller’s voice began to rise in pitch. I just couldn’t take any more of it. That change in pitch must have signaled the start of the “sex slavery meltdown” that I missed.
