Brian Taylor

Trump literally yesterday: Ukraine has till Thursday to accept this plan.

Rubio: This is not our plan.

Total f-ing 🤡 show

My favourite moments of this iteration of the ”US-Russia peace plan” were:

1. Dmitriev leaking it
2. The points admitting that Russia does kidnap Ukrainian children
3. The points including that Ukraine shouldn’t hit Moscow or St Petersburg ”without a cause”

(Tbc)

The White House doesn’t offer a plausible legal rationale because the orders are illegal.

Various lawyers wouldn’t sign off on it because the orders are illegal.

Trump flipped out at veterans saying don’t follow illegal orders because he’s giving illegal orders.

Real Occam’s razor situation here.

Listen to Kevin by listening to @eilishhart.bsky.social and @faridaily.bsky.social; great conversation on Russian elites. (Not entirely spared Kevin’s voice, he pops in to ask for money for @meduza.io - you should listen to Kevin about that too).

Anonymous Russian official: when the "28-point plan" came out he thought they could replace the famous Worker and Peasant statue in Moscow with a statue of Trump. Story also indicates Russian officials consider it a draft, with lots of details to work out.

verstka.media/mirniy-plan-...

US tells Nato if Zelenskyy does not sign peace deal Ukraine will face worse in future ‘No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,’ says US army secretary in sombre meeting

Latest from sources in Kyiv: US officials tell NATO nations that Zelenskyy will be pushed to sign the “peace plan” this week or face an even worse deal in future

Apparently the Trump admin wants Ukraine to sign the surrender deal by *next Thursday* (Thanksgiving!). If true, it is a shameful betrayal of Ukraine, of U.S. treaty allies, of U.S. and European national interests, and of basic human decency. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the nation’s top diplomat, worked on a secret plan for Ukraine to surrender to Russia, which illegally invaded it twice, with no future security guarantees against Russia trying a third time.

Dmitriev and Witkoff out there rewriting the North Atlantic Treaty all by themselves.

I think you’ve answered your own question

NATO's expansion and American imperialism made him do it

The deadliest year yet A new investigation from Meduza and Mediazona shows Russia has lost more than 200,000 soldiers in its war against Ukraine — Meduza Earlier this summer, Russia’s Federal Statistics Service (Rosstat) stopped publishing overall mortality figures, leaving inheritance case data as the only reliable and sufficiently detailed source for...

25 years later, current estimates of Russian dead in Ukraine since Feb 2022 are over 200K. 131 times higher. Putin is after "victory at any cost," not a deal. Helping Ukraine remains the only route to meaningful and lasting peace. 2/2

25 years ago today, Putin addressed the Russian military leadership and said the following about Russian deaths and casualties in the 2nd Chechen War (started in Aug 1999): 1/2

en.kremlin.ru/events/presi...

"When the government offers life-changing sums for death amid its demonstrated indifference to deep poverty and demographic collapse, it creates a macabre marketplace where human life is commodified and death becomes an investment strategy."

Great headline. Echoing the famous Clausewitz witticism: "The aggressor is always peace-loving; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed."

From @michaeldweiss.bsky.social at the bad place.

Presumably Witkoff meant this to be a DM, and K is Kirill Dmitriev.

WITless dumKOFF strikes again.🤦

This war feels endless.

Sometimes at night, when I hide from russian drones and missiles and my world is shaking with explosions, I imagine that somewhere it is a bright day, that people are living their normal lives, making vacation plans and thinking about the future.

Seems like a good day to revisit why I chose this screen name a little over seven years ago. A 🧵

It was about a week after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, and the first time (that I know of) that Trump was asked about it.

"We show that Trump's use of violent vocabulary—linked to both war and crime—intensified over time, becoming by late 2024 among the most extreme of any democratic politicians studied... He embraces an exclusionary populism, centered on vilifying political opponents and marginalized groups."

You forgot this Kevin.

gloria patti smith group on saturaday night live, 1976.

For the sonic and visual embodiment of this moment, Patti Smith Group on SNL performing "Gloria," April 1976

vimeo.com/155133943

Bsky: NYT’s framing of this story is terrible!
Counterpoint: Did you see the 4-page spread in Sunday Arts about the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s “Horses?” 😍

One local Syracuse story about how Trump & Miller are cruelly and pointlessly destroying people's lives.

"Friends, activists, politicians and a network of total strangers collaborated to keep one Syracuse husband from the clutches of an increasingly heartless federal government."

I reminisced about my son getting stitches in Altai

Is it Trump or Miller though

🚨New book alert!🚨

"Once Upon a Russia: Voices From a Vanished Era," edited by
Steven Fisher.

"Over one hundred vivid, personal accounts from foreigners who lived, worked, or wandered through Russia during a time that now feels irretrievably past." (Including 1 by me.)

At the usual outlets.

Last night was the worst bombing I have experienced in Kyiv since the war began. 7 hours of non stop aerial attacks across the city.

The San Francisco-based company, whose founders include Sam Altman and Elon Musk, had said its language learning models absorbed entire training sets of data rather than storing or copying specific songs, the Munich court said. Because its output is generated by users of the chatbot via their prompts, OpenAI said, they were the ones who should be held legally liable for it – an argument rejected by the court.

"Sure, our plagiarism machine ingests enormous amounts of copyrighted material without anyone's permission, but it's the users of the machine who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 criminals, your honor." 🙄🙄

Just unbelievable levels of chutzpah.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...