Neil Abrams
@neil_abrams
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Corruption, democracy, rule of law, Eastern Europe, Ukraine. Words in WaPo, Slate, Foreign Policy. PhD, polisci. He/him 🇺🇦 🇵🇸
Joined July 2014
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A recent indictment detailing a Russian scheme to covertly finance prominent rightwing edgelords showcases the collective gullibility which unites them with the tankie left—a gullibility, it turns out, that’s enabled by a belief system both happen to share.
My latest: 🧵
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According to tankies, the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, in which Ukrainians rose up and ousted kleptocratic dictator Viktor Yanukovych, was a “coup” by the U.S. acting in cahoots with Ukrainian Nazis. Was it?
Short answer: No
Long answer: Also, no.
Let’s dig in.
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A common Twitter exchange:
Tankie: Stop arming Ukraine!
Reasonable person: What exactly do you suggest instead?
Tankie: Pressure Ukraine to implement the Minsk accords!
So what are the Minsk accords, and why is the tankie line on Minsk ridiculous?
A thread.
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So after proudly leading the charge to oust Claudine Gay over alleged plagiarism,
@BillAckman
finds himself defending his academic wife against the same charges. Below, I’ve compiled a short thread of examples of Ackman invoking his natural right to hypocrisy. Enjoy! 🧵
I mostly think plagiarism gotcha stories are at least a bit overdone. and no one likes having their lives upended. but good lord reading the serial tantrum of Bill Ackman's twitter feed right now is just a live fire zone of schadenfreude, self-awareness fails and special pleading
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OK, so
@MaxBlumenthal
of
@TheGrayzoneNews
recently published an article claiming that Russia’s bombing of a Mariupol theater was actually a false-flag operation carried out by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. Reader, this is one dishonest article, and I’m about to show you why. Thread:
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In all seriousness, I do think we should stick to what we know.
For example, I know about Ukraine.
@DavidSacks
knows about Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Being a Douchebag, and Social Networking.
So let’s all have some humility and not spout off about any old thing.
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My point, Aaron, is that you *don’t actually care* about the people affected by these conflicts.
You do care about exploiting their suffering to make a name for yourself. But you don’t care about them.
I can prove it, too.
A thread:
@neil_abrams
Note: Ukraine has also been using cluster munitions the whole time. What’s your point? Mine is that progressive proxy warriors are hypocrites, and that rather than the US sending in even more weapons of murder, it should try diplomacy. People who don’t care about lost lives
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Tankie propaganda on Minsk is an attempt to shift blame from Russia, where it properly belongs, to Ukraine, where it doesn’t: “If only Ukraine implemented Minsk, we wouldn’t be in this situation!” It’s straight gaslighting. To simplify things, I’ll call it “gasminsking.”
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Anyone who insists the West stop arming Ukraine or force it to negotiate a peace agreement against its will is, wittingly or not, endorsing mass death and other human rights abuses.
How do we know? Russia’s own recent history tells us so.
A thread:
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There is literally no autocrat in the world this ass-clown won’t support.
What he calls a “popular anti-colonial revolt” was a military coup against a democratically-elected leader whose ascension to the presidency in 2021 marked Niger’s first-ever legitimate transfer of power
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Well hallelujah. After my many threads debunking his Ukraine lies—about the Euromaidan, the Donbas war, “NATO’s proxy war,” etc., etc., Maté finally responds to one of them.
In doing so, however,
@aaronjmate
reveals just how far out of his depth he is. Let’s take a look.
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Ok,
@DavidSacks
, in the interest of constructive debate, how about debating me on the Ukraine war?
You’ve criticized experts for dismissing your opinions. But here I am, an expert, offering to engage with you.
So are you willing to subject your views to real scrutiny, or not?
True experts display intellectual curiosity. Fake experts try to shut down debate.
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We would not, in fact, have nuked Moscow if Russia bombed José Andrés aid workers. I know this because Russia has repeatedly bombed José Andrés aid workers, not to mention scores of other humanitarian aid workers.
We’d have nuked Moscow or Tehran by now if Russia or Iran killed 7 Jose Andres workers with 3 drone strikes — one after the other, chasing them from vehicle to vehicle until they were all killed
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(sigh) No, Victoria Nuland did not “choose” Ukraine’s leader or otherwise orchestrate a coup during the Euromaidan.
She was floating candidates for P.M., not president, and only because Yanukovych *asked* the West to help mediate a deal with the opposition.
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I’m gonna keep this as short as possible, since explaining the intricacies of the Minsk process is only slightly more alluring than the thought of blowing my brains out. But it’s important because tankies, when pressed for details on a “peace deal,” use Minsk as their trump card.
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In a world where people assume that success in business must be due to intelligence, David Sacks is a walking, talking advertisement for the opposite position—that, no, most of these guys are stone-cold morons who happened to stumble ass-backwards into money.
Putin is the new Covid, an invented panic to justify stealing our money.
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Absolutely gobsmacked by the left-wing anti-imperialist vibes.
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Russia has waged many wars since 1991. Only this one is genocidal. Thus arises the obvious question: Why? What makes Ukraine different?
In my latest for The Detox, I offer an answer. 🧵
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That spring, the Kremlin financed and organized demonstrations of paid protesters across eastern and southern Ukraine. The idea was to create the appearance of an organic local uprising. Leaked tapes from Putin adviser Sergei Glazyev reveal the scope of these efforts.
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So anyone who wants to come at me with some sanctimonious lecture about Ukraine violating its sacred treaty obligations can get the fuck out of here with that shit.
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Stone’s film resembles an extended Twitter thread by the New York Times Pitchbot: “We wanted to understand what really happened during the Euromaidan so we sat down with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Yanukovych at a Fuddruckers in Tampa.” I’m not shitting you; that’s what it is.
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A lot of scholars are seemingly hellbent on damaging their reputations with ruinous advice on Ukraine and Russia. The past week alone has seen three open letters from this sorry genre, all of which, if carried out, would put real people’s lives in danger. Let’s take a look.🧵
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Not that this is surprising; Crimea is Ukraine’s only majority-ethnic Russian province. But note how much lower support for joining Russia was than the % of ethnic Russians in each region. Even ethnic Russians weren’t all that enthusiastic about joining Russia.
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There’s a mountain of evidence confirming the presence of irregular Russian forces in the Donbas operating under the Kremlin’s direction. See, for instance, this excellent and meticulously-researched report:
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That Russia had to wholly manufacture this uprising shows just how anemic separatist sentiment was among residents of eastern and southern Ukraine, a fact confirmed by opinion polls at the time.
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Of course, the undisputed king of gasminsking is
@aaronjmate
. Maté is smarter than most tankies. His takes tend to be less inane than those of, say, an
@mtracey
. So when asked for specifics on a peace deal, he’s done enough Wikipedia diving to have a ready-made answer: Minsk.
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Source for the Glazyev leaks, including transcripts:
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@mtracey
My man, the Holocaust began in June 1941, well before the U.S. entered, when Hitler set the Einsatzgruppen upon Europe’s largest Jewish population. After that it was just a question of tactics.
Oh, and it was Germany that declared war on the US, not the other way around.
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So it’s no wonder the Kremlin had forge a fake rebellion out of whole cloth. Still, local residents weren’t buying it, and it never got off the ground. So Putin responded by sending irregular Russian forces into the Donbas to pose as native rebels.
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So there you have it. When tankies talk about Minsk, they’re gaslighting people into believing Ukraine is at least as guilty as Russia for the current war, and the arguments they invoke to do so are about as silly as their other propagandistic musings. /End
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I think the leaders of the great powers should get together in front of a big map and decide the fate of smaller countries over cigars and brandy.
I am so against imperialism by the way.
If Kissinger at 100 could travel all the way to China to ease the US-China conflict, maybe Biden could pick up the phone and call Putin???
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In late-February 2014, mere days after Yanukovych fled, Russian troops occupied Crimea. Soon after, the Kremlin launched a major initiative to stir up separatist, anti-government protests in other parts of eastern and southern Ukraine.
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Come on,
@DavidSacks
, for a guy who excoriates experts for “chickening out” when it comes to debating others, you’ve been conspicuously silent since I invited *you* to debate me.
I mean, it’s enough to make people wonder whether you’re…chickening out.
No?
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The problem,
@stephenWalt
, is not that people condemn you; it’s that you *do not listen* to them and just continue repeating the same lines.
You’ve already made your “moral case for pursuing peace.” What you haven’t made is your moral case for occupation.
Time to do it. 🧵
It's easy to understand why many people sympathize with Ukraine and want to support it against Russia. But the correct moral calculus on this issue is harder to discern, even for those on Kyiv's side. Latest FP column here:
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But Russia’s Donbas proxies just went ahead and held sham elections on their own, outside the Minsk framework and with no monitoring.
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You won’t hear most tankies talk about Minsk, but a few do. Take Caitlin Johnstone, for instance:
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Incredibly, Kyiv’s improvised forces, cobbled together from state and private actors and financed in part from small donations, started absolutely kicking ass, recovering most of the lost territory and confining the Russian irregulars to a small slice of land.
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Russia’s war on Ukraine is notable in that there’s really no moral ambiguity involved. At all. So if your goal is to introduce any moral complexity into it, the only way to do it is by making up a bunch of shit that never happened.🧵
It's odd how there's never any Biden admin "frustration" with their own actions in Ukraine: backing the 2014 coup; sabotaging the Minsk accords; encouraging Zelensky to crack down on Russia-friendly opposition parties in early 2021; rejecting Russia's December 2021 peace treaty;
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@MaxBlumenthal
@TheGrayzoneNews
For those unfamiliar, the Twitter Tankie worldview can pretty much be summarized thusly: “All the world’s evils are the product of imperialism and, by the way, there is no imperialism but US imperialism.” A crude summary, yes, but it does encompass about 95% of the shit they say.
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This thread, on the Euromaidan, is the first of three debunking tankie claims about Ukraine. The next two, respectively, will address the Donbas “rebellion” of 2014-21, which was actually a covert Russian invasion, and the far-right’s influence in post-Maidan Ukraine.
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The Russian irregulars seized considerable territory and set up Russian proxy administrations in Donetsk and Luhansk. Only then did Kyiv, bankrupt and with no military worthy of the name thanks to Yanukovych’s outrageous plundering, launch its first military operation.
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I mean, the Kremlin was well aware that most of the local population was not behind its occupation. So conducting free and fair elections under international monitoring wasn’t exactly an option, was it?
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Now that our old friend is back with a fresh "Maidan coup" take, it is worth reviewing just how dumb this argument is. It's not only that the general argument is dumb; in fact, every single permutation of its various strands is just mind-numbingly stupid. Let's take a look.🧵
According to a new account in the NYT:
On the night of the Maidan coup in Ukraine ten years ago, Feb. 24th 2014, Ukraine's post-coup spy chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko arrived at his new headquarters and made his first call to "the C.I.A. station chief and the local head of MI6."
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@timgill924
I’d also recommend grinding up each book into a fine powder after the second reading and snorting it.
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Faced once again with humiliating defeat, Putin brought out the big guns. In August 2014, he sent thousands of regular Russian troops into the Donbas. The arrival of actual Russian army units turned the tide, reconquering most of the land Ukrainian forces had recently recovered
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With Covid receding, another pandemic stalks humanity. I’m referring, of course, to the scourge of awful takes by IR specialists on Ukraine.
Their harebrained calls for “peace” betray an embarrassing ignorance of the subject, and they need to stop.
My latest in The Detox 🧵
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For Ukraine, this was a nonstarter, as the Donbas “rebels” operated under Moscow’s control and relied on the presence of Russian forces. As a result, Ukraine insisted that Russia take responsibility for fulfilling its end of the Minsk bargain.
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Tankie gasminsking boils down to a few claims, two of which we’ll examine here: First, Minsk has always offered the best path to peace, and still does. Second, Minsk’s failure to bring peace was the result of Ukraine’s refusal to abide by the terms.
But first, some background:
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Of course, there also the testimony of the Russian nationals dispatched by the Kremlin to take command of the irregular forces. They freely acknowledge the war effort would have failed were it not for the arrival of Russian army units.
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In today's edition of "libertarians are ridiculous people," we examine noted crank Ammon Bundy. After going on the run from police, Bellingcat geolocated him to (are you sitting down?) Utah.
I wouldn't normally comment, only the self-awareness issues on display are astounding🧵
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What’s worse, Russia wouldn’t even admit it was a party to the agreements. This prompted a logical question: “Well then why the hell did you sign them?” Russia’s stance was “if you want Minsk to be implemented, talk to the Donbas ‘rebels’, whom we have nothing to do with.”
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Russia: Say you're Russian or we'll burn you alive and drown your children!
Ukrainians: Uh, no.
Western Marxist theorists: So yeah, as we were saying, this is obviously an inter-imperialist war by the West that illustrates the historical materialist dialectical basis of...
What is the internal relation between contemporary geopolitics and global capitalism? Latest overview of my essay with
@Andreas_Bieler
on power geometries in Ukraine in Socialist Register 2024
@alex_callinicos
@tengely_evans
@jchoonara
@yanisvaroufakis
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“In this Donetsk pub, it was a tradition: Team up with a bunch of mafia oligarchs, win power, install yourself as dictator, and loot the country. But now the woke mob has taken it all away.”
—Oliver Stone, probably. (Sorry, I’ll stop.)
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Crucially, the elections were to be carried out under Ukrainian law, with Ukraine’s involvement, and under the supervision of the OSCE.
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But it’s silly to argue, as tankies like
@caitoz
and
@aaronjmate
do, that Ukraine is the only side standing in the way of Minsk’s implementation. Look at this breakdown of the Minsk provisions as of 2020 and note how many labeled “not implemented” depend exclusively on Russia.
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Russian defense expert Igor Sutyagin estimated that several thousand Russian regulars were present in the Donbas at this time, a number that would peak at 10,000 by mid-December 2014.
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Likewise, as of September 2014 the Russian Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, an independent NGO in Russia, estimated that 10-15,000 regular Russian troops had already been sent to Ukraine. .
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By the way, don’t even think about replying to this thread with some bullshit about Oliver Stone’s ridiculous documentary about the Euromaidan.
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Russian election-rigging wasn’t the only problem. Both sides repeatedly violated the ceasefire, too. But only Russia’s forces went so far as to conquer *more* territory, taking advantage of Ukraine’s weak military position.
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.
@DavidSacks
constantly praises public figures willing to debate their views and disparages anyone who won’t.
But when he himself is challenged to a debate and it’s his own reputation on the line, he retreats into his little safe space like the coward he is.
Debate me, bro.
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The OSCE, whose representatives had been observing events on the ground since 2014 (until Russia kicked them out in 2021), has documented the presence in the Donbas of thousands of Russian soldiers.
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@jasonintrator
Ukraine expert here. Currently working on a big thread debunking the false claims among the left-wing tankies. Will hopefully be up in the next couple of days.
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Here, again, are opinion polls by region on support for joining Russia. Local enthusiasm at the prospect of becoming the 47th and 48th oblasts of Russia wasn’t exactly overwhelming.
Feb. 2014 (left):
Apr. 2014 (right):
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After questioning a Yale report which he did not read, and after I debunked his statements in a Twitter thread he also did not read, Maté is now asking me to refute a new Grayzone article which he may or may not have read but which is also very, very stupid. /n
@neil_abrams
1. I questioned allegation that Russia is mass kidnapping Ukrainian children, and noted that main source is a State Dept.-funded Yale report.
2. GZ just published an article -- not a Twitter rant -- based on Yale report's contents; an interview with its lead author
@nattyray11
;
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Not that Ukraine has any moral obligation to comply. The only reason the Minsk accords exist in the first place is because Russia, by invading Crimea and Donbas, broke *its own* past pledges to abide by Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty.
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That nation, moreover, came to be seen by Ukrainians as defined not by ethnicity or language but by common membership in a democratic state. It might not have been entirely true at the time but it has since become increasingly so, especially after the Russian invasion of 2022.
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In 2016, the International Criminal Court found evidence of “direct military engagement between the respective armed forces of the Russian Federation and Ukraine … from 14 July 2015 at the latest.”
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The Euromaidan marked the maturation of Ukrainian civil society. It also gave rise to a new national ethos of a nation that came together to cast off a predatory dictator propped up by the Kremlin.
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I know all of you Russia experts are tempted to give us your “analyses” of the Prigozhin situation, but I urge you all to wait until we hear what
@DavidSacks
has to say.
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The Russian military’s success against Ukraine’s dilapidated forces compelled Kyiv to sue for peace. The result was the Minsk accords. They consisted of two agreements, the first signed in Sept. 2014 and the second, dubbed Minsk II, following in Feb. 2015.
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Here's the problem with b.s. like this. Even if you buy the claims of Assad apologists that a few of the alleged attacks were false flags, you're still left with literally hundreds of documented chemical attacks which none of these people have ever so much as questioned. 🧵
Remember when “Assad used chemical weapons against his own people”? Didn’t happen. It was another WMD-like hoax to draw us further into war in Syria.
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The tankie narrative about the Euromaidan actually consists of three separate assertions: (1) that it was a “coup, (2) that it was engineered by the U.S., and (3) that it was carried out by the Ukrainian far-right. We will consider each in due course.
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According to our best estimates, a full 20% of the population, or over 8 million people, took part in the Euromaidan. That, dear reader, is not a coup. Even if you choose to believe that it was a nefarious scheme by far-right organization Right-Sector, it still wasn’t a coup.
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Atrocity-denial is the lowest form of punditry.
Which explains why it attracts such inveterate bottom-feeders as
@aaronjmate
and
@mtracey
.
So let’s take a look at their most recent foray into this scummy endeavor: Denying Russia’s forced-deportations of Ukrainian children.🧵
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To crudely summarize, Minsk’s key provisions called for an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of forces, the decentralization of power to Donetsk and Luhansk, and the holding of local elections in the two regions.
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@caitoz
@aaronjmate
Restoring Ukraine’s control over its border? Removing all foreign armed groups from Ukraine? Holding free and fair elections in the Donbas? Russia ain’t about to let any of that happen. Ever.
Source for above:
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Not only did the Euromaidan usher in Ukraine’s most recent experiment with democracy; it also served as a sort of second founding for an independent, post-communist Ukraine (the first having occurred in 1991 with the declaration of independence from the USSR)
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How many times do Putin and his deputies have to explicitly state that this is a war of colonial conquest against an imaginary nation before you start to wonder whether, maybe, possibly, it's not, in fact, about any supposed security threat from NATO? (Receipts in next tweet)
If you're alarmed about a possible Chinese "base" on Cuba, you might begin to grasp why Russians from across the political spectrum saw Ukraine joining NATO one day as a threat. Doesn't make the invasion any less illegal or tragic, but it does help you understand why it happened.
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The Euromaidan revolution lasted from November 21st, 2013 to February 21st, 2014. It is the critical starting point for understanding how we got to where we are today, for a number of reasons:
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Short of distributing millions of meth-laced cookies, there’s absolutely nothing McCain or Nuland could have done to *make* 8.5 million Ukrainians storm the streets and oust a president.
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@pegobry_en
Where…do you think countries actually come from, exactly? Do you think they emerged naturally like the tectonic plates or something?
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As if all that weren’t enough, the Minsk accords turned out to be a jumbled mess of mutually-contradictory provisions which were accordingly interpreted by the two sides in polar-opposite terms. Mercifully, Duncan Allen of Chatham House explains it all so I don’t have to.
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Nor was the Budapest Memorandum the only instance in which Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty—yes, including Crimea. Moscow made the same pledge in 1997 when it signed the Russian–Ukrainian Friendship Treaty.
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If, instead, the government is overthrown by thousands of people in the streets or even by some non-state organization such a political party, that’s not a coup, and it would be misleading to call it so. A coup is executed by state actors; otherwise it’s not a coup. Period.
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The first was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia agreed to respect the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in exchange for the latter three handing their Soviet-era nukes back to Russia.
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Finally, the Euromaidan precipitated Russia’s war against Ukraine—the first war, that is, which saw Putin’s forces occupy the Crimean peninsula and soon after launch a stealth invasion of the eastern Donbas region.
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Lots of civil wars end with the successful adoption of a federal state structure that grants autonomy to a secessionist region. But this wasn’t a civil war; it was a state-to-state war being treated as a civil war. Donbas “autonomy” would thus amount to Ukraine’s partition.
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And the grand finale…
Claudine Gay: Sorry, I made a mistake.
Ackman: Resign you bitch!
Business Insider: …
Ackman: You know, part of what makes someone human is that they own up to their mistakes when appropriate…
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Sometimes you know an article is stupid before reading it.
This is one of those times.
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First, some context. As you’ll see, Ackman’s wife is basically accused of the same type of sloppy citation as Gay; only his wife’s case, the conduct appears to be more extensive and considerably more egregious:
I sent these receipts, and dozens more, to
@BillAckman
earlier today, hopping they would help him do the research he said he had no time to do before blasting us here.
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Ackman: Accusing others of racism for your own plagiarism is disingenuous, careerist, even criminal!
Business Insider: Your wife plagiarized too.
Ackman: Yeah I’m gonna go ahead and…accuse others of antisemitism for my wife’s plagiarism.
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But Maria Popova, the Jean Monnet Chair in Europe & the Rule of Law at McGill and an expert on Russian and Ukrainian politics, spells it out better than I ever could. Take it away,
@PopovaProf
:
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One country, above all, did try to shape the Euromaidan’s outcome. That country was Russia. In fact, Putin’s extraordinary efforts to keep Yanukovych in power merely marked the latest chapter in the sordid history of Kremlin interference in Ukraine’s post-Soviet affairs.
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The deal never came into effect. Why? Because immediately after signing, Yanukovych hightailed out of Kyiv. Within days, he’d be in Russia. Lest it needs stating, you cannot carry out your duties as Ukrainian president from the reassuring safety of Vladimir Putin’s bosom.
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Another key to understanding Minsk’s failure was that Ukraine signed the agreements under duress, having just been beaten back by the arrival of Russian army units. Thanks largely to Yanukovych’s looting, you’ll recall, Ukraine no longer possessed a proper military of its own.
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Anyway, let’s begin with the easy part: Debunking the tankie refrain that the Euromaidan was a “coup.” When you think of a “coup,” you probably imagine the military or some other state faction unlawfully ousting the government, right?
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If so, that’s good, because it’s exactly how political scientists conceive of it as well: As one prominent definition holds, coups refer to “illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.”
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@aaronjmate
Graciously, he does offer an explanation for his silence. First, he says, my threads are too long. And you know what? He’s right.
But in my defense, that’s what tends to happen when you actually care about such trivialities as PROVIDING EVIDENCE.
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I'm always skeptical of claims that "so-and-so is a Russian asset." Like, Michael Tracey's not a Russian asset; he's just a contrarian idiot and attention-whore.
But in the case of Scott Ritter, it's not exactly hard to imagine, is it?
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983