Anne Applebaum
@anneapplebaum
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@TheAtlantic and @SNFAgoraJHU Author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Red Famine, Twilight of Democracy. threads: anneapplebaum2000
Warsaw, London, Washington
Joined May 2011
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Heads up: My new book, AUTOCRACY, INC, will be published in July. It describes the network of dictators who work together - to keep themselves in power and to undermine the democratic world. Now that it's in galleys you can pre-order with confidence:
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After this is all over, I never, ever want to hear again about how businessmen would run the government better than politicians.
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Do a thought experiment: if Biden were sick, what would happen? Here's my guess: Trump would be openly gloating, Republicans would be loudly celebrating, their campaigns would put out ads trying to raise money on the back of his illness.
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Be very, very careful over the next few days with military information. The Russians want to persuade Ukraine to surrender and they will use disinformation, fake video, fake photos.
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Everyone who now calls for Zelensky to make "territorial concessions' in exchange for a cease fire should remember what this will actually mean: tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will die.
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Hungary now blocks all further EU sanctions on Ukraine. Remind me why they are in NATO?
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China has reacted to the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy by sending aid. The US has reacted by suspending flights. Who is the superpower?
CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: CHINA EASTERN AIRLINES' A350 DEPARTED FOR ROME, ITALY FROM SHANGHAI, BRINGING 9 CHINESE MEDICAL EXPERTS AND 31 TONS OF MEDICAL SUPPLIES, INCLUDING PLASMA OF RECOVERED CORONAVIRUS PATIENTS, TO HELP ITALY FIGHT AGAINST THE VIRUS - GT
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Putin does not need an "off-ramp." He needs to lose. And only when he loses - only when he is humiliated - will Russia's wars of imperial conquest finally come to an end
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Imagine reading about Ukraine, a country where people are living without heat and light, where incredibly brave men endure bombardment and artillery fire every day, where the whole nation has pulled together to stop barbarism of a kind we haven't seen in Europe since 1944...
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Nothing was stopping Barr or McConnell from standing in front of a camera on November 7th, the day the election was called, and congratulating Joe Biden. That's what would have happened after any other election in any other year. Why didn't they do it?
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A former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was convicted Thursday after being found guilty of helping funnel illegal foreign campaign contributions from a Russian national into former President Trump's 2016 campaign
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Trump should be impeached and removed before the end of the day
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This is the right time to have mass rallies against the far-right: BEFORE the election
In Hamburg, Germany, tens of thousands protest against the far-right today.
The rally had to be cut short due to safety concerns because of crowd size.
The wave of protests against the far-right will continue on the weekend with dozens of rallies.
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They killed him, because even in jail he threatened a regime that thrives on lies and secrets
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Whatever happens next - and there are still a lot of very dark scenarios - the Ukrainian resistance over the past few days will transform the way that the country is perceived around the world: Maybe it will even change the way Russia perceives it.
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If it's true that Belarusian paratroopers are joining the Russians in their assault on Ukraine, then it's time to sanction the Belarus banks, companies and oligarchs too
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Behold the face of pure ignorance. This is what happens when you know no history.
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Amazing contrast between the bravery of ordinary Belarusians who protest, week after week, against an election that really was stolen - and the profound cowardice of elite Republicans who cower, hide from the press and refuse to concede after losing an honest election.
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My friend writes that she can hear explosions in Kyiv. A completely unnecessary war has started, born out of one man's nostalgia,paranoia and fear of losing power.
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This may be the most blatant example of high-level corruption in recent American history. Cannot think of a precedent
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This is what the leader of the free world does
Live on Kremlin TV: Merkel, standing next to Putin, speaks out for freedom of assembly, work of NGOs, rights of gays in Chechnya.
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There is a story unfolding in Poland now so awful I can hardly write it. It concerns a young boy who was the victim of a pedophile. The pedophile was convicted; the boy's name was kept anonymous, as the law requires. Unfortunately, the boy's mother is an opposition politician.
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If the voters don't eventually punish the Republicans who are calling for a de facto coup, then we have to conclude that a substantial number of Americans no longer believe in our democracy either.
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When conservatives celebrated Trump's election 4 years ago, did they know that in 2020 we would board up shops, prepare for riots and the arrival of militias, game out ways he might steal the election, protest aggressive vote suppression? This is what he has done to America.
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They were looking for Pence, and shouting Pelosi's name. They were carrying weapons. We were minutes away from an even bigger tragedy. And the Republican Senate still can't bring itself to condemn the man who inspired them, incited them, told them they were patriots.
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People will die, today, because of the cynical game played by the American Republican party. Their irresponsibility is breathtaking
Russian advances in Avdiivka, which increasingly looks likely to become the first Ukrainian city to fall since the capture of Bakhmut last May, are the direct result of acute ammunition shortage — caused by the U.S. Congress withholding further military aid to Ukraine.
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Putin's call for a "self-purification" of Russian society can have only one intention: To remind Russians of Stalin and his "purges." He wants them to be haunted by dark, ancestral memories, to remember their grandparents' stories and to be petrified with fear.
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Putin comments about JK Rowling suggest a deeply bizarre degree of acquaintance with American partisan discourse. Does he watch Fox news?
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34 years ago today, Poland voted for democracy. Today, hundreds of thousands and marching to keep it
#WielkiMarsz
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With 90% of the vote counted, it's clear the democratic opposition in Poland just defeated the national-conservative autocratic ruling party.
I know that there are a lot of terrible things happening right now, but this, finally, is actual good news:
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It's official: Poland has a new government. An eight-year attempt to build a xenophobic, autocratic and corrupt one-party state has failed. A democratic coalition will replace it.
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No, leadership does not require killing your political opponents
Tucker Carlson, when asked about Alexei Navalny, opposition leaders and journalists in Russia: “Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”
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Many journalists have interviewed Putin, who also makes frequent, widely covered speeches. Carlson's interview is different because he is not a journalist, he's a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption.
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Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to hand a victory to Russia, and to weaken American power and credibility. Why?
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Don't let Republicans, or anyone else, turn Trump's remarks about NATO into an argument about levels of spending. The news story is this: Trump told Russia to invade U.S. allies, to do "whatever the hell they want." This invitation to violence makes the world more dangerous.
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Am getting tired of hearing about how "corrupt" Ukraine is. You know which country is corrupt? The United States. We have a president who is using the White House to make money, presidential children who are using their father's prestige to make money.
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Every single serious analysis I read of this election said that it would be long and drawn out, and that Trump would try to steal the election by trying to discount late-arriving Biden votes. And now that it's happening...everyone seems shocked.
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I was asked today if I worry that Putin is becoming "radicalized." What's more radical than killing tens of thousands of people, building concentration camps, trying to create a famine in Africa? So many people don't seem to understand that the catastrophe is already underway...
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I see that many are angry about high gas prices, high food prices....Blame the people who didn't want to stop Putin when he invaded Ukraine in 2014. And think about how high the costs will be in another eight years if we don't stop him now.
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And there it is: one day after signing an agreement to allow the export of grain, Russia attacks the port of Odesa. It's not sanctions creating high food prices and hunger. It's Russian cruelty.
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Putin has assembled the largest concentration of forces in Europe since 1945, in preparation for what could be a large scale, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. And so... it's all the fault of American agression? Even for an ice cream company that's some amazing logic
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To everyone who wants to know what would have happened if the invasion had happened and Trump was president, here is the answer: He would have given in immediately. There would be no Nato support, no arms, no sanctions, no united transatlantic alliance, no nothing.
Trump is back to saying Putin is smart. He says he thinks Putin made a mistake but then describes it as a “great negotiation that didn’t go so well for him”
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There is a long history of Soviet/Russian governments inviting people for negotiations or offering safe passage and then arresting and killing them (Hungary 1956, Poland 1945). I hope Zelensky doesn't make that mistake.
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And then when the president of Ukraine, after months of planning, finally manages to cross the ocean to visit, you respond with...a snarky complaint about his timing. Or his clothes.
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Something is breaking, changing very fast
⚡️ BREAKING:
#Iran
football team captain defies regime, backs protests: “We have to accept that conditions in our country are not right & our people are not happy. They should know that we are with them. And we support them. And we sympathize with them regarding the conditions.”
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Trump still doesn't understand how NATO works, he still thinks allies "owe money" and he's sending a signal to Russia to attack them while the crowd cheers. An invitation to broaden the war.
BREAKING: Donald Trump just asked Russia to attack our NATO allies. Donald Trump is asking for World War III. Retweet to ensure the whole country knows what Trump is trying to get us into.
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Here's a solution to the Ukrainian refugee crisis: Preserve an independent, sovereign, democratic Ukraine. Then there won't be any refugees.
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Europe was slow: Europeans were not convinced war was real, or that Ukrainians would fight. But it was and they did. Whatever the outcome, I hope we will now have a renewed, changed, American-European partnership, one that will face, realistically, the difficult future together.
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the woman who invented the term 'alternative facts' suddenly decides to interest herself in real facts
"Only later did it become clear that lawmakers feared for their lives; that some of the attackers were hunting for congressional leaders; that there could have been a massacre."
Don't avert your eyes & don't excuse this.
The more we see & learn, the worse it is.
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Has Trump expressed any sympathy for his wife, who is also ill with the coronavirus? Or for Chris Christie, who is presumably still hospitalized? Or for White House staff and family who are ill?
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Navalny threatened Putin because he revealed the extent of his theft and corruption. Putin killed Navalny because he couldn't let that truth be known.
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The horrible precedent isn't that Trump was indicted. The horrible precedent is that we had a president who repeatedly broke the law.
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Irkutsk has come out for Navalny. One of many such scenes across Russia today
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Putin's speech, to which I am now listening, is so full of historical nonsense that I don't even have the energy to correct it. For example: He skipped, completely, the Ukrainian bid for independence at the time of the Russian revolution.
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Trump uses Putin's strategy: "muddy the waters by saying such inaccurate and confusing things with such frequency that the public can't keep track of what's true and what's false. "
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Or you complain because he might ask for more weapons to prevent the children in his country from being deported to Russia, the elderly from having their home destroyed and the women from being raped
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"Trump pointed at the map and said he knew that Nepal was part of India, only to be told that it is an independent nation. When said he was familiar with Bhutan and knew it, too, was part of India, his briefers told him Bhutan was an independent kingdom"
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Macron attacks RT and Sputnik as propaganda organs. Nobody has done this in front of Putin before.
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I met the engineers whose sea drones were blocked when Starlink didn't function in September 2022. But they tried the same attack again a month later, and they hit several targets in Sebastopol.
World War Three did not break out.
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Georgia - the state, not the country
The line of voters at George Pierce Park in Suwanee....
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Why is Orban in Mar-a-lago? Because he was democratically elected - and after that, he changed his country's political system so that he could never lose. He altered the media, courts, voting; threatened business; captured the state; did corrupt deals with Russia and China.
Me,
@RachelKleinfeld
and
@amandacarpenter
explain why Viktor Orban's assault on Hungarian democracy was bad for his country and bad for business - and why Trump wants to copy him
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I hope people who are interested in in post-colonial studies and the history of imperialism will study the Russian war in Ukraine. It's a textbook illustration of how a former imperial power dehumanizes its former subjects, so much that it has no problem killing them.
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Verified photographs of the brutal mass murder of Ukrainian civilians are a reminder that the Russian army is not just seeking to conquer Ukraine, it is seeking to eliminate Ukrainians.
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19 years ago today, if you had told me that this cynical grifter would be president and Rudy Giuliani would be working on behalf of a Russian intelligence officer - I wouldn't have believed you.
On September 11th, shortly after the Twin Towers collapsed, leaving thousands dead, Donald Trump boasted that his building was now the tallest building in downtown Manhattan (which also wasn't true).
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another journalist has been murdered, once again for investigating corruption. This is the defining issue of our era.
Bulgarian investigative journalist Victoria Marinova has been murdered in the Bulgarian city of Ruse, local media report. At the time of her murder, Marinova was reporting on an investigation into alleged corruption involving EU funds.
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In 1905, a failed military operation triggered a revolution in Moscow
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I know it's not enough, and can't affect the war. But I would never have believed so many people would come to feel strongly about Ukraine - something has changed.
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With the indiscriminate bombardment of Kharkiv, a mostly Russian-speaking city, Putin's strategy becomes clear: Murder as many people as possible. Then take possession of the ruins.
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An incompetent coup, a clown coup, a ludicrous coup, a ridiculous coup - these are all still coups. And if you can't bring yourself to say so, then you don't really believe in democracy any more.
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Give Russia's frozen assets to Ukraine. Now.
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We now know that in territories even briefly occupied by Russian troops there was rape, looting, random killings, assaults on schools and hospitals. This is what the Red Army did in central Europe in 1944-45, and apparently nothing has changed.
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"Olivia Troye, with much more to lose—and with none of the stature of a former member of Congress or a former Marine general—had much more courage than all of them." From
@sbg1
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I don't understand the point of sanctioning Putin and Lavrov, unless you are going to publish the addresses and bank accounts of the proxies who hold their money and property
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Mueller is suggesting Russians stole Clinton campaign election analytics. If they gave that to Trump campaign, then how is that different from Nixon's Cuban burglars breaking into Democratic campaign offices?
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Has someone written the definitive explanation of why China, which has high tech satellites, internet spyware and access to reams of stolen data, would even need a spy balloon?
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This is a lie. Soviet-style propaganda. One of the worst things he has ever done or said. It will give people unwarranted confidence.
Just reported that the United States has done far more “testing” than any other nation, by far! In fact, over an eight day span, the United States now does more testing than what South Korea (which has been a very successful tester) does over an eight week span. Great job!
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Macron speaks in front of the Arc de Triomphe, calling for 'patriotism' instead of 'nationalism'... in front of Trump and Putin, he condemns the 'fascination for withdrawal, isolationism' as a grave error which will be condemned by future generations
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Russia is throwing everything it has - bribery, propaganda, migrants, energy blackmail, hackers - at Europe and the US - with the clear (and often stated) intent of destabilizing Western democracies. When will we begin to take this challenge seriously?
Recent developments in Finland:
Over the past few days, Russia has sent an increasing number of migrants to Finland's borders. Finland has closed several border crossing points due to the authorities' threat assessment.
A video surfaced of the Russian operation. 1/
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It's incredible how Vindman's bravery infuriates the powerful. You can be a billionaire or a president and still be conscious of your own amorality, your own cowardice, your own lack of principles.
If Vindman had not spoken out at the risk of his career, Ukraine might have been cut off by a vengeful President Trump from the US aid it needed to prepare its defense against Putin's impending invasion.
Which is why enemies of Ukraine and democracy hate Vindman so much.
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In the Soviet Union, competent bureaucrats were eliminated if their truth-telling embarrassed the Leader. Trump is creating the same kind of dysfunctional loyalty cult in Washington, DC, right before our eyes. And no one is stopping him.
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"No publicly traded company would consider naming Trump to an executive position... None of his billionaire friends would trust him with their money." He couldn't work in a school or a lawfirm. And yet we might elect him president,
@SykesCharlie
writes:
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Russia has once again demonstrated its disdain for the Western world with a massive attack on Kyiv and other cities this morning.
Today would be a great day to seize Russia's frozen assets and start using them to pay for the damage.
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What kind of malignant, self-regarding narcissist imagines the invasion of Ukraine - where civilians die from bombs, people in occupied territories suffer repression and torture, children are stolen from their parents - to be another episode in the American culture wars?
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This is a real test for the EU: Time to suspend Hungarian membership or Orban will wreck the entire institution
Politico: Viktor Orban threatens to block all EU aid to Ukraine and the country's accession to the union
He demands that EU leaders completely revise their strategy for supporting Kyiv.
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Even if every single word in the Steele dossier was wrong, that would not change the fact that the Russians sought to manipulate the US election using hacked material and a disinformation campaign. Nor would it change the fact that the Trump family welcomed this intervention.
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In Russia the state has ordered publishers to eliminate the word "Ukraine" from textbooks. An attempt to erase a nation and a people, and to leave no trace, has begun.
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Russian soldiers are running away. They are leaving weapons and equipment behind, surrendering, hiding in civilian clothes.
Time to think about what happens if Ukraine wins.
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Putin *is* a butcher
Putin *should not* remain in power
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Here's an idea: Evict the occupants of the Paris and Monaco apartments where Putin's mistresses allegedly live. Throw Lavrov's daughter out of her London flat. If you aren't going to do that, it's just an empty gesture.
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Lech Wałęsa is at the Polish parliament today to witness the end of a government that broke the constitution and tried to create a one-party state
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there is a phone number you can call if you are a Russian pilot who wants to defect and sell your plane or helicopter to the Ukrainians
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense just published a promotional video offering each Russian pilot a reward if they defect to
#Ukraine
with their aircraft.
USD 1 million per aircraft and USD 500,000 per helicopter.
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Do people who think the Russian war in Ukraine should be ended for "humanitarian" reasons not understand what is happening in Russian-occupied Ukraine? They haven't read about the torture chambers? The mass murders? Deportation of thousands of children?
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"March of a million hearts" today in Warsaw - opposition demonstration, largest since 1989
#MarszMilionaSerc
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He just can't criticize Putin. Can't do it. Can't even mention his name.
Q: Who do you think poisoned Alexey Navalny in Russia?
TRUMP: Uhhhh ... we'll talk about that at another time.
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Words of condemnation are pointless. The right response to Navalny's death is to give frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, now:
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So the point of the interview was to show disdain for the visiting American and to tell, again, a false version of Ukrainian history, starting in the 9th century. That was it.
This is a hilarious shit show. Putin is now 28 minutes into his history lesson. This is the 3rd time Tucker tries to interrupt and Putin mocks Tucker for just being an entertainer and not a serious journalist. Tucker tries to fake laugh it off while Putin emasculates him.
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And there it is. The European Union's first dictatorship. None of these powers is needed to fight the virus. But they will help distract and deter opposition, especially when it becomes clear that the government has no better plan.
Hungarian Parliament passes bill that gives PM Orbán unlimited power & proclaims:
- State of emergency w/o time limit
- Rule by decree
- Parliament suspended
- No elections
- Spreading fake news + rumors: up to 5 yrs in prison
- Leaving quarantine: up to 8 yrs in prison
#COVID19
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Russian occupation means mass arrests, kidnapped children, the banning of Ukrainian language and culture. If Russia wins, the violence gets much worse.
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