From the daily chats curated by The Blind Spot community (in the last 24 hours-ish).
The conduct of the war:
- Apparently a Russian OSINT map of Ukrainian positions, showing how heavily concentrated Ukrainian forces are on the Donna’s line.
- France seizes Sechin yacht: (French customs have seized a yacht belonging to Rosneft boss Igor Sechin as it tried to leave the Mediterranean port of La Ciotat in a breach of EU sanctions on Russian oligarchs, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said.)
- Prediction markets do their thing.
- Russian truck maintenance is not optimal.
- Is the West better at sanctions this time?
- Follow the Russian-Ukraine monitor map.
- About those Ukrainian biolabs: (I’ll have more on this in my newsletter, but the key to this issue is dual-use ambiguity and the fact that only trust can manage the situation.)
WW3 Watch
- US to blame for Iran deal’s slow pace?
- Secret documents allegedly reveal that Russia expected war to last 15 days.
- Signal denies it’s been hacked, thread included fake hack screenshots.
- How to survive ww3, part three.
Politics and the economy
- Boeing suspends parts and maintenance support for Russian planes.
- Is it the end of Russian civil aviation?
- Why crypto won’t solve Russia’s sanctions problem.
- No buyers for Russian oil.
- Navalny court case continues in its 7th day.
- Western companies in the Russian oil and gas sector.
- Hillary’s plan for Ukraine is to do to Russia, what insurgents did to America in Kabul and Iraq.
- Ukraine means “borderland”.
From the “Fake News” zone:
- RT is now properly offline unless you have a VPN, in which case the headlines look like this:
- Red Pill view on why Zelensky is evil.
- The blowback associated with cancelling a whole country.
Thoughts percolating Izzy’s mind today:
- Is Putin the Nasty Nick of geopolitics? (Sorry for typos)
- What if Putin’s strategy is to carve up Ukraine using the Dnieper as a natural giant wall. And make the EU pay for it?
- Will Russian sanctions stop the use of the London High Court as a weapon to gag critical journalism by oligarchs? And what happens to outstanding cases? How much suppressed material is likely to come once the weaponisation of legal systems is suspended?
- How much kompromat is out there?
- Is Bitcoin a dual-use weapon?
- As Yuri Bezmenov says, is it time to unplug the bananas from our ears and realise the Cold War never ended?
- How to deal with whataboutism: acknowledge we’re reckless, arrogant stupid dicks: