mtutiger

Visa/MC pulling out is probably right up there with the sanctions on the Russian Central Bank.... BFD

O RLY?

Oh my

Fair enough. But ultimately the main stakeholder in this conflict is Ukraine... and in terms of where a negotiated ceasefire happens, who is involved on their behalf, etc., their word is gonna matter a lot.

The 'allies' technically aren't party to this conflict either. To the extent that there have been talks about ceasefires or ending conflict, it has happened between Russia, its proxy Belarus, and Ukraine. I doubt that will change. For Trump to act as a third party, Ukraine would have to agree to that. Which, knowing the history, I doubt they ever would agree to that (considering the first impeachment and the lack of trust emanating from that)

I doubt Ukraine would agree to having talks under those conditions

Random thought: watching Ukraine's government run laps around the vaunted Russian disinformation machine makes me wonder how effective they really were. Discuss

Ahh, yes. Trump gets all the credit for the good things, none of the blame for the bad. Rinse, repeat, etc.

It's Yacht:30 folks...

They seem to be making more gains right now, but they are also 92% committed, still short a lot of their strategic objectives, logistics are still a mess, domestically they are facing stiff sanctions, etc. I wouldn't bet against them. But who knows.

This all sounds like best case scenario

April 2020... when the unemployment rate was 14.7%. Does Trump get credit for that too? Or just the gas?

Assuming that the poll is indicative of a trend (we don't know yet), Ukraine could be a factor to an extent considering his initial drop in support did coincide with Afghanistan and how that withdrawal took it's course.... I don't think that Americans disagreed with the withdrawal, but one of Biden's strengths going into 2020 was foreign policy and management of it and, to the extent that it impacted peoples views, fairly or on fairly, it was seen as contradictory to that strength. His handling of Ukraine, by contrast, has been relatively well done (regardless of what Archie thinks) in terms of the actions taken, so it may have been only a matter of time until that started to reflect some in Biden's approval numbers. The other part is COVID - things to seem to be normalizing a lot these days and that would probably be a benefit as well. In any event, this Presidency so far can be divided into two parts - the part where Biden was sitting between 53-55% and the part where Biden is sitting between 41-43%.... during both parts, there was an assumption by many of inevitability, that those numbers could never change. People need to be open that external events do happen and opinions can change.

Incredible... these guys will breathlessly promote and write stories about Q Polls (who have been a negative outlier at every point in this Presidency), yet a poll showing something different? In the trash. I'm open to the idea that it's an outlier until shown otherwise, but I just cannot help but notice the difference in coverage

Very well could be an outlier. Gotta wait for more polling to show movement. Although one takeaway from the poll may be that pundits moved way too quickly to declare that Ukraine wouldn't have much impact... this is one of the first polls taken post Ukraine/SOTU. Probably better to wait before making such pronouncements

Don't forget about Paul Manafort (ie. Yanukovych's former svengali) and his role both in Trump's campaign as well as the effort undertaken to remove the plank about Ukrainian security from the GOP platform. The evidence is still largely circumstantial, but it points to Trump and the undermining of Ukrainian self-determination being pre-meditated.

Notable in that UAE is one of the three Security Council abstainers....

My guess would be a combination of things: This is the third time this is happening (IOW, a pattern has been established), and there is a lot of concern, particularly in Eastern Europe, that this will continue beyond Ukraine and into NATO countries if left without response Whereas you could make the case that the invaded populations in Crimea or the separatist parts of Georgia may have viewed invasion as liberation, it appears that there is little to no support domestically in Ukraine for the invasion that is currently taking place.... and it's probable that this extends into the Russian speaking regions of the country as well. Ukraine as a whole is much larger (and more strategically important) than either Crimea or Georgia There are counter viewpoints that would push back on each of these points (Mearsheimer, as buddha has shared, has a different view on what Russia's aims are wrt the first point), but these are all distinctions I see.

It's probably intended more for domestic consumption, although I do think he would obviously take the world where he invades without any loss of benefits.

Exactly, this is the old playbook.... when he invaded Georgia and Crimea, the world largely moved on. Like then, he wants his cake and eat it too. The problem here for Vlad is that the breadth and depth of these sanctions are going to be extremely hard to reverse in full. I don't think the old playbook is gonna be all that effective now because the situation is a lot different.

lol