It's not that serious a mystery.
If you stick people in tents in the desert, they tend to die. And, not a lot of people want to be involved with something like that, and so they're making the point by giving absurd amounts of money to anyone who is willing to be involved. Same as the high salaries for ICE recruits.
Paul Manafort was just one of the names we heard.
Who were the others?
I bet Zelensky himself do see him as a major threat for his reelections.
I get your point. He's popular and at some point when the dying stops, it'll be relevant. I would say it would be relevant if Vance was able to replace Zelensky with this guy before the war was over, but I don't think Vance is competent enough to make that happen, fortunately enough. I feel like people in that part of the world have a lot stronger civil immune system against disinfo.
Further, if Ukraine survives and everyone gets to go back to normal life, my guess would be that Zelensky wouldn't give two shits if a competent military commander got to take his job with his biggest concern being losing the election, but who knows.
They can do whatever they want. On the other hand, the people of the country can throw things other than sandwiches.
People tend to get confused, even when they are familiar with all these founding documents and principles (which the current government is not). They start to think there are "rules" and they get to say what's allowed, and they can punish people who do what's not allowed, but it doesn't go the other way, because that's not allowed and they're in charge. That's not reality. Reality is, we're all just on this planet bebopping around, and if someone is in a "government" role, it behooves them to make sure the people "under" them agree with the idea of them being in charge. Because no one has a monopoly on violence or vigor.
Even the top leaders of the USSR (starting with Kruschev) had to figure this out: He made a mostly unspoken deal with the other leaders that he wouldn't try to kill them for being potential threats, and in return they wouldn't kill him to take him out of power and replace him. And what do you know, it worked! It's better that way. The US up until now has had a little more sophisticated version, extending beyond the inner circle of leadership, but it sounds like Trump is hankering for an earlier era without really being aware of its perils.
Others in Ukraine see him as a potential political figure.
Which others, though? Specifically who in Ukraine sees him as a potential political figure? The only one named in the article is Paul Manafort.
There is so much vigorous disinformation in this space that I want to read pretty critically anything that sounds like this, and I saw plenty of stink lines crop up more or less instantly when I held it close to my face. For all I know it's legit, it just ticks a few of the disinfo boxes.
Zaluzhnyi declined, but also pledged loyalty, up to a point. He promised Yermak he would not criticise Zelenskyy in public while the war continued
What in the loaded bullshit
What is the point of this type of innuendo?
So far, Zaluzhnyi has not communicated that message, although there is an increasing belief in Kyiv that he is readying a political run. The general is coy even privately with close associates about his plans, but many assume he is just biding his time before entering the fray.
So... there's no particular reason to think he might have any interest in politics at all, but The Guardian is real enthusiastic about painting it that he's just "biding his time."
I think what Trump wants them to do is put down protests, and overrule judges, politicians, and local law enforcement through violence if anyone doesn't obey. You're right that arresting random individuals is a lot of what they're doing right now, but that's not why Trump wants to send them.
Yeah. I don't really know politics well enough to know how realistic it is. I do know that most of them exist in a weird white-collar corruption ecosystem which really doesn't give a shit about parties D or R, working people, America's standing in the world and success or failure, any of that stuff. They just work for who pays them, and for the most part, who pays them is the rich sociopaths who are completely fine with putting all the poors in camps.
I feel like a certain amount of it is also deliberate partisan sabotage by people who care specifically about R instead of D, but I think mostly it's just the bipartisan Washington consensus that Bernie Sanders is a loony old guy and Hilary Clinton / George W / Mitt Romney / Hakeem Jeffries / all those indistinguishable dickheads are the future of this country, because they're going to continue to enable all of "us" to get filthy rich without really having to work for it.
Honestly, the National Guard is a lot better trained at this kind of "dealing with large groups of angry but mostly unarmed and harmless people" situation. The cops are trained and experienced at dealing with individuals, for the most part, but when they're faced with a big protest or a riot they are often making it up as they go along.
One thing that multiple National Guard people said after they got involved in BLM in 2020 was that they often felt like their role in practice was to protect the people against the police. Since their job is, more or less, to maintain order, and the people were (most of the time) pretty orderly and the police often were not.
And when he's floating in a barge off Gitmo, he'll be very mad that it was someone else's fault. This isn't supposed to happen to people like him, he was doing everything professional and right.
Seriously. You'd think that after 2016 when the signal stabilized and people who ignored this messaging were consistently wildly popular in elections, and people who listened to it got beat like a rented mule year after year, they'd see the pattern. There aren't a lot of fields of big league human endeavor where you can be this stupidly unsuccessful for this long and people still take you seriously and keep paying you vast sums of money to learn your wisdom.
I suspect there's a certain amount of deliberate sabotage involved. How much of it is that, and how much is pure homegrown white-collar stupidity, it's impossible to say, although I would speculate they're both heavily involved.
That's all it's ever been. These nations rise and fall like villages in the Ice Age. We just have media and systems to make it look like everything is all organized and "professional" now, and it kind of is sometimes, but at the end of the day we're still living on the same uncaring planet by the same rules.
Man, some wild shit is going to happen before 2032. All of this is one scenario, yes, maybe, but this stuff is like weather forecasting on the Titanic at this point.