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What I Know and What I Don’t — War, Russia and Ukraine, and the Moral High Ground

rob yates
Ukraine Diaries
16 min readMar 18, 2022

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“Kill one of ours, we’ll kill one of yours / With some friendly fire, that’s a funny term, like civil war” — Sage Francis, Slow Down Ghandi

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire

M*A*S*H had it right, even decades ago

I can’t sit here and tell you I’m some foreign policy expert with the in-depth ins-and-outs of the Russia / Ukraine situation. To get that, I recommend Balancing Act, a Ukrainian American providing real-time updates and insight far beyond anything I can muster up. I also can’t pretend to make an argument as to what the U.S. should do next. Game theory analysis might seem cold, but it works, and Tim Andersen has done some detailed calculations that make sense.

Further, I don’t know what confluence of events led to Russia invading Ukraine, or if we could’ve done anything to prevent it. I don’t know what Putin was thinking, or what his next move might be, though I recommend Jason Deane’s analysis on this front. Along those lines, I can’t tell you if Russia can “win” this war, or what a Russian victory might look like, though I recommend Adebayo Adeniran’s surgical takedown of spurious nonsense predictions about the outcome.

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Ukraine Diaries
Ukraine Diaries

Published in Ukraine Diaries

Documenting and interpreting the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine.

rob yates
rob yates

Written by rob yates

"Give me a soft subtle mix And if ain't broke then don't try to fix it"

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