Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Opinion, Fareed Zakaria  A flimsy peace would legitimize conquest. A durable one could still salvage deterrence.   Yesterday [January 2], 2026 at 3:49 p.m. EST   The Washington Post Ukrainian rescuers work sift the ruins of an apartment building in Kharkiv hit by a Russian airstrike on Jan. 2. (Sofia Gatilova/Reuters) January inevitably spawns a cottage industry of forecasts. Will the U.S. economy slip into recession? Will the stock market discover gravity? 2026 contains more than the usual share of genuine uncertainty. But one question is likely to be resolved this year: the fate of Ukraine. And depending on which way things go, the consequences will not be incremental but rather seismic for the international system. The situation is grim. From the start of its second term, the Trump administration has followed a simple, if amoral plan: Pressure Ukraine to make concessions; package those concessions as the “realism” necessary for peace; then present them to Russian ...

https://jb42frabel.blogspot.com/2026/01/from-quora-jb-true-or-not-vero-o-ben.html

Do you think we will ever find out definitively what Putin has on Trump, and if so, how? Elena Gold  ·  Follow Media analyst  6mo   [ jb: are the pixes fake or real? "Cien cabe" ...] Putin obviously has tons of kompromat on Trump, starting before the Soviet Union collapsed — Trump visited the USSR in 1987 through KGB outlet “Inturist”, and on his return to NY City, he placed giant anti-NATO ads in a newspaper. But the most damning piece of kompromat — which most people don’t talk about (you hear about the “P-tape”, Epstein files, but not about that) is potentially evidence of non-heterosexual relations in his youth. In particular, with his mentor Roy Cohn . Cohn was in his 20s when, as an assistant prosecutor in 1951, he helped engineer the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies, using back-channel conversations with the judge to ensure the death penalty. Soon after, he became the chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy's commit...

Andy Durden Seen a tank before. Once  Dec 23 Why does no one want to give the real answer on the only way the war between Ukraine and Russia ends? I’ll give you my answer. It’s real to me but I am not sure about the rest of the world. Russia can’t win in the sense that Russian tank will never roll into Kyiv. Ukraine can’t win in the sense that the territories currently occupied by Russia can’t be all liberated. The end is in between and will be a sort of treaty that stops the fighting. We have seen that before The problem is political more than military. Zelensky wants to show the world and the Ukrainian people that they won the war. The only way to do so is to either defeat the Russians or to get some very good deal at the end of the war and blame the loss onto the Americans and Trump. Putin needs to show that his special operation, that was supposed to last a few weeks, has been a success, despite the costs, and that part of Ukraine is now Russian and that at least some of the st...

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that in addition to that appointment, he planned to name a new defense minister as part of “a wave of personnel changes.” Kyrylo Budanov, one of Ukraine’s highest-profile generals, has been asked to move into a political role. Credit... Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times  By  Cassandra Vinograd  and  Andrew E. Kramer Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine The New York Times , Jan. 2, 2026 Updated  4:25 p.m. ET; see also President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announced a shake-up of his national security leadership on Friday, saying he planned to replace his defense minister and had named the head of the country’s military intelligence agency as his new chief of staff . In his overnight address, Mr. Zelensky said that a “substantial overhaul” was underway to make Ukraine “more resilient.”   The Ukrainian leader said he had asked Mykhailo Fedorov, a vice prime minister and the minister of digital transformation, to become the new...