2921

Go fuck himself indeed, but I expected this. The markets have been dropping for last several weeks, now that war is certain they bounce. Markets hate uncertainty, not war.

2922

The direct benefit to oil stocks outweighed the pain elsewhere?

2923

It would appear that Scholz is trying to see no evil and hear no evil for now. That freaks me out a little bit.

2924

Good if true.

2925

Actually, the NASDAQ led the rally. +3.34%

2926

The Putin bullshit that had me growl the loudest is the “secure our western border” nonsense. All this does is create a NEW western border, which I’m sure he eill then have to make secure, right?

2927

Hostomel is 30 kilometers from central Kyiv. I couldn’t tell from reports whether it was under air or land attack. If Russian land forces are that close, that’s pretty serious.

2928

Paratroopers.

2929

I doubt there’s enough experience, knowledge and courage to get anything meaningful from our government. Today our foreign minister told the media (a bunch of times) how outraged she is that Putin and Russian officials had lied to her. (Really? That KGB agent really lied to you…well, outrageous!) Our leadership needed weeks to come up with a firm attitude towards Putin despite him lining up his forces. Without Merkel it’s the US government that needs to show our rookies the way and hopefully gets them to do the right thing. The good thing about Merkel was she could act big and in unexpected ways.

What pisses me off that there’s hardly any talk about an exclusion from Swift and Scholz already seems to be the one blocking it. There’s not much to expect from Germany right now. We are too busy shutting down our nuclear power plants and building gas-fired ones…

2930

If Ukraine actually managed to reclaim the airport from Russians, after the Russians had already controlled it?

That means Russia’s gonna have a bad fucking time in this conflict.

Again, not that they’ll lose it… but it ain’t gonna be clean.

2931

Yes, it was a parachute assault followed by an attempt to air transport more troops in. Seems like the Ukrainians prevented the reinforcements and resupply, then retook the airport.

Caveat: of course it is hard to know what is true, but this same journalist retracted earlier reports that prematurely said the airport had been retaken, for what that is worth.

2932

Yeah, it’s really hard to get a sense of what’s happening. I’m assuming the fact that there aren’t a million videos of bombardments means the Russians have done a number on communications around Ukraine.

From Reuters:

An adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office said Russian forces had captured the Chernobyl former nuclear power plant, just 90 km (60 miles) north of the capital. There was also fighting at Hostomel airport, just outside Kyiv, where paratroopers were landed. A Ukrainian official later said the airfield had been recaptured.

2933

Also, Ukraine is arming citizen ‘territorial defense’ forces.

2934
2935

Has anyone besides Biden said they were worse than SWIFT?

2936

Do the Ukranians have any kind of AA missiles/Flak? Because the Russians control the air, correct?

2937

They have some ex-Soviet equipment (who knows what the maintenance / spare parts situation is for those). And various NATO countries have given them a load of Stinger launchers (which hopefully they had enough time to train on, but again who knows). But that doesn’t really seem like enough for any kind of robust integrated air defense.

2938

It looks like Ukraine only had about 60 fighter jets to begin with, and a few squadrons of Frogfoots. No AWACs support, either.

Airfields are also high priority targets.

Not good.

2939

Hopefully Ukraine isn’t holding out hope that the West is gonna be sending a lot of help.

2940

Yes, they took the airport back.

Ukraine claims Russia lost 400 people since the invasion.