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As I’ve noted recently, I’ve usually been in the ambivalent/skeptic camp when it comes to NATO enlargement. There were many good reasons, from the U.S. perspective, to oppose NATO enlargement back in the 1990s and in the subsequent smaller expansions in the last quarter century. The U.S. has very good reasons not to extend security guarantees with what amount to existential implications to every country bordering Russia or adjacent to its borders which is or feels threatened by Russia. So you can say NATO expansion was dubious policy. Or you can claim, though the evidence for this is murky at best, that the U.S. broke some “deal” it made with the Soviets/Russians at the end of the Cold War. But all of these points ignore a basic foundational question: why did or do all these countries — Poland, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, et al. — want to join?

One of the uncanny things about what now does appear to be an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine is that so much is visible in real time. I’ve seen people saying we can’t take American claims of a military buildup or invasion at face value. And skepticism is always warranted about any government’s claims during a crisis. But in fact, between social media and commercial satellite imagery most of the story is unfolding before our eyes. If we’re smart and diligent, we can even fact check a lot of it from the privacy of our own homes.

I’m putting together a twitter list of accounts to follow the unfolding situation. You can view it here. It’s what I’m now using to keep track of events.

The leader of one of Russia’s puppet statelets in eastern Ukraine announced today that he is organizing a mass evacuation of civilians out of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and into Russia. As far as I can tell there’s no independent confirmation that this is happening. There are a few different possibilities. One is simply that this is an effort to pull civilians out of what will soon be a warzone. But it is being portrayed by Denis Pushilin, the self-styled leader, as a last chance to escape a coming invasion by Ukraine and what Vladimir Putin and his Donbas region puppets have been predicting will be a “genocide” of ethnic Russians carried out by Ukraine. In other words it looks exactly like the kind of agitprop and confusion campaign Biden, NATO and basically everyone who’s not in active sympathy with Russia has been predicting all along that Russia would use as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

We remain in a period of intense flux and uncertainty. Part of making sense of these periods is having an eye out for shifts that seem to be happening even if we don’t know precisely why they’re happening or what they’re building towards. For example, we keep getting hints that Donald Trump’s power within the GOP is waning. Not collapsing, certainly — nothing dramatic. The GOP is not moving in a Never Trump direction. But he has just a bit less sway and dominance day by day.

This morning we got an email from TPM Reader SI about the Trump document shredding. Can it really be the case that the government lacks electronic copies of these documents Trump tore up or flushed? I answered him as well as I could, noting that paper documents are often marked up by the President or aides and thus become unique documents in their paper form. But I confessed I didn’t know the precise answer myself. So we had Josh Kovensky dig into this question and he found some very interesting answers. See Josh’s report here.

On its face, the current Ukraine crisis is over the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. Russia wants a binding commitment that that will never happen. The U.S. and NATO refuse to offer such a firm and binding commitment. What’s easy to miss if you haven’t been following this story over the last two decades is that Ukraine has never gotten an invitation to join NATO. Not even close. There’s really no reason to think such an offer is or would have been coming any time soon. Successive U.S. Presidents have not been willing to take that step, even as they’ve worked to support Western-leaning governments in Kyiv. It’s been seen — rightly, I think — as just a bridge too far for the reasons I noted yesterday. Indeed, the backdrop to the current high stakes brinksmanship over whether Ukraine will be allowed to join NATO is that it’s a discussion of such a highly notional possibility. That fact must come up again and again in high level discussions.

I usually let notes from TPM Readers speak for themselves. But TPM Reader JE’s note made me think JE both didn’t know the extent to which he and I agree or where I get my news. It also gave me an opportunity to address a few issues I’ve been wanting to discuss.

First, JE …

A headline last night from the Times: “Tone of Ukraine Crisis Shifts as Russia Signals Openness to Talk More.”

There are also some limited signs that Russia is redeploying some number of military personnel from their forward positions up against the Ukraine border back to their regular bases.