Ukraine discussion group

[Martin Dietze]

Interesting nuance on the communication problems between Zelenskyi and
Biden:

There's no direct translation in Ukrainian for "imminent" — that word is
> Неминуче, which most closely corresponds to “no matter what” or
> “inevitable," which are close synonyms. But it’s not quite the same, and
> we’re told there isn’t a single Ukrainian word that conveys the meaning as
> it does in English. (Seriously, we checked with native Ukrainian speakers.)
> So when Biden’s team might genuinely mean “soon,” Zelenskyy hears U.S.
> officials effectively say “there will be an invasion regardless of what we
> do.”
>
> For Zelenskyy, then, it’s important to project confidence that Ukraine,
> the U.S. and Europe can deter Putin from launching a renewed incursion.
> “Given that we are still in the diplomatic phase, Ukraine is trying to
> prevent this from boiling over into the military phase, both for Russia and
> for NATO,” EUGENE CHAUSOVSKY, a fellow at the New Lines Institute in
> Washington, D.C., told NatSec Daily. It’s “politically useful for Zelenskyy
> to say when there is not a real threat of invasion, but it becomes more
> dangerous when that threat is now more acute.”
>

Source:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2022/01/28/why-imminent-pisses-zelensky-off-00003339

On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 12:14, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is how much Ukraine is "inviting the world's biggest bully into its
> country". When you project a
> world that doesn't exist, you get so much wrong.
>
> White House Warnings Over Russia Strain Ukraine-U.S. Partnership
>
> While Ukraine’s president complained about “acute and burning” warnings
> from Washington, the Pentagon issued a dire new appraisal asserting Russia
> has amassed enough troops to invade his entire country.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>