Right. I appreciate that "DA" sounds cool, but it's still ridiculous in context. Yes, some former DA (as in "Demnitate si Adevarul", not PPDA) went with PAS, previously prominent DA figure Andrei Năstase tried it alone even in a proportional system, got 0.85% of the vote and was not elected.

and yet, here we are. adevarul.ro/stiri-extern...

And again, link to my own piece @balcanicaucaso.org in English - www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Ru... - and in Italian - www.balcanicaucaso.org/aree/Russia/...

Juliette Faure's book: doi.org/10.1017/9781... - and a recent article doi.org/10.1017/eis....

Additional references:

updated official release on @discussdata.bsky.social, with even more ways to explore Zavtra's archive: doi.org/10.48320/EF3...

And then, worth noticing that for the group Faure calls the "hawks", what really matters is Russia's domestic cleansing, awakening, and rejuvenation. As the "hawks" themselves clarify, it is the ongoing top-down revolution within Russia that matters most to them: "Ukraine is just a pretext".

But I also question how much does ideology really matter for understanding the contours of what a plausible negotiated solution to the ongoing war would look like. Ideology is used to legitimise the Kremlin's choices: it may shape the language used to express them, but it hardly constrains policy.

"Accepting that no amount of plausible concessions from Kyiv would to put an end to the conflict is a necessary premise for more substantive policy debates in Europe and elsewhere."

"Western quiescence to Russia’s demands and Moscow’s neo-imperial design to control Ukraine, and indeed subsume it in the Russian cultural and political space along with Belarus, are inextricably intertwined, as one set of objectives cannot be achieved without the other."

"Ukraine, of course, remains central to Russia’s interests. But [in Russia's] vision, once Western geopolitical ambitions and weapons are removed from Ukraine, Ukraine would inevitably fall back within the Russian political and cultural space where it naturally belongs."

"If the “root causes” of the conflict lie in Russia’s relations with the West, no amount of unilateral Ukrainian concessions – least of all territorial concessions – would lead to a satisfactory outcome for Russia. Putin’s desired outcome cannot possibly stem from a decision taken in Kyiv."

Package: `quackingllama`. Basically, a llama that quacks like a duck (or, more technically, a package that relies on `Ollama` for interacting with LLMs, and on DuckDB for caching results). - giocomai.github.io/quackingllama/ #rstats