Russia's Easter Offensive

From, Timothy Snyder, on Substack, "Jesus in east European political thought":

Today Easter is celebrated by western Christians; a week from now it will be celebrated by the Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Ukraine, and by the Orthodox in Russia. By then, Russian troops will be engaged in their Easter Offensive, a new Russian attack on Ukraine in the Donbas.

The coincidence of the most important holiday in the Christian tradition with a war of atrocity gives an occasion to think about what Easter means, and how the life and death of Jesus has been interpreted.

One way of thinking about the life and death of Jesus is to connect them. Jesus of Nazareth took risks in life. He had things he needed to say about love and truth, but he did not deliberately provoke the state. That he died for his convictions adds an unforgettable dimension to them.

On such an interpretation of Easter, Jesus would be exemplary as an ethicist and truthteller who understood that commitments involve risks. His example would not be one of seeking death, or seeking meaning in death. The instruction would be to accept that some risk of death follows, in certain circumstances, from commitments to values such as love and truth.

“Love and truth.” Once, after a debate in 2009 in Bratislava, I looked over at the notes that the Czech thinker (and by then former president) Václav Havel had been keeping for himself. He had written "love and truth" on a sheet of paper, and then doodled flowers around it.

Havel was the author of a famous secular east European statement about risk in politics. He wrote "Power of the Powerless" in communist Czechoslovakia, three decades before that debate, under the shadow of the death of the philosopher Jan Patocka, who had died after police interrogation. In that essay, Havel maintained that one takes risks for one's own truths, not because punishment brings some meaning, but because risk inheres in truth. To "live in truth" means accepting a measure of existential danger.

The Soviet Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych, who admired Havel, said something similar. The risks that he and others took as human rights activists in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s were not a deliberate provocation of the state. They were just an inseparable element of what Myronovych called a "normal Ukrainian life." In the Soviet Union, one could be punished for singing Ukrainian songs or speaking of Ukrainian history. One should do such normal things not to court punishment, but rather because not doing so would compromise the self.

Both Havel (who was secular) and Marynovych (who experienced an epiphany under interrogation) were part of an international human rights movement that saw its main activity as the chronicle. A prominent form of resistance to communism was the attempt to record arrests, trials, deportations, sentences, and abuses. "Human rights" meant telling the truth about a moment when a life was interrupted. This tradition was continued after the end of the Soviet Union by investigative reporters who took risks to write about post-communist oligarchy and war.

I was reminded of that truthtelling tradition this Easter week when I read Nataliya Gumenyuk's reporting from Ukrainian territories from which Russian troops have withdrawn. Gumenyuk is one of an admirable group of Ukrainian reporters who have taken their share of risks reporting the inequality and conflict of the twenty-first century. (Russian reporters, such as those working for Novaya Gazeta and Ekho Moskvy belong to this tradition as well. These media have been forced to shut down by the Russian government.)

During the war in Ukraine, Russian occupation practice has been to execute Ukrainian local elites. Russian soldiers shoot Ukrainian civilians in the head for having taken some responsibility for local affairs. In the telling of survivors, these local elites were not seeking some heroic end. They simply could not bring themselves to collaborate with a Russian occupation regime. "They were killed for us," says a Ukrainian survivor to Gumenyuk, in an article published on western-rite Good Friday. What is meant is that they died because of how they lived, as servants of their communities. The point, though, was not that their death was redemptive. The murder was a horror.

I also hear something of an older east European tradition in the way that Volodymyr Zelens'kyi addresses Ukrainian losses. In an interview also published on Good Friday, Zelens'kyi speaks of suffering and death involved in resistance to invasion as a result of a risk that had to be taken to preserve the life of a society. Zelens'kyi does not glamorize combat or death. He gave a speech the other day which recalled Havel: he defined living in a lie as the source of Putin's aggression, and spoke of truth as a form of courage.

That is one broad way of thinking about politics suggested by Easter: the values of life are affirmed by a risk of death. Life is full of values, but attached to each one is risk. The risk is attendant upon the value. If the risk is realized in death, the value is affirmed. But death is not the point.

In a rival interpretation of the death of Jesus, to which Christians are vulnerable, death is the point. It is the suffering and the dying, rather that the acting and the living, that creates the meaning.

In such thinking about Easter, the significance of the dying can crowd out the living message of love and truth. The Polish Romanticism of the nineteenth century veered in this direction. The vision of Poland as a "Christ of Nations" was less about Christian comportment and more about the willingness to die for a cause. A century later, Romanian fascists identified strongly with Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy), and had an exuberant cult of death and martyrdom.

A certain kind of focus on the death of Jesus has a way, in politics at least, of dissolving responsibility for action. One convenient interpretation of Jesus dying for our sins is that we are innocent. And then the question arises as to who "we" are. Those within our group can be seen as free of sin, regardless of what we do, whereas the others can be seen as sinners, regardless of what they do.

The Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin, a Christian (Orthodox) fascist, advanced such a doctrine of national innocence. Ilyin's view was that Christ's teachings about truth and love were to be understood in a particular way, with respect to a particular nation. The world was broken, and could only be healed by Russians, and in particular by a fascist Russian leader. That was the truth that mattered. Only Russia had the chance to become a Christian nation, and that was by way of a totalitarianism that eliminated the differences between people and ruler. A restored Russia that could lead humanity would be without national minorities and without Ukraine, which Ilyin claimed did not exist. Christ commanded the love of God and the love of neighbor, but this meant for Ilyin the hatred of the Godless, which is to say those who did not understand Russia’s destiny.

On Ilyin's view, anything a Russian leader did to create a fascist, imperial Russia was by definition innocent of sin, since it was a step towards the redemption of the entire world. There is nothing wrong with lying and killing in a flawed world. Indeed, lying and killing are good when done by a Russian leader on a crusade to restore wholeness to the world.

The last time Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014, Putin was in the habit of citing Ilyin to legitimate Russian empire. And to justify that war, a living Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, supplied the image of Russia as a crucified boy (in “news” about an event that never took place).

Putin’s rhetoric about this war make sense within such a framework. In a rally, Putin quoted the Bible to celebrate the death of Russians in battle. He said that their death had made the nation more unified than ever before...

Still more.

 

Attacks Rock Ukrainian Cities, as Mariupol Nears Full Russian Control

At the Washington Post, "The port city’s fate hung in the balance after weeks of bombardment and siege by Russian forces":

MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Deadly attacks rocked numerous cities and leveled buildings across Ukraine on Saturday, serving as ominous signals of how close destruction remains even in areas where Russian forces have recently pulled out.

Russia moved ever closer to controlling the already devastated port city of Mariupol as its invasion of Ukraine continued into its eighth week. In Russian-occupied Kherson, satellite imagery that showed the digging of hundreds of fresh grave plots held haunting symbolism of the fate of civilians there.

U.S. officials and military experts are expecting that in the next phase of the war, Russian forces will concentrate their might on capturing the eastern region known as Donbas and the southern cities that provide crucial access to the Black Sea and beyond. But the latest barrage demonstrated that Russia is still capable of wreaking destruction well beyond where its forces are situated or have recently vacated, such as the capital of Kyiv and its suburbs.

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, said in an interview to air on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Putin “believes he is winning” the war.

“We have to look him in his eyes and we have to confront him with what we see in Ukraine,” Nehammer said, according to a transcript of the interview.

One person was killed as a result of a rocket strike near Kyiv, and several injured were taken to a hospital in the capital, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Saturday. The mayor urged residents of Kyiv who are away from the city not to return at present but to “stay in safer places.”

Blasts were also reported outside Kyiv on Friday. Russia said in a statement on Friday that its forces fired missiles at a suburban factory that produces Ukrainian weapons, in retaliation for what it claimed were attempted Ukrainian assaults on border towns inside Russia.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said a military plant was destroyed in the Kyiv attack, one of 16 targets hit in cities including Odessa, Poltava and Mykolaiv. The ministry claimed a repair shop for military equipment in Mykolaiv was destroyed.

In Lviv, an air raid lasting more than an hour was carried out by Russian Su-35 planes, the country’s more advanced fighter jets, according to regional governor Maksym Kozytskyy. Four guided missiles were destroyed by antiaircraft defenses, he added.

In Ukraine’s northeast, one person was killed and 18 were injured after a rocket strike in Kharkiv on Saturday, according to the provincial governor. Images captured after the attack showed Ukrainian servicemen walking amid the rubble, firefighters trying to extinguish multiple fires, and emergency workers treating an injured woman.

The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Synyehubov, said on the Telegram messaging app that a rocket fired by Russian forces “hit one of the central districts of Kharkiv again” early Saturday. He pleaded with residents to be “extremely careful” at a time when Russian forces “continue to terrorize the civilian population of Kharkiv and the region.”

Russia appeared to be on the verge of capturing the devastated port city of Mariupol, which a regional leader mourned had been “wiped off the face of the earth.” According to a top Russian military official, the only remaining area under Ukrainian forces was the Azovstal steel plant, one of the largest metallurgical factories in Europe.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to acknowledge as much on Saturday. In an address to the nation, a translation of which was posted on an official government website, Zelensky said that “the situation in Mariupol remains as severe as possible. Just inhuman.”

He said that Ukraine had continually sought military and diplomatic solutions since the blockade of Mariupol began, but that finding one had been extremely difficult.

Zelensky added: “Russia is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there in Mariupol.” On Saturday, Russia gave a deadline for surrender in Mariupol of 6 a.m. Moscow time on Sunday (11 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday), Russian state news reported.

Zelensky told Ukrainian media outlets that negotiations between Ukraine and Russia could end if Russian forces killed all of the Ukrainians defending the city. He noted that the situation in Mariupol is “very difficult,” acknowledging that “many people have disappeared” from the city. He reiterated that the wounded who remained blocked from leaving Mariupol needed to get out.

Mariupol has been under weeks of heavy bombardment and siege by Russian forces, and analysts are predicting it will be the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the coming days. Control of the Sea of Azov hub is strategically important to the Kremlin because it would connect Russian-annexed Crimea with Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said nine humanitarian corridors were to have been open Saturday, linking urban areas in the country’s south and east to relatively safer areas deeper inland in the north and west.

More than 1,400 people were evacuated through humanitarian corridors on Saturday despite persistent Russian shelling that made it difficult to carry out efforts in various parts of Ukraine, Vereshchuk said.

Those seeking to flee shelling in Mariupol and other cities had to use their own transportation because bad weather is preventing the use of evacuation buses. Parts of the roads leading to Zaporizhzhia, a city farther up the Dnieper River, have been washed out, she said.

Zaporizhzhia received nearly 1,400 people from hard-hit areas of the southeast who traveled in their own vehicles, Vereshchuk said through Telegram.

Advertisement Nearly 70 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk in the face of Russian shelling. Vereshchuk said the density of shelling prevented the evacuation of people from the eastern city of Lysychansk.

The United Nations has renewed calls for safe passage out of Mariupol, which the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, called “an epicenter of horror.” As many as 100,000 people are believed to still be in the city, which had a population of roughly 450,000 before the war began.

In Kherson, a city that was quickly seized by Russian forces during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine, recent satellite imagery showed that at least 824 grave plots were dug between Feb. 28 and April 15, according to an analysis by the Center for Information Resilience, a London-based nonprofit. The burial site is on the city’s outskirts, just east of the airport.

Advertisement Kherson is about 400 miles south of Kyiv and is home to a port on the Dnieper River close to the Black Sea, making it a strategically important site in the conflict.

Many of Kherson’s 280,000 residents have fled the city since the invasion. But the occupying Russian forces have also faced resistance and civilian protests in the city and appeared to have lost control of part of it late last month, according to the U.S. Defense Department, which said Kherson had become contested territory.

In areas that Russian forces have withdrawn from, a gruesome portrait has emerged of the horrors that residents faced...

 

The Fast-Gathering Storm

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "How close are we getting to a full-on war between Russia and the West?":

“The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness,” opined a certain Austrian maniac. And what we are discovering about Putin’s Russia as this brutal war continues, is something extremely dark.

The rhetoric in Moscow is now outright eliminationist toward not just Ukraine, but Ukrainians as a people. The more bogged down the Russian military, the more intense the “de-Nazification” memes. With each defeat, from the failure to take Kyiv to the sinking of the Mockva, the sense of humiliation and anger grows. In the words of one Kremlin propagandist: “It’s no accident we call them Nazis. What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.” Ukrainians are being dehumanized — deemed not just victims of a “Nazi” regime but somehow Nazis themselves. It’s hard not to recall Aleksandr Dugin’s 2014 remark when asked his view of Ukraine: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion. This is my opinion as a professor.”

The rhetoric on Russian TV is about ending Ukrainian identity, as well as Ukraine, altogether. “Ukrainianism, fueled by anti-Russian poison and all-consuming lies about its identity, is one big fake,” pronounced Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s mini-me. And the tactics — mass rapes, wholesale flattening of cities such as Mariupol, profligate torture, mass-murder of civilians — are those of a country seeking some kind of psychic purge of its ungrateful and traitorous Ukrainian subjects. The removal of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia proper is yet another sign of Putin’s genocidal mania.

As this sinks in, Europe is instinctually, understandably rallying to support Ukraine. Because Europe proper is next in line for Russia’s aggression if Ukraine loses. Boris Johnson has grasped the crisis as a way to play FDR (BoJo) to Churchill (Zelensky), sending arms to Ukraine, arriving in Kyiv for a photo-op with Zelensky, with whom he seems to have bonded. The UK alone has sent 4,000 anti-tank weapons, including Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapons, or NLAWs, and Javelin missiles. More are on the way. They have had a real effect.

And the EU is now doing something no one expected only a couple of weeks ago: considering a ban on Russian oil imports. Finland and Sweden may join NATO in a matter of weeks. The US is now funneling arms and training to Ukraine, as Russia menaces from the east: “The training will focus on using 155mm howitzer cannons, counter-artillery radar and Sentinel air defense radars, and will take a few days each.” This comes after years of NATO training of Ukrainian armed forces, which helps explain their remarkable early success in nimbly thwarting Russia’s onslaught.

The emergency spending from Congress a month ago for military and other foreign aid to Ukraine amounted to $13.6 billion. The aid is a culmination of deep support from the US since 2014. It’s getting more and more aggressive. Just this week, the Biden administration offered another “$800 million in additional security assistance for Ukraine, including artillery, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees ... The new package includes heavier weaponry than the U.S. previously had provided and — for the first time — American-made artillery pieces.”

But the demand for this sum to grow even further is becoming the conventional wisdom in DC. Fareed Zakaria explains why: “the world is expected to pay $320 billion to Russia this year for its energy.” $16 billion doesn’t seem so impressive. Fareed also notes what is evident: the Russians are doing far better in the south than in the north, and could throttle Ukraine if they manage to capture Odessa. So what should the West do?

[NATO] should enforce an embargo around those waters, preventing Russian troops from entering to attack Ukraine’s cities or resupply Russian forces. NATO ships would operate from international waters, issuing any approaching ships a “notice to mariners” that NATO forces are active in the area and warning them not to enter.

No risk elevation there!

Let’s be real: This is a Europe-wide war, fast becoming a global one. And as Putin gets more isolated, and his war drags on without a breakthrough, Russia is upping the ante too. The CIA director, Nicholas Burns, just worried out loud about Putin’s possible reach for chemical or nuclear weapons: “His risk appetite has grown as his grip on Russia has tightened … Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.”

If and when Russia begins a new onslaught on eastern and southern Ukraine, with the potential for Grozny-like devastation and war crimes, the pressure on all these countries to keep Ukraine free will get even more intense. Russia will be sorely tempted to prevent these huge military transfers by attacking supply lines from the west. Medvedev has warned of an end to a nuclear-free Baltic zone if Finland and Sweden join NATO. Putin cannot lose this war in the eyes of the Russian public — and has far, far more invested in Ukraine than the West does, as Barack Obama once reminded us.

And while support for the war remains solid in the US, it is not uppermost in voters’ minds, as they cope with raging inflation and rising crime. In France, a candidate who would oppose a EU oil embargo and who’s been chummy with Putin in the past, Marine Le Pen, is polling far better than expected. The Germans remain the most reluctant anti-Putin country in Europe, and if their economy goes into the shitter this fall with spiraling energy costs, who knows how long their will to fight back will last? Much of the developing world is ambivalent but leery of the US. And all this Western mobilization gives credence to Putin’s propaganda, does it not? It’s simply true that Ukraine, while not in NATO, is essentially a NATO outpost, using NATO weapons, to defend their country.

If and when Russia begins a new onslaught on eastern and southern Ukraine, with the potential for Grozny-like devastation and war crimes, the pressure on all these countries to keep Ukraine free will get even more intense. Russia will be sorely tempted to prevent these huge military transfers by attacking supply lines from the west. Medvedev has warned of an end to a nuclear-free Baltic zone if Finland and Sweden join NATO. Putin cannot lose this war in the eyes of the Russian public — and has far, far more invested in Ukraine than the West does, as Barack Obama once reminded us.

And while support for the war remains solid in the US, it is not uppermost in voters’ minds, as they cope with raging inflation and rising crime. In France, a candidate who would oppose a EU oil embargo and who’s been chummy with Putin in the past, Marine Le Pen, is polling far better than expected. The Germans remain the most reluctant anti-Putin country in Europe, and if their economy goes into the shitter this fall with spiraling energy costs, who knows how long their will to fight back will last? Much of the developing world is ambivalent but leery of the US. And all this Western mobilization gives credence to Putin’s propaganda, does it not? It’s simply true that Ukraine, while not in NATO, is essentially a NATO outpost, using NATO weapons, to defend their country...

 

Russians Who Support the War in Ukraine Are Turning in Other Russians Who Don't

Just like the good old times with Uncle Joe or back to the future?

At the New York Times, "Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War":

Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society.

Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.”

After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views.

“Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them.

“No longer,” one of the girls shot back.

A few days later, the police came to her school in the port town of Korsakov. In court, she heard a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge handed down a $400 fine for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s Armed Forces. The school fired her, she said, for “amoral behavior.”

“It’s as though they’ve all plunged into some kind of madness,” Ms. Dubrova said in a phone interview, reflecting on the pro-war mood around her.

With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.

The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.

There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.

In the western region of Kaliningrad, the authorities sent residents text messages urging them to provide phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” in connection with the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported; they can do so conveniently through a specialized account in the Telegram messaging app. A nationalist political party launched a website urging Russians to report “pests” in the elite.

“I am absolutely sure that a cleansing will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, the member of Parliament behind the website, said in an interview, predicting that the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. He then clarified: “We don’t want anyone to be shot, and we don’t even want people to go to prison.”

But it is the history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state, that now looms over Russia’s deepening climate of repression. Mr. Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.”

In the Soviet logic, those who choose not to report their fellow citizens could be viewed as being suspect themselves.

“In these conditions, fear is settling into people again,” said Nikita Petrov, a leading scholar of the Soviet secret police. “And that fear dictates that you report.”

In March, Mr. Putin signed a law that punishes public statements contradicting the government line on what the Kremlin terms its “special military operation” in Ukraine with as much as 15 years in prison. It was a harsh but necessary measure, the Kremlin said, given the West’s “information war” against Russia.

Prosecutors have already used the law against more than 400 people, according to the OVD-Info rights group, including a man who held up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it. “No to war” in Russian has eight letters.

“This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens.

“This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens.

A recording of that exchange appeared on a popular account on Telegram that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., called her in and warned her that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, last month were “100 percent a criminal case.”

She is now being investigated for causing “grave consequences” under last month’s censorship law, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison.

Ms. Gen, 45, said she found little support among her students or from her school, and quit her job this month. When she talked in class about her opposition to the war, she said she felt “hatred” toward her radiating from some of her students.

“My point of view did not resonate in the hearts and minds of basically anyone,” she said in an interview...

Still more.

 

At Least 50 Killed in Russian Strike on Kramatorsk Station (VIDEO)

Complete horror.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Russian Missile Attack Kills Dozens at Railway Station in Eastern Ukraine":

Moscow pressed its offensive in the Donbas area as Kyiv assessed the scale of damage around the capital A Russian missile attack on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed 50 people and injured nearly 100 trying to flee the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian authorities said Friday, in one of the largest single attacks on evacuees since the conflict began.

Around 4,000 people from across eastern Ukraine had gathered at the train station, a railroad hub for the region, waiting for evacuation days after Ukrainian officials told residents to leave ahead of a renewed Russian offensive in Donbas. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a ballistic Tochka-U missile had struck the station. Photographs posted on social media by Mr. Zelensky showed bodies strewn on the ground and dozens of suitcases, strollers and bags left behind.

Five children were among the dead, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the administration in the eastern region of Donetsk. Another 16 children were wounded, he said.

“They are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Mr. Zelensky wrote in a post on Instagram. “This is an evil that has no limits.”

Mr. Zelensky posted a video of a missile fragment lying on the ground near the station that had the words “for the children” painted on it. A person narrating the video identified it as the missile used in the attack.

“They clearly saw that they were hitting civilians early in the morning, that at the station at this time there were thousands of people trying to evacuate, families, children, elderly,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, wrote on his Facebook page.

Russia denied the strike but said it had been targeting train stations in the nearby Donbas towns and cities of Pokrovsk, Slovyansk and Barvinkove to destroy Ukrainian military hardware arriving into the region. Ukrainian officials have blamed Russia for thwarting evacuation attempts across the country, including outside the southern Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Berdyansk, with artillery attacks.

The strikes herald a news focus on eastern Ukraine following Moscow’s decision to give up on capturing the capital, Kyiv. Ukraine, which has asked for heavier weapons in the face of a possibly more consolidated attack by the Russians, received a Soviet-era S-300 air-defense system from Slovakia, the Slovak government said Friday.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is scheduled to meet Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv on Friday, condemned the attack, calling it despicable.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she was appalled by the strike. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime,” she wrote on Twitter. “We will hold Russia and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to account.”

Humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said the station attack was imperiling the evacuation efforts in the region.

“We were there yesterday, and we saw hundreds of people crowding the station, trying to leave,” said Christopher Stokes, emergency coordinator at Doctors Without Borders. “The hospitals had been urgently calling us to evacuate their patients by train. It is a big question whether we will be able to evacuate more people.”

Murat Sahin, the Ukraine representative at Unicef, the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, condemned the harming of children in the attack.

“Civilians, particularly children, must be protected from harm,” Mr. Sahin said. “The killing of children must stop now.”

Kramatorsk, a city of more than 100,000, has been the base for Ukraine’s joint-forces operation, which has been fighting Russian-controlled separatists that took over swaths of Ukraine’s industrial east in 2014. The city and those around it that suffered through the separatist conflict are once again becoming a war zone now that Moscow aborted its multipronged effort to capture Kyiv. Russia has said it is in the second phase of what it calls a special military operation and that the conflict is going according to plan, but analysts say Russia is being forced to reconsider its capabilities after weeks of setbacks.

The Kremlin said Friday that the military operation could end in the “foreseeable future” since its goals were being achieved and negotiations between the two sides were under way.

Renewed fighting in the east will draw more of Kyiv’s resources away from cities and towns near the capital, where Ukrainian authorities are still trying to assess the extent of damage left after Russian troops withdrew. Ukrainian authorities on Friday were sifting through the remains of apartment blocks in the town of Borodyanka, north of the capital, after Kyiv said Russian planes bombed civilian targets, killing dozens and trapping countless more under the rubble.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said Russian forces attacked at least two apartment buildings with bombs and rockets to cause maximum civilian deaths. She said 26 bodies had been recovered but that there could be many more.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians in its military assault on Ukraine and has called the video and photographic images of Russia’s alleged targeting of civilians in Bucha and elsewhere staged...

Putin's American Apologists

From Joshua Muravchik, at Commentary, "A collection of voices on the left, right, and center have found a way to blame the United States and the West...,":

from the international consensus to vote with Russia at the UN, so here at home, a miscellany of voices demurred, pointing fingers of blame in other directions, expressing sympathy for Russia’s position, or warning against any strong reaction from Washington.

Almost none offered words of worship to Vladimir Putin, as many had to Joseph Stalin in Soviet days, and none declared outright support for his actions. But still, a number of writers, political groups, and politicians offered a counterpoint to the broad chorus of indignation at Putin’s action. They came from both political poles, as well as from the camp of isolationist ideologues difficult to locate on a left-to-right spectrum. Some registered their disapproval of Russia’s attack before proceeding to their main point: warning against a U.S. response stronger than admitting refugees. Others offered up outright apologetics for Putin’s actions.

On the left, the Democratic Socialists of America—once a fringe group but that now boasts in its ranks four members of the U.S. House of Representatives (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman) as well as dozens of state legislators and many local officials—issued a statement on January 31 in response to Russia’s massing its army on Ukraine’s borders. It began:

Following months of increased tensions and a sensationalist Western media blitz drumming up conflict in the Donbas, the US government is responding to the situation in Ukraine through the familiar guise of threats of sweeping sanctions, provision of military aid, and increased military deployment to the region. [DSA] opposes this ongoing US brinkmanship, which only further escalates the crisis, and reaffirms our previous statement saying no to NATO and its imperialist expansionism and disastrous interventions across the world.

Nowhere did the document attempt to explain what had caused the sudden “increased tensions,” or so much as mention the Russian forces. It called instead on the U.S. “to reverse its ongoing militarization of the region.”

When the Russians attacked, DSA issued a new statement, which did indeed condemn the invasion while opposing any “coercive measures… economic or military” to counter it. In contrast to the UN General Assembly, which voted almost unanimously to “demand” the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces, DSA merely “urge[d]” this. It went on to “reaffirm our call for the USA to withdraw from NATO, and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” and it declared “solidarity with…antiwar protestors in both countries [Russia and Ukraine],” although it did not explain where the latter had been sighted.

Others on the left were less flagrant but also assigned more blame to Washington than Moscow. Noam Chomsky, in a lengthy interview in the online journal Truthout, explained:

The crisis has been brewing for 25 years as the US contemptuously rejected Russian security concerns, in particular their clear red lines: Georgia and especially Ukraine. There is good reason to believe that this tragedy could have been avoided.

Now, he said, focus must turn to the future. He warned, “repeatedly, [America’s] reaction has been to reach for the six-gun rather than the olive branch.” But the superior wisdom of a gentler approach, he explained, had been taught to him personally during his wartime travels to North Vietnam by representatives of the Viet Cong, a group whose penchant for gentleness was lost on less acute observers than Chomsky. Moreover, he added, “like it or not, the choices are now reduced to an ugly outcome that rewards rather than punishes Putin for the act of aggression—or the strong possibility of terminal war.” In short, our only sure path to avoid nuclear Armageddon is one that “rewards” Putin.

Writing in the Nation, Rajan Menon described the original sin that led to today’s crisis. As always in that journal, America was the sinner:

Instead of seizing the opportunity to create a new European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team squandered it by deciding to expand NATO threateningly toward that country’s borders. Such a misbegotten policy guaranteed that Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington created a new order that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet Russia.

That magazine’s publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, has recently been awarded a weekly column in the Washington Post. There, at the end of January, she warned of the danger of war and of “screeching hawks.”

In Russia, Putin is already under fire for not having taken Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in 2014.…In Washington, Biden is under fire for not being tough enough…For all its hysteria about imminent war, it’s clear that the Biden administration believes Putin is bluffing….the danger is that Putin will face escalating pressure from more hawkish factions within Russia.

When the Russians attacked, she spoke for the Nation, “condemn[ing]” the invasion in somewhat roundabout words, before resuming her theme that equal or greater blame lay with the West:

Putin’s actions are indefensible, but responsibility for this crisis is widely shared. This magazine has warned repeatedly that the extension of NATO to Russia’s borders would inevitably produce a fierce reaction. We have criticized NATO’s wholesale rejection of Russia’s security proposals. We decry the arrogance that leads U.S. officials to assert that we have the right to do what we wish across the world, even in areas, like Ukraine, that are far more important to others than they are to us.

A week later, in her Washington Post column, she advised against countering Russia. “By invading Ukraine,” she opined, “Putin demands a return to [an] archaic and obsolete Cold War order. The world would be wise not to accede.” In other words, Putin is trying to start a fight; we could frustrate him by turning the other cheek. She counseled out-of-the-box thinking:

What’s needed above all is a courageous and transnational citizens’ movement demanding not simply the end of the war on Ukraine but also an end to perpetual wars. We need political leaders who will speak out about our real security needs and resist the reflex to fall into old patterns that distract from the threats we can no longer afford to ignore [i.e., “pandemics and climate change”].

The Nation’s competitor among left-wing journals, Jacobin, took a similar tack. Staff writer Branko Marcetic asserted that Putin’s invasion was “reckless and illegal,” before going on to argue that it might have been averted by “a different set of US policies over the past few months.” He explained:

Already, the army of war-hawk pundits that has been predicting—salivating over, may be more accurate—a Russian invasion has seized on this latest move as vindication of their usual talking points: Putin is Hitler, he seeks to revive the glory of the Soviet Union, he can’t be reasoned with, and only a show of force, not further “appeasement” or negotiations that “reward” his behavior, can make him stop. This is…exactly the approach Washington and its allies…have taken to get us to this point.

If readers wondered whether it wasn’t Moscow, rather than Washington and its allies, who had gotten us to this point, Marcetic offered an example of “the most over-the-top of Western predictions” that had inflamed the situation, namely, the image of Russian soldiers “marching to Kiev and toppling the Ukrainian government.”

Elected officials on the left tended to be more forthright in denouncing the Russian invasion, while often adding caveats. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, called it “premeditated aggression,” but he did not retract his previously expressed sympathy for Russia’s adamancy about Washington’s refusal to rule out NATO membership for Ukraine. “Does anyone really believe,” he asked, “that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?”

Sanders is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Its chair, Representative Pramila Jayapal, together with the chair of its Peace and Security Taskforce, Representative Barbara Lee, spoke for the caucus during this crisis. As Russian forces poised on Ukraine’s borders, they issued a statement voicing “alarm,” although this seemed to be mostly about possible American reactions. “We have significant concerns that new troop deployments, sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions, and a flood of hundreds of millions of dollars in lethal weapons will only raise tensions and increase the chance of miscalculation,” they said.

They offered an interpretation of the mobilization on Ukraine’s borders akin to vanden Heuvel’s: “Russia’s strategy is to inflame tensions; the United States and NATO must not play into this strategy.” Apparently, the way to stymie Putin would be to go about our business of reforming America or saving the planet and to ignore his belligerent actions entirely.

Their colleague Rashida Tlaib seconded this, adding: “Enough of rushing to war…  . Diplomacy and de-escalation must be the focus, not ‘lethal’ aid. My constituents are tired of war and are demanding we use everything in our toolbox to prevent conflict.”

When the Biden administration began warning of an imminent Russian invasion, and Congress rushed to enact emergency legislation to shore up Ukraine and deter Russia, caucus member Ilhan Omar voiced her opposition:

The proposed legislative solution to this crisis, escalates the conflict without deterring it effectively….The consequences of flooding Ukraine with half a billion dollars in American weapons, likely not limited to just military-specific equipment but also including small arms and ammo, are unpredictable and likely disastrous. It also threatens unbelievably broad and draconian sanctions that will utterly devastate the Russian economy, likely doing very little to deter Putin’s aggression while causing immense suffering among ordinary Russian civilians who did not choose this.

After the Russian forces rolled across the border, caucus members were clearer in “condemning the violent invasion of Ukraine,” while still focusing most of their appeals on the need to restrain the U.S. response. In their new statement, the caucus said:

We urge the Biden administration to be guided by two goals: to avoid dangerous escalation that is all too easy in the chaos of war, and to ensure we are minimizing harm to civilians. We applaud President Biden for rightly saying there can be no military solution to this conflict, and wisely committing to not deploying U.S. troops… . The president must seek congressional authorization…before any U.S. troops deploy into areas or situations where there is a risk of imminent hostilities.

Since deploying U.S. forces to Ukraine had already been ruled out, the latter sentence seemed to aim at the movement of several thousand troops into frontline NATO states. In addition to objecting to these deployments designed to deter the Russians from moving against the Baltic states, the progressives also were chary of economic sanctions. They said: “The goal of any U.S. sanctions should be to stop the fighting and hold those responsible for this invasion to account, while avoiding indiscriminate harm to civilians or inflexibility as circumstances change.”

These attitudes on the left, if in some ways shocking, are not surprising. And the same might be said about the camp of ideological isolationists. It is centered today in the Quincy Institute, a D.C. think tank of relatively recent vintage, lavishly funded from the two extremes, George Soros on the left and Charles Koch on the right.

In the run-up to the Russian invasion, Quincy’s website was replete with items diverting blame from Russia, casting aspersions on Ukraine and its sympathizers, and warning against U.S. involvement. Research fellow Ben Freeman posted an exposé, claiming to reveal that “lobbyists from Ukraine are working feverishly to shape the U.S. response.” It went on: “Firms working for Ukrainian interests have inundated congressional offices, think tanks and journalists with more than 10,000 message and meetings in 2021.” Freeman added, “With U.S. weapons manufacturers making billions in arms sales to Ukraine, their CEOs see the turmoil there as a good business opportunity,” citing another Quincy exposé by another staff member.

In addition to the various writings of vanden Heuvel, a Quincy board member, that are posted on its site, its other principal commentators on this issue were Andrew Bacevich, the institute’s president, and senior fellow Anatol Lieven.

As the Biden administration issued warnings in February, citing intelligence that Putin was intent on war, Bacevich published an op-ed debunking it, warning that “a full-fledged war scare is upon us.” He likened the administration’s revelation of Russian plans for staging a false-flag attack to the Bush administration’s erroneous 2003 warnings about Iraqi nuclear weapons. And he vented anger at news organizations for reporting the Russia story. “The incessant warmongering of the American media [is] disturbing and repugnant,” he lamented, protesting reports that 130,000 Russian troops had massed on Ukraine’s borders. He didn’t dispute this number but rather the verb, “massed,” which he called “a favored media mischaracterization.” He suggested no preferable term, but reporters might have said more neutrally that Russian soldiers “convened” or “congregated” or “flocked” or “disembarked” at Ukraine’s border.

Two weeks later, as the crisis intensified, Bacevich took to print again, adding to his indictment of the media and of America more broadly. “Some members of the American commentariat will cheer” war, he said, owing to “the depth of their animus toward Putin.” This in part reflected “the unvarnished Russophobia pervading the ranks of the America political elite” and “disdain for Russia” that has “roots going at least as far back as the Bolshevik Revolution.” However, the “deeper” source of “our present-day antipathy toward Russia [lies in] a desperate need to refurbish the concept of American exceptionalism.” In “our collective identity [w]e Americans…are the Chosen People.” It would be more accurate, he went on, to characterize ourselves as “reckless,” “incompetent,” “alienated,” “extravagantly wasteful,” and “deeply confused.” Rather than “flinging macho-man insults,” Bacevich concluded, the U.S. should “acknowledge the possibility that Russia possesses legitimate security interests” in Ukraine.

The day after Russia’s assault began, Bacevich published yet another op-ed. “The eruption of war creates an urgent need to affix blame and identify villains,” he began, with gentle sarcasm that then grew stronger. “Russia is the aggressor and President Vladimir Putin a bad guy straight out of central casting: on that point, opinion in the United States and Europe is nearly unanimous. Even in a secular age, we know whose side God is on.” It would be better, he said, to avoid a “rush to judgment.”

Yes, Russian aggression deserves widespread condemnation. Yet the United States cannot absolve itself of responsibility for this catastrophe… . By casually meddling in Ukrainian politics in recent years, the United States has effectively incited Russia to undertake its reckless invasion.

Quincy’s most prolific commentator on the Ukraine crisis was senior research fellow Anatol Lieven. He, too, sounded a note of contempt for Americans. “A mythological monster is haunting the fevered imagination of the West,” a cartoon image of a creature whose name Americans ignorantly mispronounce “Put’n.” In contrast,

the real Putin is cautious and levelheaded—too much so, in the view of more ambitious and hotheaded members of the Russian elite. …This should give confidence that we can emerge from the present crisis without disaster… . Only the mythological Putin would March into Kiev and central Ukraine, let alone attack Poland or the Baltic states. These are ridiculous Western fantasies generated partly by genuine paranoia, partly by members of the US and European blobs who need to demonize Russia in order to cover up their own appalling mistakes and lies over the past 30 years and to parade heroic resistance to a threat that does not in fact exist.

The recurrent theme of Lieven’s many articles was that Western anxieties were unwarranted. In early February, he wrote:

One Western line about Russia’s demands has already been proved false, namely that they were never intended as a serious basis for negotiations; and that Russia always planned to use their rejection as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Clearly if that were the case, Russia would have invaded by now.

Then, when their intelligence prompted Western governments to withdraw diplomatic personnel, Lieven wrote mockingly that Russia therefore had no need to invade. “Western policy towards Ukraine is evolving from the ridiculous to the positively surreal… . Putin can enjoy a quiet cup of coffee while Western governments run around squawking hysterically and NATO’s credibility collapses along with the Ukrainian economy.” And a week after that, he forecasted: “If by the time of the Blinken-Lavrov meeting, Russia has not in fact invaded Ukraine except for the Donbas, then all these Western warnings about an imminent Russian invasion will start to look a bit silly.”

When the invasion finally came, Lieven did not stop to acknowledge who it was that now looked silly, but he did condemn it in clear terms before proceeding to suggest the outline of a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine would cede substantial territory and a bit of sovereignty.

Finally, once the war was underway, two other Quincy authors, Matthew Burrows and Christopher Preble, chimed in airily that “one way or another, the Russian war in Ukraine will wind down” and the really important thing was to avert “a new Cold War between Russia and the West.” In other words, Ukraine’s cities could end up resembling Grozny after Putin finished suppressing the Chechen uprising, but then we could move on.

If the stance of the isolationist Quincy Institute as well as that of the left was to be expected, the response on the right was less predictable, but here, too, Putin found apologists. Foremost among them was Donald Trump. In the first two days after Putin announced diplomatic recognition of the two breakaway “people’s republics” in Donbas, Trump several times called it “smart” and “genius” that Russian troops were going in as “peacekeepers.” He gushed that Putin is “very savvy,” although his words of admiration stopped short of directly endorsing or defending Putin’s action.

Indeed, characteristically, he added that the invasion wouldn’t have happened if he were president. He didn’t explain why that would have been so, beyond sneering that Biden “has no concept of what he’s doing.” Would he have mollified Putin? After all, he had recently recalled aloud that he “got along great with President Putin,” and said, “I liked him. He liked me.” Or would Putin have been afraid of him? He had once boasted of having a bigger “nuclear button” than Kim Jong Un (before he and Kim “fell in love”). Credulous admirers were left to fill in their own scenarios.

Within a week, however, as, at home and abroad, a near-consensus of indignation at Russian actions crystallized, and Ukrainians heroically stalled Russia’s advance, Trump switched the script. He branded the Russian rampage a “holocaust” and demanded that it stop. Then he claimed that the Ukrainians were able to hold off the invaders because of weapons that he had provided them.

General Mike Flynn, Trump’s first appointed national security adviser, spoke more coherently than Trump and defended Putin entirely:

Russia has…one core concern… . If Ukraine were admitted into NATO…the Russians understand that would likely result in nuclear weapons being placed at its doorstep—closer to Russia than Cuba is to the United States.…If president John Kennedy was justified in risking war to prevent nuclear missiles from being installed in Cuba in 1961, then why exactly is Russian president Vladimir Putin being reckless in risking war to prevent NATO weapons from being installed in Ukraine in 2022? Would any great nation allow the development of such a threat on its border?

Another former Trump aide, now a social-media figure with a large following, Candace Owens, took a similar stance...

Still more.

 

 

With New Punishments, West Escalates Pressure on Russia

The latest on Ukraine.

At the NewYork Times, "West Moves to Curb Russian Coal and Trade Over Ukraine War":

BRUSSELS — Western nations on Thursday escalated their pressure on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, with the European Union approving a ban on Russian coal and the United States moving to strip Russia’s trading privileges and prohibit its energy sales in the American market.

The new punishments came as the United Nations General Assembly took a symbolically important vote to penalize Russia by suspending it from the Human Rights Council, the 47-member U.N. body that can investigate rights abuses. Western diplomats called the suspension a barometer of global outrage over the war and the growing evidence of atrocities committed by Russian forces.

That evidence includes newly revealed radio transmissions intercepted by German intelligence in which Russian forces discussed carrying out indiscriminate killings north of Kyiv, the capital, according to two officials briefed on an intelligence report. Russia has denied any responsibility for atrocities.

Together, the steps announced Thursday represented a significant increase in efforts led by Western nations to isolate and inflict greater economic pain on Russia as its troops regroup for a wave of attacks in eastern Ukraine, prompting urgent calls by Ukrainian officials for civilians there to flee.

“These next few days may be your last chance to leave!” the regional governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, declared in a video on Facebook. “The enemy is trying to cut off all possible ways to leave. Do not delay — evacuate.”

But the Western penalties were unlikely to persuade Russia to stop the war, and they revealed how the allies were trying to minimize their own economic pain and prevent themselves from becoming entangled in a direct armed conflict with Moscow.

In some ways, the efforts underscored internal tensions among Russia’s critics over how best to manage the next stage of the conflict, which has created the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. The war is also indirectly worsening humanitarian and economic problems far from Ukraine, including rising food and energy prices that are exacerbating hunger and inflation, particularly in developing nations.

It took two days of protracted talks in Brussels for the European Union to approve a fifth round of sanctions against Russia that included its first ban on a Russian energy source, coal. But the measures were softened by several caveats, highlighting Europe’s diminishing appetite to absorb further economic fallout from the war.

The ban would be phased in over four months, instead of three as originally proposed, according to E.U. diplomats. Germany had been pushing for a longer transition period to wind down existing contracts, even though Russian coal is easier to replace with purchases from other suppliers, compared with oil and gas.

European diplomats also agreed to ban Russian-flagged vessels from E.U. ports, block trucks from Russia and its ally, Belarus, from E.U. roads, and stop the import of Russian seafood, cement, wood and liquor and the export to Russia of quantum computers and advanced semiconductors.

Ukrainian officials had urged Western nations to go further and completely cut off purchases of Russian oil and gas, contending that existing sanctions would not cripple Russia’s economy quickly or severely enough to affect President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to subjugate Ukraine by force.

“As long as the West continues buying Russian gas and oil, it is supporting Ukraine with one hand while supporting the Russian war machine with the other hand,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Thursday at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he urged members of the alliance to accelerate promised help to Ukraine’s outgunned military.

The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said the alliance would “further strengthen and sustain our support to Ukraine, so that Ukraine prevails in the face of Russia’s invasion.” But he did not offer details...

 

The Price of Hegemony

It's neoconservative author and columnist Robert Kagan (who is married to Victory Nuland, part of the "neocon cabal" Glenn Greenwald's been wailing about), at Foreign Affairs, "Can America Learn to Use Its Power?":

For years, analysts have debated whether the United States incited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interventions in Ukraine and other neighboring countries or whether Moscow’s actions were simply unprovoked aggressions. That conversation has been temporarily muted by the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A wave of popular outrage has drowned out those who have long argued that the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that it is in Russia’s sphere of interest, and that U.S. policies created the feelings of insecurity that have driven Putin to extreme measures. Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the anti-interventionists and shut down the debate over whether the United States should have entered World War II, Putin’s invasion has suspended the 2022 version of Americans’ endless argument over their purpose in the world.

That is unfortunate. Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post–Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact.

For critics of American power, the best way for the United States to cope is for it to retrench its position in the world, divest itself of overseas obligations that others ought to handle, and serve, at most, as a distant offshore balancer. These critics would grant China and Russia their own regional spheres of interest in East Asia and Europe and focus the United States’ attention on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans. But there is a core of unrealism to this “realist” prescription: it doesn’t reflect the true nature of global power and influence that has characterized most of the post–Cold War era and that still governs the world today. The United States was already the only true global superpower during the Cold War, with its unparalleled wealth and might and its extensive international alliances. The collapse of the Soviet Union only enhanced U.S. global hegemony—and not because Washington eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Moscow’s weakness. Instead, the collapse expanded U.S. influence because the United States’ combination of power and democratic beliefs made the country attractive to those seeking security, prosperity, freedom, and autonomy. The United States is therefore an imposing obstacle to a Russia seeking to regain its lost influence.

What has happened in eastern Europe over the past three decades is a testament to this reality. Washington did not actively aspire to be the region’s dominant power. But in the years after the Cold War, eastern Europe’s newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence. Eastern Europeans were looking to escape decades—or, in some cases, centuries—of Russian and Soviet imperialism, and allying with Washington at a moment of Russian weakness afforded them a precious chance to succeed. Even if the United States had rejected their pleas to join NATO and other Western institutions, as critics insist it should have, the former Soviet satellites would have continued to resist Moscow’s attempts to corral them back into its sphere of interest, seeking whatever help from the West they could get. And Putin would still have regarded the United States as the main cause of this anti-Russian behavior, simply because the country was strong enough to attract eastern Europeans.

Throughout their history, Americans have tended to be unconscious of the daily impact that U.S. power has on the rest of the world, friends and foes alike. They are generally surprised to find themselves the target of resentment and of the kinds of challenges posed by Putin’s Russia and by President Xi Jinping’s China. Americans could reduce the severity of these challenges by wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively. They failed to do this in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan to go unchecked until it resulted in a massively destructive world war. They failed to do so in recent years, allowing Putin to seize more and more land until he invaded all of Ukraine. After Putin’s latest move, Americans may learn the right lesson. But they will still struggle to understand how Washington should act in the world if they don’t examine what happened with Russia, and that requires continuing the debate over the impact of U.S. power.

BY POPULAR DEMAND

So in what way might the United States have provoked Putin? One thing needs to be clear: it was not by threatening the security of Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have objectively enjoyed greater security than at any time in recent memory. Russia was invaded three times over the past two centuries, once by France and twice by Germany. During the Cold War, Soviet forces were perpetually ready to battle U.S. and NATO forces in Europe. Yet since the end of the Cold War, Russia has enjoyed unprecedented security on its western flanks, even as NATO has taken in new members to its east. Moscow even welcomed what was in many ways the most significant addition to the alliance: a reunified Germany. When Germany was reunifying at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev favored anchoring it in NATO. As he told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, he believed that the best guarantee of Soviet and Russian security was a Germany “contained within European structures.”

Late Soviet and early Russian leaders certainly did not act as if they feared an attack from the West. Soviet and Russian defense spending declined sharply in the late 1980s and through the late 1990s, including by 90 percent between 1992 and 1996. The once formidable Red Army was cut nearly in half, leaving it weaker in relative terms than it had been for almost 400 years. Gorbachev even ordered the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Poland and other Warsaw Pact states, chiefly as a cost-saving measure. It was all part of a larger strategy to ease Cold War tensions so that Moscow might concentrate on economic reform at home. But even Gorbachev would not have sought this holiday from geopolitics had he believed that the United States and the West would take advantage of it.

His judgment was sensible. The United States and its allies had no interest in the independence of the Soviet republics, as U.S. President George H. W. Bush made clear in his 1991 speech in Kyiv, in which he denounced the “suicidal nationalism” of independence-minded Ukrainians (who would declare independence three weeks later). Indeed, for several years after 1989, U.S. policies aimed first to rescue Gorbachev, then to rescue the Soviet Union, and then to rescue Russian President Boris Yeltsin. During the period of transition from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to Yeltsin’s Russia—the time of greatest Russian weakness—the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration were reluctant to expand NATO, despite the increasingly urgent appeals of the former Warsaw Pact states. The Clinton administration created the Partnership for Peace, whose vague assurances of solidarity fell well short of a security guarantee for former Warsaw Pact members.

It is easy to see why Washington felt no great compulsion to drive NATO eastward. Few Americans at that time saw the organization as a bulwark against Russian expansion, much less as a means of bringing Russia down. From the U.S. perspective, Russia was already a shell of its former self. The question was whether NATO had any mission at all now that the great adversary against which it was aimed had collapsed—and given just how hopeful the 1990s felt to most Americans and western Europeans. It was thought to be a time of convergence, when both China and Russia were moving ineluctably toward liberalism. Geoeconomics had replaced geopolitics, the nation-state was passing away, the world was “flat,” the twenty-first century would be run by the European Union, and Enlightenment ideals were spreading across the planet. For NATO, “out of area or out of business” was the mantra of the day.

But as the West enjoyed its fantasies and Russia struggled to adapt to a new world, the nervous populations lying to the east of Germany—the Balts, the Poles, the Romanians, and the Ukrainians—viewed the end of the Cold War as merely the latest phase in their centuries-old struggle. For them, NATO was not obsolete. They saw what the United States and western Europe took for granted—the Article 5 collective security guarantee—as the key to escaping a long, bloody, and oppressive past. Much like the French after World War I, who feared the day when a revived Germany would again threaten them, eastern Europeans believed that Russia would eventually resume its centuries-long habit of imperialism and seek to reclaim its traditional influence over their neighborhood. These states wanted to integrate into the free-market capitalism of their richer, Western neighbors, and membership in NATO and the European Union was to them the only path out of a dismal past and into a safer, more democratic, and more prosperous future. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin loosened the reins in the early 1990s, practically every current, and soon former, Warsaw Pact member and Soviet republic seized the chance to break from the past and shift their allegiance from Moscow to the transatlantic West.

But although this massive change had little to do with U.S. policies, it had much to do with the reality of the United States’ post–Cold War hegemony. Many Americans tend to equate hegemony with imperialism, but the two are different. Imperialism is an active effort by one state to force others into its sphere, whereas hegemony is more a condition than a purpose. A militarily, economically, and culturally powerful country exerts influence on other states by its mere presence, the way a larger body in space affects the behavior of smaller bodies through its gravitational pull. Even if the United States was not aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, and certainly not through its military, the collapse of Soviet power enhanced the attractive pull of the United States and its democratic allies. Their prosperity, their freedom, and, yes, their power to protect former Soviet satellites, when combined with the inability of Moscow to provide any of these, dramatically shifted the balance in Europe in favor of Western liberalism to the detriment of Russian autocracy. The growth of U.S. influence and the spread of liberalism were less a policy objective of the United States than the natural consequence of that shift.

Russian leaders could have accommodated themselves to this new reality. Other great powers had adjusted to similar changes. The British had once been lords of the seas, the possessors of a vast global empire, and the center of the financial world. Then they lost it all. But although some were humiliated at being supplanted by the United States, Britons rather quickly adjusted to their new place in the firmament. The French, too, lost a great empire, and Germany and Japan, defeated in war, lost everything except their talent for producing wealth. But they all made the adjustment and were arguably better for it.

There were certainly Russians in the 1990s—Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, for one—who thought that Russia should make a similar decision. They wished to integrate Russia into the liberal West even at the expense of traditional geopolitical ambitions. But that was not the view that ultimately prevailed in Russia. Unlike the United Kingdom, France, and to some extent Japan, Russia did not have a long history of friendly relations and strategic cooperation with the United States—quite the contrary. Unlike Germany and Japan, Russia was not militarily defeated, occupied, and reformed in the process. And unlike Germany, which always knew that its economic power was irrepressible and that in the post–World War II order it could at least grow prosperous, Russia never really believed it could become a successful economic powerhouse. Its elites thought that the likeliest consequence of integration would be Russia’s demotion to, at best, a second-rank power. Russia would be at peace, and it would still have a chance to prosper. But it would not determine the fate of Europe and the world...

Keep reading. 

 

Zelensky in Bucha

The man looks worn down. He's aged 20 years in just one month. 

Video here, "Ukraine's President Zelensky says Russian actions make 'negotiations harder'."

And at the New York Times, "Atrocities in Bucha Complicate Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks."

And on Twitter, the grief of a nation:

Mass Grave Found in Bucha, Town on Outskirts of Kyiv

Following up from earlier, "Ukraine Condemns Russia for Alleged Civilian Executions, Braces for Onslaught in the East."

CNN's Fred Pleitgen visited Bucha and confirmed on the ground reports of atrocities committed by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians. See, "Here's what a CNN team on the scene of a mass grave in the Ukrainian town of Bucha saw.

Gleen Greenwald was raising questions about the authenticity of reports, which is fair, but the story's been so widely reported it's a huge leap of logic to suggest that that many news organizations would risk their reputations putting out bogus reports.

Anyways, it's really and despicable. 

Ukraine Condemns Russia for Alleged Civilian Executions, Braces for Onslaught in the East

Glenn Greenwald's warning us not to jump to conclusions about Bucha, the town outside Kyiv where mass atrocities have been committed. 

Look, if all the major newspapers are reporting this, and respected sources on the ground are tweeting photos photos of bodies and mass burials, the reports sure look credible to me. The best proof, for me, will be when CNN has reporters on the ground at the scene broadcasting live images. I haven't checked yet, but will after I get this posted.

At the Los Angeles Times, "LVIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces braced for an intensified Russian onslaught against the eastern Donbas region Sunday as officials from Ukraine, the U.S. and other countries condemned Moscow over allegations of civilian executions":

A gruesome cleanup was underway in the northern suburbs of Kyiv, the capital, following the withdrawal of Russian troops. Ukrainian soldiers were removing bodies from streets, homes and other sites in the towns of Bucha and Irpin, which had been recently occupied by Russian forces.

“Bucha massacre proves that Russian hatred towards Ukrainians is beyond anything Europe has seen since WWII,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, wrote on Twitter. “The only way to stop this: help Ukraine kick Russians out as soon as possible. Partners know our needs. Tanks, combat aircraft, heavy air defense systems.”

Ukrainian officials accused Russia of large-scale killings of civilians, alleging that some of the victims’ bodies in Bucha had been found with their hands tied. Russia has reportedly denied the allegations.

“Kyiv region. 21st century Hell,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to the Ukrainian president, tweeted on Sunday alongside photos of bodies on the streets. “This was purposely done. ... Stop the murders!”

The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called for an investigation into the alleged atrocities: “Appalled by reports of unspeakable horrors in areas from which Russia is withdrawing,” she wrote on Twitter. “An independent investigation is urgently needed. Perpetrators of war crimes will be held accountable.”

Authorities in the battered outskirts of Kyiv were also clearing mines, unexploded ordnance, destroyed Russian armored vehicles and other rubble. Civilians in those suburbs had for weeks been trapped between Russian bombardments and Ukrainian forces trying to protect the capital. That toll was becoming increasing evident as retreating Russian soldiers — plagued by logistical and morale problems — left a landscape of ruin.

Every day we collect the bodies of our residents from the streets,” Oleksandr Markushyn, the mayor of Irpin, told local media, adding that at least 200 civilians had been killed in Irpin. “Under the rubble there are also the bodies of the dead.”

Meantime, several booming explosions broke the pre-dawn calm in the strategic southern port city Odesa, which had been quiet in recent weeks. Targeted were an oil-processing plant and fuel depots, according to a statement from the Russian military, which said missiles were fired at Odesa from ships and aircraft.

There were no casualties, the mayor of Odesa said. Images showed a huge plume of black smoke arising in the aftermath of the attacks.

The Odesa attacks continued a pattern of Russian missile strikes on fuel depots and defense infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine. On Saturday, Russian missiles destroyed a refinery and surrounding fuel facilities in the central city of Kremenchuk, authorities said.

The war, which began with a Russian thrust into Ukraine on Feb. 24, has left thousands dead, forced almost one-quarter of Ukraine’s population of 44 million from their homes and created a broad swath of destruction across the nation.

Despite the widespread ruin and death, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted that the country’s forces continue to regain control of various areas — including the outskirts of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv — that were previously occupied by Russian forces...

 

Ukraine Strikes Fuel Depot in Belgorod, Russia (VIDEO)

At Forbes, "In Night Raid, Choppers Blow Up Fuel Depot On Russian Soil Near Ukraine." (With video on Twitter.)

And Kyiv's denial is here, at the Guardian U.K. "Ukraine rejects Kremlin claim it sent helicopters to attack oil depot in Russia: If Moscow’s accusation is true, the airstrike would be first raid on Russian territory so far in the war."

Actually, Ukraine neither denied nor confirmed, which makes it all the more interesting --- and freaky for Russia. Perhaps Putin's not doing so well. 

Putin Has Made NATO Stronger

From grand strategist Edward Luttwak, at UnHerd, "America's leadership is now uncontested":

War is the domain of paradox, contradiction, and boundless surprise. It is not merely because of ignorance or stupidity that military history is a record of crimes, follies, defeats, and very few victories worth their cost. Even so, the Ukraine war is exceptional in the amplitude of its paradoxes, the extremity of its contradictions, and the magnitude of its surprises.

For the “post-Pacifist” German mainstream, the most bitter paradox of all is that the Russians might not have attacked Ukraine had they foreseen Germany’s response: that the Bundestag would cancel the new Russian gas pipeline, invest in regasification terminals, send weapons to Ukraine, reaffirm its fealty to Nato, and move to drastically upgrade its armed forces with a €100 billion injection.

The Russians could not possibly have known these things. The day before Putin launched his invasion, the German government declared that the new Russian gas pipeline would be inaugurated no matter what, and that they would send no weapons to Ukraine; it even affirmed it would prevent Estonia’s delivery of 122mm howitzers to Kyiv because those guns had briefly belonged to Germany when the West German army absorbed East Germany’s. Yet more egregiously, Germany also denied overflight permission for British transports delivering weapons to Ukraine. As for Nato, Germany reiterated its refusal to spend 2% or even 1% of its GDP for defence. If there were to be collective defence at all, let it be European, and directed by the decidedly civilian European Commission.

In that remote past of a month ago, those were all decidedly mainstream preferences throughout Europe, albeit with a north-south divide. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden had all resurrected their ancient Baltic connections and therefore viewed Russia as a live threat. But in Italy and Spain such attitudes were rare, and declared Putin admirers could become ministers in coalition governments. As for France, Macron did not oppose the effectively pro-Russian stance of the German government because he also wanted a European defence, led by France, of course, as the only European nuclear power.

All this has now slipped into oblivion in today’s Europe, where Nato’s centrality and its US leadership are largely uncontested. The Russians assessed Nato as weak because it was weak, and therefore attacked Ukraine. Yet because they attacked, Nato is stronger than it has been for decades.

In every country’s military, the equally abrupt reversals are causing no end of trouble for the staff officers and civil servants working on next year’s budgets. The infantry is once again the queen of the battlefield, empowered as it is by anti-tank missiles that pursue armoured vehicles until they destroy them, and by portable anti-aircraft missiles that are the doom of helicopters, even if they cannot intercept much faster jets. This means that current combat helicopter and armoured vehicle purchases should be cancelled until they can be redesigned with much better protection; that is active defences that detect and intercept the incoming missiles — a process that might take years. (So far only Israel has active defence systems for its armoured vehicles )

By contrast, killer drones that can reliably destroy armoured vehicles and anything else beyond the horizon are grotesquely underfunded given their demonstrated combat value, largely because they are captive to air force priorities, set by pilots and ex-pilot senior officers. Only with political intervention can the stranglehold of the flying fraternity be overcome — they are today’s reactionary horse cavalry that resisted tanks in the Twenties. But the main thing, of course, is to have more infantry and to train it very well, and that raises the need for compulsory military service which only Sweden has confronted so far — by re-instituting it.

Because Nato has not instituted a no-flight zone, for the excellent reason that it would lead to air combat that the loser might try to nullify by escalation, and with everything happening much too fast for adult supervision, no new air combat lessons have been learned. While the heroism of Ukrainian pilots flying older models of Russian aircraft against newer models is highly admirable, it adds nothing that is not already written in The Iliad.

At the level of grand strategy, the largest and by far most consequential discovery is that in spite of decades of talk about the “diffusion of power”, particularly with the rise of China but also of Turkey, Iran, Brazil and South Africa, it is still the same old G7 countries that hold the keys of the world...

Keep reading. 

 

Why the West Must Win in Eukraine

The new edition of the Economist is out, and it's a dandy.

See, "Why Ukraine must win: A decisive victory could transform the security of Europe":

When vladimir putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine he was not alone in thinking victory would be swift. Many Western analysts also expected Kyiv, the capital, to fall within 72 hours. Ukrainian valour and ingenuity confounded those assumptions. As the war enters its sixth week, the side that is contemplating victory is not Russia but Ukraine—and it would be a victory that redraws the map of European security.

Speaking to The Economist in Kyiv on March 25th, President Volodymyr Zelensky explained how people power is the secret to Ukraine’s resistance and why the war is shifting in his nation’s favour. “We believe in victory,” he declared. “This is our home, our land, our independence. It’s just a question of time.”

The battlefield is starting to tell the same story as the president. After several weeks in which the Russian assault stalled, Ukrainian forces have begun to counter-attack. On March 29th Russia said that it will “fundamentally cut back” the northern campaign. Its retreat may well be only tactical, but Russia has in effect conceded that, for the moment, it cannot take Kyiv.

Yet a lot of Ukraine remains in Russian hands, including the strip of land on the southern coast that the Russians now claim was their focus all along. A large chunk of the Ukrainian army, in the Donbas region, is vulnerable to encirclement. Nobody should underestimate Russian firepower. Even if its forces are depleted and demoralised they can dig in. Victory for Ukraine means keeping its Donbas brigades intact and using them to deny Russia a secure hold on occupied territory.

For that, Mr Zelensky told us, the West must impose tougher sanctions on Russia and supply more weapons, including aircraft and tanks. Sanctions deplete Russia’s ability to sustain a long war. Arms help Ukraine take back territory. But nato countries are refusing to provide him with what he wants. Given what is at stake, for the West as well as Ukraine, that betrays a reprehensible failure of strategic vision.

For Ukraine, a decisive victory would deter yet another Russian invasion. The more convincingly Ukraine can see off the Russian army, the more able it will be to resist the compromises that could poison the peace. Victory would also be the best basis for launching a post-war democratic state that is less corrupted by oligarchs and Russian infiltration.

The prize for the West would be almost as great. Not only could Ukraine invigorate the cause of democracy, but it would also enhance European security. During 300 years of imperialism, Russia has repeatedly been at war in Europe. Sometimes, as with Poland and Finland, it was the invader. Other times, as with Nazi Germany and Napoleonic France, it was seen as a lethal threat and itself fell victim to aggression.

A strong, democratic Ukraine would thwart Russia’s expansionism—because its borders would be secure. In the short term an angry, defeated dictator would be left in the Kremlin, but eventually Russia, following Ukraine’s example, would be more likely to solve its problems by reform at home rather than adventures abroad. As it did so, nato would become correspondingly less of a drain on budgets and diplomacy. The United States would be freer to attend to its growing rivalry with China.

Alas, much of the West seems blind to this historic chance...

More at the link.

 

Russian Strategy in Ukraine Shifts After Setbacks, and a Lengthy War Looms

I've been lagging on my Ukraine blogging since the slapping blowout at the Oscars!

Back at it now, in any case.

At WSJ, "Moscow’s new focus on Donbas and retreats from Kyiv set the stage for a protracted war of attrition":

Russia’s war on Ukraine shifted gears this week, as Moscow, lacking the strength to pursue rapid offensives on multiple fronts, began pulling back from Kyiv and other cities in the north, and refocused for now on seizing parts of the country’s east.

The pivot, after five weeks of intense fighting, was a gauge of the intensity and effectiveness of Ukrainian resistance and signaled a decision by the Kremlin to pursue what is likely to become a prolonged war of attrition.

Ukraine’s counterattacks—including a helicopter strike inside Russian territory—and Moscow’s redeployment toward Donbas in Ukraine’s east suggest that both sides believe they can win, making it unlikely that peace talks will result in a deal anytime soon.

Russia’s “military and political strategy hasn’t changed, it remains to annihilate Ukraine,” said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian minister of defense who advises President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. But he said, “Now, their capabilities no longer match their strategic vision.”

That could be a recipe for a prolonged conflict, increasing the stakes for both sides’ ability to raise troops and money and access weapons, ammunition and supplies.

For Ukraine, with its smaller military resources, such a shift to a lengthy conventional war heightens the need for shipments of heavy weapons such as tanks and artillery, Ukrainian officials said.

Russia’s declared shift toward trying to seize Donbas could allow it to concentrate firepower on a smaller front, shorten supply lines and make air support easier, giving Moscow a better chance at military success. It would also position Russia to try to encircle some of Ukraine’s best units, which are stationed there.

The Russian pullbacks from Kyiv, however, also allow Ukraine to redeploy additional resources to the eastern Donbas front—and to do it much faster because of shorter routes. Ukrainian officials were initially skeptical of Russian announcements that Moscow would limit military operations near Kyiv and Chernihiv, but lengthy convoys of Russian armor began leaving these areas Thursday, and scores of villages in northern Ukraine have been retaken by Ukrainian troops.

Russia appears determined to retain a smaller, blocking force around Kyiv to threaten the Ukrainian capital and prevent a large Ukrainian redeployment to Donbas, Ukrainian officials say. But a threat of encirclement of these Russian forces, northwest or northeast of Kyiv, could still precipitate a full withdrawal toward the Belarus border in coming days, they say.

“The enemy is not fully successful in retaining the areas that it wishes to keep. Our forces are kicking them out in the northwest and northeast, pushing the enemy away from Kyiv and making another attempt at storming it impossible,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said Friday.

Russia sent some of its best units to Kyiv and northern Ukraine. Many of them have been battered by fierce fighting, and would need considerable time to be reconstituted and prepared for redeployment, military analysts say.

U.S. officials estimate that some 10,000 soldiers out of Russia’s 190,000-strong force in Ukraine have been killed, with tens of thousands of others injured or taken prisoner. The elite 4th Guards Tank “Kantemirovskaya” Division lost 46 of its estimated 220 T-80 tanks, according to visual evidence compiled by military analysts.

Seeking to replenish its forces, Russia has been calling up reserves, sending to Ukraine troops deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia as well as conscripts. Some of these troops, particularly from the Russian National Guard, which usually performs mostly internal-security duties, have refused orders to deploy to Ukraine.

British Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who headed operations for the British Defense Ministry and also helped create Britain’s military training program in Ukraine, said Russia no longer has many additional reserves to throw into new offensives.

“Most of the effective combat power is already assigned to the war,” he said. So Russian President Vladimir Putin “has to build some more, which is tricky without mobilizing and under sanctions, or concentrate the combat power that he has.”

Russian nationalists, dismayed by the retreat from Kyiv, have called on Mr. Putin to mobilize for all-out war...

Still more.  

War in Ukraine: No Breakthroughs But Peace Talks Spark Hope

Well, don't get your hopes up. Moscow's just pulling back from Kyiv to reposition its forces and bide time for further gains in other parts of the country. Putin's campaign to "topple" Kyiv has been a complete disaster, and in my mind, it raises questions about Russia's great power status. I mean, Russia's like a Third World petrostate with nukes. 

No matter. The country's a threat to Europe, and by extension to the U.S. through our alliance commitments. 

At the Washington Post, "Ukraine-Russia talks in Turkey stir optimism, but Western allies urge caution":

ISTANBUL — Ukrainian negotiators in Turkey said Tuesday they had offered a detailed peace proposal to their Russian counterparts, exchanging military neutrality for security guarantees, as Moscow said it would “drastically reduce” military activity near the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv “to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations.”

The declarations from the two sides followed hours of negotiations hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in an ornate palace on the Bosporus strait. They signaled a rare moment of optimism after weeks of halting negotiations that have done nothing to slow the bloody invasion.

But U.S. and other Western leaders were skeptical, saying they would judge Russia by its actions and not its words. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said there were continued strikes Tuesday on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. “We’re not convince that the threat to the capital city has been radically diminished,” he said.

Russia, whose forces have bombarded Ukrainian cities for weeks, said in a statement that Tuesday’s talks had focused on “humanitarian issues." The Kremlin also signaled it will keep fighting for Mariupol, a key southern port city, saying that unless “Ukrainian nationalist militants” stop resisting and lay down their arms, it will be difficult to “resolve the acute humanitarian situation” there.

The centerpiece of the Ukrainian proposal was a pledge that the country would give up its bid to join NATO in exchange for a security system guaranteed by international partners including the United States, Turkey and others. Ukrainian negotiators likened the offer to Article 5 of NATO’s charter, which ensures the alliance’s collective defense.

The guarantor parties — including European countries, Canada and Israel — would provide Ukraine with military assistance and weapons if it were attacked, the negotiators said. Ukraine, in turn, would ensure it remained “nonaligned and nonnuclear,” although it would retain the right to join the European Union.

The Ukrainian proposal also offered a 15-year timeline for negotiations with Russia over the status of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s lead negotiator, characterized the talks to reporters afterward as a “substantive conversation.” Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, said the discussions amounted to “the most meaningful progress since the start of negotiations."

Reaction from the United States was mixed, even as Moscow’s pledge to reduce military activity boosted U.S. stock markets on Tuesday morning. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed skepticism about the talks in Turkey, saying Moscow’s brutal, month-old military offensive leaves little room for optimism...

Keep reading.