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- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
PARIS — On a day of commemoration of the end of World War II in Europe, the war in Ukraine was marked by posturing and signaling on Sunday, as each side ramped up its rhetoric and resolve.
Leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies vowed to end their dependence on Russian energy and ensure that Russia does not triumph in its “unprovoked, unjustifiable and illegal aggression,” as President Vladimir V. Putin pursued his indiscriminate bombardment of eastern Ukraine and orchestrated celebrations for Russia’s Victory Day holiday on Monday.
A statement by the Group of 7 major industrialized nations said that on a day when Europe recalled the devastation of World War II and its millions of victims, including those from the Soviet Union, Mr. Putin’s “actions bring shame on Russia and the historic sacrifices of its people.”
The leaders, signaling to Mr. Putin that their unrelenting support of Ukraine would only grow, said, “We remain united in our resolve that President Putin must not win his war against Ukraine.” The memory of all those who fought for freedom in World War II, the statement said, obliged them “to continue fighting for it today.”
The tone was firm, with no mention of any potential diplomacy or cease-fire.
In Moscow, as fighter jets streaked across the sky and nuclear weapons were put on display in preparation for Victory Day, Mr. Putin appeared to signal back to Western leaders that he was determined to double down on the war until he could conjure something that might be claimed as victory.
There was fresh evidence of that on Sunday, as rescuers picked through the rubble in Bilohorivka, a village in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine where a Russian bomb had flattened a school building the day before, killing people sheltering there, local authorities said.
“Most likely, all 60 people who remain under the rubble are now dead,” Gov. Serhiy Haidai wrote on the Telegram messaging app. But it was unclear how many people were in fact in the school and that toll may prove inflated. If confirmed, it would be one of the deadliest single Russian attacks since the war began in February.
Despite the World War II commemorations in most of Europe on Sunday and in Russia on Monday, a painful reminder of the tens of millions of people killed, there was no indication that the war in Ukraine was anywhere near ending. If anything, all signals pointed in the opposite direction. Russian attacks on Ukrainian towns and villages met a crescendo of Western rhetoric, accompanied by the constant danger of escalation.
Mr. Putin, whose steady militarization of Russian society in recent years has turned the May 9 celebration of the Soviet defeat of the Nazis into an annual apotheosis of a resurgent nation’s might, is expected to portray a war of repeated setbacks in Ukraine as a successful drive to “de-Nazify” a neighboring nation whose very existence he denies.
His much-anticipated speech may go further, possibly signaling that whatever conquest in Ukraine there has been up to now will become permanent through annexation. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and began stirring military conflict in the eastern Donbas region...
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine released a black-and-white video address on Sunday marking the Allied victory in 1945. Standing in front of a destroyed apartment block in a Kyiv suburb hit hard by Russian troops before their withdrawal from the region around the capital, he said, “We pay our respect to everyone who defended the planet against Nazism during World War II.”
Mr. Putin has portrayed Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, as the leader of a nation threatening Russia with revived Nazism. His aim has been to instill the spirit of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia, among Russian troops, but to little apparent avail.
In the vast Azovstal steel mill that is the last remaining part of Mariupol not under Russian control, Ukrainian troops again rejected Russian deadlines to surrender. In a virtual news conference, Lt. Illya Samoilenko, an officer in a Ukrainian National Guard battalion known as the Azov regiment, said: “We are basically dead men. Most of us know this. That is why we fight.”
Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, a deputy commander of the regiment, said, “We don’t have much time, we are under constant shelling,” with attacks from Russian tanks, artillery, airplanes and snipers.
The remaining civilians in the steel plant were evacuated on Saturday. Local officials estimate the death toll in the city at over 20,000...
A third group of civilians was being evacuated from the labyrinth of bunkers beneath Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant Friday, officials said, as Ukraine’s military counterattacked against Russian forces in the east.
For weeks the Mariupol defenders’ dogged stand tied down Russian forces there, reducing the units available elsewhere. Now, Ukraine says it has largely blunted Russia’s offensives in other areas in the east and is hoping to use heavy weapons to push them back.
On Friday, Ukrainian and Russian officials said a total of 50 civilians, including children, were evacuated from the plant during the day. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that the evacuees were handed over to representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross for delivery to temporary accommodations. The evacuation operation at Azovstal will continue on Saturday, the ministry said.
The United Nations said almost 500 civilians were evacuated in two previous operations with its assistance.
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the evacuations proceeded slowly because Russia was violating a cease-fire. Moscow has previously repeatedly denied targeting civilians.
The Azov Regiment stationed at the steel plant said one fighter had been killed and six wounded as a car was struck while moving toward some civilians to evacuate them.
Azovstal, a sprawling Soviet-era complex of warehouses, furnaces, tunnels and rail tracks in the southeastern city of Mariupol, has become a focal point in the war in recent weeks. Ukrainian soldiers have continued to hold out as Russia stepped up its bombing of the plant.
Russian ground forces had blockaded Azovstal and assaulted some parts of it in the past 24 hours, supported by warplanes, the Ukrainian General Staff said Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday called for Russia to release or exchange those remaining at Azovstal in comments via videolink with Chatham House, the U.K. think tank.
“If they kill people who can be exchanged as prisoners of war or just released as civilians or be helped as wounded or injured, civilian and military alike, if they destroy them, I don’t think we can have any diplomatic talks with them after that,” he said.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said Russia was seeking to seize the last part of Mariupol by Monday, when Moscow celebrates the anniversary of the victory over the Nazis in World War II.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday that the Russians were besieging Azovstal primarily through airstrikes and that the majority of Russian ground forces that had been dedicated to Mariupol had been withdrawn. The Kremlin has declared victory in Mariupol and said it is aiming to seal the remaining defenders in Azovstal until they surrender.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces were counterattacking around the northeastern cities of Kharkiv and Izyum, said Army Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, chief of the Ukrainian General Staff.
Ukraine’s military has pushed Russian troops back to the east of Kharkiv, curbing the shelling of the country’s second-most-populous city. Russia has sought to thrust south from Izyum, which is southeast of Kharkiv, but has encountered stiff Ukrainian resistance.
Gen. Zaluzhniy’s comments, which came after a phone call with the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Mark Milley, reflect optimism among Ukrainian officials that Russia’s offensives are running out of steam and that the deployment of heavy weapons systems from the West could turn the tide of the war in the east of the country in the coming weeks.
Other officials cautioned, however, that the counteroffensive was localized.
“Western weapons are not yet arriving at a rate that would allow Ukrainian forces to go on a counterattack,” Mr. Arestovych, the presidential adviser, said late Thursday.
He characterized Ukraine’s capture of some villages in the east around Kharkiv and the south around Kherson, which is occupied by Russia, as small movements that could lead to a broader counteroffensive.
“It’s too early to talk of serious successes,” he said.
President Biden said Friday the U.S. is sending another round of security assistance to Ukraine that will include artillery munitions, radars and other equipment. An administration official said the equipment is valued at up to $150 million.
Mr. Biden said the Ukraine funding authorized by Congress is nearly depleted, and he has asked Congress for $33 billion more to fund weapons and provide longer-term economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Russia, meanwhile, claimed that its aircraft hit 24 Ukrainian military assets overnight, including weapons depots and an artillery battery.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Friday that its high-precision air-based missiles had destroyed an ammunition depot in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. The ministry said that Russian forces had shot down two Ukrainian warplanes, an Su-25 and a MiG-29.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said in a commentary Thursday that the Ukrainian counteroffensive “may disrupt Russian forces northeast of Kharkiv and will likely force Russian forces to decide whether to reinforce positions near Kharkiv or risk losing most or all of their positions within artillery range of the city.”
The Ukrainian advances to the east of Kharkiv could develop into a broader counteroffensive, ISW said...
I quit watching Tucker sometime last year --- and mind you, this was after months of watching his show religiously during the thick of the "pandemic spring" 2020.
First, I was just bored. But then I saw people freakin' out about how he'd become a "New Right" extremeist. Once he went to Hungary to air his program with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, all of my interest tanked. I can take a lot of populist nationalism, up to a point, but Tucker crossed the line.
So now, it turns out, the New York Times has published the first part of an investigative series on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," now trending at Memeorandum.
Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.
Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.
The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.
When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.
“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.
In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.
His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.
Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.
“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”
That pattern is no accident. To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trump’s base and much of Fox’s core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Fox’s flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channel’s vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”
A Fox spokeswoman rejected those characterizations of the network’s strategy, pointing to coverage of stories like President Biden’s inauguration and the war in Ukraine, where a Fox cameraman was killed in March while on assignment. In a statement, Justin Wells, a senior executive producer overseeing Mr. Carlson’s show, defended the host’s rhetoric and choice of topics: “Tucker Carlson programming embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored. Stories in ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ broadcasts and ‘Tucker Carlson Originals’ documentaries undergo a rigorous editorial process. We’re also proud of our ongoing original reporting at a time when most in the media amplify only one point of view.”
Mr. Carlson has led the network’s on-air transformation, becoming Fox’s most influential employee. Outside Fox, Mr. Carlson is bandied about as a potential candidate for president. Inside the network, he answers solely to the Murdochs themselves. With seeming impunity, Mr. Carlson has used his broadcast to attack Fox’s own news coverage, helping drive some journalists off the air and others, like the veteran Fox anchor Shepard Smith, to leave the network entirely. In Australia, the editors of some Murdoch-owned newspapers watch Mr. Carlson’s show religiously, believing it provides clues to Mr. Murdoch’s own views. According to former senior Fox employees, Mr. Carlson boasts of rarely speaking with Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, but talking or texting regularly with Mr. Murdoch. And in an extraordinary departure from the old Fox code, Mr. Carlson is exempt from the network’s fearsome media relations department, which under Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder, served to both defend the channel’s image and keep its talent in line.
Mr. Carlson is powerful at Fox not merely because he is the network’s face but because he is also its future — a star whose intensity and paranoid style work to bind viewers more closely to the Fox brand, helping lead them through the fragmented post-cable landscape...
This is what the Times does, publish these lurid portraits of basically someone who is right now totally mainstream --- *the* mainstream. I mean, there's a reason he's the most popular cable host on T.V.
And the Times will float off leftist conspiracy talking points and half-baked attacks that don't pass the most rudimentary fact checks.
For instance, when asked during Senate testimony if there were chemical weapons biolabs in Ukraine, Victory Nuland --- the Biden administration's Undersecretary of State for Affairs --- confirmed Ukraine's research facilities, saying, "Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, ah, gain control of --- so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials to fall into the hands of, ah, Russia forces..."
You don't get more high-up confirmation on that unless it's coming out of the president's mouth himself.
This woman is a State Department veteran going back two decades, and was Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. She knows *exactly* what's going on over there, and in fact, she's been one of the most important U.S. governmental officials entangling U.S. foreign policy in the Ukraine-Russia crisis' long-running morass.
All of this is fresh-baked propaganda for the politicos and party hacks of the Democratic Party left. It's all battlespace preparation ahead of November. Fuck 'em.
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.
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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.
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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 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...
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...
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...
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...
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky declared Tuesday that, when the war is finally over, Ukraine would emerge from the rubble a “big Israel.”
He meant that the war would never really be over, that Ukraine would be on a permanent war footing, just as the Jewish state is. He meant that it would view its neighbors the way Israel has long viewed its own: As enemies waiting to pounce. Most importantly, he meant that Ukraine would never again rely on anyone else for its security: not the West, not the international community, not the so-called liberal order. It would be, like Israel, a nation apart, answering to no one but its people, in control of its own destiny.
It said something heroic about Ukraine, which has gone from pleading with NATO to save it from imminent destruction to fighting—forcing—the Russians into peace talks in a matter of weeks.
It said something not so heroic about the West, which had failed to admit Ukraine to NATO and, more recently, to wean itself off Russian oil and gas.
But mostly it said something profound about Israel—a country whose behavior over the past seven weeks has confused and confounded. How did the Israelis—scrappy, abrasive—become the convener of presidents and nations?
Zelensky has repeatedly suggested that the Russians and Ukrainians could meet in Jerusalem to hash out a peace agreement. It’s an amazing suggestion, even if he’s just floated it. Not Washington, not London, not Brussels or Paris. Jerusalem. The Israeli capital, which, until just a few years ago, the United States did not even recognize as the Israeli capital.
It wasn’t Joe Biden who was shuttling to meet with Putin, but Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, an observant Jew who jetted to Moscow on Shabbat to meet with Vladimir Putin in the early days of the war. (He is the only Western leader to have done so.) Since then, Bennett has had countless separate phone calls with Putin and Zelensky, who repeatedly asked Bennett to mediate in the first place, and he has sought to remain as diplomatic as possible—the better to keep the Russians and Ukrainians talking to the Israelis.
All this has raised the increasingly burning question: whose side was Israel on?
Israeli politicians and the public overwhelmingly support Ukraine, but Zelensky, who is Jewish, was frustrated with what he saw as Jerusalem’s inaction. In an address to the Knesset last month, he tried to prod Israel into taking a greater stand by comparing the invasion of his country with the Holocaust. Noting that the invasion happened February 24, exactly 102 years after the Nazi Party was founded, Zelensky went on to rail against Russia’s “final solution,” repeating the Holocaust comparison so much that some Israeli politicians accused him of distorting its history.
On the one hand, Israel has flown plane loads of medical supplies, water-purification systems, winter coats and sleeping bags to the Ukrainians. And it is the only country that has built a field hospital in Ukraine. On the other hand, it won’t send military aid, including its famed Iron Dome anti-missile system. (Israeli officials say Iron Dome won’t work against Russian missiles.)
On the one hand, Israel has barred Russian oligarchs like Roman Abramovich from using Israel as a safe haven. On the other, it has not sanctioned Russia—as the United States, the European Union and many other countries have done. (Israeli lawmakers have noted that they lack the legal mechanism to impose sanctions.)
On the one hand, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has repeatedly condemned Russia’s attacks, and on Tuesday, while discussing the Bucha massacre, he accused Russia of “war crimes.” On the other, Bennett has only expressed a more general sorrow about the loss of life. Reacting to the slaughter at Bucha, the Israeli prime minister said, “We are shocked by what we see in Bucha, horrible images, and we condemn them”—but he refrained from explicitly condemning Russia or Putin.
How did Israel end up walking this tightrope? In part, it’s because Israel exists to be a safe haven for Jews everywhere, and there are still nearly half a million in Ukraine and Russia. Israel wants to make sure it doesn’t alienate Putin—and complicate things for the Jewish community in his country. (Since the war began, over 10,000 Jews have applied to immigrate to Israel from Russia. The country has prepared to absorb as many as 100,000 refugees.)
But the bigger reason is waning American hegemony. America’s post-Iraq war exhaustion with the Middle East led Israel to begin to see what Ukraine has just discovered: That it cannot rely on the assurances of an America that has turned inward—and away from the rest of the world. As the United States backed away from its “red line” in Syria and pursued a nuclear deal widely viewed in Israel as an existential threat, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted Israel away from relying on the vaunted special relationship, forging new ones with China, India, and Russia, among others. Israel’s position in the Ukraine war has brought the Jewish state’s new geopolitical reality into stark relief.
When did the realignment begin? It’s a complicated story, but there are two years that matter most: 1989 and 2015...
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...
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.
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 photosphotos 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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
