Ukrainian President Zelenskyy Faces Down the Russians

 At Der Spiegel, "The Role of a Lifetime":

Vladmir Putin thought he would roll into Kyiv almost unchallenged. But the Ukrainians refuse to give it – led by a man who seems perfectly adapted to the role history has asked him to fill: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

It often seems these days like there isn’t just one Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but many of them. The Ukrainian president can be seen addressing the European Parliament, he can be seen speaking to cheering masses of peace demonstrators from the big screen in Prague or Frankfurt, and he can be seen delivering video addresses – as he did this week – to lawmakers in Ottawa, Washington and

Berlin. And his speeches are tailored perfectly for his target audience. In London, he deployed a modified version of a quote from Winston Churchill, the World War II hero who is deeply venerated in the United Kingdom, saying: "We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets."

In his address to parliamentarians in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, he beseeched Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to imagine that it was his country that was being attacked: "Imagine that at 4 a.m., each of you start hearing bomb explosions. Severe explosions. Justin, can you imagine hearing it? You, your children hear all these severe explosions: … bombing of Ottawa airport, tens of other cities of your wonderful country. Can you imagine that?”

In Washington, he compared Ukraine’s situation with the trauma of the U.S. after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War II and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He then showed a video clip of falling bombs, of people fleeing, of dead and injured children. It was such a moving and disturbing film, that some of the members of Congress could be seen wiping tears from their eyes and the broadcaster CNN apologized afterwards for not having warned its viewers of the drastic images.

In a video speech to the Bundestag in Berlin, Zelenskyy adopted a more severe tone and scolded Germany for its overly cozy economic relations with the Putin regime. "We saw how many ties your companies still have with Russia," Zelenskyy said. His government, he added, issued plenty of warnings to Germany that Moscow could use the natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 as a weapon and to prepare for war. "We heard in response that it was an economy after all. Economy. Economy. But it was cement for a new wall."

He then addressed Chancellor Olaf Scholz directly: "Chancellor Scholz! Tear down this wall. Give Germany the leadership you deserve." That, too, was a historical reference, this time to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s famous Berlin Wall speech from 1987, when he demanded that then-Kremlin boss Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall.

A Global Audience

Zelenskyy’s message to the West is clear: Help us. You must do much more.

In the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, meanwhile, antitank obstacles are blocking the streets of Kyiv, missiles are slamming into residential buildings and people are crowding into subway stations to find shelter from the onslaught.

Zelenskyy has become a hero essentially overnight, the David who is fighting against Goliath. Good against evil. The unlikely war president, a Churchill dressed in an olive-green T-shirt and fleece jacket, a man who was ridiculed as a political clown until just recently. Now, he has catapulted himself onto the world stage and is reaching a global audience.

Zelenskyy is far from being the only one who is standing up to the Russian invasion. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are fighting the invaders, including members of the Territorial Defense Forces, doctors, first responders, logisticians, cooks, helpers and an army of volunteers. There is the mayor of the country’s second-largest city of Kharkiv, under attack by Russian troops. He speaks no Ukrainian, only Russian, but he has left no doubt that his city belongs to Ukraine. There is the young administrator in the city of Mykolaiv in the country’s embattled south who has become a media star in his own right with his regular video appearances. There is the mayor of the town of Melitopol, who was taken prisoner by the Russians, only to be freed by the Ukrainians. "There is something like a collective Zelenskyy," says Kyiv-based political scientist Volodymyr Fessenko.

And then, of course, there is Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxer who was elected mayor of Kyiv in 2014. Together with his brother Vladimir, Klitschko has made clear that he will not leave the city and intends to fight to the end. He has been a constant presence in the city the Russians are striving to encircle as he visits destroyed buildings and encourages aid workers and other volunteers.

But it is Volodymyr Zelenskyy who has become the face of the resistance against Russia’s aggression.

The Coming Bloodbath of the Democrats

From the ever-insightful Joel Kotkin, at Spiked, "Joe Biden's woke, green agenda will cost him dearly at the ballot box."

Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn's Tenacious Interrogation of Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson (VIDEO)

Jill Filipovic, who I interact with occasionally on Twitter, is out with a new Substack, "'Parental Rights' is Code for Child Abuse." She makes a lot of unverified claims. She omits quotes or citations to the data she claims to assert. She writes, for example:

The conservative demand for “parental rights” has left millions of Americans kids under-educated; it has consigned them to physical abuse; it has denied them medical care. They have the audacity to impose laws that do such broad harm to kids and then claim the mantle of protecting them.

Millions? How many millions? By what measurement? Whose data? She tells us not. 

Ms. Jill takes aim at Tennessee Senator Martha Blackburn, who hammered Biden's pick for the high court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. Senate testimony is live right now, but click on the PBS YouTube page to go back to Day 1 to start at the beginning. 

And here's video of today's testimony, "Senator Marsha Blackburn Questions Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson."

Also, at Fox, "Outrage after Ketanji Brown Jackson says she 'can't' define the word woman: 'Legit bizarre': 'The new leftist orthodoxy is that woman can’t be defined scientifically or logically'."

And Senator Blackburn on Maria Bartiromo's earlier:

Unpack Your Privilege!

I have all kinds of privilege and I think about it often. My mom was white though, but not my dad. So how am I defined by leftists? It's not by my goodness and decency, my fairness and kindness, my honesty and integrity, my work ethic, nor my commitment to faith and family. Nope.

You're defined by your ideological fanaticism, about swallowing the woke critical theory ideology and making your entire existence about that. Nothing else matters. It's diabolical.

On Twitter:

'Lady Madonna'

It's you-know-who.

How Russia's Revamped Military Fumbled the Invasion of Ukraine

Things aren't going well. 

At. All.

At WSJ, "How Russia’s Revamped Military Fumbled the Invasion of Ukraine":

For over a decade, Russia spent hundreds of billions of dollars restructuring its military into a smaller, better equipped and more-professional force that could face off against the West.

Three weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its first big test, the armed forces have floundered. Western estimates, while highly uncertain, suggest as many as 7,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed.

The dead included four Russian generals—one-fifth of the number estimated to be in Ukraine—along with other senior commanders, according to a Western official and Ukrainian military reports. The generals were close to the front lines, some Western officials said, a sign that lower ranks in forward units were likely unable to make decisions or fearful of advancing.

Russian troops turned to using open telephone and analog radios following the failure of encrypted communications systems, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has said, making them vulnerable to intercept or jamming. Russian officers were likely targeted after their positions were exposed by their use of open communications, Western military analysts said.

In the strategically located town of Voznesensk, Ukrainian forces comprising local volunteers and the professional military drove off an attack early this month, in one of the most comprehensive routs Russian forces have suffered since invading Ukraine.

Russia’s failings appear to trace to factors ranging from the Kremlin’s wrong assumptions about Ukrainian resistance to the use of poorly motivated conscript soldiers. They suggest that Russia and the West overestimated Moscow’s overhauls of its armed forces, which some military analysts say appear to have been undermined by graft and misreporting.

The military’s previous outings in staged maneuvers and smaller operations in Syria didn’t prepare it for a multipronged attack into a country with a military fiercely defending its homeland, said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a nonprofit research organization based in Arlington, Va.

“The failures that we’re seeing now is them having to work with a larger force than they’ve ever employed in real combat conditions as opposed to an exercise,” he said. “These exercises that we’ve been shown over the years are very scripted events and closer to theater than anything else.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment on analyses of its performance. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an address to regional authorities on Wednesday, praised the war efforts, which in Russia are described only as a special military operation.

“The operation is being carried out successfully, strictly in accordance with previously laid-out plans,” he said. “And our boys and soldiers and officers are showing courage and heroism and are doing everything to avoid losses among the civilian population.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week said Ukraine had lost around 1,300 soldiers since the start of the invasion. A senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization official said losses were likely on par with the Russians’.

Insurgent Tactics

For sure, Russia’s forces have taken territory, mainly in the south and east of the country against a smaller, less well-equipped adversary. Russian military commanders may also learn from their mistakes as they reposition their forces in readiness for a new offensive.

Western defense analysts say that even if Moscow’s military overcomes Ukraine’s armed forces eventually, they doubt that would end hostilities and merely mark the beginning of an insurgency that could tie up Russian forces for years. Moscow’s declared military objectives of replacing the government and establishing effective Russian control over a submissive population look remote.

But for now, Ukrainian forces have beaten back Russian paratroopers trying to secure airfields, and miles-long convoys of tanks and support trucks have stalled on highways out of fuel, Ukrainian soldiers’ videos and satellite imagery show. Hundreds of Russian military vehicles have been destroyed and others abandoned, sometimes because of mechanical breakdowns and poor-quality equipment, said Western officials and military analysts closely following the campaign.

Ukraine says its forces have downed more than 80 fixed-wing aircraft and 100 helicopters, though many fewer have been independently verified. Western officials have expressed surprise that Russia failed to use its superior air power to establish dominance of the skies, which left Ukraine’s much smaller air force operating.

Still, Russian warplanes flying over Ukraine continue to inflict heavy damage, including against civilians. The mayor of Mariupol said Russia’s air force had bombed the city’s drama theater Wednesday, killing an unknown number of people who had taken shelter there. Russia has denied responsibility. Mr. Zelensky in his video address to U.S. Congress on Wednesday said Ukraine is experiencing terror from the airstrikes every day, as he pressed for further military assistance. Ukrainians have continued to attack long columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles on open roads in formations making them vulnerable to Ukraine’s Turkish Bayraktar drones and its Territorial Defense units that use insurgent tactics to destroy fuel trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers, videos posted by the Ukrainian military show.

In one such attack last week, Ukrainian drone footage posted on the Ukrainian armed forces’ YouTube channel showed the confusion caused by a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column of dozens of tanks and armored vehicles approaching Brovary on the northeastern outskirts of Kyiv. The convoy suffers apparent drone hits at the front and the rear, trapping vehicles between them.

As soldiers escape their blazing vehicles, further explosions envelop them. Other tanks turn in panic, their tracks churning the road surface, before they retreat. Later footage shows tanks, apparently nearby, destroyed by an antitank weapon fired from a roadside position.

The movement of troops in bumper-to-bumper convoys is a clear sign of “soldiers who are untrained or undisciplined,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe and now chair in strategic studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. “You need sergeants or NCOs constantly telling them to spread out. It’s a human instinct to huddle together when you’re in danger,” he said. “I feel terrible for the young soldiers in the Russian army.”

The NATO official said the Russians’ fighting style surprised Western observers because it didn’t follow the Russian military’s doctrine of using mobile units called battalion tactical groups and a consolidated system to command troops, which would have allowed the military to be nimbler against the enemy without extending supply lines dangerously inside Ukrainian territory.

“For now, they just can’t move,” the official said, adding that Russia has been trying to resupply the army by moving “trash”—civilian trucks and cars—across the country to the front line where they can be used by the military...

There's some dispute on Russia's fatalities numbers. Check Newsweek, "Report of 10,000 Russian Deaths Immediately Deleted by Pro-Putin Tabloid."

As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin's Leadership

At the New York Times, "Military losses have mounted, progress has slowed, and a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war":

In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be “pointless and extremely dangerous.” It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten “the existence of Russia itself as a state.”

To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. Reached by phone this week, the retired general who authored the declaration, Leonid Ivashov, said he stood by it, though he could not speak freely given Russia’s wartime censorship: “I do not disavow what I said.”

In Russia, the slow going and the heavy toll of President Vladimir V. Putin’s war on Ukraine are setting off questions about his military’s planning capability, his confidence in his top spies and loyal defense minister, and the quality of the intelligence that reaches him. It also shows the pitfalls of Mr. Putin’s top-down governance, in which officials and military officers have little leeway to make their own decisions and adapt to developments in real time.

The failures of Mr. Putin’s campaign are apparent in the striking number of senior military commanders believed to have been killed in the fighting. Ukraine says it has killed at least six Russian generals, while Russia acknowledges one of their deaths, along with that of the deputy commander of its Black Sea fleet. American officials say they cannot confirm the number of Russian troop deaths, but that Russia’s invasion plan appears to have been stymied by bad intelligence.

The lack of progress is so apparent that a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war — even as Russian propaganda claims that the slog is a consequence of the military’s care to avoid harming civilians. Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophically incorrect assessment” of Ukraine’s forces.

“The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” Mr. Girkin said.

The Russian forces’ poor performance has also surprised analysts, who predicted at the start of the war that Russia’s massive, technologically advanced military would make short work of Ukraine. Mr. Putin himself seems to have counted on his troops quickly seizing major cities, including the capital, Kyiv, decapitating the government and installing a puppet regime under the Kremlin’s control.

“Take power into your own hands,” Mr. Putin urged Ukrainian soldiers on the second day of the invasion, apparently hoping Ukraine would go down without a fight.

Instead, Ukraine fought back. Nearly a month has passed, and Russian troops appear bogged down in the face of relentless attacks from a much weaker, though far more maneuverable, Ukrainian military. “There was probably the hope that they wouldn’t resist so intensely,” Yevgeny Buzhinsky, ​​a retired lieutenant general and a regular Russian state television commentator, said of Ukraine’s forces. “They were expected to be more reasonable.”

As if responding to criticism, Mr. Putin has said repeatedly in his public comments about the war that it is going “according to plan.”

“We can definitively say that nothing is going to plan,” countered Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies have seen such great losses in such a short period of time.”

Russia last announced its combat losses three weeks ago — 498 deaths as of March 2. American officials now say that a conservative estimate puts the Russian military death toll at 7,000. Russia says it lost a total of 11,000 service members in nearly a decade of fighting in Chechnya.

The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russia’s military and security services...

 

Putin's Challenge to the American Right (VIDEO)

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "An invasion in Europe has exposed the flimsiness of post-liberalism":

It would perhaps be too glorious an irony if it were Vladimir Putin who finally buzz-killed the American and European right’s infatuation with post-liberalism. But, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine staggers shambolically and criminally forward, it’s no longer unthinkable. The icon of the West’s new right is in serious trouble now — and it might tarnish all of those who only yesterday were idolizing his reactionary zeal.

It’s not so much Putin’s trashing of international law, his unhinged rehashing of post-Soviet grievances, his next-level Covid paranoia, the foul murders of his opponents, or his brazen embrace of shelling hospitals that has so deepened the damage to the Putin brand among the West’s new Russophiles. These atrocities and madnesses they have long found ways to live with. No, it’s Putin’s failure — thus far — to actually win the war he started that’s so damning. It’s one thing for a dictator to be deemed cruel; and quite another — and far more dangerous — thing for him to be seen as incompetent.

And it’s happened so fast. The love letters had been flowing for years now before this unfortunate interruption. “Russia is like, I mean they’re really hot stuff,” Donald Trump chortled in April 2014, adding that “now you have people in the Ukraine — who knows, set up or not — but it can’t all be set up, I mean they’re marching in favor of joining Russia.” Two weeks ago, in the face of Putin’s pre-invasion posturing over the Donbas region, Trump marveled:

How smart is that? I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful … And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. … There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. … Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

“They’re gonna keep peace all right.” Think of the depth of the cynical callousness that has to lie behind such a smirk. Notice that for Trump, Putin is not just a thug but a smart one, and the possibility of his brutal incursion into a sovereign neighbor state was, in Trump’s mind, “wonderful.” And cheap: “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain.

Even those on the far right who had long had to acknowledge that, yes, well, Putin was a bit of a sociopath, nonetheless professed to admire his skill, if not his motives. Nigel Farage, the well-nicotined Brexit pioneer, called Putin one of the world leaders he most admired, hurriedly hedging with “as an operator, particularly the way he managed to stop the West from getting militarily involved in Syria.” He later reiterated: “He’s a very canny, very sharp, very clever political operator.” Eric Zemmour, the dynamic far-right leader in France, also spoke highly of Putin, calling him “the last bastion against the hurricane of the politically correct which, starting in America, has destroyed all the traditional structures of family, religion and nation.” He later added, “I dream of a French Putin emerging, but there is none.”

Putin’s Russia, like Orban’s Hungary, appealed to many post-liberal conservatives in the West for obvious reasons. Part of it was the shamelessness of the strongmen’s ethnically-homogeneous nationalism, compared with what was seen as the simpering, multicultural globalism of EU types; part was hatred of Obama, who was always deemed weak in contrast with, er, anyone; and part was a more amorphous but nonetheless profound view of Putin and Orban as cultural traditionalists, standing up to Western decadence, as it staggers into its Drag Queen Story Hour hellscape. For besieged social conservatives and Christianists in America, Putin loomed like some phantasm of strange hope.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.” Congressman Madison Cawthorn took it further: “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt, and it is incredibly evil, and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” That plucky little Zelensky, speaking live to the British House of Commons as bombs rained down on his country’s cities? An “incredibly evil” “thug.” Our old friend Dinesh D’Souza, in his usual temperate style, sees the Democrats as posing “a far greater threat to our freedom and safety than Putin.” And Bannon is still urging his minions to give “zero dollars to Ukraine,” even as the corpses of children lie on the streets. There’s an alt-right edginess to this moral perversity.

And over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016. Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative...

Still more.

 

Annie Agar in Las Vegas

We last saw this beautiful woman she was apologizing for old racist tweets. Maybe she's uncancellable.

Now she's in Vegas, on Twitter.

The Takeover of America's Legal System

A truly must-read article, from Aaron Sibarium, on Bari Weiss's Substack, "The kids didn't grow out of it." 

Ms. Bari has the introduction:

If you are a Common Sense reader, you are by now highly aware of the phenomenon of institutional capture. From the start, we have covered the ongoing saga of how America’s most important institutions have been transformed by an illiberal ideology—and have come to betray their own missions.

Medicine. Hollywood. Education. The reason we exist is because of the takeover of newspapers like The New York Times.

Ok, so we’ve lost a lot. A whole lot. But at least we haven’t lost the law. That’s how we comforted ourselves. The law would be the bulwark against this nonsense. The rest we could work on building anew.

But what if the country’s legal system was changing just like everything else?

Today, Aaron Sibarium, a reporter who has consistently been ahead of the pack on this beat, offers a groundbreaking piece on how the legal system in America, as one prominent liberal scholar put it, is at risk of becoming “a totalitarian nightmare.”

This is a long feature on a subject we think deserves your time. Save it, share it, or print it to read in a quiet moment...

And read Mr. Sibarium in full. Really. Don't miss it

 

Groomer Teachers Are Absolutely Determined to Talk About Their Sexual Fetishes With Your Children

At AoSHQ, "Teachers organized a 'Pride' march inside a publicly funded government grade school -- in Texas. Check out the video. Teachers are waving rainbow flags at elementary school students on their 'Pride' march."

Olga Oliker, Russia's Chechen Wars 1994-2000

At Amazon, Olga Oliker, Russia's Chechen Wars 1994-2000: Lessons from the Urban Combat.

Ukrainians Flee Mariupol as Russian Forces Push to Take Port City

Another day of war. Thursday will mark exactly one month since Putin's invasion.

At WSJ, "Russian airstrikes, artillery and mortar rounds have gutted entire neighborhoods in the strategically important Ukrainian city":

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine—The battle for the southern port city of Mariupol intensified Tuesday with fleeing civilians describing Russian and Ukrainian forces locked in street-by-street warfare through the city’s downtown as Moscow’s airstrikes gutted entire neighborhoods.

Nearly a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, it is on the verge of taking Mariupol in what would be the first major city to fall under its control. But Mariupol is a shattered prize.

“Everything fell apart,” Natalia Poluiko said Tuesday, hours after arriving in Zaporizhzhia, about 150 miles to the west, with her 8-year-old daughter and five other relatives. “We had a choice to wait there until a bomb fell on our building, or risk trying to get out.”

The family fled Mariupol in two vehicles with belongings strapped to the roof and a religious icon on the dashboard, praying for safe passage on the approach to each Russian checkpoint.

Hundreds of people from Mariupol now arrive daily in Zaporizhzhia in a grim procession of cars, with shattered windshields and shrapnel damage speaking to the ordeal endured by their passengers.

The wider battle lines across Ukraine have shifted little in recent days. Ukrainian forces said they were regaining ground in some areas. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday its troops had made progress battling for towns along its lines of attack.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, maintained his busy schedule of trying to rally international support on Tuesday, speaking with the pope and, separately, the Italian parliament.

President Biden heads to Europe on Wednesday for talks with allies about the war and is preparing to roll out new sanctions on most members of Russia’s State Duma, the lower house of parliament, U.S. officials said.

The fighting around Mariupol has been under way since the opening days of Russia’s assault that began Feb. 24. The city has seen stepped-up levels of attack for about the past two weeks and as the battle moved closer to the city.

Mariupol has been a focus of the Russian offensive because it is a strategically important city linking Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine with a swath of territory Moscow has captured in the south, and creating an arc containing much of the country’s Russian-speaking population.

Streams of cars from Mariupol pull into the parking lot of a hardware store on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia—now a way station for people fleeing to safety further west, or abroad—part of the more than 10 million people uprooted by the fighting. Taped to the windows are homemade signs reading “children” in Russian, and strips of white material tied to the door handles, scant protection from the war raging over their city.

More than a dozen residents who fled since last week described a desperate struggle to stay alive in a city where venturing outside meant exposure to being shot, shredded by artillery fire or obliterated in an airstrike.

“They are basically wiping the city from the face of the earth,” said Andriy, 37, who took his chances during a lull in the bombardment on Monday and fled Mariupol with his wife and two children. Andriy, who declined to give his full name, said his ears had yet to adjust to the absence of constant shelling in the city he left behind. “It’s as though I’ve come back to life.”

Although Mariupol was always likely to be a target of Russia’s invasion, many residents stayed because they couldn’t believe the situation would get so bad. By the time they realized what was unfolding, it was too late.

The bombardment of the city of between 350,000 to 400,000 residents was growing heavier and closer by the day. Local officials say Russia has rained 50 to 100 bombs a day on Mariupol, destroying between 80% and 90% of the city. Ukraine rejected a Russian ultimatum to surrender the city this week.

Ukrainian military officials said Tuesday that those defending the town were able to destroy a Russian patrol boat operating close to the city, as well as a Russian radio complex...

 

Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom

Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

Flying Tesla in Echo Park, Los Angeles (VIDEO)

Pretty sensational. 

The stunt totaled the Tesla's front-end. Brand new car too, apparently. 

At ABC Eyewitness News Los Angeles, "The LAPD is searching for the driver responsible for a dangerous stunt. Videos have been posted on social media showing a Tesla going airborne before crashing into vehicles in #EchoPark."

And, "Dangerous Tesla stunt caught on video ends in crash in Echo Park neighborhood, driver on the loose."

Say Hey, Paige!

Top of the morning with Paige Spirinac:

Russia's Army Stalemated?

Great thread on Twitter.

Click through and read it all. 

Has the war entered a stalemate? Yes and no. Russian forces may make slow, incremental advances in the Donbas. I suspect UKR military can hold on most fronts and perhaps even counter attack on others. However, attrition is undoubtedly taking its toll on both sides. 15/

— Michael Kofman (@KofmanMichael) March 20, 2022

General David Petraeus: 'Russia's Command and Control Has Broken Down' (VIDEO)

Five Russian generals have been taken out. It's very uncommon, explains General Petraeus. 

At CNN: 

Russian Soldier Grovels for Forgiveness (VIDEO)

Or does he? Isn't this a well-rehearsed show of debasement? 

He's got the routine down!

WATCH:

Anders Åslund, Russia's Crony Capitalism

At Amazon, Anders Åslund, Russia's Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy.

Kalashnikov Automatic Rifle

Small-arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov created this weapon in 1947, the Avtomat Kalashnikov (Автомат Калашникова), thus the AK-47.

History's most popular weapon of war, the AK's an avatar of revolutionary movement across the Third World. If you've been watching, they're everywhere in Ukraine. Seems like everyone's totin' one, even civilians. 

More, from Phillip Killicoat, "Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles":

Existing data on aspects of the small arms market are extremely limited. Since 2001, the In the case of small arms there isan obvious choice: the AK-47 assault rifle. Of the estimated 500 million firearms worldwide, 100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK47s (Small Arms Survey 2004). The pervasiveness of this may be explained in large part by its simplicity. The AK-47 was initially designed for ease of operation and repair by glove-wearing Soviet soldiers in arctic conditions. Its breathtaking simplicity means that it can also be operated by child soldiers in the African desert. Kalashnikovs are a weapon of choice for armed forces and non-state actors alike. They are to be found in the arsenals of armed and special forces of more than 80 countries. In practically every theatre of insurgency or guerrilla combat a Kalashnikov will be found. The popularity of the AK-47 is accentuated by the view that it was a necessary tool to remove colonial rulers in Africa and Asia. Indeed, an image of the rifle appears on the Mozambique national flag, and “Kalash”, an abbreviation of Kalashnikov, is a common boy’s name in some African countries.

The AK-47’s popularity is generally attributed to its functional characteristics; ease of operation, robustness to mistreatment and negligible failure rate. The weapon’s weaknesses - it is considerably less accurate, less safe for users, and has a smaller range than equivalently calibrated weapons - are usually overlooked, or considered to be less important than the benefits of its simplicity. But other assault rifles are approximately as simple to manage, yet they have not experienced the soaring popularity of the Kalashnikov.

The AK-47’s ubiquity could alternatively be explained as a result of a path dependent process. Economic historians recognize that an inferior product may persist when a small but early advantage becomes large over time and builds up a legacy that makes switching costly (David 1975). In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied. Furthermore, large caches of these weapons were freely distributed to regimes and rebels sympathetic to the Soviet Union - more freely, that is, than weapons were distributed by the US - thereby giving the AK-47 a foothold advantage in the emerging post-World War II market for small arms.

According to a path dependence interpretation, inferior durable capital equipment may remain in use because the fixed costs are already sunk, while variable costs (e.g. ammunition, learning costs for new recruits) are lower than the total costs of replacing Kalashnikovs with a new generation of weapons of apparently superior quality. Whatever the exact causes, it remains that for the last half-century the AK-47 has enjoyed a near dominant role in the market for assault rifles making it the most persistent piece of modern military technology. Since the technology used in the AK-47 is essentially unchanged from the original, one may be confident that the prices observed across time and countries are determined market conditions rather than changes in the product...

SOURCE: Foreign Policy, "Looking for a deal on AK-47s? Go to Africa."

Long Bloody Battle for Kyiv Looms (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "The Battle for Kyiv Looms as a Long and Bloody Conflict":

Ukraine’s capital is the biggest prize of all for the Russian military. If Russia tries to take control, it could lead to one of the biggest urban conflicts since World War II.

KYIV, Ukraine — The city of Kyiv covers 325 square miles and is divided by a broad river. It has about 500,000 structures — factories, ornate churches and high-rise apartments — many on narrow, winding streets. Roughly two million people remain after extensive evacuations of women and children.

To the northwest and to the east, tens of thousands of Russian troops are pressing toward the city, Ukraine’s capital, backed by columns of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery. Inside Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers and civilian volunteers are fortifying the downtown with barriers, anti-tank mines and artillery.

Kyiv remains the biggest prize of all for the Russian military; it is the seat of government and ingrained in both Russian and Ukrainian identity. But capturing it, military analysts say, would require a furious and bloody conflict that could be the world’s biggest urban battle in 80 years.

“What we are looking at in Kyiv would dwarf anything we’ve seen since World War II,” said David Kilcullen, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army who has extensively studied urban combat. “If they really, really want to level Kyiv, they can,” he said of the Russian leadership. “But the level of political and economic damage would be tremendous.”

For comparison, one of the largest urban battles this century was the nine-month siege of Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 and 2017 to oust its Islamic State occupiers. Mosul covers 70 square miles and had a wartime population of about 750,000 people — a fraction of the numbers for Kyiv, where the metropolitan area’s prewar population was 3.6 million.

Negotiations over a cease-fire are continuing, and a long, heated battle over Kyiv is not inevitable. Despite superior numbers and firepower, Russia has not achieved a breakthrough. A Western official, in a briefing with reporters this past week, said the Russians had taken heavy casualties, been unable to establish any meaningful off-road presence, and — perhaps most surprising — failed to achieve dominance in the air.

But the first stages of the battle have already begun, with cruise missile bombardments, troop movements to encircle the city and a fight to gain air superiority. Savage, street-by-street gunfights akin to guerrilla warfare have broken out in northwestern suburbs like Irpin, an important gateway into the city. It could be the beginning of a long, drawn-out siege using hunger and street fighting to advance toward the city center.

After three weeks of fighting in the suburbs, Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers, who are operating in loosely organized small units and relying heavily on ambushes, are growing more confident in the city’s defense. Part of their strategy is to make the assault so costly for the Russian army in lives that it will exhaust or demoralize its troops before they reach the city center.

“There’s no talk of capitulation for Kyiv,” said Lt. Tetiana Chornovol, the commander of an anti-tank missile unit operating on the outskirts of the city. “Everything is going far better than we thought.”

Lieutenant Chornovol, 42, is a former activist in Ukraine’s street protest movement who sent her two children to safety before reporting for duty as a reserve officer. She commands two teams of a half-dozen or so people each, firing Ukrainian-made, tripod-mounted missiles, which they transport to ambush positions in their personal cars.

Lieutenant Chornovol drives a red Chevy Volt electric hatchback, which she calls an “ecologically clean killing machine.”

Interviewed beside a burning grocery warehouse in the suburban town of Brovary, the lieutenant popped the hatchback to reveal a beige tube, holding a Stugna-P missile. It has a range of three miles and hits a target within a diameter of one foot.

Seemingly unfazed by combat, Lieutenant Chornovol described the Ukrainian tactic of ambushes that has defined the early phases of the battle for the capital. Last week, she said, she blew up a Russian tank a few miles east of Brovary on the M01 highway.

“We look for firing positions where we can see a stretch of road,” Lieutenant Chornovol said, adding that “we know a column will drive on the road” eventually. With her car parked some distance away, covered in camouflage, she and her team lay in wait in a tree line for three days before a Russian column came rumbling down the road...

Keep reading.

 

 

Institute for the Study of War

It's like these cats were put in deep-freeze since the surge in Iraq. And now? A go-to resource on the "Russian Campaign Offensive."

If there are "neocons" pushing for war in Ukraine, it would be these people. Yet besides daily updates on the Russia's campaign --- which are being cited by the New York Times, of all outlets --- there's been no Kaganite pro-war media blitz to plant U.S. forces in Lviv.

Nope, now Glenn Greenwald's warning against the "Bush/Cheney" cabal reincarnated in --- David Frum? Okay. *Shrugs.*

In any event, from ISW: 

NEW: Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial #Russian campaign of this war. Its culmination is creating conditions of stalemate throughout most of #Ukraine.

Read the latest Russian offensive campaign assessment from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats: https://t.co/EtMCrMbAjO pic.twitter.com/4XrCCj5Gnj

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 19, 2022

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe

At Amazon, Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.

REPORT: Russia Has Empowered Neo-Nazi Factions in Zelensky's Army

There's some debate over this here, and I'm sure lots more on Twitter and elsewhere.

Nazis in the Ukraine army? This is way beyond my knowledge. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more on this. 

At UnHerd, "The truth about Ukraine’s far-Right militias":

Like any war, but perhaps more than most, the war in Ukraine has seen a bewildering barrage of claims and counter-claims made by the online supporters of each side. Truth, partial truths and outright lies compete for dominance in the media narrative. Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia invaded Ukraine to “de-Nazify” the country is surely one of the clearest examples. The Russian claim that the Maidan revolution of 2014 was a “fascist coup” and that Ukraine is a Nazi state has been used for years by Putin and his supporters to justify his occupation of Crimea and support for Russian-speaking separatists in the country’s east, winning many online adherents.

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free elections that produce significant changes of power, including the election, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a Nazi state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests.

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports Nazis”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing militias, including neo-Nazi ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future.

Indeed, some of the best coverage of Ukraine’s extreme Right-wing groups has come from the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, which is not known for a favourable attitude towards Russian propaganda. Bellingcat’s excellent reporting of this under-discussed topic over the past few years has largely focused on the Azov movement, Ukraine’s most powerful extreme Right-wing group, and the one most favoured by the state’s largesse.

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-Nazi black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric Nazism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role translating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance...

Keep reading.

 

The Annihilation of Mariupol (VIDEO)

At the Financial Times, "‘Hell on earth’: survivors recount Mariupol’s annihilation under Russian bombs":

Residents who escaped from besieged Ukrainian port depict harrowing conditions for civilians.

In the besieged city of Mariupol, scene of the heaviest fighting in Russia’s three-week war on Ukraine, people are now so hungry they are killing stray dogs for food.

Dmytro, a businessman who left the city on Tuesday, said friends told him they resorted to this desperate measure in the past few days after their supplies ran out.

“You hear the words but it’s impossible to really take them in, to believe this is happening,” he said. “It is hell on earth.”

Once one of Ukraine’s most important ports, Mariupol is now a charnel house, a city of ghosts. For more than two weeks it has been subjected to a Russian bombardment of such intensity that it has turned whole neighbourhoods into piles of smouldering rubble.

After days of punishing aerial and artillery assaults that broke Mariupol’s three lines of defensive fortifications, Russian troops have now entered the city centre, with heavy fighting reported on some of its main shopping streets and near Theatre Square, a key landmark.

On Sunday night, Russia gave Ukraine until 5am local time to decide whether to surrender Mariupol. Its defence ministry said it would allow Ukrainian troops to leave the city, but only if they lay down their arms. 

Russian forces are already in control of Livoberezhnyi Raion, or left-bank district, in the east of the city, as well as Mikroraiony 17-23, a string of residential neighbourhoods in the north-east, said Anna Romanenko, a Ukrainian journalist who is in close contact with Ukrainian forces there. “The front line runs right through Mariupol now,” she said.

Dmytro, who declined to give his surname, was one of a number of Mariupol residents the Financial Times contacted by phone after they had been evacuated over the past week to the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, about 230km to the west. All described an assault so brutal it has destroyed the city, killed and maimed countless civilians and left deep scars on the survivors.

Mykola Osichenko, chief executive of Mariupol TV, said his abiding memory of the past three weeks was the feeling of utter powerlessness. “When the bombs fell, I would routinely cover my son with my body,” he said. “But I knew that I couldn’t really protect him, that it was an act of desperation.”

Strategically located on the Sea of Azov, the gateway to the Black Sea, Mariupol was in Russia’s crosshairs from the start of the war. From just a few days in, its forces started launching missiles at the city in an onslaught that severed its electricity, gas and water supplies and left its 400,000 residents cowering in freezing shelters, hugging for warmth. Mariupol authorities said 2,400 residents of the city had been killed since Russia launched its invasion.

Survivors described desperate attempts to stock up on supplies while bombs exploded around them. Dmytro said he visited the central market last Sunday after it had been flattened by a Russian artillery attack.

“Everything was burning, there were corpses everywhere, and I was just walking through, picking up a cabbage here, a carrot there, knowing it meant my family would live another day or two,” he said. “You become completely desensitised.”

Witnesses depicted post-apocalyptic scenes of stray dogs eating the remains of bombing victims who lay unburied on the street. Civilian casualties have been placed in mass graves or buried in the courtyards of houses: proper funerals are too dangerous...

 Still more.

Ukrainian Influencer Kristina Korban Reports on Ukraine

At the Verge, "Ukrainian Influencers Bring the Frontlines to TikTok." 

Watch here.

Also on YouTube last weekend: "Warzone Truth." 

Ukraine Blasts Kremlin for Bombing Civilians, Alleged Forced Removal of Ukrainians to Russia

Russia can't win on the battlefield, so Putin will level the cities and terrorize the civilian population, attempting to demoralize Kyiv and force a negotiated win at the bargaining table.

Putin will never go before the Hague. He's kill himself first. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "Ukraine accuses Russia of bombing shelter, deporting citizens":

LVIV, Ukraine — Amid a growing consensus that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is morphing into a bloody stalemate that could last months, Ukrainian officials on Sunday blamed the Kremlin for a new spate of deadly attacks on civilian targets, including the bombing of an art school in the embattled port city of Mariupol where hundreds had taken shelter. Ukrainian officials also accused Russian forces of seizing several thousand Mariupol residents and deporting them against their will to “remote cities in Russia.”

Ukraine’s human rights spokesperson, Lyudmyla Denisova, said on Telegram that residents were being transported across the border to a Russian city about 60 miles from Mariupol and then sent by train farther into the Russian interior.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko likened the alleged deportations to the expulsion and slaughter of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, a theme also evoked Sunday by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a virtual address to lawmakers in Israel. “What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II,” Boychenko said.

The reports of forced removals could not be independently verified given that few journalists or humanitarian aid workers have been able to enter Mariupol, where machine-gun battles rage daily between Russian forces and Ukrainian defenders. The Kremlin has not responded to the allegations, although Russian state media reported that buses filled with what they described as refugees have been arriving from Ukraine in recent days.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN on Sunday that she could not confirm the reports but added it would be “unconscionable for Russia to force Ukrainian citizens into Russia and put them in what will basically be concentration and prisoner camps.”

Mariupol, a strategic city of some 400,000 on the Sea of Azov, has become a vivid symbol of the devastation wrought by the unprovoked invasion, with massive craters opened by bombs and artillery shells and 90% of the city’s buildings reportedly damaged or destroyed.

The apparent bombing early Sunday of Art School Number 12, where some 400 people were said to be sheltering, follows a similar bombing Wednesday of a large Mariupol theater where more than 1,000 people were apparently hiding.

As in the attack on the theater, officials said there appeared to be people trapped under the debris at the school. “It is known that the building was demolished and there are still peaceful people under the rubble,” the Mariupol city council said on Telegram.

Zelensky said Sunday that Moscow’s relentless assault on the city “will go down in history” as a war crime.

“The terror the occupiers did to the peaceful city will be remembered for centuries to come,” Zelensky said in his daily address, marking the 25th day since Russia invaded Ukraine. “And the more Ukrainians tell the world about it, the more support we find.”

Despite reports of widespread destruction in Mariupol, there were growing signs that Moscow’s apparent hopes for a quick war and rapid Ukrainian capitulation have faded against unexpectedly fierce resistance and what many call miscalculations and missteps by Russian military planners.

In a new assessment of the war in Ukraine, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said that the protracted siege on Mariupol, while devastating, “is costing the Russian military time, initiative, and combat power.”

It said Russia’s failures to quickly seize control of Kyiv and other major cities have created the conditions for a “bloody stalemate that could last for weeks or months.” The U.K. Ministry of Defense has issued a similar appraisal, saying Russia, after failing to win control of Ukraine’s skies, has adopted a “strategy of attrition” aimed at wearing down Ukrainian forces to the point of collapse. The agency predicted an increase in Russia’s “indiscriminate use of firepower” and warned of civilian casualties, the destruction of key Ukrainian infrastructure and a growing humanitarian crisis.

At least 847 civilians have been killed in the war, the United Nations says, although it warns the real toll may be much higher given that many parts of the country remain inaccessible.

At least 6.5 million people have been internally displaced, according to U.N., and more than 3.3 million people have fled Ukraine...

 

Woman Muscling Marlin

This lady is freakin' rad!

More nice ladies here and here.

Plus, Natalie Portman and Barbara Palvin.

How the U.S. and EU Cut Russia Off From the Global Economy

This is extremely fascinating to me. For all the talk of U.S. relative decline, the administration's actions have displayed the brute power of economic sanctions to wield havoc on strategic rivals. The Russians have just begun to hurt. 

At WSJ, "Unprecedented coordination from late November set the stage for aggressive sanctions when Ukraine was invaded":

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with senior officials in the White House Situation Room to discuss a Russian troop buildup on the border of Ukraine. The meeting included top intelligence advisers, defense officials and diplomats, who concluded Russia might be preparing to invade.

Ms. Yellen said she would contact counterparts in Europe and elsewhere to urge them to begin preparations for an economic response, according to people familiar with the meeting, and she started making calls to coordinate after the holiday.

That meeting marked the launch of an unprecedented financial sanctions program by the West aimed at a major economy. In the war between Russia and Ukraine that program, along with massive arms shipments, were the front lines of the West’s engagement. It is a strategy designed to steer clear of direct combat between Russia and members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization while crippling Russia’s economy to ensure that any military victory is pyrrhic.

“We’re using economic statecraft to fight for democracy and take on autocracy,” said Mark Gitenstein, U.S. ambassador to the European Union.

It remains unclear whether the campaign will achieve its goal of deterring President Vladimir Putin or altering his calculus on the battlefield. So far, Russia’s military progress has been slower than many anticipated and Ukraine’s resistance stronger, but Mr. Putin has shown little interest in de-escalating the crisis.

Some observers also note that such sweeping Western measures could cause collateral damage by shocking commodities markets that countries around the globe rely on for energy, metals and food.

“The risk now is that these sanctions have a grave impact on the world economy because of their size and the role of the Russian economy in global markets,” said Nicholas Mulder, a historian at Cornell University who studies the history of sanctions. “It is going to be a pretty serious drag on global growth and could lead to recession.” As a shock to the Russian economy, however, the program to cut off Russia’s access to international finance appears to have met with early success even though the U.S. and Europe have continued to allow Russia to collect hundreds of millions of dollars a day in payments for its energy exports to Europe. Many global companies—such as Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft Corp. and McDonald’s Corp. —amplified government efforts to isolate Russia by abandoning or scaling back operations there.

Russia’s currency, the ruble, is down 13% since the invasion started on Feb. 24. Russians have lined up to withdraw their savings from the country’s banks and Russian factories have been crippled. Assets held internationally by a host of Russian oligarchs viewed as close to Mr. Putin have been frozen. Russia’s stock market has been closed for weeks.

Russia calls the actions aggression. “The United States has unconditionally declared economic war on Russia, and they are waging this war,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this month.

The campaign also took the drastic step of isolating Russia’s central bank by freezing the reserves it holds at central banks around the world—denominated in dollars, euros and other currencies. Those assets help authorities manage the economy and are a resource for Russian companies that do business internationally.

As of June 2021, the Russian central bank had 16.4% of its reserves in U.S. dollar assets, 32.3% of its reserves in euro-denominated assets and much else in China, gold and other places. Together, U.S. and EU officials have blocked Russia’s access to nearly half of its global funds.

In recent years, the U.S. and Europe at times have been at odds over how far to go in financial deterrents. U.S. and European officials squabbled in the past when the U.S. imposed sanctions on foes such as Iran or North Korea and threatened European companies with repercussions if they didn’t comply.

When faced with Russian aggression toward Ukraine, the two sides worked with an unprecedented level of cooperation and scope between Treasury, the White House, the Commerce Department and the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, according to several of the participants.

They brought together elements of other sanctions and measures that among them they have launched in recent years against Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, as well as Russia over its 2014 seizure of Crimea, and Chinese telecommunication-equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co.

As the war grinds on, Ms. Yellen has said the West isn’t done seeking out economic responses. The Biden administration has since banned imports of Russian oil into the U.S. and sought to sever normal trade ties with Russia.

“The atrocities that they’re committing against civilians seem to be intensifying,” Ms. Yellen said last week in a public forum. “So it’s certainly appropriate for us to be working with our allies to consider further sanctions.”

After the pre-Thanksgiving meeting, senior Treasury officials including Ms. Yellen’s deputy, Wally Adeyemo, who oversees the day-to-day sanctions operation at the Treasury Department, and Elizabeth Rosenberg, assistant secretary on terror financing issues, led the coordination effort from Washington.

The central point of contact at the White House was Daleep Singh, a former Federal Reserve and Treasury official now at the National Security Council. He in turn was in regular contact with Björn Seibert, a former German defense official who serves as head of cabinet to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, coordinating EU policies.

Messrs. Singh and Seibert began talking about sanctions in December. Among the hurdles: Each element could blow back differently on the U.S. and the EU’s 27 national economies. The two focused on sanctioning Russia’s government-owned banks and imposing export controls, which would cut off Russian businesses from global suppliers.

For that, U.S. officials turned to the Foreign Direct Product Rule, a regulation they read as enabling Washington to block exports to Russia of potentially any product, including foreign goods made using U.S. equipment, software or blueprints. The rule has enabled the U.S. to hobble Huawei.

Many EU officials were hesitant, according to people involved in the talks. The EU exported about $100 billion of goods to Russia last year, while the U.S. exported directly less than $10 billion...

Still more.

 

Miranda Divine, Laptop from Hell

At Amazon, Miranda Divine, Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (An Experiment In Literary Investigation - Nobel Prize Winning Complete Three Volume Trade Paperback Set).

Another Kamala Harris Staffer Departs, After Failing to Position Kamala For Success

At AoSHQ, "She's the ninth staffer to depart."

Survivors Emerge From Bombed Ukrainian Theater (VIDEO)

At WSJ, "Survivors Emerge From Ukrainian Theater Bombed in Russian Airstrike":

Rescuers freed 130 people from the building in Mariupol and hundreds more remained trapped, as Russian forces continued shelling in Ukraine.

LVIV, Ukraine—Rescuers in Mariupol evacuated 130 people from the wreckage of a theater hit by an airstrike this week and searched for more survivors, as Russia expanded its air assaults on Ukraine’s west, striking an aircraft-repair facility near the Polish border, officials said.

“Hundreds of Mariupol residents are still under the debris,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during an address to the nation. “Despite the shelling, despite all the difficulties, we will continue rescue work.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to press on with his invasion of Ukraine in a rare public appearance before a crowd of tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters in a Moscow stadium, and President Biden warned Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a call on Friday that Beijing would face repercussions if it provided assistance to Russia in its military assault.

In Mariupol, about 1,300 people remained trapped in the basement of the theater where residents had sought shelter from Russian shelling, said Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human-rights commissioner, adding that it was difficult to be certain of the number of survivors. She didn’t confirm any casualties.

“We hope that they will be alive but as of now we have no information about them,” she said in a local television interview. The building was hit during an attack on Wednesday.

Efforts to sort through the wreckage and rescue any survivors are being hampered because rescue services have been nearly wiped out by the attack on the southern port city.

Getting medical treatment to those injured could be difficult, because “a lot of doctors have been killed,” former Gov. Sergiy Taruta said overnight.

More than 9,000 people were evacuated from Mariupol, Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address. He said that more than 180,000 Ukrainians have been rescued and tons of essential supplies have been delivered. Still, he said, aside from seven humanitarian corridors that have been opened, Russian forces “continue to block the supply of humanitarian aid to the besieged cities in most areas.”

Mr. Zelensky called on Russia to negotiate and said that in the coming days he will address other nations like Switzerland, Israel, Italy and Japan, just like he did the U.S., Canada and Germany. “It’s time to meet. Time to talk. It is time to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise, Russia’s losses will be so huge that several generations will not be enough to rebound,” he said. “Ukraine’s proposals are on the table.”

Russian missiles hit an aircraft-repair facility in the western part of the country on Friday, in a long-range strike far from the heaviest fighting while attacks continued on other cities.

The Ukrainian air force said Russia fired six cruise missiles from the Black Sea. Two were intercepted, preventing them from reaching their target near the airport in the western city of Lviv, about 50 miles from the Polish border.

Polish immigration authorities said Friday that the number of people who have fled Ukraine for Poland has now surpassed two million. More than three million Ukrainians have fled the country since the war began, according to the United Nations refugee agency. A building at the air facility was destroyed, according to Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, who said work at the facility had been suspended before the strike. One person was wounded, and rescue workers were on site putting out a fire, said Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the Lviv regional military administration.

Friday’s strike on the Lviv facility followed a Sunday air attack on a similar location in Lutsk, also in western Ukraine. Workers at each site repair and modernize Ukrainian combat aircraft of various types. Oleg Zhdanov, a reserve colonel in the Ukrainian army and a military analyst, said the strikes showed that Ukraine’s air fleet, modest and aging, continued to frustrate the Russian war machine.

“This can only mean that our aviation is becoming a big problem for Russia,” he said.

Most of the fighting between the invading Russian forces and Ukrainian troops has been concentrated further east and south. In the eastern city of Kramatorsk, at least one missile hit a residential building overnight, killing two people and wounding 16, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the regional military administration in the eastern region of Donetsk...

 

Jeremy Friedman, Ripe for Revolution

Jeremy Friedman, Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World.

Ukraine Could Win

From James Holmes, at 1945, "Yes, Ukraine Could Beat Russia":

Which antagonist—if either—will prevail in Ukraine?

The longevity and success of Russia’s offensive is a hot topic of debate among foreign-policy practitioners and the commentariat. Nor is it an idle topic. But beware of too-confident assessments. Canvassing military history indicates that campaigns tend to sputter over time. A campaign may stagnate, and reversals of fortune are far from rare. It takes not just a proficient military machine but leadership possessed of ingenuity and force of character to keep the momentum going, or regain it if it slips way.

So Russia isn’t predestined to be the victor over Ukraine even though it’s the stronger combatant—by far—by the numbers. Indeed, the Russian offensive has shown signs of faltering since day one. A lesser combatant that makes maximum use of its latent combat power can stymie an opponent that wastes its potential.

Ukraine has a chance...

Still more.

 

Kirstie Alley

Peace.

On Twitter.

The New York Times Finally Admits Hunter Biden's Laptop Is Real

From Michael Goodwin, at the New York Post, "The New York Times hates to say The Post told you so."

Here's the story, "Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill, but Broad Federal Investigation Continues."

See here, smack dab at the middle column:

What Is the Oldest Holiday People Still Celebrate Today?

Here's Dennis Prager, on Passover:

Biden Warns China of 'Consequences' if It Aids Russian War

We'll see. I'd love to see China shut down with a barrage of sanctions to match or exceed those imposed on Russia. Hoo boy, that would be something.

At the New York Times, "Biden Tells Xi There Would Be Consequences to Helping Russia":

Russian forces extended their bombardments into a relatively unscathed part of western Ukraine on Friday, striking a warplane repair plant about 50 miles from the Polish border, as President Biden warned President Xi Jinping of China not to provide military aid to Russia amid a scramble of diplomatic efforts to end the violence engulfing Ukraine.

During a nearly two-hour video call, Mr. Biden warned Mr. Xi, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that there would be “implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians,” according to the White House.

But a senior administration official declined to discuss what kind of penalties the United States would impose on China if it provided Moscow with military hardware or offered it financial relief. The official also declined to say how Mr. Xi responded to Mr. Biden’s warning.

“We will continue to watch until we see what actions they take or don’t,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said...

Keep reading.

Chinese President Vows to Control Covid Outbreak With Smallest Cost

Well, Xi must have gotten some blowback for welding his population in apartment blocks to stop the spread.

At WSJ, "Xi Jinping says leaders must ‘minimize the impact of the Covid situation on economic and social development’":

Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to reduce the impact of Covid-control measures on the economy and people’s lives, a first acknowledgment from the Chinese leadership of the costs of the government’s stringent policies to rein in outbreaks.

As other countries have moved away from lockdowns and social distancing, Beijing has touted the success of its draconian measures in keeping the number of cases low, despite a mounting toll on its people and economy.

However, Chinese officials have scrambled to boost confidence in the Chinese economy as the more contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus has prompted a surge in cases. The costs of fighting outbreaks add to recent headwinds, as Mr. Xi’s campaign of regulatory tightening last year has slowed economic momentum more than expected. The geopolitical crisis over the war in Ukraine, and the potential costs to China of its recent alignment with Russia, have also rattled investors’ nerves.

In a Thursday meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top decision-making body, Mr. Xi asked officials to minimize the impact on the Chinese economy and people’s lives from Covid-19 control measures, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

China is facing the biggest wave of Covid-19 infections since Wuhan became the original center of the pandemic in early 2020. Several local governments have resorted to the same playbook used over the past two years to stamp out new outbreaks by ordering large-scale shutdowns and mass testing.

Mr. Xi still urged officials to curb the spread of infection as soon as possible and said the central government would hold local officials accountable if they fail to respond to outbreaks promptly, Xinhua reported. Several officials in Jilin province in China’s northeast, where most of the recent cases have been reported, have been removed from their positions.

However, Mr. Xi said China must “strive to achieve the biggest prevention and control effect with the smallest cost, and minimize the impact of the Covid situation on economic and social development,” Xinhua reported.

Over the past two days, the rise in cases appears to have abated slightly. On Thursday, China reported 2,432 cases, including both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections. Of those, 1,157 were in Jilin.

Mr. Xi’s remarks came a day after senior officials moved to reassure investors rattled by the prospect of widespread factory closures and trade disruptions...

 

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.

Bari Weiss Has a Lot to Say

A very important piece from Ms. Bari. RTWT.

Here, "Things Worth Fighting For: What we can learn from President Zelensky."

The Runaway Cost of Virtue-Signalling

From Batya Ungar-Sargon, at Spiked, "Working-class Americans are paying a heavy price for their elites’ moral posturing":

As gasoline prices in the US continue to surge to an unprecedented $7 a gallon in some places, President Joe Biden seems more interested in finding someone to blame than mitigating the problem. ‘Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’, the president said on Friday at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference. The president then cited a ‘fact checker’ in the New York Times and a Washington Post op-ed to counter anyone daring to lay the blame for skyrocketing prices at the feet of the president of the United States.

As gasoline prices in the US continue to surge to an unprecedented $7 a gallon in some places, President Joe Biden seems more interested in finding someone to blame than mitigating the problem. ‘Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’, the president said on Friday at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference. The president then cited a ‘fact checker’ in the New York Times and a Washington Post op-ed to counter anyone daring to lay the blame for skyrocketing prices at the feet of the president of the United States.

I guess if you’re going to gaslight working-class Americans who have been struggling with historic levels of inflation for over a year now, it’s good to have legacy media outlets backing you up.

Of course, Biden is right that his decision to ban Russian oil and gas from the US market – a popular move, which 80 per cent of Americans approved of – has exacerbated these trends. But in trying to lay the blame of a year-long trend entirely at Putin’s feet because of a war that started three weeks ago, Biden is erasing the ongoing struggle American families have been facing, enlisting a foreign foe to cover for his domestic failures.

And it’s the very people the Democratic Party claims to care about who are suffering the most as a result of those failures. A new Wall Street Journal poll found that 35 per cent of black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters were feeling the sting of inflation, compared to just 28 per cent of white voters. Among black women and Hispanic men, the proportion was even higher, at 44 per cent. And of course, for those making less than $60,000, it was the worst, with half feeling the pain of inflation – compared to just 13 per cent of those making over $150,000.

It’s perhaps no surprise that it’s those whose incomes protect them from the sting of inflation who are most vocal about how willing they are to pay more for petrol – lecturing those who can least afford it about the importance of doing so on moral grounds...

Keep reading.

 

Arnold Schwarzenegger Makes Impassioned Plea to 'End This War' in Ukraine (VIDEO)

This is quite an address. Schwarzenegger's father fought for the Nazis in Leningrad during WWII.

At SF GATE, "Arnold Schwarzenegger's plea to Russian people, soldiers amid Ukraine invasion goes viral."