NATO Rejects No-Fly Zone for Ukraine

If Twitter's global commentariat's any measure, practically the entire world's population wants the U.S. military to join the fight in Ukraine. Turns out it's a moral imperative, ironically, since for the last 21 years, the U.S. has been demonized for its nation-building wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to say nothing of the reaction to the assassination of Osama bin Laden among the 2 billion Muslims worldwide. 

The truth is there is no other country that can destroy Russia and liberate Ukraine. No country with the economic, financial, and military might. Every head of state knows this. People get on the wrong side of the American hegemon at their peril. Even China is hedging its bets now after seeing how fast the U.S. and members of the Western led-international community took down Russia's entire financial system.

It's a breathtaking display of U.S. power. We may not be the the international superpower we once were, but for now, there's no one near ready to take our spot. 

At the video, Vladimir Putin warns the Western allies against creating a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine.

And at the Los Angeles Times, "NATO rejects Ukraine’s plea for no-fly zone after Russia seizes nuclear plant, uses cluster bombs":

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces pressed their offensive against key Ukrainian cities Friday in a heavy bombing and shelling campaign that has led to a ballooning humanitarian disaster, spurred a growing exodus of people and raised fears of a wider calamity after Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant was set ablaze. A chorus of international condemnation and outrage followed Moscow’s capture of the nuclear complex, amid indications Russian forces would continue to go after such facilities.

And in Ukraine’s south, Russian troops besieged the city of Mykolaiv in an apparent march toward Odessa, Ukraine’s most important city on the Black Sea.

In urgent meetings of U.S. and European leaders at NATO headquarters in Brussels, the alliance’s commander confirmed Russia was attacking Ukrainians with cluster bombs, a munition outlawed by more than 120 countries. But NATO also rejected Ukraine’s pleas to establish a no-fly zone over the battered country.

“Unfortunately, tragically, horrifically, this may not be over soon,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said, emerging grim-faced from the meetings.

Blinken said a no-fly zone would require employing NATO aircraft over Ukraine in potential conflict with Russian fighter jets and lead to “a full-fledged war in Europe.”

The Biden administration, which has joined most of Europe in enacting severe economic sanctions on Russia, said it was examining a ban on Russian oil exports, although support for that is muted because it would raise gas prices in the U.S. and Europe.

Pentagon officials expressed alarm over Russia’s violent takeover of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex in the southeastern city of Enerhodar and said it remains unclear how Moscow plans to use the facility. At a minimum, the Russians could cut off the electricity that the plant supplies to much of Ukraine, a senior official said.

“Using combat power to try to take a nuclear power plant over ... it just underscores the recklessness of this Russian invasion,” the official said, briefing reporters in Washington on condition of anonymity.

Authorities said Friday morning that local firefighters had extinguished the fire at the plant and that there had been no release of radioactive material. Even with Russian forces in control, officials said, the local staff continues to operate the plant and is inspecting it for damage.

None of the site’s six reactors — only one of which was in use, at about 60% capacity — was damaged, said Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva. Initial reports Friday had mistakenly indicated there was a fire inside one of the reactors.

But the strike on the plant, which sparked immediate fears of a Chernobyl-like disaster, with radioactive clouds drifting over the rest of Europe, demonstrated anew the war’s potential for terrifying effects far outside Ukraine’s borders. Norway’s leader called the shelling of Zaporizhzhia “in line with madness.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, warned in an emergency session of the Security Council that Russia could make use of any of Ukraine’s other nuclear facilities as pawns in the war.

Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear plant operator, said three Ukrainian soldiers were killed and two were injured in the strike.

In an emotional video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed for a stop to the shelling of Zaporizhzhia and for a Western-enforced no-fly zone over the country to forestall any other strikes on sensitive infrastructure. Ukraine is home to four nuclear power plants.

“Only urgent action by Europe can stop the Russian troops,” said Zelensky, who fielded a flurry of worried calls from President Biden and other world leaders. “Do not allow the death of Europe from a catastrophe at a nuclear power station.”

His comments came as Russian troops strengthened their grip on Ukraine’s south in a bid to choke off access to the Black and Azov seas and establish control over a swath of land pushing up against Moldova and NATO member Romania to the west...

Keep reading.

 

Russia's Currency Reserves Aren't Safe

Actually, nobody's reserves are safe. This round of economic and financial sanctions are perhaps the most devastating since World War Two. 

At WSJ, "If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock":

Sanctions have shown that currency reserves accumulated by central banks can be taken away. With China taking note, this may reshape geopolitics, economic management and even the international role of the U.S. dollar.

“What is money?” is a question that economists have pondered for centuries, but the blocking of Russia’s central-bank reserves has revived its relevance for the world’s biggest nations—particularly China. In a world in which accumulating foreign assets is seen as risky, military and economic blocs are set to drift farther apart.

After Moscow attacked Ukraine last week, the U.S. and its allies shut off the Russian central bank’s access to most of its $630 billion of foreign reserves. Weaponizing the monetary system against a Group-of-20 country will have lasting repercussions.

The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis scared developing countries into accumulating more funds to shield their currencies from crashes, pushing official reserves from less than $2 trillion to a record $14.9 trillion in 2021, according to the International Monetary Fund. While central banks have lately sought to buy and repatriate gold, it only makes up 13% of their assets. Foreign currencies are 78%. The rest is positions at the IMF and Special Drawing Rights, or SDR—an IMF-created claim on hard currencies.

Many economists have long equated this money to savings in a piggy bank, which in turn correspond to investments made abroad in the real economy.

Recent events highlight the error in this thinking: Barring gold, these assets are someone else’s liability—someone who can just decide they are worth nothing. Last year, the IMF suspended Taliban-controlled Afghanistan’s access to funds and SDR. Sanctions on Iran have confirmed that holding reserves offshore doesn’t stop the U.S. Treasury from taking action. As New England Law Professor Christine Abely points out, the 2017 settlement with Singapore’s CSE TransTel shows that the mere use of the dollar abroad can violate sanctions on the premise that some payment clearing ultimately happens on U.S. soil.

To be sure, the West has frozen Russia’s stock of foreign exchange, but hasn’t blocked the inflow of new dollars and euros. The country’s current-account surplus is estimated at $20 billion a month due to exports of oil and gas, which the U.S. and the European Union want to keep buying. While these balances go to the private sector, officials have mobilized them. Stopping major banks like Sberbank from using dollars and excluding others from the Swift messaging system still plunges the economy into chaos, especially if foreign businesses are afraid to buy Russian energy despite the sector’s explicit exclusion from sanctions. But hard currency will probably keep gushing in through energy-focused lenders like Gazprombank, and can theoretically be used to pay for imports and buy the ruble.

Yet the entire artifice of “money“ as a universal store of value risks being eroded by the banning of key exports to Russia and boycotts of the kind corporations like Apple and Nike announced this week. If currency balances were to become worthless computer entries and didn’t guarantee buying essential stuff, Moscow would be rational to stop accumulating them and stockpile physical wealth in oil barrels, rather than sell them to the West. At the very least, more of Russia’s money will likely shift into gold and Chinese assets...

 

Russian Police Arrest St. Petersburg Babushka! (VIDEO)

In my heart of hearts, I have to believe these jackboots were getting the woman off the street before opening fire on the youthful protesters. But sadly, my brain of brains tells me they put this woman behind bars. Putin's regime is brutal. 

WATCH:

Shocking video footage shows eight officers swooping in to arrest a pensioner named as Yelena Osipova while others in the crowd shout at officers to stop.

Osipova, who is a survivor of the Nazi's Siege of Leningrad - since renamed St Petersburg - carried a sign that read: 'Soldier, drop your weapon and you will be a true hero!'

Jessica Simpson

Not my favorite photo, but I'm happy she's doing well. She had a difficult pregnancy, gained baby, and now she's back and healthy and doing well with her fashion line.

Her body's my favorite, that's for sure. 

Also, new Lindsey Pelas bikini photos. 

Plus, Ukrainian women. 

Outdoor Sports and Fitness

 At Amazon, Outdoor Sports.

Shelling of Ukrainian Nuclear Plant Draws Condemnation

Extremely frightening. 

I was watching the news last night just thinking of all the possibilities, the main one of which was whether a new Chernobyl was in our future. 

At WSJ, "No Radiation Leaks Reported After Russians Take Ukrainian Nuclear Plant":

KYIV, Ukraine—Russian shelling in southern Ukraine sparked a fire at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant before Russian troops took control of the area, according to local authorities and international observers, raising fears that Moscow’s increasingly indiscriminate war could cause a global environmental disaster.

The fire, extinguished Friday morning, erupted at the Zaporizhzhia power plant’s training facility, Ukraine’s emergency service said. None of the plant’s six reactors were affected and no radiation leaked, officials said. Both sides said Russian troops at the complex weren’t interfering with the plant’s Ukrainian staff.

Still, the skirmish provoked international condemnation and fanned fears of a repeat of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, which sent a vast plume of radioactive steam across Europe and rendered the region surrounding the plant uninhabitable.

Russian forces pushing from the south reached Enerhodar, where the Zaporizhzhia plant is located, on Wednesday. After surrender negotiations failed, a Russian column attacked the city on Thursday. Webcam footage showed a fireball rising behind a church in the city, a short distance from the nuclear facilities, and then two munitions, possibly illumination rounds, landed on the compound itself.

“What we understand is that this projectile is…coming from the Russian forces,” International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi told journalists on Friday. Mr. Grossi said he had offered to travel to Ukraine for talks on ensuring the protection of nuclear sites.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack an act of terror that put all of Europe at risk.

“We survived the night that could have put an end to history,” he said, reiterating his call on the West to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Russia’s government blamed the Ukrainian military for the incident, which it called “an attempt at sabotage.”

“The purpose of this was to blame Russia for what happened,” the Defense Ministry television channel Zvezda cited the ministry as saying.

The war that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched more than a week ago to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government and end its alignment with the West has run into fierce resistance. The Russian offensive has stalled around the capital, Kyiv, but forces have advanced in the northeast and south of the country and Moscow has resorted to indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighborhoods in cities like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol and Sumy.

On Friday, North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said members of the alliance had agreed they wouldn’t establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine to slow the fighting or send troops into the country...

 

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Historian Stephen Cohen Blames the U.S. and NATO for the Ukraine Crisis (VIDEO)

That is, he blamed the U.S. and NATO for the Ukraine crisis back in 2014. 

This guy's way better than John Mearsheimer, as he's not all theory. He knows Russia like the back of his hand. In relation to what's happening now, I can't find fault with a single thing he says. It's not the argument folks want to hear, myself included. It's just that he's practically irrefutable. Interesting as hell, in any case. 

It's very amazing how the U.S. foreign policy elites can't seem to get it. For Putin, NATO is not a defensive alliance. 

I used to criticize this guy back in the day, but almost a decade on, I admit I was not listening very closely to what he was saying. 

WATCH:

A Flourishing Democracy in Ukraine?

A flourishing Ukrainian democracy. 

That's what Vladimir Putin fears, according to Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, along with Robert Person.

(Contrast this article to John Mearsheimer's, post earlier. The two contrasting takes represents a very common axis in international relations theory: realism vs. liberalism,)

At the Journal of Democracy, "What Putin Fears Most":

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has begun. Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that it’s NATO’s fault. He frequently has claimed (including again in an address to the nation as this invasion commenced) that NATO expansion—not 190,000 Russian soldiers and sailors mobilized on Ukraine’s borders—is the central driver of this crisis. Following John Mearsheimer’s provocative 2014 Foreign Affairs article arguing that “the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault,” the narrative of Russian backlash against NATO expansion has become a dominant framework for explaining—if not justifying—Moscow’s ongoing war against Ukraine. This notion has been repeated by politicians, analysts, and writers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Multiple rounds of enlargement, they argue, exacerbated Russia’s sense of insecurity as NATO forces crept closer to Russia’s borders, finally provoking Putin to lash out violently, first by invading Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine in 2014, and now a second, likely far larger, invasion of Ukraine today. By this telling, the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership points both to the cause of the conflict and its solution: take membership off the table for Ukraine, so the argument goes, and war will be prevented.

This argument has two flaws, one about history and one about Putin’s thinking. First, NATO expansion has not been a constant source of tension between Russia and the West, but a variable. Over the last thirty years, the salience of the issue has risen and fallen not primarily because of the waves of NATO expansion, but due instead to waves of democratic expansion in Eurasia. In a very clear pattern, Moscow’s complaints about NATO spike after democratic breakthroughs. While the tragic invasions and occupations of Georgia and Ukraine have secured Putin a de facto veto over their NATO aspirations, since the alliance would never admit a country under partial occupation by Russian forces, this fact undermines Putin’s claim that the current invasion is aimed at NATO membership. He has already blocked NATO expansion for all intents and purposes, thereby revealing that he wants something far more significant in Ukraine today: the end of democracy and the return of subjugation.

This reality highlights the second flaw: Because the primary threat to Putin and his autocratic regime is democracy, not NATO, that perceived threat would not magically disappear with a moratorium on NATO expansion. Putin would not stop seeking to undermine democracy and sovereignty in Ukraine, Georgia, or the region as whole if NATO stopped expanding. As long as citizens in free countries exercise their democratic rights to elect their own leaders and set their own course in domestic and foreign politics, Putin will keep them in his crosshairs....

The more serious cause of tensions has been a series of democratic breakthroughs and popular protests for freedom throughout the 2000s, what many refer to as the “Color Revolutions.” Putin believes that Russian national interests have been threatened by what he portrays as U.S.-supported coups. After each of them—Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, the Arab Spring in 2011, Russia in 2011–12, and Ukraine in 2013–14—Putin has pivoted to more hostile policies toward the United States, and then invoked the NATO threat as justification for doing so.

Boris Yeltsin never supported NATO expansion but acquiesced to the first round of expansion in 1997 because he believed his close ties to President Bill Clinton and the United States were not worth sacrificing over this comparatively smaller matter. Through Partnership for Peace and especially the NATO-Russia Founding Act, Clinton and his team made a considerable effort to keep US-Russian relations positive while at the same time managing NATO expansion. The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia to stop ethnic cleaning in Kosovo severely tested that strategy but survived in part because Clinton gave Yeltsin and Russia a role in the negotiated solution. When the first post-communist color revolution overthrew Slobodan Milosevic a year later, Russia’s new president, Putin, deplored the act but did not overreact. At that time, he still entertained the possibility of cooperation with the West, including NATO.

However, the next round of democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, escalated U.S.-Russian tensions significantly. Putin blamed the United States directly for assisting in this democratic breakthrough and helping to install what he saw as a pro-American puppet, President Mikheil Saakashvili. Immediately after the Rose Revolution, Putin sought to undermine Georgian democracy, ultimately invading in 2008 and recognizing two Georgian regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—as independent states. U.S.-Russian relations reached a new low point in 2008.

A year after the Rose Revolution, the most consequential democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world erupted in Ukraine in 2004, the Orange Revolution. In the years prior to that momentous event, Ukraine’s foreign-policy orientation under President Leonid Kuchma was relatively balanced between east and west, but with gradually improving ties between Kyiv and Moscow. That changed when a falsified presidential election in late 2004 brought hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets, eventually sweeping away Kuchma’s—and Putin’s—handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Instead, the prodemocratic and pro-western Orange Coalition led by President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko took power.

Compared to Serbia in 2000 or Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 was a much larger threat to Putin. First, the Orange Revolution occurred suddenly and in a much bigger and more strategic country on Russia’s border. The abrupt pivot to the West by Yushchenko and his allies left Putin facing the prospect that he had “lost” a country on which he placed tremendous symbolic and strategic importance.

To Putin, the Orange Revolution undermined a core objective of his grand strategy: to establish a privileged and exclusive sphere of influence across the territory that once comprised the Soviet Union. Putin believes in spheres of influence; that as a great power, Russia has a right to veto the sovereign political decisions of its neighbors. Putin also demands exclusivity in his neighborhood: Russia can be the only great power to exercise such privilege (or even develop close ties) with these countries. This position has hardened significantly since Putin’s conciliatory position of 2002 as Russia’s influence in Ukraine has waned and Ukraine’s citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape from Moscow’s grasp. Subservience was now required. As Putin explained in a recent historical article, in his view Ukrainians and Russians “were one people” whom he is seeking to reunite, even if through coercion. For Putin, therefore, the loss of Ukraine in 2004 to the West marked a major negative turning point in U.S.-Russian relations that was far more salient than the second wave of NATO expansion that was completed the same year.

Second, those Ukrainians who rose up in defense of their freedom were, in Putin’s own assessment, Slavic brethren with close historical, religious, and cultural ties to Russia. If it could happen in Kyiv, why not in Moscow? Several years later, it almost did happen in Russia when a series of mass protests erupted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in the wake of fraudulent parliamentary elections in December 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time in his decade-plus in power, ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten Putin’s grip on power. That popular uprising in Russia, occurring the same year as the Arab Spring, and then followed with Putin’s return to the Kremlin as president for a third term in 2012, marked another major negative turn in U.S.-Russian relations, ending the reset launched by Presidents Obama and Medvedev in 2009. Democratic mobilization, first the Middle East and then Russia—not NATO expansion—ended this last chapter of U.S.-Russian cooperation. There have been no new chapters of cooperation since.

But U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated ever further in 2014, again because of new democratic expansion. The next democratic mobilization to threaten Putin happened a second time in Ukraine in 2013–14. After the Orange Revolution in 2004, Putin did not invade Ukraine, but wielded other instruments of influence to help his protégé, Viktor Yanukovych, narrowly win the Ukrainian presidency six years later. Yanukovych, however, turned out not to be a loyal Kremlin servant, but tried to cultivate ties with both Russia and the West. Putin finally compelled Yanukovych to make a choice, and the Ukrainian president chose Russia in the fall of 2013 when he reneged on signing an EU association agreement in favor of membership in Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. To the surprise of everyone in Moscow, Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington, Yanukovych’s decision to scuttle this agreement with the EU triggered mass demonstrations in Ukraine again, bringing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets in what would become known as the Euromaidan or “Revolution of Dignity” to protest Yanukovych’s turn away from the democratic West. The street protests lasted several weeks, punctuated by the killing of dozens of peaceful protestors by Yanukovych’s government, the eventual collapse of that government and Yanukovych’s flight to Russia in February 2014, and a new pro-Western government taking power in Kyiv. Putin had “lost” Ukraine for the second time in a decade.

This time, Putin struck back with military force to punish the alleged American-backed, neo-Nazi usurpers in Kyiv. Russian armed forces seized Crimea; Moscow later annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. Putin also provided money, equipment, and soldiers to back separatists in eastern Ukraine, fueling a simmering war in Donbas for eight years, in which approximately 14,000 people have been killed. After invading, not before, Putin amped up his criticisms of NATO expansion as justification for his belligerent actions.

In response to this second Ukrainian democratic revolution, Putin concluded that cooption through elections and other nonmilitary means had to be augmented with greater coercive pressure, including military intervention. Since the Revolution of Dignity, Putin has waged an unprecedented war against Ukraine using a full spectrum of military, political, informational, social, and economic weapons in an attempt to destabilize and eventually topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

 

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault

This article from John Mearsheimer is getting a lot of attention, as well as the lecture video I posted the other night. 

Prescient, you might say. (And liberalism here means "classical" liberalism grounded in philosophies of the Enlightenment, from folks like Emmanuel Kant, John Locke, etc.). It's not the American ideological "liberalism" associated with an earlier version of the Democrat Party, now a radical, extreme left party, not *liberal* at all). 

At Foreign Affairs, "The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin":

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant—and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement—which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.

Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided—and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.

The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion...

 

Mick Ryan, War Transformed

At Amazon, Mick Ryan, War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict.

Moisés Naím, The Revenge of Power

Moisés Naím, The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century. 

Victoria Silvstedt

This woman is 5' 11'' --- an inch taller than I am. Would that still work? 

On Twitter.

Putin Follows Through on His Word

It's Pat Buchanan, at the American Conservative, "Putin Warned Us":

When Russia’s Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted. We’re not changing that.

In the Bucharest declaration of 2008, NATO had put Ukraine and Georgia, ever farther east in the Caucasus, on a path to membership in NATO and coverage under Article 5 of the treaty, which declares that an attack on any one member is an attack on all.

Unable to get a satisfactory answer to his demand, Putin invaded and settled the issue. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia will become members of NATO. Russia resolved that it would go to war to prevent that from happening, just as it did on Thursday.

Putin did exactly what he warned us he would do.

Whatever the character of the Russian president, now being hotly debated here in the USA, he has established his credibility. When Putin warns he will do something, he follows through.

Days into this Russia-Ukraine war, potentially the worst in Europe since 1945, two questions need to be answered: How did we get here? And where do we go from here?

How did we get to a place where Russia—believing its back is against a wall and the United States, by moving NATO ever closer to Russia’s borders, put it there—reached a point where it chose war with Ukraine rather than accept the fate and future it believed the West had in store for Mother Russia? ...

Keep reading. 

Interview With Professor John Mearsheimer

He's a controversial guy. I had to stop reading The Israel Lobby years ago, it was filled with so many anti-Israel tropes. 

He's smart though, and consistent. He's a scholar of neorealist theory of international politics, and he's been getting a lot of things right, and for a long time now. 

He's interviewed at the New Yorker. It's worth your time. See, "Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine." 

BONUS: Mearsheimer's lecture at the University of Chicago from 2015, "Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?":

U.S. and NATO Pressed on Ukraine Aid

 At WSJ, "As Russian Invasion of Ukraine Widens, the West’s Options Shrink":

Seven days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are coming under increasing pressure to do more to help Ukraine, even as they face diminishing options for doing so.

As Russia continues its push to capture urban areas, one of the more drastic options discussed publicly has been a no-fly zone, which would stop Russian aircraft from launching strikes over Ukraine, eliminating a key military tactic. But the idea has been dismissed by the U.S. and NATO countries.

“That is in many ways for many people, the unspoken question. Why not just engage militarily? But that’s not something any NATO member is thinking of doing. And there’s a reason for that, which is in order to have a no-fly zone above Ukraine, in the current circumstances, you would have to take decisions to shoot down Russian jets,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Wednesday. “And that’s not something that any Western country is contemplating.”

British officials say that while the no-fly zone has been discussed at senior levels, it isn’t a realistic option given the risks of it provoking a direct conflict with Moscow.

Creating a continuous, effective no-fly zone over Ukraine, particularly with several NATO nations, would require several hundred planes, not only to uphold the no-fly zone but to support those aircraft maintaining that no-fly zone. In addition, air forces across multiple nations would have to coordinate. And, should Russia attack NATO-member aircraft, that would be seen as an attack on the 30-member alliance.

The British government has said it would instead continue to impose more sanctions on Russian individuals, deliver more weapons to Ukraine and make it easier for refugees fleeing the conflict to settle in the U.K.

Sanctions, however, won’t have an immediate effect on the battlefield, Western leaders have acknowledged. “This is going to take time,” President Biden said last week as the U.S. began rolling out punitive financial measures that included cutting off some of Russia’s largest banks from the global financial system.

However, officials hope that the unprecedented economic hit will bite the Russian economy rapidly, meaning that as the bombs fall on Kyiv, there will be Russian bank runs and Russian businesses collapsing, showing real-world consequences for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A no-fly zone could be part of an eventual peace agreement, one official said.

While NATO members have rejected any notion of direct intervention, they have recently increased their defensive presence, with more than 100 jets now at high alert, operating from 30 locations, more than 120 ships on patrol from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and thousands more troops deployed to NATO’s east.

Mr. Putin’s reference to putting his nation’s nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert has also raised concerns among NATO allies about the potential risks of military involvement. There appears to be no consensus yet as to how the West would react to such an escalation, and one European diplomat suggested the nuclear-posture change was a bid to deflect attention away from the conduct of the war.

But if Mr. Putin did follow through with his threat, the nuclear-armed NATO members would put their nuclear arsenal on alert, officials said.

One NATO official speculated that Western countries could in such a scenario attempt to send more substantial support to Ukraine by private channels, without specifying what that would entail. A European official said this had already been discussed in government circles.

“The situation is escalating and Putin seems keen for it to escalate, he is following a logic of war,” the European official said.

On Friday, foreign ministers from NATO member states will hold emergency talks about Ukraine. Among the issues they will discuss, U.S. officials said, is how the alliance can support Ukraine, even though it is a non-NATO member. But officials conceded there aren’t many options.

Even the Western weapons shipments now streaming into Ukraine via Poland could lead to an escalation of hostilities between Russia and NATO, some officials fear, and the alliance members are divided on how much military assistance to provide. Over the weekend, the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said the bloc would send jet fighters to Ukraine, and, for the first time, finance member countries’ deliveries of offensive weapons to Kyiv.

Several officials familiar with the discussions said that there was never any agreement on such a move, which had merely been discussed among foreign ministers of the bloc. On Tuesday, officials in several countries that have the types of aircraft Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly said they were unwilling to provide them despite Mr. Borrell’s comment.

NATO and European officials said that there was a great concern about Russia attacking the supply lines that channel weapons and other materiel to Ukraine via Poland. The positioning of troops in Belarus as well as around Kyiv suggested that Russia was planning to cut off the western part of the country and end the shipments of arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

NATO members appear to accept that regardless of what measures they take, Mr. Putin appears set on widening the conflict...

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Alexander Vindman's Wife Delivers a Psychotic Statement for the Ages

Yep.

At Instapundit, "WELL, ANYONE WHO’D MARRY VINDMAN HAS TO BE CRAZY." 

Click through for the entire thread:

Dumb. https://t.co/B7rWV0KdQn

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) March 1, 2022

Putin the Powerful: Oligarchs Can't Take Out Russian Dictator

Somewhere I read that Vladdy's hold on power had weakened since last Thursday, especially since things were going so badly on the ground. 

Perhaps not.

See Max Seddon, at the Financial Times, "Russia’s oligarchs powerless to oppose Putin over Ukraine invasion: President responds to any criticism with reprisals, leaving business leaders with diminished influence":

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As Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine last week, Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s top businessmen in the Kremlin’s ornate Hall of the Order of St Catherine to discuss their response to the economic shocks that would follow.

The Russian president, seated about 20ft away in a conspicuous social-distancing measure, told them he had “no other choice” but to invade Ukraine — and, if they wanted to keep their businesses, neither did they, according to people briefed on the meeting.

“It was a pointless meeting. The main idea was to explain himself. The explanation was: ‘I get it, but I didn’t have any other way out.’ That’s really what he thinks,” one of them said.

The EU on Monday froze the assets and imposed travel bans on more than half a dozen of Russia’s most prominent businessmen in a move officials have said is aimed at compelling the country’s elite to demand Putin change course.

But the power dynamic of the meeting made for a much starker message to the assembled billionaires. He warned that anyone who avoided doing business with companies sanctioned by the west would face punishment under the law — implying that the oligarchs had to make a stand — while also stating that Russia would help companies hit by western sanctions.

The comprehensive guest list for the meeting, where attendees sat in alphabetical order, showed that any form of dissent has become a distant prospect as Putin’s power becomes near-absolute, people close to some of the attendees said.

Though some, such as banker Petr Aven and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, owner of the Sistema conglomerate, were among the first to make a fortune in Russia’s turbulent 1990s, they were outnumbered by the heads of the state-run banking and energy groups that now dominate Russia’s economy — many of whom have ties to Putin’s inner circle.

Mikhail Fridman, Aven’s business partner, has criticised the war in general terms but told reporters on Tuesday he did not want to attack Putin directly because it “will not have any impact for political decisions in Russia” while endangering his employees.

“Nobody really wants to suffer. But the message is we will have to,” said a senior state banker. “Being on the US sanctions list used to be a status symbol of patriotism. But now it’s a requirement. If you’re not on it, it’s suspicious.”

The meeting showed how far Russia — and Putin himself — had come since his first meeting with the oligarchs a few months after he took office in 2000.

Then, the fledgling leader offered a deal to the wealthy businessmen: keep the gains they had made from privatising Russian state assets after the Soviet Union’s collapse in return for pledging fealty and staying out of politics.

Since then, Putin has imposed his will on the oligarchs by responding to any criticism with reprisals, leaving them with vastly diminished influence — and some of them in prison, such as the former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in prison on tax and fraud charges that were largely seen by international observers as politically motivated.

Some who built their fortunes before Putin came to power — such as Khodorkovsky and the banker Sergei Pugachev — have left the country. A few other more recently minted businessmen have left the country or been arrested...

Russia Scrambles to Maintain Oil Sales, Lifeblood of Economy

It's stunning. These sanctions are unbelievable powerful, and all in real time, with shockingly swift effects.

And now Russia's energy sector is getting hammered.

At WSJ, "Refiners balk at buying Russia’s oil and banks refuse to finance shipments of Russian commodities, fearing the impact of financial sanctions":

In their broadside of sanctions on Russia, the U.S. and its allies are going out of their way to spare energy shipments and keep economies humming and voters warm.

The oil market went on strike anyway. Acting as if energy were in the crosshairs of Western sanctions officials, refiners balked at buying Russian oil and banks are refusing to finance shipments of Russian commodities, according to traders, oil executives and bankers.

The self-imposed embargo threatens to drive up energy prices globally by removing a gusher of oil from a market that was tight even before President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine. Russia, waging war and in need of revenue with its financial system in turmoil, is taking extreme steps to convince companies to buy its most precious commodity.

Before refiners and banks are certain they won’t fall afoul of complex restrictions in different jurisdictions, they won’t do business with Russian oil, traders and others involved in the market say. Market players also fear that measures that target oil exports directly could land as fighting in Ukraine intensifies.

“This is going to make it very complex to trade with Russia,” Sarah Hunt, a partner at law firm HFW who works with commodities traders, said of the sanctions laid out as of Monday. “These sanctions against Russia will have an incredible effect on global trade and on trade finance.”

Brent-crude futures, the benchmark in international energy markets, rose nearly 8% Tuesday to above $105 a barrel. In a sign that demand for Russian oil has evaporated, prices for the country’s flagship Urals crude moved in the opposite direction.

Traders are offering Urals at massive discounts of around $15 a barrel below the price of Brent—and even then not finding buyers. A drop in the price of Espo, a grade of Russian crude popular in Asia, suggests refiners in Japan and South Korea are hitting pause on purchases alongside those in Europe and the U.S.

“The market is starting to fail,” said a person at a major commodities trading house.

Companies including Vitol and Trafigura Group Pte. Ltd.—among the world’s biggest independent oil traders—hold Russian oil bought under long-term deals. They were unable to sell Tuesday, people familiar with their operations say.

In Europe, Swedish refiner Preem AB and Finland’s Neste Oyj say they have stopped Russian oil purchases and mostly replaced them with Northern European oil purchases. Valero Energy Corp., a Texas-based refining company, has suspended all future purchases of Russian oil, people familiar with the decision said.

For now, Russia is exporting about as much oil as it was on the eve of Thursday’s invasion. But those flows, based on sales made before the war, will slow drastically in the coming weeks once cargoes have been delivered, traders and analysts say.

Russia was seen as having the upper hand when it came to energy in its confrontation with the West. In peacetime, Russian crude and other varieties of oil get funneled into refineries in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. There, it gets converted into fuels that power fleets of cars and other forms of economic activity.

Europe especially relies on Russia for much of its energy needs, both for natural gas to heat homes and fuel electricity plants, but also the oil that travels through pipelines directly into refineries in Germany, Poland, Slovakia and elsewhere. Some of that oil transits through Ukraine.

The importance of Russia’s energy industry—exporter of about 7.5% of the world’s oil—to the global economy led Western governments to carve oil and gas out of their sanctions. In cutting some but not all banks from the financial system’s messaging infrastructure, Swift, the U.S. and others left avenues for traders to pay for oil and gas.

As prices for Russian crude tanked last week, companies in India vacuumed up around seven million barrels of Urals oil, according to people familiar with the matter. Even there, however, companies are taking steps to limit sanctions risk.

On Monday, Indian Oil Corp. sent a letter to crude traders stating it would buy Russian oil only if delivery was included, according to a person familiar with the matter and a document seen by The Wall Street Journal. In the document, the Indian refining giant said it would no longer buy two grades of Russian oil, as well as a blend of Kazakh oil, if it had to take responsibility for transporting the oil. This was because some shipping companies are hesitant to load Russian crude, the person said. Indian Oil didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment...