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Biden Enjoys Boost in His Job Approval Ratings Following the State of the Union... A Majority Approve of Biden’s Handling of Conflict in Ukraine... Overwhelming Support Exists for Economic Sanctions.
Following a State of the Union address which underscored President Joe Biden’s commitment to promoting democracy across the world, the president enjoys a bounce in his handling of the crisis in Ukraine. His standing among the American people has also improved on the issues of the economy and the coronavirus pandemic. While Biden’s bounce is predominantly among his Democratic base, he also enjoys moderate gains among independents. Of note, rare, bipartisan consensus exists on the issue of sanctions levied against Russia. Most Americans, regardless of party, support these sanctions, and nearly seven in ten favor them even if it means higher energy prices domestically.
Footage appears to show the moment a Russian gunship helicopter was shot down by a man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS) in the Kyiv Oblast province of Ukraine.
In the video, a helicopter immediately bursts into flames and crashes to the ground after being targeted by a weapon.
The footage was shared on Twitter by the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine on Saturday morning. "This is how the Russian occupiers are dying," the ministry said in the caption. "This time in a helicopter!"
It was also circulated on Facebook by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine...
Up to eight paratroopers, in addition to its two-person crew, can conduct fire with small arms through the openings in the side windows of these helicopters. Mil Mi-24 Hind gunships have been in use since 1970.
The helicopter appears to have been shot down by an FIM-92 Stinger MANPADS, according to the military and civil aviation website The Aviationist. These man-portable air-defense systems developed in the US can operate as an infrared homing surface-to-air missile.
Several nations have said they are providing Stinger missiles to the Ukrainian forces amid the Russian invasion, including Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands, and the U.S. ...
I was thinking about this as I was writing my earlier entry on establishing a "no-fly zone" over Ukaine. My thought's were more American F-16s than Russian MIGs, but hey, it's like a new cold war, right?
The U.S. is exploring a deal in which Poland would send Soviet-era aircraft to Ukraine in return for American F-16 jet fighters, U.S. officials said Saturday, in the latest bid to help Ukraine respond to Russia’s invasion.
The deal would require White House approval and congressional action, U.S. officials said.
The disclosure of a possible deal followed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s impassioned plea to Capitol Hill for assistance in obtaining more lethal military aid, especially Russian-made jet fighters that Ukrainian pilots can fly. Mr. Zelensky also supported a proposal to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil, in a video call Saturday morning with members of Congress.
There were more than 200 House and Senate members on the call, said people who participated. Mr. Zelensky spoke for about 25 minutes before taking questions.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) asked Mr. Zelensky what one thing he needed most, according to two people on the call. The Ukrainian president replied with the need for jet fighters. He also brought up instituting a no-fly zone over Ukraine, but said, through a translator, “if you can’t do that, at least get me planes,” according to a person on the call.
Eastern European allies are in possession of Russian military jets that potentially could be transferred to Ukraine. Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said that the U.S. should help make possible the transfer of the aircraft. “We must eliminate every obstacle to providing every measure of support to Ukraine to include finding a way for the United States to compensate our Eastern European partners who wish to donate their Soviet-style aircraft to Ukraine,” he said in a statement.
Another lawmaker said in an interview that Congress could direct funds in a pending spending bill to replenish the stockpiles of European allies.
Mr. Zelensky said that the jets were more important than the Stinger antiaircraft missiles that the U.S. has greenlighted.
A U.S. defense official said other allied nations are seeking to provide Ukraine with Russian aircraft. The U.S. military would backfill with American aircraft...
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Russia’s strategy of seizing control of Ukraine’s power generation by attacking its fleet of nuclear reactors has prompted global fears of a Chernobyl-style nuclear catastrophe.
On Friday, AEDT, Russian troops seized the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe after a middle-of-the-night attack that set it on fire. Firefighters extinguished the blaze, and no radiation was released, UN and Ukrainian officials said...
The attack triggered global alarm and fear of a catastrophe that could dwarf the world’s worst nuclear disaster, at Ukraine’s Chernobyl in 1986. In an emotional nighttime speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he feared an explosion that would be “the end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe.” ...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
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, NATOis 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.
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":
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).
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...
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