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."

Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows

From the blurb:

Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many. Thus we also hear about Ivan’s cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who got Ivan sent to the camps. Then a brilliant short play interrupts the narrative: a series of informers steps forward, each making excuses for the inexcusable things that he did—inexcusable and yet, the informers plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan’s lover, who tells about her eager involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932–33, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants. Here Everything Flows attains an unbearable lucidity comparable to the last cantos of Dante’s Inferno.

And purchase here. 

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