Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow

At the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war, this book was literally too hot. Impossible to obtain.

Now Clover's out with a new edition, at Amazon, Black Wind, White Snow: Russia's New Nationalism.

Entering Sixth Month of War, Ukraine Faces Thorny Dilemmas (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Entering a sixth month of war, Ukraine faces thorny dilemmas":

KYIV, Ukraine — The explosion is invariably spectacular: a gigantic spewing fireball, often followed by a slow-motion airborne cascade of secondary blasts. As soon as such footage finds its way online, exultant Ukrainian commentary erupts: “It’s HIMARS o’clock!” As its war with Russia enters a sixth month, Ukraine has been celebrating recent battlefield successes generated by sophisticated launchers known as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. The Pentagon has provided or promised a dozen of the advanced systems, capable of hitting targets up to 50 miles away.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of its smaller neighbor on Feb. 24, the conflict has veered from Moscow’s initial failed effort to capture the capital, Kyiv, to substantial Ukrainian territorial losses this summer in the country’s eastern industrial heartland.

Now the combat calculus appears to be shifting yet again, with Ukrainian forces, assisted by their new weaponry, striking dozens of sites, including Russian ammunition dumps, troop concentrations and bridges. That is seen as likely preparation for an offensive to regain Russian-held territory in the country’s south, near the Black Sea coast.

“Ukrainian forces are now using long-range rocket systems to great effect,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said last week during a virtual meeting of 50 countries that are donating equipment to Ukraine. “I think that everyone here understands the difference that they’ve made on the ground.”

That battlefield effect, however, leaves Ukrainian officials treading a fine line.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials continue to issue forceful pleas for more Western weaponry, declaring bluntly that Ukraine cannot seize the military initiative without far more donated armaments. Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, made an unusual personal appearance Wednesday before Congress, where she graphically invoked civilian suffering at Russian hands while also appealing for additional military materiel.

But at the same time, Zelensky and his lieutenants seek to depict a landscape in which their armed forces already may be poised to gain the upper hand — implicitly promising that the country’s sacrifice of lives, together with Western allies’ growing economic and energy strains stemming from the war, will ultimately prove worthwhile.

“We have a significant potential for the advance of our forces on the front, and for the infliction of significant new losses on the occupiers,” Zelensky said late Thursday in his nightly address to the country.

The two messages aren’t necessarily contradictory. Calibrating them, however, is a difficult task.

Too much triumphalism, while boosting domestic morale, can undercut the urgency of appeals for more Western weaponry. By contrast, any appearance of defeatism could accelerate outside calls for Zelensky to agree to territorial concessions to Moscow and perhaps end the fighting before winter sets in.

The advent of cold weather will mean Ukraine’s European allies face a far more intense Kremlin-inflicted energy crunch. Austin acknowledged as much, citing the challenges in keeping up the pressure on Russia.

“We’re pushing hard to maintain and intensify the momentum of donations,” he said. “There’s no question that this will always be hard work, making sure that we maintain unity.”

On the world stage, Ukraine consistently portrays Russia as a perfidious power that cannot be trusted to honor international agreements — and Moscow’s actions often make that characterization compelling.

On Saturday, Russian missiles struck Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa, the Ukrainian military said, only one day after the sealing of a U.N.- and Turkish-brokered deal to allow grain exports from Black Sea ports meant to ease global food shortfalls caused by the war.

“That’s all you should know about Russians and agreements,” tweeted Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. He argued that the episode bolstered the case for more and better Western weapons for Ukraine.

With the advent of a sixth month of fighting — a psychological crossing into long-war territory — the Kremlin is saying it will ramp up its military aims, brushing aside an earlier stated focus on the industrial eastern heartland, much of which it has seized...

The Anatomy of Germany's Reliance on Russian Natural Gas

Just announced, Putin's cutting natural gas deliveries to Europe by 20 percent. At WSJ, "Russia to Cut Europe’s Gas Flow via Nord Stream to 20%."

And earlier, at Der Spiegel, "The Anatomy of Germany's Reliance on Russian Natural Gas":

The Americans warned Germany, as did the Eastern Europeans. But Germany just continued buying more and more natural gas from Russia. The addiction stretches back several decades, and it is full of misjudgments and errors.

Matthias Warnig. If you don’t know the name, he is a German natural gas executive. And a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin's. The czar's loyal courier. Or the dark Rasputin of German gas policy. Whichever you like.

Warnig, CEO of Nord Stream AG, the company behind the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline that leads from Russia to Germany, is sitting in the lobby of a Berlin hotel in early May. He has the self-confidence of a man who has his own initials stitched onto his shirts. Or, should we say, Warnig had that self-confidence? Was a friend of Putin’s? Thought that he knew Russia?

It almost certainly isn't good for your self-confidence when you end up on an American sanctions list and can no longer withdraw money from the cash machine as a result – and even the online shop where you used to order your coffee capsules has cut ties with you. But even more than self-confidence, say those close to him, Warnig has lost his self-conviction.

Just a week prior to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Warnig was in Moscow. Even at that late date, he still thought that Putin wouldn’t simply throw away all that Warnig had been working toward for half his life: The Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream 2. Investments adding up to over 9.5 billion euros. The German-Russian energy partnership that also played a significant role in Germany's reunification – at least in Warnig's view. Now, he is faced with digesting his radical misjudgment of his friend Vladimir.

Peter Altmaier is also intimately familiar with Germany's natural gas imports and the reliance on Russia that expanded year after year. The mutual dependence – money for gas. Altmaier, sitting in a Berlin beer garden on a recent afternoon, approaches it with the sobriety of the historian he always wanted to be. But instead of pursuing his academic inclinations, he became former Chancellor Angela Merkel's environment minister, her chief of staff and, in his last cabinet position, economics minister, a post he held until the end of 2021.

No, Altmaier says, he wasn't wrong about Putin, insisting he had long suspected the Russian president might be dangerous. He says that when Putin marched into Georgia in 2008, he jettisoned any illusions that he might still have held about what the Russian president was capable of: pure brute force. But Altmaier erred nonetheless, not believing that it would ever be possible for Germany to come up with the idea of withdrawing from Russian gas on its own accord. He wasn't prepared for it, and neither was the country he helped lead. In a sense, he is the personification of the German-Russian schizophrenia – political opponents but natural gas allies – which was to guarantee cheap natural gas as a bridge to a new era. Gas was seen as the buffer for Germany's shift to renewable energies, a shift that only made halting progress during Altmaier's tenure as economics minister. Today, he finds himself forced to admit that he miscalculated regarding the time Germany had at its disposal to make the shift.

Jürgen Hambrecht also knows plenty about natural gas, in the way a junkie knows all about the drug he yearns for and knows precisely how to obtain it. Hambrecht was a natural gas addict. Or rather, the company that he led for many years was addicted: BASF, the multinational chemicals conglomerate based in Ludwigshafen, one of the largest consumers of natural gas and energy in the republic. Hambrecht receives his guest in the BASF restaurant, where the pairing of a glass of Riesling with the fish is no mistake – just as Hambrecht fails to see where his company might otherwise have committed errors. BASF was a main driver of Germany's gas romance with Russia, and actively helped bring the gas into the country through its subsidiary Wintershall. Good, cheap tonic, mainlined through a pipeline and transformed into chemicals by BASF and used as energy for the country.

It's just that Germany's political leaders, Hambrecht believes, went down the wrong path. First, the phaseout of nuclear energy, and then the phaseout of coal, amounting to an overreliance on natural gas from Russia. What should be done now? Hambrecht doesn't see liquefied natural gas and green hydrogen, both of which won't really be available within the decade, as real alternatives. "We can't just turn off the gas," Hambrecht warns, and he is also opposed to a natural gas embargo. At BASF alone, the jobs of some 40,000 people depend on reliable natural gas inflows. What Hambrecht has trouble understanding, though, is how Germany could have made such huge mistakes in its energy policy...

Keep reading.

 

Shinzo Abe's Influence Was Still Evident Long After He Left Office

Following-up, "Shinzo Abe Assassinated: Former Prime Minister Was Leader For a New, Stronger Japan (VIDEO)."

At the New York Times, "Japan’s longest-serving prime minister became perhaps the most transformational politician in the country’s post-World War II history":

WASHINGTON — In his record-breaking run as prime minister, Shinzo Abe never achieved his goal of revising Japan’s Constitution to transform his country into what the Japanese call a “normal nation,” able to employ its military to back up its national interests like any other.

Nor did he restore Japan’s technological edge and economic prowess to the fearsome levels of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Japan was regarded as China is today — as the world’s No. 2 economy that, with organization and cunning and central planning, could soon be No. 1.

But his assassination in the city of Nara on Friday was a reminder that he managed, nonetheless, to become perhaps the most transformational politician in Japan’s post-World War II history, even as he spoke in the maddeningly bland terms that Japanese politicians regard as a survival skill.

After failing to resolve longstanding disputes with Russia and China, he edged the country closer to the United States and most of its Pacific allies (except South Korea, where old animosities ruled).

He created Japan’s first national security council and reinterpreted — almost by fiat — the constitutional restrictions he could not rewrite, so that for the first time Japan was committed to the “collective defense” of its allies. He spent more on defense than most Japanese politicians thought wise.

“We didn’t know what we were going to get when Abe came to office with this hard nationalist reputation,” said Richard Samuels, the director of the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. and the author of books on Japan’s military and intelligence capabilities. “What we got was a pragmatic realist who understood the limits of Japan’s power, and who knew it wasn’t going to be able to balance China’s rise on its own. So he designed a new system.”

Mr. Abe was out of office by the time Russia invaded Ukraine this year. But his influence was still evident as Japan, after 10 weeks of hesitation, declared it would phase out Russian coal and oil imports. Mr. Abe pushed further, suggesting that it was time for Japan to establish some kind of nuclear sharing agreement with the United States — breaking his country’s longtime taboo on even discussing the wisdom of possessing an arsenal of its own.

His efforts to loosen the restraints on Japan that date back to its postwar, American-written Constitution reflected a recognition that Japan needed its allies more than ever. But alliances meant that defense commitments went both ways. China loomed larger, North Korea kept lobbing missiles across the Sea of Japan and Mr. Abe believed that he needed to preserve his country’s relationship with Washington, even if that meant delivering a gold-plated golf club to Donald J. Trump at Trump Tower days after he was elected president.

Mr. Abe was not killed for his hard-line views, which at moments triggered street protests and peace rallies in Japan, at least according to initial assessments. Nor was his killing a return to the era of “Government by Assassination,” the title that Hugh Byas, the New York Times bureau chief in Tokyo in the 1930s, gave his memoir of an era of turmoil.

Mr. Byas recounted the last killing of a current or former Japanese prime minister: Tsuyoshi Inukai was killed in 1932 as part of a plot by Imperial Japanese Navy officers that seemed intended to provoke a war with the United States nine years before Pearl Harbor.

In the postwar era, political assassinations have been rare in Japan: a Socialist leader was murdered in 1960 with a sword, and the mayor of Nagasaki was shot dead in 2007, though that appeared to be over a personal dispute. And the American ambassador to Japan in the 1960s, Edwin O. Reischauer, was stabbed in the thigh by a 19-year-old Japanese man; Mr. Reischauer survived and returned to his post as Harvard’s leading scholar of Japanese politics.

Mr. Abe’s death will now set off a race to be the next leader of one of the most powerful factions of the Liberal Democratic Party. And the shock of it, President Biden said on Friday during a visit to the C.I.A., will have “a profound impact on the psyche of the Japanese people.”

But it will hardly create a political earthquake. Mr. Abe left office, partly because of poor health, two years ago. And in the pantheon of current world leaders, he could not match the powers of Presidents Xi Jinping of China or Vladimir V. Putin of Russia; Japan’s humbling recession in the 1990s damaged its ranking as a superpower.

But his influence, scholars say, will be lasting. “What Abe did was transform the national security state in Japan,” said Michael J. Green, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration who dealt with Mr. Abe often. Mr. Green’s book “Line of Advantage: Japan’s Grand Strategy in the Era of Abe Shinzo” argues that it was Mr. Abe who helped push the West to counter China’s increasingly aggressive actions in Asia...

Keep reading.

 

War of Attrition

At WSJ, "Russia’s Tactical Shift in Ukraine Raises Prospect of Protracted War":

Kyiv says it needs more Western weapons and help training new soldiers to turn the tide.

KYIV, Ukraine—Russia’s steady advances in eastern Ukraine, relying on superior firepower and larger numbers of troops, are grinding down Ukraine’s military and setting the stage for a protracted war of attrition in which Kyiv needs more Western weapons and help training new soldiers to turn the tide.

After early missteps, Russia has found tactics that are working. In the invasion’s opening phase, Moscow’s armies tried to make daring thrusts deep into Ukrainian territory. They largely failed and lost elite units in the process. Now, Russian forces are advancing by increments under the cover of artillery.

Russia is massing “a very heavy concentration of artillery and armor in every square kilometer that we are unable to cope with,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is giving them the advantage.”

Ukrainian forces are seeking to slow the Russian advance, wearing them down and preparing to counterattack when they can bring more Western weapons to bear.

Ukraine has landed some counter-blows in the past few days with long-range rocket launchers from the U.S. and other Western allies. But Russia’s tactical shift raises questions for Ukraine’s backers, who must now confront the possibility of a long, drawn-out conflict.

Russia seized the city of Lysychansk at the weekend, completing the takeover of the Luhansk region, and is now bombarding Ukraine’s remaining strongholds in neighboring Donetsk.

Despite narrowing its immediate objectives to taking Ukraine’s east, Russia’s strategic goal of controlling Ukraine remains unchanged. The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said Tuesday that Russia is aiming to demilitarize Ukraine and force it to adopt neutral status, according to Russian state news agency RIA.

Such statements suggest “that the Kremlin is preparing for a protracted war with the intention of taking much larger portions of Ukraine,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in an analysis Tuesday.

Moscow’s success in the east recalls some of Russia’s previous wars. As in Chechnya in the 1990s, Russia is offsetting the shortcomings of its ground forces by using massed firepower.

Ukraine is trying to impose high costs on the advancing Russians with fierce resistance, while also preserving troop strength by slowly falling back to more defensible positions as it awaits flows of heavy weapons from the West. It took Russia two months to take the city of Severodonetsk.

Some Western leaders say they fear Ukraine won’t be able to win, despite its fierce determination, as the conflict further erodes the country’s economy and its military struggles against Russia’s advantage in sheer numbers.

While the West has extended military aid to Ukraine, Kyiv says it needs more and warns that it will take time to train soldiers to use the multiple new weapons systems being delivered by the U.S. and its allies.

In a report this week, the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute think tank said Ukraine needs long-range artillery systems and electronic warfare equipment to counter Russia’s own advanced systems.

The report said that Ukraine’s allies are capable of making up the shortfalls. But, in a nod to the complications of operating too many different weapons systems, the report said success “cannot be achieved through the piecemeal delivery of a large number of different fleets of equipment, each with separate training, maintenance and logistical needs.”

Mr. Danilov said that the Ukraine army has used so many of its Soviet-era armaments and ammunition that it is gradually becoming a force that will have to rely on NATO weaponry.

He said the arrival of U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or Himars, last month has enabled Ukraine to strike precisely at Russian targets beyond the front lines that were previously beyond the reach of Ukrainian guns.

Mr. Danilov said nine mobile Himars and similar rocket-launch systems donated by the U.S. and its allies are now operating inside Ukraine with deadly effect. The Russians “are defenseless against them,” he said. “They are very worried.”

A Himars strike devastated a command post in the east Ukrainian town of Izyum last week, and on Monday a top Ukrainian official confirmed that Himars were used to bombard Snake Island, a small but significant outpost in the Black Sea that Russia abandoned last week.

But Mr. Danilov said Ukraine would need dozens more Himars launchers to shift the fighting in eastern Ukraine. For now, he said, Ukraine must fight a defensive war.

The Royal United Services Institute report noted that Ukraine’s paucity of skilled infantry and armored-vehicle operators limit its abilities to launch serious counteroffensives. Russia’s artillery is also successfully targeting the Ukrainian military so that it is unable to mount attacks, the report said.

Mr. Danilov said Russia’s own arsenal is showing signs of running low four months after launching its invasion, saying that it no longer has the strength to launch attacks on more than one front.

Moscow has also increasingly been sending lower-precision Soviet-era missiles deep into Ukrainian territory, with less regard for whether they hit civilian targets, he said. Last week, one missile landed in a neighborhood in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa, where Ukrainian officials said at least 21 civilians were killed.

Mr. Danilov said the missile campaign was intended to blunt support for the war among the Ukrainian public, an overwhelming share of whom still say it would be unacceptable to reach a peace deal with Moscow by ceding territory lost to Russian forces.

Mr. Danilov said that the high level of support for some kind of Ukrainian counterattack may be a rubbing point with some of Ukraine’s allies, who have pledged to support Ukraine until it wins, without specifying what victory means...

More:

The Ukrainian PM dropped the number in a presentation yesterday.

Ukraine's entire GDP is $150 billion.

One of the biggest shakedowns in world history, only second to COVID Mania.https://t.co/mVaZtPvToM

— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com (@JordanSchachtel) July 6, 2022

 

Markets Suffer Worst First Half of a Year in Decades

At the Wall Street Journal, "Investors gird for more volatility; almost everything—from stocks to bonds and crypto—falls to start 2022":

Global markets closed out their most bruising first half of a year in decades, leaving investors bracing for the prospect of further losses.

Accelerating inflation and rising interest rates fueled a monthslong rout that left few markets unscathed. The S&P 500 fell 21% through Thursday, suffering its worst first half of a year since 1970, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Investment-grade bonds, as measured by the iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond exchange-traded fund, lost 11%—posting their worst start to a year in history.

Stocks and bonds in emerging markets tumbled, hurt by slowing growth. And cryptocurrencies came crashing down, saddling individual investors and hedge funds alike with steep losses.

About the only thing that rose in the first half was commodities prices. Oil prices surged above $100 a barrel, and U.S. gas prices hit records after the Russia-Ukraine war upended imports from Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer.

Now, investors seem to be in agreement about only one thing: More volatility is ahead. That is because central banks from the U.S. to India and New Zealand plan to keep raising interest rates to try to rein in inflation. The moves will likely slow down growth, potentially tipping economies into recession and generating further tumult across markets.

“That’s the biggest risk right now—inflation and the Fed,” said Katie Nixon, chief investment officer for Northern Trust Wealth Management.

Ms. Nixon said she would be keeping a close eye on economic data to gauge how much rising interest rates are weighing on growth over the next few months. Her firm has kept money in U.S. stocks, wagering the economy will slow down but avoid a recession. It has also put money into companies focused on natural resources, a bet that should pay off if inflation persists for longer than it expects.

“You don’t want to be whipsawed by the markets,” she said.

The good news for investors is that markets haven’t always done poorly after suffering big losses in the first half of the year. In fact, history shows they have often done the opposite.

When the S&P 500 has fallen at least 15% the first six months of the year, as it did in 1932, 1939, 1940, 1962 and 1970, it has risen an average of 24% in the second half, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

One reason markets have often snapped back after big pullbacks: Investors have eventually stepped in, wagering prices have fallen too far. Fund managers currently have larger-than-average cash positions, smaller-than-average equities positions and a markedly high degree of pessimism about the economy, Bank of America found in its June survey of investors. Those factors, among others, make markets look “painfully oversold”—and thus potentially ripe for a rally, the bank’s strategists said in a separate report.

But even those finding buying opportunities these days say they are focusing on specific companies, instead of buying broadly. They concede that the current economic environment—in which inflation is high, borrowing costs are rising and growth is expected to slow—makes it difficult to be enthusiastic about many parts of the market.

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal in June said they saw a 44% probability of a recession in the U.S. in the next 12 months, compared with 18% in January.

History also has shown the Fed has seldom been able to pull off a “soft landing,” a scenario in which it slows the economy enough to rein in inflation but avoids tightening monetary policy to the point of causing a recession. The U.S. went into recession four of the last six times the Fed began raising interest rates, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that looked at monetary policy tightening cycles since the 1980s.

“The runway for the Fed to manage a soft landing is not only narrow but also winding and bumpy,” said Lauren Goodwin, economist and portfolio strategist at New York Life Investments...

A Manifesto on National Conservatism

This is a clarifying document with much to like (even more so, seeing it moved one writer at the Washington Post to attack it as "fascist"). 

Some parts are just okay, though. 

The document can't reconcile America's role as the "indispensable nation" in world affairs with the current domestic populist isolationist zeitgeist. The United States is simply too powerful to assume that we can completely shrink from what the authors call "liberal imperialism." Political fashions come and go. We've had major populist movements for reform previously, which, for example, later tailed-off into a more New Deal-style liberalism, that is, radical progressive statism, etc. The same in foreign policy. Should Russia and China agree to formally ally against the U.S., and to threaten U.S. interests beyond Ukraine --- say, with a Russian war in Western Europe or the establishment of Chinese forward operating bases in Latin America --- things will change, and the U.S., in its role as the world's liberal hegemon, will be forced to act according to the pressures of national security in an anarchic world of interstate competition and power shifts. 

The manifesto's a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation and is endorsed by such big name MAGA-esque figures as Michael Anton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Julie Kelly, among others.

See, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles." It's a ten-point program. Here's 8-10:

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

RTWT. 

Russia’s War on Ukraine at 100 Days Has No End in Sight, Threatening Global Costs

Putin sure has some staying power, because this cluster must be causing some inside assessments of his leadership and power. Somebody's gotta cross the Rubicon, breach the Kremlin, and get him out of there.

At the Wall Street Journal, "A war of attrition for Ukraine’s survival—and Putin’s vision of Russia—devours both countries’ resources while hurting the world economy":

After 100 days, Russia’s war on Ukraine is turning into a bloody slog with no end in sight, causing mounting devastation in Ukraine and prolonged costs world-wide.

The biggest conflict between European states since World War II has undergone swings of fortune that offer a reminder of war’s unpredictability. The failure of Russia’s early blitzkrieg fueled Ukrainian confidence that is ebbing as Russia concentrates its firepower on a narrower, grinding advance.

On Friday, Russian forces advanced behind heavy artillery barrages in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, where they have slowly but steadily gained ground, sending tens of thousands of civilians fleeing westward.

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky marked 100 days of war with a somber but defiant video message. “The armed forces of Ukraine are here,” he said. “Most importantly, our people–the people of our nation– are here. We have been defending our country for 100 days already. Victory will be ours! Glory to Ukraine!”

Many Western governments fear a destructive stalemate looms, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s defenders locked in a struggle that is viewed as existential by both.

Around 6.9 million Ukrainians have left the country since the war began, according to the United Nations, with Poland alone receiving 3.7 million, although some are returning home. Millions more Ukrainians have been displaced internally by the Russian onslaught. The invasion has devastated cities in Ukraine’s east, including Mariupol, where at least 22,000 residents were killed during the weekslong Russian siege, according to local officials.

Ukrainian and international investigators are gathering evidence of possible war crimes in areas where Russian troops killed and mistreated civilians. Kyiv has accused Moscow of forcibly deporting large numbers of Ukrainians to Russia, including many children.

Mr. Zelensky said Thursday that Russia now controls 20% of his country’s territory. The problem for Kyiv—and for Western European governments proposing a cease-fire—is that Russia has seized much of the industrial heartlands of Ukraine’s east and vast tracts of its fertile agricultural land, while blocking Ukraine’s access to the sea, needed for exports.

That threatens to leave Ukraine as a barely viable state surviving on Western giving. Ukraine needs roughly $5 billion every month to cover essential government services and keep its battered economy functioning, officials in Kyiv have said, in addition to humanitarian aid and armaments.

Russia, meanwhile, faces a deep recession this year from Western sanctions and a long-term erosion of its economic potential. Absent an unexpected collapse by one side, a war of attrition looms that could steadily devour the resources of both countries.

The stakes are too high for Ukraine or Russia to back down. The war also threatens two long-accepted pillars of global order: The principle that territory can’t be annexed by force, and that the seas are free to all nations’ ships.

The war has made the world poorer. By driving up food and energy prices, it has complicated the troubled global recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The disruption of long-established energy and food supply relationships leaves much of the world facing a protracted and costly economic adaptation.

“The time of cheap fossil-fuel energy is over,” German economy minister Robert Habeck said recently.

Russia’s expansionism has brought the world’s advanced countries closer politically. But it has also exposed gaps in interests and outlooks between the West and the poorer global South, which has remained largely neutral, and where Russia’s narrative of anti-Western grievances—echoed by China—has many sympathizers.

With no outright Ukrainian victory in sight, the Biden administration has begun to emphasize that its goal is to increase Kyiv’s leverage for potential negotiations with Moscow...

 Still more.

More Cracks in the Western Front

Following-up, "Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia's War in Ukraine."

At WSJ, "Ukraine’s Allies Split on Heavy-Weapons Shipments, War Outlook (WSJ Germany correspondent Bojan Pancevski)":

Bojan Pancevski: Hi there.

Luke Vargas: Okay, so tell us about this split that is beginning to emerge now within NATO and how significant a split it is?

Bojan Pancevski: Well, three months after the start of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, cracks are beginning to appear in the Western front against Russia and in the NATO support of Ukraine. Essentially, there are two blocks, two school of thoughts, if you will. On one hand, you have the United States, the UK, and a group of Central and Northern European nations, such as Poland and the Baltic countries who believe that Ukraine can and should win the war. They believe all stops should be pulled in order to provide military assistance to Kiev in order to be able to win. On the other hand, you have a group of Western European nations, which are led by Paris and Berlin, who are not actually outright saying that Ukraine must win the war. They're saying Russia should not be allowed to win, and they're supporting Ukraine financially and militarily, but there have not been sending the kind of quantity and quality of military supply that we've seen coming from this other block. So to put things into a context, if you see Germany is the biggest economy of Europe, it has a population of well over 83 million people, and it has so far sent, according to government estimates, military aid worth of something around 200 million Euros. Whereas Estonia, a tiny little country in the north of Europe that actually borders Russia and it has a population of just over one million, has sent military aid worth well over 220 million Euros, including heavy artillery. That discrepancy just shows that there's different level of commitment. Equally so, that this is true for France. France has only sent, I think, 12 pieces of military equipment, whereas Poland, for example, which is a much poorer country, economically speaking, has sent 240 tanks to Ukraine.

Luke Vargas: And, Bojan, what has brought about this divergence in approach?

Bojan Pancevski: Well, I think when the war started, pretty much everyone was taken aback. There was ample Western, and especially, U.S. and British intelligence about what was going to happen. When it finally happened, governments were taken aback. It was a watershed moment. So I don't think they had preconceived policy for this war of attrition, which we are now seeing. I don't think they had a pre-fabricated policy for this, and I think the policy is kind of crystallizing as we speak. I think policy makers in Berlin and in Paris and elsewhere that I've spoken to seem to think that we are in for the long haul. It's a very challenging situation. There is a looming recession all across Europe. Energy prices are soaring. They're fueling the already existing inflation, and they have huge concerns about the political backlash of that. I think they would like to see the crisis resolve sooner rather than later. The war is comparatively distant from them physically. If you sit in Paris or Berlin, you're not seeing millions and millions of Ukrainian refugees like Poland is seeing. I think every seventh person in Poland now is Ukrainian. Also, historically speaking, Poland and (inaudible) countries and the Czech Republic have been the dominion of the Soviet Union. And they have, historically speaking, a much more tense relationship to Russia. They're not thinking about trade when they think about Moscow. They don't think about gas and oil, they're mainly thinking about a potential aggressor. They see the invasion of Ukraine as a prelude to a possible wider front against the European Union, against NATO, against themselves. I think that is the fundamental difference. There's a difference in perception for someone sitting in Berlin or Paris, this is not an existential threat. For someone sitting in Warsaw or Tallinn in Estonia, this is a war against Europe itself.

Luke Vargas: How is this French and German stance being received within Ukraine, and within NATO, can the Alliance actually reconcile this split that seems to be emerging within its ranks?

Bojan Pancevski: Well, I think Kiev has been on the record without perhaps singling out Germany or France has been quite critical of these type of efforts. I think the noises here from Kiev and from Kiev's diplomats across Europe and the Western world, is that what they need is weapons. They need more and more and more weapons. Now, how will that play out in the coming months? It's very difficult to tell. Of course, it must be said that the reluctance of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, perhaps, or the Netherlands or any other Western European country to send their own weapons to Ukraine doesn't obviously stop the United States or Great Britain or Poland, for that matter, from doing so. The bulk of the Western support has been coming from those countries, and I think it continues to flow into Ukraine. With the caveat that Eastern European nations such as Poland will surely soon reach the limit of what they can actually send to Ukraine without jeopardizing their own security. And, basically, the only country that pretty much has a limitless capacity to support Ukraine at this stage is the United States, and possibly to an extent, Great Britain...

 

Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia's War in Ukraine

Yeah, I'll bet. 

Problem is Ukraine won't make it without Western help, so if "the West" wants to preserve Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, it'll be the United States that makes it happen. 

Congress just approved $40 billion, against the wishes of just about everyone on Twitter, if that matters. I can't disagree with them. We have so many needs at home, and here we are sending tens of billions of dollars across the pond. For what? How U.S. national security is tied to Western Europe's is not very well defined these days, and I can't for the life of me see how the country will support more "endless wars" via the national checkbook when we just bailed out of Afghanistan most disgracefully and at great risk not only to those we left behind --- Americans and our Afghani allies --- but to international security on the whole. 

Biden's doing extremely poorly, not just in the polls, but among people in his own party and administration. And to think, we've still got to bear two and a half more years of him. *Grunts.*

At the Wall Street Journal, "Allies are increasingly divided on further heavy-weapons shipments to Kyiv":

Cracks are appearing in the Western front against Moscow, with America’s European allies increasingly split over whether to keep shipping more powerful weapons to Ukraine, which some of them fear could prolong the conflict and increase its economic fallout.

At the center of the disagreement—which is splitting a group of Western European powers from the U.S., U.K. and a group of mostly central and northern European nations—are diverging perceptions of the long-term threat posed by Russia and whether Ukraine can actually prevail on the battlefield.

The first bloc, led by France and Germany, is growing reluctant to provide Ukraine the kinds of offensive, long-range weapons it would need to reclaim ground lost to Russia’s armies in the country’s south and east. They doubt Russia would directly threaten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

On the other side, Washington, London and a group of mainly central and northern European nations, some of them former Soviet bloc members, see the Russian offensive as a harbinger of further expansion by Moscow, making Ukraine the front line in a broader war pitching Russia against the West.

The differences between the two groups—which European officials said have been building in recent weeks, as Ukraine lost ground in its Donbas area—are getting aired more loudly in public this week, as the European Union’s heads of government hold a summit on Ukraine.

Collectively, European governments have been able to agree on measures to isolate Russia’s economy that once would have been unthinkable, including an embargo on most of the crude oil Russia sells to Europe. But opinion is sharply divided on the stakes of the war and Ukraine’s chances.

Public statements by the leaders of France and Germany and comments by those countries’ officials suggest they are skeptical Kyiv can expel the invaders and they have called for a negotiated cease-fire, triggering complaints from Ukraine that it is being pushed to make territorial concessions.

Leaders in the Baltic States, Poland and elsewhere argue instead that supplying Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated heavy weapons is critical to not just hold the line, but reverse Russian advances and deal Moscow the kind of blow that would deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from any further military action in the future.

“This is an unprecedented attack on Ukraine,” said Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks. “Our understanding, which is based on a long history of interactions with Russia, is that we cannot rely on Russian mercy and we see the Russian attack on Ukraine as simply the prelude for further Russian imperial expansionism.” Some Western European nations are losing appetite for sustaining a war they think is unwinnable and has reached a bloody stalemate that is draining European resources and exacerbating a looming recession. By contrast, Poland and the Baltic countries, who once lived under the Kremlin’s boot, see themselves as next in line for Russian imperialist expansion.

The flow of millions of Ukrainian refugees into those countries has brought the war much closer to citizens’ ordinary lives, while for Germany, Austria and Italy, the conflict is primarily felt through higher energy costs.

“Every phone call, ministers from the north of Europe and central Europe are getting more and more angry,” said a senior Czech official. “This is destroying the unity. It’s precisely what Putin wants and what the French and Germans are giving him.”

Unlike the leaders of Britain, Poland, the Baltic nations and several central European countries, French and German leaders have yet to visit Kyiv. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has repeatedly warned that the conflict could lead to a third World War and nuclear annihilation. The goal of Western engagement, Mr. Scholz has said, was to keep Russia from winning.

Germany hasn’t sent tanks to Ukraine and agreed to ship seven pieces of heavy artillery. So far, Europe’s largest economy, with a population exceeding 83 million, has sent military aid worth about €200 million, according to government estimates—less than Estonia, with a population of just over one million. France has sent 12 howitzer-type cannons to Kyiv and no tanks or aerial defenses.

Poland has delivered more than 240 Soviet-designed T72 tanks to Ukraine, alongside drones, rocket launchers, dozens of infantry fighting vehicles and truckloads of ammunition. The Czech Republic has shipped helicopter gunships, tanks, and parts needed to keep Ukraine’s air force flying. Ordinary citizens in Lithuania and the Czech Republic have donated tens of millions of euros to crowdsourcing campaigns to buy Turkish drones and Soviet-era weapons for Ukraine.

“We’re sending whatever we can, whatever we have, and whenever we’re able to,” said Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky twice and speaks to him most days. “Why? Because we believe that this is a war on civilization. This is about a war for the defense of Europe.”

Germany also has yet to replace the Polish and Czech tanks that had been sent to Ukraine with German-made hardware, as it agreed to do as part of a swap. A spokesman for the German government said this was due to lengthy procedures including maintenance, while some Defense Ministry officials decried a lack of political will to act with greater expedience.

“It is very disappointing that neither the federal government nor the Chancellor personally have the courage to speak about a victory for Ukraine and act accordingly in supporting Ukraine with modern, heavy weapons,” said Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin...

 

Biden's Foreign Policy is Driven by Impulse, Not Reason

From Caroline Glick:

Almost every day, questions arise about President Joe Biden‘s ability to make presidential-level decisions. The questions stem mainly from Biden’s repeated rhetorical gaffes.

In a recent column in the Boston Herald, Howie Carr assembled a sampling of dozens of Biden’s misstatements since the start of May. Among the highlights, Biden told guests at the White House, “I thank all of you for being here, and I want you to enjoy the rest of the recession.”

In a speech before an audience of policemen, Biden asked, “How many police officers have multiple time and put a lion and had to do things that they’d have to think they’d have to do?”

Whereas Biden’s domestic policy malapropisms are generally subjects of amusement (or derision) with few consequences, the same cannot be said of his parallel misstatements when it comes to foreign policy.

Consider the war in Ukraine. In late January, as Russian troops were situated on the border with Ukraine awaiting Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s marching orders, Biden gave a press conference in which he exposed NATO‘s disagreements by noting that the alliance would be divided over how to respond to a “minor incursion” by Russian forces.

Confusion, and worse, impulsiveness, have been the hallmarks of Biden’s decisions no less than his pronouncements. The helter-skelter withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan last August remains the paramount example of the impulsive nature of Biden’s foreign policy. Biden ordered U.S. forces to withdraw, ending a 20-year war in humiliation and defeat without first coordinating the move with U.S. allies.

Biden gave the order without first making arrangements for U.S. citizens to depart the country, and apparently without regard to an inspector general report that warned the Afghan military would not be able to maintain control of any part of the country without supporting U.S. air control and contractors.

Biden acted in callous disregard for the safety of the U.S.’s Afghan partners, and without first making arrangements to secure the $90 billion in U.S. weapons that the withdrawing U.S. forces left behind.

Obviously, much of the failure can be laid at the feet of the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. But it was obvious that in the case of the Afghan withdrawal, it was Biden calling the shots from the top.

The Afghan withdrawal devastated the credibility of the U.S. as both an ally and an enemy. Its direct and indirect consequences will haunt the U.S. and its allies for years to come.

Biden’s actions against Russia since it invaded Ukraine are similarly seen by allies and enemies alike as the product of impulsive decisions, made without sufficient consideration of easily foreseeable consequences. Three decisions stand out, in particular.

The first was Biden’s decision to freeze $300 billion in Russian dollar reserves. The decision was unprecedented. And although it harmed Russia economically, it devastated the credibility of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. In response to the move, China and Russia abandoned the dollar in their bilateral trade. Other key countries, including Saudi Arabia and India, have also agreed to sell and purchase oil and gas in local currencies, undermining the petrodollar.

In response to the U.S. move and to Washington’s decision to block Russia from the international banking system, Russia began insisting that foreign purchasers of Russian oil and gas open ruble and foreign currency accounts with Gazprombank. Germany, Italy and more than a dozen other EU member states have thus far complied.

The ruble is as strong as it was before the February invasion. Simultaneously, the U.S. dollar is weak and its role as the world’s reserve currency is being questioned around the world. Time will tell if this is the beginning of the end of the dollar-based international economy. But what is already apparent is that the U.S. move on Russia’s dollar reserves was a net loss for the U.S. A more carefully crafted sanctions package might have had less deleterious consequences.

Then there are the leaks from Washington regarding the direct role the U.S. is apparently playing in Ukrainian military operations against Russia. The sources of the leaks are unclear. Biden is reportedly angry about them. All the same, administration officials have informed reporters that the U.S. provided Ukraine with the intelligence that enabled Ukrainian forces to sink the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in its Black Sea fleet, as well as intelligence that has enabled the Ukrainians to kill Russian generals.

In other words, Biden administration officials are telling the media that the U.S. is not merely supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia; rather, the U.S. is an active participant in that war. Whether it is Biden’s wish to go to war against Russia, or whether he is being led by his advisors, is unclear. But what is clear enough is that the escalatory consequences of these leaks are dangerous. Moreover, the U.S. interest in such escalation is unclear—at best.

The same can be said regarding the sudden decision to add Sweden and Finland to NATO. Is the U.S. really willing to send forces, if need be, to defend these nations? If so, where is that reflected in U.S. military budgets, training, hardware and doctrine?

Finally, there is the issue of the sanctions’ impact on the U.S. economy and on the global food supply. For months ahead of Russia’s invasion, as Putin’s troops deployed along the border grew, the Biden administration signaled that the U.S.’s primary tool for defeating Russia would be economic sanctions. Under the circumstances, Biden and his team could have been expected to calculate the sanctions for their effects on Russia and their blowback for the U.S. and its allies, as well as to consider the implications of Russian counter-sanctions on the U.S. and the global economy. But from the looks of things, it appears that the administration considered neither of these things.

Take the embargo on Russian oil and gas. Due to Biden’s decision to drastically cut U.S. energy production well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. had moved from being a net energy exporter to a net importer. Fuel prices in the U.S. had already risen precipitously. Those price rises aggravated skyrocketing inflation rates caused by a rapidly expanding U.S. money supply unmatched by a corresponding rise in domestic production.

Biden’s embargo on Russian oil and gas, therefore, took a bad situation and made it much worse.

Then there are the banking sanctions on Russian nationals. Russia is the main global exporter of fertilizer. While fertilizer exports weren’t banned, the financial sanctions on Russian nationals have impeded the ability of Russian exporters to do business with foreign purchasers, driving up the cost of fertilizers—and through them, of all foodstuff.

This brings us to the issue of Ukrainian food exports. Ukraine is a major supplier of wheat and corn to global markets. Ukrainian production and exports dropped by roughly 50% following the Russian invasion. And now Russia is blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in order to prevent any exports of what remains of the besieged country’s crop yield. Expectations of a global food shortage are already causing panic worldwide, particularly among poor, unstable nations that are dependent on wheat imports to feed their people.

Russia will bear primary responsibility for global famine. But a better conceived U.S. sanctions strategy might have provoked a less devastating Russian counter-response. Now, with the real prospect of global food shortages, the danger of a naval confrontation between U.S. and NATO forces and Russian forces in the Black Sea rises every day.

Russia’s conventional forces have performed far below expectations. But Russia’s nuclear arsenal is both larger and more advanced than its U.S. counterpart. And unlike the U.S., Russia has built extensive and credible defensive systems to protect its cities and military bases from nuclear attack. Putin and his top advisors are openly threatening to use nuclear weapons if they feel it is necessary. Under the circumstances, any military exchange between the U.S. and Russia has the potential of becoming a nuclear war.

In response to the Ukrainian grain crisis, India announced last week that it is suspending its wheat exports to secure its domestic food supply. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, India has repeatedly flummoxed the Biden administration with its unwillingness to join the U.S. and NATO in their campaign on behalf of Ukraine. India’s early decision to maintain its oil and gas purchases with Russia while moving the trade from dollars to rupees and rubles was the first clear sign that New Delhi was staying loyal to its Cold War ally and moving away from the U.S.

India’s decision to distance itself from the U.S. poses grave consequences to the U.S. in its rising superpower struggle with China. President Biden, like President Donald Trump before him, rightly views India’s participation in a U.S.-led Pacific alliance as a key component of the U.S.’s strategy for containing China.

This brings us to Biden’s latest foreign policy gaffe with strategic implications. In response to a reporter’s question on Monday during his visit to Tokyo about whether the U.S. would use military force to defend Taiwan from China, Biden said, “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.”

But that isn’t the commitment the U.S. has made. For decades, U.S. policy with respect to the defense of Taiwan has been one of “strategic ambiguity.” The context of Biden’s remark, made from Tokyo at a time of heightened Chinese aggression against Taiwan, was significant. And while Biden’s advisors worked feverishly to present his remark as inconsequential, and U.S. policy as unchanged, the president has now “misspoken” numerous times on Taiwan.

Biden’s many gaffes and whispers of possible dementia have led many to wonder whether he is really the one driving U.S. policy. But to the extent he is, Biden’s foreign policy is a bundle of impulsive actions, whose economic and strategic implications have been disastrous for the U.S. and destabilizing to the world as a whole.

 

The World Order Reset

At the Upheaval, "China’s Ukraine Catastrophe, the Rise of Trans-Atlantis, and a New Age of Power":

What did Vladimir Putin tell Xi Jinping when they met in the cold, blustery first days of February in Beijing? In a ceremony afterwards the two leaders signed a joint-statement condemning the geopolitical audacity of the United States and NATO while declaring the China-Russia relationship to have “no limits.” This was also at this moment when, at least according to American intelligence, Putin promised Xi he would refrain from military action against Ukraine until the end of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games, which were then about to commence. Whether this is true or not it is impossible to say, though Russia’s tanks did roll across the border into Ukraine just four days after the games concluded. But in either case the question remains: on the eve of war, what did Putin say was actually about to go down?

We will never know the words they exchanged, but it nonetheless seems possible to point what the two leaders probably thought was about to happen. That’s because neither of the two men has ever been particularly shy about saying what they want. And, beyond all of Putin’s personal fixations with pushing back NATO, and “regathering the Russian lands,” and reuniting the wayward Slavs of Ukraine with the motherland, and generally going down in history as the second coming of Peter the Great, these two leaders have been very transparent about long sharing an even broader dream for their countries.

That dream was described explicitly in their February joint statement, much the same as it has been in many similar previous documents: to “advance multipolarity and promote the democratization of international relations”; to put a stop to “Certain states’ attempts to impose their own ‘democratic standards’ on other countries” through “bullying, unilateral sanctions, and extraterritorial application of [domestic law]”; and ultimately to see a “transformation of the global governance architecture and world order.” In other words: to finally free themselves from the hegemonic post-Cold War global dominance of the United States and the “liberal international order” that it has led since 1945.

But February 2022 came at a unique time because it was the moment, as the document put it, at which “a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world.” This was a moment in which, as Xi has described it, “the East is rising, the West declining.” The United States and its dominion appeared be on its last legs.

And it’s not hard to understand why they might have looked at the West and seen it as collectively decadent, weak, and – let’s be honest – often completely deranged. The Western core of the liberal international order was manifestly divided (internally within Europe, between Europe and America, and within Western societies), lazily comfortable with its dependence on Russian energy imports and Chinese export markets, and largely steadfast in its refusal to pay for its own defense amid what Emmanuel Macron had once labeled “the brain death of NATO.” It was easy to assume, in other words, that the West no longer had the will or capacity to fight – a hypothesis that seemed to have been recently put to the test and confirmed in Afghanistan.

The liberal international order therefore appeared to remain propped up only by, as Putin soon put it, an “empire of lies.” The reality of this only had to be demonstrated with a firm push, and the whole façade was liable to come tumbling down, exposing the rotten pillars beneath and perhaps even causing the whole edifice of the liberal international order to collapse. And, if so, then perhaps this was the moment Putin had long prepared for: a chance to break the back of this stifling Western order in one bold stroke.

And what better place to strike than Ukraine? It was, at least as far as Putin could tell, yet another of Washington’s corrupt client regimes, a fake nation with a fake American-trained military that would, like the fake Afghan National Army, immediately throw down its weapons and melt away as soon as Washington’s diplomats had fled the country – alongside their puppet comedian-president, who would speed across the border in a helicopter stuffed full of cash, just like the last guy. After which Russian forces would be welcomed, if not as liberators then at least with general resignation. With Ukraine’s major cities having quickly surrendered once the Spetznaz simply drove in and raised the Russian flag over city hall, with Kiev probably holding out about as long as did Kabul, Putin’s takeover would rapidly become a fait accompli. Their empty rhetoric about deterrence having failed, NATO would have no option but to stand by helplessly...

Keep reading.

 

Vladimir Potemkin: Putin's Disaster and What Could Happen Next

At Der Spiegel, "The world has overestimated Putin's power. His army is much weaker than thought, his intelligence services have failed and sanctions are starting have an impact. Will all this weaken the Russian president or make him more dangerous?":

May 9, 2022 – what a victory celebration it should have been! Just imagine: Vladimir Putin, Gatherer of the Russian Lands, greets the victorious returning troops on Red Square. Ukraine shattered as a country, its capital Kyiv taken in a surprise attack, its government exiled. Along with the battlefield triumph, Russia also celebrates its ruler, who boldly changed the course of history, triggering the biggest celebration since the 1945 parade held to celebrate the victory of Stalin's army over Nazism.

Given the events of the past few months, that was likely what Putin had been hoping for. But the reality has turned out rather differently. On May 9, Russia will again celebrate Victory Day with a military parade, as it does every year, but the army that will parade through Red Square this time will be a humiliated one. Two and a half months after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's armed forces are no longer the feared power they once were.

Putin's troops have experienced a military and moral fiasco in Ukraine. Poorly led, poorly supplied, poorly motivated and poorly equipped, they have failed against an enemy thought to be much weaker. They had to retreat from their positions near the capital city of Kyiv. And what had been planned as a blitzkrieg has turned into a tough slog, a war of attrition.

Russia's military pride has turned out to be something of a sham, like the village backdrops that Prince Grigory Potemkin once allegedly set up for his czarina to fool her into thinking he was settling empty territories.

It is all just as surprising as it is devastating to the system Putin has built. The Kremlin leader has spent years preparing his country for a major confrontation with the West – in military, economic and political terms. His declared goals are maximum sovereignty and autonomy, for Russia to be an independent pole of power in the world. Now, it has turned out that the highly equipped army is unable to overrun its poorer neighbor. Russia's economy – dependent on imports. Most of its vast foreign reserves – blocked by Western sanctions. Its intelligence services – unable or unwilling to properly inform the ruler.

Is Putin's system of power itself a Potemkin village, without the world, including Vladimir Putin himself, having noticed? What does it mean when this system's weaknesses are suddenly exposed? And does that make it more dangerous?

A pet project of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is located an hour's drive west of Moscow: the army amusement park called "Patriot." At the park, you can ride in toy tanks, shoot with real AK-47s, watch re-enacted World War II battles and buy army souvenirs. Since 2020, it has also featured a church co-designed by Shoigu in olive green – the "Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces." House-sized mosaics depict Russia's armed victories through the centuries – all the way up to the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia's intervention in Syria. A mosaic featuring Putin and Shoigu and the country's political elite had also initially been planned. In the lower church, a spacious baptismal font allows for the baptism of troops, and weapons looted from the Nazi Wehrmacht have been melted into the steps.

The church's inauguration is symbolic of the new prestige the army has acquired during Putin's rule – in part attributable to the ambition of Defense Minister Shoigu. He brought glamour to the military, a new level of self-confidence and societal status. He gave the army not only its church, but also dashing new uniforms, a youth organization (Yunarmiya) and political officers for the kind of ideological indoctrination conducted in Soviet times. He kept the troops busy with large-scale, snap exercises. Russia's air force operation in Syria could even be seen as a patriotic film in theaters.

With the invasion of Ukraine, though, that facade has collapsed and bizarre shortcomings have come to light. Just this week, a secretly recorded conversation emerged in which contract soldiers from the Caucasus detailed all that had gone wrong for them. The men returned home on their own in late March to South Ossetia, a de facto Russian-controlled area on Georgian territory. In a conversation with the region's president, they complained of armored personnel carriers that wouldn't start, tanks that refused to fire, officers who hide from their soldiers out of fear, artillery that missed targets by two kilometers and wounded soldiers who weren't provided with treatment. They also lamented a lack of information, maps and radios and of grenade launchers they said were bent. South Ossetia's president rebuked the men and asked if they thought Russia would lose the war. "Yes, we do," came the reply.

Moscow prefers to keep silent about the number of Russians who have actually been killed in Ukraine. The latest official figures are about a month and a half old. In April, the British government said it estimated 15,000 soldiers had been killed, whereas the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces cites nearly 25,000 fallen. One military analyst in Brussels estimates that the Russians have lost close to 1,000 tanks. At least seven Russian generals have been killed. The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the guided missile cruiser Moskva sank, apparently after being fired upon by anti-ship missiles.

The first days of the invasion, in particular, when the Russian army advanced on the Ukrainian capital, baffled Western analysts. "The strategic mistakes are completely crazy," John Spencer, an expert on urban warfare at the Madison Policy Forum think tank, told DER SPIEGEL at the time. Many observers now agree that the strength of the Russian military has been overestimated.

One of the most visible weaknesses is logistics. Overstretched, poorly secured supply routes turned into easy targets for small, mobile Ukrainian units, especially in the early weeks of the war. Just a few days after the war began, a U.S. official said that 70 percent of Russian forces would soon run out of fuel and food, or had already.

Glaring failures have also emerged in equipment maintenance – a result of sloppiness or corruption: Expensive air defense systems are getting stuck because their tires are defective, some missile launchers still have tires with "Made in the USSR" labels on them. "Their logistics have been disastrous throughout," says military historian Phillips O'Brien. "They just assumed they would steamroll the Ukrainians and they wouldn't have to worry about supply." Since Russia began concentrating its attacks on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, these massive logistics problems have been less frequent, in part due to the fact that supply routes are shorter and the advance has faltered...

Keep reading.

How Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot Escaped Russia (VIDEO)

I don't listen to this band. Not particularly to my tastes, though your mileage may vary.

I like their rebellious politics though. Frankly, what other politics could they have in Putin's Russia?

There new music video is here, "Hate Fuck." 

At the New York Times, "Leader of Pussy Riot Band Escapes Russia, With Help From Friends":

After more than a decade of activism, Maria Alyokhina disguised herself as a food courier to evade the police — and a widening crackdown by President Vladimir Putin.

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Maria V. Alyokhina first came to the attention of the Russian authorities — and the world — when her punk band and performance art group Pussy Riot staged a protest against President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.

For that act of rebellion in 2012, she was sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.” She remained determined to fight Mr. Putin’s system of repression, even after being jailed six more times since last summer, each stint for 15 days, always on trumped-up charges aimed at stifling her political activism.

But in April, as Mr. Putin cracked down harder to snuff out any criticism of his war in Ukraine, the authorities announced that her effective house arrest would be converted to 21 days in a penal colony. She decided it was time to leave Russia — at least temporarily — and disguised herself as a food courier to evade the Moscow police who had been staking out the friend’s apartment where she was staying. She left her cellphone behind as a decoy and to avoid being tracked.

A friend drove her to the border with Belarus, and it took her a week to cross into Lithuania. In a studio apartment in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, she agreed to an interview to describe a dissident’s harrowing escape from Mr. Putin’s Russia.

“I was happy that I made it, because it was an unpredictable and big” kiss-off to the Russian authorities, Ms. Alyokhina said, using a less polite term. “I still don’t understand completely what I’ve done,” she admitted, dressed in black except for a fanny pack with a rainbow belt.

Ms. Alyokhina, 33, has spent her entire adult life fighting for her country to respect its own Constitution and the most basic human rights, like freedom of expression. After being freed early from prison in December 2013, she and another member of Pussy Riot founded Mediazona, an independent news outlet focused on crime and punishment in Russia.

She also wrote a memoir, “Riot Days,” and traveled internationally performing a show based on the book. Though her dream was to tour with it in Russia, only three venues agreed to host the show, and all faced repercussions.

Ms. Alyokhina was committed to remaining in Russia despite regular surveillance and pressure from the authorities. But now she has joined the tens of thousands of Russians who have fled since the invasion of Ukraine.

Alyokhina, whose friends call her Masha, had bitten her nails down to stubs, and she puffed almost unceasingly on a vape or on Marlboro Lights. She made the journey in black, three-inch platform boots without laces — a nod to her many stints in jail, where shoelaces are confiscated.

In prison, she and others instead threaded moist towelettes through the eyelets of their shoes to keep them on. As a statement, she and other members of Pussy Riot will wear them while they perform during a tour, starting on May 12 in Berlin, to raise money for Ukraine.

When it first began more than a decade ago, Pussy Riot seemed as much publicity stunt as political activism. But if their protest in the Moscow cathedral — where they sang a “Punk Prayer” ridiculing the symbiosis that had developed between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin — seemed overwrought at the time, today it appears prescient.

The church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill, recently blessed Russian troops going to Ukraine, and the European Union put his name on a proposed list of people to be sanctioned.

Exactly 10 years to the day after the cathedral protest, Mr. Putin delivered a ranting speech in which he called Ukraine a country “created by Russia,” laying the groundwork for his invasion.

Ms. Alyokhina listened to the speech on the radio from a jail cell. The invasion, she said, had changed everything, not just for her, but for her country.

“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore.”

During the interview she was surrounded by other members of the group, now a collective with about a dozen members. Most of them had also recently fled Russia, including her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein.

Ms. Shtein had chosen to leave Russia a month before, also evading restrictions on her movement by sneaking out in a delivery-service uniform. Her decision came after someone posted a sign on the door of the apartment she shared with Ms. Alyokhina accusing them of being traitors...

Keep reading.

 

WATCH: President Volodymyr Zelensky Video Statement Marking Allied Victory in Europe in 1945

Yesterday. A big day for propaganda and statesmanship.

The full speech is here: "Zelensky releases video on day of remembrance: 'We hear "never again" differently'."

And at the New York Times, "Both Sides Harden Positions on Anniversary of Nazi Defeat in Europe":

PARIS — On a day of commemoration of the end of World War II in Europe, the war in Ukraine was marked by posturing and signaling on Sunday, as each side ramped up its rhetoric and resolve.

Leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies vowed to end their dependence on Russian energy and ensure that Russia does not triumph in its “unprovoked, unjustifiable and illegal aggression,” as President Vladimir V. Putin pursued his indiscriminate bombardment of eastern Ukraine and orchestrated celebrations for Russia’s Victory Day holiday on Monday.

A statement by the Group of 7 major industrialized nations said that on a day when Europe recalled the devastation of World War II and its millions of victims, including those from the Soviet Union, Mr. Putin’s “actions bring shame on Russia and the historic sacrifices of its people.”

The leaders, signaling to Mr. Putin that their unrelenting support of Ukraine would only grow, said, “We remain united in our resolve that President Putin must not win his war against Ukraine.” The memory of all those who fought for freedom in World War II, the statement said, obliged them “to continue fighting for it today.”

The tone was firm, with no mention of any potential diplomacy or cease-fire.

In Moscow, as fighter jets streaked across the sky and nuclear weapons were put on display in preparation for Victory Day, Mr. Putin appeared to signal back to Western leaders that he was determined to double down on the war until he could conjure something that might be claimed as victory.

There was fresh evidence of that on Sunday, as rescuers picked through the rubble in Bilohorivka, a village in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine where a Russian bomb had flattened a school building the day before, killing people sheltering there, local authorities said.

“Most likely, all 60 people who remain under the rubble are now dead,” Gov. Serhiy Haidai wrote on the Telegram messaging app. But it was unclear how many people were in fact in the school and that toll may prove inflated. If confirmed, it would be one of the deadliest single Russian attacks since the war began in February.

Despite the World War II commemorations in most of Europe on Sunday and in Russia on Monday, a painful reminder of the tens of millions of people killed, there was no indication that the war in Ukraine was anywhere near ending. If anything, all signals pointed in the opposite direction. Russian attacks on Ukrainian towns and villages met a crescendo of Western rhetoric, accompanied by the constant danger of escalation.

Mr. Putin, whose steady militarization of Russian society in recent years has turned the May 9 celebration of the Soviet defeat of the Nazis into an annual apotheosis of a resurgent nation’s might, is expected to portray a war of repeated setbacks in Ukraine as a successful drive to “de-Nazify” a neighboring nation whose very existence he denies.

His much-anticipated speech may go further, possibly signaling that whatever conquest in Ukraine there has been up to now will become permanent through annexation. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and began stirring military conflict in the eastern Donbas region...

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine released a black-and-white video address on Sunday marking the Allied victory in 1945. Standing in front of a destroyed apartment block in a Kyiv suburb hit hard by Russian troops before their withdrawal from the region around the capital, he said, “We pay our respect to everyone who defended the planet against Nazism during World War II.”

Mr. Putin has portrayed Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, as the leader of a nation threatening Russia with revived Nazism. His aim has been to instill the spirit of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia, among Russian troops, but to little apparent avail.

In the vast Azovstal steel mill that is the last remaining part of Mariupol not under Russian control, Ukrainian troops again rejected Russian deadlines to surrender. In a virtual news conference, Lt. Illya Samoilenko, an officer in a Ukrainian National Guard battalion known as the Azov regiment, said: “We are basically dead men. Most of us know this. That is why we fight.”

Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, a deputy commander of the regiment, said, “We don’t have much time, we are under constant shelling,” with attacks from Russian tanks, artillery, airplanes and snipers.

The remaining civilians in the steel plant were evacuated on Saturday. Local officials estimate the death toll in the city at over 20,000...

Keep reading.

 

Fresh Rescue Efforts Under Way at Ukraine's Azovstal Steel Plant (VIDEO)

 Some news out of Ukraine.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Russia wants to seize the last part of Mariupol by Monday, Ukrainian presidential adviser says":

A third group of civilians was being evacuated from the labyrinth of bunkers beneath Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant Friday, officials said, as Ukraine’s military counterattacked against Russian forces in the east.

For weeks the Mariupol defenders’ dogged stand tied down Russian forces there, reducing the units available elsewhere. Now, Ukraine says it has largely blunted Russia’s offensives in other areas in the east and is hoping to use heavy weapons to push them back.

On Friday, Ukrainian and Russian officials said a total of 50 civilians, including children, were evacuated from the plant during the day. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that the evacuees were handed over to representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross for delivery to temporary accommodations. The evacuation operation at Azovstal will continue on Saturday, the ministry said.

The United Nations said almost 500 civilians were evacuated in two previous operations with its assistance.

Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the evacuations proceeded slowly because Russia was violating a cease-fire. Moscow has previously repeatedly denied targeting civilians.

The Azov Regiment stationed at the steel plant said one fighter had been killed and six wounded as a car was struck while moving toward some civilians to evacuate them.

Azovstal, a sprawling Soviet-era complex of warehouses, furnaces, tunnels and rail tracks in the southeastern city of Mariupol, has become a focal point in the war in recent weeks. Ukrainian soldiers have continued to hold out as Russia stepped up its bombing of the plant.

Russian ground forces had blockaded Azovstal and assaulted some parts of it in the past 24 hours, supported by warplanes, the Ukrainian General Staff said Friday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday called for Russia to release or exchange those remaining at Azovstal in comments via videolink with Chatham House, the U.K. think tank.

“If they kill people who can be exchanged as prisoners of war or just released as civilians or be helped as wounded or injured, civilian and military alike, if they destroy them, I don’t think we can have any diplomatic talks with them after that,” he said.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said Russia was seeking to seize the last part of Mariupol by Monday, when Moscow celebrates the anniversary of the victory over the Nazis in World War II.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday that the Russians were besieging Azovstal primarily through airstrikes and that the majority of Russian ground forces that had been dedicated to Mariupol had been withdrawn. The Kremlin has declared victory in Mariupol and said it is aiming to seal the remaining defenders in Azovstal until they surrender.

Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces were counterattacking around the northeastern cities of Kharkiv and Izyum, said Army Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, chief of the Ukrainian General Staff.

Ukraine’s military has pushed Russian troops back to the east of Kharkiv, curbing the shelling of the country’s second-most-populous city. Russia has sought to thrust south from Izyum, which is southeast of Kharkiv, but has encountered stiff Ukrainian resistance.

Gen. Zaluzhniy’s comments, which came after a phone call with the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Mark Milley, reflect optimism among Ukrainian officials that Russia’s offensives are running out of steam and that the deployment of heavy weapons systems from the West could turn the tide of the war in the east of the country in the coming weeks.

Other officials cautioned, however, that the counteroffensive was localized.

“Western weapons are not yet arriving at a rate that would allow Ukrainian forces to go on a counterattack,” Mr. Arestovych, the presidential adviser, said late Thursday.

He characterized Ukraine’s capture of some villages in the east around Kharkiv and the south around Kherson, which is occupied by Russia, as small movements that could lead to a broader counteroffensive.

“It’s too early to talk of serious successes,” he said.

President Biden said Friday the U.S. is sending another round of security assistance to Ukraine that will include artillery munitions, radars and other equipment. An administration official said the equipment is valued at up to $150 million. Mr. Biden said the Ukraine funding authorized by Congress is nearly depleted, and he has asked Congress for $33 billion more to fund weapons and provide longer-term economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Russia, meanwhile, claimed that its aircraft hit 24 Ukrainian military assets overnight, including weapons depots and an artillery battery.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Friday that its high-precision air-based missiles had destroyed an ammunition depot in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. The ministry said that Russian forces had shot down two Ukrainian warplanes, an Su-25 and a MiG-29.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said in a commentary Thursday that the Ukrainian counteroffensive “may disrupt Russian forces northeast of Kharkiv and will likely force Russian forces to decide whether to reinforce positions near Kharkiv or risk losing most or all of their positions within artillery range of the city.”

The Ukrainian advances to the east of Kharkiv could develop into a broader counteroffensive, ISW said...

'Apocalyptic' American Nationalist Tucker Carlson (VIDEO)

I quit watching Tucker sometime last year --- and mind you, this was after months of watching his show religiously during the thick of the "pandemic spring" 2020.

First, I was just bored. But then I saw people freakin' out about how he'd become a "New Right" extremeist. Once he went to Hungary to air his program with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, all of my interest tanked. I can take a lot of populist nationalism, up to a point, but Tucker crossed the line.

So now, it turns out, the New York Times has published the first part of an investigative series on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," now trending at Memeorandum. 

Here, "How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable":

Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.

Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.

The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.

When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.

“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.

In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.

His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.

Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.

“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”

That pattern is no accident. To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trump’s base and much of Fox’s core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Fox’s flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channel’s vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”

A Fox spokeswoman rejected those characterizations of the network’s strategy, pointing to coverage of stories like President Biden’s inauguration and the war in Ukraine, where a Fox cameraman was killed in March while on assignment. In a statement, Justin Wells, a senior executive producer overseeing Mr. Carlson’s show, defended the host’s rhetoric and choice of topics: “Tucker Carlson programming embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored. Stories in ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ broadcasts and ‘Tucker Carlson Originals’ documentaries undergo a rigorous editorial process. We’re also proud of our ongoing original reporting at a time when most in the media amplify only one point of view.”

Mr. Carlson has led the network’s on-air transformation, becoming Fox’s most influential employee. Outside Fox, Mr. Carlson is bandied about as a potential candidate for president. Inside the network, he answers solely to the Murdochs themselves. With seeming impunity, Mr. Carlson has used his broadcast to attack Fox’s own news coverage, helping drive some journalists off the air and others, like the veteran Fox anchor Shepard Smith, to leave the network entirely. In Australia, the editors of some Murdoch-owned newspapers watch Mr. Carlson’s show religiously, believing it provides clues to Mr. Murdoch’s own views. According to former senior Fox employees, Mr. Carlson boasts of rarely speaking with Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, but talking or texting regularly with Mr. Murdoch. And in an extraordinary departure from the old Fox code, Mr. Carlson is exempt from the network’s fearsome media relations department, which under Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder, served to both defend the channel’s image and keep its talent in line.

Mr. Carlson is powerful at Fox not merely because he is the network’s face but because he is also its future — a star whose intensity and paranoid style work to bind viewers more closely to the Fox brand, helping lead them through the fragmented post-cable landscape...

This is what the Times does, publish these lurid portraits of basically someone who is right now totally mainstream --- *the* mainstream. I mean, there's a reason he's the most popular cable host on T.V. 

And the Times will float off leftist conspiracy talking points and half-baked attacks that don't pass the most rudimentary fact checks. 

For instance, when asked during Senate testimony if there were chemical weapons biolabs in Ukraine, Victory Nuland --- the Biden administration's Undersecretary of State for Affairs --- confirmed Ukraine's research facilities, saying, "Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, ah, gain control of --- so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials to fall into the hands of, ah, Russia forces..."

You don't get more high-up confirmation on that unless it's coming out of the president's mouth himself. 

This woman is a State Department veteran going back two decades, and was Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. She knows *exactly* what's going on over there, and in fact, she's been one of the most important U.S. governmental officials entangling U.S. foreign policy in the Ukraine-Russia crisis' long-running morass. 

All of this is fresh-baked propaganda for the politicos and party hacks of the Democratic Party left. It's all battlespace preparation ahead of November. Fuck 'em.

Whatever, there's more at the link.

Also, "Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’."