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Saturday, March 26, 2022

March 26: Ukraine

What Is Driving Vladimir Putin? Understanding Putin is crucial to deciphering his goals in attacking Ukraine. The Russian American journalist Masha Gessen recommends books on the Russian president and the forces that shaped him. ....... In an interview more than two decades ago, Vladimir V. Putin described his younger self, with a hint of self-congratulation, as “a hooligan.” ....... “I was a real thug.” ...... Putin’s unabashed description of himself as “a thug” was key to his self-image: someone who could not be bullied, who would lash out unpredictably if he felt slighted and who relished violence. ...... destruction in the very Ukrainian cities Putin claims he wants to “liberate.” ....... the way he vilified the West to solidify his grip on power. ...... his evolution from “a bureaucrat who had accidentally been entrusted with a huge country into a megalomaniacal dictator who believed he was on a civilizational mission.” ....... We’re going to look at this period between 2012 and 2022 as a period when there’s a lot of that happening, when the war was slowly ramping up in plain view and most of the world was in denial about it.” ........ he recounts three different fights that he had. One was when he was a kid and he felt mistreated by a teacher, if I remember correctly. One was when he was a student and one was when he was a young officer. And in all three cases, he lashes out. He basically loses his temper and then he goes quiet for a bit, and then he strikes again. ........ This is what it communicates: that this is somebody who has no desire to control his temper. He thinks of himself as somebody who will lash out, somebody who’s vengeful. Somebody who likes to strike out of the blue, but also — and this is the thing that I’m most worried about now — he will go quiet for a bit and then he will strike again. .......... I think my favorite book of his is called “The Post-Communist Mafia State,” which pretends to be about Hungary, but is the best book for understanding post-Communist Russia and how the regime works.” .



Biden calls for ‘lockstep’ NATO response to Russia’s Ukraine invasion
Biden calls for regime change in Russia: Putin 'cannot remain in power' Biden opened his speech saying that Ukraine is now a front line battle in the fight between autocracy and democracy, casting Russia's invasion of its neighbor as part of the decadeslong fight that has played out between the West and the Kremlin.......... Just before Biden was set to speak in Poland, an airstrike struck a fuel depot just outside Lviv, Ukraine -- about 200 miles away from where the President would speak. The strike caused billowing smoke and flames to rise above the western Ukrainian city, which had largely been seen as a safe haven during the war given its distance from the Russia-Ukraine border. ....... It was a surprising attack, coming just a day after the Russian military said the first phase of the conflict had ended and they were shifting their attention to the disputed eastern parts of Ukraine. ....... Biden, standing along NATO's eastern edge, in Poland, issued a stern warning during his speech, telling Putin: "Don't even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory." He said the US was committed to the collective protection obligations laid out in NATO's charter "with the full force of our collective power." ......... "Nothing about that battle for freedom was simple or easy. It was a long, painful slog fought over not days and months but years and decades," Biden told the crowd. "We emerged anew in a great battle for freedom, a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression." ...... Biden told Duda that he was sure Putin "was counting on being able to divide NATO and separate the eastern flank from the west, and separate nations based on past histories. But he wasn't able to do it." ........ the talks with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov were the first time Biden was able to meet face-to-face with officials from Ukraine during his tour. ...... Kuleba described an arduous journey from Kyiv to Warsaw that included a train and three hours in a car. ....... The group meeting at a hotel in Warsaw, which also included Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, delved into more substantive issues later. A White House readout said the men discussed "further efforts to help Ukraine defend its territory." .......... Biden met with chef José Andrés and other volunteers in Warsaw Saturday at a food distribution site for Andrés' World Center Kitchen, the nonprofit devoted to providing meals in the wake of disasters.

What the Silicon Valley Prophet Sees on the Horizon Stewart Brand coined the term “personal computer” and was one of the first to envision what digital technology would become. He knows it got messy. He thinks tech can clean itself up. ....... But the clock itself is possible because of the largess of the foundation’s largest benefactor, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people. ...... His writing, ideas and the community he created in Menlo Park, Calif., in the late 1960s were an integral part of the forces that coalesced in the region that would be named Silicon Valley in 1971. .......... it touched a nerve and became a manual for reinvention for an entire generation — including Apple’s Steve Jobs. ..... In 2005, Mr. Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford, cited Mr. Brand as a major influence in his life and explained what “Whole Earth” was to a younger generation: “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along,” he said. “It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” ........ Mr. Brand coined the term “personal computer” in 1974, several years after writing an article for Rolling Stone that drew a picture of the future of the digital world. Computers, he predicted, would be the next important trend after psychedelic drugs ......... Mr. Brand has long had an eerie knack for being able to spot trends early on or show up in the midst of them like some high-I.Q. Forrest Gump, only to leave for the next big thing just when everyone else catches up......... have all pointed to Mr. Brand as the original technological utopian. His words and ideas, they argue, seduced and inspired the engineers who created the modern digital world. .......... Mr. Brand, who considers himself a relentless pragmatist, winces at the label. “All utopias are dystopias,” he said during a conversation this month in the ramshackle office he has inhabited on the Sausalito, Calif., waterfront since the early 1970s. ....... he has not backed away from his certainty that humanity’s future lies in our ability to develop technology: New tools to address the challenges of everything from climate change to repairing the threat that social media has posed to democracies. ........ He has recently begun advocating the idea of “intended consequences” ......... He saw the dark side of online anonymity in the early 1980s ...... a convivial community that would avoid the pitfalls presented by the new world of virtual gathering places. ....... Mr. Brand opened the original “Whole Earth Catalog” by writing, “We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it.” In his 2007 book, “Whole Earth Discipline,” he modified his call to arms: “We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it.” His book endorsed nuclear power, genetically modified crops, dense cities and geoengineering. ........ Solar got better faster than he ever expected, he said, as did battery capacity. .

Mikhail Khodorkovsky on how to deal with the “bandit” in the Kremlin A former oil mogul and political prisoner warns the West it must face down Vladimir Putin now or prepare for something worse ........ my being jailed in Russia for ten years and then expelled, with a warning that life imprisonment awaited me if I ever returned......... I look with despair at the defeatist approach of Western leaders, such as Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Naftali Bennett. ........ They fly to Moscow, call him, ask him to stop, but assure him that they will not interfere and do not want him to perceive certain movements as a provocation. The president sees all of this as weakness, and that is extremely dangerous. ......... the current leaders of Western countries have never dealt with thugs. Their experience and education relate to interactions between statesmen. The principle of these people’s behaviour is that both sides concede to each other in the interests of their electorate or subjects. War is evil to them, and the use of force is a last resort. .......... He was raised in the KGB, an organisation that relied on force and disregard for the law. While working at St Petersburg City Hall in the early 1990s, he was responsible for the informal interaction of the law-enforcement agencies with gangsters. St Petersburg at that time was perceived in Russia just as Chicago was seen during prohibition. Instead of smuggled whisky, the gangsters were selling drugs and oil. .......... a bandit will always remain a bandit in terms of his perception among those around him. It is a drastic mistake when he is seen as a normal statesman. Russia’s foreign partners fail to understand who he really is. ......... I have plenty of experience of dealing with bandits. After spending ten years in Russian prisons, I can say that the most dangerous thing is to show them any weakness or uncertainty. ........ Any step towards their demands, without a clear demonstration of strength, will be perceived as weakness. Following their logic, if Western countries say they will not give up Ukraine and yet they do exactly that, it means that they are weak. And that makes it likely that Mr Putin will look towards other neighbours, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, who were also previously part of the Russian Empire. ............. Other bandits are also watching and waiting their turn, as America’s humiliation echoes around the world.

Transnistria is stirring, the Balkans are restless again, Iran is attacking American bases.

............ The habit of impunity among thugs does not subside so quickly. And that means a worse war, an even bigger one, is likely........ Putin managed to increase his ratings when he came to office, in 1999, with the war in Chechnya. He solved the problem of controlling his “interim president”, Dmitry Medvedev, by going to war with Georgia in 2008. Having gone to war on Mr Putin’s orders, Mr Medvedev was forced to abandon his own agenda of modernisation. Mr Putin solved the problem of his ratings plunge in 2013-14 by seizing Crimea. ............ Unless Mr Putin is stopped in the air over Ukraine, NATO will have to fight him on the ground. ........ As for nuclear weapons, the Russian president has a manic psychosis. He is obsessed with being a historical figure like Stalin. He has placed a huge statue of Prince Vladimir, the creator of Russia, at his Kremlin gate. But he is not suicidal or he would not be sitting at the other end of a 20-foot table from his cronies. He will only use nuclear weapons if he believes there will be no response..... I do not want my country to face NATO in a global conflict, but trying to talk to a thug without showing him your strength leads exactly to that point. .



NATO has activated a task force to respond if Russia uses weapons of mass destruction. Here’s what that means. . NATO has activated a special defense task force to deal with the fallout from a chemical, biological or nuclear attack ......... the alliance would provide Ukraine with specialized equipment and training to deal with such an attack ....... “has activated NATO’s chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense elements.” He added that “allies are deploying additional chemical and biological and nuclear defenses.” ........ The activation of the NATO defense task force means that experts and advanced technological equipment on standby in allied nations are now at NATO’s disposal, ready to be deployed should an attack take place. ........ it is very unusual that the task force is actually being activated.” ........

the use of such weapons inside Ukraine could contaminate neighboring NATO members.

......... There are concerns that Russia might try to use weapons of mass destruction and blame Ukraine for an attack ....... Its activation is intended to send a strong signal to Russia .

Ukraine’s troops have begun a counteroffensive that is reshaping the conflict. . A month into a war that began with widespread expectations of a quick Russian rout, Ukraine’s military is undertaking a counteroffensive that has altered the central dynamic of the fighting: The question is no longer how far Russian forces have advanced, but whether the Ukrainians are now pushing them back. ......... Ukraine has blown up parked Russian helicopters in the south, and on Thursday claimed to have destroyed a naval ship in the Sea of Azov. Its forces struck a Russian resupply convoy in the Northeast. ......... It has been one month since Russian invaded Ukraine, and people continue to flee Ukraine for Poland and elsewhere; the United Nations estimates that more than three million people have fled the country. .

The U.N. General Assembly adopts a strong resolution blaming Russia for Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis.
As the U.S. plans to accept Ukrainian refugees, Afghans feel left behind.
Most Americans say Biden is ‘not tough enough’ on Russia, a new poll finds.
‘We are on the edge of survival’: A Mariupol neighborhood through the eyes of one of its residents.

Putin Only Cares About One Thing, and It’s Not Oligarchs . I asked Anatoly Chubais, who was then the deputy prime minister, the question that seemed at the heart of the fight: What is more important to Russians, power or money? He replied, “If you have to ask, you don’t understand Russia.” The answer was power. ........ Many in the West are hoping for Mr. Putin’s overthrow. They do not understand Russia or the attitudes that people there have toward power. Russian scholars have long noted that the absence of private property rights and impartial legal authority lead to state actors holding the power that determines the lives of Russians in every way. Beyond its borders, Russia has since the 15th century exerted its power through military aggression. In a country where power is nearly everything, sanctions and lost fortunes alone will not change that fundamental dynamic. .......... To him, the West has ignored Russia for too long, and denied it superpower status. ......... In Western capitalist democracies, wealth often equates to access and influence. So it’s not surprising that many believe that sanctioning oligarchs can move them to pressure Mr. Putin to change course. That is a miscalculation. These oligarchs may hold wealth that connects them to power and can be used by Mr. Putin, but in Russia, that does not mean that they wield any power over him or those in the Kremlin. ........ back to the 1990s, when I witnessed mostly former Communist Party officials amassing wealth through a privatization of state assets overseen by Mr. Chubais. Those who then vowed fealty and lent money to Mr. Yeltsin’s political campaign became even wealthier, granted ownership of the largest state-owned enterprises in oil, gas and raw materials like nickel and aluminum. Today they remain the richest men in Russia. ......... Court decisions for or against oligarchs could easily be reversed depending on the favor of the Kremlin. ....... He has made clear the dangers of challenging his hold on power. Take the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once the wealthiest man in Russia. Rising from the ranks of the Communist Youth, Khodorkovsky obtained several formerly state-owned oil fields in Siberia and formed the corporation Yukos. In a televised meeting at the Kremlin in 2003, he dared to criticize the government as corrupt. Mr. Putin responded by stripping Mr. Khodorkovsky of his assets and putting him in prison for 10 years, until he was allowed to leave to live in exile. ......... He vowed to spit them out “like a midge that flew into our mouths.” ........ The only people who can truly sway Mr. Putin are ideologues who share his views, the so-called

siloviki

. The word literally means people with force — the power that comes from being in the security forces or military. These insiders have been with Mr. Putin since his days in the K.G.B. or in the St. Petersburg municipal government, and they see themselves as protectors of Russia’s power and prestige. They have kept their money mostly inside Russia and out of reach of sanctions. And like Mr. Putin, they see the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, and believe this fight is for Russia’s “sovereignty and the future of our children.” ........

To influence them, the West must prioritize the things that they believe give Russia its superpower status: its oil and its military.

....... Russia’s oil and gas sector provides as much as 40 percent of the country’s federal budget revenues and accounts for 60 percent of the country’s exports. ....... the best way to undermine Russia’s military is by limiting access to technology ....... the Russian military lacks the vital hardware and software used by other modern forces to gather real-time field intelligence, along with the communication systems necessary to use that intelligence effectively. And the days-long stalling of a tank convoy indicates that the Russians lack a sophisticated supply-chain system to bring food and gas to troops. ......... if the European Union thought he could tell Mr. Putin “to stop the war and it will work, then I’m afraid were all in big trouble,” because that means Western leaders “understand nothing about how Russia works.” .

She Was a Candidate to Lead Levi’s. Then She Started Tweeting. Jennifer Sey left Levi’s after her advocacy against school closures and mask mandates for children gained attention. She says it’s a matter of free speech. The company disagrees. ......... (“So when is Fauci going to stop doing the morning shows on Sunday, terrorizing the already fearful?” she tweeted in April 2021.) ...... She also expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of masking, mostly for young children. ....... The tweets came when Levi’s was using public health guidance to manage protocols across hundreds of stores and in distribution centers. ....... She also noted that Levi’s — which has been vocal about hot-button issues like gun control — had not previously complained when she posted on social media in support of Democratic politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren or more liberal causes. ........ her claims that she was punished because her views veered from “left-leaning orthodoxy” and that she walked away from a $1 million severance package in order to be able speak freely about the company ......... an increasingly common phenomenon in the digital age known as “context collapse.” ...... Ms. Sey, a former national champion gymnast, was the chief marketing officer at Levi’s before being promoted to brand president in October 2020. She was regularly offered up to journalists for interviews ....... Ms. Sey was well liked internally and was an executive sponsor of the company’s resource group for Black employees. ....... She grew worried about how young children like hers might be harmed by public school closures. That was when she turned to Twitter, where in a time of isolation she found other like-minded parents. ....... It could feel in San Francisco that nobody shared this view.” ......... She regularly posted about school closures, an especially contentious issue in the city, and was involved with rallies about reopening them. ...... she had been “encouraged to tone it down” by a board member and other leaders at the company ...... Ms. Sey also did a YouTube interview with Naomi Wolf, who has been barred from Twitter for spreading vaccine misinformation. ...... “Covid masks are obedience training and Covid vaccines are loyalty oaths.” ....... Sey has argued that she was subject to “viewpoint discrimination” by Levi’s. ....... She remains active on Twitter and is working on a memoir “that’s focused on using your voice and speaking up with integrity and doing it as a woman in corporate America.” .



Yesterday I Was Levi’s Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free. I turned down $1 million severance in exchange for my voice. ....... When I traveled to Moscow in 1986, I brought 10 pairs of Levi’s 501s in my bag. I was a 17-year-old gymnast, the reigning national champion, and I was going to the Soviet Union to compete in the Goodwill Games, a rogue Olympics-level competition orchestrated by CNN founder Ted Turner while the Soviet Union and the United States were boycotting each other. .

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A Post-Putin Russia

I see a post-Putin Russia where Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Alexei Navalny have their own political parties and they take turns being in power and in opposition, and Russia is a democracy. And Russia has a massive sphere of influence that is dependent on it having robust trade with all its neighbors. Russia has been an intellectual capital superpower for a century. That should put it in a good place in the global economy.

I will be surprised if Putin is still in power in the Fall.

Ordinary Russians can end this war and are in the best position to do so. Flee if you have to, but get organized in the diaspora with the goal of taking over the streets of Moscow.

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Tuesday, March 22, 2022

March 22: Ukraine



20 Days In Mariupol . We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage. ....... Time was measured from one shell to the next, our bodies tense and breath held. Shockwave after shockwave jolted my chest, and my hands went cold. ......... As a teenager growing up in Ukraine in the city of Kharkiv, just 20 miles from the Russian border, I learned how to handle a gun as part of the school curriculum. It seemed pointless. Ukraine, I reasoned, was surrounded by friends. ........ In the first few days of the war, the Russians bombed the enormous Freedom Square in Kharkiv, where I had hung out until my 20s. ....... We pulled into Mariupol at 3:30 a.m. The war started an hour later. ........ About a quarter of Mariupol’s 430,000 residents left in those first days, while they still could. But few people believed a war was coming, and by the time most realized their mistake, it was too late. ........ One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell phone, radio and television towers. The few other journalists in the city got out before the last connections were gone and a full blockade settled in. ......... The absence of information in a blockade accomplishes two goals. Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on, and they panic. At first I couldn’t understand why Mariupol fell apart so quickly. Now I know it was because of the lack of communication. ......... Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us, there would be nothing. ......... Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets. ........ Sometimes we would run out to film a burning house and then run back amid the explosions. ........ There was still one place in the city to get a steady connection, outside a looted grocery store on Budivel’nykiv Avenue. Once a day, we drove there and crouched beneath the stairs to upload photos and video to the world. The stairs wouldn’t have done much to protect us, but it felt safer than being out in the open. ........... For several days, the only link we had to the outside world was through a satellite phone. And the only spot where that phone worked was out in the open, right next to a shell crater. I would sit down, make myself small and try to catch the connection. ....... Everybody was asking, please tell us when the war will be over. ......... Every single day, there would be a rumor that the Ukrainian army was going to come to break through the siege. But no one came. ......... By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in. ............ We had recorded so many dead people and dead children, an endless line. ........ The Russian Embassy in London put out two tweets calling the AP photos fake and claiming a pregnant woman was an actress. ......... The only radio you could catch broadcast twisted Russian lies — that Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shooting at buildings, developing chemical weapons.

The propaganda was so strong that some people we talked to believed it despite the evidence of their own eyes.

....... The message was constantly repeated, in Soviet style: Mariupol is surrounded. Surrender your weapons. ............ We went up to the 7th floor to send the video from the tenuous Internet link. From there, I watched as tank after tank rolled up alongside the hospital compound, each marked with the letter Z that had become the Russian emblem for the war. We were surrounded: Dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients, and us. ........... People were nervous. They were fighting, screaming at each other. Every minute there was an airplane or airstrike. The ground shook. ........ We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. At each, the mother sitting in the front of our car would pray furiously, loud enough for us to hear. .

Climate change: 'Madness' to turn to fossil fuels because of Ukraine war
Physicists Just Discovered a Weird New Tetragonal Phase of Water Ice
85K birds euthanized in South Dakota amid avian flu outbreak
Carcinogenic chemical benzene found in hundreds of US personal care products Independent lab found the chemical in more than a quarter of items it tested – sometimes at levels considered ‘life threatening’ .
Securing the TikTok Vote Is the app the next frontier of political campaigning or just another place to burnish one’s image? ...... Years ago he was all in on meditation. Why not try the social platform of the moment? ...... any TikTok newbie would quickly learn, popular songs help videos get discovered on the platform ...... This year, he’s running for Ohio’s open Senate seat; he thinks TikTok could be a crucial part of the race. ......... TikTok, with its young-skewing active global user base of one billion, would seem a natural next frontier. ...... national security experts, who think the app would be a relatively inefficient way for Chinese agencies to obtain U.S. intelligence....... A video should strike a careful balance of entertaining but not embarrassing; low-fi without seeming careless; and trendy but innovative, bringing something new to the never-ending scroll. ...... In the 2020 presidential election, about half of Americans between the ages 18 and 29 voted .

@nycmayor Good morning, TikTok! Grab your smoothie and make it a great week to #GetStuffDone. #fyp #foryoupage #nyc ♬ original sound - Mayor Eric Adams


Jimmy Kimmel Ribs Republicans Over Ketanji Brown Jackson Kimmel said Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings could make the G.O.P.’s worst nightmare could come true: “Having this decided by two Black women whose names they can’t pronounce.” ...... Jimmy Kimmel joked that the hearings “give a number of our Republican senators a chance to compete in one of their favorite events: the subtle racism jamboree.” ....... “I saw that top Republican leading the hearings, Chuck Grassley, is 88 years old. Wow. When it was his turn to speak he was like, ‘Tell us who you are, and then tell me who I am.’” — JIMMY FALLON .

Late Night Gapes at Biden’s Calling Putin a ‘War Criminal’ A Kremlin spokesman pointed the finger back at the U.S. for World War II bombings, and Trevor Noah joked, “Keep up with the times, yo!” .......... “Seriously, Russia, you’re gonna bring up something America did in the ’40s?” Noah said. “America has committed plenty of war crimes since then. Keep up with the times, yo!” ........ “Just because America committed war crimes doesn’t mean you have to, as well, Vladimir Putin, OK? I mean, what if all your friends jumped off a bridge — would you do it, too? No, seriously, would you? I’m just brainstorming ways to end this whole thing. I just want to know what you would do, you know?” — TREVOR NOAH ......... “You can tell people were ready to let loose. On my way in, I heard a guy on the street ask where the bathrooms are, and another guy said, ‘It’s wherever you want it to be.’” — JIMMY FALLON ......... “It’s funny, everything we know about St. Patrick’s Day is not true. St. Patrick was born in England, not Ireland. There are no snakes in Ireland to drive out. And that creep wearing the ‘Kiss me, I’m Irish’ T-shirt? Probably not Irish.” — JIMMY KIMMEL ........... “In fact, the world’s first recorded St. Patrick’s Day parade took place in what is now St. Augustine, Florida, in 1601. At this parade, they drank green beer and ate green beef. They didn’t dye the beef — everything was just very moldy back then.” — JIMMY KIMMEL .

Yemen rebels launch wide strikes on Saudi sites; no one hurt This is the latest escalation as peace talks stall and the war in Yemen continues .
Oil, weapons and realpolitik: Why some countries want to stay on friendly terms with Russia India relies on Russian-made weapons, Israel needs Russia’s cooperation to strike inside Syria and Gulf Arab states look to Russia to help manage the oil market. ........ A small number of countries have declared unqualified backing for Russia since its forces rolled into Ukraine, including regimes in Syria, Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. But a longer list of governments, including China, have avoided using the word “invasion,” abstained from U.N. votes castigating Russia or declined to take part in punishing sanctions on Russia’s economy. ........ Russia is watching the response of other countries closely, including customers for its defense industry and fellow oil producers. But one government in particular may hold the key for Moscow — China. Experts say only Beijing has the economic heft and global power to help soften the blow of harsh economic sanctions introduced by the United States and the European Union, or to potentially persuade Moscow to pull back from its military offensive in Ukraine. ...... Russia supplies about 60 percent of the weapons and equipment for India’s military, the cornerstone of a decades-long friendly relationship between Moscow and Delhi. ........ “I think Indian strategists calculate that they cannot afford to alienate Russia” ...... it would serve India’s interest to try to do more to get this war to end,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center think tank. “Not by coming out and condemning it publicly but more so by quietly trying to urge the Russians and Ukrainians, but especially the Russians, to wind down” .......... In a move that will frustrate Washington, India’s central bank is exploring a trade arrangement with Moscow that would use only Indian rupees and Russian rubles, bypassing Western sanctions ......... India also plans to purchase three million barrels of oil from Russia at a discount. ........ Under Israeli law, sanctions can only be imposed on a country designated as an enemy state. ...... Israel, citing its friendly relations with both Moscow and Kyiv, has offered to play a role as mediator in the conflict. ...... “We have a kind of border with Russia,” Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said last month, shortly before the invasion. Russia is “the important force” in Syria, Lapid said, and so Israel is in “a bit of a Baltic situation.” ........... He also said Russia and Ukraine have large Jewish communities, and that he has to be “more careful than any other foreign minister in the world.” ......... so far Gulf countries have not opted to increase oil production to control a rise in oil prices, despite requests from Washington and other Western governments. ........ The wealthy Persian Gulf monarchies see Russia as a crucial actor in a coalition of oil producers designed to manage the global oil market. In 2019, the Saudis and other oil powers invited Russia to form an expanded group known as “OPEC+,” to control output and ensure a stable, profitable oil market. The group was created to counter the effect of America’s boom in shale production. .......... The Gulf Arab states don’t want to jeopardize that arrangement over the war in Ukraine, and see Russia as an important “linchpin” for the oil producing coalition ......... “These Gulf countries want to maintain the OPEC alliance with Russia because it makes OPEC more powerful as a market manager” ........... The 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit team has placed a permanent strain on U.S.-Saudi relations, and the Emiratis are frustrated that the Biden administration has not imposed tough sanctions on Iranian-backed Houthi forces after a series of attacks on the UAE. The Gulf states also are wary of the Biden White House’s efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, fearing the restoration of the accord could bolster their arch-rivals in Tehran. ........... In Libya and Azerbaijan, Turkey has supported groups fighting Russian-backed forces. But Erdogan and Putin have forged a friendly relationship, and Turkey has bought Russian-made anti-aircraft S-400 missiles and cut energy deals with Moscow. Turkey also looks to Russia to help it maintain pressure on Kurdish groups in Syria, as Ankara fears the emergence of a Kurdish state on its border. ........... In Ukraine, the government in Kyiv has used Turkish-made drones to great effect against Russian armored convoys ............ As it tries to balance between Russia, Ukraine and NATO, Ankara has emerged as a potential mediator, along with Israel, in efforts to find a negotiated settlement to the war. ........ China’s response to the war in Ukraine could shape the conflict’s outcome and the larger clash between Moscow and the West. ......... Since U.S. and European governments imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion, China’s exports to Russia have surged, including electrical equipment, vehicles and machinery, while Moscow has sent China petroleum products and lumber. ............. The war has complicated China’s ambitions in Europe, a key market in Beijing’s long-term plans, and its effects on the global economy could have major fallout for China’s economy, which was already sputtering before the Russian invasion. ......... only China has the power to throw Moscow a lifeline as sweeping Western sanctions squeeze its economy. .......... No matter how China responds, Russia’s economy “is in for a ton of pain” ......... South African political leaders retain loyalty to Moscow from the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union trained and armed anti-apartheid activists while the United States supported the apartheid regime for years. ........ Russia has cultivated ties across the continent through military cooperation agreements with no human rights conditions attached, and Russian mercenaries have been linked to conflicts in the Central African Republic and Mali. .



Ex-partner of Russian oligarch close to Putin said life in Russia was like 'The Godfather' and there was a 'lack of normal human morals' . The ex-partner of Putin's former banker said living in Russia was like "The Godfather." .......... She added that Putin's top aides all "hate each other" and that their government is "ruthless." ........ He once owned two shipyards, the world's largest mine, and significant real estate across Russia, but he claims it was all taken from him. The Kremlin said Pugachev is a criminal, claiming he stole hundreds of millions of dollars from loans given to Russia's central bank in 2008 .

In the War Over Ukraine, Expect the Unexpected . because China’s quarantine strategy has left it with little immunity from prior infections, the virus is now spreading like wildfire there ........ “Tens of millions of residents in Chinese provinces and cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen are under lockdown amid an outbreak of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Travel has been cut off between cities, production lines have stopped and malls have been closed.” .......... What is that doing? It’s killing demand for, and tanking the price of, crude oil — which, after approaching $130 a barrel because of the war in Ukraine, fell below $100 on Tuesday. And what country desperately needs high oil prices because it has so little else to sell to the world to fund its war? Putin’s Russia. So, China’s Covid strategy is hampering Putin’s oil price strategy — probably hurting him as much as anything the U.S. is doing. We’re all still a lot more connected than we might think. ............. the three biggest are the extraordinary acts of cruelty, courage and kindness that this war is revealing and inspiring. ........ it is stunning to watch how quickly he has tied himself into knots. In the space of three weeks, Putin has gone from saying that he came to liberate Ukraine from its “Nazi” leadership and bring Kyiv back to its natural home with Russia to crushing its cities and indiscriminately shelling its civilians to break their resistance to his will. ......... How does a leader go from one day saying Ukraine and its people are integral parts of the soul and fabric of Russia — with shared languages, culture and religion — to, when rebuffed, immediately pivoting toward turning the place to rubble — without any explanation to Ukrainians, the world or his own people? ..........

It’s the kind of vicious madness that you see from a spurned lover or in an “honor killing.”

......... Marina Ovsyannikova — remember her name. She dared to tell the czar that he had no clothes. ....... Executives at Airbnb say they basically woke up in early March to discover that members of their community were spontaneously using their platform in a novel new way — transforming its booking technology into a homemade, people-to-people, foreign aid system. ...... people from 165 countries have booked more than 430,000 nights at Ukrainian homes on Airbnb with no intention of using the rooms — but simply in order to donate money to these Ukrainian hosts ........ $17 million going directly to the hosts ........ as of Sunday, about 36,000 people from 160 countries signed up through Airbnb’s nonprofit affiliate, Airbnb.org, to welcome refugees fleeing Ukraine to their homes. ....... There is no way that America’s giant Agency for International Development, USAID, could have such an impact so fast. .



America’s Economy in the European Mirror . a large part — maybe two-thirds — of the acceleration in U.S. inflation reflects global forces rather than specifically American policies and developments .......... because these global forces may abate if we finally emerge from this dark tunnel of pandemic and war, U.S. inflation may eventually decline substantially even without drastic changes in policy .........

our working-age population has in fact stagnated since 2019, largely thanks to a collapse in immigration.

....... total labor compensation is up 13.6 percent since the eve of the pandemic ........ Recovering from the pandemic was always going to be tough, and Vladimir Putin has made it tougher. .



Another Dictator Is Having a Bad Year . The most important argument against autocracy is, of course, moral: Very few people can hold unrestrained power for years on end without turning into brutal tyrants. ........ in the long run autocracy is less effective than an open society that allows dissent and debate ....... the advantages of having a strongman who can tell everyone what to do are more than offset by the absence of free discussion and independent thought. ......... Putin, whose decision to invade a neighboring country looks more disastrous with each passing day. Evidently nobody dared to tell him that Russia’s military might was overrated, that Ukrainians were more patriotic and the West less decadent than he assumed and that Russia remained highly vulnerable to economic sanctions. .......... while we’re all justifiably obsessed with the Ukraine war — I’m trying to limit my reading of Ukraine news to 13 hours a day ............ there’s a superficially very different yet in a deep sense related debacle unfolding in the world’s other big autocracy: China, which is now experiencing a disastrous failure of its Covid policy. ........ in the West we’re all supposed to be over Covid, although it is still killing 1,200 Americans a day and infections are surging again in Europe, probably presaging another surge here. ......... Hong Kong, which for a long time seemed virtually unscathed, is experiencing hundreds of deaths a day, a catastrophe reminiscent of early 2020 in New York — back when there were no vaccines and we didn’t know much about how to limit transmission. ........... Quite a few commentators, not all of them Chinese, went so far as to cite China’s Covid success as proof that world leadership was passing from America and its allies to the rising Asian superpower. .......... the zero-Covid strategy is extremely disruptive in the face of highly contagious variants like Omicron, especially given the weak protection provided by Chinese vaccines. ........

all of these failures, like Putin’s failures in Ukraine, ultimately stem from the inherent weakness of autocratic government.

....... China, like Russia, is now giving us an object lesson in the usefulness of having an open society, where strongmen don’t get to invent their own reality. .

America’s Right Has a Putin Problem . Just a few weeks ago many influential figures on the U.S. right loved, just loved Vladimir Putin. In fact, some of them still can’t quit him. For example, Tucker Carlson, while he has grudgingly backed off from full-on Putin support, is still blaming America for the war and promoting Russian disinformation about U.S.-funded bioweapons labs. ......... Russia is facing disaster precisely because it is ruled by a man who accepts no criticism and brooks no dissent. .......

everything indicating that Russia will have a depression-level slump.

....... Some of this dictator-love reflected the belief that Putin was a champion of antiwokeness — someone who wouldn’t accuse you of being a racist, who denounced cancel culture and “gay propaganda.” ........ many on the right simply like the idea of authoritarian rule. Just a few days ago Trump, who has dialed back his praise for Putin, chose instead to express admiration for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Kim’s generals and aides, he noted, “cowered” when the dictator spoke, adding that “I want my people to act like that.” ........ Russian forces appear to be undertrained and badly led; there also seem to be problems with Russian equipment, such as communications devices. ......... It shouldn’t have required deep analysis to realize that Putin’s $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves would become largely unusable if the world’s democracies cut off Russia’s access to the world banking system. It also shouldn’t have required deep analysis to realize that Russia’s economy is deeply dependent on imports of capital goods and other essential industrial inputs. ........ The point is that the case for an open society — a society that allows dissent and criticism — goes beyond truth and morality. Open societies are also, by and large, more effective than closed-off autocracies. .

A Realist Take on How the Russia-Ukraine War Could End In a conversation that carries a glimmer of hope, the foreign policy scholar Emma Ashford considers possible paths to de-escalation........ Realism is a political framework that understands international relations as a contest between relatively rational states for power and security. It’s pretty structural in that way. It sees the actions and activities of states as quite predictable, given their role and needs in the international security hierarchy. ......... it can be much less interested than other frameworks in the ideologies of individual leaders or the values they profess to hold. It wants to be structural, not personal or individualistic. ............ and he had a speech from a few years ago arguing that the crisis in Ukraine is largely the fault of the West for opening NATO to Ukraine, and that we did that despite Russian warnings that it was a red line, and through that, pushed them into a corner that led to this invasion. ............. a genuine danger to the West’s professions of perfect innocence, our unwillingness to scrutinize our own actions. ............ She’s what’s called a neo-classical realist. She begins with a structural, state-based, power-based analysis of realism, but then opens it up to more influence from domestic politics — the psychology of individual leaders, the messiness of reality. ........ Putin may be motivated by all kinds of things, by imperial tendencies, by isolation, by ideology, by nostalgia for the Russian Empire, by a desire to mark his own place in history, by these mystic philosophers that he reads ......... a realist is somebody who views the international system as a fundamentally unchanging place, where states act on their interests, where there aren’t really rules or norms that constrain states, and where security concerns are always paramount. ........... You shouldn’t confuse realism with being realistic ........ notion of sort of unending competition between states in history. ........ he says that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is fundamentally the West’s fault. ...... through constant expansion of particularly NATO into the spaces of the former Soviet Union, the West effectively pushed Russia into a corner and forced it to lash out and to seize Crimea in 2014 and to invade the rest of Ukraine. ........... A hundred percent clear he did not have to do this invasion. It seems like most of the elites in Russia thought he wouldn’t. So whenever something is that contingent on the ideas of a singular actor, I think it’s hard to call it structural. I think it’s hard to say we pushed him into a corner, and they had to do this, and they predictably did this. ......... if you are looking at Putin as a rational strategic actor who’s worried about, say, the size of NATO, I think it’s pretty clear that invading Ukraine is likely to strengthen NATO ......... What triggered the Maidan Revolution in 2014 in Ukraine was actually European Union ties for Ukraine. .......... the 1990s were an extremely difficult, hard time for many Russians. The impact of shock therapy proposed by the West, supported by the U.S., was really harsh for many Russians. ......... assume Vladimir Putin is a rational actor. Assume he is motivated by reasonable strategic considerations. Then what? What would that imply about how we should have treated him, or what would that imply about how we should treat him now? .......... I fully believe Putin is a rational person. ........ that rationality is constrained. It’s constrained by the information that he’s getting, the people that he’s getting advice from, and in the kind of personalistic dictatorship symptomatic of the Russian system, Putin is making decisions that may seem rational to him, but are not necessarily rational when viewed from the outside. ..........

this crisis may end up expanding NATO, not shrinking it

......... What off-ramp or approach to him does that offer? ........ it’s the approach that the Ukrainian government is already taking, which is to try and find some kind of negotiated settlement to this conflict ......... They’re not even talking about demilitarization in the same way anymore. Now they’re talking much more about Ukrainian neutrality and potential territorial gains. ......... that the war reveals something to the parties that enable them to come to the negotiating table and hammer out a ceasefire or hammer out a peace deal. And this won’t be easy, but I really do think it’s basically the only option for improving the situation, rather than heading to somewhere worse. ........ and that is one of the first optimistic things that I’ve heard from anyone. ......... Within, I think it was a few hours of the invasion, Zelensky offered to talk to Moscow about neutrality, right? So the Ukrainian position there shifted very fast. The Russian position has been much, much harder to discern, not least because we’re trying to cut through the fog of Russian war propaganda and Sergei Lavrov, who’s always saying outrageous things. .......... Really, really likes to stick it to Western diplomats and point out hypocrisy and not act very diplomatic. ........ and they’re no longer talking about the regime change part at all ......... give it another couple of weeks, and that might be the point where we have an opening for negotiations. ..........

the way that Ukraine has inspired many in Europe and in America

........ I don’t see the Russians necessarily agreeing to a deal if it doesn’t come with some sanctions being lifted, perhaps freeing up some of those frozen central bank reserves or something. And it’s not clear to me that people in the West are necessarily going to accept that. .......... And then within about 72 hours of the start of this conflict, they shifted to a form of economic warfare more analogous to something we haven’t seen since the 1940s. ......... And there are exceptions around energy sales in particular, but at this point, we’ve destroyed their financial system. ........ A lot of key players in both their commercial and financial architecture have simply pulled out. I mean, Visa and Mastercard aren’t working in Russia anymore. Citibank, Citigroup is pulling out of Russia. These things have gone even beyond what the sanctions themselves were potentially doing. And it is a little hard for me to imagine the kind of deal that Putin could make where it would be a dirty deal with Ukraine. Because if he’s going to stop an invasion that he believes, over time, he would win, it will probably be because he got quite a bit of what he wanted. ......... But given how we have framed Putin in the international system now in our moral cosmology, the idea that we’re going to have him wall Ukraine off from NATO and possibly hold on to a fair amount of territory in the east, and then just go back to treating Russia normally and lift the sanctions, even as he made all these gains, it’s hard for me to imagine the domestic politics of that working out in the United States and Europe. ........... but not finding a way to resolve this conflict results in worse outcomes, worse outcomes for people inside Ukraine, potentially worse outcomes for Europe, more broadly ......... there’s going to have to be some sanctions relief in exchange for actually ending the war. ....... He’s probably going to get Crimea as part of Russia ... I don’t think we’re at risk anymore of Ukraine completely losing its sovereignty. Three weeks ago, I would have told you that was a very high probability. ............. The weapons have helped the Ukrainians to resist the Russians. The sanctions are hitting hard. And what we need to do now is rather than just letting those sanctions go on forever, we need to use them as an instrument to try and improve the situation again. So we need to offer a carrot now that we’ve used the stick. ............. the assumption was that if the Russians didn’t do it fast, they would do it in a very slow, grinding fashion ........ we have already seen the Russians try to insert a puppet government in a couple of cities in east of the country — doesn’t seem to be going very well. We are no closer to sort of the actual Ukrainian government collapsing, having to flee, leaders being assassinated. ......... they may be unwilling to pour more into this conflict. They might be willing to settle for something less than the absolutist gains they were going for at the start. And this is how peace settlement, peace negotiations work in almost all wars, right? ......... It’s rarely that one side loses and another side entirely wins. It’s almost always some kind of compromise because future fighting is more costly than giving up on your absolutist gains. ......... And you’re going to be trying to do an occupation of a very, very large geographically and population wise country, when your economy is shattered. ............ if he’s even minimally strategic at this point, he’s got to be looking for some option here that isn’t an unending occupation of Ukraine .......... He’s obviously been receiving bad information. One of the few things that can really cut through that system is

his ability to look on the internet, to turn on the news, and he can see that things aren’t going well

. And so reality has a way of intruding onto that bubble in the context of this conflict. ............... this is a deal with the devil. And this is why nobody likes realists. But what I’m saying is that in the grand scheme of things, this will be better for everybody than long-term sanctions that end up eviscerating Russia while Russia destroys Ukraine. ............. People who spent 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, arguing that the U.S. goal should be to expand NATO, to expand the European Union, to focus on pushing liberal democracy and human rights in Eastern Europe, that these would be the things that would make Europe safer and more secure. It’s not at all clear to me that those claims have been proven true in any way. ........... the concerns about security that Russia has been expressing for 30 years..... and about the fact that Russia has been effectively excluded from the European security environment ............ The ambiguity that the United States has over Taiwan with the One China policy is probably part of the reason why we haven’t seen conflict over that. And Europe is maybe a place where we need to get more creative in thinking about middle ways that don’t necessarily involve NATO’s membership for everyone or NATO’s membership for no one. ......... NATO’s open door policy is not 100 percent a security policy. It’s somewhat a values policy. We want countries to become more democratic. We want them to become part of the liberal infrastructure that we think of as the West. .......... But obviously, we don’t always live up to our values. And whenever we begin talking about them, accusations of hypocrisy fly fast and furious. And most of them are warranted. ........ realists often get this rap as being immoral or amoral. And that’s not really true. ........ politicians cannot only pursue what they think is right. They have to be constrained by an understanding of what is possible in specific time and places. ......... I’m not saying that Russia has a normative right to control Ukraine. I think that’s a terrible notion. I do think that Ukraine, though, is a place where American interests are relatively small, Russian interests are much bigger, and we do not have an interest in getting in a larger conflict with Russia over that. .......... the notion that we have repeatedly told Ukraine that we would let them in NATO and defend them, and now we’re not doing it, to me, that is almost more immoral than saying upfront, this is too much of a risk for us. We will not defend you. You need to find another solution, like the Finns did during World War II, like the Austrians did afterwards. ............ I hear a lot about the Ukrainians who could die in Russia’s invasion. And properly so, I’m hearing much less about the Afghans who might die from starvation in the coming months from the Yemens who are caught in a war that America has helped to finance through our partnership with Saudi Arabia. .......... Something that you’ve pushed for in foreign policy is a belief in restraint. Can you talk a bit about why you think more American restraint would be better for more American security or for American values? ......... if you actually look at our history, maybe we should be doing less. ........ a lot of the history of the Cold War is both sides, both superpowers, sort of dancing right up to that line to try and avoid a bigger conflict, while still hurting the other side. .......... led to a search for ways of exerting our power that feel to us like they are not war. And so we have very, very aggressive sanctions policies. ......... are we fooling ourselves that they don’t understand our sanctions now as a kind of economic war, that direct arms provision from NATO won’t potentially escalate into a shooting war ......... a pathology in American foreign policy thinking today that sees almost anything the U.S. does abroad as not war, as peaceful, if it’s not dropping a bomb .......... further steps could quite easily prompt a Russian response of some kind. ........... On the financial side, we could see some sort of Russian cyber attack on the U.S. financial system or some sort of asymmetric response from them. On the issue of weapons, the weapons are a tempting target for the Russians. ......... an email I got from a listener who is a Russian expat and is somebody who doesn’t particularly like Vladimir Putin, but is furious about the sanctions because, to them, we are destroying the lives, the savings of all these ordinary Russians who had nothing to do with it. .......... many Russians who are trying to flee Russia right now, they can’t access a lot of their money because of Visa and Mastercard pulling out. And so they basically can’t get out. ........... we also overestimate the extent to which they actually hurt those in charge. So in the 2014 case, after Russia seized Crimea, we put on all these big sanctions onto Russia. And you know, one of the things that the Russian government did was it provided bailout funds to the oligarchs that were specifically sanctioned under those authorities. ........... sanctions can, in many cases, actually bolster those in charge. ....... it would not surprise me if there were not some folks around Vladimir Putin saying, we can use this to our advantage. A Russian economy that is more insulated from the West will be to our advantage. And they might be right from the point of view of their narrow clique in power. ........ we’re seriously underestimating the risks of arms transfers. ......... some misperception, misunderstanding, accidental escalation, firing that kills a number of NATO troops on the border, something like that. But anyone who studied history can tell you, that is how war starts. ..........

There’s a lot of fear right now about nuclear weapons being the endpoint of escalation.

.......... something we’re under-rating and which you gestured at earlier is massive cyber attacks. ........ we are nowhere near prepared for. ....... We don’t really know how we’d respond to them. We know we have huge vulnerabilities and all kinds of critical infrastructure and financial infrastructure. ......... So if Russia wanted to begin striking back at the U.S. and Europe in, more or less, the terms we’ve struck at them, that might be how they go about it. .......... the calls to use cyber techniques to strike directly at Russian infrastructure, stop Russian trains, make it hard for Russia to fight the war in Ukraine, those seem to be viewed pretty clearly as making the U.S. an actual party to this conflict. .......... “nuclear escalation is possible, should the United States or its NATO partners intervene in Russia’s war against Ukraine.” That’s coming out of Putin and Sergey Lavrov being very, very clear about that. ........ their willingness to engage in talks as that they are willing to try and find a solution here that doesn’t necessarily involve either complete capitulation by Ukraine or a complete withdrawal by Russia ........... in the first round of talks, the Ukrainian and Russian delegations just showed up and sort of read one another statements. .......... this is Ukrainian security at stake. It is their deal to make. ........ There’s been a sea change in German security policy in the last three weeks. The Germans went from being, basically, the most reluctant large member of NATO to offering to spend more than 2 percent of their G.D.P. on defense and committing extra funding to get up to that amount over the next four years ......... we’ve gone from a place a month and a half ago where the notion of Germany as a geopolitical actor was relatively unthinkable to a place where now Germany, as part of a broader Europe, might actually be able to act as a power center in coming years. .........

China is trying to walk a very fine line here

......... the Indian position is really interesting. So one of India’s biggest arms suppliers is Russia. In fact, at the start of this crisis, before the war actually happened, Vladimir Putin took a trip to India, had these smiling, happy pictures with Narendra Modi. And that relationship has been relatively close in recent years. When you add to that the fact that the Indians import something like 80 percent of their oil from overseas to fuel what is a giant economy, you can see why the Indians are concerned about potentially losing access to Russian markets, right? .......... They’re concerned about losing access to Russian oil, losing access to food supplies. There’s various precious minerals and metals Russia exports. And India also, obviously, has this long history of non-alignment. And so this came as a surprise to many in Washington, who are more used to the way we’ve been talking about India in the last few years as a democratic bulwark against China, right, part of America’s democratic alliance in the Indo-Pacific. But actually, India is very much sort of a third party apart from this conflict. It’s not taking either side, and it is showing that it is definitely still willing to work with the Russians in the commercial and trade space insofar as it benefits India. .......... the U.S.-Russian relationship went from actually being in a very good place in 1991 to being, basically, dead today, and how steps by both the West and Russia created this sort of long running, large scale security spiral, like we just talked about, to bring us to where we are today. ............ the First World War. ...... really nobody wanted a war, and certainly nobody wanted a World War. Yet, somehow we ended up there anyway, step by small step. .



While Putin Shrinks, Zelensky Soars
RAISING SUCCESSFUL KIDS A psychologist says parents who raise resilient, socially intelligent kids always do 5 things during ‘hard times’
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This Time The Russian Transition Should Be Done Right

It was Boris Yeltsin who toppled the Soviet Union, the man with a lot of bravado but no plan. It was also Boris Yeltsin who gave Russia Putin. Russia never had a chance. The collapse was too much. The ordinary Russians never got to make good on the promise. The Soviet Communist Party went away but the KGB took over. There was the collapse, but no buildup.

Russia is and will be a major world power no matter which way you look at it. And to think Russia and China had similar size economies only 30 years ago.

When Putin loses his war in Ukraine, and the Russian people take to the streets to topple the Putin regime, Russia should embrace democracy anew. Russia should be a bigger version of Ukraine.

The democracy in Russia will not be a photocopy of anything anywhere else. No two democracies are alike. Culture and history come into play. Events shape the political process.

I would hope Russia would install robust federalism. It is a large country with many nationalities.

I hope there is a major redistribution of wealth. The Soviet Union collapsed, and what was owned by the state was handed over to key individuals.

It is very important a new Russia works with the US to get rid of more than 90% of the world's nuclear weapons before 2030. That is unfinished business from the Cold War era.

I do think it is healthy for a country to stand up to the US and the West. Imagine a US where there is a Republican Party but no Democratic Party. That would be an unbalance.

A fully democratic, federal Russia will have a sphere of influence. Its very size makes that a given. But that Russia will enhance its influence by respecting the sovereignty of its neighbors.

I hope a democratic Russia puts the country on a path to double digit growth rates. Russia has strong defense, cyber, education, and space industries. It has a lot of natural resources. It can hope to diversify.

And I think it will be a good thing if that Russia is a critique of US policy and actions in the global arena. That would be a welcome counterbalance to have.

But this war in Ukraine is insane.

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Sunday, March 20, 2022

March 20: Ukraine



While Putin Shrinks, Zelensky Soars . Putin was cocksure, dismissing Volodymyr Zelensky as a shrimp, a nothing. But Zelensky has shown the world what true stature is. ............ Putin has always had a Napoleon complex, puffing out his bare chest on horseback; fishing shirtless in Siberia; winning staged judo and hockey displays. ........ Stature is a physical quality, but, more important, it is a human and moral quality. Keats was barely over five feet, but look at his spiritual size. ....... Our military leaders have lately been quoting Napoleon, who said,

“The moral is to the physical as three to one.”

We have seen this with the Ukrainians, who are not only courageously resisting the Russians, but also launching counteroffensives. ........ Putin doesn’t realize what the world knows: You don’t show your muscularity by razing cities, by bombing a maternity hospital, a boarding school for the visually impaired, a bread line, a community center and a shelter painted with a message in Russian pleading that children are inside. ......... The corrupt, paranoid germophobes love surrounding themselves with sycophants, conjuring delusional worlds and giving unhinged rants. ....... Putin let loose on those who question his misbegotten war: “Any people, and even more so the Russian people, will be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths. Spit out on the pavement.” He even went after his pals, the oligarchs, “who can’t do without foie gras, oysters or the so-called gender freedoms” in Miami or the French Riviera. ............. “When you have an autocrat who’s been in power for too long, they don’t listen to people anymore, and this war was afflicted by very bad decision making” ....... This has left Putin vulnerable and humiliated before Russian elites and the world, she said. But it has also, parlously, left him without an offramp “because autocrats don’t negotiate.” ........ the Russians have a fractured identity. Culturally and scientifically, they are a world-class power. But economically and politically, they have a hard time matching the West, so “they resort to coercion.” .



Russia Will Remake Itself. But It Has to Crumble First. . The Russia I grew up in came with dubbed Disney cartoons and Argentine soap operas. Everyone suddenly had a crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. My mom’s new eye-shadow palette encompassed every shade of neon. I went to concerts, bought posters and cassette tapes and, unlike my parents, did not have to wear a five-pointed-star badge with a portrait of Vladimir Lenin on my chest every day at school. ....... With new freedoms came new challenges: a deep economic crisis and a sharp rise in inequality, an explosion of organized crime. After decades in which the state dictated nearly every decision for its subjects, from housing to place of work to taste in movies and music, the new era also brought with it uncertainty and chaos. ........... They spoke about prohibited literature (anything perceived to go against Soviet values or written by émigré writers who had fled Soviet Russia), the difficulties of travel (impossible without the party committee’s blessings), the incessant shortages of food and consumer goods. I’m too young to remember, but my parents would line up for hours for the rare furniture supply that appeared at shops every few months. .......... the brutalities of the U.S.S.R.’s ideological constructs and oppressive practices ....... Vladimir Putin’s cynically named “special military operation” on Ukraine has thrust my country into pariah status — rightly, given the atrocities, human rights violations and brazen disregard for sovereignty that he has unleashed on Ukraine.

Impossibly, in the past few weeks it’s felt as if we’d been yanked back to the Soviet era, except this time it’s even more horrifying, more repressive than we could have imagined.

Russia is not just losing the comforts that Western capitalism offered, owing to severe sanctions, but Mr. Putin is also doubling down on closing off any expression of dissent. ........... For Ukrainians, the war has meant hell on earth. Countless lives shattered. I watch in horror as my friends there hide out in bomb shelters. Schools, hospitals, residential buildings destroyed by bombs, innocent people reportedly shot dead in the street as they attempt to escape to safety. It is immeasurably cruel, unfair and devastating. For Russians, there is the fear and disgust at watching Mr. Putin’s ruthless campaign, which will inevitably raise the civilian death toll. There’s also the feeling of helplessness of not having been able to stop it and the shame of being from the country of the aggressor. And unsurprisingly, Russia has been catapulted into a dark hole. Many foreign companies — clothing and credit card brands, car manufacturers and tech corporations, fast food and retail chains — have suspended operations, affecting every corner of the economy. The West’s sanctions have mostly cut Russian civilians off from the global economy. ...........

This crackdown on freedom is not new to Russians, but it has reached a peak of absurdity: Standing in the street with a flower or a blank sign now gets you loaded into a police van.

.......... Between arrests for speaking out, censorship, rumors of martial law and relentless propaganda, it’s as though we had landed straight in the Stalin era. The Russia I knew has been erased. What’s coming next is dark. ......... But they continued to create art, make scientific discoveries and build families and architectural masterpieces. There was a great deal of humor, beauty and creativity behind the Iron Curtain. ......... We will remake Russia, of course, slowly and patiently, just like the generation before us. But not before this one crumbles first. .



It’s Now Putin’s Plan B in Ukraine vs. Biden’s and Zelensky’s Plan A . Putin’s potential plan C is really scary — and I don’t even want to write what I fear would be his plan D. ......... it seems obvious to me that Putin, having realized that his plan A has failed — his expectation that the Russian Army would march into Ukraine, decapitate its “Nazi” leadership and then just wait as the whole country fell peacefully into Russia’s arms — has shifted to his plan B. ........ Plan B is that the Russian Army deliberately fires upon Ukrainian civilians, apartment blocks, hospitals, businesses and even bomb shelters — all of which has happened in the past few weeks — for the purpose of encouraging Ukrainians to flee their homes, creating a massive refugee crisis inside Ukraine and, even more important, a massive refugee crisis inside nearby NATO nations. ........ “More than 3.3 million refugees have fled Ukraine since the war began — Europe’s fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II — the vast majority of them women and children, according to the U.N. Another 6.5 million are thought to be displaced inside the country.” ......... indiscriminate use of firepower resulting in increased civilian casualties, destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure, and intensify the humanitarian crisis.’” ....... Zelensky’s plan A, which I suspect is playing out even better than he hoped, is to fight the Russian Army to a draw on the ground, break its will, and force Putin to agree to Zelensky’s terms for a peace deal — with only minimal face-saving for the Kremlin leader. For all the barbaric bloodshed and bombings by Russian forces, Zelensky is — wisely — still keeping one eye on a diplomatic solution, always pushing for negotiations with Putin while rallying his forces and people. ........ “the war in Ukraine has reached a stalemate after more than three weeks of fighting, with Russia making only marginal gains and increasingly targeting civilians ........ Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war ....... Russians do not have the manpower or the equipment to seize Kyiv, the capital, or other major cities like Kharkiv and Odessa ......... economic sanctions on Russia the likes of which have never been imposed before by the West — with the aim of grinding the Russian economy to a halt. ....... “More than half of the goods and services flowing into Russia come from 46 or more countries that have levied sanctions or trade restrictions, with the United States and European Union leading the way’’ ........ If Putin’s plans A, B and C all fail, though, I fear that he would be a cornered animal and he could opt for plan D — launching either chemical weapons or

the first nuclear bomb since Nagasaki.

.

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Thursday, March 17, 2022

March 17: Ukraine (2)

U.S. Adds ‘Kamikaze Drones’ as More Weapons Flow to Ukraine The Ukrainians will succeed, U.S. and European military experts said, if they can operate in small teams, strike assembled Russian forces, then melt away to set a new ambush later. ........ tactical radios and jamming gear to help prevent Russian forces from talking to one another. ......

the war has moved to a new stage

........ In addition to antiaircraft systems like the Stinger, Ukraine is requesting mobile air defense systems that can hit planes flying at higher altitudes, like the bombers that struck a training ground near the Polish border on Sunday. ......... Mr. Zelensky asked for the S-300, a Russian-made air defense system, which the United States could ask other nations to provide. ......... The Ukrainians have been able to destroy so many Russian tanks and armored vehicles in large measure because they have good conceptual plans of how to use the antitank missiles and the bravery to employ them up close in battle .........

“are fighting against an existential threat and they aren’t giving up. They have the will.”

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As Russian Troop Deaths Climb, Morale Becomes an Issue, Officials Say More than 7,000 Russian troops have been killed in less than three weeks of fighting, according to conservative U.S. estimates. ........ The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. ........ a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks. ......... the estimated 14,000 to 21,000 injured ....... the Russian military has also lost at least three generals in the fight ........ a high, and rising, number of war dead can destroy the will to continue fighting ... One recent report focused on low morale among Russian troops and described soldiers just parking their vehicles and walking off into the woods. .......... The high rate of casualties goes far to explain why Russia’s much-vaunted force has remained largely stalled outside of Kyiv ........... That aerial bombardment, officials say, has helped camouflage the Russian military’s poor performance on the ground. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this week that an estimated 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the war. ........ Putin had put two of his top intelligence officials under house arrest. The officials, who run the Fifth Service of Russia’s main intelligence service, the FSB, were interrogated for providing poor intelligence ahead of the invasion ........... “They were in charge of providing political intelligence and cultivating networks of support in Ukraine,” Mr. Soldatov said in an interview. “They told Putin what he wanted to hear” about how the invasion would progress. .......

some Russians have access to virtual private networks (VPNs) and are able to get news from the West.

......... around 20 Russian generals were in Ukraine as part of the war effort ......... “Three generals already — that’s a shocking number” ........... a fourth general, Maj. Gen. Oleg Mityaev, the commander of the 150th motorized rifle division, had been killed in fighting. ...... many Russian generals are talking on unsecured phones and radios. In at least one instance, they said, the Ukrainians intercepted a general’s call, geolocated it, and attacked his location, killing him and his staff. ........... the Russian toll, some military specialists and lawmakers say, is unlikely to change Mr. Putin’s strategy. ......... “It is stunning, and the Russians haven’t even gotten to the worst of it, when they hit urban combat in the cities” .

Russia Is Destroying Kharkiv Residents describe what has been lost after three weeks of attacks. ......... a vibrant, youthful city of nearly 1.5 million people steeped in academia, art and literature. ......... Unable to take control of the city, Russia has resorted to destroying it. As in Syria and Chechnya, Russia aims to demoralize the city’s inhabitants with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower. It is following a similar plan in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv. ......... Russia has attacked Kharkiv with artillery, rockets, cluster munitions and guided missiles on at least 13 different days, a relentless barrage, lately targeting the city at night.

Most Kharkiv residents are Russian speakers, and many are ethnic Russians.

......... “You would see so many young people on the streets; it gave the city this kind of energetic, vibrant feeling because of the youth,” said Maria Avdeeva, a disinformation and security expert. “Imagine tomorrow, life goes back to normal in Kharkiv. Where will they live? Where will they go to university?” ........ For Ms. Avdeeva and other lifelong residents, the annihilation of the city is incomprehensible. She remains in Kharkiv, documenting its destruction. Last weekend she walked around in search of stores still selling food. ........ “They are maximizing the terror. They are shelling or bombing random objects now,” said Ms. Zubar. “But we would rather die fighting for the city than leave.” .



The Price of Putin’s Belligerence . As his ruthless invasion continues, Vladimir Putin is trying to break Ukraine by demolishing its cities and brutalizing its people. Each day brings fresh horrors. ........ The United States, the European Union and other countries, including Australia and Switzerland, have responded by imposing economic sanctions on Russia with a severity that has few parallels among nations not at war. .......... the United States would join the European Union and other allies in moving to suspend permanent normal trade relations with Russia, which would put it in the company of Cuba and North Korea. ......... McDonald’s first Moscow restaurant, opened in 1990, was a powerful symbol of Russia’s openness to the West. On Tuesday, McDonald’s temporarily closed all of its nearly 850 restaurants in the country. ........ Russia is already facing a devastating economic crisis from the sanctions in place now. ....... the need for America and Europe to loosen the economic ties with Russia that were so carefully built over the past three decades ...... Europe, in particular, is confronting the grim reality that its dependence on Russian gas means that it is funding Mr. Putin’s war. .......... nations regretting their reliance on Putin’s Russia can simultaneously pursue a shift away from dependence on any petrostates by accelerating the development of renewable energy sources ....... Mr. Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine has shattered the post-Cold War project of interlacing Russia with the democratic nations of Europe. As the West once again finds itself pitted against Russia, it is worth remembering that the Cold War was won by those who took better care of their own people and held out the prospect of a better life to those on the other side of the divide.

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