March 11: Ukraine, India

Ukraine Crisis Kicks Off New Superpower Struggle Among U.S., Russia and China Beijing and Moscow now hold a stronger hand in confronting the West than during the Cold War ......... Russia’s audacious military assault on Ukraine is the first major clash marking a new order in international politics, with three major powers jostling for position in ways that threaten America’s primacy. ........ Russia and China have built a thriving partnership based in part on a shared interest in diminishing U.S. power. Unlike the Sino-Soviet bloc of the 1950s, Russia is a critical gas supplier to Europe, while China isn’t an impoverished, war-ravaged partner but the world’s manufacturing powerhouse with an expanding military. .......... “We all thought we were looking at a Europe whole, free and at peace indefinitely,” said Michele Flournoy, who served as the Pentagon’s top policy official during the Obama administration. “We knew that Russia would conduct gray zone operations and that Putin would use his KGB playbook to create instability on his periphery. But a wholesale invasion of a sovereign country to reorient its government is a different moment.” .......... Beijing doesn’t really like Putin’s tactics ...... When pro-democracy protesters rose up in Hong Kong, Mr. Xi imposed harsh security laws, brushing off agreements his predecessors made giving autonomy to the former British colony and international financial center. ......... what the Pentagon in 2015 called the “re-emergence of great power competition” and shifted from its emphasis of counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. ......... Even with annual defense budgets that soared over $700 billion, coping with an urgent Russian-generated crisis while preparing for a Chinese threat whose peak is still years away presents an enormous challenge for the Pentagon. ........ “The United States is going to have to get used again to operating in multiple theaters simultaneously—not just militarily, but in terms of psychology and foreign-policy making” ....... Beyond the military, the new confrontation with Moscow might also accelerate a further fracturing of economic globalization. China and the U.S. are trying to unravel supply chains for critical technologies. Should the West impose crippling sanctions on Russian banks and major companies, Moscow is likely to become more reliant on Beijing, which has issued a digital currency and is building a payments system separate from the West’s. ..........

most Europeans see the Ukraine crisis as a broader threat to Europe.

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Narendra Modi’s BJP Wins Big in Indian Elections Result of regional votes shows the enduring popularity of the leader despite the impact of the pandemic and a controversial proposal to overhaul the agricultural sector ......... It is the first time in decades that voters have returned an incumbent party to power in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP was also on track to win a majority in three other states—Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur. .......

“He enjoys a huge, huge popularity among ordinary people.”

........ The BJP’s wins will strengthen the party’s control in Parliament’s upper house, where it doesn’t have a majority. ........ In a major upset, the regional Aam Aadmi Party, which runs the government of New Delhi, won a majority of seats in the huge farming state of Punjab and defeated the Indian National Congress Party ........ Its victory in Punjab now positions the Aam Aadmi Party, led by Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, for a bigger presence during the 2024 national elections. ...... He has cultivated an image as a pious bachelor and devout Hindu who is wholly dedicated to public service. .

Why Is Russia Invading Ukraine and What Is Happening on the Ground? Ukrainian fighters put up fierce resistance as Putin places nuclear forces on alert ....... Russia is Europe’s major supplier of natural gas. ....... Ukraine’s defenders held on to Kyiv, and pushed back Russian troops in urban combat in its second-largest city, Kharkiv. ....... Ukrainian authorities have ordered Kyiv residents to stay indoors until Monday morning while they hunt for Russian infiltrators, who engaged in several shootouts with Ukrainian troops and civilian volunteers overnight. ....... “They have consciously chosen to hit civilians and everything that renders life normal. Power stations, hospitals, kindergartens, housing blocks—they are all targeted daily.” .......... Before the invasion, Russia had massed a fighting force totaling up to 190,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders compared with Ukraine’s 200,000-strong army, supplemented by tens of thousands of reservists. ........ Putin says the main objective is to defend the Russian-speakers in Ukraine, especially those in the two self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which broke away from Ukrainian control in 2014. ....... eight million Ukrainians died during World War II and that his own grandfather served as a Soviet officer during the conflict. ....... Before 2014, polls showed a roughly even split in support among the population for joining the EU or a Moscow-led economic bloc. In a November survey, however, 58% favored the EU, with 21% for Russia’s group. Polling data show that even people in the south and east, where there are many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, are now in favor of the EU. ....... Russia’s military campaign marks the continuation of a policy that has seen Mr. Putin steadily expanding the country’s sphere of influence, reasserting Moscow’s dominion over former Soviet republics such as Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. ........ Putin excoriated Mr. Zelensky, calling him a terrorist and urging Ukraine’s military to oust him. ...... “This is really a pattern that we’ve seen from President Putin through the course of this conflict, which is manufacturing threats that don’t exist in order to justify further aggression,” she said. “And the global community and the American people should look at it through that prism. We’ve seen him do this time and time again.” ......... NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called Russia’s invasion an act of war, “deliberate, coldblooded and long-planned.” ........ Ukrainian Mig-29 jet fighters roared low overhead, in a sign that Russia, despite its formidable advantage in aviation and two days of relentlessly bombing Ukraine’s air bases, still hadn’t achieved full control of the skies. ........ Ukrainian artillery and tanks were moving through the city, and thousands of volunteers lined up at recruitment centers to receive weapons. On the roads south of Kyiv, armed villagers made their own roadblocks out of tractors and sandbags. ........ The Russian advance toward Kyiv has been slowed by antiair and antitank weapons, raising the possibility that Russian forces might be weakened by a lack logistical support before they can achieve their objective. The growing fear, though, is that Moscow may begin indiscriminate strikes against civilian targets to cow the Ukrainian government into submission. .

Free to read: Western intelligence officials predicted victory for Russia in less than a week after it invaded Ukraine. But more than a fortnight later, it remains locked in a battle for control. How will this conflict play out? https://t.co/JEyOkIt9wF

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) March 11, 2022

Endgame in Ukraine: how could the war play out? Russia’s failure to secure a swift win opens a range of possible outcomes ....... Ukraine is mounting a stronger than anticipated defence and western countries are supporting it with arms supplies. Meanwhile, Russia’s campaign has been beset by strategic errors, logistical shortcomings and intelligence blunders that vastly underestimated Ukrainian capabilities. ........ that Russia will win a comprehensive victory — remains the most likely outcome, given its overwhelming military power. ........ The civilian death toll will also be much higher than anticipated as Russia turns to more indiscriminate bombardment and deploys arms such as cluster munitions and thermobaric weapons. ........ many defence and intelligence officials say a potential retreat to western Ukraine — where Russia has so far made no attempt to seize territory — is a potential endgame. They have mooted Lviv, close to the Polish border, as a possible new capital for a rump Ukrainian state........ a partition of the country between its more Russian-speaking east and Europe-focused west........ If Russia were to attack and capture the port of Odesa, Ukraine’s third-largest city and long identified by Nato as a potential Russian target, it could cut off a rump Ukraine from the sea, crippling a crucial export route........ few think Putin would settle for failing to capture Kyiv or to topple the Zelensky government, given his stated aim to “demilitarise” the country and wrench it from its EU and Nato membership ambitions. ........ In talks in Turkey between the combatants’ foreign ministers — the most senior-level negotiations so far convened — on Thursday, Russia’s Sergei Lavrov denied Moscow had attacked Ukraine and claimed the US was funding biological weapons research in the country. Dmytro Kuleba, his Ukrainian counterpart, said seeking ceasefire promises from Lavrov was impossible as “there are other decision makers for this matter in Russia”........ while Ukrainian officials have suggested a deal on the status of Crimea and pro-Russian separatist-controlled regions in the east could be feasible, Kyiv has ruled out Russia’s broader demands that it become neutral and give up its military capabilities. ........ western officials say anything short of a full Russian withdrawal would mean that crippling economic sanctions against Moscow were retained. “We keep tightening the noose,” said one. “Putin cannot hope for a fait accompli and for the world to go back to some kind of [normality]. There has been an irreversible change.” .........

Russian retreat, Putin toppled

......... Ukraine’s resistance so far has raised the possibility that Kyiv could continue repelling Russian efforts to seize key cities, especially if western weapons supplies continue to bolster the army’s capabilities ......... Putin himself could be a casualty of a failed invasion. They argue that the Russian president, who has ruled for more than 22 years, might be toppled by Kremlin elites, or by Russian military or security officials angry at his handling of the war, or by a groundswell of protest among Russian citizens furious at falling living standards...... the key to ending the conflict in Ukraine was increasing opposition to Putin inside Russia ...... However, Putin’s grip on power is arguably stronger than it has ever been, thanks to draconian new legislation in effect outlawing independent media in Russia and leaving Kremlin-controlled outlets as the sole source of information....... Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said this week that plans — mooted by the west but now ruled out — to supply Kyiv with Polish MiG fighters would be a “very undesirable and potentially dangerous scenario”. In turn, Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, has warned Russia that attacks on western supply lines to Ukraine would represent an escalation. ......... “Putin wants less Nato, he’s getting more Nato,” Stoltenberg said this week. “He wanted to divide us, he is getting a more united alliance.” .

Won’t fight in Ukraine, direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III: Joe Biden Joe Biden stated that the United States would not fight in Ukraine, and that a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia would result in World War III. .

Communication, visibility and delivery: How Yogi bulldozed Akhilesh Yadav's caste calculus The BJP has become the only party since 1977 to breach the 40% vote share mark in Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. ......... Yogi Adityanath has become the first Chief Minister in 37 years to retain power after completing a full five-year term in Uttar Pradesh....... The Election Commission data showed BJP bagging a 41.3 % vote share. In 1977, the Janata party had touched a 47.8% vote share high in UP. ........ The BJP swept the UP polls, winning 255 of the 403 assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh. Meanwhile, the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party settled with 111 seats. ........ The BJP swept the UP polls, winning 255 of the 403 assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh. Meanwhile, the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party settled with 111 seats. ....... The free ration delivery along with the cash transfer scheme of the BJP government has given the party a big boost in this election. With the help of these two schemes, the BJP was able to mobilise poor voters, cutting across the caste and community lines. .

https://www.indiatoday.in/elections/story/congress-preps-for-post-result-battle-stations-senior-leaders-in-poll-bound-states-1922219-2022-03-08 'If Congress wants...': Mamata Banerjee hints at 2024 alliance against BJP Mamata Banerjee said her party can get together with the Congress to defeat the BJP in the 2024 general elections. ...... The grand old party, which has been reduced to an all-time low in the recently-concluded elections, accused the Trinamool Congress of being “agents of the BJP” in a sharp rebuttal. “The TMC is the biggest agent of the BJP. Rather, TMC should merge with Congress if it is so serious about fighting against BJP,” Congress’ Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said. ......... On Thursday, Kolkata Mayor and senior TMC leader Firhad Hakim offered: “The TMC has shown how you can put up a fight against the BJP and defeat it (in Bengal). It is high time that Congress merges with TMC and fights under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee.” ....... The Trinamool chairperson had sent shockwaves across the Congress camp in December with her “the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) does not exist anymore” remark. The attack didn’t stop there. Editorials in the TMC mouthpiece “Jago Bangla” continued its criticism of the grand old party, writing: "Congress is a failure... UPA is over..." It even went on to say that the Congress “has locked itself in the freezer”. .

How Arvind Kejriwal has disrupted Mamata Banerjee’s India plan ahead of 2024 The 2022 Assembly Elections have put Kejriwal's AAP as the major contender next only to BJP and Congress while Mamata's TMC suffered losses. What does it mean for the two parties as it gears up for 2024 Lok Sabha elections? ....... After winning the Punjab election, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is the only party after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress to have a majority government of its own in two states or more. Even the Communist Party of India-Marxist does not have majority in two states. ........ With Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh going to the polls later this year, Kejriwal’s party has a chance to cross the threshold to enter the elite club. ....... Arvind Kejriwal, on the other hand, has been working to strengthen the AAP in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat for the late-2022 elections. The AAP contested Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand elections. Both gave forgettable results for the AAP but the presence was recorded. ....... The AAP’s success in the Punjab election has given Arvind Kejriwal an edge over Mamata Banerjee in their competition to replace the Congress as the BJP’s principal challenger in 2029 if not in 2024. Soon after the Punjab victory, AAP leader Raghav Chadha said, “The AAP is going to become the challenger of the BJP. There is no doubt in my mind that in the times to come, the AAP will become the national and natural replacement.” .



After massive drubbing in 5 states, G23 battle for all-new Congress intensifies The G23's fight for a new Congress has heated up following a landslide defeat in five states in the Assembly election. ....... An intense power struggle has begun in the Congress hours after humiliating electoral setbacks in Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Goa, and Manipur. ....... ‘G23’, or the group of 23 dissenters, is closing ranks once again to force the leadership issue. Unlike the August 15, 2020, missive that had questioned Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s style of functioning, this time around, the focus would be on "democratising" the decision-making process in the Congress. The target is the composition of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), an emergency session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), accountability for the recent poll debacle, and the completion of organisational polls. ........ Priyanka in Uttar Pradesh drew a good crowd, but neither seats nor votes polled justified her efforts. Old Congressmen from UP, leaning on an old film song, said she should have understood the distinction between crowd curiosity and votes. The song from Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi is "woh hans ke mile hum pyar samajh baithe". ......... Team Rahul was in a daze. A day before the results came out, Rahul’s picture of having a triple ice-cream sundae with faluda was apparently circulated to convey how confident he was about getting Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Goa. Three scoops for the three states. The poll outcome came as a shocker. It explains why Congress has gone into a shell again. .

How 'Delhi model' facilitated AAP's historic Punjab sweep The AAP’s historic victory in a state with no reliable voting base and a weak and invisible party organisation is a fairy tale story almost similar to what the newbie party achieved in the Delhi elections in 2015. ........ the 2022 elections have proven to be a Waterloo for the old and established parties in Punjab. ....... How did an eight-year-old party achieve this magical feat in a state where its party unit was dissolved by AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal over indiscipline after the 2017 electoral debacle? Behind the AAP revolution in Punjab, there is a single and uncomplicated factor that has vastly shaped the insurgent party’s historic victory: the ‘Delhi Model’. ......... a key factor was the electorate’s disillusionment with the established parties in the state. This is nowhere more prominent than the ruling Congress party which, despite winning an inspiring election in 2017, allowed itself to be consumed in factionalism and leadership war. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh’s unceremonious removal by the party’s leadership from Delhi, his running feud with newly appointed party president Navjot Singh Sidhu and the party’s known Dalit face Charanjit Singh Channi’s elevation to the hot-seat just months before elections played a key role in the party’s debacle. ....... a disillusioned voter in Punjab was desperately looking for a change and a new template of governance that could address deep-rooted corruption, patronage politics and end elite control. The Kejriwal government’s ‘Delhi Model’ of governance based on efficient delivery of public services found a strong resonance among voters in Punjab. The Delhi Model, as has been aggressively promoted by the AAP government, comprises four crucial planks of welfare delivery - quality school education, healthcare, water and electricity at affordable rates. ......... After it won the landslide in 2015 in Delhi, the AAP government singled out education as a key area of building its credentials. With slogans such as ‘education first’, the AAP-led government infused a fresh dose of energy into a moribund education system, especially the government-run schools in the capital. The AAP government under the leadership of deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, who holds the education portfolio, allotted the highest funds to education, introduced new teacher training courses for students, and infused money to improve the ailing schooling infrastructure. A concerted and much focussed effort produced quick positive results. For instance, a Delhi government school, Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya in Dwarka, was ranked number one among all government-run day schools in India, while two others have made it to the top ten in 2019. Since then, many other schools have joined the rank. The net result is that more and more students from private schools are joining government schools in Delhi. ........ Beyond school education, there has been a visible transformation in healthcare access and quality. Delhi’s Mohalla Clinics have acquired national and international attention in the last few years. What also helped the broader appeal of the Delhi Model is that additional packages such as electricity subsidies (free up to 200 units), free bus rides for women, drinking water for 24X7 have earned the goodwill of most residents of the national capital. AAP’s back-to-back landslide victory in 2020 despite facing a massive challenge from the BJP is a vindication of the success of the Delhi Model. .......

the Delhi Model that assures corruption-free and efficient delivery of public services.

........ The party managed to connect with the women voters by promising them monthly cash grants of Rs 1,000, buttressing the narrative of a dignified life for women in some way within a societal setting marred by traditions of patriarchy. This seems to have worked given AAP’s good track record of delivering its key promises in Delhi and Kejriwal’s own image as an anti-corruption activist. .

G23 members demand new Congress chief, seek emergency AICC meeting G23 members Kapil Sibbal and Manish Tiwari held a meeting at former leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad's house on Friday. .

Arvind Kejriwal's AAP marches forward to become a national party | Infographic The victory in Punjab has turned Arvind Kejriwal's AAP into a fledgling national party with a simmering potential to replace the Congress as the main opposition. .

Arvind Kejriwal model of governance is now becoming national identity in politics: Manish Sisodia on AAP's win in Punjab . .



Congress preps post-poll strategy, opens backchannel talks with like-minded parties As the countdown to the declaration of state assembly polls’ result starts, Congress gets down to implement its post-poll strategies. .

The great stall of Kyiv Ground reports from Ukraine and western intelligence indicate that the key to Ukraine’s fight against Russia lies in the resilience being shown on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv. ...... US intelligence assessments estimate that Ukraine’s Air Force still has operational jets along with TB2 Unmanned Combat Aircraft Vehicles (UCAV). Coverage of these assets has so far kept Russian air strikes away from the capital, although the capital has been hit by missiles. Ukraine still has 56 operational fighter jets in its inventory and the Ukraine Air Force is still flying anywhere between 5-10 sorties every day ...... Russia has launched 328 cruise missiles on civilian facilities since the invasion began. .

March 10: Russia, India

Modi's BJP wins big in India's largest state election . BJP won or leading in 251 of 403 seats in Uttar Pradesh ....... Win will reinforce Modi's popularity for 2024 general election ....... Delhi's ruling party AAP set for landslide victory in Punjab

. Russian economy in 'shock' from unprecedented economic war - Kremlin an "absolutely unprecedented" economic war being waged against Moscow.......... "Our economy is experiencing a shock impact now and there are negative consequences, they will be minimised," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. ........ He described the situation as turbulent, but said that measures to calm and stabilise it were already being taken.

. Kremlin tells United States to await response to "economic war" . The Kremlin accused the United States on Wednesday of declaring an economic war on Russia that was sowing mayhem through energy markets, and put Washington on notice it was considering its response to a ban on Russian oil and energy. ..... Russia's economy is facing the gravest crisis since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union after the West imposed heavy sanctions on almost the entire Russian financial and corporate system following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. ........ The West's attempt to cut off Russia - one of the world's biggest exporters of oil, gas and metals - has hit commodity markets and raised the spectre of spiralling inflation across the world....... Asked about the Kremlin's comments, White House deputy national security adviser Daleep Singh said: "This is brutal and needless war of aggression. We've said all along, if the aggression escalates, so will the costs." ........ Russia said on Monday that oil prices could shoot up to over $300 per barrel if the United States and European Union banned imports of crude from Russia. Brent hit $139 on Monday, its highest since 2008. ...... Russia says Europe consumes about 500 million tonnes of oil a year. Russia supplies around 30% of that, or 150 million tonnes, as well as 80 million tonnes of petrochemicals. ....... "The situation demands a rather deep analysis - those decisions announced by President Biden," Peskov said. "If you are asking me what Russia is going to do - Russia is going to do what is necessary to defend its interests." "The United States definitely has declared economic war against Russia and is waging this war," he said.

. Russia’s Other Contest With the West: Economic Endurance Which side can maintain domestic support as the war costs regular citizens could also determine the outcome in Ukraine......... The severity of Western measures has far exceeded expectations, not only devastating Russia’s economy but also isolating its citizens from travel and even from Western brands. .......... Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, had prepared Russia for sanctions like those imposed after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, as if daring Western countries to cut off their citizens from Russian trade and see who blinked first. .......... Now, both sides face a test of their ability to maintain domestic support for a standoff whose costs will be borne by regular citizens. ......... The economic balance favors the West in the extreme. One study estimated that

a full trade war would curb the combined gross domestic product of Western countries by 0.17 percent, but Russia’s by a devastating 9.7 percent

......... Public opinion may also advantage the West, where surveys find wide support for harsh measures against Russia, whereas Mr. Putin dare not even acknowledge the war’s extent for fear of triggering more protests........ Still, Western leaders must maintain unity across 20-plus fractious democracies, persuading citizens from Canada to Bulgaria that spiking energy prices — which may be just the start of the economic shocks — are worth the sacrifice. .......... Mr. Putin, meanwhile, must maintain his grip on both Russia’s public and the network of political power brokers who back him. If their tolerance of the war’s rapidly rising toll slips before Western resolve does, it could imperil not just his war, but his very hold on power. .......... In polls, Europeans across the continent express a moral imperative to punish Russia’s invasion, as well as a belief that Russia now poses a direct threat to their countries. ......... In Germany — the European Union’s largest economy and often its decider on Russia matters — only 38 percent supported increasing military spending as of September, now it is up to 69 percent. ....... leaders like Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France are seeing their approval ratings surge as they rally against Russia. Far from playing down the costs to everyday citizens, some emphasize it as a point of pride. ........ Biden is under countervailing pressure from Republicans and voters alike to simultaneously stand up to Russia while keeping down gas prices ....... Germany imports more than half of its gas from Russia, as does Austria. Some Eastern European countries run on nearly 100 percent Russian gas. ........ Europe’s West gets most of its gas elsewhere, such as from Norway and Algeria. Still, as Russia is cut off from buyers, fossil fuels will become scarcer and therefore costlier worldwide. Some Germans’ energy bills are already projected to increase by two-thirds this year. ........ To ease the burden, European governments are putting in place sweeping energy subsidies, worth 15.5 billion euros, or about $17 billion, in France, €5.5 billion in Italy, €2 billion in Poland, €1.7 billion in Austria, and so on. Many target low-income households. ....... But there may be a timer on Western resilience. Unless European countries radically re-engineer their infrastructure for importing gas or take on perhaps the fastest shift to renewable energy in history — both considered technically feasible but costly — they could potentially run out of fuel next winter. ........ Russia also exports much of the world’s copper and other industrial materials. ........

The West’s greatest ally in maintaining unity may be Mr. Putin himself.

By massing forces on NATO’s borders and producing shocking images of destruction in Ukraine, he has given Europeans something to rally against, distracting from their disagreements, for now. ........ has accelerated a kind of authoritarian feedback loop in Russia, with tightening repression feeding popular discontent ......... Putin belongs to a particular club of authoritarians — individual strongmen, rather than military or party dictatorships — for whom popular support is a secondary concern. ...... such leaders draw their power from the backing of political elites, like the heads of security agencies or state industries ....... Authoritarian elites, garrisoned behind vast personal wealth, can more easily endure the economic hardship that will be borne by regular Russians. They also tend to give leaders wide latitude in wartime, which may be why strongmen rarely lose power because of battlefield losses ......... Still, such elites are not fooled by state propaganda. And they are not indifferent to their country’s fate. ......... Surveys of Russian political elites conducted in 2020 found that most backed Mr. Putin for exactly the accomplishments now under threat: stabilizing the country and winning it respect abroad. Many also expressed concern over his handling of the economy — and opposition to military adventurism in Ukraine. .......... “The crisis will be most severe for a minimum of three years. Take the 1998 crisis and multiply it by three,” Oleg Deripaska, a prominent Russian billionaire, said in an unusual break with the Kremlin, referring to Russia’s economically catastrophic 1990s. ......... Sanctions could hurt Mr. Putin with the elite by limiting his ability to distribute the spoils they expect in return for their support. So could popular unrest, if it grows severe enough to make those elites question whether Mr. Putin is imperiling Russia’s stability. .........

“Russian public opinion is becoming such a problem that Putin is effectively fighting two wars: one in Ukraine, and one at home”

.......... Bank runs or other forms of mass economic panic, Mr. Greene argued, could trigger a sense of national crisis, overriding even the sanguine lies of state media. ........ You can’t ask citizens to rally around a war you insist does not exist. ........ “The indicators of elite discontent that we have seen thus far are unusual in Putin’s Russia and should therefore be taken seriously” ....... “in the long term, this external pressure — coupled with the domestic unrest — could lead to Putin’s downfall.”

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It’s a Good Time to Be a Relationship Coach Whether dating or divorcing, people are turning to coaches for their goal-oriented approach, which can deliver structure and achievements at a time when both may be lacking. ........... Some, like Ms. Montijo, see it as an alternative to therapy, which often focuses more on process and the past. ........ He attributes his increase in clients to the fact that the pandemic made online dating the best — and sometimes only — way to meet others. “People realized their digital presence mattered more than their physical one,” said Mr. Alley, who charges $200 for an initial two-hour consultation that includes tips on bio writing and picking photos, and $100 an hour for follow-up sessions. ........ “Therapy felt open-ended. I needed someone to give me advice, help me create a plan and have action steps” ....... “Being a coach, you don’t have the same boundaries as a therapist,” said Ms. Stein, who charges $550 for four hourlong sessions and $800 for eight. “You show your emotions and are a human being. I’m a best friend who is still connecting as a professional.”

Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don’t Believe It’s a War Many Ukrainians are encountering a confounding and frustrating backlash from family members in Russia who have bought into the official Kremlin messaging. ......... “He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis.’”

Here’s how Putin protects himself from assassins and coup plots . Bodyguards with bulletproof briefcases and high-powered pistols, look-alike stand-ins and food tasters are just some of the ways Russian President Vladimir reportedly protects himself from would-be assassins and coup plotters. ....... Putin, a former KGB agent who’s been in power since rising to power in 2000, is apparently obsessed with both his security and his health – protecting himself from assassins and avoiding COVID-19 at all costs, as demonstrated by the lengths to which he’s gone to avoid catching the virus. ......... Recent photos show him meeting with world leaders and even his own advisers at opposite ends of extremely long tables to maintain at least 20 feet of distance between them, and he donned a hazmat suit — complete with a full face respirator — before visiting a Moscow hospital treating coronavirus patients in April 2020. .......... Putin’s bodyguards — who call themselves his “Musketeers” — comprise a special unit within Russia’s Federal Protective Service, or FSO, which traces its roots to 1881, when Czar Alexander III surrounded himself with guards following the assassination of his father by a bomb-throwing revolutionary ........... Putin’s bodyguards are hand-picked for qualities that include “operational psychology,” physical stamina and the ability to withstand cold and not sweat in heat. ....... They’re reportedly outfitted with special briefcases that serve as shields to protect Putin and carry Russian-made, 9 mm SR-1 Vektor pistols loaded with armor-piercing bullets. ........

Before Putin travels, advance teams scout out his destination months ahead of time, checking to see how the public will likely respond

and even if the area could be affected by bad weather or natural disasters. ......... Wherever he’s going to stay gets inspected, jamming devices are installed to prevent remote detonation of bombs and technicians conduct electronic surveillance of cellphones and other devices in the area. ......... On the road, Putin rides amid a convoy of heavily armored vans that carry military special operators armed with AK-47s, anti-tank grenade launchers and portable anti-aircraft missiles. ........ And when he steps out in public, four rings of security surround him, starting with his personal bodyguards, others hidden amid the crowd, still more ringing the perimeter and snipers perched on the surrounding rooftops. ........ And when he steps out in public, four rings of security surround him, starting with his personal bodyguards, others hidden amid the crowd, still more ringing the perimeter and snipers perched on the surrounding rooftops. ........ Putin’s bodyguards reportedly have to be replaced upon turning 35, but they can be rewarded with powerful new posts as regional governors, federal ministers, special services commanders and presidential administrators. .......... a giant Soviet-era poultry plant outside Moscow was appropriated and its valuable land was divvied up among high-ranking officers in the FSO and the Presidential Security Service. ........ Among those who benefitted from the scam were three former Putin bodyguards who were recorded flanking him during an official trip to Helsinki, Finland, in 1999 ....... the FSO sometimes employed a “presidential body double” to ensure the safety of Putin, or “body No. 1.” ........ Putin also has someone sample every meal he’s served to ensure he’s not being poisoned

War in Ukraine enters third week

YouTube: March 9: Putin, Russia

March 9: Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Brooklyn

Harris heads to Poland amid turbulence over jets for Ukraine Harris is slated to meet on Thursday with Polish President Andrzej Sebastian Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki as well as with Ukrainians who have fled to Poland. She’ll also meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau while in Warsaw. Trudeau has been in Europe this week meeting with Ukraine allies. ...... Harris will travel on Friday to Bucharest, where she’s to meet Romanian President Klaus Iohannis. ........ Some 2 million people have fled Ukraine, and more than half of the refugees have arrived in Poland. ..... more lethal drones could be another option to help provide air power to the Ukrainians .

Fact and Mythmaking Blend in Ukraine’s Information War Experts say stories like the Ghost of Kyiv and Snake Island, both of questionable veracity, are propaganda or morale boosters, or perhaps both. ........ TikTok videos with the hashtag #ghostofkyiv reached 200 million views. ...... “Why can’t we just let people believe some things?” one Twitter user replied. “If the Russians believe it, it brings fear. If the Ukrainians believe it, it gives them hope.” ......... “If Ukraine had no messages of the righteousness of its cause, the popularity of its cause, the valor of its heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose,” said Peter W. Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at New America, a think tank in Washington. “Not just the information war, but it would lose the overall war.” .......... Since Russian state media is still calling the conflict a “special military operation” and not a war — in line with the description used by President Vladimir V. Putin — state broadcasters are left “trying to talk about a war that is apparently not happening,” Dr. Garner said. .

Congress finalizes a $13.6 billion aid package to Ukraine, doubling the White House’s initial request. reflected the furious backlash in Congress to Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine ........ sending money and weapons. ...... The bill would send $6.5 billion to the Pentagon, to cover the costs of deploying American troops to Eastern-flank allies and providing Ukrainian forces with intelligence support, as well as to backfill weapons the United States has already sent to the government in Kyiv. ....... a shipment that represented the largest single authorized transfer of arms from U.S. military warehouses to another country. ........ $1.4 billion to humanitarian support for the two million refugees who have left Ukraine. Another $2.65 billion would go to the United States Agency for International Development to provide emergency food assistance and health care to Ukrainians and other affected people in the region. .

The Kremlin accuses the U.S. of ‘economic war,’ but looks ahead to talks with Ukraine. A meeting scheduled for Thursday in Turkey between Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, will be the first face-to-face encounter between the countries’ top diplomats in the nearly two weeks since Russian forces invaded Ukraine. .

Russia calls for return to 'peaceful co-existence' with U.S. like during Cold War . .

An omicron 'subvariant' is doubling in NY, just as mandates lift Known as BA.2, this virus is an offshoot, or sublineage, of the omicron variant that just swept through New York State. It’s like a kid sister, and some experts even call it “Omicron 2.” But it spreads about 30% faster than its sibling — BA.1 — and is just as severe, according to the World Health Organization. .......

BA.2 is doubling in proportion statewide every two weeks and represents about one in 10 sequenced cases.

...... Since omicron’s discovery in late November, the state has recorded 2.2 million COVID-19 cases — its biggest surge of the pandemic. Despite the immunity from those infections and 75% of New York residents being fully vaccinated, BA.2 is finding space to thrive. Wastewater surveillance in New York City is now showing an increase in coronavirus readings over recent weeks. ....... When BA.2 hit Denmark this winter, for example, it caused a second surge and lifted daily deaths to a new summit — mere weeks after the country had peaked with its sibling. But BA.2 is also spreading through the U.K. and South Africa without reversing progress against the disease. ...... every case of the coronavirus offers an opportunity for developing chronic symptoms — or long COVID. .

Saudi crown prince snubbed Biden's request to discuss the oil crisis brought about by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, report says . "There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn't happen," a US official told The Journal. "It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil]." ......... in February, a week before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Saudis declined a request from the US to increase production, as it could upset Russia, CNN reported. Saudi Arabia and Russia are members of the OPEC+ oil-producing alliance. ....... After Biden took office, the White House effectively demoted MBS to the rank of defense minister, and the two leaders have not spoken. ........ When asked whether Biden misunderstood him, MBS said, "Simply, I do not care." .......... Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the leader of the United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia's closest regional ally and a notable oil-producing nation — also declined the US's request to discuss the oil crisis. ........ the US had asked Saudi Arabia whether MBS could mediate in the conflict. MBS said on Thursday that he was ready to help end the violence with a political solution ......... Evidence suggests Putin and MBS are close personally; they were seen on camera at the 2018 G20 summit high-fiving and laughing. .

ABSOLUTE POWER Asked about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman said, “If that’s the way we did things, Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list.” ........ Once, he was ubiquitous, on a never-ending publicity tour to promote his plan to modernize his father’s kingdom. But soon after the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, MBS curtailed his travel. His last interview with non-Saudi press was more than two years ago. The CIA concluded that he had ordered Khashoggi’s murder, and Saudi Arabia’s own prosecutors found that it had been conducted by some of the crown prince’s closest aides. They are thought to have dismembered Khashoggi and disintegrated his corpse. .......... In 2017, he rounded up hundreds of members of his own family and other wealthy Saudis and imprisoned them in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel on informal charges of corruption. The Khashoggi murder fixed a view of the crown prince as brutish, thin-skinned, and psychopathic. Among those who share a dark appraisal of MBS is President Joe Biden, who has so far refused to speak with him. Many in Washington and other Western capitals hope his rise to the throne might still be averted. ......... But within the kingdom, MBS’s succession is understood as inevitable. ........ His father’s eventual death will leave him as the absolute monarch of the birthplace of Islam and the owner of the world’s largest accessible oil reserves. He will also be the leader of one of America’s closest allies and the source of many of its headaches. ......... Even MBS’s critics concede that he has roused the country from an economic and social slumber. In 2016, he unveiled a plan, known as Vision 2030, to convert Saudi Arabia from—allow me to be blunt—one of the world’s weirdest countries into a place that could plausibly be called normal. It is now open to visitors and investment, and lets its citizens partake in ordinary acts of recreation and even certain vices. The crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts, and invited notably raw hip-hop artists to perform. He has allowed women to drive and to dress as freely as they can in dens of sin like Dubai and Bahrain. He has curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious police. He has explored relations with Israel. ........... He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. ......... “When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.” ........ For about two years, MBS hid from public view, as if hoping the Khashoggi murder would be forgotten. It hasn’t been. But the crown prince still wants to convince the world that he is saving his country, not holding it hostage—which is why he met twice in recent months with me and the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg. .......... The halls were astir. The crown prince had just returned after nearly two years of remote work, and aides and ministers padded red carpets seeking meetings, their first in months, with the boss. Neglected packages and documents had piled up on the desks and tables in his office, which was large but hardly opulent. The most obvious concession to high taste was an old-fashioned telescope on a tripod, its altitude set shallow enough that it appeared to be pointed not at the heavens but at Riyadh .......... He tries to limit his Twitter use. He eats breakfast every day with his kids. For fun, he watches TV, avoiding shows, like House of Cards, that remind him of work. Instead, he said without apparent irony, he prefers to watch series that help him escape the reality of his job, such as Game of Thrones. ........ Difficult questions caused the crown prince to move about jumpily, his voice vibrating at a higher frequency. Every minute or two he performed a complex motor tic: a quick backward tilt of the head, followed by a gulp, like a pelican downing a fish. He complained that he had endured injustice, and he evinced a level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the standards of Middle Eastern rulers. .......... The crown prince has told two people close to him that “the Khashoggi incident was the worst thing ever to happen to me, because it could have ruined all of my plans” to reform the country. ........ In our Riyadh interview, the crown prince said that his own rights had been violated in the Khashoggi affair. “I feel that human-rights law wasn’t applied to me,” he said. “Article XI of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that any person is innocent until proven guilty.” Saudi Arabia had punished those responsible for the murder, he said—yet comparable atrocities, such as bombings of wedding parties in Afghanistan and the torture of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, have gone unpunished. ........... “I never read a Khashoggi article in my life,” he said. To our astonishment, he added that if he were to send a kill squad, he’d choose a more valuable target, and more competent assassins. “If that’s the way we did things”—murdering authors of critical op-eds ............

If his best is not good enough for Joe Biden, MBS said, then the consequences of running a moralistic foreign policy would be the president’s to discover.

“We have a long, historical relationship with America,” he said. “Our aim is to keep it and strengthen it.” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have called for “accountability” for Khashoggi’s murder, as well as the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, due to war between Saudi Arabia and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The Americans also refuse to treat him as Biden’s counterpart—Biden’s peer is the king, they insist—even though the crown prince rules the country with his father’s blessing. This stings. MBS has lines open to the Chinese. “Where is the potential in the world today?” he said. “It’s in Saudi Arabia. And if you want to miss it, I believe other people in the East are going to be super happy.” ............ Qatar, MBS said, was comparable to Nazi Germany. ........ As for the actual Ritz-Carlton prisoners: They had it coming, the crown prince said. Overnight he’d rounded up hundreds of the most prominent Saudis, delivered them to Riyadh’s most lavish hotel, and refused to let them go until they confessed and paid up. I said that sounded like he was eliminating rivals. MBS looked incredulous. “How can you eliminate people who don’t have any power to begin with?” If they had power, he would not have been able to force them into the Ritz. ........... The Ritz operation, MBS said, was a blitzkrieg against corruption, and wildly successful and popular because it started at the top and did not stop there. “Some people thought Saudi Arabia was, you know, just trying to get the big whales,” MBS said. They assumed that after the government extracted settlements from the likes of Alwaleed bin Talal, the kingdom’s richest man, corruption at lower levels would resume. MBS noted, proudly, that even the minnows had been hooked. By 2019, everyone “understood that even if you steal $100, you’re going to pay for it.” In just a few months, he claims to have recovered $100 billion directly, and says that he will recover much more indirectly, as dividends of deterrence. .......... Salman, the current king and at 86 one of the youngest of Abdulaziz’s brood, saw the perils of unchecked gerontocracy and anointed a successor from the next generation. His choice of Mohammed was not obvious. King Salman’s sons include Faisal, 51, who has a doctorate in international relations from Oxford; and Sultan, 65, a former Royal Saudi Air Force pilot who in 1985 spent a week on the space shuttle Discovery as a payload specialist. Either of these competent and educated men, citizens of the world, might have been a natural successor. But Salman had an inkling that the next king would need a certain grit and fluency with power that cannot be acquired in a seminar or a flight simulator. The new generation, born into luxury, tended to be soft, and the next king would need to be a modern version of a desert warlord like his grandfather. ........... having consolidated power, MBS focused on Vision 2030. He is exasperated by the rest of the world’s failure to acknowledge how well it has gone. “Saudi Arabia is a G20 country,” he said. “You can see our position five years ago: It was almost 20. Today, we are almost 17.” He noted strong non-oil GDP growth, and reeled off statistics about foreign direct investment, Saudi overseas investment, and the share of world trade that passes through Saudi waters. The economic success, the concerts, the social reform—these are all done deals, he said. “If we were having this interview in 2016, you would say I’m making assumptions,” he said. “But we did it. You can see it now with your eyes.” ............. When I first visited, I ate at restaurants that had cinder-block walls dividing single men on one side from women and families on the other. These were sledgehammered down—a little Berlin 1989 in every restaurant—and now men and women can eat together without eliciting so much as a sideways glance from fellow diners. ......... Many of the crown prince’s most persistent critics approve of these changes, and wish only that they had come sooner. (Khashoggi was such a critic. When I met him in London for brunch, shortly before his death, I asked him to list MBS’s failings. He said “90 percent” of the reforms were prudent and overdue.) The most famous Saudi women’s-rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, campaigned for women’s right to drive, and against the Saudi “guardianship law,” which prevented women from traveling or going out in public without a male relative. Al‑Hathloul was thrown in prison on terrorism charges in 2018—after MBS and his father had announced the imminent end of both policies. In prison, her family says, she was electrocuted, beaten, and—this was just a few months before Khashoggi’s murder—threatened with being chopped up and thrown in a sewer, never to be found. (The Saudi government has previously denied allegations of torturing prisoners.) ............. Al-Hathloul and other activists had demanded rights, and the ruler had granted them. Their error was in thinking those rights were theirs to take, rather than coming from the monarch, who deserved credit for having bestowed them. Al-Hathloul was released in February 2021, but her family says she is forbidden from traveling abroad or speaking publicly. ............ Another dissident, Salman al-Awda, is a preacher with a massive following. His original crime, too, was to utter publicly a thought that would later be shared by the crown prince himself. When MBS began squabbling with his counterpart in Qatar, al‑Awda tweeted, “May God harmonize between their hearts, for the good of their people.” He was imprisoned, and actual harmony between the two leaders has not freed him. His son Abdullah, now in the United States, claims that his father, who is 65, is being held in solitary confinement and has been tortured. ................. (The Muslim Brotherhood plays a bogeyman role in the Saudi imagination similar to the role of Communists in America during the Red Scare. Also like Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood really has worked covertly to undermine state rule, just not to the extent imagined.) ............. Would MBS consider pardoning those who’d spoken out in favor of women driving and normalization with Qatar—both now the policy of the country? “That’s not my power. That’s His Majesty’s power,” MBS said. But, he added, “no king has ever used” the pardon power, and his father does not intend to be the first. .......... On one side are liberals, tugging on the sympathies of Westerners; on the other, Islamists who are also opposed to the monarchy. Letting this latter group out would not just mean the end of rock concerts and coed dining. They would not stop until they brought down the House of Saud, seized the country’s estimated 268 billion barrels of oil and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and established a terrorist state.

In private conversations with others, MBS has likened Saudi Arabia before the Saud family’s conquest in the 18th century to the anarchic wasteland of the Mad Max films. His family unified the peninsula and slowly developed a system of law and order. Without them, it would be Mad Max all over again—or Afghanistan.

................ Many secular Arab leaders before him have made the same dark implication: Support everything I do, or I will let slip the dogs of jihad. This was not an argument. It was a threat. ........... the changes in Saudi Arabia could be compared to those in revolutionary France. An old order had been overturned, a priestly class crushed; a new order was struggling to be born. .......... The brand of conservative Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia—called Wahhabism, after the sect’s 18th-century founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al‑Wahhab—once wielded great power and enjoys at least some popular support. I asked Shihabi if MBS really had diminished the Wahhabis’ role. “Diminished their role?” Shihabi asked me. “He put the Wahhabis in a cage, then he reached in with gardening shears”—here he made the universal snip snip gesture with his fingers—“and he cut their balls off.” ............. he House of Saud wanted the anticlerical revolution while conveniently omitting the antiroyalist one. I wanted to see how that alliance between monarch and sansculottes was working. .......... Vision 2030 made modernization easier to observe now than it would have been just a few years ago. Until October 2019, tourist visas to Saudi Arabia did not exist. Then the Saudis realized that to attract crowds to the concerts they had legalized, they’d need to let in visitors. Overnight, a visa to Saudi Arabia went from one of the hardest in the world to get to one of the easiest. In minutes I had one valid for a whole year. ............ The new system arrived so fast that the first visitors were like an invasive species, an unnatural fit in the rigid social order of the kingdom. For years, almost every non-Saudi in the country had needed a document called an iqama. It was a sort of license to exist: Your iqama identified your Saudi patron, the local national whom you were visiting or working for, and who controlled your fate. Every Saudi patron had his own patron, too—sometimes a tribal leader, sometimes a regional one. Even those bigwigs paid obeisance to someone and, eventually, by the transitive property of Saudi deference, to the king himself. Saudi Arabia, MBS explained, “is not one monarchy. You have beneath it more than 1,000 monarchies—town monarchies, tribal monarchies, semitribal monarchies.” ............. “No,” he said. “Saudi Arabia is based on pure monarchy,” and he, as crown prince, would preserve the system. To remove himself from it would amount to a betrayal of all the monarchies and Saudis beneath him. “I can’t stage a coup d’état against 14 million citizens.” .......... In Riyadh I found, effortlessly, young people thrilled by the reforms. Like the other major Saudi cities, Dammam and Jeddah, Riyadh has specialty coffee shops in abundance—little outposts of air-conditioning and caffeine, in an environment otherwise characterized by heat and boredom. Many of the Saudis I met professed a deep love for America. “I spent seven years at Cal State Northridge,” one told me, before rattling off a list of cities he had visited. He was one of several hundred thousand Saudi students who’d attended U.S. universities on government scholarships in the 2000s. “I studied finance,” he said. “But I never graduated. I had a wonderful time.” He listed his American friends, who had names like Mike and Emilio. “I drank and did too much meth, and my grades weren’t good.” ...........

he said his fondest wish was to listen to music in the open air and smoke a joint—just one

............ He asked if I thought that would happen. I said I did not think that was explicitly part of Vision 2030 ........ I asked the crown prince whether alcohol would soon be sold in the kingdom. It was the only policy question that he refused to answer. ........ a woman’s hair; a celebration of song; a celebration of a song about singing; and, on top of all this, the music playing in the café as we spoke. Before the rise of MBS, every component of this scene would have violated long-standing canons of Saudi morality enforcement. ......... I told one of MBS’s advisers that the religious police had been an international PR problem. “May I be impolite?” he asked me. “I don’t give a fuck about the foreigners. They terrorized us.” He likened the religious police to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, operating with unchecked authority. ........... Anyone who wished to drag down a professional or political rival could scrutinize him for sins, then call the religious police to set up a sting. ......... “The religious police were the losers in school,” Ali Shihabi told me. “Then they got these jobs and were empowered to go and stop the cute girls, break into the parties no one wanted them at, and shut them down. It attracted a very nasty group of people.” The Saudi diplomat told me that he did not miss them, and that Saudi Arabia had needed someone with the crown prince’s mettle to get rid of them. “When someone hits you because he does not like what you are wearing,” he said, “that is not just a form of harassment. It is abuse.” ........ The rulers of Saudi Arabia put almost no limits on the speech or behavior of conservative clerics, and in return those clerics exempted the rulers from criticism. “That was the drug deal that the Saudi state was based upon for many years,” Theroux told me. “Until Mohammed bin Salman.” .......... MBS has a law degree from King Saud University and flaunts his knowledge and dominance over the clerics. “He’s probably the only leader in the Arab world who knows anything about Islamic epistemology and jurisprudence” ........... “In Islamic law, the head of the Islamic establishment is wali al-amr, the ruler,” MBS explained. He was right: As the ruler, he is in charge of implementing Islam. Typically, Saudi rulers have sought opinions from clerics, occasionally leaning on them to justify a policy the king has selected in advance. MBS does not subcontract his religion out at all. .......... Certain rules—not many—come from the unambiguous legislative content of the Quran ........ and he cannot do anything about them even if he wants to. But those sayings of the Prophet (called Hadith), he explained, do not all have equal value as sources of law, and he said he is bound by only a very small number whose reliability, 1,400 years later, is unimpeachable. Every other source of Islamic law, he said, is open to interpretation—and he is therefore entitled to interpret them as he sees fit. ........... The effect of this maneuver is to chuck about 95 percent of Islamic law into the sandpit of Saudi history and leave MBS free to do whatever he wants. .......... “We are going back to the core, back to pure Islam” as practiced by Muhammad and his four successors. “These teachings of the Prophet and the four caliphs—they were amazing. They were perfect.” ........... and encourages sinners to keep their transgressions between themselves and God ........ He also stressed that none of these laws applies to non-Muslims in the kingdom. “If you are a foreign person who’s living or traveling in Saudi Arabia, you have all the right to do whatever you want, based on your beliefs,” he said. “That’s what happened in the Prophet’s time.” ........... It is hard to exaggerate how drastically this sidelining of Islamic law will change Saudi Arabia. Before MBS, influential clerics issued fatwas exhibiting what might charitably be called a pre-industrial view of the world. They declared that the sun orbited the Earth. They forbade women from riding bikes (“the devil’s horses”) and from watching TV without veiling, just in case the presenters could see them through the screen. Salih al-Fawzan, the most senior cleric in the kingdom today, once issued a chillingly anti-American fatwa forbidding all-you-can-eat buffets, because paying for a meal without knowing what you’ll be eating is akin to gambling. ............... In the past, Saudi clerics inveighed against infidels of all types. Now al-Issa spends his time meeting Buddhists, Christians, and Jews, and trying to stay ahead of the occasional surfacing of comments he made in less conciliatory times. ............ these lingering manifestations of intolerance illustrate what MBS’s critics say is his ultimate error: Even a crown prince can’t change a culture by fiat. ......... MBS said Neom is “not a copy of anything elsewhere,” not a xerox of Dubai. ........... Neom would lure its investors, I gathered, by creating the ideal regulatory environment, stitched together from best practices elsewhere. The city would profit from central planning. When New York or Delhi want to grow, they choke on their own traffic and decrepit infrastructure. Neom has no inherited infrastructure at all. The centerpiece of the project will be “The Line”—a 106-mile-long, very skinny urban strip connected by a single bullet train that will travel from end to end in 20 minutes. .......... The Line is intended to be walkable—the train will run underground—and a short hike perpendicular to its main axis will take you into pristine desert. Water will be desalinated; energy, renewable. .......... In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an entrepreneur’s nightmare. Riyadh has almost no public transportation. No matter where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. .......... Neom is MBS’s declaration of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy on behalf of his country. Few nations have as many carried costs as Saudi Arabia, and Neom zeroes them out and starts afresh with a plan unburdened by the past. To any parts of the kingdom that cling to their old ways, it promises that the future is everything they are not. And the future will wait only so long. ........... I worried about what would happen next. Newsworthy events inside the walls of terrorist prisons tend not to be good. ........ but the Saudis decided he needed more time in prison and locked him up for eight years in a facility in Dammam, and for another seven in Ha’ir. ...... Al-Qaeda and ISIS forbid most music and revile the monarchy. Like so many other Saudis, these men seemed to have swapped their religious fanaticism for nationalist fanaticism. One wondered what they really believed. .......... He looked me steadily in the eye, like he was trying to convince me and not himself. “Vision 2030 is real.” .......... Twenty years ago, if you had told me that in 2022 the future king of Saudi Arabia would be pursuing a relationship with Israel; treating women as full members of society; punishing corruption, even in his own family; stanching the flow of jihadists; diversifying and liberalizing his economy and society; and encouraging the world to see his country and his country to see the world—Wahhabism be damned—I would have told you that your time machine was malfunctioning and you had visited 2052 at the earliest. ............. Enghien’s schemes wouldn’t have stopped Napoleon, and Khashoggi’s columns wouldn’t have stopped MBS. But his murder was a warning about the personality of the man who will be running Saudi Arabia for the next half century, and it is reasonable to worry about that man even when most of what he does is good and long overdue. .......... (“You Americans think there is something strange about a ruler who sends his unqualified son-in-law to conduct international relations,” one Saudi analyst told me. “For us this is completely normal.”) ....... he is presenting a binary choice: support me, or prepare for the jihadist deluge. ......... And no persuasion will be possible at all without acknowledging that the game of thrones has concluded and he has won. ........... As MBS told me, to justify the Ritz operation, “It’s sometimes a decision between bad and worse.” .......... In effect, both the Saudis and the Americans are now in the Ritz-Carlton, forced to bargain with a jailer who promises us prosperity if we submit to his demands, and Mad Max if we do not. The predicament is familiar, because it is the same barrel over which every secular Arab autocrat has positioned America since the 1950s. Egypt, Iraq, and Syria all traded semitribal societies for modern ones, and they all became squalid dictatorships that justified themselves as bulwarks against chaos. ........... Twenty years ago, Syria watchers praised Bashar al-Assad for his modernizing tendencies—his openness to Western influence as well as his Western tastes. He liked Phil Collins; how evil could he be? By now most everyone outside Damascus, Tehran, and Moscow recognizes him as Saddam Hussein’s only rival in the dubious competition for most evil Arab leader. ............. MBS has completed about three-quarters of the transition from tribal king with theocratic characteristics to plain old secular-nationalist autocrat. The rest of that transition need not be as ruthless as the beginning, but MBS shows no sign of letting up. ......... Sometimes this is how absolute power relaxes its grip: slowly, without anyone noticing. In England, the transition from absolute monarchy to a fully constitutional one took 200 years, not all of them superintended by the most stable kings. MBS is still young and hoarding power, and everyone who has predicted that he would ease up on dissent has so far been proved optimistic. But 50 years is a long reign. The madness of King Mohammed could give way to something else: a slow and graceful renunciation of power—or, as with Assad, an ever more violent exercise of it.

New York’s First Supertall Tower Outside of Manhattan Rises in Brooklyn The 1,066-foot Brooklyn Tower is launching sales as the luxury market once again booms, but concerns about supertall tower construction are still fresh in buyers’ minds. ........ will have 150 condos ranging from about $875,000 for studios to $8 million for four-bedroom apartments ....... Reports last year of flooding, stuck elevators and safety hazards at 432 Park may have shaken buyer confidence ...... “When you pioneer, sometimes there are growing pains,” he said in defense of the developers of 432 Park Avenue, where residents are suing for at least $125 million after reports of intolerable noise, electrical explosions and burst pipes related to the construction of the building.

Biden takes big step toward government-backed digital currency The Biden administration is throwing its support behind further study and development of what would be known as a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency. ....... instructing the federal government to explore possible uses of and regulations for digital assets like cryptocurrencies. ........ it could transform central and commercial banking, as well as government sanctions, banking accessibility and taxes. ........ a CBDC could make payments cheaper and easier for consumers but might also pose a risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system. ......... China has introduced its own CBDC, with more than 140 million people having opened digital “wallets,” and many other countries have either rolled out or are developing digital currencies. The Bahamas’ Sand Dollar is considered among the world's most successful digital currencies. ......... “Once the central banks start co-opting the technology, it’s pretty much game over." ....... the functionality could be reasonably simple, with transactions flowing directly to and from the Fed, sidestepping banks and payment systems and creating near-seamless flows of cash. ......... a broadly embraced digital currency would pose existential questions for banks and many other financial services focused on facilitating payments. ........ “Bill Gates famously said there will always be banking but there will not always be banks” ........

A digital currency could make the kind of stimulus payments of the coronavirus pandemic nearly instantaneous and far more efficient

............. commercial banks have a vested interest in opposing the technology. ...... “​​Two years ago everyone was ridiculing this,” Yermack said. “Now it’s the hot thing to do.”

WHO recommends COVID-19 boosters in reversal

March 8: Ukraine

Tax the land One radical idea to solve America’s housing crisis. ......... If you tax income, it provides a disincentive to work. If you tax property, it provides a disincentive to improve the physical buildings on top of the land. ........ America’s housing crisis. That crisis is caused, in part, by the failure to appropriately use valuable in-demand land for its best purpose. ........ In small towns, vacant lots contribute to decline — and if there’s no valuable structure on a property, its delinquent landlords likely only pay a nominal property tax. This both lowers tax revenue and hurts neighborhood quality for everyone else. ....... part of what makes land taxes so attractive is that “there should be no economic inefficiency” if you are able to tax “true land rents.” ....... At this point, “land value tax could solve this” has become a meme in niche online communities, with its strongest adherents believing that one simple policy has the potential to solve some of the nation’s biggest problems — including our housing crisis. ........ At its core, America’s housing crisis is about the nation’s perennial failure to build enough homes....... the country needs an additional 3.8 million homes to meet demand. ....... As a result of various rules and regulations mostly set at the local level, developers can’t simply build and provide more homes. Instead, laws that make it illegal to develop land more intensely — that is, build multiple homes on a single lot of land like a duplex or an apartment building or build smaller single-family homes — keep prices high.......... Land and property owners are often the most vocal opponents of liberalizing land use laws. Homeowners trend older and have stronger preferences for stability as well as negative attitudes towards renters and apartment buildings.

Local governments, which have been granted near unchecked authority by state governments, are entirely captured by homeowners.

.......... looked at planning board and zoning meetings in nearly 100 Massachusetts cities and towns and found that meeting participants were disproportionately homeowners. Participants were consistently likelier to oppose new housing in their communities. ......... If you add a room for your father-in-law who is moving in with you to help raise your kids or add a home office during a global pandemic, you could receive a penalty in the form of higher taxes since you have made your property more valuable. And if someone turns their garage into an apartment, providing an affordable housing option for their community, they pay higher property taxes than similarly situated neighbors who don’t add housing options to their land. .......... Under a land value tax system, proponents say property owners would be clamoring to be allowed to develop their land more intensely — leading to more homes being built. ........... Taxing land reduces the profit that comes from just owning a piece of property. Instead, you are incentivized to put that land to work. ......... the case of a parking lot charging drivers $40 per day for parking and accruing under $10,000 in property taxes. That parking lot, Grabar writes, sits next to a seven-story building that requires more than a quarter of a million in taxes annually. ....... “You leverage the same toxic local politics that are now creating NIMBY-ism, you leverage for YIMBY-ism because now you have people wanting to build stuff.” ........... In Allentown, Pennsylvania, the system worked! ..... after the city adopted an LVT (through a split-rate system that still kept some property taxes in place) in 1996, “construction returned to the city: the number of taxable building permits surged past neighboring Bethlehem, market investment returned and capital improvement reappeared in city budgets. ... The losers in this trade were absentee owners of vacant lots, who had to shoulder much more of the burden.” ............. “The number of building permits in Allentown has increased by 32 percent from before we had a land tax.” .......... property tax reform is the third rail of American politics ........ “Now we’ve run out of suburbs,” Doucet argued. “We can’t push any further through expansion.” ........ as rents skyrocket, people are desperately searching for radical solutions to America’s housing crisis. .

How Putin Wants Russians to See the War in Ukraine Even if his hold on power is precarious, he can still convince Russians that the whole world is conspiring against them. .........

People seem to be tired of Putin

, and Putin seems to feel himself teetering, a Moscow-based analyst of contemporary Russian society said. The outcome could be dire. ............ From most appearances, Moscow is a city at peace. ....... sixty-four hundred detentions since Thursday, in more than a hundred cities. Twenty-eight hundred of these—in fifty-six different cities—were on Sunday, February 27th, on the seventh anniversary of the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. ......... The next time that Yudina saw him, about an hour and a half later, it was in an ambulance outside the police station. “He was in a neck brace,” she told me. “He was covered with dirt—they must have dragged him. He was confused.” Yudin had been in and out of consciousness. When we met on Sunday, at one of those cozy and delicious Moscow restaurants, Yudin still had a swollen eye and a noticeable scrape on his left temple. .........

“I think now is a turning point,” he said.

......... “If they can’t secure a military victory—at least take Kyiv and Kharkiv—then Putin will shift to treating U.S. sanctions as a declaration of war. It will be the world against Putin, and Putin will have to raise the stakes—by, say, threatening to lob a nuclear weapon at the center of the world, which he believes is in New York.” ............ “In this new situation, I can’t really imagine that he will be able to maintain his hold on power. On the other hand, we have always underestimated his ability to hang on.” ......... Russian news channels released a short clip of Putin ordering his defense minister, Sergey Shoigu, and head of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov—the two of them sitting next to each other, like two kids summoned to the principal’s office, looking weary and bloated—to raise Russia’s level of nuclear readiness. State television presented the President as confident and decisive, but it seemed apparent Putin felt that he had been misled by his military. “He has clearly miscalculated on at least two counts,” Yudin said. It appears that the generals had promised Putin a blitzkrieg that had already failed. Putin himself, it seems, had imagined that Ukrainians would welcome the Russian military with open arms. “It’s this concept that there is no such thing as Ukraine, an insane idea on which he has based an entire military operation,” Yudin said. Putin appears to have wildly underestimated Ukraine’s military and the Ukrainians’ resolve. .............. Even the shrewdest dictators—which usually means the most paranoid—often come to overestimate their reach, their popularity, and their wisdom. They surround themselves with sycophants, shut out the rest of the world, and usually, sooner or later, make a misstep. Over his twenty-two years at the helm, Putin has winnowed down his circle of interlocutors.

In the past two years, fear of covid has forced him into near-total isolation. “This is a huge factor,”

Mikhail Fishman, who hosts a political-analysis show on Russia’s last independent television channel, TV Rain, said. “He is alone with only his most loyal people, who basically live with him—his adjutants, his servants in a way, who make his way of life possible. . . . They are in the same pool, sharing the same vision, and there is nothing else. They, of course, think he is sent by heaven to save the world.” ........... What small ways Putin once had of checking in with outer reality have fallen away during the pandemic. One example is the conference of Russian and foreign political scientists that he has gathered every fall since 2004. But, in 2020, he came to the event only virtually, and last year he isolated himself from the gathering and appeared in person only once, to allow the attendees to ask him questions; he sat on a distant stage, with a moderator who had been quarantining for two weeks. According to Fishman, Putin’s closest advisers, if they request a meeting, must first sequester. ......... Two of my friends went to stock up on nonperishables. Both reported that the supermarkets where they got their toilet paper, coffee, and pasta were otherwise doing normal, slow, daytime business. .......... Russians would very soon feel the combined effects of a precipitous drop in currency prices, Western-export bans, and airspace closures: everything was about to become more expensive and scarce. But economic anxiety requires a sort of consensus of uncertainty, and Russians have been through several economic crashes before: in 1992, 1998, 2008, and 2014. They know that they can survive them. This time, more than ever, they know that their hardship stems from sanctions imposed by the West. The whole world is conspiring against Russia—and that is why, according to Putin, Russia is doing what it’s doing in Ukraine in the first place. ........... Last year, the military banned the use and possession of smartphones by soldiers. A new law that went into effect on February 1st of this year legalized the use of mass graves during wars and states of emergency. These measures may make it easier to hide the real number of military losses, or the fact of any casualties at all. In the first five days of the invasion, Ukrainian sources have reported Russian losses in the thousands; Russians are not releasing numbers. ............ On Monday morning, the newscast on Rossiya, one of the official state channels, contained four headlines: “The U.N. Security Council Has Discussed the Situation in Ukraine”; “The West Continues to Pump Ukraine Full of Arms”; “Refugees from the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic Continue to Arrive in Russian Cities”; “The European Union is Closing Its Airspace to Russians; the Foreign Ministry is Working on Evacuating Russian Citizens.” In other words, the world is ganging up on Russia, which is busy saving its people, who are forced to flee both Ukraine and the European Union. All of this was bland and bloodless; videos showed the Russian representative to the U.N. Security Council, who looked bored and angry, and women and children arriving from eastern Ukraine, who looked tired. .............. “For Russians, even three generations removed from the Second World War, the word ‘war’ is scary. ‘Special operation’ or ‘military operation’ just isn’t.” ........ “Every day of Russia’s war against Ukraine is made possible because there are no real mass antiwar protests in cities of Russia. This is not so much because people are afraid of repercussions… but mostly because the vast majority of the population doesn’t know that the Russian military has been waging full-scale war for the last four days. . . . [If the five headlines on the Yandex home page] were to show something like the truth, that would bring the end of the war closer. If this space were empty, that would also be good, because it might compel people to think and ask questions. But every hour and day that it functions the way it’s working now, it’s supporting the war effort.” .............. His regime, Yudin believes, rests on a hollow kind of legitimacy that it itself manufactures. “People recognize Putin’s authority because they think that the population is behind him. He swings the big stick of this ostensible legitimacy to threaten and subordinate the bureaucrats, the élites, and the people.” ............ when the country holds what it calls elections, bureaucrats are forced, under threat of losing their jobs, to herd state employees to the polls to vote for Putin, who then uses their votes to assert his popularity and his right to continue imposing his will on the very people who just voted for him under duress. ...........

The very presence of Ukraine, a familiar society that is developing a different political system, is a threat to Putin.

......... his actions are based on false premises and on bad information, which may break his legitimacy-perpetuation cycle. .......... If a sea change is going to happen again, it may happen now, when Putin has assembled every possible force against himself. ........... the adult Putin identifies with the rat. He is a rat with a nuclear button and a police state at his disposal. If this is the end of his reign, the events that may surround his downfall are chilling to contemplate. .

They Called Ukraine Home. But They Faced Violence and Racism When They Tried to Flee . But when Kass reached Lviv in Ukraine’s west near Poland, joining the heaving crowds desperately trying to board trains for safety, she says she encountered hostility from the Ukrainian military, who were dividing people into two groups: those who were white, and those who were not. ......... Groups of Nepalese, Indian and Somalian men described to TIME how they were kicked and beaten with batons by Ukrainian guards who later begrudgingly allowed them to cross over, on foot. ........ Later, when Kass’s train stopped for 17 hours at the Polish border, she says Ukrainian train guards gave out bread and sausages to passengers. But they passed by Kass and her African friends. “By the time it was our turn, they threw us the ends of stale bread,” she says. After spending more than a third of her life in Ukraine, she felt let down. “It was a traumatic experience. ....... Up to 4 million more could flee if the situation deteriorates further ...... Now safely across the border, refugees of color were also dismayed by the continued preferential treatment for Ukrainians in the official Polish response and from ordinary Poles. ........ Muslim was in the final year of his medicine degree in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava, where tuition costs $10,000 a year. “The moment we became useless to them, they turned us into bums,” he said. Muslim and Kuretta spent 60 hours in their car at the border pleading with Ukrainian officials—in fluent Russian—to allow them to join the column of vehicles snaking out. ........ support from Poland since the invasion means that Ukrainian nationals can access Polish trains for free, and some medical services. Solidarity between the Slav neighbors, which share a similar language and a border that stretches for more than 300 miles, has extended to villagers lending their bedrooms and homes to total strangers, and volunteers ferrying stranded Ukrainians back and forth from border towns to the larger cities. .......

Parvinder Singh from India said he spent three days waiting to cross the border without food, water, or sleep, while white Ukrainians passed through much more quickly

.

'Surprise move': U.S. stunned by Poland's fighter jet offer The announcement came after a week of back-and-forth negotiations about a transfer of fighters to Ukraine. ....... The airspace over Ukraine is still contested, a senior Defense Department official told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, with neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians owning the sky. ........ “The Russians continue to fly and also are capable of missile defense — very little of the nation of Ukraine is not covered by some sort of Russian surface-to-air missile capability.” .

Meet the Lithuanian ‘Elves’ Fighting Russian Disinformation . The Yorkshire puppies are a cover for a large, informal community of Lithuanian citizens who, for the past eight years, have been engaged in an ongoing battle against the Russian disinformation that regularly floods Lithuanian media, social and otherwise. The group’s members number in the thousands, and although most keep their identities secret, they include bartenders, doctors, students, businesspeople, and at least one member of the Lithuanian parliament. And although they go by the whimsical name of “elves,” they are a serious part of a broader coalition across different levels of society that have made Lithuania a leader in that other war against Russia: the information war. .......... By reporting the disinformation en masse to the platform they eventually generate enough complaints to have it removed by Facebook. ......... And for all its simplicity, the method has proven effective enough that Lithuania’s Ministry of Defense has recommended it as an alternative to young men eager to join the fight to defend Ukraine but who lack the military experience necessary to do so .......... it has become increasingly clear just how eager the Putin regime is to spread distorted facts, lies, and propaganda in its attempts to destabilize Western nations, secure the loyalty of its own citizens, and further its expansionist ambitions ........ “Every family in Lithuania was touched by Russia’s occupation” .......

“Everything,” she adds, “happens in the information environment first.”

........ “With Crimea, we saw that the mind of the people, their patriotism, had been eaten away by Russia, so it was easier to take the land. If we aren’t prepared here to withstand Russian propaganda, the same could happen here.” .

Angry Putin set to 'double down' in Ukraine, intel chiefs warn lawmakers . a picture of an increasingly determined Vladimir Putin set to “double down” on his invasion of Ukraine despite being ill-prepared for the consequences to Russia’s economy and with little prospect for long-term success. ......... “I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now. He's likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties" ....... he has no sustainable political end game in the face of what is going to continue to be fierce resistance from Ukrainians.” ....... Russia has already sustained anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 casualties almost two weeks into the war. ........ Moscow has also bombed dozens of schools and hospitals in a move one official said may meet the criteria for war crimes. ....... Russia has also arrested some 13,000 to 14,000 anti-war protesters at home. .

Ukraine claims Russian general has been killed in Kharkiv