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. .



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