Saturday, March 26, 2022

Hitting Putin Hard To Topple Him

The Biden red line to not send ground troops into Ukraine is a sound decision, although it is hard to watch.

But that restraint has to be matched with an abundant supply of weapons so the army and volunteers in Ukraine can fight their own war. This is war. You can not send in planes, but you can share satellite surveillance, you can share intelligence. You can share surface to air missiles. You can give cutting edge communication gear. You can supply. You can not enforce a no fly zone, but you can share real time intelligence on all Russian air movements, plane to missile. Putin has to see a military defeat in Ukraine. That is when he starts losing support in his inner circles also.

The Russian air advantage is obvious. There is no risk to them in firing missiles to bring down apartment buildings. And they are relentless about it. Assad has come to Ukraine.

But there are individual volunteers who are streaming in from all sorts of countries. And half a million hackers from all over the world have come together to attack the Putin regime in the cyber sphere. That is a substantial move.

Plenty of refugee aid is being provided. That is commendable. The move is temporary. The Ukrainians will be home for Christmas. The Russians who have also fled will be home before the year is out.

But it boils down to the Russian diaspora taking the lead to get hyper organized so to take back Russia. There has to be a coordinated effort to take to the streets of Moscow in the largest numbers in the history of that city. That is what will end this horrible, horrible war. We need a regime change. Russia deserves democracy as much as anyone else.

You do not have Moscow, yet, but you do have Warsaw, you do have Prague, you do have London and New York, you have Paris and Berlin. March.

It is the Putin stagnation that has deprived Russians of their dignity.

A vibrant, democratic, federal Russia will live in harmony with its minorities and its neighbors.

Regime change is the solution. And that will come about when the Russians take control of the streets of Moscow. Perhaps Putin can retire in Pyongyang.

No peace talk will end this war. There is no Zelensky-Putin summit to be had. There is no deal to be cut. Putin's departure is the only end to this war.



The Making of Vladimir Putin Tracing Putin’s 22-year slide from statesman to tyrant......... His opponents, a “fifth column” manipulated by the West, will meet an ugly fate, Mr. Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.” ........ Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth. ....... 22 years of power and five American presidents. As China rose, as America fought and lost its forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as technology networked the world, a Russian enigma took form in the Kremlin. ........ Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, piece by piece, year by year, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory. ......... “He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.” .......... The West had to provide Russia with humanitarian aid, so dire was its economic collapse, so pervasive its extreme poverty, as large swaths of industry were sold off for a song to an emergent class of oligarchs. ............ But Mr. Putin was no Marxist, even if he reinstated the Stalin-era national anthem. ........ The new president would work with the oligarchs created by chaotic, free-market, crony capitalism — so long as they showed absolute fealty. Failing that, they would be expunged. If this was democracy, it was “sovereign democracy,” a phrase embraced by Mr. Putin’s top political strategists, stress on the first word. ............ Putin does appear to have been guardedly open to the West early in his rule. ......... He mentioned the possibility of Russian membership of NATO to President Bill Clinton in 2000, an idea that never went anywhere. He maintained a Russian partnership agreement signed with the European Union in 1994. A NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. .......... “You should never lose control,” he told the American movie director Oliver Stone in “The Putin Interviews,” a 2017 documentary. He once described himself as “an expert in human relations.” German lawmakers were not alone in being seduced by this man of impassive features and implacable intent, honed as an intelligence operative...........

“You must understand, he is from the K.G.B., lying is his profession, it is not a sin,”

said Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2017 to 2020. “He is like a mirror, adapting to what he sees, in the way he was trained.” .......... “If he wants you to like him, you will like him.” ......... The previous time I had seen Mr. Khodorkovsky, in Moscow in October 2003, was just days before his arrest by armed agents on embezzlement charges. He had been talking to me then about his bold political ambitions — a lèse-majesté unacceptable to Mr. Putin. ......... In 2003, Mr. Putin’s personal tastes did not yet run to palatial grandiosity. .......

Mr. Putin, as he likes to do, kept us waiting for many hours. It seemed a small demonstration of one-upmanship, a minor incivility he would inflict even on Ms. Rice, similar to bringing his dog into a meeting with Ms. Merkel in 2007 when he knew she was scared of dogs.

.......... At this time, Mr. Putin had already clamped down on independent media; prosecuted a brutal war in Chechnya involving the leveling of Grozny, its capital; and placed security officials — known as siloviki — front and center in his governance. Often, they were old St. Petersburg buddies, like Nikolai Patrushev, now the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council. The first rule of an intelligence officer is suspicion. .......... there was “a varnish of liberalism to his discourse in the early 2000s,” but the pull of restoring Russian imperial might, and so avenging Russia’s perceived relegation to what President Barack Obama would call “a regional power,” was always Mr. Putin’s deepest urge. ....... an older brother died during the brutal 872-day German siege of the city, and a grandfather had worked for Stalin as a cook. ........ Mr. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.” .......... “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.” ............ Mr. Putin brought a measure of that comfort to Russia in the first eight years of his presidency. The economy galloped ahead, foreign investment poured in. “It was perhaps the happiest time in the country’s life, with a measure of prosperity and level of freedom never matched in Russian history,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. ........... And remember, in the 1990s, everyone had been poor as a church mouse.” Now the middle class could vacation in Turkey or Vietnam. .......... The problem for Mr. Putin was that to diversify an economy, the rule of law helps. He had studied law at St. Petersburg University and claimed to respect it. In fact, power proved to be his lodestone. He held legal niceties in contempt. “Why would he share power when he could live off oil, gas, other natural resources, and enough redistribution to keep people happy?” ......... “Having toyed with an authoritarian rule-of-law state, he simply become the oligarch-in-chief and turned the state into the enforcer mechanism of his oligarchical clan.” ........... Still, the biggest country on earth, stretching across 11 time zones, needed more than economic recovery to stand tall once more. Mr. Putin had been formed in a Soviet world that held that Russia was not a great power unless it dominated its neighbors. ...... In November 2003, the Rose Revolution in Georgia set that country firmly on a Western course. ....... Once, asked by Ms. Merkel what his greatest mistake had been, the Russian president replied: “To trust you.” .......... The president scrapped elections for regional governors in late 2004, turning them into Kremlin appointees. Russian TV increasingly looked like Soviet TV in its undiluted propaganda. ......... In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist critical of rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered in Moscow on Mr. Putin’s birthday. Another Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent, who had dubbed Russia “a mafia state,” was killed in London, poisoned with a radioactive substance by Russian spies. .........

“Putin’s nightmare is not NATO, but democracy”

......... “It’s the color revolutions, thousands of people on the streets of Kyiv. Once he embraced an imperial, military ideology as the foundation of Russia as a world power, he was unable to tolerate this.” ......... “Putin is of course right that a democratic Ukraine integrated with Europe and successful is a mortal threat to Putinism. That, more than NATO membership, is the issue.” ....... His loathing of weakness dictated a proclivity for violence. Yet Western democracies were slow to absorb this basic lesson. ........ The Russian president, who was the first to call President Bush after 9/11, was an important potential ally in what came to be called the Global War on Terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity. ........ In every stirring for liberty, Mr. Putin now saw the hidden hand of the United States. And why would Mr. Bush not include Russia in his ambitious program? ........ “Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into a ‘Europe whole and free,’” he wrote. As he relates in his memoir, “The Back Channel,” Mr. Burns added that Russian “interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role” would “sometimes cause significant problems.” .......... When François Hollande, the former French president, met Mr. Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Mr. Putin told him. NATO was an organization “aggressive by its nature,” used by the United States to put Russia under pressure, even to stir democracy movements. ....... “He is a man who always wants to demonstrate a kind of implacable determination, but also in the form of seduction, almost gentleness. An agreeable tone alternates with brutal outbursts, which are thereby made more effective.” ........... Convinced of the exceptionalism of Russia, its inevitable fate to be a great power, he could not abide American exceptionalism, the perception of America throwing its power around in the name of some unique destiny, an inherent mission to spread freedom in a world where the United States was the sole hegemon. .......... Putin’s ferocious speech in 2007 to the Munich Security Conference. “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he declared to a shocked audience. ......... Mr. Putin put his two children in Moscow’s German school after his return from Dresden. He liked to quote from German poems. ........... “We deeply believed it would not be good to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO,” Mr. Heusgen said. “They would bring instability.” Article 10 of the NATO Treaty, as Mr. Heusgen noted, says any new member must be in a position to “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” Just how the two contested countries would do that was unclear to Ms. Merkel. ............. Mr. Bush wanted a “Membership Action Plan,” or MAP, for Ukraine and Georgia, a specific commitment to bringing the two countries into the alliance, to be announced at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. NATO expansion had ensured the security and freedom of 100 million Europeans liberated from the totalitarian Soviet imperium; it should not stop........... “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have to yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” ............. Already, in February 2008, the United States and many of its allies had recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, a unilateral declaration rejected as illegal by Russia and seen as an affront to a fellow Slav nation. ........... France joined Germany in Bucharest in opposing the MAP for Georgia and Ukraine. “Germany wanted nothing,” Ms. Rice recalled. “It said you could not take in a country with a frozen conflict like Georgia” — an allusion to the tense standoff between Georgia and the breakaway, Russian-backed, self-declared republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. ....... To which Mr. Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, retorted: “You were a frozen conflict for 45 years!” ....... and calling Kyiv the mother of all Russian cities — a claim that would develop into an obsession. ......... suggesting that Poland and Russia simply partition Ukraine ........ Three months later, a five-day war erupted in Georgia. Russia called it a “peace enforcement” operation. Having provoked an impetuous Georgian attack on its proxy forces in South Ossetia, Russia invaded Georgia. Its strategic goal was to neutralize any ambitions for Georgian NATO membership; this was largely achieved. Moscow recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, integrating them into Russia. .......... The outbreak of large street protests five months earlier, with marchers bearing signs that said “Putin is a thief,” had cemented his conviction that the United States was determined to bring a color revolution to Russia. The demonstrations erupted after parliamentary elections in December 2011 that were widely viewed as fraudulent by domestic and international observers. ............. Mr. Putin’s definitive “choice of repolarization” in 2012. China had risen, offering new strategic options. “He had become convinced that the West was in decline after the 2008 financial crisis,” Mr. Duclos said. “The way forward now was confrontation.” .......... He cast himself as the macho embodiment of conservative Orthodox Christian values against the West’s irreligious embrace of same-sex marriage, radical feminism, homosexuality, mass immigration and other manifestations of “decadence.” ............ Putinism, as it was now fleshed out, stood against a Godless and insinuating West. Moscow had an ideology once more. It was one of conservative resistance, and it appealed to rightist leaders across Europe and beyond. ............. Putin was not joking about his conservative challenge to Western culture. It allowed him to develop his own support in Europe among hard-right parties like the French National Rally, formerly the National Front, that received a loan from a Russian bank. Autocratic nationalism revived its appeal, challenging the democratic liberalism that the Russian leader would pronounce “obsolete” in 2019. ............ Ivan Ilyin, increasingly influenced Mr. Putin’s thinking. Ilyin saw the Russian soldier as “the will, the force and the honor of the Russian state” and wrote, “My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” Mr. Putin took to citing him frequently. ......... “By the time Putin returns to the Kremlin he has an ideology, a spiritual cover for his kleptocracy,” said Mr. Snyder, the historian. “Russia now extends however far its leader decides. It’s all about eternal Russia, a mash-up of the last 1,000 years. Ukraine is ours, always ours, because God says so, and never mind the facts.” ............. “Power, for the Russians, is arms. It is not the economy” ....... “When I first met him you had to lean in a little to understand what he was saying,” said Ms. Rice, the former secretary of state. “I’ve seen Putin go from a little shy, to pretty shy, to arrogant, and now megalomaniacal.” ........... An important moment in this development appears to have come with Mr. Obama’s last-minute decision in 2013 not to bomb Syria after Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, crossed an American “red line” against using chemical weapons. Mr. Obama took the case for war to a reluctant Congress instead, and under the lingering American threat and pressure from Moscow, Mr. al-Assad agreed to the destruction of the weapons. ......... Ukraine, by ousting its Moscow-backed leader in a bloody popular uprising in February 2014, and so de facto rejecting Mr. Putin’s multi-billion-dollar blandishments to join his Eurasian Union rather than pursue an association agreement with the European Union, committed the unpardonable This, for Mr. Putin, was the devouring specter of color revolution made real. It was,, he insisted, an American-backed “coup.” .......... Two decades earlier, in 1994, Russia had signed an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its vast nuclear arsenal in exchange for a promise of respect for its sovereignty and existing borders. But Mr. Putin had no interest in that commitment. ............ “He said there were some Chechen fighters and terrorists there, and he did not want them back, and he would bomb the whole of Aleppo to get rid of them,” Mr. Heusgen said. “It was of an absolute brutality. I mean, how brutal can you get?” ...........

Lies and brutality: The core methods of late Putin were clear enough.

.......... Europe, once the Cold War ended, should have built “the common European house” — a “free economic zone” from Lisbon to Vladivostok — rather than expand NATO eastward. ........... The oligarchs continued to make “Londongrad” their home; Britain’s Conservative Party was glad to take money from them. Prominent figures in Germany, France and Austria were happy to accept well-paid Russian sinecures. They included Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, and François Fillon, the former French prime minister. Russian oil and gas poured into Europe. .......... “The United States applied itself to humiliating Russia,” she told a French TV interviewer, suggesting the simultaneous dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have better served the world. .............

As for former President Donald J. Trump, he never had a critical word for Mr. Putin

, preferring to believe him rather than his own intelligence services on the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election............ “We did not realize that Putin had spun himself into a historical mythology and was thinking in categories of a 1,000-year empire. You cannot deter someone like that with sanctions.” ................ “The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.” .......... After President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Putin at opposite ends of a 20-foot table last month, he told journalists on his plane that he found him more stiff, isolated and ideologically unyielding than at their previous meeting in 2019. Mr Macron’s aides described Mr. Putin as physically changed, his face puffy. “Paranoid” was the word chosen by the French president’s top diplomatic adviser to describe a speech by Mr. Putin just before the war. ............ That Ukraine got to Mr. Putin in some deeply disturbing way is evident in the 5,000-word tract on “The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” that he penned in his isolation last summer and had distributed to members of the armed forces. Marshaling arguments ranging back to the ninth century, he said that “Russia was robbed, indeed.” Ukraine was now home to “radicals and neo-Nazis” intent on effacing any trace of Russia. ............. The West, Mr. Putin had long since concluded, was weak, divided, decadent, given over to private consumption and promiscuity. Germany had a new leader, and France an imminent election. A partnership with China had been cemented. Poor intelligence persuaded him Russian troops would be greeted as liberators in wide swaths of eastern Ukraine, at least. ............ “Putin was drunk on his success. In recent years, he has won enormously.” In Crimea, in Syria, in Belarus, in Africa, in Kazakhstan. “Putin tells himself, ‘I am advancing everywhere. Where am I in retreat? Nowhere!’” ....... In a single stroke, Mr. Putin has galvanized NATO, ended Swiss neutrality and German postwar pacifism, united an often fragmented European Union, hobbled the Russian economy for years to come, provoked a massive exodus of educated Russians and reinforced the very thing he denied had ever existed, in a way that will prove indelible: Ukrainian nationhood. He has been outmaneuvered by the agile and courageous Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a man he mocked. ......... Yet the Russian leader retains deep reserves of support in Russia, and tight control over his security services. ........... If nuclear war remains a remote possibility, it is far less remote than a month ago .......... It is as if, after a flirtation with a new idea — a Russia integrated with the West — Mr. Putin, who will be 70 this year, reverted to something deeper in his psyche: the world of his childhood afterThe Great Patriotic War had been won, with Russia in his head again liberating Ukrainians from Nazism, and Stalin restored to heroic stature. ...........

“I think at this point he either wins or he’s done. Done politically, or done physically.”

.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,

March 26: Ukraine (2)

Museums Are Cashing In on NFTs There’s money to be made, though most institutions are wary of getting involved. ....... Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm, with sales estimated in the tens of billions. ..... Unit and its Florence-based technology partner Cinello forged licensing agreements with several prominent Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of limited edition LED reproductions in period-style wooden frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT. ........ The Belvedere museum in Vienna has fractionalized the digitized image of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” into a one-off drop of 10,000 NFTs. This was released on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, priced at 0.65 Ethereum, or €1,850, each. Earlier this week, Irene Jaeger, a media relations officer at the Austrian museum, said around 2,400 of these Klimt NFTs had been sold, generating about €4.3 million. ........ One institution that has wasted no time in embracing NFTs as a fund-raising tool is the British Museum in London. ........ “for each minted NFT, we plant a tree” that “more than offsets” the activity’s carbon footprint. .

After Pak and Beeple, What’s Next for NFT Collectors? Art Made With a Paintbrush Now crypto collectors are investing in something more tangible, and traditional, like paintings and sculpture. And art dealers are rushing to woo them. ....... catering to the tastes of the crypto nouveau riche has become the frantic obsession of the commercial art world, which is reshaping itself around these new collectors nearly a year after artists like Beeple and Pak sold NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, for tens of millions of dollars, inspiring the typically technophobic art industry to head into the metaverse. .

Pakistan's Imran Khan faces a political showdown — without the army for support . Khan's fortunes have rapidly shifted. The military appears to have withdrawn support and defections within the ranks of Khan's own party, known as the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, mean that a no-confidence move in parliament planned to get underway on Monday, looks like it has a good chance to succeed. ...... The current crisis erupted after the military appeared to suddenly back away from him, signaling to the opposition that it was open season on the prime minister. ....... "He is not like thieves who are making money for themselves and their children. Imran Khan cares about the entire country," Fazl-e-Wadood, a 28-year-old laborer with seven children in Islamabad, says, adding that his support for Khan is so strong that he would "even sacrifice my life" for the prime minister. .

Ukrainian president calls on energy producers to hike output . .

We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies. Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn’t there for it anymore. ....... one product among many in a vast and profitable content industry. ...... what looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation. ...... Nineteen ninety-nine is a candidate for the best year in movies ever — the year of “Fight Club,” “The Sixth Sense,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Election,” “Three Kings” and “The Insider,” so on down a roster that justifies not just a Top 10 but a Top 50 list in hindsight. ....... a creative breakthrough on television, beginning in earnest with “Sopranos”-era HBO, which enabled small-screen entertainment to vie with the movies as a stage for high-level acting, writing and directing. ......... Globalization widened the market for Hollywood productions, but the global audience pushed the business toward a simpler style of storytelling that translated more easily across languages and cultures, with less complexity and idiosyncrasy and fewer cultural specifics. ........ The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood’s potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema’s communalism. ........ the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today. ....... The landscape of the past year, in which the new “Spider-Man” and “Batman” movies between them have made over a billion dollars domestically while Oscar hopefuls have made a pittance ........ much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. ......... The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. ...... The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined. ........

the serial television drama has narrative capacities that even the most sprawling movies lack

......... a world where more and more movies are made primarily for streaming platforms will be a world that cares less about audiovisual immersion. ........ Even the best serial will tend to have an unnecessary season, a mediocre run of episodes or a limp guest-star run, and many potentially great shows, from “Lost” to “Game of Thrones,” have been utterly wrecked by not having some sense of their destination in advance. ........ There are things “The Sopranos” did across its running time, with character development and psychology, that no movie could achieve. ......... But “The Godfather” is still the more perfect work of art. .

Hillary Clinton: Madeleine Albright Warned Us, and She Was Right . Madeleine was 10 years ahead of me at Wellesley, and for decades we used to address and sign our notes to each other “Dear ’59” and “Love, ’69.” ....... She was a woman of action, especially when facing injustice. Madeleine understood that American power is the only thing standing between the rules-based global order and the rule of the sword. That did not mean she was ever quick or casual about the use of force, even for the right cause. Madeleine was a diplomat’s diplomat, ready to talk to even the most odious adversary to advance the prospects of peace. In 2000, she was the first secretary of state to travel to North Korea, where she spent 12 hours negotiating with the dictator Kim Jong-il. But, as she often said, her crucial historical frame of reference was Munich, not Vietnam, so she had a deep appreciation for the risks of inaction. ......... she understood that the security provided by NATO was the key to keeping the continent free, peaceful and undivided. She saw it as a political alliance, not just a military pact, cementing democracy in countries that had only recently freed themselves from authoritarianism. ........

In her searing 2018 book, “Fascism: A Warning,” Madeleine described Mr. Trump as the first U.S. president in the modern era “whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.”

........ the threat to our democracy that so alarmed Madeleine remains an urgent crisis. ....... To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, she visited parts of the Czech Republic that had been liberated by American troops in 1945. Many people waved American flags as she passed, and to her surprise, some had just 48 stars. They had to be decades old. It turned out that American G.I.s had handed out the flags a half-century earlier. Czech families said they had kept them hidden all through the years of Soviet domination, passing them down from generation to generation as the embodiment of their hope for a better, freer future. .



I’m the Prime Minister of Estonia. Putin Can’t Think He’s Won This War. To anyone who lived under Soviet occupation, reports from Ukraine replay scenes we thought we would never see again. The bombing of civilians and the wanton destruction of buildings recall the carnage unleashed on the European continent by Hitler and Stalin. In Mariupol, a port city subjected to a brutal, horrifying siege, residents are reportedly being deported to faraway places in Russia where an uncertain fate awaits them. ....... My mother was only a 6-month-old baby when, in 1949, the Soviets deported her, together with her mother and grandmother, to Siberia. My grandfather was sent to a Siberian prison camp. They were lucky to survive and return to Estonia, but many didn’t. Today the Kremlin is reviving techniques of sheer barbarity. Those who have escaped Mariupol describe it as hell on earth. ..... We must face up to the fact that the Kremlin’s idea of European and global security is completely at odds with that of the free world. And Vladimir Putin is willing to kill and repress en masse for the sake of it. ........... To check Russia’s aggression, we need to put in place a long-term policy of smart containment. .......... First, we must help Ukraine in every possible way. ......... Ukrainian soldiers are able fighters, but they need weapons and matériel, including longer-range air defense assets and anti-tank missiles to better protect their skies. Defensive military aid must be our top priority, and we must commit ourselves to it for the long haul. ...... In Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, we have provided Ukraine with close to $250 million worth of assistance so far. Much of that is military, but it extends to ambulances, blankets and baby food. ......... we need to go further. The forward presence needs to become forward defense, of land, air and sea. That would mean more combat-ready allied troops stationed permanently in the Baltic States, supported by long-range artillery, air defense and other enabling capabilities. It would mean more NATO fighters in our skies ready to switch from peacetime air policing to wartime air defense. And it would mean more NATO ships patrolling the Baltic Sea. ........

we must paralyze the Kremlin’s war machine

. We must do so not only to end the bloodshed and occupation in Ukraine but also to disarm Russia economically, to prevent Mr. Putin from further expanding the war......... At the heart of the machine is oil and gas. Last year exports from hydrocarbons amounted to roughly 40 percent of the Russian state budget, and this year they’re likely to turn into the biggest source. Our focus must be on drying up these revenues. ....... We should also put some of the payments for Moscow’s oil and gas in a special third-party account so that the revenue does not go toward financing the war. And we should direct a significant share of these funds to a future reconstruction plan for Ukraine. ........ There will be no business as usual with Mr. Putin’s Russia. In fact, there can be no business at all. ....... Moscow may think that forcing millions of Ukrainians to leave and seek shelter across Europe will destabilize our societies. This is also part of Mr. Putin’s war aims, and one of the tools of his hybrid warfare. We must show him he’s wrong. .......... and the European Union immediately gave Ukrainians the right to live and work in the bloc .

The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War . Since the 1990s, plans to reunite Ukraine and other post-Soviet states into a transcontinental superpower have been brewing in Russia. A revitalized theory of Eurasian empire informs Mr. Putin’s every move. ....... The end of the Soviet Union disoriented Russia’s elites, stripping away their special status in a huge Communist empire. What was to be done? For some, the answer was just to make money, the capitalist way. In the wild years after 1991, many were able to amass enormous fortunes in cahoots with an indulgent regime. But for others who had set their goals in Soviet conditions, wealth and a vibrant consumer economy were not enough. Post-imperial egos felt the loss of Russia’s status and significance keenly. ........ One of the most alluring concepts was Eurasianism. Emerging from the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, this idea posited Russia as a Eurasian polity formed by a deep history of cultural exchanges among people of Turkic, Slavic, Mongol and other Asian origins. In 1920, the linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy — one of several Russian émigré intellectuals who developed the concept — published “Europe and Humanity,” a trenchant critique of Western colonialism and Eurocentrism. He called on Russian intellectuals to free themselves from their fixation on Europe and to build on the “legacy of Chinggis Khan” to create a great continent-spanning Russian-Eurasian state. ....... Trubetzkoy’s Eurasianism was a recipe for imperial recovery, without Communism — a harmful Western import, in his view. Instead, Trubetzkoy emphasized the ability of a reinvigorated Russian Orthodoxy to provide cohesion across Eurasia, with solicitous care for believers in the many other faiths practiced in this enormous region. ........ Mr. Gumilyov emphasized ethnic diversity as a driver of global history. According to his concept of “ethnogenesis,” an ethnic group could, under the influence of a charismatic leader, develop into a “super-ethnos” — a power spread over a huge geographical area that would clash with other expanding ethnic units. ....... With the publication in 1997 of his 600-page textbook, loftily titled “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” Eurasianism moved to the center of strategists’ political imagination. ........ In Mr. Dugin’s adjustment of Eurasianism to present conditions, Russia had a new opponent — no longer just Europe, but the whole of the “Atlantic” world led by the United States. And his Eurasianism was not anti-imperial but the opposite: Russia had always been an empire, Russian people were “imperial people,” and after the crippling 1990s sellout to the “eternal enemy,” Russia could revive in the next phase of global combat and become a “world empire.” ..........

Eurasian geopolitics, Russian Orthodoxy and traditional values — these goals shaped Russia’s self-image under Mr. Putin’s leadership.

.......... Mr. Dugin made things more direct in his 1997 text: Ukrainian sovereignty presented a “huge danger to all of Eurasia.” ......... Total military and political control of the whole north coast of the Black Sea was an “absolute imperative” of Russian geopolitics. Ukraine had to become “a purely administrative sector of the Russian centralized state.” .......... The goal, plainly, is empire. And the line will not be drawn at Ukraine. .



America Thinks the War Is About Ukraine. Russia’s Neighbors Disagree. . For Western countries, not least the United States, the conflict is a disaster for the people of Ukraine — but one whose biggest danger is that it might spill over the Ukrainian border, setting off a global conflict. ....... For Central and Eastern European countries, it’s rather different. These neighbors of Russia tend to see the war not as a singular event but as a process. To these post-Soviet states, the invasion of Ukraine appears as a next step in a whole series of Russia’s nightmarish assaults on other countries, dating back to the ruthless attacks on Chechnya and the war with Georgia. To them, it seems foolhardy to assume Mr. Putin will stop at Ukraine. The danger is pressing and immediate. ..........

Many Central and Eastern Europeans share an anxious sense of themselves, a nervous sovereignty.

Their independence, restored with such great effort after 1989, could easily be lost again .

How High Inflation Will Come Down . .

The Funniest Travel Account on Instagram Is Run by the T.S.A. Seriously. Meet the woman behind the agency’s endless puns and dad jokes. (And don’t forget the 3.4 ounces rule.) ..... the agency’s Instagram page has enjoyed consistent, considerable growth since it began its humor-based approach about two years ago ....... My team does their own research, searching hashtags and trolling social media. “Trolling” is a terrible word, but that’s really what they do on any social media platform out there — LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and even apps on their own phones like WhatsApp. I don’t ask them to go to any particular sites to look for anything; I give them freedom to roam. They are often looking on their personal social media accounts to see what’s trending. Ideas are then shared among the team to determine if there is something we can do with it. We are constantly looking for an interesting post that’s trending on any platform and we also use photos that our followers share. We spend each morning collaborating to determine what is trending and whether there’s an opportunity for an educational moment. ........... We have what I call “two sides of the house” — six people on the proactive side who work on Instagram posts and 12 people on the reactive side who answer questions on Facebook and Twitter. ...... I was just out of training and it was my first time running the X-ray machine. A well-dressed woman had a gun in her purse and when she was questioned, she simply stated that she forgot the gun was in her purse. .

Yesterday I Was Levi’s Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free. . Over my two decades at Levi’s, I got married. I had two kids. I got divorced. I had two more kids. I got married again. The company has been the most consistent thing in my life. And, until recently, I have always felt encouraged to bring my full self to work—including my political advocacy. ....... and the burden would fall heaviest on disadvantaged kids in public schools, who need the safety and routine of school the most. ....... This time, I was called a racist—a strange accusation given that I have two black sons ...... But the calls kept coming. From legal. From HR. From a board member. And finally, from my boss, the CEO of the company. I explained why I felt so strongly about the issue, citing data on the safety of schools and the harms caused by virtual learning. While they didn’t try to muzzle me outright, I was told repeatedly to “think about what I was saying.” ......... I was asked to go on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News. That appearance was the last straw. ........ Meantime, the Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the company asked that I do an “apology tour.” I was told that the main complaint against me was that “I was not a friend of the Black community at Levi’s.” I was told to say that “I am an imperfect ally.” (I refused.) ........ In the fall of 2021, during a dinner with the CEO, I was told that I was on track to become the next CEO of Levi’s—the stock price had doubled under my leadership, and revenue had returned to pre-pandemic levels. The only thing standing in my way, he said, was me. All I had to do was stop talking about the school thing. ....... Every day, a dossier of my tweets and all of my online interactions were sent to the CEO by the head of corporate communications. At one meeting of the executive leadership team, the CEO made an off-hand remark that I was “acting like Donald Trump.” ....... I never set out to be a contrarian. I don’t like to fight. I love Levi’s and its place in the American heritage as a purveyor of sturdy pants for hardworking, daring people who moved West and dreamed of gold buried in the dirt. The red tag on the back pocket of the jeans I handed over to the Russian girls used to be shorthand for what was good and right about this country, and when I think about my trip to Moscow, so many decades ago, I still get a little choked up. ........ like so many other American companies: held hostage by intolerant ideologues who do not believe in genuine inclusion or diversity. ....... In the end, no one stood with me. Not one person publicly said they agreed with me, or even that they didn’t agree with me, but supported my right to say what I believe anyway. .

‘I Don’t Have the Right to Cry’: Ukrainian Women Share Their Stories of Escape In war, things can change quickly. A New York Times reporter wanted to capture — in whatever blurry way one can in a war — this moment in this war, three weeks in. ........ In war, things can change quickly. You look away and the kaleidoscope has turned. ............ All of them were women, many with children, as that is overwhelmingly who is doing the leaving in Ukraine today, and I realized the small stories of their lives were telling me something about the broader war, too. ........ They talked about the randomness of who survives and who does not; the sheer weirdness of the moment things change, when suddenly your body is moving in ways that your brain can’t comprehend. One day you are driving to the dentist. The next you are whispering with strangers in a dark basement. It is a moment when instinct — to save your children, to get through the next checkpoint — takes over and emotions are blocked. Finally, it is the shocking realization that suddenly, unwillingly, you are a refugee, dependent on the generosity of strangers, no longer a middle-class person in charge of your own life. .......... It reminded me of the stunned quality of the early moments of other wars, when people are still in disbelief, habits have not hardened, and society has yet to fully collapse. ...... I write TV shows. But now I feel like I’m a character in one of them. I didn’t want to leave my homeland. I was satisfied with my country, even with all its shortcomings and all its complications. But now I understand that tomorrow is my last day in my country. I don’t want to be a refugee somewhere in a foreign land. I’ll miss my home. I’ll miss my things, our photographs, pictures of my parents. I left my diaries, my children’s toys, my dresses. ........ And on March 2, when the water stopped and phone connection was lost, we finally understood that we should try to leave. ........ We drove through about six checkpoints. They were all Russian. It was about 40 kilometers. But then when we got to the seventh, it was a Donetsk People’s Republic checkpoint. They said only the cars with no men can pass. They told us we don’t know anything about a green corridor. And they said they had no phone connection. ........ We waited for five hours on the road. It was very cold. We couldn’t turn on the cars for heat because we didn’t have enough gas. ......... Now it is a catastrophic situation in Mariupol. People, to get water, they take water from the radiators, from the pipes that heat the radiators. That’s how they make tea. ...... there are hundreds of thousands of people left who are dying from this now. We left the keys for our apartment to our friends because we still had some water left. ....... They try to give the water first to the children and then to the elderly. For themselves, they just wet their lips. ....... there are almost no windows left in the houses. Recently, it was minus five degrees in Mariupol. People are freezing in the cold. ....... I will speak in Russian for you to understand me. But in fact, since the beginning of the war, I have completely abandoned the Russian language. ........ We had a lot of potatoes in the basement. So we were preparing food for people, for the territorial defense, for the army, for the hospitals. ....... You know, nobody’s waiting for anybody. Once you get going, you just sit down and go because this is your life. ...... We got lost and we had only 20 liters of gasoline — that was very little. ....... All we did over and over was to pray that we would find gas and be able to make it to Lutsk. ........ My friends who were about to evacuate, they were killed. They were shot. Three people. They were heading in the direction of the evacuation route on foot. And they were shot on the road. ......... Yesterday, 50 buses were blocked and Russian soldiers didn’t allow them to pass down the green corridor that had been agreed on by the Red Cross. Only civilian cars were allowed to pass. People got out of the buses and ran out onto the street and fell on the cars and begged them to take them. My friends saw this. They loaded their car with 10 people. They threw out every belonging so they could get more people in. ......... It’s a sin for me to complain. I was received by a wonderful Polish family. This family gives me food and a place to sleep and something to eat and warm socks. But I’m very worried about the people who stayed in Ukraine, who don’t have food, who are being shot at. My husband stayed in Kyiv to defend his right to live in his country. We have to be strong for his sake. I pray all the time. But I don’t have the right to cry. ....... I didn’t know what date it was because it seemed like it was going on for a long time even though it was a few days. ....... Our house and garden is on 25 acres. We plant vegetables there. If you go out of the house, you can see the old farm next to us. The Russians put a Grad rocket launcher in this farm. We counted how many volleys. From three to seven and sometimes up to 30. It makes very scary noises — I can’t express to you how scary. It makes this sound: shooh, shooh, shooh. These rockets the fly with such force, and at night they make these red streaks. It sounds like a murderous force. ......... We were lucky because my husband’s mother, she found a connection. The soldiers were from Dagestan and Buryatiya. They were not Russian. Russians are mean. But these were national minorities. ............ They really believed that there is no army in Ukraine and that foreigners are fighting for us. They hear from the propaganda that Russia is at war with NATO and with the West here. They believe that they should remove all weapons because Ukraine is under the control of America and NATO. ......... Now I’m talking to you and crying, but I haven’t cried for two days. This is my personal achievement. .



‘Things Will Only Get Worse.’ Putin’s War Sends Russians Into Exile. Thousands of Russians saw their comfortable, middle-class lives fade overnight with the invasion ordered by President Vladimir V. Putin. ....... Tens of thousands of Russians have fled to Istanbul since Russia invaded Ukraine last month, outraged about what they see as a criminal war, worried about conscription or the possibility of a closed Russian border, or concerned that their livelihoods are no longer viable back home. ........ Tens of thousands more traveled to countries like Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan which are better known as sources of migration to Russia. At the land border with Latvia — open only to those with European visas — travelers reported waits lasting hours. ....... the descent of Russia into new depths of authoritarianism has many Russians despairing of their future. That has created a flight — though much smaller than in Ukraine — that some are comparing to 1920, when more than 100,000 opponents of the Communist Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War left to seek refuge in what was then Constantinople. ......... “There has never been anything like this before in peacetime,” said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago. “There is no war on Russian territory. As a single event, it is pretty huge.” ....... “They didn’t just take away our future,” Polina Borodina, a Moscow playwright, said of her government’s war in Ukraine. “They took away our past.” ........ The speed and scale of the flight reflect the tectonic shift the invasion touched off inside Russia. For all of President Vladimir V. Putin’s repression, Russia until last month remained a place with extensive travel connections to the rest of the world, a mostly uncensored internet giving a platform to independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class arts scene. Slices of Western middle-class life — Ikea, Starbucks, affordable foreign cars — were widely available. ........ To be sure, many Russians support the war, and many of those supporters are completely unaware of the extent of Russia’s aggression because they rely on state-run television news. ........... While most of Europe has closed its skies, Turkish Airlines has been flying from Moscow as much as five times a day; combined with other airlines, more than 30 flights arrive from Russia on some days. ....... Many Georgians see clear parallels between the Ukraine invasion and Russia’s war on Georgia in 2008. And while most have been welcoming to the new arrivals, some have not distinguished between Russian dissidents who have fled Russia for security or moral reasons and those who support Mr. Putin. ...... The Bank of Georgia has demanded that new Russian customers sign a statement denouncing Mr. Putin’s invasion and acknowledging Russia’s occupation of parts of Georgia — a problematic request to make of anyone hoping to return to Russia. .......... “I realized that since the start of this war, I am an enemy of the state along with thousands of Russians,” he said. ........ “Have you lived under a dictatorship?” Ms. Borodina, 31, whose work has told the stories of Russians imprisoned for years after protesting, said she would ask those Westerners. “Do you know what the consequences of these protests can be?” ........... The pain of leaving everything behind has been excruciating, many said — along with the guilt of perhaps not having done enough to fight Mr. Putin. ........ Alevtina Borodulina, 30, an anthropologist, joined more than 4,700 Russian scientists in signing an open letter against the war. Then, as she walked with friends on central Moscow’s Boulevard Ring, one of them pulled out a tote bag that said “no to war” and promptly got arrested. ....... “It was like I was seeing the Soviet Union,” Ms. Borodulina said of her last days in Moscow. “I was thinking that the people who left the Soviet Union in the 1920s probably made a better decision than those who stayed and then ended up in the camps.” .

.
at No comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)