Madman Putin And The Nuclear Sword: The Putin Regime Must Collapse

This military misadventure has no support whatsoever inside Russia and no success in Ukraine. It is only a matter of time before the people of Russia proper brave the streets. The time for Putin to not invade Ukraine has passed. He crossed a line that he can no longer uncross. 

The thing about the nuclear sword is you do not wave it. When you wave it, you are a madman who waved it at his own people. That is a no-no. The Putin regime has nowhere to go from here but to a collapse. The color revolutions will also now color Russia. Within a proper democratic structure, the Russian economy will surge and take its rightful place. The Russian minorities in the Russian neighborhood will earn dignity and prosper. Russia itself is many nationalities and will see genuine federalism so it is no longer an imperial setup run from Moscow. 

But the Putin regime must go now. That is the only exit strategy available to him now. The economic sanctions must get the work done. 

A newly installed democratic regime in Russia should steer the country towards elections to a constituent assembly to write the country a new constitution that meets all standards of a modern democracy. Never again another Putin. A democratic Russia must work with the United States to reduce its nuclear arsenal by 90% by the end of the decade. The weapons-grade uranium belongs at the nuclear energy facilities around the world. 

Enough of Madman Putin. Get him off the world stage. 

Madman Putin And The Nuclear Sword: The Putin Regime Must Collapse https://t.co/TnjiWWreI6 @NikaMelkozerova @sashavasilyuk @INechepurenko@DanBilefsky #Ukraine #UkraineUnderAttack #UkraineRussiaWar #UkraineRussia #UkraineInvasion #UkraineRussie @WhiteHouse @VP @StateDept

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) February 27, 2022

February 26: Ukraine, Justice Jackson

Before Ukraine Invasion, Russia and China Cemented Economic Ties Facing a wary United States and worried about depending on imports by sea, China is buying more energy and food from its northern neighbor. ........ Chinese purchases of oil from Russia in December surpassed its purchases from Saudi Arabia. Six days before the military campaign began, Russia announced a yearslong deal to sell 100 million tons of coal to China — a contract worth more than $20 billion. And hours before Russia began bombing Ukraine, China agreed to buy Russian wheat despite concerns about plant diseases. ...... In a throwback to the 1950s, when Mao Zedong worked closely with Joseph Stalin and then Nikita Khrushchev, China is again drawing close to Russia. As the United States and the European Union have become wary of China, Beijing’s leaders have decided that their best geopolitical prospects lie in marrying their vast industrial might with Russia’s formidable natural resources. .......... China opposed the use of sanctions. “Sanctions are never an effective way to solve the problems,” he said. “I hope relevant parties will still try to solve the problem through dialogue and consultation.” ........ At the same time, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has imposed an awkward diplomatic quandary on China by violating the principle of national sovereignty that the Chinese leaders regard as sacrosanct. ........ China and Russia share a nearly 2,700-mile border, and in recent years China has become Russia’s largest source of imports and the biggest destination for its exports. ......... For now, U.S. officials have avoided targeting consumer goods, agricultural products and energy, to try to avoid harming ordinary people and further fueling inflation. ......... China and Russia have been settling more of their trade using the renminbi and the ruble. Beijing has also been trying to develop the digital use of its currency as an alternative to the dollar, which could help Russia limit the effect of financial sanctions. .......... Despite its professed distaste for sanctions, China regularly punishes trading partners that have offended it in some way. It does this through unannounced orders sent to customs officials, to avoid clear violations of international trade rules. ......... China currently has an unannounced trade embargo against Lithuania, after Lithuania agreed to let Taiwan open an office there. .

. We Have Never Been Here Before . Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. ................... On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams. .......... the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries — before the democracy revolutions in America and France — when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did ......... That balance — or imbalance in Putin’s view — was the humiliating equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’s impositions on Germany after World War I. In Russia’s case, it meant Moscow having to swallow NATO’s expansion not only to include the old Eastern European countries that had been part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, like Poland, but even, in principle, states that were part of the Soviet Union itself, like Ukraine. ............ We may be back in the jungle — but today the jungle is wired. It is wired together more intimately than ever before by telecommunications; satellites; trade; the internet; road, rail and air networks; financial markets; and supply chains. .......... Welcome to

World War Wired

— the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web. ......... “What is coming out of Ukraine is simply impossible to produce on such a scale without citizens and soldiers throughout the country having easy access to cellphones, the internet and, by extension, social media apps. A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world. What is occurring is already horrific, based on the information released just on the first day.” .............. a population of 44 million people, which is a little less than one-third the size of Russia’s population. .......... the majority of these Ukrainians have been struggling to be part of the democratic, free-market West for 30 years and have already forged myriad trade, cultural and internet ties to European Union companies, institutions and media. .......... He has the firepower to bring Ukraine to heel. But in this modern era we have never seen an unfree country, Russia, try to rewrite the rules of the international system and take over a free country that is as big as Ukraine — especially when the unfree country, Russia, has an economy that is smaller than that of Texas. .............. the E.U. is already Ukraine’s biggest trading partner — not Russia ......... In 2012, Russia was the destination for 25.7 percent of Ukrainian exports, compared with 24.9 percent going to the E.U. ......... “Russia’s share of Ukrainian exports had fallen to only 7.7 percent, while the E.U.’s share shot up to 42.6 percent” ......... a retired Russian diplomat in Moscow emailed me: “Tell me how this war ends? Unfortunately, there is no one and nowhere to ask.” ............. As this war unfolds on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, Putin cannot closet his Russian population — let alone the rest of the world — from the horrific images that will come out of this war as it enters its urban phase. ...........

On just the first day of the war, more than 1,300 protesters across Russia, many of them chanting “No to war,” were detained ... That’s no small number in a country where Putin brooks little dissent.

........ if Poland just halts truck and rail traffic from Russia to Germany, “as it should,” it would create immediate havoc for Russia’s economy, because the alternative routes are complicated and need to go through a now very dangerous Ukraine. .......... Anyone up for an anti-Putin trucker strike to prevent Russian goods going to and through Western Europe by way of Poland? Watch that space. Some super-empowered Polish citizens with a few roadblocks, pickups and smartphones could choke Russia’s whole economy in this wired world. ............ “China wants to compete with America in the Super Bowl of economics, innovation and technology — and thinks it can win. Putin is ready to burn down the stadium and kill everyone in it to satisfy his grievances.” ........... China’s economy is more dependent on Ukraine than Russia’s. ...... “China leapfrogged Russia to become Ukraine’s biggest single trading partner in 2019, with overall trade totaling $18.98 billion last year, a nearly 80 percent jump from 2013. ....... 30 percent of all of China’s corn imports last year came from farms in Ukraine. ........ China overtook the United States as the European Union’s biggest trading partner in 2020, and Beijing cannot afford for the E.U. to be embroiled in conflict with an increasingly aggressive Russia and unstable Putin. China’s stability depends — and the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party rests — on Xi’s ability to sustain and grow his already massive middle class. And that depends on a stable and growing world economy. .......... All that Beijing has done so far is mumble that Putin’s invasion was “not what we would hope to see” .......... In today’s interconnected world, a leader’s “sphere of influence” is no longer some entitlement from history and geography, but rather it is something that has to be earned and re-earned every day by inspiring and not compelling others to follow you. ......... The musician and actress Selena Gomez has twice as many followers on Instagram — over 298 million — as Russia has citizens. ........... Russian celebrities who are posting on Instagram about their opposition to the war. ........ You are now officially a global pariah. I hope you like Chinese and North Korean food. .......... Vladimir, the first day of this war was the best day of the rest of your life. I have no doubt that in the near term, your military will prevail, but in the long run leaders who try to bury the future with the past don’t do well. ................. Putin has more unchecked power than any other Russian leader since Stalin. And Xi has more unchecked power than any other Chinese leader since Mao. ......... what those two leaders decide to do with their unchecked power will touch virtually all of us directly or indirectly. .

. Why Is Putin at War Again? Because He Keeps Winning. . Whether against Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 or in Syria since 2015, the Russian military has repeatedly converted battlefield successes into political victories. Russia’s rearmament over the past decade and a half has been unmatched by a comparable increase in Western capabilities. ............ The invasion of Georgia in 2008 lasted five days but forced that country into humiliating political concessions. In Ukraine in 2014, regular Russian military units were deployed at scale for a few weeks, but this proved enough to force Kyiv to sign a painful peace deal. When Russia intervened in Syria in 2015, some Western analysts predicted a disaster along the lines of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in 1979 and ended, after a decade of quagmire, in retreat. Instead, Syria’s civil war served as a testing ground for Russia’s most advanced weaponry. ........... Russia’s strength lies in hybrid tactics — cyberwarfare, misinformation campaigns, covert operations — and its ability to meddle in other countries’ domestic politics. ........ Russia has replaced the poorly equipped army it inherited from the Soviet Union with a modern fighting force, featuring everything from new missiles to advanced electronic warfare systems. ...... what matters is not theoretical military matchups but the ability to use force for specific aims. Russia has developed precisely the capabilities needed to rebuild its influence in Eastern Europe. ...... It may be that, in trying to swallow all of Ukraine, Mr. Putin has finally overstepped. .......... Russia’s recent wars have been carefully calculated and limited in cost. There’s no guarantee that this conflict won’t be, too. .

. Rash Putin Razes Ukraine . Now comes the insanity of Vladimir Putin, the former K.G.B. officer who has been feeling humiliated and furious ever since the red banner of the Soviet Union came down from the Kremlin 30 years ago. This demonic little man with the puffy Botoxy face has been watching too many episodes of “The Americans” during his Covid isolation. .......... He longs for the shadowy era when Moscow was a menacing superpower, not a withering autocracy. ........... There’s not even cheering in Russia like there was after the annexation of Crimea, which was done with almost no bloodshed. And I doubt a majority of Russians believe the propaganda about the imminent Nazi threat.” (Especially since the country is run by a Jewish comedian turned courageous president, Volodymyr Zelensky.) ......... Putin made clear that his invasion wasn’t really about Ukraine. It was about the United States, about history and settling old scores, and rewriting the terms of surrender, 30 years later, that ended the Cold War.” ...... saying that Russia — i.e., Putin — was being treated in an “insolent,” “contemptuous” and “disdainful” way by the West. ....... Putin could have been alluding to Trump in his speech Thursday when he accused the U.S. of “con-artist behavior,” adding that America had become “an empire of lies.” Certainly, Trump was the emperor of lies. .

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Defeat Trump, Now More Than Ever . The democratic nations of the world are in a global struggle against authoritarianism. ........ But that struggle also has domestic fronts — the need to defeat the mini-Putins now found across the Western democracies. These are the demagogues who lie with Putinesque brazenness, who shred democratic institutions with Putinesque bravado, who strut the world’s stage with Putin’s amoral schoolboy machismo while pretending to represent all that is traditional and holy. ........

In the United States that, of course, is Donald Trump.

........ As democracy is threatened from abroad, it can’t also be cannibalized from within. ........ He won the White House by winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with strong support from white voters without a college degree. ........ Democrats need to get over at least three delusions. ...... The first Democratic myth is, “People of color think and act alike.” ..... working-class people have been moving toward the G.O.P. across racial lines. .......... “The party is also losing support from working-class Blacks and Hispanics.” ......... The second Democratic myth is, “Economics trumps culture.” ........ religious, social and cultural issues — on guns, crime and immigration ....... The third myth is, “A progressive ascendancy is emerging.” ........ a neo-Hamiltonian agenda that stands for the idea that we need to build more things — roads, houses, colleges, green technologies and ports. ....... But Democrats also have to do something they’re really bad at:

Craft a cultural narrative around the theme of social order.

The Democrats have been blamed for fringe ideas like “defund the police” and a zeal for “critical race theory” because the party doesn’t have its own mainstream social and cultural narrative. ................ Democrats need to tell us which cultural and moral values they stand for that will hold this country together. ......... The authoritarians tell a simple story about how to restore order — it comes from cultural homogeneity and the iron fist of the strongman. Democrats have a harder challenge — to show how order can be woven amid diversity, openness and the full flowering of individuals. But Democrats need to name the moral values and practices that will restore social order. ........... It doesn’t matter how many nice programs you have; people won’t support you if they think your path is the path to chaos. .

. For Ukraine’s Refugees, Europe Opens Doors That Were Shut to Others Thousands of Ukrainians will end up in countries led by nationalist governments that have been reluctant to welcome refugees in the past. ......... unlike the refugees who have flooded Europe in crises over the past decade, they are being welcomed. .......... Countries that have for years resisted taking in refugees from wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are now opening their doors to Ukrainians ......... the world’s next refugee crisis. ....... In Poland, government officials assisted by American soldiers and diplomats have set up processing centers for Ukrainians. “Anyone fleeing from bombs, from Russian rifles, can count on the support of the Polish state,” the Polish interior minister, Mariusz Kaminski, told reporters on Thursday. His government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a border wall, a project it began after refugees and migrants from the Middle East tried to reach the country last year but ended up marooned in neighboring Belarus. ............. The military in Hungary is allowing in Ukrainians through sections of the border that had been closed. Hungary’s hard-line prime minister, Viktor Orban, has previously called refugees a threat to his country, and his government has been accused of caging and starving them........... Farther West, Chancellor Karl Nehammer of Austria said that “of course we will take in refugees if necessary” in light of the crisis in Ukraine. As recently as last fall, when he was serving as interior minister, Mr. Nehammer sought to block some Afghans seeking refuge after the Taliban overthrew the government in Kabul. ....... At least 1.3 million people — mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — applied for asylum in Europe in 2015 during what was widely regarded as the worst refugee crisis since World War II, stretching national budgets and creating a backlash of political nativism in countries across the continent. ......... Some estimates project that at least one million refugees will flee Ukraine because of the Russian invasion. ......... the fighting could uproot as many as five million people, “putting pressure on Ukraine’s neighbors.” ......... “If you think of causing the refugee crisis as one of Putin’s tools to destabilize the West, then a calm, efficient, orderly response is a really good rebuke to that” .......... “it’s hard not to see that

Ukrainians are white, mostly Christian and Europeans

. And so in a sense, the xenophobia that’s really arisen in the last 10 years, particularly after 2015, is not at play in this crisis in the way that it has been for refugees coming from the Middle East and from Africa.” ........... Nearly 1.5 million people had been forced from their homes by the fighting even before the invasion this past week. ......... A Soviet crackdown on a Hungarian uprising in 1956, for example, resulted in 200,000 refugees, most of whom fled to Austria before they were settled in dozens of countries across Europe. Between 80,000 and 100,000 people — and perhaps even more than that — left what was then Czechoslovakia to escape a Soviet invasion in 1968 that was launched to silence pro-democracy Prague Spring protests. .

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‘The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,’ by Steven Lee Myers . Once they were done ransacking the offices that had inspired so much terror, they directed their anger down the street toward the K.G.B. residence where Lieutenant Colonel Putin, a young intelligence officer, stood looking out the window. Watching the approaching mob, Putin called the local Soviet military command and asked for reinforcements. But no higher authority would approve it. “Moscow is silent,” he was told. .............. Dressed in his military uniform but with no pistol, no orders and no backup, he walked out to the gate where the crowd had assembled. And he bluffed. “This house is strictly guarded,” he said in an even tone, in fluent German. “My soldiers have weapons. And I gave them orders: If anyone enters the compound, they are to open fire.” With that, he turned and walked back into the house. The protesters dispersed. ................. Putin loves this story. ..... when Putin first came to power in 2000 and went to war in Chechnya. ....... how he likes best to see himself: One man representing his country, representing stability and order, stands against the chaos of the street; one man who still believes in the unique power of the state personifies its sovereignty and its prerogative to defend its interests; one man who embodies calm, measured authority resists the emotional swell of undisciplined, angry people, and understands that the appearance of forcefulness and obstinacy can be as powerful as an actual show of force. ............ Putin simply feels that he’s the last one standing between order and chaos. .......... a man swinging from crisis to crisis with one goal: projecting strength ........ he has consolidated power in his own person in an astounding way. In his first two terms, from 2000 to 2008, he brought down the oligarchs, thereby regaining total control of the news media and orchestrating the breakup of Yukos, the giant oil company (and jailing its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky), which returned two important power sources to the state. His loyal friends now run most of Russia’s important industries. Unfettered democracy also pointed the way to chaos, and so he developed something his advisers called “managed democracy,” providing only the semblance of popular will. ­Opposition parties were neutered, and Russians lost the ability to vote in direct elections for local or regional governments. “The Russian people are backward,” Putin once told a group of foreign journalists. “They cannot adapt to democracy as they have done in your countries. They need time.” .............. was a colorless and uncharismatic figure before coming to power (“like that bored schoolboy in the back of the classroom,” President Obama observed in 2013), became a living monument for his people, a leader onto whose taut skin they have projected ­so much. ........... Putin himself now represents the chaos he so abhors — the chaos that will surely come in his wake. .

. Ketanji Brown Jackson Won’t Be Able to Change a Radical Court. Yet. . White men make up less than one-third of the U.S. population but have accounted for 94 percent of Supreme Court justices. ........ the ideology of its current six-member majority is far to the right of the average American. ...... Judge Jackson will bring vital, underrepresented experiences and intellectual firepower to the high court. ....... she is a graduate of both Harvard University and its law school. ....... no previous justice has been a public defender. ....... the complex criminal justice policy issues that led to the nation’s four-decade prison boom .......... The current court — whose conservative supermajority was manufactured over the past several years in a series of power grabs by Senator Mitch McConnell and his Republican caucus — is now the most right-wing it has been in a century, even as the country as a whole has moved left. ......... the courts have the power of neither the sword nor the purse. Their ability to issue life-altering rulings derives entirely from the public’s acceptance of their legitimacy. ........... appointing justices who will interpret the Constitution as a document that can adapt to changing circumstances and that embodies the nation’s highest and most enduring ideals. ......... The most obvious to consider is term limits, which have enjoyed consistent support from both conservatives and liberals. ......... lifetime appointments created a “self-perpetuating oligarchy” and that carefully timed retirements only contributed to the public perception of justices as political actors. ......... The strongest proposal involves staggered 18-year terms for justices, giving every president at least two and as many as four appointments. There are ways to do this without amending the Constitution, but it would not be easy. .......... No matter who sits on the bench, the most important and lasting progress toward a fairer and more equal nation will be won outside the court, not within it. .

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. We’ve Entered a New Phase of the Pandemic. It’s Time for New Metrics. . Omicron is very different from the coronavirus variant that arrived on our shores two years ago. .

. My Family Never Asked to Be ‘Liberated’ . My 70-year-old aunt had planned a quiet week. A bit of ironing, planting petunias in the garden and maybe finally tackling an unwieldy tangle of electrical chargers. Instead, she sits with my uncle, watching the Russian invasion on their laptops. ....... For eight years this conflict has done nothing for my family except tear it apart. This is just the latest ugly chapter. ........ I emigrated to San Francisco from Moscow as a teenager in 1996, but most of my family still live in Russia and Ukraine. My father, who grew up in Donetsk, moved to Moscow in the 1970s and lived there until his death in 2017. My brother still lives in Moscow. Until 2014 the rest of my family — my grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousins and nephews — all lived in Donetsk, and I visited them almost every summer since I was little. .......... they found Ukraine’s politics dysfunctional and the pervasive corruption repulsive, but they thought the situation in Russia wasn’t much better. ....... Many in my family tried to convince her that she was panicking for no reason, that the idea of a war between Russia and Ukraine was preposterous. .......... Unlike my cousins, our 90-year-old grandmother, who had survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, had no intention of leaving. When I called her from California to urge her to abandon the heavily shelled city, she told me: “Let them come and get me. I’m too old to leave.” Then she recited a dirty poem she’d made up about Mr. Putin. .......... Years of war had left my aunt somewhere between traumatized and amused, a quintessentially Soviet attitude. ........... Grandma passed away in 2019. Their children stayed in Kyiv. My aunt and uncle converted their basement into a bomb shelter, dug in and slowly got used to their strange life. ......... But then Mr. Putin ordered his military into Ukraine, and the regional conflict they lived with stoically for so long grew into an international calamity, and the last of my aunt’s composure evaporated. Now when I call her, she is in tears. “I’m not afraid for my own life anymore after eight years of war,” she says. “But my heart aches for my children.” ..........

my fear is that their whole country will be turned into Donetsk, an unlivable unplace.

..... “There were times in the past few years that I felt like soon normal life will return,” my aunt told me on Friday, as Russian troops moved toward Kyiv. “But now I know it won’t.” .

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@sashavasilyuk I am also working on a novel. https://t.co/W2wkdJT99P

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) February 26, 2022

I’m in Kyiv, and It Is Terrifying . and I felt fear crawling in my guts. I had never felt this way before. ...... This feeling has stayed with me: It is my new permanent condition. .......... To Mr. Putin, as he explained in his crazed speech on Monday, Ukraine is not a sovereign state and has no right to exist. It is to be folded up, by force, into Russia’s control. ......... Some 43 percent of Ukrainians, according to a recent poll, are ready to fight the Russians — and more than 100,000 have already joined defense units across the country.

We will fight

........ Proud citizens of one of Eastern Europe’s democracies, we refuse to be ruled by military diktat. ........ Mr. Putin claims that he is a liberator, and that Ukraine will profit from the invasion. But even my 76-year-old granny, a typical Soviet babushka who still misses the Soviet Union and its “stability,” thinks he has gone mad. ......... I had a long life. I would rather die in my perfectly decorated flat than in some dirty basement.” ........ I tried to urge her to pack her belongings and documents, but she refused. “I would rather cook some soup,” she said with sad laughter, and ended the call. ......... To ward off despair, I took my dog, Hans, for a walk. Not even a Russian attack will stop Hans’s need for exercise. ....... Neighbors were hurriedly loading their cars with belongings, while others were standing in lines for the grocery store and cash machine. People were moving fast: Some had huge backpacks and looked like they were going camping. Nobody smiled. ....... Despite constant warnings from the media and the government that the Kremlin — which built up around 190,000 troops in and near Ukraine since October — was poised to invade, she had not believed Mr. Putin would dare to do it. She hadn’t checked if there was a bomb shelter nearby; she hadn’t stored any food. ......... Russian tanks had come close to Kharkiv, our second largest city. In a town right next to Kyiv, Russian helicopters attacked the local airport. And Russian forces captured Chernobyl, north of the capital. In the first hours of defending the country, more than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded. ..........

Ukraine is ours, no matter what Mr. Putin says.

I’m 31, born in the year Ukraine became independent: My adult life has been lived in the shadow cast by Russian aggression. First Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, then he fomented the war in the Donbas that has killed more than 14,000 people. Now the battle for Ukraine has come to a climax....... But it’s about more than Ukraine. It’s a contest between democracy and autocracy, freedom and dictatorship, whose implications will scatter across the world. It’s not our fight alone. So please don’t leave us alone to fight it. .

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@NikaMelkozerova Hybrid Warfare, Meet Human Warfare https://t.co/XlYckJmsqT

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) February 26, 2022

Trump Praises Putin, Leaving Republicans in a Bind G.O.P. leaders, while condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, were silent on comments made by the former president. Some figures on the right amplified them. ........... He is “pretty smart,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a Florida fund-raiser, assessing the impending invasion like a real estate deal. “He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” he said, “taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.” .......... “The idea that a former president would praise the man or leadership who American troops are even now traveling to confront and contain” .. “is astounding.” ........ “Could one imagine Dwight Eisenhower praising Leonid Brezhnev for invading Czechoslovakia in 1968?” he asked in an email. “I think not.” ............ Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, denounced Mr. Putin at length and urged the Biden administration to provide military aid to help the Ukrainians fight back. Asked at a news conference in Louisville about Mr. Trump’s comments, the senator responded with silence. ........ Mr. Putin was “an elegantly sophisticated counterpart” and “very shrewd,” Mr. Pompeo said. ...... A chorus of Republicans are arguing that the White House is worrying more about a distant conflict than about illegal immigration. ........ “Why does Joe Biden care more about Ukraine’s border than the U.S. southern border?” the official Twitter account of the Republican minority of the House Judiciary Committee declared on Wednesday. ........... NATO should placate Russia by refraining from expanding membership to Ukraine. ...... Tucker Carlson has echoed Kremlin talking points so closely that his sound bites have become a staple of Russian state television. ........... “Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked, adding, “Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic?” “No one on this show is rooting for Putin,” Mr. Carlson sought to clarify on Wednesday, “or rooting for the Ukrainians for that matter.” ......... the Kremlin had sought for a decade to win over allies on the American right, in part by denouncing gay rights, emphasizing Russian support for conservative social norms and inviting visits from prominent evangelical figures like Franklin Graham. .......... “Putin ain’t woke — he is anti-woke,” Mr. Bannon said approvingly on Wednesday. ......... Bannon argued that Congress should impeach Mr. Biden for “instigating this war in Ukraine.” ........ “There is no appetite in Europe to defend themselves, OK?” Mr. Bannon said. “Now you’ve gone in and stirred up a hornet’s nest.” ............ compared the apparent sympathy for Russia among some on the right to earlier periods when groups on the political fringes embraced foreign rivals as foils for domestic opponents. ........ During the years before the United States entered World War II, for example, a handful of lawmakers lauded Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for their strong leadership. During the early years of the Cold War, he noted, some on the far left spoke approvingly of the Soviet Union as an alternative to unfettered capitalism. “Russia is a stand-in for anti-wokeness,” he said. .

. ‘Abrupt Changes’: China Caught in a Bind Over Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine China has presented itself as a defender of sovereign independence. But its reluctance to denounce Russia’s aggression forces it into an awkward position. ......... Russia’s war has put its partner Beijing in a severe bind ...... China’s message has been that it is the true guardian of sovereign independence, especially for poorer countries. ........ On the other hand, Mr. Putin has expected Mr. Xi to accept, if not support, the invasion. Mr. Xi’s government has played along so far, laying responsibility for Europe’s worst war in decades on hubris by the United States. China has also distanced itself from the condemnation of Russia at the United Nations. ......... China’s “central attack on the United States as a global power since Xi Jinping has come to office has been to accuse it of continued violation of U.N. Charter principles on national sovereignty,” Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia who served as a diplomat in China, said in a telephone interview. “This torpedoes that argument midship.” ......... Putin may need China more than ever as an investor and buyer of Russian oil, wheat and other products. .......... Asian and African countries traditionally close to Beijing have condemned Russia’s actions. One of the main currencies of Chinese diplomacy — its declared dedication to sovereign rights for all countries — could be devalued. ........ Chinese newspapers have uniformly held to the government’s position on the war, accusing the United States of provoking Russia by holding open the possibility that Ukraine could join NATO. ...... “In that sense, China sees this war as one of self-defense by Russia, therefore naturally it would not describe it as an invasion.” ....... “Ukraine is a sovereign, independent country, and if it wants to join NATO or the E.U., that’s its freedom and nobody else has the right to intervene,” said one comment on Friday on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media service. ........ When the authorities put dissidents on trial in secret, they brush off requests for access or information by citing “judicial sovereignty.” When Chinese internet censorship is criticized, officials cite China’s right to preserve its “cybersovereignty.” ..... “Looks like Putin suckered Xi.” .

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. Russia Could Use Cryptocurrency to Blunt the Force of U.S. Sanctions Russian companies have many cryptocurrency tools at their disposal to evade sanctions, including a so-called digital ruble and ransomware........ When the United States barred Americans from doing business with Russian banks, oil and gas developers and other companies in 2014, after the country’s invasion of Crimea, the hit to Russia’s economy was swift and immense. Economists estimated that sanctions imposed by Western nations cost Russia $50 billion a year. .......... Russian entities are preparing to blunt some of the worst effects by making deals with anyone around the world willing to work with them ......... Sanctions are some of the most powerful tools the United States and European countries have to influence the behavior of nations they don’t consider allies. The United States in particular is able to use sanctions as a diplomatic tool because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and used in payments worldwide. ....... But if banks are the eyes and ears of governments in this space, the explosion of digital currencies is blinding them. ........ Banks have to abide by “know your customer” rules, which include verifying their clients’ identities. But exchanges and other platforms that facilitate the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies and digital assets are rarely as good at tracking their customers as banks are, even though they are supposed to follow the same rules. .......... Should it choose to evade sanctions, Russia has multiple cryptocurrency-related tools at its disposal, experts said. All it needs is to find ways to trade without touching the dollar. .......... The Russian government is developing its own central bank digital currency, a so-called digital ruble that it hopes to use to trade directly with other countries willing to accept it without first converting it into dollars. ......... Iran and North Korea are among countries that have used digital currencies to mitigate the effects of Western sanctions ......... the new “digital ruble” would make the country less dependent on the United States and better able to resist sanctions. It would let Russian entities conduct transactions outside the international banking system with any country willing to trade in digital currency. .......... Russia could find willing partners in other nations targeted by U.S. sanctions, including Iran, that are also developing government-backed digital currencies. China, Russia’s largest trading partner in both imports and exports, according to the World Bank, has already launched its own central bank digital currency. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, recently described China’s relationship with Russia as having “no limits.” ......... “The lessening of U.S. sanctions power comes from a system where these nation-states are able to do transactions without going through the global banking system.” .......... Iran was using revenue from Bitcoin mining to make up for the limitations on its ability to sell oil because of sanctions. .......... Russia is at the center of the growing ransomware industry. Last year, about 74 percent of global ransomware revenue, or more than $400 million worth of cryptocurrency, went to entities that are probably affiliated with Russia in some way .......... Illegal funds have also flowed into Russia through a dark web marketplace called Hydra, which is powered by cryptocurrency and handled more than $1 billion in sales in 2020 .......... “We know that there’s no questions asked, and we know that Hydra operates not just throughout Eastern Europe but throughout Western Europe,” said Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis. “There’s definitely cross-border business happening.” .......... Digital currencies all use blockchain technology, a form of computer code that is publicly viewable by anyone, anywhere. .

. What Americans Really Think About ‘Critical Race Theory’ . When asked if books should ever be banned for “discussing race” or “depicting slavery,” an overwhelming 87 percent of Americans said no. ....... And 58 percent of Americans, including 52 percent of white Americans, say that racism is a “major problem” in America today. ...... most Americans — 65 percent — have heard either “a little” or “nothing” about critical race theory ....... Republicans aren’t capturing the public mood on this issue as much as they are successfully using it to mobilize their supporters and send them to the voting booth. ......... For Democrats, then, this is a culture war they can win. They just have to fight it. .

. Vladimir Putin’s Empire of Delusions In a lengthy screed, the Russian dictator made it clear that his ambitions are to restore his nation’s status as a colonizer of Europe. ....... Putin—isolated and irate, almost Strangelovian in front of the camera—railed about a different topic entirely: empire, and Russia’s right to its former colonial holdings. ........ Putin claimed, “can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine.’” ...... claiming that Ukraine “is entirely the product of the Soviet era” and that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people.” And when the Soviet Union collapsed, according to Putin, Russia was “robbed, indeed.” ........ Putin’s admission that he is propelled primarily by revanchism and ressentiment .........

pure, unadulterated neo-imperialism

........ For too many Westerners, European empire calls only far-flung conquests to mind—across oceans and on distant continents. The British empire, French empire, Spanish empire, Dutch empire: (Nearly) all of it took place outside Europe proper, in Africa and South America and South Asia. And (nearly) all of it collapsed by the mid-twentieth century, caught up in the waves of independence sweeping these former colonial holdings. .......... But there was one European power that retained its imperial possessions, through the end of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first: Moscow. Under the tsars, Russia conquered a continent, bloodying and breaking Indigenous populations from Crimea to the Caucasus to Siberia. In Tatarstan and Turkestan, Circassia and Chechnya, Kamchatka and Kazakhstan, Moscow cut an imperial scythe, brutalizing entire peoples in the process, and claiming their lands as Russia’s alone. In many ways, Russia’s continental expansionism mirrored America’s, with both imperial capitals marching simultaneously toward the Pacific. Just compare imperial Russians’ slaughter of, say, Alaska’s First Nations populations—or how Russian settlers followed smallpox epidemics that decimated Indigenous communities. When talking about a country that “colonized itself,” you’re equally likely to be talking about Russia as the U.S. ............. Even when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was shorn of only part of its former imperial holdings. A range of new republics gained independence—an independence Putin admits that he sees as a falsehood—but myriad conquered nations remained part of Russia proper. In the early 1990s, this was seen by Western partners as perfectly acceptable, even when Moscow began carpet-bombing places like Grozny. Moscow’s empire tottered but never fully collapsed. As one analyst recently wrote,

Russia “never fully decolonized.”

........... Lest you think Ukraine is alone, Putin said that Kazakhs had also “never had statehood,” sending the Russian nationalists eyeing Northern Kazakhstan into a tizzy. ......... Putin has revealed himself as the latest in a long line of European dictators impelled solely by historic illiteracy and ethnic grievance, seeking to reclaim lands he believes are rightfully his. ........ the sooner the rest of us realize that we’re witnessing the return of European imperialism, the closer we’ll be to moving past the horrendous violence suddenly looming....... “This is neo-colonialism in broad daylight” ........ “This situation echoes our history,” Kimani said, condemning Moscow’s moves. “Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of an empire. Our borders are not of our own drawings. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.” So, too, were the dozens of nations colonized by Moscow—including those still subject to the Kremlin’s latest dictatorship, both inside and outside of Russia. ....... Thankfully, all empires fall, as Putin’s certainly will. When this is all said and done, we may well be watching more nations colonized by Moscow finally experience independence—and, perhaps, leading Russia on a path to a decolonization long delayed. .

. The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine Putin has declared that history is destiny, and that Ukraine will never get away from Russia. ....... I was listening—Putin had just said that Ukraine had no history of legitimate statehood. When the speech was over, my friend posted on Facebook, “I can’t breathe.” .......... Fifty-four years ago, the Soviet dissident Larisa Bogoraz wrote, “It becomes impossible to live and to breathe.” When she wrote the note, in 1968, she was about to take part in a desperate protest: eight people went to Red Square with banners that denounced the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. ......... For some Soviet intellectuals, Czechoslovakia in 1968 represented the possibility of a different future. That spring, events appeared to prove that Czechoslovakia was part of the larger world, despite being in the Soviet bloc. The leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was instituting reforms. It seemed that, after the great terrors of both Hitler and Stalin, there could be freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a free exchange of ideas in the media, and possibly even actual elections in Eastern and Central Europe, and that all of these changes could be achieved peacefully. The Czechoslovaks called it “socialism with a human face.” ......... Ukraine has long represented hope for a small minority of Russians. Ukraine shares Russia’s history of tyranny and terror. It lost more than four million people to a man-made famine in 1931-34 and still uncounted others to other kinds of Stalinist terror. Between five and seven million Ukrainians died during the Second World War and the Nazi occupation in 1941-44; this included one and a half million Jews killed in what is often known as the Holocaust by Bullets.

Just as in Russia, no family survived untouched by the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism

.......... After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, both Russian and Ukrainian societies struggled to forge new identities. Both contended with poverty, corruption, and growing inequality. Both had leaders who tried to stay in office by falsifying the vote. But in 2004 Ukrainians revolted against a rigged election, camping out in Kyiv’s Independence Square for weeks. The country’s highest court ordered a revote. Nine years later, when the President sold the country out to Russia—agreeing to scrap an association agreement with the European Union in exchange for fifteen billion in Russian loans—Ukrainians of vastly different political persuasions came to Independence Square again. They stayed there, day and night, through the dead of winter. They stayed when the government opened fire on them. More than a hundred people died before the corrupt President fled to Russia. A willingness to die for freedom is now a part of not only Ukrainians’ mythology but their lived history. ........... Many Russians—both the majority who accept and support Putin and the minority who oppose him—watched the Ukrainian revolutions as though looking in a mirror that could predict Russia’s own future. The Kremlin became even more terrified of protests and cracked down on its opponents even harder. Some in the opposition believed that if Ukrainians won their freedom, Russians would follow. ........... totalitarian regimes function by declaring imagined laws of history and then acting to enforce them. .......... As the self-appointed enforcer of the laws of history, Putin was laying down the groundwork for removing the Ukrainian government and installing one that he imagines will do the Kremlin’s bidding. ...... What Putin does not imagine is the kind and scale of resistance that he would actually encounter in Ukraine. These are the people who stood to the death in Independence Square. In 2014, they took up arms to defend Ukraine against a Russian incursion. Underequipped and underprepared, these volunteers joined the war effort from all walks of life. Others organized in monumental numbers to collect equipment and supplies to support the fighters and those suffering from the occupation of the east, in an effort that lasted for several years. When Putin encounters Ukrainian resistance, he will respond the only way he knows: with devastating force. The loss of life will be staggering. Watching it will make it impossible to live and to breathe. .

. A World Moving Toward Autocracy . My naïve assumption has always been that people generally desire American-style liberty. ....... the founders structured our system the way they did precisely because they understood the less-than-democratic instincts of human nature. ........ the predominant instinct for most people is not to ensure a just society for all, but one in which they and their tribal interests thrive ....... The adversary we face isn’t simply Trumpism or Putinism. Our enemy is human nature. .

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