Sunday, March 20, 2022

March 20: Ukraine



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

the first nuclear bomb since Nagasaki.

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