5: Ukraine

Everything Democrats Could Do if Warnock Wins Without Mr. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff, President Biden could not have made substantial investments in roads, bridges, public transportation and semiconductor chip manufacturing. He could not have permitted Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs. He could not have taken tangible steps to combat climate change. The 2021 tranche of federal pandemic aid, today criticized for contributing to inflation, offered critical bailouts for local governments that headed off crippling layoffs and brutal cuts to public schools. ........ Mr. Schumer’s Senate has actually confirmed federal judges at a faster rate than Mr. McConnell’s at the time of the first midterm election. So far, over 85 judges appointed by Mr. Biden have been confirmed, including a new Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. The judges, overall, are traditional liberals, many of them younger and nonwhite. Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer were willing to elevate judges who were former public defenders, an unlikely prospect in the law-and-order 20th century. .......... There are about 75 vacancies on U.S. District Courts and nine at the appellate level. That number is bound to grow as more judges retire in the next two years.

Ukrainian Drones Just Took Out A Russian Heavy Bomber 300 Miles From Ukraine
Explosions rock two Russian airbases far from Ukraine frontline
Strikes deep inside Russia highlight Ukraine’s tactical ingenuity Another happened at the Dyagilevo military airbase near Ryazan, a city just 150 miles from Moscow and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. .......... Since October the Kremlin had used these strategic bombers to wreck Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, bit by bit, leaving millions without heat and electricity as winter arrives. .......

There is speculation Kyiv has developed a strike drone with an astonishing 1,000km range.

........ If accurate, this means much of European Russia is now in reach. And that the asymmetric advantage Moscow has enjoyed this year – the ability to launch cruise missiles safely from deep inside Russia itself – is under threat. .......... “We attack where they are weak and defend where they are strong,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defence minister said. He described Ukraine’s military tactics as essentially “opportunistic”. Russia by contrast, he continued, was waging an all-out “unidirectional” assault to capture the town of Bakhmut, in the eastern Donbas region, despite huge losses of Russian soldiers and equipment. .......... There could be further offensives before spring, Zagorodnyuk said. ........ The latest guerilla-style raid on Monday shows Ukraine’s tactical ingenuity in its bitter battle against Russia. And Kyiv’s continuing capacity to surprise. ........ Kyiv does not always tell its allies before it conducts certain types of risky military operations ........ the Ukrainians deliberately avoid disclosing attacks the west might try to dissuade them from carrying out ......... Attacks deep inside Russian territory are an area of particular sensitivity. ....... The Biden administration has indicated it is wary of coming into direct military conflict with Russia and fearful of nuclear escalation. The Kremlin says it is already at war with the US, and the west – and considers Ukraine to be a US-run puppet state. The White House has supplied Kyiv with almost $20bn in military and security assistance so far, but has refused to deliver long-range munitions that would allow Kyiv to strike Russia directly. ....... Further surprises can be expected. .

Explosion at Nuclear Airbase Just 150 Miles From Moscow Opens Stunning New Phase of War
Ukraine destroys two Russian nuclear bombers in airport bombings
Blasts Hit Russian Bomber Bases Used to Launch Ukrainian Grid Attacks
Scary Images Of Russia’s Nuke-Capable Bombers, Tu-160, T-95, Surface From Engels-2 Airbase; ‘Massive Strikes’ On Ukraine Imminent?

Ecstasy Gives Way to Despair in a Liberated Ukrainian City Kherson has been whipsawed by occupation, liberation and now dread. It’s a lonely place. And cold........ In a city overflowing with fear, there is one part of town considered more lethal than any other: the river. ....... Each day Russian shells sail across the muddy gray water and blow up somewhere in the maze of apartment blocks and small homes beyond. The Dnipro River, which flows languidly around the city of Kherson, has become the front line. People duck behind trees and peek carefully around buildings, squinting across the water. This is where you can see Russian-occupied territory with your naked eye and where snipers lurk. ........ Now Kherson is deserted. It is cold. The people here say they are lonely. And the streets are glazed with ice. ............ The lights are off on the main street. The smell of soot from wood-burning fires wafts through the thin winter air. The electricity grid in Kherson, as in so many other Ukrainian cities, has been relentlessly pounded by Russian missiles, an attempt to bring this country to its knees, and people are burning logs to heat their homes. ............ “In other parts of the world, people are beginning to celebrate the holidays,” she said. “Here there is nothing to be glad about.” ......... She listed the woes: No electricity. No running water. No heat. She also has no customers. Soon, she said, she will have no job. ........... Many people left right after liberation. More have evacuated since. ......... “I haven’t been in a classroom for three years,” said Liosha, 11, counting the time off since the Covid pandemic and then the war. “I actually want to be in school.” ......... Russian troops often fire on the town at night, when people are sleeping. People here feel especially vulnerable because there are not many bomb shelters or cellars as there are in most Ukrainian cities, relics of the Cold War. The water table is too high to dig them. ....... in a city with a prewar population of around 300,000, maybe a few thousand folks are left in the center of town. .......... On Seniavyna Street on Sunday afternoon, a shell hit a 10-story apartment building. Tetiana Roshchyna was in her kitchen making meatball soup. The explosion shook the whole block. The windows exploded, creating a blizzard of glass. ......... “You have to understand this is purely a residential area,” she said. “No military. No factories. Just apartments.” ........ Kherson used to be a major industrial hub, home to one of Ukraine’s biggest ports, which shipped steel and grain to the world. Now the main port building is covered in graffiti. Its windows are smashed. Snow blows inside. ............... Anatoliy Makarenko, a neighbor, said that when he looked at the damaged buildings, he wanted “to grab an automatic weapon” and fight the Russians himself. He is 75.

War and Sanctions Threaten to Thrust Russia’s Economy Back in Time While Russia’s economy has not collapsed, an exodus of Western companies is eroding hard-won progress, and experts say the worst may be yet to come. ........ The slowdown in auto manufacturing is one of the most tangible signs of the effects of Western sanctions on Russia’s economy........... More than nine months after the invasion, neither the war effort nor the economy has collapsed, and the economic pain is still limited for many Russians. Mr. Putin has avoided any substantive domestic pressure that would threaten his leadership. But the impact of what some have described as the most coordinated and deepest economic sanctions in modern history is evident in communities across Russia — and the worst may be yet to come. .......... The sanctions have stymied Russia’s faltering attempts to modernize its economy along Western lines and to catch up to European living standards after the fall of the Soviet Union ........ That has dimmed the hope that the country could become a modern, prosperous nation in the near term. ......... “It’s like a cake that was dropped on the table and it looks more or less fine, but inside it’s all blown up’’ .......... Carmakers employ 300,000 Russians ....... up to 3.5 million more work in related industries. ......... Russian industries are highly dependent on Western components. ....... Even Mr. Putin has acknowledged the problem, admitting last week that, in some sectors, dependence on imported parts is as high as 90 percent. .......... To adapt, Russia is turning inward, cutting ties with the rest of the world and moving toward an economic model similar to one adopted by Iran, where political legitimacy rests on providing citizens with the essentials rather than spurring transformative growth .......... Russia’s government was better prepared to withstand the sanctions than many in the West expected. ......... “Sanctions have not destroyed the resilience of the Russian financial system, nor have they impacted macroeconomic stability,” Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said last week during a government meeting. ........ A combination of high oil revenues, large currency reserves and an expert team of economic officials has allowed Mr. Putin to soften the blow — much to the frustration of some Western leaders who had hoped the sanctions would have more bite by now. ......... But the loss of investment, technology and skills caused by the sanctions is likely to echo across generations, depriving many Russians of a chance at a better economic future .......... In June, AvtoVAZ, which makes Russia’s best-known domestic car brand, the Lada, announced that its new cars would meet only 1996 emissions standards and have no passenger-side airbags. ........ In a symbolic move, an AvtoVAZ affiliate, Kamaz, announced that it would use a Moscow plant vacated by Renault after the invasion to relaunch the production of a Soviet-era car brand, Moskvich, or Muscovite, which had long been an almost comical byword for the deficiencies of Communist consumer goods. ......... modern history offers few examples of successful attempts to replace imported Western technology with local substitutes ....... Russian companies lack the know-how and skilled workers to replace Western capital in technology-intensive sectors. Relying on homegrown substitutes will result in “primitivization,” Mr. Inozemtsev said. ........... “After the mobilization, the banks stopped giving out loans because the clients could be called up” ........ “What we’re seeing is falling income, broad depression, less consumption.



The Rise of the International Nationalists The political and social battles being fought in the U.S. and across Europe are part of a single conflict over the nature of Western civilization.......... Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary highlighted the importance of the year 2024 because of the conjunction of the American presidential election and the European parliamentary elections. Mr. Orban spoke of these two events as if they were simply different fronts in a single war — a war of values......... Mr. Orban’s speech highlights a striking feature of contemporary nationalism: its international character. ........ Mr. Orban sees himself as the keeper of the true flame of Europeanness. ....... A Hungarian institution whose shareholders include friends of Mr. Orban bankrolled Marine Le Pen’s 2022 run for the French presidency to the tune of more than 10 million euros. .......... Steve Bannon, a former strategist for President Trump, attempted to set up a sort of elite training academy for right-wing activists in an 800-year-old Italian monastery — an academy that would have been explicitly and deliberately international in its intake and ambitions .......... Mr. Bannon’s school was to be called the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West and sought applicants who wanted to defend Western civilization. ........ Most of them have an attachment to a set of values and a sense of national identity that might be described as “Christian.” ....... Marine Le Pen insists that her country’s national principles of liberté, égalité and fraternité ultimately stem from its “Christian heritage.” ......... One way in which this sense of Christian identity manifests itself is in hostility to Muslim immigration. ......... For today’s Christian nationalists, however, the real “other” is not Islam — it is contemporary secular culture. This secular culture is clearly the heir of the 18th-century European Enlightenment, hence the habit of referring to the moral and social principles it espouses as “Enlightenment” values. ......... From St. Petersburg, Russia, to St. Petersburg, Fla., woke ideology and the L.G.B.T.Q. lobby are the enemies, which is why Mr. Orban was able to show up in Dallas and talk to his audience in terms that they immediately and intuitively understood. .........

the war in Ukraine sometimes seems to be a grotesque extension of these culture wars into the realm of state-level warfare.

........ The Russian side presents itself as fighting in defense of a Christian civilization against a depraved secular culture that has taken root in what it calls “the West.” This is the basis on which Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church in Russia, feels able to give his explicit and enthusiastic backing to the war. Indeed, he claims that the sins of Russian soldiers who die fighting in Ukraine will be washed away. Mr. Putin himself berates the “outright Satanism’‘ of Western countries, as well as their “overthrow of faith and traditional values.” ....... And it is hard not to feel that Mr. Putin’s greatest crime, for some of these people, is that by resorting to naked violence, he has disgraced and discredited their project and handed their opponents a significant moral victory.