Zoya Sheftalovich writes: Watching Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine play out, it seems the Russian president has vastly underestimated and misunderstood Ukrainians and their president. Putin, a one-time KGB operative who in 2004 said “there is no such thing as a former KGB man,” has made clear that he lives in a world of the past. The world that existed before the end of the Cold War, a world in which the territories of the former Soviet Union, potentially even…
Jason Stanley writes: When Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at dawn on Thursday, he justified the “special military operation” as having the goal to “denazify” Ukraine. The justification is not tenable, but it would be a mistake simply to dismiss it. Vladimir Putin is himself a fascist autocrat, one who imprisons democratic opposition leaders and critics. He is the acknowledged leader of the global far right, which looks increasingly like a global fascist movement. Ukraine does have a…
Simon Miles, assistant professor of public policy, expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, says: Before the very lengthy historical speech President Putin gave a couple days ago about Ukraine not having a tradition of statehood – just lie after lie – I was one of the people who didn’t think he could balance the risk/reward equation. The man that I saw giving that speech — and also in that very long, bizarre, grievance-filled speech — and also a deeply…
Paul Krugman writes: The Europeans, unfortunately, have fecklessly allowed themselves to become highly dependent on imports of Russian natural gas. This means that if they were to attempt a full-scale cutoff of Russian exports they would impose soaring prices and shortages on themselves. Given sufficient provocation, they could still do it: Modern advanced economies can be incredibly resilient in times of need. But even the invasion of Ukraine probably won’t be enough to persuade Europe to make those sorts of…
Bill McKibben writes: The pictures this morning of Russian tanks rolling across the Ukrainian countryside seemed both surreal – a flashback to a Europe that we’ve seen only in newsreels – and inevitable. It’s been clear for years that Vladimir Putin was both evil and driven and that eventually we might come to a moment like this. One of the worst parts of facing today’s reality is our impotence in its face. Yes, America is imposing sanctions, and yes, that…
Michel Eltchaninoff writes: “They have only one objective: to prevent the development of Russia. They are going to do it in the same way as they did it before, without furnishing even a single pretext, doing it just because we exist.” These were Vladimir Putin’s words on 21 February, in his now notorious speech on Ukraine. They repeat the argument already formulated in his speech on Crimea in March 2014: “The politics of the containment of Russia, which continued throughout…
James M Acton writes: There is a disquieting nuclear dimension to the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe of Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. This brutal assault violates the security guarantees that Moscow provided in 1994, when Kyiv allowed it to remove nuclear weapons left in Ukrainian territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In recent days, trying to justify his aggression, Russian President Vladimir Putin has invoked the specter of a nonexistent Ukrainian nuclear weapons program—a cynical ploy to…
The New York Times reports: Over three months, senior Biden administration officials held half a dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials in which the Americans presented intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine and beseeched the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade, according to U.S. officials. Each time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the ambassador to the United States, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did not think an invasion was in the works. After one…
The Guardian reports: The Ukraine crisis has plunged Germany into an intense debate about how it will heat its homes and power its industry in future, summed up in the short question: can Europe’s largest economy function without Vladimir Putin’s gas? The Green federal economics minister, Robert Habeck, answered with a decisive “yes it can”, a day after the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was meant to deliver from Russia as much…
The Guardian reports: Kiev or Kyiv? As Russian forces menace the Ukrainian capital and thousands flee, the very least onlookers around the world can do is learn how to say the name of the city under siege. The short answer is simple: Ukrainians call their capital “Kyiv” (kee-yiv), the spelling, a transliteration of the Ukrainian Київ. The Russian version is “Kiev” (kee-yev). The latter, based on transliteration from the Russian cyrillic Киев, became the internationally accepted name through the Soviet…
The New York Times reports: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, will bring fresh perspectives to the job if she is confirmed. She may serve for decades. But there is little reason to think she can do much to alter the court’s conservative trajectory in the short term. Her replacement of Justice Stephen G. Breyer would substitute a liberal for a liberal and would do nothing to shift the basic dynamic of the current court, which is…
The New York Times reports: Russians thought they knew their president. They were wrong. And by Thursday, it appeared too late to do anything about it. For most of his 22-year rule, Vladimir V. Putin presented an aura of calm determination at home — of an ability to astutely manage risk to navigate the world’s biggest country through treacherous shoals. His attack on Ukraine negated that image, and revealed him as an altogether different leader: one dragging the nuclear superpower…
The Daily Beast reports: Russian soldiers from all across the country were deceived into heading to the Ukrainian border, and some were beaten if they resisted, according to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, a Russian non-governmental organization that works to expose human rights violations within the military. The group is reportedly preparing a complaint for the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office alleging that their sons only recently joined the military as conscripts and were told they were going to the border…
Yascha Mounk writes: Vladimir Putin has stopped pretending. For months, the Russian president had claimed that he was merely interested in the security of his nation. For months, he had assured the world that he was interested in a diplomatic solution. For months, he had ridiculed warnings about an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then he ordered a full-scale attack on a sovereign nation. Russian missiles blew up targets in key cities including Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv. Russian troops rapidly…
Bloomberg reports: It failed to prevent a war, but almost everything the U.S. said Russia would do in Ukraine has come to pass. The intelligence that President Joe Biden made public in a highly unusual step gave the world a preview of Vladimir Putin’s true intentions, robbing him of the element of surprise. It also gave the U.S. time to rally support from its allies on sanctions that in normal circumstances would have taken months to hash out. Last November,…
The New York Times reports: Only hours before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, former President Donald J. Trump again praised the cunning of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia while lashing out at the intellect of President Biden. “I mean he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin to donors and Republican lawmakers at Mar-a-Lago, his private club, on Wednesday. “I’d say that’s pretty smart.” The kind words a former president…