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Category: Politics

Ukraine’s high casualty rate could bring war to tipping point

Ukraine’s high casualty rate could bring war to tipping point

Dan Sabbagh writes: Any way you count it, the figures are stark: Ukrainian casualties are running at a rate of somewhere between 6oo and 1,000 a day. One presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, told the Guardian this week it was 150 killed and 800 wounded daily; another, Mykhaylo Podolyak, told the BBC that 100 to 200 Ukrainian troops a day were being killed. It represents an extraordinary loss of human life and capacity for the defenders, embroiled in a defence of…

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Inside the OSCE’s botched withdrawal from Ukraine

Inside the OSCE’s botched withdrawal from Ukraine

Politico reports: The signs had been there for weeks, if not months: Russian forces were massing around Ukraine, painting Zs and Vs on their military vehicles; Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric was getting more and more bellicose; and Western intelligence agencies were warning that an invasion was imminent. But the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest security body, was caught napping. For eight years, it had overseen a Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) on the ground in Ukraine,…

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The reason the Watergate hearings were explosive — and the January 6 hearings won’t be

The reason the Watergate hearings were explosive — and the January 6 hearings won’t be

Jeff Greenfield writes: It is fitting that a giant television screen loomed over the members of the January 6 committee Thursday night. The core premise of this hearing was that the images from that day, accompanied by the comments and testimony of key players in Donald Trump’s orbit, would galvanize a national audience. It’s too easy — and more importantly, unfair — to dismiss the presentation as “political theater.” The interviews with insurrectionists, the blunt comments from former Attorney General…

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The other cause of January 6: The Electoral College

The other cause of January 6: The Electoral College

Kate Shaw writes: John Eastman. Rudy Giuliani. Donald Trump himself. These people all bear some responsibility for the events of January 6, 2021. But there is another contributing factor—an institution, not a person—whose role is regularly overlooked, and that deserves a focus in the ongoing January 6 committee hearings: the Electoral College. The Electoral College isn’t responsible for President Trump’s efforts to remain in office despite his clear loss. But it was integral to Trump’s strategy, and it has everything…

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Rural America reels from violent crime

Rural America reels from violent crime

The Wall Street Journal reports: Local prosecutor Rebecca McCoy used to think of her home in central Arkansas as a place where the worst crimes were usually stolen tractors and lawn mowers. In March 2020, she was called to the trailer of a 72-year-old man who had been bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. It was White County’s first homicide in almost two years. By that December, there were 11 more. In Marion County, a swampy stretch of South…

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Why Russia’s ‘underperforming’ military is still making gains in Ukraine

Why Russia’s ‘underperforming’ military is still making gains in Ukraine

RFE/RL spoke with George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War: Barros: Moving forward, a major question is whether the Ukrainians will be capable of actually conducting counteroffensives to liberate the territory that the Russians have taken since the beginning of the war. I would say that we’ve not seen a Ukrainian capability to actually retake territory that the Russians are serious about defending. The territory that the Ukrainians recaptured in and around Kyiv and Kharkiv…

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The Black Sea blockade — mapping the impact of war in Ukraine on the world’s food supply

The Black Sea blockade — mapping the impact of war in Ukraine on the world’s food supply

The Guardian reports: Wheat is on the verge of rotting in Ukraine’s warehouses. Piles of it have been stuck in storage since Russia invaded in February and imposed a blockade on Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, from where the bulk of wheat is exported. This immediately disrupted global wheat exports from the two countries, which together provide 30% of world supply, and completely cut off Ukraine’s 9% share. The blockade sparked global panic about where to buy wheat, particularly…

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John Kerry: ‘We have to push back hard’ on efforts to build new fossil fuel infrastructure

John Kerry: ‘We have to push back hard’ on efforts to build new fossil fuel infrastructure

Time reports: John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate change, warned Tuesday that the war in Ukraine could undermine international progress to cut carbon emissions. “You have this new revisionism suggesting that we have to be pumping oil like crazy, and we have to be moving into long term [fossil fuel] infrastructure building, which would be absolutely disastrous,” Kerry said, speaking on June 7 at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City. “We have to push back,…

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Big Oil is suing countries to block climate action

Big Oil is suing countries to block climate action

The Lever reports: Fossil fuel investors are adopting a bold new legal tactic in response to efforts to limit global warming: They are going to private international tribunals to argue that climate change policies are illegally cutting into their profits, and they must therefore be compensated. Now governments are scrambling to figure out how to not get sued for billions when enacting climate policies. Termed “investor-state dispute settlement” legal actions, such moves could have a chilling effect on countries’ ability…

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A detailed roadmap for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030

A detailed roadmap for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030

Inside Climate News reports: Researchers of a new peer-reviewed study say they’ve developed the “first detailed roadmap” for how the United States can achieve its ambitious climate pledge to slash the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. It’s a critical target that, if missed, would likely jeopardize the larger global efforts to prevent devastating runaway climate change. The study, published in Science late last month by some of the nation’s leading research institutions, found that it is both…

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Lessons NATO should draw about Russia’s military capabilities

Lessons NATO should draw about Russia’s military capabilities

Foreign Policy interviews former NATO chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen: FP: What lessons will NATO planners draw from what they’ve seen of Russia’s military? AFR: I think we have made two miscalculations. We have overestimated the strength of the Russian military. Despite huge investments in military equipment and the reopening of old Soviet bases, we have seen a very weak Russian military. It remains to be seen why this is. I think corruption may be one of the reasons. But the…

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Putin isn’t ‘crazy’ but he is absolutely ‘evil’ says Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister

Putin isn’t ‘crazy’ but he is absolutely ‘evil’ says Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister

The Guardian reports: Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has described Vladimir Putin as “absolutely rational, cold, cruel, black evil” and claimed he is determined to go down in Russian history alongside Stalin and Peter the Great. In an exclusive interview, Tymoshenko dismissed the suggestion that the Russian president was “crazy”. “He acts according to his own dark logic,” she said. “He’s driven by this idea of historic mission and wants to create an empire. That’s his hyper-goal. It comes…

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Official EU candidacy for Ukraine is unlikely, but even accession status would send a powerful signal

Official EU candidacy for Ukraine is unlikely, but even accession status would send a powerful signal

Andreas Umland writes: At first glance, the status of potential EU candidacy may not sound like much. It would put the three countries [Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia] on par with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, which are not exactly on a fast track to membership. It would clearly be less than Ukraine and its supporters in the commission want, placing it behind current membership candidates Turkey and Serbia, which has been an EU candidate since 2012. The latter two countries’…

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Russian troops need civilian support for food, laundry, fuel, equipment, and repairs

Russian troops need civilian support for food, laundry, fuel, equipment, and repairs

Reuters reports: The town of Valuyki in western Russia has become a crucial staging post in the latest phase of Russia’s war over the nearby border in Ukraine. Throughout last month, helicopters buzzed overhead, military vehicles clogged the roads, and soldiers prepared for combat at a huge military base there. It’s also a place where soldiers’ relatives and private citizens are working to provide supplies and equipment for troops based near the town to address shortages, including drones, radios and heat-detecting…

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How Jared Kushner washed his hands of Donald Trump right after the election

How Jared Kushner washed his hands of Donald Trump right after the election

The New York Times reports: On Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, barely 24 hours after President Donald J. Trump claimed in the middle of the night that “frankly, we did win this election,” Jared Kushner woke up in his Kalorama mansion and announced to his wife that it was time to leave Washington. “We’re moving to Miami,” he said. The election had not even been called for Joseph R. Biden Jr., but as Mr. Kushner later told the story to aides…

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Guerrilla attacks signal rising resistance inside Russian-occupied Ukraine

Guerrilla attacks signal rising resistance inside Russian-occupied Ukraine

The New York Times reports: The Kremlin-backed mayor of the Ukrainian town of Enerhodar was standing on his mother’s porch when a powerful blast struck, leaving him critically wounded. A week later, about 75 miles away, a car packed with explosives rocked the office of another Russian-appointed official in the occupied southern city of Melitopol. In a rarity, both Ukrainian and Russian officials confirmed the blasts, which struck deep inside Russian-controlled territory. And both explosions appeared to be the work…

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