Attention to the Unseen

Casey Michel writes: As Russian troops bulldoze and bludgeon Ukraine, the West has begun implementing one of the few tools in its arsenal: sanctions. The United States blacklisted multiple Russian oligarchs and banks, and the United Kingdom followed suit by blocking Russian banks and barring Russian companies from raising money on British markets. The European Union issued what its foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, dubbed the “harshest package of sanctions” in the bloc’s history, targeting energy, trade, and a group of…

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Politico reports: The West’s united response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is splintering over whether European countries are willing to take a severe economic hit and stop buying the oil that fuels the Kremlin’s war effort. While the U.S. is set to impose a crude oil ban, it looks increasingly unlikely that its European allies will agree to sanction President Vladimir Putin’s energy exports because of fears about runaway inflation and retaliation from the Russians. Sensing a danger to this…

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Christopher S. Chivvis writes: Wars sometimes start easily, but it is a tenet of strategy that they are always unpredictable and extremely hard to end. Putin’s war of choice in Ukraine is already escalating faster than most experts would have imagined just a week ago. He has now encircled major Ukrainian cities with his army and threatens to flatten them with thermobaric weapons, cluster munitions, and guided missiles. This will terrorize the civilian population and could demoralize the budding Ukrainian…

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Jonathan Chait writes: On February 25, the day after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Lee Smith published an essay in Tablet arguing that Ukraine had brought on its problems. Smith, a house stenographer for Representative Devin Nunes and the author of two pro-Trump books, unburdened himself of a long list of Ukrainian provocations. In 2014, Ukraine’s people rejected Vladimir Putin’s generous offer to remain a Russian dependency and voted out his handpicked presidential candidate. A few years later, Ukrainian Americans…

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The Washington Post reports: Among executives, board members, analysts and others in the business world in recent days, a “who’s who” list has been floating around, showing which companies have pulled out of Russia amid its attack on Ukraine — and which ones have stayed put. The spreadsheet, compiled by Yale University professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his research team, has become a naughty-or-nice list of sorts, with CEOs trying their best to avoid being placed on the roster of “Companies…

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The New York Times reports: Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America released a statement that drew instant reproof. The group condemned the invasion, but also urged the United States “to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” The position — a watered-down version of a prior, even more pointed statement from the group’s international committee — drew rebukes from a White House spokesman and from a…

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Politico reports: Poland is offering to transfer all of its Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets “immediately and free of charge” to a U.S. air base in Germany, a likely precursor to the jets being delivered to Ukraine. The announcement Tuesday came after a week of back-and-forth negotiations between the U.S. and Warsaw about the transfer, and amid Russian warnings that delivering the jets to Ukraine would be seen as a provocation. In a statement, the Polish Foreign Ministry said Warsaw “requests…

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Shadi Hamid writes: If there was any doubt before, the answer is now clear. Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power—or, for that matter, Western power—is not a better world. For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the country’s nuclear forces to go on high alert last week, he looked down a long table at his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, who nodded in assent. In his decade at the head of the Russian military, Mr. Shoigu, who has never been a professional soldier but holds the rank of general of the army, has worked to modernize and professionalize the armed forces, and build their image as…

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Putin has kept most oligarchs at a distance – literally and figuratively. Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images By Stanislav Markus, University of South Carolina U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders are setting their sights on Russia’s oligarchs as they seek new ways to punish Vladimir Putin – and those who have enabled him and profited from his reign – for waging war in Ukraine. Biden singled out wealthy oligarchs in his State of the Union address, promising to…

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Russian police have detained thousands of Russians who have taken to the streets to protest the invasion of Ukraine. AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky By Brian Grodsky, University of Maryland, Baltimore County The West has responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by imposing harsh economic sanctions. Most consequentially, key Russian banks have been cut out of the SWIFT payments messaging system, making financial transactions much more difficult. The United States, European Union and others also moved to freeze Russian Central Bank reserves….

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