Attention to the Unseen

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Even by his own fire-and-brimstone standards, Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed angry on Friday as he addressed hundreds of Russian parliamentarians and governors in St. George Hall in the Kremlin. The event had been called so that Putin could triumphantly announce his latest gambit in Ukraine, the annexation of four regions of that country into the Russian Federation. But as he rattled off a litany of reasons as to why this land grab was…

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Alexei Navalny writes: The war with Ukraine was started and waged, of course, by Putin, trying to solve his domestic political problems. But the real war party is the entire elite and the system of power itself, which is an endlessly self-reproducing Russian authoritarianism of the imperial kind. External aggression in any form, from diplomatic rhetoric to outright warfare, is its preferred mode of operation, and Ukraine is its preferred target. This self-generated imperial authoritarianism is the real curse of…

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Susan B Glasser writes: Over the weekend, Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, promised a “catastrophic” response if Putin were to deploy battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine. American military officials have no doubt produced many serious options for the United States to consider in such a scenario, including directly entering the war on Ukraine’s side—just the Third World War scenario that Biden has been so determined to avoid. Watching all of this, it’s hard not to think of how often over…

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Moscow Times reports: A clear indication the Kremlin is preparing for a protracted war is the draft budget for 2023-2025. This shows that spending on the Russian army this year will amount to almost 5 trillion rubles ($86.2 billion), not the 3.5 trillion originally planned. In subsequent years spending will also exceed forecasts. At the same time, the Kremlin is increasing expenditures on the police, apparently fearing opposition protests. “We are transitioning into a wartime economy. Everything related to development…

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Anne Applebaum writes: Vladimir Putin today announced his annexation of four provinces of Ukraine—four provinces that he does not fully control, that did not vote to join Russia, that have been the site of mass murder and mass deportation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. With this statement, the Russian president is also declaring war. But this is not merely a war on Ukraine. Putin’s war—Russia’s war—is also a war on a particular idea of world order and international law,…

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James Kirchick writes: In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time….

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The Wall Street Journal reports: NATO said that a series of leaks on the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Europe were the result of sabotage and that attacks on its members’ infrastructure would be met with a collective response from the military alliance. The statement, from the North Atlantic Council, the decision-making body of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, didn’t provide details or evidence. It also noted that the damage to the pipelines occurred in international waters. But it…

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The Associated Press reports: Russia positioned itself Wednesday to formally annex parts of Ukraine where occupied areas held a Kremlin-orchestrated “referendum” on living under Moscow’s rule that the Ukrainian government and the West denounced as illegal and rigged. Armed troops had gone door-to-door with election officials to collect ballots in five days of voting. The suspiciously high margins in favor were characterized as a land grab by an increasingly cornered Russian leadership after embarrassing military losses in Ukraine. Moscow-installed administrations…

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The Guardian reports: Norway’s prime minister has said its military will be more visible at oil and gas installations as politicians across Europe warned the suspected sabotaging of the two Nord Stream pipelines could herald a new stage of hybrid warfare targeting vulnerable energy infrastructure in order to undermine support of Ukraine. Jonas Gahr Støre told a news conference Norway would step up its military presence at Norwegian installations after the country had become Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas….

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Mac William Bishop reports: Vladimir Putin spent decades modernizing his army and building his empire, ruthlessly asserting control over Russia’s border states through force, intrigue and economic might. Now the cream of his military has been destroyed or is bogged down in Ukraine: hundreds of his once-parade-worthy tanks rusting away as burned-out hulks in wheat fields while thousands of his best soldiers will never return home. Beset by sanctions, his economy survives mainly through energy exports: Putin’s enemies continue to…

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The New York Times reports: The Kremlin has dispatched still more forces to shore up its faltering war effort, but the units are headed not to Ukraine but to Russia’s borders with other countries, where on Tuesday they were confronting young Russian men trying to join an exodus out of the country. As the avenues for Russians to escape a draft order issued last week narrowed, the Federal Security Service sent armored vehicles to the frontiers, where some men waiting…

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The New York Times reports: In a rare admission of official mistakes, the Kremlin acknowledged on Monday that its new military draft to reinforce the Russian assault on Ukraine has been rife with problems. The admission occurred the same day that a man, apparently distraught over the mobilization, shot and seriously wounded a recruitment officer at a draft office in Siberia. Since President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia announced a “partial mobilization” last week to call up 300,000 people with…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The grain elevator towering over the eastern edge of Kupyansk, the former seat of Russian power in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, was supposed to be defended by soldiers from an elite Russian unit. But when troops from Ukraine’s International Legion moved to seize the compound on Thursday, part of the developing Ukrainian military offensive east of the Oskil River, the expected firefight never happened. “They just ran away. They know they are finished here,” said the…

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Peter Pomerantsev writes: “Do you want Total War?” Goebbels demanded of the Nazi faithful as the Second World War went south for Germany in 1943. He depicted a Reich surrounded by evil Jewish cosmopolitan conspirators bent on its destruction and he advocated for total mobilisation and to embrace a glory-in-death ideology. Vladimir Putin delivered his own (partial) version last week. As the Ukraine war goes south for Russia, he claimed the defeats are the result of cosmopolitan conspiracies bent on…

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