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Category: War

The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

Timothy Snyder writes: When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it. Empire’s story divides subjects…

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Oil middlemen fueled Putin’s war machine, but now they’re getting out

Oil middlemen fueled Putin’s war machine, but now they’re getting out

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia built a self-proclaimed fortress around its economy in the run-up to war—but there was a crack. Moscow depended on foreign middlemen to ferry its most strategic and lucrative export around the world: oil. Now the most-important middleman, Trafigura Group, is joining several competitors in cutting off Russian giant Rosneft Oil Co. from global oil markets. In a high-stakes move that goes farther than official Western sanctions, the Swiss commodities trader plans to stop exporting…

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Why Russia bungled its invasion of Ukraine

Why Russia bungled its invasion of Ukraine

Jeffrey Edmonds writes: Many of us who analyze the Russian military for a living have been shocked to see Russian forces fumble the way they have in Ukraine. There are already some heated calls for analytical accountability, most prominently from Eliot Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien, into how the body of Russian military analysts could have gotten the Russian military so wrong. There is no doubt that the Russian military has performed much more poorly than most anticipated and it…

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‘Russia is fighting — but Ukraine is winning’

‘Russia is fighting — but Ukraine is winning’

William M Arkin reports: Russia has stumbled again. Its southern offensive, the second phase of the Ukraine war, has failed to be the “biggest tank war since World War II,” as some analysts were predicting. Instead, Russia’s ground forces have shown the same lackluster performance on the ground, unable to break through anywhere. The towns and villages of the south, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday, “are the places where the fate of this war and the future of our…

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Roots of the resistance: Understanding national identity in Ukraine

Roots of the resistance: Understanding national identity in Ukraine

Aaron Erlich writes: Were Ukrainians sending signals to the world prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion that they believed, as Putin does, that they and Russians were part of “one people?” In the aftermath of the first stage of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, reporting has emerged that Russia expected to quickly win the war and consolidate its military victory by coopting local elected officials and citizens, who were expected to rejoice in or at least countenance Russian occupation. Social science…

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Biden welcomes Ukrainian refugees but neglects Afghans, critics say

Biden welcomes Ukrainian refugees but neglects Afghans, critics say

The Washington Post reports: President Biden’s aggressive push to admit up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees has generated resentment among those clamoring for his administration to help extract the tens of thousands of Afghan citizens desperate to escape Taliban rule now eight months after the calamitous end of America’s war there. The Department of Homeland Security this week unveiled its program to accelerate the admissions process for Ukrainians, allowing U.S.-based family members, organizations and other groups to apply, using a dedicated…

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Russia doubles fossil fuel revenues since invasion of Ukraine began

Russia doubles fossil fuel revenues since invasion of Ukraine began

The Guardian reports: Russia has nearly doubled its revenues from selling fossil fuels to the EU during the two months of war in Ukraine, benefiting from soaring prices even as volumes have been reduced. Russia has received about €62bn from exports of oil, gas and coal in the two months since the invasion began, according to an analysis of shipping movements and cargos by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. For the EU, imports were about €44bn…

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Russia accused of blackmail after gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria halted

Russia accused of blackmail after gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria halted

The Guardian reports: Russia has been accused of seeking to blackmail Europe, as the energy giant Gazprom confirmed it had halted gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria and was prepared to target other countries. The Kremlin said the dramatic move, widely seen as an attempt to weaponise Russia’s energy supplies, was a response to the failure by the two EU countries to make their payments in roubles. The immediate consequence of Gazprom’s decision was a 20% rise in the wholesale…

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The Putinomics playbook won’t work forever

The Putinomics playbook won’t work forever

Chris Miller writes: On March 27, President Joe Biden claimed that U.S. sanctions had reduced Russia’s currency to “rubble.” Yet in the past few weeks, the currency has rebounded, while the country shows no outward signs of crisis. So what impact are sanctions having? Plenty of questions remain in the short term. But the long-term consequences of the sanctions are clear and severe. Russian industry now faces difficulties in acquiring crucial tools and components. The future of entire sectors of…

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Russian leaders know they’re committing war crimes. Their laws of war manual says so

Russian leaders know they’re committing war crimes. Their laws of war manual says so

Evan Wallach writes: The Russian armed forces and their commanders know they are committing war crimes in Ukraine. It says so in the 2001 “Manual on International Humanitarian Law for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” In my 2017 book, “The Law of War in the 21st Century,” I thought it might be useful for readers and researchers to have examples of non-NATO views of the law of armed conflict, so in an appendix I included law of war…

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In Afghanistan, vice and virtue are front and center

In Afghanistan, vice and virtue are front and center

Ahmed-Waleed Kakar reports: Muhammad Sadiq Akif was not in Kabul as the city fell to the Taliban last August. An insurgent propagandist who had been chronicling the frantic last days of the war on Twitter, he was over 60 miles to the southeast, in Loya Paktia. Taliban control there was tenuous and the surrender of a regional CIA-created militia, the notorious Khost Protection Force, was still being negotiated. Akif arrived in Kabul days later. Across the city, fluttering in the…

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Ukraine: First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing

Ukraine: First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing

Anne Applebaum writes: In the terrible winter of 1932–33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They…

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The environmental costs of war in Ukraine

The environmental costs of war in Ukraine

Genevieve Kotarska and Lauren Young write: The Russian attack on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant at the beginning of March 2022 led to fears of a nuclear disaster worse than Chernobyl. Fortunately, the fire at the Zaporizhzhia plant was contained with no damage to essential equipment or change in radiation levels. However, the incident alerted the international community to the many threats the conflict poses to environmental security. The conflict in Ukraine is resulting in a devastating loss of human…

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Heavy weaponry pours into Ukraine as commanders become more desperate

Heavy weaponry pours into Ukraine as commanders become more desperate

Politico reports: Western countries are rushing heavy weaponry to Ukraine as the war enters what promises to be a deadly, and potentially protracted, new phase. Those deliveries are coming amid increasingly desperate pleas from Ukrainian battlefield commanders as they endure withering Russian artillery and rocket fire that could last weeks or months. Over the past two weeks, the Biden administration began shipping out $1.2 billion worth of howitzers, around 200,000 artillery rounds, armored vehicles, counter-battery radars and experimental new armed…

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How London became the world’s laundromat for dirty money

How London became the world’s laundromat for dirty money

  Russian oligarchs and companies have been investing in London for two decades, encouraged by British politicians of all stripes, but critics say the ‘London laundromat’ cleans dirty money from Russia and across the globe. The FT examines why it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to put the issue in the spotlight and whether new sanctions and measures to tackle the problem go far enough. Read more at Financial Times

Arming Ukraine is the path to peace

Arming Ukraine is the path to peace

Nicholas Grossman writes: As the United States and other NATO countries send Ukraine weapons to fight Russian invaders, some left-wing critics have denounced the effort as warmongering escalation. For example, linguist professor and activist Noam Chomsky described American policy as “praising ourselves for heroism” while “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.” I fault no one for lamenting the destruction and hoping for peace, but that assessment misunderstands this war and America’s role in it. The decision of when to stop…

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