Russia retreats from Lyman a day after Putin’s annexation

Russia retreats from Lyman a day after Putin’s annexation

Politico reports: Russia withdrew its troops from the strategic city of Lyman in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region on Saturday, a day after President Vladimir Putin hailed the annexation of Donetsk. The retreat, announced by the Defense Ministry in Moscow, comes as Kyiv’s counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion makes further gains and presents a big setback for Putin. Due to “a threat of encirclement, allied troops were withdrawn” from Lyman “to more advantageous lines,” the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday in…

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Putin’s ‘annexation’ announcement changes little on the ground in Ukraine

Putin’s ‘annexation’ announcement changes little on the ground in Ukraine

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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Nord Stream’s sabotage was a climate disaster. What it signals could be worse

Nord Stream’s sabotage was a climate disaster. What it signals could be worse

Inside Climate News reports: A growing number of international officials and global security experts believe Russia sabotaged its own natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea, resulting in the release of an estimated 300,000 metric tons of methane gas into the atmosphere. Researchers say that amounts to the largest-ever release of the potent greenhouse gas during a single event, with an impact similar to the annual emissions of 1 million cars. Because methane is 81 times more potent than carbon…

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The story of America’s ‘lost crops’ shows that the reign of corn was not inevitable

The story of America’s ‘lost crops’ shows that the reign of corn was not inevitable

Sarah Laskow writes: The development of agriculture, the Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe declared in 1935, was an event akin to the Industrial Revolution—a discovery so disruptive that it spread like the shocks of an earthquake, transforming everything in its path. Childe’s work on what he termed “the Neolithic Revolution” focused on just one site of innovation in the Near East, the famous Fertile Crescent, but over time archaeologists posited similar epicenters in the Yangtze River valley of East Asia…

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Alexei Navalny: This is what a post-Putin Russia should look like

Alexei Navalny: This is what a post-Putin Russia should look like

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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What if we’re already fighting the Third World War with Putin?

What if we’re already fighting the Third World War with Putin?

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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‘Putin always chooses escalation’

‘Putin always chooses escalation’

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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Putin’s newest annexation of Ukrainian territory is dire for Russia too

Putin’s newest annexation of Ukrainian territory is dire for Russia too

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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How the war in Ukraine might end

How the war in Ukraine might end

Keith Gessen writes: When we first spoke, in early September, [Hein] Goemans [a leading theorist on war termination] predicted a protracted conflict. None of the three main variables of war-termination theory—information, credible commitment, and domestic politics—had been resolved. Both sides still believed that they could win, and their distrust for each other was deepening by the day. As for domestic politics, Putin was exactly the sort of leader that Goemans had warned about. Despite his significant repressive apparatus, he did…

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Trump’s legal team divided over how to handle Mar-a-Lago case

Trump’s legal team divided over how to handle Mar-a-Lago case

The Washington Post reports: After attorney Christopher Kise accepted $3 million to represent Donald Trump in the FBI’s investigation of government documents stored at Mar-a-Lago, the veteran litigator argued that Trump should adopt a new strategy. Turn down the temperature with the Department of Justice, Kise — a former Florida solicitor general — counseled his famously combative client, people familiar with the deliberations said. Federal authorities had searched Trump’s Florida residence and club because they badly wanted to retrieve the…

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Gerrymandering isn’t giving Republicans the advantage you might expect

Gerrymandering isn’t giving Republicans the advantage you might expect

Nate Cohn writes: There is no shortage of reasons Republicans are expected to retake the House this year, including President Biden’s low approval ratings and the long history of struggles for the president’s party in midterm elections. But there’s another issue that looms over the race for the House, one that doesn’t have anything to do with the candidates or the voters at all: the fairness of the newly redrawn congressional maps. You might assume that the House map is…

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How the anti-war camp went intellectually bankrupt

How the anti-war camp went intellectually bankrupt

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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NATO formally blames sabotage for Nord Stream pipeline damage

NATO formally blames sabotage for Nord Stream pipeline damage

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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Judge warns of Justice Department’s gift to Trump that could keep on giving

Judge warns of Justice Department’s gift to Trump that could keep on giving

The Daily Beast reports: A judge has warned that former President Donald Trump is building a legal shield that could block him from being held accountable for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, pointing to the bizarre move by the Department of Justice to side with Trump in a rape defamation case last year. The DOJ’s legal stance—that anything a president does is part of his official duties, and therefore makes him a federal employee immune to lawsuits—was widely criticized…

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