Vladimir Putin in Ukraine: The consequences of the war on the United States, the Kremlin, and the Russian government as a global power system

Putin last month delivered a speech announcing the partial mobilization of some 300,000 reservists following successful Ukrainian counterattacks, raising the specter of nuclear weapons if he deemed the “territorial integrity” of Russia to be jeopardized. The Russian president announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions in defiance of international law.

One could say that Putin thought the US wouldn’t support Ukraine very forcefully. After all, one of the two major political parties in the United States had made Trump its leader. Zelensky had asked for help, but Trump had toyed with his pleas.

Western logic may be masking insight into Putin’s mindset. The Russian leader had a different perspective on the world. Many foreign observers, though not in the US government, convinced themselves after all that it was not in Russia’s interest to invade Ukraine – but Putin went ahead anyway. He is still going strong despite a year of defeats, the arrival of sophisticated NATO weapons and the fact thatUkrainians are dying in NATO-supplied weaponry. He is sending Russian convict recruits to their deaths in futile attempts at World War I-style advances despite the fact that Russian forces have already suffered massive losses.

The recent heavy-handed conscription drive for 300,000 troops will not reverse Putin’s battlefield losses and will leave him up a dangerous political tab.

Independent Russian media quoting Russia’s revamped KGB, the FSB, put the total exodus even higher. They say more military age men have fled the country since conscription – 261,000 – than have so far fought in the war – an estimated 160,000 to 190,000.

Western analysts have noted Russia has grumbled consistently about these deliveries, but been relatively muted in its practical response to the crossing of what, as recently as January, might have been considered “red lines.”

Kortunov says he doesn’t know what goes on in the Kremlin but that he understands the public mood over the huge costs and loss of life in the war. People would start asking questions, why did we get into this mess? We lost a lot of people.

Mr. Putin said that he was forced to make the decision. American officials have used a phrase to describe the outcome of the war against Russia which they want to cause, and climb on our nuclear facilities. The Russian Air Force keeps the bombers that can deliver nuclear weapons, which made the Ukrainians use drones to attack air bases in Russia.

Even though Putin sees the conflict as a threat to the West, Biden is careful to avoid a confrontation with Russia. But the great strategic danger now is that Russian defeats are leading Putin into exactly that corner that Kennedy warned against, where the Russian President may face a choice between humiliation or the use of a nuclear weapon.

The sabotage of Nord Stream, Russia’s biggest strategic miscalculation, and the “nuclear crisis” that Putin has unleashed

Both Danish and Swedish seismologists recorded explosive shockwaves from close to the seabed: the first, at around 2 a.m. local time, hitting 2.3 magnitude, then again, at around 7 p.m., registering 2.1.

The Danes, Germans and Norway all sent warships to secure the area after patches of sea were discovered.

The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage could, according to Hill, be a last roll of the dice by Putin, so that “there’s no kind of turning back on the gas issues. And it’s not going to be possible for Europe to continue to build up its gas reserves for the winter. So what Putin is doing is throwing absolutely everything at this right now.”

Western intelligence sources said that Russian naval vessels were seen by European security officials. NATO described the damage as a deliberate, reckless and irresponsible act of sabotage.

Nord Stream 2 was never operational, and Nord Stream 1 had been throttled back by Putin as Europe raced to replenish gas reserves ahead of winter, while dialling back demands for Russian supplies and searching for replacement providers.

It could turn into Putin’s biggest strategic miscalculation, if this is his plan. There is little Western appetite to see him stay in power – US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said as much in the summer – and even less to let down Ukraine after all its suffering.

Without specifics, Zelensky endorsed the idea of a peace summit for this winter. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has previously floated the idea of Russia retreating out of areas it invaded since February. Zelensky has argued Russia should retreat even out of territory it claimed in 2014. Putin has not suggested he would retreat at all.

Putin is expected to pitch France and Germany first, saying that they need to end the war, protect their territories at all costs, and put pressure on the Ukrainians to settle.

“We continue to monitor his nuclear capabilities, Kate, best we can. I can tell you that there are no signs that Mr. Putin will use weapons of mass destruction or nuclear weapons. And we’ve seen nothing, Kate, that would give us cause to change our own deterrent posture,” Kirby said.

Putin described his attack as a special military operation. He has framed the ongoing brutality as a campaign of “denazification” – a description dismissed by historians and political observers – and has increasingly described Russia’s unprovoked invasion as a patriotic and almost existential cause.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Putin lost Lyman just as he was publicly declaring that the Donetsk region – in which Lyman sits – was now annexed by Russia.

Two powerful Putin backers called for harsher fighting methods because they hated the Kremlin and felt that the illegally annexed region would remain Russian forever.

But the soldiers interviewed on the Sunday broadcast said they had been forced to retreat because they were fighting not only with Ukrainians, but with NATO soldiers.

“These are no longer toys here. They are part of a systematic and clear offensive by the army and NATO forces,” the unnamed deputy commander of one Russian battalion told the show’s war correspondent, Evgeny Poddubny. The soldier insisted that his unit had been intercepting discussions by Romanian and Polish soldiers, not Ukrainians, on their radios.

The broadcast seemed intended to convince Russians who have doubts about the war or feel anger over plans to call up as many as 300,000 civilians that any hardships they bear are to be blamed on a West that is bent on destroying Russia at all costs.

In an interview with the father of a car bomb victim, the idea was once again expressed that Russia is fighting a bigger campaign.

Mr. Dugin, like Mr. Putin, has accused Western countries of damaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which ruptured after underwater explosions last month in what both European and Russian leaders have called an act of sabotage.

“The West already accuses us of blowing up the gas pipeline ourselves,” he said. The war with the West is unfolding on a large scale and extent, and we need to understand it. It is necessary that we join this battle with a mortal enemy who will use any means possible to destroy us.

The nonstop messaging campaign seems to be working. Many Russians feel threatened by the West, said Aleksandr Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who is from Russia.

The war in Ukraine is becoming an engine that fuels a far-right push for more influence; a symbiotic relationship between Putin and his fans in the West. Just as a political action committee linked to the former Trump aide Stephen Miller is arguing against spending on Ukraine, somehow linking it to poverty and crime in the US, like-minded figures in Europe are trying to promote their views by pointing to their country’s hardships as the cost of helping Ukraine. For now, support for Ukraine remains strong in Europe and the US, although flagging among Republicans.

Analysts inside and outside the government who have tried to game out Mr. Putin’s threats have come to doubt how useful such arms — delivered in an artillery shell or thrown in the back of a truck — would be in advancing his objectives.

The primary utility, many U.S. officials say, would be as part of a last-ditch effort by Mr. Putin to halt the Ukrainian counteroffensive, by threatening to make parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. The officials spoke with anonymity to describe some of the most sensitive discussions.

Russia is attacking the power grid in Ukraine, making people into darkness and cold and pushing the US to place a missile defense system in the country.

The Iran-Ukraine Coupling: War, Violence, and Democracy in the Era of Nuclear Reform and the Rise of Cold Dark Matter

Editor’s Note: Editor’s note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN and a columnist for both The Washington Post and World Politics Review. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

The two groups of demonstrators came together by mistake. One person was waving flags from Iran and Ukraine. When they met, they cheered each other, and chanted, “All together we will win.”

This is a conflict like few, if any, in recent memory, with grave and far-reaching consequences. The ramifications we have seen thus far underscore how important it is for Russia to not succeed.

These battles show bravery that is almost impossible to find in the rest of us, as well as inspiring support in places like Afghanistan.

In Iran, the spark was the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last month. Known as “Zhina,” she died in the custody of morality police who detained her for breaking the relentlessly, violently enforced rules requiring women to dress modestly.

In scenes of exhilarated defiance, Iranian women have danced around fires in the night, shedding the hijab – the headcover mandated by the regime – and tossing it into the flames.

In Iran, women rose up against theocracy for not allowing them to express themselves freely. The regime killed hundreds of people in response, according to human rights organizations.

It was less than 10 years ago that Russian President Putin entered Syria to help save Assad, like Iran did.

Russia spent billions of dollars apparently modernizing its military, but it turns out that it was, to a large extent, a sham. It has discovered its supply chains don’t function a few dozen miles from its own borders; that its assessment of Ukraine as desperate to be freed from its own “Nazism” is the distorted product of nodding yes-men, feeding a president – Vladimir Putin – what he wanted to hear in the isolation of the pandemic.

The repressive regimes of Moscow and Tehran are now pariahs in much of the world and supported by a lot of autocrats.

How the Iranian Regime Fall and Why the Middle East is Using Drones to Kill Hundreds of Million People in the First Year of the Cold War

Iran later said it had sold weapons before the war started, but they weren’t being used in Ukraine. The documents show that the drones in Ukranian are very similar to the ones used in the Middle East.

Both of these regimes have similar tactics of oppression and willingness to project power abroad, and are very different in their ideologies.

Multiple Putin critics have suffered mysterious deaths. Many people have fallen from the windows. And both Iran and Russia have become leading practitioners of transnational repression, killing critics on foreign soil, according to Freedom House and other democracy research and advocacy groups.

For people in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, there’s more than passing interest in the admittedly low probability that the Iranian regime could fall. It would change their lives for the better because of the influence of Tehran. After all, Iran’s constitution calls for spreading its Islamist revolution.

Putin is a sad example of how delusions and illusions of one individual are allowed to shape events without any challenge. The media is controlled by autocrats who are able to order their subordinates to follow foolish orders.

The State of Russia’s War in Ukraine: Joe Biden and the Tom Brady & the Fate of World Warfare in Ukraine

Mr. Zlatev and his new business partner, a local osteopath, took their first crack at international arms dealing. The contract documents obtained by The New York Times show that the deal relied on multiple layers of transportation across seven countries. It exists in a legal gray area, designed to skirt the arms export rules of other countries.

“Time is of the essence,” the pair recently wrote to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. They outlined a plan to sell American, Bulgarian and Bosnian arms to Ukraine.

Since the Russian invasion in February, the Biden administration has quietly fast-tracked hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of private arms sales to Ukraine, slashing a weekslong approval process to a matter of hours. Government documents show that the State Department authorized more than $300 million of private deals to Ukraine during the first four months of the year. The department authorized less than 15 million dollars in sales to Ukraine during the year.

In August a car bomb outside of Moscow that killed the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist was part of a campaign that the United States intelligence agencies believe was authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government.

The closely held assessment of Ukrainian complicity, which has not been previously reported, was shared within the U.S. government last week. Ukraine denied involvement in the killing immediately after the attack, and senior officials repeated those denials when asked about the American intelligence assessment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made nuclear threats and has been warned about the dangers by President Joe Biden. CNN’s Military Analyst Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling joins Don Lemon to discuss the state of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

He is serious about the potential use of nuclear weapons, biological weapons or chemical weapons when he talks about his military.

Biden is trying to figure out what Putin is doing off ramp. “Where does he find a way out? Where did he find himself in a situation that meant he lost face and power within Russia? Biden said something.

The President may have been thinking about JFK’s address at American University in Washington in 1963 in which he warned of the risks posed by missiles and WMDs and how they could end the world.

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” Kennedy said.

“To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy – or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Nuclear weapons are too terrible to be used, and any nation that did would be writing a death warrant, so that’s why they keep them.

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden said at the fundraiser.

The US Response to the Makiivka War and the Russian Strategy of Defending World Warfare: The Perspective of Putin and the Kremlin

There have been direct communications to Moscow in the last several weeks detailing the scale of the US response should Putin decide to go down that path. Those details remain closely held, and officials say that won’t change any time soon.

US officials cautioned that the US had not detected preparations for a nuclear strike on Thursday. As Russia’s invasion continues, experts see them as a potential option for the US.

The official went on to defend Biden’s remarks because of the ongoing gravity of the matter.

The Makiivka strike showed the western-backed Weapons capabilities of Ukraine, as well as the ongoing strategic errors of Russia.

Peter Bergen is a professor at the Arizona State University, vice president at New America, and CNN’s national security analyst. Bergen is the author of The Cost of Chaos. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

With his allies expressing concern and hundreds of thousands of citizens fleeing partial deployment, an increasingly isolated Putin has once again taken to making speeches that offer his distorted view of history.

(Indeed, his revisionist account defines his rationale for the war in Ukraine, which he asserts has historically always been part of Russia – even though Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.)

The Soviets were going to install a puppet government in Afghanistan after they invaded it in December of 1979 in order to get out as early as possible, according to a recent book by a historian.

The US was initially reluctant to escalate support for the Afghan resistance, fearing a bigger conflict with the Soviet Union. When the CIA gave the Afghans anti-aircraft missiles in 1986, they ended the Soviets’ total air superiority, and forced them to withdraw from Afghanistan three years later.

The reality is that the US and the western alliance must be looking as far into the future as Putin and those in the Kremlin who could succeed him. The key question here is: How long will the commitment to the fight persist?

The problem is that the Russians have figured it out. Chris Dougherty, a senior fellow for the Defense Program and Co-Head of the Gaming Lab at the Center for New American said that the Russians have been able to modify their tactics by moving their big weapons depots back outside of the range.

The World War Was Coming: Vladimir Putin, the U.S. Ambassador to the Crimes of the Second World, and the Rise of Armageddon

The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 2004 was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Romanov monarchy was weakened by the loss of the Russian empire in 1905. Czar Nicholas II’s feckless leadership during the First World War then precipitated the Russian Revolution in 1917. Subsequently, much of the Romanov family was killed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

It was days ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Kremlin’s invasion of its neighbor that Putin delivered his remarks. The assembled audience included uniformed soldiers the Kremlin said had come directly from the frontlines of Moscow’s special military operation.

Lawrence Freedman, the emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London explains in his just-published book “Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine” how Putin plunged his countrymen into the Ukrainian morass.

If Russia is allowed to win, Putin’s war would mark the beginning of a new era of global instability, with less freedom, less peace and less prosperity for the world.

Bidens assessment caught several senior US officials by surprise, largely due to the lack of new intelligence to drive them and the grim language he used.

Biden gave us a glimpse into an ongoing discussion within his administration as he sought to calibrate the response to that environment.

Typically held with only a few dozen donors, Biden often speaks from handwritten notes, only mimicking a script he has written for himself. Biden talks from a handheld microphone during his fundraisers and typically wanders around the room while he is talking. Reporters are allowed to listen and report on the President’s remarks but not film them, a convention that began during the Obama presidency.

His remarks are usually only slotted for 10 minutes but in the past he has stretched to half an hour or more, expounding on various topics. After the remarks, reporters are ushered out while Biden takes questions.

The aides back in Washington learned of Biden’s comments through the news reports and the dispatches from the press pool in the room.

The President’s use of Armageddon served to illustrate that point – there’s no escalation ladder when it comes to nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise. The cascading response only has one outcome if a move in that direction is made.

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The White House didn’t say anything publicly on Thursday night, so there’s no plan to address the comments in detail on Friday. One official said that if Biden wants to address it himself, it will be obvious when he leaves for his event later in the morning.

The most important thing is that US officials have not seen any changes to their posture or intelligence to raise the threat level.

The aftermath of the massive bridge explosion that hit Kiev Monday: Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, thousands of injured, millions of forced from their homes and livelihoods

With that deal, which came to light only later, a disaster that could have killed tens of millions of Americans and untold numbers of Soviet citizens was averted.

In the summer of 2007, Bociurkiw relocated to Ukraine as a global affairs analyst. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Even amid irrepressible jubilation here in Ukraine in the aftermath of a massive explosion that hit the hugely strategic and symbolic Kerch Straight bridge over the weekend, fears of retaliation by the Kremlin were never far away.

Millions of Ukrainians were forced from their homes, decimating their economy and killing thousands of people in the biggest land war in Europe since World War II.

People are going to work and children are being dropped off at schools. I got a message from a friend in Ukranian that she had just left the bridge before it was struck.

The area around my office in Odesa remained quiet between air raid sirens and reports of missiles and drones being shot down. (Normally at this time of the day, nearby restaurants would be heaving with customers, and chatter of plans for upcoming weddings and parties).

Monday’s attacks also came just a few hours after Zaporizhzhia, a southeastern city close to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, was hit by multiple strikes on apartment buildings, mostly while people slept. At least 17 people were killed and several dozens injured.

Russian missiles damaged a glass-bottomed footbridge in Kyiv that is a popular tourist site, tore into intersections at rush hour and crashed down near a children’s playground on Monday. Power outages rolled across the country, in places cutting off water supplies and transport, in strikes that recalled the terror inflicted on civilians in the invasion’s early days but that had largely ebbed in recent months.

In scenes reminiscent of the early days of the war when Russian forces neared the capital, some Kyiv media outlets temporarily moved their operations to underground bomb shelters. In one metro station serving as a shelter, large numbers of people took cover on platforms as a small group sang patriotic Ukrainian songs.

Millions of people will be spending most of the day in bomb shelters and businesses have been asked to shift work online as much as possible, at the request of officials.

It was only a matter of time before the regions of Ukraine were back to work, and the attacks might cause another blow to business confidence.

But the visit caused fury in Russian pro-military and ultranationalist circles, as it upstages Putin on the eve of a major address in which the Russian president is expected to tout the supposed achievements of what he euphemistically calls a “special military operation.”

Hardwiring newly claimed territory with expensive, record-breaking infrastructure projects seems to be a penchant of dictators. In 2018, Putin personally opened the Kerch bridge – Europe’s longest – by driving a truck across it. That same year, one of the first things Chinese President Xi Jinping did after Beijing reclaimed Macau and Hong Kong was to connect the former Portuguese and British territories with the world’s longest sea crossing bridge. Two years of delays has resulted in the opening of the road bridge.

The Response of the Ukrainians to the Decay of Crime: How Should the United States Protect the Ruins of Crime? A Reflection on Putin’s Deceit

The reaction among Ukrainians to the explosion was instantaneous: humorous memes lit up social media channels like a Christmas tree. Many people shared their jubilation with text messages.

For Putin, consumed by pride and self-interest, sitting still was never an option. He responded by unleashing more death and destruction with the force that he knows how to unleash, it’s likely that he’s a former KGB man.

It was also an act of selfish desperation: facing increasing criticism at home, including on state-controlled television, has placed Putin on unusually thin ice.

The Russians’ thinking, Dougherty observes, is: “We can stabilize the front and we’ll wait out Ukrainians. We’ll wait out NATO, we’ll wait out the United States.”

While Beijing has yet to confirm Xi’s side of the conversation, China’s consummation of a new friendship with Moscow just before the invasion of Ukraine caused alarm in the West. The talks between Beijing and Moscow could be an indication of restraint from Russia and a diplomatic win for the US.

This raises the question, what should be done? I believe the way forward for the United States is, first, to double down on diplomacy to convince those nations that have not joined in stoutly supporting the defense of Ukraine of the moral, political, legal and military necessity of doing so.

High tech defense systems were required to protect the energy infrastructure around the country. The heating systems are in dire need of protection.

The Russian Launch of Cruise Millimeter-Scale Relativistic Heavy Ion Refueling in Ukraine and the Status of the Cold War between the United States and Ukraine

The West needs to push Turkey and the Gulf states to sign on to further isolation of Russia with trade and travel restrictions.

The White House statement said that Biden expressed his condemnation of the missile strikes and expressed his sympathies to the family of those killed and injured in the attacks. President Biden promised to give Ukraine the support it needed to defend itself.

But the official also said Mr. Biden would not allow the United States to be drawn into an active war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, a pledge the president had made before Russian forces entered Ukraine at the end of February.

Asked whether the attacks of the past 24 hours would change the calculus on what the US would consider offering Ukraine, a senior administration official said they had no announcements to make on that front, but that the US will continue to help provide Ukraine with short- and long-range air defense systems, as it has in the past.

NASAMS was not delivered to Ukraine by the US as of late September. At that time, there was a brigadier. The general said that two systems were expected to be delivered in the next couple of months and that the remaining six would arrive at a later date.

Russia launched 84 cruise missiles against targets acrossUkraine on Monday, the General Staff of the armed forces of Ukraine wrote in a post.

The Ukraine attack on New Year’s Day by Russian aggression and a new campaign of civilian destruction by the Kremlin-Selensky

The new security package comes as Russia intensifies its attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine. Zelensky, who visited the White House a month ago, called for more assistance from the west to fight Russian aggression. He said the support was not “charity” but “an investment in the global security and democracy.”

John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said Monday that there will likely be additional support packages for Ukraine announced “in the very near future.”

“It’s clear that he’s feeling the pressure both at home and overseas, and how he reacts to that only he can say,” Kirby told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

The city dwellers who spent months in the subways during the war have been able to return to their normal lives, but the attacks made them fear more for their lives.

The targets on Monday were not of much military value so it was a reflection of Putin needing to find new targets because of his inability to win battles on the battlefield.

He proved to Ukrainians that they and their army were not the only ones who were under attack as Russian attacks on power plants effectively weaponized winter.

Kirby was unable to say whether Putin was moving from a losing battlefield campaign to a campaign of civilian destruction, which he suggested was already in the works, or whether it was a new strategy being put in place.

It was something that they had been planning for a long time. Kirby said that the explosion on the bridge might not have accelerated some of their planning.

There were concerns that the rush-hour attacks inUkraine could be the beginning of another conflict in the area.

Retired Lt. The former director of European affairs on the National Security Council thinks that Putin is sending a message with his attacks onUkrainian targets.

The Ministry of Defense of Russia said that the location of the soldiers’ cell phones exposed their location when they were attacked by the Ukrainians on New Year’s Day.

If we had modern equipment, we could probably increase the number of drones and missiles downed and not kill innocent civilians or hurt Ukrainians.

A long campaign by Putin against civilians would break the spirits of the Ukrainians and possibly lead to a new flood of refugees in western Europe that could cause a rift between NATO allies.

It appears that Putin doesn’t seem to have realized that revenge is not an appropriate way to act on or away from the battlefield and it’s possible that Russia will be weakened irreversibly.

The end of the war: the case for a cease-fire and the call for an immediate peace plan in the age of asymmetric nuclear weapons

Olena Gnes, the mother of three who is filming the war on video, told Anderson Cooper on Monday that she was angry at the return of fear and violence to the lives of Ukrainians.

“This is just another terror to provoke maybe panic, to scare you guys in other countries or to show to his own people that he is still a bloody tyrant, he is still powerful and look what fireworks we can arrange,” she said.

The knee-jerk response to the attacks must be kept to a minimum. It’s time for renewed pressure to get a cease-fire.

In the age of nuclear weapons, all accepted modes of just war — self-defense, justice and punishment for wrongdoers, recovery of international borders; in essence, all notions of right and wrong — are irrelevant. It really doesn’t matter who was the aggressor, who the aggrieved, who committed crimes against civilians, who was merely acting in self-defense.

In an asymmetrical exchange of nuclear missiles in which hundreds of millions could die, it does not really matter who was right and who was wrong. Historians will not survive to tell the story.

President Biden should dispatch his diplomats to give Russia the cold shoulder. An immediate cease-fire must occur, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine must be pressured to agree.

MOSCOW — For months, Russia’s state media has insisted that the country was hitting only military targets in Ukraine, leaving out the suffering that the invasion has brought to millions of civilians.

On Monday, state television not only reported on the suffering, but also flaunted it. It showed plumes of smoke and carnage in central Kyiv, along with empty store shelves and a long-range forecast promising months of freezing temperatures there.

The U.S. and China as Faces of the Twenty-Year End of the Cold War: 21 Months after the Biden Term

At the same time, the U.S. is negotiating worsening foreign policy crises with its former Cold War adversaries in the Kremlin and a new superpower rival led by a man labeled a “traitor”. Both of these rivals are against the international rule of law and rejecting the norms that have underpinned the international system for decades.

The document, required by Congress, comes 21 months into Biden’s term. The broad contours of the strategy have been in evidence over the course of the President’s tenure, including a focus on rebuilding global partnerships and countering China and Russia.

“Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been. Biden writes that there is a competition to shape the future of the international order.

“We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure,” he goes on. The United States of America is the perfect nation to lead with strength and purpose as the world navigates the impacts of Pandemic and global economic uncertainty.

China has repeatedly refused to condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. In late 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that their partnership was more important than ever in the face of “unprecedented pressure” from the West. Xi echoed Putin’s message of unity, saying that the two countries should “strengthen strategic coordination” and “inject more stability into the world,” according to Chinese state media Xinhua.

“This decisive decade is critical both for defining the terms of competition, particular with the (People’s Republic of China), and for getting ahead of massive challenges that if we lose the time this decade we will not be able to keep pace with,” he said.

CNN’s Dean Obeidallah: From The Daily Beast to Fox News to the U.S. and Russia, and How Kevin Carlson and Laura Ingraham Have Been During the 2016 Ukrainian-Russia War

The partnership of convenience between the two dictatorships is called Iran expert by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Both countries are deep in crisis, struggling economically and politically. Iran is attempting to quell street protests that are the most serious challenge to the government in years, while Russia is trying to deal with rising discontent over a faltering war effort and unpopular draft.

Dean Obeidallah is a columnist for The Daily Beast as well as the host of The Dean Obeidallah Show on SiriusXM radio. Follow him on social media. His opinions are not the opinion of this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.

Tucker Carlson has used his influential spot on Fox News to spout pro-Putin propaganda. Newly-elected Sen, of Ohio, stated that he doesn’t care about what happens to Ukranian one way or another, while the former Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro stated thatUkraine isn’t really a country, and the former secretary of state praised Putin.

“I support Ukraine but I never support a blank check,” McCarthy said after the speech. There must be accountability for every dollar we spent.

It’s amazing that Kevin McCarthy is going to become the leader of the pro-Putin wing of my party. Cheney said on NBC that it was dangerous.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed Ukraine for the war after Russia attacked it, saying that she wants McCarthy to give her a lot of power if Republicans win the House next month.

Conservative Fox News stars, including Laura Ingraham and especially Tucker Carlson, have been laying the groundwork with members of the Republican base, readying them for the possibility of an end to US assistance for Ukraine.

Carlson — who declared on his show in 2019 when there was a potential conflict between the neighboring countries that he was “root(ing) for Russia” — did his best in the months before Putin’s attack to paint Ukraine in a negative light. For example, Carlson falsely claimed Ukraine was “not a democracy” and called Ukrainian leader Zelensky a “puppet of the Biden administration.”

Last week, Ingraham derided former Vice President Mike Pence for referring to the U.S. as the ” “Alzheimer’s” of democracy,” while suggesting the military is too thin to help other countries. During that same episode, Ingraham welcomed GOP Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who echoed McCarthy’s comments about aid for Ukraine, saying, “We can’t put America first by giving blank checks to those around the world to solve their problems.”

As Biden suggested, McCarthy and some of his fellow Republicans may or may not get it. But there’s one person who fully gets it: Vladmir Putin. If the GOP regains control of the House, few people will have better reason to celebrate.

Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He was formerly a correspondent for CBS News in Europe and Asia. His own opinions are expressed in this commentary. CNN has more opinion.

He is attempting to distract his nation from the obvious, namely that he is losing badly on the battlefield and not achieving the scaled back objectives of his invasion.

Pressure on Europe: From the first eurozone to the crisis in the light of the Russian-Putin-Russia gas embargo

This ability to keep going depends on a host of variables – ranging from the availability of critical and affordable energy supplies for the coming winter, to the popular will across a broad range of nations with often conflicting priorities.

The EU agreed a plan to control energy prices early on Friday, after Russia cut natural gas supplies in protest at the embargo.

There is an emergency cap on the Dutch title transfer facility as well as permission for EU gas companies to create a group to buy gas on the international market.

While French President Emmanuel Macron waxed euphoric leaving the summit, which he described as having “maintained European unity,” he conceded that there was only a “clear mandate” for the European Commission to start working on a gas cap mechanism.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is skeptical of price caps. It is necessary that ministers work out details with Germany to make sure that the caps don’t encourage higher consumption.

These divisions are part of Putin’s dream. Europe could prove to be a key to success from the Kremlin’s viewpoint, which states that the continent is failing to agree on essentials.

Germany and France are already at loggerheads on many of these issues. Though in an effort to reach some accommodation, Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have scheduled a conference call for Wednesday.

Italy’s first woman prime minister and the role of Putin in the post-fascist war on the Russian military-industrial complex

And now a new government has taken power in Italy. Giorgia Meloni was sworn in Saturday as Italy’s first woman prime minister and has attempted to brush aside the post-fascist aura of her party. One of her partners has a deep appreciation for Putin.

Silvio Berlusconi, himself a four-time prime minister of Italy, was recorded at a gathering of his party loyalists, describing with glee the 20 bottles of vodka Putin sent to him together with “a very sweet letter” on his 86th birthday.

The other leading member of the ruling Italian coalition, Matteo Salvini, named Saturday as deputy prime minister, said during the campaign, “I would not want the sanctions [on Russia] to harm those who impose them more than those who are hit by them.”

At the same time, Poland and Hungary, longtime ultra-right-wing soulmates united against liberal policies of the EU that seemed calculated to reduce their influence, have now disagreed over Ukraine. Poland has taken deep offense at the pro-Putin sentiments of Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orban.

Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House if Republicans win control of the congress after next month’s elections, said in an interview that he thinks people are going to be sitting in a recession and won’t write a blank check. They will not do it.

Meanwhile on Monday, the influential 30-member Congressional progressive caucus called on Biden to open talks with Russia on ending the conflict while its troops are still occupying vast stretches of the country and its missiles and drones are striking deep into the interior.

The caucus chair sent reporters a clarification of their remarks, hours after being criticized for supporting Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also called his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba to renew America’s support.

This support in terms of arms, materiel and now training for Ukrainian forces have been the underpinnings of their remarkable battlefield successes against a weakening, undersupplied and ill-prepared Russian military.

The pressure is being put on Russia by the West. Last Thursday, the State Department released a detailed report on the impact of sanctions and export controls strangling the Russian military-industrial complex.

Russian production of hypersonic missiles has all but ceased “due to the lack of necessary semi-conductors,” said the report. Plants that produce the anti-aircraft systems have stopped making them, and Russia is forced to switch to Soviet-era defense stocks for replenishment. The Soviet era ended more than 30 years ago.

Putin has also tried to establish black market networks in other countries to find what he needs to fuel his war machine, like KimJong-un did in North Korea. The United States has already uncovered and recently sanctioned vast networks of such shadow companies and individuals centered in hubs from Taiwan to Armenia, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, and Luxembourg to source high-tech goods for Russia’s collapsing military-industrial complex.

The Justice Department is charging individuals and companies that are trying to bring equipment into Russia in violation of sanctions.

What Do We Really Want to Learn From the Russian Revolution? At the End of Putin’s Second World War and the Challenges Far From the Battlefields

Still, there remain hardliners like Pavel Gubarev, Russia’s puppet leader in Donetsk, who voiced his real intention toward Ukrainians: “We aren’t coming to kill you, but to convince you. But if you don’t want to be convinced, we’ll kill you. We’ll kill as many as we have to: 1 million, 5 million, or exterminate all of you.”

The United States retains some visibility over the Russian arsenal, mostly with satellites that keep track of Russian nuclear movements. There is a deeper worry. The five-year extension of New START that President Biden and Mr. Putin agreed upon in the first month of the Biden presidency is the only one permitted under the agreement, which was negotiated during the Obama presidency. That means an entirely new treaty would have to be pieced together. And while American officials insist that they want to negotiate a new treaty, it is increasingly hard to imagine that happening in the next three years.

The direction of human history is at stake, because a victory by Russia could open the door to wars of aggression, something that most nations have come to reject since the Second World War.

Ukraine’s ongoing metamorphosis from legacy Soviet force to NATO clone hasn’t just been about the mechanics or even diplomacy of getting tanks, fighting vehicles, air defenses and artillery, it’s been about bringing NATO member states’ near-billion people along with their politicians. Scholz made that point in parliament on Wednesday.

The repercussions of what happens far from the battlefields are still relevant today. When oil-producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, decided last month to slash production, the US accused the Saudis of helping Russia fund the war by boosting its oil revenues. (An accusation the Saudis deny).

Inflation, Nuclear Wars, and the Cold War: The Power of the Defensive in the United States and in the Commonwealth

Israel is reluctant to give up the defensive systems because it might need them in its own defense. Hezbollah in the north holds a massive arsenal of missiles, and Hamas in the south has its own rockets.

Russian assaults onUkrainian ports and patrols of Black Sea halted the export of grain, which caused food prices to soar. The head of the World Food Program warned that the world was going to be mugged towards starvation in May.

As the war nears its one-year anniversary, however, international support for Ukraine is being tested. Sanctions on Moscow have contributed to higher energy prices, particularly in Europe, which is heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas. In the United States, Republicans who are poised to take control of the House of Representatives have signaled they won’t quickly approve massive new assistance packages for Ukraine.

Family budgets and individual lives are affected by higher prices. They pack a big political punch when they have that powerful momentum. Inflation, worsened by the war, has put incumbent political leaders on the defensive in countless countries.

The War on the Ballot: The Case for a Resolution of the Kremlin Conjecture about the Ukraine Crisis and the U.S. Mission to Ukraine

And it’s not all on the fringes. Kevin McCarthy, who could become speaker of the House after next week’s US elections, said that the GOP may choose to reduce funding for Ukraine. The Progressives withdrew their letter calling for negotiations. Evelyn Farkas, a former Pentagon official during the Obama administration, said they’re all bringing “a big smile to Putin’s face.”

“When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment,” General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff said recently.

The result is a growing debate inside the administration over whether Ukraine’s recent gains on the battlefield should spark a renewed effort to seek some sort of negotiated end to the fighting, according to officials.

In a major victory for Ukraine that Zelensky called “the beginning of the end of the war,” Russian forces abandoned Kherson to avoid a battlefield rout. The Ukrainians continued their successful campaign against the Russian invasion despite having met with Chinese President Putin in Beijing just a few days before.

The comments left administration officials unsurprised – given Milley’s advocacy for the position internally – but also raised concerned among some about the administration appearing divided in the eyes of the Kremlin.

Sources tell CNN that most of the top diplomatic and national security officials are wary of giving Russian President Putin any sort of leverage at the negotiation table and believe Ukrainians must decide when to hold talks, not the US.

In internal deliberations, officials said Milley has sought to make it clear that he is not urging a Ukrainian capitulation, but rather that he believes now is an optimal time to drive toward an end to the war before it drags into spring or beyond, leading to more death and destruction without changing the front lines.

But that view is not widely held across the administration. One official explained that the State Department is on the opposite side of the pole from Milley. That dynamic has led to a unique situation where military brass are more fervently pushing for diplomacy than US diplomats.

The War in Ukraine, and the Status of the American Navy Against Its Allies, as Woven by the November 2016 Democratic Session

“This has become a grinding war of attrition and therefore it’s also a battle of logistics,” Stoltenberg said. “The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of ammunition and depleting allies’ stockpiles. The current rate of production is not as high as the current rate of expenditure.

The US intends to buy 100,000 rounds of artillery ammunition from South Korean arms manufacturers to provide to Ukraine, a US official said, part of a broader effort to find available weaponry for the high-intensity battles unfolding in Ukraine. 100,000 rounds of 157mm howitzers will be purchased by the US and transferred to Ukraine via the US.

Ned Price would not say if there was agreement between the State Department and Milley. Price moved away from the idea that a diplomatic solution is necessary, and towards a position that US officials have often made: that the US is in contact with Zelensky who has said that a diplomatic solution is needed.

A majority of Americans remain behind supporting Ukraine and keeping sanctions on Russia, according to recent polling, but in a December survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the share of Americans who believe the US should support Ukraine for “as long as it takes” dropped 10 percentage points since the summer to about half. In the survey, one-third of Republicans supported indefinite support.

The aide handed the phone to the president after they finished their dinner with Asian leaders.

On the other end of the line was David Trone, the millionaire Maryland wine retailer who was thousands of miles and a time zone 12 hours away and had just clinched another term in the House.

The call wasn’t long, a person familiar with it said, but reflected the warmth and enthusiasm Biden had deployed dozens of times in calls to winning candidates over the last week – each one further solidifying a midterm election that dramatically reshaped the prevailing view of his presidency.

Biden spoke to reporters in Phnom Penh, Cambodia shortly after the Democrats secured another two years of control of the Senate. I am looking forward to the next couple of years, and I feel good.

As Washington grapples with the domestic repercussions of a voter-induced electoral earthquake that kept the Senate in Democratic hands and has put the inevitability of Republican House control on the shakiest of ground, the most significant near-term effect is palpable here, on Biden’s long-scheduled foreign trip where the first face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is taking place.

Jake Sullivan, US national security adviser, provided a glimpse into dynamics of the moment, pointing to the fact that many leaders came up to the president and said they were following his every move.

“I would say one theme that emerged over the course of the two days was the theme about the strength of American democracy and what this election said about American democracy,” Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One as Biden traveled from Phnom Penh to Bali, Indonesia, for the Group of 20 Summit.

How US-China relations have evolved in the 21 months leading up to the 2016 U.S.-China presidential meet-down: The driving wind of the G-20 sit-down

White House officials, even those who braced for losses in the weeks leading up to election day, have cast aside any reticence to take to their Twitter accounts or to TV interviews to call out pundits and politicians who predicted otherwise.

It’s a reflection – abroad and back in Washington – of a team that officials acknowledge feels constantly underestimated and has long coveted unambiguous success after a relentless and crisis-infused first 21 months in office.

White House officials had been circling the G-20 as the likely sit-down with Xi for months. There were intensive preparations between the two sides in the lead up to announcing the engagement publicly. Regardless of domestic politics, a sit down was needed in the tenuous state of the relationship.

The election results show that a political landscape that rattled allies and foes alike over the last few years is actually working for Biden, who has argued that the White House mood has only grown more positive with each new day of called races.

There was a awareness of the potential split screen in which the US president was grappling with his party’s political defeat at the same moment that the Community Party Congress was happening, according to people familiar with the matter.

One US official said that perception and political standing affect one another. We are aware of the fact that everyone was watching this election around the world, and it wasn’t a central focus or driver of the dynamics.

Far from a liability, however, each of the congratulatory calls back home have underscored the driving wind at the back of a president who entered the meeting with Xi at a moment where US-China relations appear to be inching away from great power competition toward inevitable conflict.

It was an opportune time for Biden to speak frankly about areas of disagreement between the two countries while trying to build safeguards to prevent the rivalry from careening into conflict as the relationship has deteriorated.

They want to know if the United States is stable. We know what we are about. Are we the same democracy we’ve always been?” Biden said at his post-election news conference as he described his conversations with world leaders.

Biden’s Xi-Memory after the 2016 US Senate Term: Revealing the Establishment of a Global Vision in the 21st Century

Donald Trump was still the most powerful figure inside the Republican Party, even after his election lies drove the assault on the US Capitol.

Biden had navigated the narrowest of congressional majorities to enact a sweeping domestic agenda, a chunk of which was done on a bipartisan basis. His approval rating was in the low 40s, weighed down by high inflation and the fact that people were tired from years of crisis.

It was quite likely that Biden would face the same kind of judgement as his predecessors in the first two years of office. It was expected.

Biden’s political vindication served as a validation for his approach on the world stage.

Biden “feels that it does establish a strong position for him on the international stage and we saw that I think play out in living color today,” Sullivan told reporters after Biden departed the ASEAN-US Summit, as the Xi meeting loomed. “I think we’ll see that equally when we head into both the G20 and to his bilateral engagements in Bali.”

Biden described the meeting as an open and candid discussion, saying he would manage the China relationship properly.

The reelection battle was fought by Nevada Rep. Dina, who had secured another term in office. Biden needed to pass along his congratulations.

The United States and China at G20 Summit: Implications for the Cold War, Nuclear Security and Security, and for the Future of the World

The summit in Indonesia yielded two important outcomes, according to the United States: A joint position that Russia must not use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, and an expected restart of talks on climate between American and Chinese negotiators.

Biden told Xi that Beijing has an obligation to address the proliferation of nuclear and missile activity in North Korea, which has the Pacific region on edge.

The whole world is affected when Washington and Beijing are as estranged as they have been this year.

The talks were apparently productive. The Chinese called them “thorough, frank, and constructive.” Biden said, “We were very blunt with one another” but agreed to try to avoid a new Cold War. The President said that it wasn’t “Kumbaya”, but that the two sides could possibly be less likely to start a war.

Leon Panetta – a former White House chief of staff, defense secretary and CIA chief who dealt with US-China relations for decades – expressed cautious optimism after the talks on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

Panetta believes that the meeting could be a “pivotal” one because it could lead to a dialogue on issues that need to be dealt with.

But at the summit in Bali, Indonesia, it was clear that while both sides want to avoid a clash now, their goals – China wants to be the preeminent Asian and potentially global power, as does the US – remain fundamentally incompatible.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry urged both sides to maintain their own image or subvert the other’s system.

After expressing questions and concerns about the war, Xi has remained faithful to the strategic bonds. After a video meeting in December, Putin gushed, “We share the same views on how the world will change.” Xi, according to state media, said the two countries should “strengthen strategic coordination.”

That means making sure that Russia doesn’t win in Ukraine, but also prying apart Moscow and Beijing (echoing then-President Richard Nixon in the 1970s) and countering China’s efforts to forge stronger bonds with Iran.

Both leaders have been talking to autocratic regimes. Russia is seeking armaments for its floundering war in Ukraine, and China is hard at work trying to become the center of a new alliance to counter the West. The project has faltered; it is far from a resounding success. It is still a work in progress.

Analysts said the meeting could lay the groundwork for stronger ties between the world’s top economic powerhouses. The stock markets in mainland China and Hong Kong were up on Tuesday.

Neil Thomas, senior analyst for China and Northeast Asia at Eurasia Group said the goal was to build a floor under falling relations between Beijing and Washington.

Ken Cheung, chief Asian foreign exchange strategist at Mizuho Bank, said the meeting was a positive sign that the two sides were keen to find common ground.

The Hang Seng Index of Hong Kong, China, and the epoch of democracy: U.S. President Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky

On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng (formerly the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong) Index went up 4%, which was good for a third straight day of gains. A sweeping rescue package for the property sector and China’s latest policy shift towards gradually reopening of borders gave a boost to the index.

Chinese technology shares, which had been hammered by a regulatory crackdown at home and rising geopolitical tension abroad, led markets higher on Tuesday. Alibaba shares shot up by 11% in Hong Kong, followed by Tencent, which was up 10%.

Biden’s reiteration of the US position on Taiwan and its “One China” policy was helpful, they said, as was Xi speaking out against the use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

“This was far more progress than we, or indeed most commentators had expected, and dominates what may otherwise turn out to have been a fairly irrelevant G20 summit,” the ING analysts said.

The year begins with the forces of democracy, of liberal democracy, ascendant. The far right is in disarray in the US and much of the world. And the world’s leading autocracies, China and Russia, are on the back foot.

That’s not the only reason, however, why this was the perfect moment — from the standpoint of the United States and for democracy — for this meeting to occur: There’s much more to this geopolitical moment than who controls the US House of Representatives and Senate.

As Biden and Xi were meeting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an emotional, triumphant return to the devastated, now liberated city of Kherson, the one provincial capital that Russian invaders had conquered.

A year later, the alliance that would have helped Russia solidify its place as a top global player seems less valuable and the push for a quick victory in Ukraine looks like a disaster.

Putin made a choice not to attend the G20 summit, avoiding confrontations in order to become a pariah on the global stage.

The World is Not Yours to Live: The Last Three Years of War in the Xi-Region China and the Russia-Russia War on Crime

To be sure, Biden is not the only leader with a strong hand. Xi has just secured an unprecedented third term as China’s leader, and he can now effectively rule for as long as he wants. He doesn’t have to worry about elections, about a critical press or a vociferous opposition party. He’s the unquestioned ruler of a mighty country for many years to come.

Also a mirage was the brilliance of President XI jing. The country saw protests demanding a change to the Zero Covid policy after nearly three years of Covid-19 lockdowns. Suddenly, all restrictions on the convalescence were lifted and there was no preparation or transition.

It is important for the competition between the two systems to show that democracy works, that unprovoked wars of aggression are not successful, and that China and Russia will not be able to undermine it.

The first missile to have landed in Poland – a NATO member – on Tuesday may well have been a Ukrainian anti-aircraft rocket intercepting an incoming Russian missile a short distance from one of Ukraine’s largest cities, Lviv, as suspected by Polish and NATO leaders. (President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has insisted the missile was not Ukrainian)

As it was when the US government declared that Russia committed war crimes last March, it remains to be seen whether there will be any accountability for those accused of carrying out the alleged crimes and whether Russian President Vladimir Putin himself will be forced to bear any responsibility.

Russian retaliation – an onslaught of missile attacks – has expanded as Ukrainian forces have continued to push back Russian units and reclaim territory seized in the early days of the war.

Meanwhile thousands of innocent Ukrainians have died in Putin’s egotistical and misguided bid to revive a Tsarist empire. authoritarianism has been shown to be disastrous with which to wage wars of choice.

That said, a growing number of Russian soldiers have rebelled at what they have been asked to do and refused to fight. The UK Defense Ministry believes Russian troops may be ready to shoot retreating or deserting soldiers.

Indeed a hotline and Telegram channel, launched as a Ukrainian military intelligence project called “I want to live,” designed to assist Russian soldiers eager to defect, has taken off, reportedly booking some 3,500 calls in its first two months of activity.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to leave Ukraine: Implications for the stability of NATO and for the future of the combat air system, as observed by a leading journalist in Berlin

One leading Russian journalist, who has settled in Berlin after fleeing in March, told me last week that he’s prepared to accept the reality that he might never be able to return to his homeland.

Yet some good has come from this debacle. Europe knows it must get off its dependence on Russian gas immediately, and hydrocarbons in general in the longer term, as economic dependence on the fossil fuels of dictators cannot bring longer-term stability.

Moreover, Putin’s dream that this conflict, along with the enormous burden it has proven to be on Western countries, would only drive further wedges into the Western alliance are proving unfulfilled. On Monday, word began circulating in aerospace circles that the long-stalled joint French-German project for a next-generation jet fighter at the heart of the Future Combat Air System – Europe’s largest weapons program – was beginning to move forward.

Nine months in, Russian hopes of a swift seizure have been well and truly dashed, its army largely on the defensive across more than 600 miles of battle lines strung along the eastern and southern reaches of Ukraine.

And in an opinion article by CNN’s Peter Bergen, retired US General and former CIA Chief David Petraeus said the conflict would end in a “negotiated resolution” when Putin realizes the war is unsustainable on the battlefield and on the home front.

“The only thing a premature truce does is it allows both parties to re-arm,” Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the CNA think tank and a leading expert on the Russian military, told me in an interview.

Russia keeps large quantities of arms closer to the troops they will supply, and also within range of enemy weaponry. Even if Russian territory is not declared off-limits to Ukrainian strikes, the military practice dictates that large depots be broken up and scattered and that they should be located behind enemy lines.

According to Kofman there is information that shows the manufacture of munitions has switched from two to three days a week in some factories. He suggested that they would not double and triple shifts if they had component parts.

Petro Poroshenko, the former Ukrainian president, spoke on Monday to the Council on Foreign Relations. “You are sitting in your own house, the killer comes to your house and kills your wife, rapes your daughter, takes the second floor, then opens the door to the second floor and says, ‘OK come here. I want to have a negotiation. What would your reaction be?

Ryan’s frustration with the Russians: What will they do next time if Russia isn’t ready to lose its footing in the cold war?

General Mick Ryan said that giving the Russians time to regroup and rearm would relieve the pressure on their forces. “They have been at it hard for nine months. Their forces are tired.

Jeremy Fleming, head of Britain’s top spy agency GCHQ, expressed that sentiment last month. “We know – and Russian commanders on the ground know – that their supplies and munitions are running out,” said Fleming.

That’s “basically any big command post or ammo dump they pulled back beyond the 80-kilometer range,” he explained. In many cases it is just inside Russian territory where the assurances from Ukraine have been given to the US.

The United States and other Western nations have been shipping tranches of arms, tanks and ammunition to Ukraine, steadily increasing what they are willing to provide in the hopes of changing the trajectory of the war. Zelensky wants fighter jets and heavier weaponry.

But at some point, they’ll also get tired of this war, he added. And the Russian mindset may become “we may not have everything we wanted. We will hold onto that area and annex it into Russia. And I think that’s kind of their bet right now.”

At the same time, a truce would also allow the West to rebuild rapidly depleting arsenals that have been drained by materiel sent to Ukraine, even upgrade what’s been supplied.

It is a question of whether the US and its allies would be prepared to return to a war that many are already wishing was over.

The fate of Brittney Griner vs Viktor Bout: a Russian bogeyman, a terrorist, and the messenger of war

It is the most uneven of swaps at the most unlikely of times, but perhaps the intense pressure of this moment is why the exchange of a US basketball star for a Russian arms dealer ended up happening now.

On the surface, Brittney Griner and Viktor Bout are accused of ludicrously different crimes. Griner was sentenced to a Russian penal colony for possession of a single gram of cannabis oil. Bout is allegedly the most prolific arms dealer of the past decades, fuelling conflicts in Africa and beyond – and more specifically being convicted in a US court of plotting to kill Americans.

Russian officials told their counterparts that freeing two Americans for one Russian prisoner was not possible. American officials wanted to raise other options that would make the case for the other person to be released.

This is a man who many ordinary Russians may have heard of, and he certainly is of mythological importance to the Russian elite. He is not someone that Moscow would ever want to be around, because he was not involved in the invasion that left hundreds of soldiers dead.

I interviewed Bout in 2009 after months of negotiations while he was imprisoned in Bangkok. He is a polyglot who is loquacious, charming and can rhapsodize endlessly about the list of political characters he has personal relationships with globally.

I have seen videos of Bout in the Congo and across Africa, where he was pretty close to the conflicts there. He is accused, by multiple analysts and UN investigations, of proliferating small arms across that continent during the 90s and early 00s, which he denied. There were accusations he even armed al Qaeda, which he also denied. There was little he was not accused of doing, and few things he didn’t deny. A film starring Nicolas Cage called “Lord of War” centers on the man who became a bogeyman.

That is the career history: the reputation as the man who became known as the “Merchant of Death.” What he spent 14 years in jail for, and was extradited to the United States over, was a complex sting by the US Drug Enforcement Agency, in which he was duped into agreeing to supply weapons to US agents pretending to be Colombian terrorists – weapons intended in the sting to kill Americans. It is an oddity that after all the crimes Bout was accused of, the one he did jail time for was a conspiracy – a plot, rather than an act.

For sure, he is a pilot and an entrepreneur. He was a translator for the military. But there are allegations he worked in Russian intelligence and became an asset for them in the supply of weapons around the world to bolster Moscow’s geopolitical aims. There were suggestions that he had served alongside some Russians who were very close to the president. This might have explained the intensity with which the Americans sought him. He was never a nobody.

There was always a curious mystique to Bout and his entourage. He would say that he was innocent of everything. But also yes, he had had an interesting life. There was always the wink-wink you often get when someone knows there is more to a story than is being said openly.

The story of Paul Bout in the prisoner’s shadow and the fate of Putin in the wake of the Russian invasion and brutalization of Ukraine

The larger surprise today is how this exchange happened during the Russian invasion and brutalizing of Ukraine. It says two things: that Moscow and Washington are able to do business even as Russian bombs kill innocent Ukrainian civilians, and the United States provides arms to Ukraine that are killing Russian soldiers, and that nuclear powers can work on other thorny issues while bullets are flying. It is a great thing for everyone on the planet. It means some cool heads prevail, and basic interests win out.

After President Joe Biden personally informed Cherelle of her wife’s release from Russian jail, aides told her she was safe out of Russia and on the phone.

Because of the matter’s exceedingly high profile, it was certain those conditions had been set by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, one US official said.

Despite Biden’s attempts to link Griner’s case to that of Paul Whelan, a former US Marine arrested on espionage charges in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison two years later, it became plain recently that Putin would not budge.

With winter approaching at the penal colony where Griner was being held, Biden faced a singularly presidential decision. She promised to end the nightmare andWelcoming her home would fulfill that promise.

But any victory would be tempered by the inability to secure Whelan’s freedom and inevitable blowback over the release of one the most prolific arms dealers of the past decades.

The situation was complicated further when senior law enforcement officials, angry at the prospect of releasing a notorious figure it had taken years to capture and alarmed by the precedent Bout’s release would set, raised strong objections.

Moments earlier in Abu Dhabi, Griner had stepped from her transport plane into the Middle East air – fifty degrees warmer than Moscow – and smiled, a US official said.

A group of US officials shared the decision to prevent the news from breaking before he was brought to the US to be held. US officials were concerned that Russia would back away from its promise after being warned that the matter should not be discussed in public. They were aware of the ongoing war in Ukranian, and worried about any major actions that could derail the plan. So concerned were White House officials that the fragile deal could collapse that Biden didn’t sign the commutation papers for Bout until Griner was on the ground in Abu Dhabi and in the sight of a US greeting party.

Cherelle Griner waited at the White House for a short period of time before it became clear the planned meeting with Sullivan had shifted. The person wanted to tell the truth about how long the case had gone on for.

Griner’s flight to freedom marked a moment officials acknowledged was only the first step of what will likely be a difficult and emotionally jarring process for the professional athlete in the weeks and months ahead. The US government has developed a number of support programs over the years to help those who have been taken prisoner or have been held in US prisons.

She has lost months of her life, experienced a needless trauma, and she deserves time with her loved ones to recover from her time being wrongly held, he said.

Her case made it more clear that Whelan, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison for espionage in 2020, is also in need of help. The charges are manufactured and the trial has been called unfair by US officials.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/politics/biden-griner-whelan-decision/index.html

The Security Assessment of Bout and the Russia-Israel War in the Run-Up to Biden’s Delay in the Kremlin-Ukraine Process

A senior administration official said the US had “tried to articulate other options, other categories of options, to create the space to really have the haggling that we want to have,” describing the other categories as involving individuals in US custody.

“If you’re haggling, you’re getting closer,” the official said. “And instead we have had no change or softening of a response that is simply a demand for something we just can’t provide because it’s not something in our control.”

Senior US government officials traveled to the sister of Whelan to share and talk through the news that she was not going to be released with Griner. A senior US official spoke with Whelan.

“I was arrested for a crime that never occurred,” he said from the penal colony where he is being held in a remote part of Russia. I am not sure why I am still sitting here.

The security assessment done by the Biden administration in the run-up to Biden giving the go-ahead for the deal gave final approval to the trade. Ultimately, the assessment’s conclusion was that “Bout was not a security threat to the US,” a US official told CNN.

One reality the assessment took into account, the official said, is the fact that Bout has been in prison for over a decade and has not been actively engaged in any recent criminal activity.

Other than to say that the security assessment conducted on Bout was “thorough,” the official would not elaborate further on how the US was able to be certain that the Russian arms dealer wouldn’t pose a future risk to the country.

Concerns have been raised about whether the deal will allow Russia, Iran, and other countries to use the arrest of Americans to get concessions from the US that otherwise wouldn’t be given.

The official said Thursday that the thought that Bout’s release was a new precedent for securing the release of Americans would be mistaken.

The official thinks that it would be foolish for governments around the world to draw an inference from this. “But in the rare case when there is an imperative to Americans home, which is a real priority for this president, there sometimes are no alternatives left, and a heavy price has to be paid.”

But news, first reported by CNN, that the US is finalizing plans to send the system to Ukraine triggered a cryptic warning from Russia’s US embassy Wednesday of “unpredictable consequences.”

Zakharova said that many experts had questioned the rationality of such a step which could lead to an increase in the conflict and drag the US army into combat.

The US Army’s missile defense system, which is called the “Patriot” because it is called Phased Array Tracking Radar for intercepting Target, is one of the most capable long-range air defense systems on the market.

It is ironic that officials from a country who brutally attacked its neighbor would choose to use words like provocative to describe defensive systems that are meant to save lives and protect civilians.

The Kozelsky missile formation commander, Alexander Sokolov, was shown the installation of a “Yars” intercontinental missile into a silo during a video shared by Russia’s defense ministry.

Appearing this week on Russian state TV, Commander Alexander Khodakovsky of the Russian militia in the Donetsk region suggested Russia could not defeat the NATO alliance in a conventional war.

Old weapons in the US air defense system: Are Russian Patriot missiles bombs the next best weapon in the armed sector of the United States?

Smaller air defense systems have less manpower and need more crews to properly operate them. The United States will have to train for Patriot missiles under pressure from Russia, which has launched near-daily aerial attacks on the US.

The system is widely considered one of the most capable long-range weapons to defend airspace against incoming missiles and aircraft. Because it has a long-range and high-altitude weapon, it can shoot down Russian missiles and planes that are far from its intended targets.

Zelensky in an interview with The Economist categorically denied the idea ofUkrainian seeking to regain land seized by Russia and not parts of the country that have been under Russian control.

The NATO Secretary General said in an interview with France 24 this week that the alliance is still trying to help Ukraine and make sure it isn’t involved in the war.

Old weapons. CNN’s Ellie Kaufman and Liebermann reported earlier this week on a US military official who says Russian forces have had to resort to 40-year-old artillery ammunition as their supplies of new ammo are “rapidly dwindling.”

The official told reporters that if the bullets fire and explode, they will cross their fingers.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/politics/russia-patriot-missiles-what-matters/index.html

Will Ripley: In the trenches. How Zelensky stood up to Putin during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 1922

In the trenches. Will Ripley filmed a video report about the building of fortifications on the Ukrainian side of the border with Belarus, where he reported on growing concern about the deployment of troops by Russia. Ripley talks to a sewing machine repairman turned tank driver.

In Paris at the time, I witnessed how Zelensky pulled up to the Élysée Palace in a modest Renault, while Putin motored in with an ostentatious armored limousine. The French President hugged Putin but did not shake hands with Zelensky.

Zelensky claimed that the prisoner swap with Russia was a step towards ending the conflict in eastern Ukrainian, which had started in 2014 and claimed the lives of over 15,000 people.

Fast forward to 2022 and Zelensky is the instantly recognizable wartime president in trademark olive green; as adept at rallying his citizens and stirring the imaginations of folks worldwide, as naming and shaming allies dragging their feet in arming his military.

Zelensky’s upbringing in the rough and tumble neighborhoods of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine shaped him into a scrappy kid who learned how to respond to bullies.

“After the full-scale invasion, once he got into a position of being bullied by someone like Vladimir Putin he knew exactly what he needed to do because it was just his gut feeling,” Yevhen Hlibovytsky, former political journalist and founder of the Kyiv-based think tank and consultancy, pro.mova, told me.

The leader of the US, as Russia launched its invasion, quipped that he needed a ride not a bullet.

It is perhaps easy to forget that Zelensky honed his political muscles earlier in his career standing up to another bully in 2019 – then-US President Donald Trump, who tried to bamboozle the novice politician in the quid pro quo scandal.

It has been a long time since Zelensky celebrated his victory at a Ukrainian nightclub, where he thanked his supporters for their support. Standing on stage among the fluttering confetti, he looked in a state of disbelief at having defeated incumbent veteran politician Petro Poroshenko.

The war appears to have turned his ratings around. Just days after the invasion, Zelensky’s ratings approval surged to 90%, and remain high to this day. Zelensky was rated highly by Americans for his handling of international affairs, ahead of US President Joe Biden.

His previous career was in comedy, and he has many people from that career in his bubble. Even in the midst of the war, a press conference held on the platform of a Kyiv metro station in April featured perfect lighting and curated camera angles to emphasize a wartime setting.

As for his skills as comforter in chief, I remember well the solace his nightly televised addresses brought in the midst of air raid sirens and explosions in Lviv.

Zelensky at the end of the Cold War: a risky trip to Poland and Ukraine to rally support for the U.S., Russia and Ukraine

A fashion historian and author says Zelensky is projecting his confidence and competence in a modern way by wearing T-shirts and hoodies.

She said that he was more comfortable on camera than Putin and that he was also a digital native. “I believe both of them want to come across as relatable, not aloof or untouchable, although Zelensky is definitely doing a better job balancing authority with accessibility.”

Journeying to where her husband can’t, Zelenska has shown herself to be an effective communicator in international fora – projecting empathy, style and smarts. She met King Charles during a visit to the refugee assistance center at the Holy Family Cathedral in London. (Curiously, TIME magazine did not include Zelenska on the cover montage and gave only a passing reference in the supporting text).

Despite the strong tailwinds at Zelensky’s back, there are subtle signs that his international influence could be dwindling. For example, last week, in what analysts called a pivotal moment in geopolitics, the G7 imposed a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian crude – despite pleas from Zelensky that it should have been set at $30 in order to inflict more pain on the Kremlin.

As Zelensky said in a recent nightly video address: “No matter what the aggressor intends to do, when the world is truly united, it is then the world, not the aggressor, determines how events develop.”

Ten months later, he got both. When Zelensky touched down outside Washington in a US military plane Wednesday, his arrival capped a 10-day sprint by American and Ukrainian officials to arrange a risky wartime visit meant to rally support for Ukraine’s ongoing resistance to Russia’s invasion.

The visit to Poland and Ukraine comes at a bad time for the war, as the war enters a new phase. Russia has launched its latest spring offensive. Ukraine is expected to soon mount its own counteroffensive — with the assistance of U.S. and western weapons. There is no end to the war in sight.

The final decision was made in an Oval Office meeting on Friday evening, when Biden gave the final green light. The US took steps to alert Russia of their plans once it was on, in order to avoid disaster while Biden was on the ground.

The Pentagon’s response to the Ukraine crisis: Anonymous sources do not solve the problem, but they do solve problems for the Ukrainian government – an opinion piece in the Times

The first group of 635 Ukrainians training on this style of fighting wrapped up their course at Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany last week, according to Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder. The second group of more than 700 soldiers has already begun the five-week training course.

Before using anonymous sources we have to consider what. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort despite these questions being satisfied. The reporter and one of the editors know who the source is.

Other people indicated late Tuesday that their opposition to the spending measure would cause them to abandon support for Ukrainian aid. Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said voting against the spending bill “doesn’t mean we don’t support Ukraine.”

Zelensky’s Visit to Ukraine and the Role of Patriots in the Defense of Ukraine, and Implications for the War on the Middle East

The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin compared Zelensky’s address to one given by Winston Churchill on Boxing Day in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Zelensky’s appearance was arranged by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as part of her final act. She met with Zelensky in Kyiv earlier this year.

“Patriots are a defensive weapons system that will help Ukraine defend itself as Russia sends missile after missile and drone after drone to try and destroy Ukrainian infrastructure and kill Ukrainian civilians,” she said. “If Russia doesn’t want their missiles shot down, Russia should stop sending them into Ukraine.”

The speech was importantly symbolic because this was Zelensky’s first trip outside of Ukraine since the war began and he came to “the country that more than any other, perhaps more than all the others put together, has enabled his country to defend itself so far,” said former CIA Director and retired Army Gen. David Petraeus before Zelensky’s remarks.

Republicans are set to take over the House majority in the new year, and this will affect the debate on Capitol Hill over the aid for Ukraine. Some pro-Donald Trump members, who will have significant leverage in the thin GOP majority, have warned that billions of dollars in US cash that have been sent to Ukraine should instead be shoring up the US southern border with a surge of new migrants expected within days.

The Battle of Saratoga: Zelensky and the United States on December 22, 1941, a turning point in America’s Revolutionary War

That imagery encapsulated Zelensky’s mastery of historical allusion and public relations theater. He argued the war in Ukraine was at a turning point – drawing an analogy to the Battle of Saratoga, a rallying point for an outgunned army against a superpower enemy in America’s revolutionary war. He evoked the heroism of US soldiers dug into freezing foxholes in the Battle of the Bulge during Christmas 1944, which thwarted the last effort by Nazi Germany to repel the allied liberation of Europe. And he cited wartime President Franklin Roosevelt to promise a certain, hard-won victory for freedom.

“Remember Pearl Harbor, terrible morning of December 7, 1941, when your sky was black from the planes attacking you. Just remember it,” Zelensky said. Remember the terrible day in 2001 when evil tried to turn your cities, independent territories, into battlefields. When innocent people were attacked, attacked from air, just like nobody else expected it, you could not stop it. Our country experiences the same every day.”

The wartime British leader sailed to the United States aboard HMS Duke of York, dodging U-boats in the wintery Atlantic and took a plane from the coast of Virginia to Washington, where he was met on December 22, 1941, by President Franklin Roosevelt before their joint press conference the next day.

Over days of brainstorming and meetings – fueled by Churchill’s regime of sherry with breakfast, Scotch and sodas for lunch, champagne in the evening and a tipple of 90-year-old brandy before bed – the two leaders plotted the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and laid the foundation of the Western alliance that Biden has reinvigorated in his support for Ukraine.

Churchill, who had pined for US involvement in World War II for months and knew it was the key to defeating Adolf Hitler, said during his visit, “I spend this anniversary and festival far from my country, far from my family, and yet I cannot truthfully say that I feel far from home.”

The historical parallels are likely to be appreciated by the Ukrainian leader. He paraphrased one of Churchill’s most famous wartime speeches in an emotional address to British members of parliament in March.

The History of the U.S. Navy Against Russian Insurrection: The Case for Ukrainian Attacks on Russia and the War in Ukraine

The first headline deliverables are the Patriot missile systems. They are described as the US’s “gold standard” of air defense. NATO protects them and requires the personnel that operate them to be trained properly, almost 100 for each weapon.

The precision-guidedmunitions are for Ukrainian jets. Ukraine, and Russia, largely are equipped with munitions that are “dumb” – fired roughly towards a target. Ukraine has been provided with more and more Western standard precision artillery and missiles, like Howitzers and HIMARS respectively.

In addition to the money directly for Ukraine, the larger year-end spending bill includes an increase in US defense spending that will help American weapons and ammunition stockpiles depleted by support sent to Ukraine.

Moscow’s conventional forces are struggling, and with the exception of its nuclear forces, appears to be running out of new cards to play. China and India have joined the West in open statements against the use of nuclear force, which has made that option even less likely.

The remnants of the Trumpist “America First” elements in the party have doubts about how much aid the US should be giving to the edges of eastern Europe.

Washington’s trillion-dollar defense budget makes the bill for the long and slow defeat of Russia relatively light.

Zelensky gave a historic speech from the US Capitol expressing gratitude for American aid in fighting Russian aggression and asking for more.

The speech talked about the struggle of the Ukrainian people and how they want to be warm in their homes to celebrate Christmas and to know they are on the front lines.

She hopes they will send more than one. She said the US and NATO have been hesitant in the past to provide advanced equipment, but that they saw how effective the Ukrainian military was.

Clinton, who previously met Russian President Vladimir Putin as US secretary of state, said the leader was “probably impossible to actually predict,” as the war turns in Ukraine’s favor and his popularity fades at home.

“I think around now, what [Putin] is considering is how to throw more bodies, and that’s what they will be – bodies of Russian conscripts – into the fight in Ukraine,” Clinton said.

“That dark night one year ago, the world was literally at the time bracing for the fall of Kyiv,” Biden told Zelensky at a news conference flanked by the Stars and Stripes and Ukraine’s distinctive blue and yellow national flag. The event itself carried its own symbolism – it did not feature two leaders cowering in a bunker, but went ahead in an ornate room like any other leaders’ press conference in any other capital.

Yet as Zelensky departed Washington for a lengthy and similarly risky return trip to Ukraine, it wasn’t clear that a pathway to ending the conflict was any clearer.

Emerging from their talks, both men made clear they see the war entering a new phase. Fears are growing of a stalemate as Russia sends more troops and wages a brutal air campaign against civilian targets.

Zelensky made a statement on Wednesday that suggested the path to ending the war would not involve concessions to Russia.

He said that he doesn’t see how peace can be achieved if it involves Ukraine giving up territory or sovereignty.

Last week, John Kirby, a National Security Council official, said that the US had provided input on a 10-point peace plan Zelensky had been showcasing.

Biden said it was Zelensky who had to decide how to end the war.

Zelensky peppered his address to lawmakers with references to American history, from the critical Battle of Saratoga during the American Revolutionary War to the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

He telegraphed his choice to make the address in English, which he did. Even his attire – the now-familiar Army green shirt, cargo pants and boots – seemed designed to remind his audience they were in the presence of a wartime leader.

Zelensky: Why we should care about Russia and what we have to do in order to make the most of America – a candid request for more Patriots

Zelensky has demonstrated an ability to appeal to various groups, from the national Legislature to the audience of the grammys.

He sought to bring Americans together in a way that evoked darkness when Russia sought to interruptUkraine’s power supply.

He observed that Ukrainians will celebrate Christmas by candlelight not because it is romantic but because there will be no electricity. Russia has destroyed infrastructure and the electrical grid.

He seemed aware that many Americans wondered aloud why billions of US dollars were needed for a conflict thousands of miles away. He tried to make the cause more than just his homeland.

The administration will work with congress to give an additional $907 million of foreign military financing.

Zelensky’s candid request for more Patriots – and Biden’s lighthearted response – amounted to a window into one of the world’s most complicated relationships.

That hasn’t always sat well with Biden or his team. But as he has with a host of other foreign leaders, Biden appeared intent Wednesday on translating physical proximity into a better understanding of his counterpart.

“It is all about looking someone in the eye. I mean it with all my heart. He said there is no substitute for face to face contact with a friend or foe.

Zelensky, the hero of the Ukrainian Revolution, and the role of the US in war-time re-entangled Russia: The CNN story of December 22

The December 22 edition of CNN had a story adapted from the email about US politics for global readers. Click here to read past editions and subscribe.

The comic actor-turned-wartime hero put the fate of millions of Ukrainians in the hands of American lawmakers, taxpayers and families, at a time when there is growing skepticism about the cost of US involvement.

He gave the Ukrainian flag to Pelosi in order to convince her to support the country. He walked out of the chamber with the American flag that had been flown over the US Capitol.

“Our heroes … asked me to bring this flag to you, to the US Congress, to members of the House of Representatives and senators whose decisions can save millions of people,” he said.

On the dais where heads of state usually sport suits, Zelensky embraced the look of a warrior as he used confident English to claim “joint victory” in what he said was the defeat of Russia in the “battle for minds of the world.”

Zelensky gave a shout out to Americans, who had given tens of billions of dollars in weapons and aid. They had to keep this independence hero and suppress something of their own patriotism.

The welcome the Ukrainian leader received in the House was an attempt by the incoming Republican majority to shame them if they tried to stop aid.

— To Europeans, enduring their own grim winter of high electricity and heating prices after cutting off from Russian energy, and who may be minded to push for an end to the conflict on Putin’s terms, Zelensky showed that the West is united and that Biden means it when he said Wednesday the US is in “for as long as it takes.”

But at the same time, it’s clear to Zelensky, and also to Biden, that this is the time to re-engage the US public as Russia’s war drags toward its one-year marker with no indication there is an end to fighting on the way.

What are we going to do after the patriots are installed? Zelensky said during a White House news conference that they would send another signal to President Biden after that. In his address to Congress, he said: “We have artillery, yes, thank you. We have it. Is it enough? Honestly, not really.” Both times, he was joking but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t deadly serious. In his address to Congress, Zelensky pleaded with Washington to send more offensive weapons to spur victory.

The president has limited the potency of the weapons he sends into the battle, balancing the need to defend a European democracy with the desire not to trigger a disastrous direct clash with Russia and to avoid crossing often invisible red lines whose locations are known only to Putin.

“Putin thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided,” Biden said Monday in Kyiv, alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “As you know, Mr. President, I said at the beginning, he’s counting on us not sticking together.”

Zelensky at the White House: Why do we need the United States to keep fighting against Russia? A message from Ukraine after the Battle of the Bulge

However, given partisan fury that will erupt in a divided Washington next year, there is no guarantee that America’s lawmakers will even be able to fund their own government – let alone one fighting for its survival thousands of miles away.

Fresh from a trip to the bloody front lines in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky strode onto the ornate US House floor on Wednesday evening in his signature green military wear to shore up his supply line.

Although he did not mention the elephant in the room, the speech was a clear plea to Republican lawmakers, who will control the House in January, to stay with Ukraine.

Congress was about to vote this week on a year-long spending bill that contains about 45 billion dollars in emergency aid for the countries of Ukraine and NATO.

He said he remembered that the Battle of the Bulge, in World War II, was when US troops were surrounded in the snow after gaining a foothold in Europe.

“Just like the brave American soldiers, which held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944, brave Ukrainian soldiers are doing this same to Putin’s forces this Christmas,” Zelensky said.

“He’s already established in the American people’s mind we’re in this together, but then pointing out that they’ll do the fighting for us – ‘just give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ That’s what Churchill said,” Kearns Goodwin told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday evening.

A state of the nation address, originally scheduled for April, was repeatedly delayed and won’t happen until next year. Putin’s “direct line”, a media event in which he offers questions from ordinary Russians, has been canceled.

Zelensky was faced with then-president Donald Trump’s call for him to investigate Biden in exchange for military aid years ago. And now Zelensky was thanking Americans for their help against Russia in the very chamber where Trump was impeached three years ago for pressuring Zelensky.

Petraeus added it was substantive because of the new money pledged to Ukraine both at the White House and in a larger $1.7 trillion spending bill lawmakers need to pass before Friday.

Zelensky and the American war machine: a warning to Moscow against Russian aggression in Ukraine after a meeting with the U.S.

Kevin McCarthy had a meeting with Zelensky and the other top congressional leaders as he tries to get votes for House speaker next month.

The only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, Indiana GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz, has expressed skepticism about some of the aid to Ukraine and concerns about corruption in Zelensky’s administration.

Kyiv and its Western allies are “set for a long confrontation with Russia” following President Volodymyr Zelensky’s momentous visit to Washington, Moscow said as the war in Ukraine approaches 10 months.

US President Joe Biden promised to provide more military aid to Ukraine during his White House meeting with Zelensky on Wednesday, after Russia condemned the brutality of the Ukrainian regime.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that no matter how much military support the West provides to the Ukrainian government, “they will achieve nothing.”

As the leader of our country has said, the tasks set within the framework of the military operation will be fulfilled, taking into account the situation on the ground and the actual realities, Zakharova added.

The meeting showed that the US is in a proxy war against Russia and is trying to destroy it, Peskov told journalists.

The Russian public largely buys that line from the Kremlin, says a Russian history professor.

Zelenskyy and Ukraine are making clear that they want a “just peace” and the U.S. has been helping the country defend itself against Russian aggression, according to Sloat.

Moscow warned last week that it would see the delivery of missiles to Ukraine as a provocative move by the United States, so does it mean that a Russian conflict is imminent?

Russian President Putin, who signed a censorship law that makes it a crime to spread fake information about the invasion of the country, has come under fire for using the word “war” to describe the conflict.

“Our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war,” Putin told reporters in Moscow, after attending a State Council meeting on youth policy. We will strive for this and have been for a while.

Nikita Yuferev said on Thursday he asked the Russians to prosecute Putin for spreading fake information about the army, since he fled due to his antiwar stance.

There wasn’t any decree to end the special military operation. “Several thousand people have already been condemned for such words about the war.”

A US official told CNN their initial assessment was that Putin’s remark was not intentional and likely a slip of the tongue. Officials will be looking closely at what the figures in the Kremlin say about it.

Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Wednesday declared the Kremlin would make a substantial investment in many areas of the military. Increasing the size of the armed forces is one of the initiatives, which Putin called “inevitable clashes” with its adversaries.

Putin’s invitation to the United Nations: a positive attitude toward the 2023 Ukrainian-US peace agreement, according to U.S. President Vlasov

At theMunich Security Conference, Beijing’s top diplomat said that it was ready to present its peace plan for Ukraine and referred to the conflict as a war.

Asked about whether they would invite Russia to the summit, he said that Moscow would first need to face prosecution for war crimes at an international court.

Kuleba also said he was “absolutely satisfied” with the results of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. last week, and he revealed that the U.S. government had made a special plan to get the Patriot missile battery ready to be operational in the country in less than six months. Usually, the training takes up to a year.

Kuleba said in an interview that diplomacy always plays an important role as he promised to do everything he could to win the war in 2023.

This is not about making a favor to a specific country, and the United Nations could be the best place to hold this summit. It is really about bringing everyone on board.

Kuleba said, “He has shown himself to be an efficient mediators and an efficient Negotiator, and most importantly, as a man of principle and integrity.” So we would welcome his active participation.”

They say that they are ready for talks, which is not true, because everything they do on the battlefield proves the opposite.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/26/1145539638/ukraine-russia-peace-summit-foreign-minister

U.S. and Ukraine’s role in the air and ground war in Ukraine: a joint mission of the U.N. and the Ukrainian Embassy in the United States

Kuleba was part of the delegation to the U.S. and he said how important the United States is to both Ukraine and the United States.

He said that the U.S. government developed a program for the missile battery to complete the training faster than usual “without any damage to the quality of the use of this weapon on the battlefield.”

Kuleba didn’t say when it would be, but he did say that it would be less than six months. And he mentioned that the training will be done outside of Ukraine.

Zelenskyy carried the message of Ukraine during the air and ground war in Russia, but Kuleba has been second only to him in getting the message to an international audience.

On Monday, the Ukrainian foreign ministry called for Russia to be stripped of its permanent membership in the UN Security Council. Kuleba said they have prepared for the step to uncover the fraud and deprive Russia of its status.

The Foreign Ministry says that Russian never went through the legal procedure for acquiring membership and taking the place of the USSR at the U.N. Security Council after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Russian War of Independence: From Military to Civil Liberation in a “Fake News” Era? Revisiting Russia’s cyber attacks on the internet

“It is similar to the central nervous system of the human body: If you mess with it, it will bring about chaos,” says Menon who had just returned from a trip to the Ukrainian capital. An enormous economic cost is associated with it. It’s an effort to create pain for the civilian population, to show that the government can’t protect them adequately.”

Menon notes, however, that every one of his comments could just as easily apply to Russia’s earlier waves of cyberattacks on the country’s internet—such as the NotPetya malware released by Russia’s GRU hackers, which five years earlier destroyed the digital networks of hundreds of government agencies, banks, airports, hospitals, and even its radioactivity monitoring facility in Chernobyl. The goal is the same, but they’re different in some areas. “Demoralizing and punishing civilians.”

Putin said his forces were embarking on a “special military operation” and that the campaign would last a few weeks.

Yet the war has also fundamentally upended Russian life — rupturing a post-Soviet period in which the country pursued, if not always democratic reforms, then at least financial integration and dialogue with the West.

The military has been the subject of harsh laws passed since February. Nearly 20,000 people have been detained for demonstrating against the war — 45% of them women — according to a leading independent monitoring group.

For questioning the Russian army, long prison sentences have been meted out to prominent opposition voices.

The most revered human rights group in Russia was forced to suspend its activities after it was accused of violating the foreign agents law.

The war in Ukraine reflected a broader attack on “traditional values” according to the state.

For now, repressions remain targeted. Some of the new laws are still unenforced. The measures are designed to crush dissent should a moment arise.

Leading independent media outlets and a handful of vibrant, online investigative startups were forced to shut down or relocate abroad when confronted with new “fake news” laws that criminalized contradicting the official government line.

The internet users have restrictions as well. American social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook were banned in March. Since the beginning of the conflict, more than 100,000 websites have been blocked by the internet regulator in the Kremlin.

Russians can still get access to independent sources of information, thanks to technical workarounds. State media propaganda covers the air waves favored by older Russians, with angry TV shows spreading conspiracy theories.

The Russian War with Ukraine: The Fate of the Soviet Empire and Russia’s Role in the World’s Economic and Political Debates

Thousands of perceived government opponents — many of them political activists, civil society workers and journalists — left in the war’s early days amid concerns of persecution.

Some countries that have absorbed the Russian exodus are expecting their economies to grow even though the issue of Russians is still sensitive for former Soviet republics.

Helped by Russian price controls, the ruble regained value. McDonald’s and several other brands ultimately relaunched under new names and Russian ownership. By year’s end, the government reported the economy had declined by 2.5%, far less than most economists predicted.

The president believes that the Europeans will pull back on support forUkraine after they see how angry Europeans are over soaring energy costs. He announced a five-month ban on oil exports to countries that abide by the price cap, a move likely to make the pain more acute in Europe.

When it comes to Russia’s military campaign, there’s no outward change in the government’s tone. Russia has a Defense Ministry that provides daily briefings. The president assures that all is going according to plan.

The sheer length of the war shows that Russia underestimated the willingness of Ukrainians to resist.

Russian troops have proven unable to conquer Ukraine’s capital Kyiv or the second city of Kharkiv. Kherson was abandoned during a Ukrainian counteroffensive in November. Russian forces have shelled the city repeatedly since retreating.

It has been demonstrated that Moscow doesn’t have control over the lands it claims as its own, despite the annexation of four territories of Ukraine in September.

Even though Russia is reported to have lost under 6,000 men, it is still a taboo subject at home. Western estimates put those figures much higher.

“The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that, and steamrolling, that has not even come close to happening,” DeSantis said on Fox. They’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power.

Longtime allies in Central Asia have criticized Russia’s actions out of concern for their own sovereignty, an affront that would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. Despite their purchases of discounted Russian oil, India and China failed to give full support to the Russian military campaign.

The Big Press Conference in 2022: Russia’s Fate After 10 Months of War, and the Role of Russia and the West

An annual December “big press conference” – a semi-staged affair that allows the Russian leader to handle fawning questions from mostly pro-Kremlin media – was similarly tabled until 2023.

The Kremlin has not given a reason for the delays. Many suspect it might be that, after 10 months of war and no sign of victory in sight, the Russian leader has finally run out of good news to share.

It’s the evening of February 23, 2022. The boss of the news site relaxes with bath and candles. In Zaporizhzhia, a young woman goes to bed planning to celebrate her husband’s birthday in the morning. In Moscow, a journalist happens to postpone his travel plans to Kyiv.

CNN has been on television and digital platforms for more than 40 years, but it’s still the news that people come to. More than 160 million people come to CNN Digital from around the globe every month, according to Comscore.

The war in Ukrainians was the main news story of the year and it proved that our interest is global and our news coverage needs to be too. Six of our top 10 stories (and 32 of our top 100) were Ukraine live stories that followed the twists and turns of the day’s news, including the incomparable coverage from CNN’s teams on the ground, often in the line of fire.

The US and its allies would and wouldn’t do what they did in Afghanistan early in the conflict. The limits have been a topic of contention from the beginning and are only getting worse as Russia complains that the West is going too far.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade and its impact on women’s lives and US politics were a recurring top story, as were the numerous mass shootings and natural disasters.

The Last Three Years: How Russia, America, and Europe Has Been Affected by Nuclear Disarmament and the Unexpected Unification of the West

The rules and regulations that were in place for the past three years were simply tossed aside. China did not use the time to push for stock up on certain drugs. Reports say hundreds of millions of people have been affected by the disease, and various models predict a million deaths.

Entertainment news brought millions of you to CNN. Stephen “tWitch” Boss, the DJ for ” The Ellen DeGeneres Show”, passed away in tragic circumstances. The Good Samaritans made a difference in the lives of strangers, and there were bright moments as well.

For those playing along at home, every piece on our Top 100 Stories list this year received more than 3 million visits, according to our internal data.

Thank you for being here with us through it all. We promise we will be there for you in 2023, for every breaking news story and every piece of joy and triumph.

1. Live story: Russian military strike hit a civilian evacuation crossing point outside of Kyiv, killing at least eight people, including two children

To those who had felt that nuclear saber-rattling was an oxymoron, it was because thedestruction they brought was complete for everyone on the planet.

Europe is not welcoming because of the Russian decline. Calls for greater defense spending are louder, and heeded, even if they come at a time when Russia, for decades the defining issue of European security, is revealing itself to be less threatening.

Russia has met the West, who was happy to send some of its own weapons to its eastern border. Western officials might be surprised by how Russia’s red lines change constantly, as Moscow knows how limited its non nuclear options are. None of this was supposed to happen. Now that Europe has done something, what will it do next?

Key is just how unexpectedly unified the West has been. Europe and the United States have said the same thing when it comes to Ukraine even though they’ve split over Iraq and Syria, and even though they’re unwilling to spend 2% of GDP on security. At times, Washington has seemed a bit warier and there have been outliers like Hungary. But the shift is towards unity, not disparity. That was quite a surprise.

The surprising resilience of the Ukrainian people, along with the unexpected ineptitude of the Russian forces, have prevented a full takeover. The NATO chief said last week it was agrinding war of attrition with no end in sight.

The Rise and Fall of the United States: The Rise of Autocracy in the 2022 U.S. & 2020 Rescuing of Democracy

America has done this before. The Soviet Union changed their position in a matter of days during the Cuban Missile Crisis and accepted the outcome of the conflict with the West. Had “red lines” thinking been in vogue, America might well have accepted an inferior compromise that weakened its security and credibility.

The Bradley fighting vehicle can hold around 10 troops and can be used to move personnel into battle. The White House said the US and Germany would help train the Ukrainian forces.

Biden spoke to the German Chancellor on Thursday about the new commitment. Germany will also send Ukraine new fighting vehicles, along with a Patriot missile battery to protect against Russian air attacks.

Those systems had been at the top of Zelensky’s wish list because it will allow his military to target Russian missiles flying at a higher altitude than they were able to target previously.

It was an open question. Many believed that autocracy would prevail and prove to be the better system. How many of them believe in that today?

How many believe that Russia, China, and Iran offer a better model than an open society with challenges? How many believe the US would be better off with a more autocratic president?

In 2022, democracy fought back with astounding determination, conviction and, yes, idealism. The autocrats went on the defensive. Even populism started to sputter. Positive trends forged through huge human suffering look promising at the moment.

This is a time for democratic leaders to show they can navigate the economic challenges of the coming months because of the poor showing for election deniers in the US and the exodus of Russians from their own country. All the while, they will face the continuing efforts of ambitious autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to regain the upper hand.

The autocracy brothers wanted the world to think their system was superior, a message that would preemptively quiet any doubts at home. According to the non-partisan democracy monitor Freedom House, democracy lost ground for 16 continuous years. About 20% of the world’s population lived in Free countries, where authoritarian leaders and illiberal forces were on the rise.

In 2022, while these global strongmen struggled, self-assured “geniuses” like Elon Musk – who more than once appeared to side with autocrats – revealed their own shortcomings, and oppressed populations fed up with decades of tyranny demanded change.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” campaign in the aftermath of the Cold War: how far will the russian regime go?

The invasion strengthened NATO, a democratic defense alliance, in a way nothing had in decades. Even Sweden and Finland – countries that had long cherished their neutrality – wanted to join.

The activists of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” did not expect to defy the regime and its brutality. How far away will they go? How far will the regime go to snuff them out? How will the rest of the world respond?

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/opinions/democracy-china-russia-2023-ghitis/index.html

Trump’s Damp Squib: Why a Lead Balloon Was Not a Demonstration, nor Does a Left Behind Its Right

Donald Trump has a new campaign. It was what the British called a “damp squib,” a lead balloon. After many of his top choices did not perform, he is becoming an increasingly isolated figure. He called on the Republicans to unify behind Kevin McCarthy as the House Speaker, but that didn’t seem to deter the rebellion this week. democracy was on display in all the messy wrangling over the speakership. Trump’s legal troubles seem endless.

The doppelganger of Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, lost his reelection bid. Like Trump, he refused to admit defeat or attend the inauguration of the man who defeated him. Instead, a grim Bolsonaro decamped to Florida.

In the UK, the populist Boris Johnson lost the premiership and after an embarrassing interlude with the hapless Liz Truss, the decidedly non-populist centrist, Rishi Sunak, became prime minister. Back when Johnson was leading his country out of the European Union, populists across Europe wanted their own versions of Brexit. We don’t hear that anymore. Marine Le Pen was defeated byMacron because of her ties to Putin, like other European populists, she had to go from her record of close proximity to Putin.

The Story of Makiivka Deaths on Cell Phones: Implications for Russia and the War in General Relativity

The account from the Russian side says that the cell phones the new troops were using was a violation of the regulations that allowed the Ukrainians to target them most accurately. The attack was executed byUkraine, but they haven’t provided details about how it happened. But the implications are broader and deeper, especially for how Russia is conducting its war now.

It is telling that a short-term truce was called for by the President after the attack on Russian servicemen. The move was rightly dismissed by Ukraine and the US as a cynical attempt to seek breathing space amid a very bad start to the year for Russian forces.

Russian officials said four rockets from the Ukrainian side hit a school where the forces are housed and are adjacent to an arms depot. Two HIMARS were shot down by Russian air defenses.

The reality that Russia cannot communicate adequately is what Chris said about Russia’s failure to break up or move large arms depots.

The view shared by other experts is a view of it. “Bad communications security seems to be standard practice in the Russian Army,” James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told me in an e-mail exchange.

He isn’t the only one who is casting doubt. The blame for the incident in Makiivka began to be put on the soldiers themselves by the post on the Telegram channel known as the Grey Zone. “In this case, it is to 99% a lie and an attempt to throw off the blame.”

Indeed, a number of the most recent arrivals to the war are inmates from Russian prisons, freed and transferred immediately to the Ukrainian front. One can only imagine how much a prisoner would like to be able to talk to people outside of the confines of their cells.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/opinions/russia-makiivka-deaths-cell-phones-andelman/index.html

The Makivka massacre and McCarthy’s skeptics: Why the United States should be careful with its military apparatus when it is asked to do so

The fatal attack on Russian forces in the Makiivka region, which shows the blatant errors made by the military, has prompted some of Putin’s apologists to turn on the military establishment.

Semyon Pegov was awarded the Order of Courage by President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin two weeks ago and he attacked the Ministry of Defence for trying to pin the blame for the cell phone use on the troops.

He asked how the Ministry of Defense could be so sure about the location of soldiers in a school building if they had not used drones to find them.

After a month, the defense ministry replaced four-star Gen. Bulgagung with Col. Gen. Mikhail Y. Mizintsev, also known as the “Butcher of Mariupol”), as its deputy defense minister. The location of the arms depot, adjacent to the Makiivka recruits, would likely have been on Mizintsev’s watch.

Sergei Shoigu, a Putin loyalist and defense minister, told his forces in a celebratory video that their victory was inevitable after the Makiivka attack.

The administration announced a new $2.85 billion drawdown for Ukraine, part of more than $3 billion in new military assistance to Ukraine. The drawdown, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday, will include “Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, armored personnel carriers, surface to air missiles, ammunition, and other items to support Ukraine as it bravely defends its people, its sovereignty, and its territorial integrity.”

Some diplomats think the Ukraine aid is at risk because of the impasse, as many of those who have fought McCarthy’s speakership have previously spoken out against additional assistance.

Two Republicans who had opposed McCarthy had called on the House to change its rules about discussion over aid for Ukraine. Other Ukraine aid skeptics have continued to oppose McCarthy’s bid.

Several Republican members who switched their votes to support McCarthy said they are encouraged by the framework of an agreement, but that they don’t know details of the deal.

The U.S. Budget Puzzle in Ukraine: What Will it Tell Us About the Future of Subsea Assistance? Observations from a High-Capacity Diploma

That number was even higher than President Joe Biden requested – a reflection of Democrats’ concern that additional funding wouldn’t be as forthcoming in a GOP-led House. The number was seen as an insurance policy against Republican resistance and the White House believed that it would keep the US’s support for several months.

Rules changes to the budget process could make it difficult for Congress to pass new aid in September.

“This is a harbinger for a protracted legislative paralysis,” the diplomat said, adding that “the Freedom Caucus – which is not particularly pro-Ukrainian – has just demonstrated its clout.”

Others said they were keeping a close eye on how McCarthy would secure the role and how it would affect aid.

Another diplomat told CNN they’re personally concerned about “the policy concessions McCarthy has to make, and if they are going to affect US role in the world.”

A third diplomat expressed concerns concessions like crucial committee assignments, such as the House Rules Committee, could be given to lawmakers who have advocated against more aid to Ukraine, which could create immense hurdles for passing additional assistance legislation.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the latest drawdown was an awesome Christmas present for his country. And lawmakers in Ukraine told CNN they are not concerned that the future of assistance is at risk, noting the strong past bipartisan and public support for aiding their country.

Russia reasoned that if Washington blocked Nord Stream 2, which it ultimately did, then it would show that European power no longer flowed through Berlin, but actually via the White House.

The United States wanted the new high-capacity subsea supply to replace old overland lines that transited Ukraine so as to provide vital revenue to the increasingly Westward-leaning leadership in Kyiv.

Donald Scholz and the pragmatism of Europe: how he confronted the Russia crisis in Brussels, Moscow, and the Kremlin

Europe has been slow to respond to the deep fissures in US politics and the uncertainty another Trumpian-style presidency could wreak on its allies. Germany leads the way when it comes to European pragmatism, because decades of a reasonable, if not complete, trust in the US has been replaced by it.

Europe was led by the moral compass of the former Chancellor of Germany. Scholz has found unexpected metal in his ponderous, often stop/go/wait traffic-light governing coalition and won thunderous applause in Germany’s Bundestag on Wednesday as he flashed a rare moment of steely leadership.

“Trust us,” he said, “we won’t put you in danger.” He explained how his government tackled Russia’s aggression and how it mitigated fears of a freezing winter and economic collapse. He said: “We are in a much better position compared to what we were a year ago.”

The applause at each step of his carefully crafted speech spoke as loudly as his words. The population of Germany is typically averse to war and projecting their own power, and Scholz has brought them together to understand how much they should help Ukraine in killing Russians and angering the Kremlin.

In Moscow, they don’t think his new vigor changes much even if he wrestled some vestige of influence over America in the Ukrainian war.

Russia’s Ambassador to Germany accused the German ambassador of refusing to acknowledge Germany’s historical accountability to its people for the gruesome crimes of Nazism, calling the move to send tanks extremely dangerous. Meanwhile his counterpart in Washington accused the White House of “blatant provocation” and Biden of being intent on the “strategic defeat” of Russia.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and deputy chairman of its national security council, has said Russia would never allow itself to be defeated and would use nuclear weapons if threatened.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/europe/germany-russia-us-relations-intl-cmd/index.html

NPR’s State of the Union: The U.S., NATO, and Russia’s Threat to the War on Ukraine During Biden’s Second Year in Office

The mixed messaging has some Muscovites CNN spoke with after the announcements by Biden and Scholz on tanks confused. A significant proportion were worried about the war and dismayed that Putin didn’t pay more attention to their concerns.

From being late to recognize Russia’s threat, reorient Germany, reinvigorate its military, and ramp up weapon supplies to Ukraine, the pragmatist Scholz has now signaled Germany is very much in play – and, indeed, wants hands on the controls. He said Germany would “coordinate” supplies of the Leopard 2 from allies to Ukraine, a power invested in him by German legislation preventing any purchaser of the country’s war-fighting hardware to pass it on to a third state.

Longer debates about the next military moves for Ukraine might be coming and will likely signal to Zelensky that more of a German leash will be given to the Ukrainians, as opposed to being taken over by the US.

This shift in the power dynamic may not change the way the war is fought but could impact the contours of a final deal and shape a lasting peace when it comes.

Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova attended President Biden’s State of the Union speech, for the second year in a row, but the war in Ukraine received far less attention in the address this time.

Past recaps can be found here. For context and more in-depth stories, you can find more of NPR’s coverage here. You can subscribe to NPR’s State of Ukraine for updates as the day progresses.

The U.S. and NATO are trying to see what happens to Russia. And then, as if nothing happened, they say they’re prepared to visit our military bases, including our newest,” said the Russian leader.

Chairman of the Joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley said that Russia has lost strategically, operationally and tactically. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned Wednesday that “Putin must realize that he cannot win” as he explained the rationale for rushing arms and ammunition to Ukrainian forces. And Julianne Smith, the US ambassador to NATO, told CNN’s Becky Anderson that Washington was doing all it could to “continue to apply pressure on Moscow to affect (Putin’s) strategic calculus.”

Vice President Kamala Harris will head to the security conference this week, and the Western rhetorical and diplomatic offensive will intensify. The president will visit Poland and a NATO and ex-Poland Pact state next week, bolstering his legacy of offering the most effective leadership of the Western alliance since the end of the Cold War.

What is the power of the left and how does it affect the US? An expert on Russia and Putin at the 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing

Some Republicans in the US House are hesitant. Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz last week demanded an end to aid to Ukraine and for the US to demand all combatants “reach a peace agreement immediately.” A bipartisan majority for saving Ukraine still exists in the House and the Senate. But it’s not certain Biden can guarantee massive multi-billion dollar aid packages for Ukraine in perpetuity. And US aid might be in serious doubt if ex-President Donald Trump or another Republican wins the 2024 election.

The outside world knows Putin is not contemplating defeat or an exit from the war because of the complete lack of any diplomatic framework for ceasefire talks.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, a leading expert on Russia and Putin who worked in the White House said there were barely any signs that Putin is giving up.

Even if China did leaning on Putin for the end of the war, that was not going to happen because of the recent flap in US-China relations.

“You’re going to end up with an albatross around your neck,” Sherman said at an event at the Brookings Institution, though admitted the US was concerned about tightening ties between China and Russia at a time when it is locked in simultaneous showdowns with each power.

Sporting a self-satisfied grin, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood alongside a confident Chinese President Xi Jinping in February of last year. After the end of the Beijing Olympics, Putin denied that he intended to invade Ukraine.

In a show of unity, the leaders of the two nuclear powers vowed to have a relationship with “no limits.” It looked like it was a turning point in the reconfiguration of power in the world.

In addition to fortifying NATO and strengthening alliances, which President Joe Biden’s administration has accomplished with great success, the US must aim to forestall the creation of a credible, unified force of aggressive antidemocratic regimes.

The February launch of a bloc of aggressively anti-Western autocracies was exactly what they were. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president warned that Beijing and Moscow wanted to replace the rule of law with the rule of the strongest.

But the rule of the strongest doesn’t work when you can’t win, which is how Russia’s plans started to unravel, and China had to rethink its commitment.

Is Xi in or out with Putin? It seems that the president of the United States wants it both ways. He wants the relationship with a country that has invaded its neighbor without provocation, but he’s trying to present himself as a responsible global leader; an alternative to the democratic Western model for other countries to follow.

US intelligence has it that Russia has bought shells from North Korea, a dictatorship that denies its involvement in a war that is beyond the pale.

PUTIN DECLARES WAR on UKRAINE: News from the Xi-President’s trip to Saudi Arabia

Beijing’s relationship with Tehran is complicated. In December, when Xi visited Iran-foe Saudi Arabia, a joint statement after meeting with Saudi officials noted Iran’s “destabilizing regional activities” and “support for terrorist and sectarian groups,” infuriating Iran.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress fear China’s support of Tehran could allow it to dodge sanctions relating to its nuclear and conventional weapons programs, support for terrorism and human rights abuses.

The next morning, my phone was ringing from all the messages and missed calls. A red headline in all caps on the Kyiv Independent website read: “PUTIN DECLARES WAR ON UKRAINE.”

In a year, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions have been displaced. It has wreaked havoc, decimated cities, driven a global food and energy crisis and tested the resolve of western alliances.

The Russian War Against Ukraine: I Don’t Live in Kiev, I Learned from it. I’m afraid I can’t do that

Zaporizhzhia, February 23, 2022. I thought I would celebrate my husband’s birthday the following day. Our life was getting better. My husband was doing his own thing. Our daughter started school there and made friends. A special needs nursery was located for our son, thanks to the support services we had arranged. I had time to work. I was happy.

We are trying to live in the here and now. We are sad. While physically we are in Prague, our hearts have remained in Ukraine.

The Czech Republic provided opportunities for my husband to get a job. I found special needs classes for my son. He now attends an adaptation group for Ukrainian children and has a learning support assistant. My daughter is studying in a Ukrainian school while she is in a Czech school.

On February 24, 2022, I was supposed to be in Kyiv. My husband broke his shoulder and we had to stay in Moscow. He had surgery at 9:00 a.m. that day.

We woke up to the news that the invasion was starting. 12 Russian writers, directors and cultural figures signed the open letter that I wrote condemning the war. Soon it was published, and tens of thousands of Russian citizens added their signatures.

My husband and I left Russia on the third day. It was a kind of moral obligation for me. There is a place in the state that has become a fascist place where I could no longer stay.

We moved to Berlin. My husband went to work as a volunteer at the refugee camp next to the main railway station, where thousands of Ukrainians had been arriving every day. And I started writing a new book. It starts like this:

“This book is a confession. I am guilty for not paying attention to the signs. I too am responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine. My forebears are as well. Russian culture is to blame for all these horrible things.

I am aware that the Russians are exposed toimperialism. Russia was a great empire and we need to heal it from the disease that it caused.

This whole year has been full of tears and worries. People who were close to me were killed by Russians, and I read the news about it.

There was another fight that I was trying to take my life back from. The life Russia stole from me and millions of Ukrainians.

Time and again since the Russian invasion started, I’m haunted by the darkness in my father’s eyes during the re-telling of chilling dinnertime stories of relatives shipped off to the Soviet gulag, never to return. Stories of millions of Ukrainians who starved to death in Stalin’s manmade famine of 1932-33.

Russian missiles first began to fall on February 24, 2022, what’s changed? The Ukrainians have given up on fear as they stand up to the rockets and drones.

A year into the full-scale invasion, my passport is a novel in stamps. My life is split between London, where I teach Ukrainian literature, and Ukraine, where I get my lessons in courage.

Some of my high school classmates have volunteered to fight addictions that I expected to be the end of. I had thought my hairdresser was a nice summer child, but she ran away on foot from the Russiaoccupied town of Bucha through the forest with her mother, grandmother and five dogs.

My capital, which the Kremlin and the West expected to fall in three days, has withstood 12 months of Russia’s terrorist bombings and energy blackouts. The Russians have only been able to bring closer to eternal life by seeing so many stars over Kyiv during the dark winter nights.

It seems that since February 2022 we have experienced several eras. The first was euphoric, when Putin suddenly, after a significant time of stagnant ratings, received more than 80% approval from the population.

The future was canceled by aborting the past. It’s better to live this way when your superiors decide what you should or should not do, and you take for granted everything you’re told by propaganda.

For me personally and my family, what happened was a catastrophe to which it is impossible to adapt. The authorities labeled me a “foreign agent” because I was active in the events, raising my personal risk and making people believe that I was living in a utopian world.

I remember talking to colleagues, trying to assemble and coordinate a small army of volunteers to strengthen the newsroom. I am calling my parents to make sure the supplies are purchased.

The life I knew started falling apart soon after, starting with the small things. It doesn’t matter what cup of tea I drank, the way I dressed, or the shower I took. Life itself no longer mattered, only the battle did.

It was difficult to remember the good times of the pre-war era a few weeks into the full-scale invasion. I would remember being upset about my boyfriend, but I could no longer relate. My life didn’t change on February 24, it was stolen from me on that day.

Life values are not always the same. Like never before, I enjoy every opportunity to see or talk to relatives and friends. And like other Ukrainians, I believe in our victory and that all of us will return to our beloved country. But we need the world’s help.

I was no longer concerned with my personal ambitions. To raise our flag and show that we’re still fighting even after these tragic events is the important goal.

I didn’t like winning on the track. They were possible due to the number of defenders who had died. I received messages from soldiers on the frontline. They were so happy to follow our achievements, and it was my primary motivation to continue my career.

The Crimes of Crime against Humanity: The U.S. and the Crimes against Crimes Against Ukraine, as Determined at the Munich Security Conference

The case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine has been examined. We know the legal standards and there is no doubt these are crimes against humanity,” she said at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany.

The crimes against humanity determination are significant, but they are symbolic for now. The US cannot prosecute the Russians involved in crimes against humanity as it does not have the power to do so. However, it could provide international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, which work to hold perpetrators accountable, with evidence to effectively try to prosecute those crimes.

Harris said that when she was a prosecutor she used to use the court room to gather facts and hold them up against the law.

Harris spoke at the famed Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich, where she laid bare some of the evidence she believed was proof that Russia had committed crimes against humanity. The vice president outlined specific instances that have peppered news clips and official reports.

“In the face of these indisputable facts, to all of us here in Munich, let us renew our commitment to accountability. Let us renew our commitment to the rule of law,” she said. The United States will support the judicial process in Ukraine and international investigations as long as justice is served. Let us all agree, on behalf of all the victims, known and unknown: Justice must be served.”

Questions have swirled in recent months about how much more funding the US will provide to Ukraine’s war effort, now that Republicans are in charge of the US House of Repsentatives and have promised no “blank checks.” Harris noted how many congressional leaders were at the conference. Pelosi, McConnell and Graham were part of the group.

“They are here together because they understand the stakes. The leadership of these members is important to America, and they will continue their support for Ukraine.

He urged them to think about what role Europe should play in bringing peace to Europe.

When we do that, we will make a world of it, and every would-be aggressor will conclude that if Russia got away with it, we can get away with it. And that’s not in anyone’s interest because it’s a recipe for a world of conflict,” he added.

The CIA Director said Saturday that the intelligence sharing with NATO allies has proved to be crucial to backing up the Ukrainian government against Russia.

“It’s a two-way street. We’ve learned a lot from our NATO partners. Burns told a panel discussion that they learn a lot from the Ukrainians. He said that it has been the type of essential cement in the coalition the president has organized.

China’s proposal for a cease-fire response to the crisis in Ukraine: Mr. Wang meets with Russian diplomats in Moscow on the next-to-leading agenda

It will be the first time that a Chinese official has visited Russia since the invasion of Ukraine as Wang is expected to arrive in Moscow this week.

In China’s proposal, sovereignty and territorial integrity of every country will be respected, Wang said.

Mr. Wang has been using the conference in Munich as a platform to tell European leaders and diplomats that China is ready to bolster ties with them and to try to play a role in ending the war in Ukraine. In his public remarks on Saturday, he said that China would soon offer a peace proposal to stop the fighting. But Mr. Blinken warned in a separate event against the allure of cease-fires that Russia might exploit to regroup for new offensives.

Wang made the remark at the Security Conference that referred to the conflict as “warfare”, a rare comment that was made about the Ukrainian conflict. The European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said in an interview with CNN that we need more proof that China is not working with Russia.

In September 2022, Putin admitted Beijing had questions and concerns about the invasion, seemingly admitting differing views on the war.

Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu: “We’re doing what we’ve learned from the Ukrainian War in Ukraine,” Leila Fadel told NPR

“This is something that leads me to the question – for whom do we document all these crimes?” Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties, told us. “Because I’m not a historian, I’m a human rights lawyer, and we document human pain in order sooner or later to have all these Russians … brought to justice.”

Speaking to NPR’s Leila Fadel, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said his country is learning lessons from the war in Ukraine and keeping a wary eye on China.

Expansionist motivation is what they have. They want to continue to expand their sphere of influence. They want to continue to expand their power. And if they are not stopped, then they will continue to march on,” Wu told us.

“We’ve managed to avoid conflict directly between great powers,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told NPR. ” For all of its quirks, this system works.” But now, it’s being challenged.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1157820509/ukraine-russia-war-anniversary

The Invasion of the Ukraine by a Russian Force on the First Day of the First World War II: Radio Report from Natalia Hajek

They tried to flee in the first days of the war, but the family car was shelled, Natalia believes, by Russian forces. Her husband was killed, along with her 6-year-old nephew, Maxim. Vova was hospitalized for months with several gunshots in his body.

The audio for this story was produced by Danny Hajek. Additional editing and production assist are provided by Carol Klinger, as well as production assistance byDenise Couture and Nina Kravinsky. Reporting and translation help was provided by Hanna Palamarenko and a couple others.

The Secretary of State issued a statement on Saturday saying that the U.S. will work to hold those responsible to account and emphasizing the importance of this designation. Blinken is attending the meeting.

Ukraine is not a party to the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. The country has the right to agree with the court’s jurisdiction over war crimes occurring within it’s borders. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the basis on which the prosecutor will seek permission to open a war crimes investigation.

The U.S. Security Conference after the Decoherence of a Chinese Balloon: Defenses against Systematic Violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and a Warning from Beijing

China initially struck a contrite tone about the balloon, saying that it was a weather craft that had drifted off course. The U.S military shot down three objects that it now says may have been innocuous, and Beijing’s tone became more hostile after that.

But there are signs now that Beijing could now be considering it, the officials said, and Biden administration officials are warning publicly and privately that the US is monitoring closely for any violations of western sanctions prohibiting military support for Russia.

US officials have been concerned enough with the intelligence that they shared it with allies and partners in Munich, according to CNN reporting. In a meeting with Wang on the sideline of the conference, Blinken also raised the issue and warned him about its consequences according to a US readout.

The Secretary of State raised the issue with his Chinese counterpart at the conference, officials said.

“The Secretary was quite blunt in warning about the implications and consequences of China providing material support to Russia or assisting Russia with systematic sanctions evasion,” a senior State Department official told reporters.

“This warfare cannot continue to rage on. We need to think about what efforts we can make to bring this warfare to an end,” Wang said at the conference.

The Chinese companies that we’ve seen so far have provided support to Russia for use in the Ukraine, and there is no distinction between private and state companies in China.

The concern that we have now is based on the fact that they may provide lethal support. We have made it clear to them that that would be a big problem for us and our relationship.

The first high-level meeting between the U.S. and China since the downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon was held on the last night of the conference.

Mr. Wang said it was up to the United States to get rid of the damage done by indiscriminate use of force after it shot down the balloon.

The two descriptions suggested that both Washington and Beijing were digging in, two weeks after the episode. The US government had hoped to find a way to allow Mr. Blinken to visit China again, after he had canceled in the middle of his flight because of the weather.

While President Biden often talks of aspiring to a relationship in which the two nations are in vigorous competition but not conflict, many at the Munich Security Conference — an annual meeting of diplomatic, intelligence officials and lawmakers — expressed concerns that the handling of the balloon episode merely highlighted how the two countries had failed to de-escalate, even when no lives were lost.

A State Department description of Mr. Blinken’s message to Mr. Wang, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China, said the United States “will not stand for any violation of our sovereignty, and that the P.R.C.’s high-altitude surveillance programs — which has intruded into the air space of over 40 countries across 5 continents, has been exposed to the world.”

The equipment recovered by the US Navy and the Coast Guard was a smaller balloon than a regional plane, and there are plans to make public details about some of the sensors recovered from the balloon. Officials have already said the craft’s surveillance equipment was visible, contradicting China’s claims that it was a weather balloon.

In a Saturday night interview with NBC, Mr. Blinken claimed that Beijing was considering giving lethal assistance to Russia.

That phrase was particularly notable given that Mr. Wang had said, during earlier remarks on Saturday at the conference, that “the Cold War mentality is back” in global affairs.

The canceled trip and subsequent war of words set relations back further. After Mr. Biden ordered the craft shot down, China rejected a request from Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to speak with his Chinese counterpart — a development that U.S. officials called troubling.

Despite the pointed rhetoric, said Danny Russel, a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, an independent research organization, “the fact that the meeting occurred and that both sides can claim to have delivered their points on the spy balloon may help the two sides put the incident behind them and move on to rescheduling Blinken’s trip to Beijing — which is where the real work needs to get done.”

On the heels of the meeting with the Chancellor of Germany, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said that China was willing to have exchanges with Germany and other European countries in various fields.

Rep. Mike McCaul: The State of the Union and the Threats to the U.S.-A. War on Crime and Security

Biden’s aides ultimately believe Republican members of Congress will continue to provide support for Ukraine, buoyed by the staunch backing of GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy despite the protestations of some of their party’s members.

Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN’s Pamela Brown on “State of the Union” in a joint interview with House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner that aired Sunday that bipartisan support for Ukraine is “still very strong.”

But as the one-year anniversary of the war approaches, McCaul warned that hedging support for Ukraine could prolong the conflict, which could play into Russia’s advantages and allow anti-Ukraine dissent to build.

McCaul said he hoped the US would send fighter jets to Ukraine, and that he was concerned about a drawn out conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Turner equated the resolution to a letter more than two dozen progressive House Democrats sent the White House last fall, asking it to pursue diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine. The letter was retracted shortly after.

This balloon contained a lot of American parts. McCaul said Beijing had a nuclear- capable hypersonic missile in 2021, and that it was built on the back of American technology.

“They steal a lot of this from us. We don’t have to sell them advanced weapons technology that they can use to start a war against Taiwan or the US in the Pacific. I think there is a lot of bipartisanship on this issue.

McCaul said the tension between the countries is high, and that both Democrats and Republicans want to confront Chinese threats.

McCaul said there is a unique opportunity to be bipartisan on national security against one of the greatest threats to this country.

The Munich Security Conference (CUP) – A unified forum for geopolitical issues from Europe to the EU: the US, Europe, and Ukraine

The Munich Security Conference attracts head of state, generals, intelligence chiefs, and top diplomats from around the world.

President Zelenskyy called for the quick delivery of weapons and warned of diminishing supplies in his opening speech, setting the tone for the three-day conference.

There was significant bipartisan and bicameral representation from Congress when the U.S. made its presence felt at the gathering.

But with delegations attending from every continent, beyond Europe and the members of NATO, broader geopolitical issues were at play, both on the conference stage and on the sidelines.

The US Secretary of State stated in a statement that they reserve “crimes against humanity determinations for the most egregious crimes.”

“On the Ukraine issue, China has always stood on the side of peace and dialogue, and has always insisted on pressing for peace and negotiation,” Mr. Wang said in a meeting with Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, on Saturday, when they were both in Munich for an annual security conference, according to China’s official summary of the meeting.

Europe’s leaders agreed to invest more in weaponry while Wang Yi did not mention how to achieve it or what peace in the region meant.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier this month that Europe and NATO’s production capacity needs to be ramped up if the West is going to meet Ukraine’s needs.

Boris Pistorius continued to push for increased military spending within Europe and NATO. He wants the NATO alliance to agree on 2% of GDP as a minimum commitment, and went one step further than Scholz’s promise to meet this target. Germany is currently not expected to meet the 2% target for the next couple of years, despite the additional 100 billion boost to the Bundeswehr budget.

Scholz remained tight-lipped about requests from Ukraine to send fighter jets, having publicly said no on several occasions. He said that Germany’s support is not withdrawn, but warned against hasty decisions.

John J. Sullivan left Moscow in December 2019 to Moscow in the early 2022 Russian-Russian invasion of the Donbas: An opinion from the former US Ambassador

Prominent Kremlin critics — including exiled oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chess champion Gary Kasparov, and Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed opposition political Alexey Navalny — were pointedly offered seats instead.

Heusgen, who served as a top foreign policy aide to the chancellor, admitted in an interview earlier this week that he left last year’s conference believing that Russia will not invadeUkraine. Four days later, the invasion began.

Editor’s Note: John J. Sullivan was US Ambassador to Russia from December 2019 to October 2022. He was a US deputy secretary of state. And is now a partner in Mayer Brown LLP and a Distinguished Fellow at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

I had been telling people for a while that Russian President Vladimir Putin was going to launch a war in Europe, which hadn’t been seen since World War II.

Although confident in my pre-war assessment, I was disconsolate. The US Ambassador worked hard to make even modest progress in a few areas with the Russians after being there for two years.

I say this with a heavy heart, as a person who was an advocate for continued negotiations with the Russian government even as the downward spiral of our relationship accelerated. I was the deputy secretary of state and took charge of the negotiations in Moscow, leaving a comfortable perch on Mahogany Row.

The Russians would not engage in a real dialogue if they read from their talking points. Minders from the Russian security services monitored every meeting and phone call. The Russians were going through a diplomatic charade to lay the groundwork for an invasion that Putin had already decided to launch. When was the only question.

The war changed things great and small, from where I lived in Moscow to Russia’s standing in the world. The pace of teleconferences with Washington made it necessary for me to be available at all hours.

It was a year ago that the Russian leader called for international diplomatic efforts to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity and find a solution to the conflict in the Donbas.

The economic toll alone is staggering, and until it is stopped and reversed on acceptable terms, it will only get worse.

The Russian government needs to realize that its goals can’t be achieved. The Russians will only negotiate in good faith. And only then will peace return to Europe.

Biden’s departure from Kiev on Sunday morning criticized China for allegedly provoking the Ukrainian war with a missile and a drone attack

As US President Joe Biden touched down in Ukraine to meet with his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday, China’s top diplomat was traveling in the opposite direction, on his way to Russia.

The sharpening of geopolitical fault lines between the world’s two powers is emphasized by the events taking place on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the war.

“We do not add fuel to the fire, and we’re against reaping benefits from this crisis,” Wang said in a thinly veiled dig at the US, echoing the propaganda messaging that regularly made China’s nightly prime-time news program – that the US is intentionally prolonging the war because its arms manufacturers are earning fat profits from weapon sales.

China’s Foreign Ministry accused the US of spreading false information and blamed them for “shoving responsibility”.

The US side supplies a steady stream of weapons to the battlefield. The US is not qualified to lecture China because they are not aware of the situation, a ministry spokesman told a news conference.

Is it possible that dialogue and peace are being called for? Who is encouraging confrontation by giving out knives? The international community can see clearly,” the spokesperson said.

Beijing avoided actions that could prompt secondary sanctions, which would have been devastating for the economy, because they had avoided it previously.

Though Beijing claimed impartiality in the conflict and no advance knowledge of Russia’s intent, it has refused to condemn Moscow and parroted Kremlin lines blaming NATO for provoking the conflict.

Beijing supports Moscow because of its annual trade, diplomatic engagements, and schedule of military exercises, as well as the fact it has a pro-Russian rhetoric.

Instead, he secretly left Washington early on Sunday morning. Security concerns meant that details about how he got to Ukraine were not immediately available. Biden left the capital. Kyiv has been the target of Russian missile and drone strikes, including as recently as Feb. 10.

Biden traveled to Kyiv with a lot of caution due to the security concerns. Air Force One departed Joint Base Andrews under cover of darkness at 4:15 a.m. ET on Sunday, and reporters aboard the plane were not allowed to carry their devices with them.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan, deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon and personal aide Annie Tomasini are some of the people that Biden is traveling with.

The first two months of the Russian-Russia war in Kyiv: Biden’s visit to Poland and the U.S.-Russia deconfinement

They first began visiting Kyiv in March 2022, when the prime ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic all arrived by train. Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited April 9, followed by visits from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and then-Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

Biden’s wife traveled to a small city in the far southwestern corner of Ukraine last year for a surprise visit on Mother’s Day. She met with Zelenska at the former school that was converted into temporary housing for displaced Ukrainians.

Security precautions prevented Biden from going to another place. When he visited Poland in April last year, the White House did not even explore the potential for a trip across the border, even though Biden said he had voiced interest.

The war, unlike Biden’s previous appearance in Warsaw, appears poised to stretch at least another year, since Putin’s forces appeared to retreat and the Russian economy seemed to be going broke under the weight of Western sanctions. There are currently no serious efforts at negotiating an end to the fighting.

Zelensky isn’t sure if he’ll accept any parameters in any peace negotiations, and the US has refused to say what a settlement might look like.

A few hours before he departed, the United States informed Russia of the plans to visit the Ukrainian capital for “deconfliction purposes,” according to Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Biden will send a message to the region that the U.S. needs to remain united behind Ukraine, while reassuring the region that U.S. support remains strong.

Biden in Kiev: Why do we need a US air force to go see it, or how to go about it? A CNN interview with Kirby

Some Republican budget hawks want to curtail the spending on the war as a growing number of Americans are concerned about how much money has gone to it.

The President and his wife were in Washington for a Saturday night of date-nights, and they ate rigatoni and smoked vegetables before flying back to Washington.

The next time he was seen in public was 36 hours later, striding out of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv into a bright winter day, air raid sirens wailing a reminder of both the risks and reason for visiting Ukraine as it nears a second year of war.

Yet it was more than symbolism that drove Biden to endure the significant risk of visiting an active war zone without significant US military assets on the ground.

“This is so much larger than just Ukraine. It’s about freedom of democracy in Europe, it’s about freedom and democracy at large,” he said, his blue-and-yellow tie an overt nod to his Ukrainian hosts.

That was in part due to the fluid nature of the trip itself. Even as the small circle of White House officials looped in on the planning grew confident it was an achievable undertaking, the realities of sending a president into a war zone where the US had no control over the air space were daunting.

The no notice of Biden’s departure was given to reporters on Sunday. The White House schedule said he would leave at 7 p.m. on Monday.

“We’re going to continue to use our convening power, to marshal the world, to galvanize support for Ukraine, but there are no plans for the president to enter Ukraine on this trip,” NSC spokesman John Kirby said in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/20/politics/president-biden-kyiv-trip/index.html

The Biden-Zelensky trip to Ukraine, a decision made with the White House, but without the Military or Secret Service

At that point, Biden had already gotten off the plane at Joint Base Andrews and was flying in an Air Force C-32, not the regular plane used for Air Force One.

There would be a stop to refuel at a US base in Germany before continuing the flight into Poland. Biden was focused on planning his conversations with Zelensky and hoped to use his limited time to discuss the coming months of fighting.

“I am in Poland to see firsthand the humanitarian crisis, but at the same time I am not able to see it firsthand like I have elsewhere,” Biden said at the time. I will not be able to cross the border and look at what is happening in Ukraine.

It was the culmination of a process that began months earlier, as Biden watched as a parade of his foreign counterparts each made the journey into Ukraine.

The person familiar with the matter said that Biden was presented with many options for a visit to Ukraine but only chose the capital of Ukranian for the trip.

“This was a risk that Joe Biden wanted to take,” said White House communications director Kate Bedingfield. Even when it is hard, he directs his team to make it happen no matter how challenging the logistical aspects are.

Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, did not say if Biden had to overrule the military or Secret Service in order to go ahead with the trip.

“He got a full presentation of a very good and very effective operational security plan. He heard that presentation, he was satisfied that the risk was manageable and he ultimately made a determination (to go),” Sullivan said.

President Biden’s visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, isn’t a danger to the United States, and it will be deeply offensive to Russia

The President of the United States, wearing a coat and sunglasses, strolled through Kyiv in the middle of the day, visiting a historic church as air raid sirens wailed and stood exposed in St Michael’s Square.

Biden may have not had the right words when he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” But Biden’s visit instantly went down in history alongside two defining trips to divided Berlin by Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan that were flashpoints of the Cold War and each of which sent their own image of US resolve to the Kremlin.

Putin is going to have to respond tomorrow to what happened today and President Biden’s claim of the upper hand, according to Rudik.

Biden was also concerned that Russia’s targeted campaign on civilian infrastructure would leave Ukraine’s air defenses spread too thin, forcing Kyiv to make an impossible choice: deploy its limited air defense assets to protect its frontline troops, or its cities.

It felt like a jab at critics that questioned whether Biden should be thinking about a reelection race at the age of 80.

And like Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month, his stagecraft infuriated the most extreme wing of the Republican Party, which Biden has said is a danger to US democracy and values. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, quickly slammed Biden for journeying to Ukraine and other GOP figures accused him of caring more for Kyiv’s borders than those in the US.

It is incredibly offensive. On today’s President’s Day, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, chose the Government of Ukraine over the Government of the United States. I can not express how much Americans hate Joe Biden,” Greene said in a tweet.

There is nothing more presidential than standing for the right of a people to resist tyranny, from a foreign oppressor whose fight for independence mirrors America’s own.

“Biden in [Kyiv]. Russian journalist Sergey Mardan slammed his Telegram reply, saying it was a huge humiliation of Russia. “Tales of miraculous hypersonics may be left for children. Just like spells about the holy war we are waging with the entire West.”

Russian army veteran and former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Igor Girkin meanwhile suggested that Biden could have visited the frontlines in eastern Ukraine and escaped unharmed.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if the grandfather (he is not good for anything but simple provocations anyway) is brought to Bakhmut as well… AND NOTHING WILL HAPPEN TO HIM,” Girkin said.

There are many hardline military commentators who give analysis of the conflict for large swaths of the Russian populace and who have criticized what they consider to be a soft approach by Putin’s generals.

The differences between the two speeches were stark, both in content and character. Biden was introduced in Warsaw to a pulsing pop anthem; Putin seemed to put some members of his audience to sleep with his hour-and-45-minute address. Biden said that Putin made a mistake by suspending his country’s participation in the New START treaty.

The Kremlin is saying that foreign guests will not be invited to the event but participants of the special military operation will.

On the one- year anniversary of the war in Iraq, Biden will return to the Royal Castle, which has put him at odds with the Russians, a Cold War dynamic underscored by his secretive visit to the Ukrainian city of Kyiv a day earlier.

Biden talked to the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania and the head of the EPA on the phone after his speech in Warsaw.

The End of the War: Biden’s Visit to the White House and the Implications for the US and the Warsaw Crisis in the Era of Warsaw

“Freedom is priceless. For as long as is necessary, it is worth fighting for. Biden told Zelensky that he was going to be with him for as long as it took.

Yet Biden – nor any other Western leader – has not been able to say exactly how long that will be, making this week as much about the year ahead as it is about the past 12 months.

As Air Force One returns to Washington, however, it is difficult to ignore the looming questions Biden’s visit did little to answer: How and when the war will end.

Germany’s Chancellor, who will meet Biden at the White House next month, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Friday that it was wise to be prepared for a long war.

Concerns about the availability of weapons and ammunition in the past week indicate that the West can’t always provide unlimited support for the war effort, as shown by polls showing support for the war effort waning.

There is a concern about the US staying power, in Poland and in Ukraine, that I can tell you about. This war would look entirely different without the support of the US,” said Michal Baranowski, the managing director in Warsaw of the German Marshall Fund.

“The fact is that we are fighting with time, right?” Baranowski said. “I mean, it’s really whether time is on the side of Russia, who is losing but has a lot of resources to deplete us in the West. That’s what gives me pause. I hope we have the staying power.

The U.S. War on Irregular Nuclear Infrastructures and the Ruling of a New START Atomic Reduction Treaty with the United States

In an indication of the massive number of refugees Poland has absorbed since the start of the war, his remarks will be translated into both Polish and Ukrainian.

John Kirby said the president would have a message for people all around the world.

The risky trip on Monday to an active war zone was a shot in the arm to a population that has faced constant attacks on their homes by Russia, and it was a symbol of American support.

In the early days of the invasion, Ukrainians claimed they found Russian troops dressed in their dress uniforms expecting a victory parade.

Biden is elderly and has a stiff neck. Air raid sirens sounded over Kyiv while Biden was there, but he has no shortage of courage or competence.

A joyous Zelensky said Biden’s visit “brings us closer to victory,” adding it will “have repercussions on the battlefield in liberating our territories.”

China’s Foreign Ministry said that the upcoming visit to Moscow by the Chinese will give them an opportunity to continue to develop their strategic partnership with Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is suspending his country’s participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, imperiling the last remaining pact that regulates the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.

Finally, another treaty simply between Moscow and Washington no longer makes sense to most nuclear experts. The Pentagon now estimates that China, which is rapidly expanding its arsenal, could deploy 1,500 weapons in the next dozen years, matching the American and Russian arsenals. So an arms control treaty that left out one of the three major powers would be all but useless. If there were negotiations, China had no interest in joining them.

Russia had refused multiple times to allow inspections of their nuclear facilities, according to US officials. The US State Department stated in January that Russia isn’t complying with its obligations under the New START Treaty.

Even before Mr. Putin dismissed the implementation of the treaty’s required inspections as “nonsense,” it was already in deep trouble. Last month, the State Department said the Russians were out of compliance with their treaty obligations.

The administration of President Joe Biden is willing to talk about the nuclear arms treaty with Russia no matter what else is happening in the world.

“It’s really unfortunate and irresponsible that Russia decided to do that,” said Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State. The U.S. has previously accused Russia of violating the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries.

HansKristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project, questioned if Russia will stop exchanging data with the US after Putin said that the treaty was on life support.

Mr. Putin’s announcement, he added, was “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible.” He thought that the United States would continue its compliance with the treaty regardless of what Russia did.

The new world that will appear to be similar to the one of half a century ago, when arms races were in full swing, could be facing someone sitting in the Oval Office.

Vladimir Putin: The War on the Crimes of the Third Reich, the Crime of the Cold War, and the Integral Security of the State of the Union

He said inspectors could pass their findings on to the Ukrainians, so he wouldn’t allow them to survey those facilities. He said that it was a theater of the absurd. “We know that the West is directly involved in the attempts of the Kyiv regime to strike at the bases.”

Putin acknowledged Russia’s significant losses in the war and called on those present to stand for a moment of silence in their memory. The leader of Russia promised to support the families of the fallen.

Missing from Putin’s address was any discussion of Russia’s significant setbacks on the battlefield and its evident failure in the early days of the war to occupy Kyiv and remove Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

Should the US conduct new nuclear tests, the military and atomic energy agency have been instructed to test additional nuclear weapons as well.

Putin presented a now-familiar list of grievances against the West, including what he described as its moral and spiritual collapse whose values, he said, threaten the children of Russia. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarch Kirill, was seated front-row center in the hall.

The Russian leader again equated Ukraine’s “neo Nazi” government with Nazi Germany, and said Russia was defending itself just as the Soviet Union defended its territory during World War II.

Putin’s speech in effect made good on an overdue commitment: the Kremlin repeatedly delayed and then ultimately canceled last year’s address amid a trickle of bad news from the battlefield in Ukraine.

Today’s address also kickstarts a series of connected and choreographed events: Russian lawmakers gather for an extraordinary session of both chambers of parliament Wednesday, when Putin will also address a mass rally at Moscow’s largest stadium.

Putin then assembled his National Security Council for a televised session to discuss the independence issue — now famous for the image of the Russian leader holding court across a vast hallway to consult with, in theory, his closest advisors.

How Does Putin Want to Make America Great Again? An Analysis of the Conversation on CNN with E.C. Kirby, J.E. Petraeus, S.O. Putin, C.L. Osnos, J

Poland has provided $3.8 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to NATO. Kirby said that Biden would like to thank Poland for its hosting of U.S. forces.

The author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind” is a journalist based in New York. Follow her on social media. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.

For Americans who came of age after the end of the Cold War, this renewed threat of nuclear annihilation is both new and terrifying; for those who lived through the original Cold War, this is no doubt a hair-raising reboot.

Biden is correct that this is a fight between freedom and oppression. It’s worth nothing, though, that Putin’s emphasis on cultural and gender warfare is also correct, in its own way.

He is of course lying and fear-mongering when he fulminates about same-sex marriage or the prospect of a gender-neutral God and when he says that the West seeks “the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion and the abuse of children are declared the norm.” There is a clear historical and contemporary relationship between conservatism and autocracy, as well as liberal tolerance and democracy.

Conservative religiosity is of course not a requirement for autocracy – just look at the previous era of Russian autocracy, which was decidedly irreligious. Conservative Christian principles in China are not being brought by Beijing’s autocrats who are toying with lending material support to Russia.

They are embracing traditionalism and other tendencies of the past. Among analysists of global authoritarians, a familiar refrain has emerged: Make [x country] Great Again. According to Evan Osnos, the president is trying to make China great again. David Petraeus said in a CNN interview that Putin wanted to make Russia great again. We all know the American version.

It’s informative, though (and scary) to realize the extent to which a number of right-wing Americans believe Putin has a point about the West being degenerate, and seem comfortable bringing a strongman in to restore the traditional order.

The most prominent difference between West and East is that of those who want democracies to allow people to live freely regardless of their religious beliefs, sexual orientations or ambitions, and those who prefer strongmen who use the law to impose conservative values.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/opinions/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-war-one-year-filipovic/index.html

What Putin Really Means: Liberating Ukraine and Defending the Globalist Empire as a Crime against Human Rights and Freedoms in the U.S.

Donald Trump praised Putin and trashed NATO, elevating the dictator to a pro-Trump conservative. As of a year ago, Republicans in the US had a more favorable view of Putin than of Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party.

The Georgia lawmaker said NATO had supplied the neo-Nazis with powerful weapons and training to use them.

She said on the campaign trail that she would not allow another penny to go to Ukraine. The white nationalist who ate with Trump and West told his followers that he wishes Putin was president of America. The CEO of the right-wing platform Gab put the issue succinctly last year: what Putin really means is that Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the globalist empire.

This is not just a divide between Russia and the US. It’s a divide within Russia itself, as the nation’s feminists, LGBTQ rights advocates, and democracy activists continue to push (often at great personal risk) for a freer and fairer country. And it’s a divide within the US, too, between the Americans who want liberal democracy to thrive, and those who want their ideology to rule us all.

A year into Putin’s war, it’s clear that he is willing to sacrifice untold lives to cement his power and Russia’s imperial interests. The American people can either stand with autocrats and their views of the world or they can choose not to. Or do we stand for freedom and democracy – including the obligation to live among those whose views you don’t agree with and whose choices you wouldn’t make yourself?

The Pentagon’s push for Ukrainian integration of war-torsion: Sullivan and Milley speak directly with top advisers to Zelensky

That directive, described to CNN by three administration officials, jump-started an effort at the Pentagon to identify and deliver a Patriot missile battery that the US could spare. New intelligence that Iran might be preparing to sell ballistic missiles to Russia also made the issue even more urgent and, two months later, the Pentagon announced a Patriot battery would be on its way to Kyiv.

The United States has urged the Ukrainian military to shift to a maneuver warfare style of fighting that uses rapid, unforeseen movements and a combination of different combat arms instead of relying too heavily on cannon fire.

In addition to lower-level military contacts, National security adviser Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley all speak directly with their counterparts multiple times a week.

Both Sullivan and Milley have regular joint calls with top advisers to Zelensky, including the leader of the Ukrainian armed forces. These calls give Sullivan and Milley a chance to get the latest reports from the battlefield and assess the Ukrainian military’s needs.

The Pentagon conducts a high degree of analysis on Ukrainian requests to assess how quickly they will be integrated into the battlefield, the impact of transferring new weapons onto US military readiness, and how long it will take to train and integrate the new weapons.

Even as the process has gotten more organized, with US equipment now often landing in Ukraine within days of Biden approving a security package, the urgency persists.

A senior official in the State Department said they had never seen a bureaucracy work as quickly as it is doing.

A senior administration official told us the president was angry about the issue and pushed his team at the Pentagon to look at what they could do to help.

Sullivan hosts a daily meeting of the National Security Council officials at the White House, which led to an effort to get US allies to also help with the support of Ukraine.

“We really went around the world and found for them, not only additional systems that other countries had and persuade them to transfer them, but parts,” the official said, allowing Ukraine to get non-operational S-300 systems back online.

The decision by the US to provide howitzers in April and multiple rocket launchers in June have been matched or complemented by allies.

“At every stage of conflict, we have adapted to make sure the Ukrainians had what they needed to be successful – and they have,” a senior administration official said. They have adapted.

The West’s support for the war in Ukraine is being challenged by sheer logistics and the need to maintain the pace of supplies as stockpiles dwindle.

The Ministry of Defense in the Republic of Georgia stated that a lot of the ammunition stocks in Europe have been used up.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/22/politics/ukraine-us-military-aid-reservations-one-year/index.html

Joe Biden’s war strategy against Russia isn’t going to stop there, but the United States does want to make the war in Ukraine a priority

The Ukrainian military has instinctively wanted to fight an artillery war, US officials say, which involves firing a crushing amount of heavy artillery at the enemy’s defensive lines.

It is a strategy straight out of the Russian way of doing things. Russia has tried to drag Ukraine into an extended war in hopes that it can take on the Ukrainians, officials said.

The plan calls for Russia to withdraw its troops from the state of Ukraine, as well as a special court to prosecute Russian war crimes, and the release of all Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“I think strategically the allies are getting to the realization that this is going to be a longer war,” said Salm, the Estonian defense secretary. “It’s going to be an extremely costly war and in order to manage this strategy, you need to have an end goal.”

The senior State Department official told them the US understands the position. An end goal “has to be something that any democratically elected leader in Ukraine can sell to his or her public,” the official said. “But I think he’s committed to get there.”

The warzone that has taken shape of President Joe Biden’s presidency came to the fore when he slept barely as his train car went across the warzone earlier this week.

Biden will leave Europe three days later and loudly reiterate his commitment to backing the Ukrainian government in its fight against Russia, while trying to cast aside doubts about the resilience of American support and blaming the Russians for starting the war.

In conversations with aides, foreign counterparts and even by phone with his wife over the course of his visit, Biden has asserted his trip this week was essential in showing the world the US wouldn’t waver in its support.

Biden’s landmark speech in Warsaw, Ukraine, is not an example of an American crisis despite Russia’s renunciation of Ukraine

There have been persistent concerns at how Ukraine is using those resources among some US and European officials, who have encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to focus on planning and executing a spring counteroffensive rather than waging battle on multiple fronts, some with less strategic importance than others.

Tellingly, Sullivan said much of Biden’s focus during the day-long journey into the warzone was spent plotting out how he would raise those issues with Zelensky when they sat down to talk inside the gold-and-white Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv.

Instead, the president focused his remarks in Warsaw – a landmark address he’s been developing for weeks – on heralding the continued resistance of the Ukrainians and accusing Putin of a litany of atrocities.

In his speech, Biden was hoping to reach a wide range of people, including the Russians who may be dissatisfied by their leaders’ failings, and the besieged Ukrainian people.

The United States, thousands of miles from the frontlines, was seen by some on his team as the most important, because they were mostly silent about the war despite polls showing a change in public opinion.

Biden’s critics used his trip this week to paint him as inattentive to his own country’s needs, seizing upon a toxic chemical spill caused by a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, as an example of an American crisis deserving his attention.

“I reaffirmed my commitment to making sure they have everything they need,” he wrote in a caption accompanying a photo of the call that was posted on Instagram.

But he also used the opportunity to blast Republicans – including former President Donald Trump, who is set to visit East Palestine on Wednesday – for loosing regulations and making it more difficult to strengthen rail safety.

Initially viewed skeptically by the Biden administration for his human rights record and reversal of certain democratic norms, Duda has emerged as the United States’ top partner in Eastern Europe amid the raging war in Ukraine, overseeing a massive influx of refugees and turning Poland into a logistics hub for the shipments of Western military assistance over the border.

This week was in a century-old context of robust American presence on the continent, as spoken across the table from Biden.

“The United States … has demonstrated on multiple occasions its responsibility for European matters during the First World War, during the Second World War, during the Cold War. Every single time, they restored the democratic rules. The United States brought freedom back every time.

Chinese-Russian relations and the 2024-2024 campaign: China is going to new frontiers, according to Russian Prime Minister Wang Macaulay

In the latest highly significant move in a week of diplomatic symbolism, Putin welcomed Wang and told him relations between Beijing and Moscow were “reaching new milestones.”

“Currently, the international situation is certainly grim and complex,” Mr. Wang told Mr. Putin, according to brief footage from the meeting that was shared by the Chinese news media. “But Chinese-Russian relations have withstood the test of international turbulence, and are mature and durable — as steadfast as Mount Tai,” he said, referring to a famed Chinese mountain.

And this new and complicated foreign policy picture is not just a problem for American diplomats. Rising challenges abroad as well, as the depletion of US and Western weapons stocks as arms are sent to Ukraine, pose questions about military capacity and whether current defense spending is sufficient. Key Republicans meanwhile are accusing Biden of snubbing voters facing economic and other problems, even as he tries to position Democrats as the protectors of working Americans as the 2024 campaign dawns.

And Biden vowed, “President Putin’s craven lust for land and power will fail, and the Ukrainian people’s love for their country will prevail,” he added.

Biden’s trip also demonstrated that the estrangement between the US and Russia – a factor that will shape global politics for years – is almost complete.

US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned on CNN Sunday that a step would cross a US red line, but did not specify what consequences would be.

So, there are many reasons why China – which has long seen the war in Ukraine through the prism of its rivalry with the US – may not be in a hurry to see the war in Ukraine end.

On Tuesday, Mr. Wang met with Nikolai P. Patrushev, Mr. Putin’s top security adviser. The Chinese government said the two had an exchange of views.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Putin highlighted the economic aspect of the China-Russia relationship, predicting that the countries’ annual trade volume could reach $200 billion as early as this year, compared with $185 billion last year.

We are going to new frontiers, according to Mr. Putin. We are talking about economic issues.