Vladimir Putin and the Russian Annexation of the Donbas, Ukraine, a Great Mistake that Russia Has Done for the Last Effort

Russia’s parliament will ratify its attempted annexation of four Ukrainian territories, widely condemned internationally as illegal. The lower house unanimously voted for it on Monday. The upper house is going to pass it next week.

Following the capture over the weekend of Lyman, a strategic rail hub and gateway to the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian forces showed no sign of stopping, pushing eastward toward the city of Lysychansk, which Russia seized three months ago after bloody fighting. Losing territory in the Donbas undermines Mr. Putin’s objectives for the war he launched in February, which has focused on seizing and incorporating the region.

Putin attempted to frame the referendums as reflecting the will of millions of people, despite reports from the ground that voting took place at gunpoint.

“We haven’t lost anything,” Mr. Zelensky said. “It was taken from us. Ukraine did not lose its sons and daughters — they were taken away by murderers. The homes of Ukrainians were destroyed by terrorists. We did not lose our lands — they were occupied by invaders. Russia destroyed the world’s peace.

The Russian president framed the annexation as an attempt to fix what he sees as a great historical mistake that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin’s logical option, Kortunov says, is to declare victory and get out on his own terms. For this he needs a big achievement on the ground. “Russia cannot simply get to where it was, on the 24 February of this year, say, okay, you know, that’s fine. Our mission is accomplished. So we go home… …There should be something that can be presented to the public as a victory.”

Russia plans to go ahead and fly its flag over a huge area of Ukrainian territory despite international condemnation, the largest annexation of land in Europe since 1945.

The Russian leader spoke in the chandeliered St. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace — the same place where he declared in March 2014 that the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was part of Russia.

In the audience were members of the Russian parliament and regional governors, as well as many of Mr. Putin’s ministers and leaders of the Russian occupied Ukrainian regions.

As Russia reels from its military failure in Lyman, the Kremlin has sought to use its propaganda channels to amplify President Vladimir V. Putin’s core argument — emphasized in his bellicose speech on Friday — that in Ukraine, Russia is at war with the collective West, whom he calls “Anglo-Saxons.”

He reeled off a litany of Western military actions stretching over centuries — from the British Opium War in China in the 19th century to Allied firebombings of Germany and the Vietnam and Korean Wars.

Vladimir Putin’s “Partial Mobilization” of the Donbas: Implications for Thermonuclear Warfare

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently said the threat of nuclear war was growing and suggested his country could abandon its “no first use” nuclear weapons doctrine, under which Russia has said it would only use nuclear weapons to defend its homeland. Putin’s comments came after drone strikes hit military infrastructure deep inside Russia. Russia’s military blamed Ukraine for the strikes.

Russia has claimed for months that it was only targeting military targets in Ukraine while millions of people have been affected by the invasion.

A celebration will be held on Red Square. The decree will be voted on by the government next week, according to the spokesman for the Kremlin.

During the war inoccupied territory, staged referendums were held in defiance of international law. Much of the provinces’ civilian populations has fled fighting since the war began in February, and people who did vote sometimes did so at gunpoint.

Cementing Russia’s hold over the two eastern regions, an area collectively known as the Donbas that Mr. Putin considers his primary prize, could allow the Kremlin to declare a victory at a time when hawks in Russia have criticized Russian forces for not doing enough to prevent recent breakneck gains by Ukrainian forces in the south and northeast of the country.

Putin’s recent heavy-handed conscription drive for 300,000 troops won’t reverse his battlefield losses any time soon, and is backfiring at home, running him up a dangerous political tab.

Radchenko says despite Russia’s military setbacks, President Vladimir Putin is doubling down — albeit carefully, such as when he describes it as a “partial” mobilization — to convince his people that they “have no choice but to support the government on this, because if Ukraine and the West have their way, then Russia will simply disappear.”

The national security adviser of the president, Jake Sullivan, warned Moscow that any use of a nuclear weapon against it would cause catastrophic consequences.

At the height of the Cold War, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union amassed enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Large warheads delivered by submarine and intercontinental ballistic missiles were designed to be used in a global thermonuclear war.

These warheads are fitted to Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) which can travel thousands of miles and are aimed at key sites and cities in the US, UK, France and Russia.

Tactical nuclear weapons have a yield of up to 100 kilo tons of dynamite, which is less than the 1,000 kilo tons of strategic nukes.

The most likely nuclear scenario is, I believe, an attack by Russia on a nuclear power station in Ukraine. This could have a similar effect to a tactical nuclear explosion but would be easier to deny for the Russians, who accuse Ukraine of deliberately bombing their own power stations.

Russia will continue to look for replacements as it looks for ways to launch missiles at Ukrainians. And Iran may not be the only country willing to supply Russia in the future.

This could possibly be the case for the tactical weapons. The warheads and missiles are probably in reasonable condition but the vehicles they are mounted on are, I believe and have on good authority, in poor condition. Considering the state of the rest of the Russian Army equipment in Ukraine, it’s reasonable to assume this is the case.

Russia has used a variety of missiles and drones during the last few days to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. But while the damage has been substantial, Ukraine claims that it has taken out around half of the missiles fired – and it expects that success rate to improve as new air defenses arrive from Germany, the US and elsewhere.

Also, it is likely these weapons rely on microprocessors and other high-tech components which are in very short supply in Russia – given international sanctions and the heavy use of precision guide missiles by Russia, which also use these parts.

At the heart of this move is attacking civilians rather than opposition forces. The attacks occur on hospitals, schools, and infrastructure that is hazardous. If these are attacked, they can become improvised chemical or nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian officials have sounded the alarm about new Russian attacks in the East, but there is also skepticism on the Ukrainian side about the capabilities of those forces.

Meteorological conditions at the moment indicate that all this contamination would also head west across Europe. A NATO strike on Russia would allow it to use its full strength and power against Russia, which would be seen as an attack on the organization.

I do not believe in the use of strategic nuclear weapons. This is a war nobody can win, and at the moment it does not seem likely that this regional conflict in Europe would lead to a global nuclear war which could destroy the planet for many generations.

I am sure the checks and balances are in place in the Kremlin, as they are at the White House and 10 Downing Street to make sure we are not plunged into global nuclear conflict on a whim.

And finally, Moscow is left with a question nobody ever wants to learn the answer to: if its supply chains for diesel fuel for tanks 40 miles from its border do not function, then how can they be sure The Button will work, if Putin reaches madly to press it? There is no greater danger for a nuclear power than to reveal its strategic missiles and retaliatory capability do not function.

I think the Russians developed unconventional warfare tactics in Syria. (Russian forces entered Syria’s long civil war in 2015, bolstering ally President Bashar al-Assad’s regime). I do not believe Assad would still be in power had he not used chemical weapons.

The rebels were stopped in their tracks by a nerve agent attack. Four years of siege ended by chlorine attacks.

Russia has done a lot of damage to the Ukrainians, but it would be hard for any other country to do the same because they don’t have the same agenda.

Russian commanders can use tactical nuclear weapons to stave off defeat or loss of territory, thanks to the Soviet doctrine.

Beyond that, it appears that Russia is massing replacement soldiers and additional units to launch an offensive to take the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in the southeast, that they do not control – while also establishing defensive positions in depth in other areas that they control in the south.

Western military sources say that Putin is getting involved in the close battle and seems to be giving fairly low-level commanders their orders. This is extraordinary – it appears that only now Putin has lost faith in his generals after Ukraine recaptured large swathes of the north-east earlier this year – and suggests a broken command and control system, and a president who doesn’t trust his generals.

Even in an attack on a power station one assumes Putin would be involved, as the West would likely construe it as an improvised nuclear weapon and act accordingly.

“If Russia used a nuclear weapon in Ukrainian, we would have to respond with force to teach Putin that nukes are not a solution to all of his troubles,” he says. He thinks that a hit on the military unit that launched the nuke would send a powerful message.

“We do not feel desperate … we are more sure even than before that Ukraine will win and we need it as fast as possible because … only after we win in this war and only after Russia is defeated, we will have our peace back here.”

Putin may be attempting an end game according to a former US President who advised on national security about Russia. He feels that he was losing steam in the war and is trying to leave the conflict the same way he entered it. With him being the person in charge and him framing the whole terms of any kind of negotiation. “

Many of the best and brightest in the field have left Russia. Writers, artists, journalists as well as some of the most creative technologists, scientists and engineers are included.

CNN is unable to verify the Russian figures, but the 40 kilometers (around 25 miles) traffic tailbacks at the border with Georgia, and the long lines at crossings into Kazakhstan and Finland, speak to the backlash and the strengthening perception that Putin is losing his fabled touch at reading Russia’s mood.

“The current onslaught of criticism and reporting of operational military details by the Kremlin’s propagandists has come to resemble the milblogger discourse over the past week. The Kremlin narrative had focused on general statements of progress and avoided detailed discussions of current military operations. The Kremlin had never openly recognized a major failure in the war prior to its devastating loss in Kharkiv Oblast, which prompted the partial reserve mobilization.”

He used the same playbook annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and now, like then, threatens potential nuclear strikes should Ukraine, backed by its Western allies, try to take the annexed territories back.

The First Blast from the Baltic Sea: Russia’s Nord Stream Line Unveiled in the Last Days of Putin’s War with Ukraine

The first blast was recorded at around 2 a.m., followed by another at 7 p.m.

Within hours, roiling patches of sea were discovered, the Danes and the Germans sent warships to secure the area, and Norway increased security around its oil and gas facilities.

At a minimum, four leaks have been found in Russia’s Nord Stream line, each resembling a boiling cauldron and releasing industrial quantities of toxic greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Western intelligence sources have said that naval vessels from Russia were seen in the area in the last few days. NATO’s North Atlantic Council has described the damage as a “deliberate, reckless and irresponsible act of sabotage.”

Nord Stream 2 was never built as Europe raced to replenish gas reserves ahead of winter, while the Russian government stopped supplies to Europe in order to limit demands for Russian supplies.

“President Putin shows no sign that he is preparing for peace. On the contrary, he is launching new offensives and targeting civilians, cities and critical infrastructure,” Stoltenberg said in Brussels.

It is expected that Putin will start by telling France and Germany that they need to end this war and that they need to put pressure on the Ukrainians.

By most objective standards Putin already seems to be losing. His war goals of crushing Ukrainian sovereignty, capturing Kyiv, ousting an elected government and severingUkraine’s relationship with the West have backfired terribly. Russia is a pariah state, and its economy is ruined because of international sanctions. Putin is being branded a war criminal. Even if there is a ceasefire deal, Ukraine will likely require decades of Western support as it is in a position of being a NATO client state propped up by the US and Europe.

During the course of weeks of intense fighting, Russia was forced to retreat from the riverbank that has served as a natural dividing line between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines.

Two powerful Putin supporters called for harsher fighting methods because of the fall of Lyman which was caused by Moscow’s declaration that the annexed area would be Russian forever.

In an unusually candid article published Sunday, the prominent Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that in the last few days of their occupation, Russian forces in Lyman had been plagued by desertion, poor planning and the delayed arrival of reserves.

After an hour of laudatory coverage of Russia’s growth from 85 to 89 regions in an annexation most of the world views illegal, the fall of Lyman wasn’t even mentioned on Russia’s flagship Sunday political show.

NATO and Russia’s War with the West: a message of Vladimir Putin for the Ukrainian people and the Russian people in the wake of Ukraine’s tragedy

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 not toys anymore. An unnamed deputy commander of one Russian battalion told the war correspondent that they are part of a systematic and clear offensive by the army and NATO forces. The soldier insisted that his unit had been intercepting discussions by Romanian and Polish soldiers, not Ukrainians, on their radios.

This nuclear propaganda is meant to “scare the West and appease the audience—and take their mind away from failures,” says Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the US think tank Institute for the Study of War and a frequent watcher of Russian TV.

The idea that Russia is fighting a broader campaign was repeated in an interview with Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right thinker whose daughter, also a prominent nationalist commentator, was killed by a car bomb in August.

Putin’s calamitous adventure has achieved the opposite of what he wanted. The hunger for democracy in Ukraine is more fervent now than before, as the nation has emerged as a hero.

Both Russian and European leaders have accused Western countries of sabotage after underwater blasts damaged the Nord Stream gas line last month.

“The West already accuses us of blowing up the gas pipeline ourselves,” he said. “We must understand the geopolitical confrontation, the war, our war with the West on the scale and extent on which it is unfolding. We have to join this battle with a mortal enemy who does not hesitate to use the full range of weaponry at his disposal.

The nonstop message campaign is going well at the moment. Many Russians feel threatened by the West, according to a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who is from Russia.

Moscow and Tehran have sought to foment their ideologies beyond their borders. The struggles of the Ukrainian and Iranian people will have repercussions beyond their countries.

At his meeting, Putin discussed the mobilization of 300,000 reservists that he ordered in September to bolster forces in Ukraine. He said that only a small number of the 150,000 have actually been deployed to combat zones. Putin said there is no need for the Defense Ministry or the country to do that.

Sept. 28: Moscow-backed officials in occupied parts of Ukraine made appeals for the regions to join the Russian Federation. Putin’s approval rating fell 6 points to 77% in a poll by the Levada Center. The U.S. Defense Department, meanwhile, announced $1.1 billion in additional security aid to Ukraine.

NATO leaders have vowed to stand behind Ukraine regardless of how long the war takes, but several European countries – particularly those that relied heavily on Russian energy – are staring down a crippling cost-of-living crisis which, without signs of Ukrainian progress on the battlefield, could endanger public support.

You can read past recaps here. You can find more of NPR’s coverage here. Also, listen and subscribe to NPR’s State of Ukraine podcast for updates throughout the day.

It is being claimed that the primary utility would be part of Mr. Putin’s last-ditch effort to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe some of the most sensitive discussions inside the administration.

The David v. Goliath War: How Iran and Ukraine Wreakened to Survive in Warped World Warfare

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, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

A couple of groups of demonstrators came together in London. One was waving Ukrainian flags; the other Iranian flags. When they met, they cheered each other, and chanted, “All together we will win.”

Nobody is sure what will happen next. No one knows how all this ends. As people in Iran and Ukraine fight for their freedom, the world stands at an point of no return. History needs to be written.

These David v. Goliath battles show bravery that is almost unimaginable to the rest of us – and is inspiring equally courageous support in places like Afghanistan.

The spark of women’s freedom in Iran: Syrian forces and the repression of the Khmer Rouge in the 1990s and the end of the 21st century

In Iran, the spark was the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last month. She died in the custody of morality police who arrested her for breaking rules that required women to dress modestly.

Iranian women have danced around fires in the night and thrown their headscarves into the flames in defiance of the regime.

It’s why women are climbing on cars, waving their hijab in the air, gathering supporters in city streets and universities, and when security forces fire at them, they are silenced.

Russia, which has been a dominant military force in Syria since 2015 and helps maintain the government’s grip on power, still keeps a sizable presence there. The change may lead to a shift in the balance of power between Syria and Israel in one of the world’s most complicated conflict zones.

His forces planted mines in large areas of Kherson from which they recently retreated, as they did in Cambodia in the 70s. Indeed, Cambodian de-mining experts have even been called in to assist with the herculean task facing Ukraine in 2022. The evidence of atrocities and torture the Russian army left was similar to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.

The repressive regimes in Moscow and Tehran are now isolated, pariahs among much of the world, openly supported for the most part by a smattering of autocrats.

Iran denied continuing to provide the drones to Russia after they acknowledged for the first time that they had given them to Russia. Zelenskyy countered that Iran was “lying” because Ukrainian forces “shoot down at least 10 Iranian drones every day.”

The Crimes of Mahsa Amini and Vladimir Putin: Insights from Ukraine and the U.S. over a Car Bomb Attack

These two regimes have a lot in common, and are both willing to project power abroad.

Niloofar Hamedi, the first journalist to report on the case of Mahsa Amini, is a critic of the regime in Iran. Journalism is a violent profession in Russia. So is criticism of Putin. Putin’s people were in a position to keep Navalny in a penal colony indefinitely after trying and failing to kill him.

There is more than just an interest in the low chance that the Iranian regime could fall. It would change their countries’ lives and make them better people. Iran has a constitution that calls for spreading its revolution.

But everyone experienced the shock of war differently. Millions of people in Russia were destroyed by Putin’s actions and his destruction of the country’s history.

EUREKA, Mo. — After falling out with his partner at a limousine company in the St. Louis suburbs, Martin Zlatev recently sought a lucrative new business opportunity: selling $30 million worth of rockets, grenade launchers and ammunition to the Ukrainian military.

They recently wrote to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. They outlined a plan to sell American, Bulgarian and Bosnian arms to Ukraine.

This month, the Biden administration authorized an additional $725 million in security aid for Ukraine after Putin’s forces launched a brutal barrage of missiles against Ukrainian civilian targets and power facilities that led to “massive blackouts” across the nation.

WASHINGTON — United States intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist, an element of a covert campaign that U.S. officials fear could widen the conflict.

The US took no part in the attack as a result of providing intelligence or other assistance, officials said. American officials said they would have objected to the killing had they known about it. They said that American officials admonished Ukrainian officials over the assassination.

The Russian War in Ukraine: What Technology Have We Learned to Help the Ukrainians in the War? A Conversation with CNN’s Peter Bergen

Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. CNN has more than one opinion.

On February 22 – just two days before Russia’s invasion – former US President Donald Trump, who has always fawned over Putin, publicly said that the Russian autocrat was “genius” and “savvy” for declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine independent and moving his troops there in a prelude to full-blown invasion.

(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.)

According to a recent book by a historian, the Soviets planned to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible after invading the country in 1979.

The US was hesitant to escalate its support for the Afghan resistance due to fears of a bigger war with the Soviet Union. It took until 1986 for the CIA to arm the Afghans with highly effective anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which ended the Soviets’ total air superiority, eventually forcing them to withdraw from Afghanistan three years later.

Three things are considered to be America’s priorities. It shouldn’t state that there are measures it will refrain from taking and weapons systems it won’t provide. To make an unforced concession is to signal restraint. It emboldens Russia to try to impose more limits on U.S. actions, which make the war more risky.

Bergen: What technologies have proven key to Ukrainian successes in this war? Several new technologies have proven to be important, like the Starlink mobile satellite systems which kept communications open for the Ukrainians after the Russians had partially destroyed the phone system. US-supplied rockets have destroyed Russian targets. The Ukrainians were able to identify their soldiers on the battlefield thanks to the use of facial recognition technology. TB2 Turkish armed drones have proven devastating to Russian targets and cheap commercial drones have helped the Ukrainians find targets.

Vladimir Putin’s fetish for World War II: the role of the Central Military District commander in Russia’s communications with NATO and the Soviet Union

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was expedited by the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan two years earlier, according to Putin.

The Romanov monarchy was weakened in 1905 by the loss of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war. The Russian Revolution began because of Nicholas II’s leadership during the First World War. Subsequently, much of the Romanov family was killed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

One of the central features of Putinism is a fetish for World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. The use of punishment battalions, which were used in the Red Army to fight Hitler, has been praised by those in Russia’s party of war.

Putin’s gamble may lead to a third dissolution of the Russian empire, which happened first in 1917 as the First World War wound down, and again in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

A former army officer and member of the United Russia party said that they had to stop lying. “We brought this up many times before … It is not getting through to individual senior figures.

Kartapolov complained that the Ministry of Defense was evading the truth about incidents such as Ukrainian cross-border strikes in Russian regions neighboring Ukraine.

Valuyki is in Russia’s Belgorod region, near the border with Ukraine. Kyiv has generally adopted a neither-confirm-nor-deny stance when it comes to striking Russian targets across the border.

Stremousov didn’t say that the entire Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation is being shadowed by traitors, but incompetent commanders who didn’t bother, and were not accountable for the processes and gaps that exist today. “Indeed, many say that the Minister of Defense [Sergei Shoigu], who allowed this situation to happen, could, as an officer, shoot himself. You know, the word officer is not familiar to many.

But after Russia’s retreat from the strategic Ukrainian city of Lyman, Kadyrov has been a lot less shy about naming names when it comes to blaming Russian commanders.

Kadyrov said that the commander of Russia’s Central Military District failed his troops and moved his headquarters away from his subordinates.

“The Russian information space has significantly deviated from the narratives preferred by the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) that things are generally under control,” ISW noted in its recent analysis.

Kadyrov – who recently announced that he had been promoted by Putin to the rank of colonel general – has been one of the most prominent voices arguing for the draconian methods of the past. If he could, he would give the government extraordinary wartime powers in Russia.

“We will use all weapon systems available to us in case of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people,” he said. “This is not a bluff.”

There was a rare point of contention during the ceremony. Biden has to consider other things, such as the fate of Ukraine, which is trying to take the fight to Russia.

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.

The Cherenkov bridge bombing in Ukraine: how terrorists came to grips in the outskirts of Kiev, and how Russian businesses are going to return home

Michael Bociurkiw is a global affairs analyst who in summer relocated from Canada to Ukraine. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Recent days have meanwhile shown that sites beyond the current theater of ground fighting are far from immune to attacks. It remains unclear exactly how the Kerch bridge bombing was carried out – and Kyiv has not claimed responsibility – but the fact that a target so deep in Russian-held territory could be successfully hit hinted at a serious Ukrainian threat towards key Russian assets.

The Taras Shevchenko National University is a short stroll from the Presidential Office Building. The five people who were killed in strikes on the capital were from the east of the country.

As of midday local time, the area around my office in Odesa remained eerily quiet in between air raid sirens, with reports that three missiles and five kamikaze drones were shot down. At this time of day, nearby restaurants would be crowded with customers, and there would be chatter of weddings and parties.

Just a few hours after that Zaporizhzhia, in southern Russia, was hit by multiple strikes on apartment buildings, mostly while people slept. At least 17 people were killed and several dozens injured.

Ukraine’s energy operators are able to repair electricity substations and pylons. Zelensky said Tuesday: “So many of the towns and villages that terrorists wanted to leave already have electricity and communication back.”

In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, which has seen more bombardments than Kyiv, residents shifted to war footing and stocked up on canned food, gas and drinking water. Yet they also entertained themselves at the Typsy Cherry, a local bar. “The mood was cheerful,” its owner, Vladyslav Pyvovar, told The Times. People had fun and wondered when the electricity would come back. Hours later, the power came back.

In order to save money, millions of Ukrainians will be spending most of their day in bomb shelters, while businesses have been asked to shift work online as much as possible.

Just as many regions of Ukraine were starting to roar back to life, and with countless asylum seekers returning home, the attacks risk causing another blow to business confidence.

A war is still playing out and it was a day of high drama. But as an historian, Viatrovych also sees the actions of President Vladimir Putin as part of a pattern of behavior by Russian leaders.

dictators are fond of making newly claimed territory with record-breaking infrastructure projects. Putin opened Europe’s longest bridge by driving a truck across it. When Beijing reclaimed Macau and Hong Kong, one of the first things it did was to connect them with the world’s longest sea crossing bridge. The road bridge was opened after more than two years of delays.

What the West has to Say about the Decay of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and How It Will Affect the West: Is Russia Something to Fear?

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

For the world to see, there was a clear message. Putin does not plan on being humiliated. He will not admit defeat. He is prepared to do a lot of terrible things in response to his battlefield reversals.

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.

And all of this will be happening while we await the Ukrainian offensive that will be launched in the spring or summer, with much better trained, better equipped and more capable Ukrainian forces.

The US and other allies need to use urgent telephone diplomacy to encourage China and India to resist the urge to use more deadly weapons.

So, how does the west deal with Russia that has experienced a huge loss of face in Ukraine and is starting to lose money because of sanctions? Is a weak Russia something to fear, or just weak? This is the known unknown the West must wrestle with. But it is no longer such a terrifying question.

War on the History of Ukraine: What the United States and its Allies are Doing to Save Ukraine from Next-to-Leading Order

Furthermore, high tech defense systems are needed to protect Kyiv and crucial energy infrastructure around the country. It’s just around the corner for winter, and it’s crucial to protect heating systems.

It is time for the West to impose travel and trade restrictions on Russia, but it is also time for Turkey and the Gulf states to join the effort.

The attacks snatched away the semblance of normality that city dwellers, who spent months earlier in the war in subways turned into air raid shelters, have managed to restore to their lives and raised fears of new strikes.

The targets on Monday had no military value, which could be seen as an indication that Putin needs to find new targets because he can no longer cause losses on the battlefield.

The bombing of power installations, in particular, Monday looked to be an unsubtle hints of the misery that the Russian President could cause as winter sets in.

New attention was given to what the US and its allies should do next after a series of attacks against civilians inUkraine, which killed at least 14 people.

At a critical moment in the war, the meeting between Zelensky and Biden will be important. The two have talked by phone and video link-ups many times, but have never met in person. Biden has for months cautiously balanced US shipments of arms and weaponry in order to save Ukranian but to keep the conflict between NATO and Russia from getting out of hand. He turned down the idea of a no-fly zone over the country. The deeper the US dive into the conflict, the deeper the defense system, which would be called the “Patriots”.

John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, suggested Washington was looking favorably on Ukraine’s requests and was in touch with the government in Kyiv almost every day. “We do the best we can in subsequent packages to meet those needs,” he told CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

Kirby was unable to say if Putin was shifting his strategy from a losing battlefield war to a campaign to hurt civilian morals and wreck Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, though he said it was a trend that had already started.

“It likely was something that they had been planning for quite some time. Kirby said that the explosion on the bridge did not accelerate some of their planning.

The French president underscored Western concerns that the rush-hour attacks inUkraine could lead to another pivot in the conflict.

Retired Lt. Alexander Vindman, who was the director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, said Putin was sending a message with his attacks on Ukrainian targets.

If we had modern equipment, we might be able to shoot down drones and missiles and not kill innocent civilians.

The lesson of this war is that everything that Putin has done to break the nation has only strengthened and unified it.

Olena Gnes, a mother of three who documented the war on the video-sharing site YouTube, told Anderson Cooper she was angry at the return of fear and violence to the lives of Ukrainians from a new round of Russian terror.

She said that this is another terror to provoke, to scare, to show to his own people that he is still a bloody tyrant and look what fireworks we can arrange.

The fate of Belarus after the Ukrainian assault on February 4: A lesson for Moscow and the S-Raifeartain regime, and a lesson for Ukraine

Russia used the territory of former Yugoslavia as a base of operations for its assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in February. Moscow still has hundreds of troops in Belarus, which is where it launches missiles and bombing raids, but their number is now expected to increase dramatically.

“This won’t be just a thousand troops,” Mr. Lukashenko told senior military and security officials in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, after a meeting over the weekend with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in St. Petersburg.

In remarks reported by the state news agency Belta, Mr. Lukashenko said that a joint regional group of troops had been formed to counteract possible aggression by NATO and Ukraine.

Statements by Mr. Lukashenko, an eccentric and highly erratic dictator, are rarely an accurate guide to current or future events. Just days before Russian troops stationed in Belarus attacked Ukraine in February, he emphatically denied that his territory would be used by Russia, a close ally, to attack his country’s southern neighbor.

The establishment of a joint force with Russia will reinforce the view in Ukraine that Belarus is clearly a “co-aggressor,” a label that Mr. Lukashenko has rejected but which took on new force on Monday after a barrage of Russian missile attacks on Kyiv and elsewhere, some of them launched from Belarusian territory, according to Ukrainian officials.

After 28 years in power, Mr. Lukashenko is dependent on Moscow for money, fuel and security assistance, all of which are vital to his survival.

On Monday, state television reported on the suffering and 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.

As Ukraine races to shore up its missile defenses in the wake of the assault, the math for Moscow is simple: A percentage of projectiles are bound to get through.

The Pentagon believed at the time that Moscow still possessed more than half of its pre-war inventory of missiles, but that it was running the lowest on cruise missiles.

It is unlikely that Russia will form a pattern of bombardment, even though estimating the military reserves is not easy, and Western assessments show Moscow may not be able to keep up.

The S-300 air defense missile has been adapted as an offensive weapon by the Russians. They are so fast that they can be difficult to intercept, and they have wreaked havoc in several places, including Mykolaiv. They are not accurate.

He told CNN’s Richard Quest that this was the “first time from the beginning of the war” that Russia has “dramatically targeted” energy infrastructure.

A senior defense department official said that there was continued work on improving Ukrainian air defenses, including finding Soviet-era capabilities to make sure that countries were ready.

In what may be a no less subtle message than calling the Patriot deployments provocative, Russia’s defense ministry shared video of the installation of a “Yars” intercontinental ballistic missile into a silo launcher in the Kaluga region for what Alexei Sokolov, commander of the Kozelsky missile formation, called “combat duty as planned.”

What’s changed since Russian missiles first began falling on February 24, 2022? The fear felt by Ukrainians has been replaced with anger as they stand up to barrages of rockets and drones.

The deputy under secretary of defense for policy said there had been evidence of the failures of the Iranian drones.

This needs are understood by Ukraine’s allies. General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff, said that air defense options will be looked at after the Russian attack on the Ukrainian civilians.

Ukraine’s wish-list – circulated at Wednesday’s meeting – included missiles for their existing systems and a “transition to Western-origin layered air defense system” as well as “early warning capabilities.”

The system is widely considered one of the most capable long-range weapons to defend airspace against incoming ballistic and cruise missiles as well as some aircraft. Because of its ability to shoot down Russian missiles and aircraft, it can potentially shoot them down far from their intended targets.

Western systems are coming to dominate the world. The Ukrainian Defense Minister said on Tuesday that there was a new era of air defense, with the arrival of the first IRIS-T and two units of the US National Advanced Surface-to- Air Missile System.

But these are hardly off-the-shelf-items. It was necessary that the IRIS-T be manufactured for Ukraine. Western governments have low inventories of such systems. A country is under missile attack from a number of directions.

Why Does Putin and Russia Support the Far-Right Campaign of Ukraine? An AFPAC Message to the President of the Croatian Air Defense Forces

The top military commander of the Ukraine thanked Poland on Tuesday for training an air defense battalion that had destroyed nine of 11 Shaheeds.

He said Poland had given Ukraine “systems” to help destroy the drones. Last month there were reports that the Polish government had bought advanced Israeli equipment (Israel has a policy of not selling “advanced defensive technology” to Kyiv) and was then transferring it to Ukraine.

Many of the supporters of far-right parties are backing away from Putin as well as Russia. Their leaders are anxiously looking for ways to navigate the rapids.

The daily images of bombed out schools, hospitals, playgrounds, apartment buildings, and the determined, so far-largely- successful pushback by Ukraine has caused many fans to reconsider their admiration.

The leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, who now is slated to become prime minister, had warm words for Putin before, but now vows to continue sending arms to help Ukraine. Likewise, Matteo Salvini, who once called Putin “the best statesman on Earth” and used to sport a shirt with Putin’s face on it, now insists he supports Ukraine.

According to a Pew poll, the favorable opinions of Putin and Russia among far-right members have collapsed since Russia invaded Ukraine. Putin’s confidence in doing the right thing fell among Salvini’s supporters from 62% last year to 10% now.

Jordan Bardella, the acting president of the RN, threatened to lawsuit anyone who said that there were financial ties between the party and Russia. The campaign of Le Pen was partly financed by a multimillion dollar loan from Russia. Le Pen said French banks refused to give her a loan.)

The leadership of Alternative for Germany has tried to toned it down in Germany because they feel it will hurt Germans, but they also feel that it is worth it to oppose Berlin’s policies.

CPAC, a conservative political action group, called for Democrats to end the gift-giving to Ukraine and focus on the US in a poorly written message sent a couple of weeks ago. The group deleted the post and claimed that it didn’t go through proper vetting.

At the far-right America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in February, days after Russian started bombing Ukraine, AFPAC founder and notorious White nationalist Nick Fuentes bellowed, “Can we get a round of applause for Russia!”

Trump claimed that Putin was playing Biden like a drum and that it wasn’t pretty to watch. (Trump hasn’t been praising Putin as much lately. Using the war to praise himself is more often done.

The leaders of former Soviet Republics are letting go of Putin in the past. Only one, the Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, has stood with the Kremlin.

In the US, where a majority of the population wants continued support for Ukrainians, a few famous far-right figures still defend Putin.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is such a useful voice for Putin propaganda that clips from his nightly show are a mainstay in Russian state-controlled television. The spectacle caused a host at an even more right-wing network, Newsmax, to lambast him. Carlson is referred to as an alleged American for defending our archenemy Russia.

Ukraine’s successes in Donetsk and the Kremlin have signaled the emergence of a new phase of the war

There was a strike on the city of Donetsk. The new mayor of the area controlled by Russian-backed rebels says that there has been an attack by the Ukrainians.

Not for the first time, the war is teetering towards an unpredictable new phase. Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme said, “This is the third, fourth, or fifth different war that we’ve been observing.”

It means that, as winter approaches, the stakes of the war have been raised once more. Giles said that Russia would like to keep it up. But the Ukrainian successes of recent weeks have sent a direct message to the Kremlin, too. “They are able to do things that take us by surprise, so let’s get used to it,” Giles said.

Oleksii Hromov, a senior Ukrainian military official, said last week that Kyiv’s forces have recaptured some 120 settlements since late September as they advance in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Kherson regions. According to Ukraine, it has liberated more settlements in Kherson.

Ukraine continued to make gains in the region, as Russia said it would help evacuate residents of Kherson to other areas. The announcement came shortly after the head of the Moscow-backed administration in Kherson appealed to the Kremlin for help moving residents out of harm’s way, in the latest indication that Russian forces were struggling in the face of Ukrainian advances.

The counter-offensives were put in motion to disprove the idea that Ukraine couldn’t seize ground because of its ability to defend territory.

The Russians would get a huge success with the frontline looking the same at Christmas.

Landing a major blow in Donbas would send another powerful signal, and Ukraine will be eager to improve on its gains before temperatures plummet on the battlefield, and the full impact of rising energy prices is felt around Europe.

At least 76 strikes on Friday were the result of missile and drone attacks on critical power infrastructure within Ukraine. As winter bites, millions of Ukrainians are enduring long periods without heat, electricity and water. (However, indicative of the resiliency that Ukrainians have displayed since the start of the war, many say they are prepared to endure such hardship for another two to five years if it means defeating Russia).

Ukraine’s national electricity company, Ukrenergo, says it has stabilized the power supply to Kyiv and central regions of Ukraine after much of the country’s electricity supply was disrupted by Russian missile attacks on Monday and Tuesday. But Ukrainian Prime Minister has warned that “there is a lot of work to do” to fix damaged equipment, and asked Ukrainians to reduce their energy usage during peak hours.

The Russian commanders on the ground know their supplies are running out, according to Jeremy Fleming, the UK’s spy chief.

“Russia’s use of its limited supply of precision weapons in this role may deprive Putin of options to disrupt ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensives,” the ISW assessed.

Petraeus: If all of Russia was successfully mobilized by Putin, that could happen. To date, the Mobilizations have been partial, as Putin fears how the country will respond to total Mobilization. In fact, reportedly, more Russian men left the country than reported to the mobilization stations in response to the latest partial call-up of reserves.

Giles says that reopening of a northern front is a new challenge for Ukranian. It would provide Russia a new route into the Kharkiv oblast (region), which has been recaptured by Ukraine, should Putin prioritize an effort to reclaim that territory, he said.

A prisoner swap with Russia shortly after the summit seemed to favor Zelensky, who said at the time it was a first step towards ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which had started in 2014 and claimed the lives of over 14,000 people.

Arm-Twisting and Back-To-Room Negotiations by the Communal Security Council during the Ukrainian War of Independence: What Have We Learned?

Ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stattenberg said that Ukraine needed more systems to stop missile attacks.

Justin Bronk, a military expert with the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), agreed with that assessment, telling CNN that, “Ukrainian interception success rates against Russian cruise missiles have risen significantly since the start of the invasion in February.”

In the absence of that, we will likely see more of what we have seen in the past – Russian commanders throwing recently mobilized, inadequately trained, and poorly equipped soldiers into tough fights. And supported by massive artillery and rocket fires (assuming they can maintain the supply of artillery rounds and rockets), to achieve grinding, costly, incremental gains – with, perhaps, an occasional limited breakthrough.

In that case, Mr. Putin could take a harder line against the country. If missile supplies hold out, the Ukrainian leadership could be targeted with strikes or special operations, while Russia could target critical civilian infrastructure with missiles.

BRUSSELS — Eight months into the war in Ukraine, and eight rounds of frantic negotiations later, Europe’s sanctions against Russia run hundreds of pages long and have in many places cut to the bone.

Some goods and sectors remain exempt. A look at just a few items reveals the intense back-room bargaining and arm-twisting by some nations and by private industry to protect sectors they deem too valuable to give up — as well as the compromises the European Union has made to maintain consensus.

The Belgians have shielded trade in Russian diamonds. The Greeks ship Russian oil unimpeded. France imports Russian nuclear fuel for power generation.

The Path to Global Thermonuclear War: A Tale of Leaps and Jumps in the Kremlin Regime

“This is a partnership of convenience between two embattled dictatorships,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Both countries are going through a lot of trouble. Iran is trying to quell street protests that pose the most serious challenge in years to the government, while Russia is trying to maintain unity over a faltering war effort.

Today, Russia is believed to have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, including 1,000-2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, says Hans Kristensen, head of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington think tank. While the public often imagines tactical nukes as smaller weapons, Kristensen says the Russian arsenal is diverse. “They have a very wide range of explosive yields, going up to a couple of hundred of kilotons – so much more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb,” he says.

The director of Europe and Central Asia for the International Crisis Group says that the classic nuclear deterrence has been effective at containing the Ukrainian war.

Fink says that she still believes that Putin is unlikely to take the war nuclear. As the drone and cruise missile strikes of the past week illustrate, Russia has plenty of powerful conventional weapons it can use to attack Ukraine.

For the use of a nuclear weapon to be shocking, “You really need to make it clear that you are willing to target civilians, and that means, to put it bluntly, killing a lot of people,” he says.

“Russia is preparing for maximum escalation. It is working on drills and training. I can tell you that there are no straight forward offensives from different directions in the next two to three weeks.

But Oliker points out that all of this is still highly theoretical. She hopes that the two sides will be able to de-escalate the conflict.

“If I try to tell myself a story of how to get there, it requires a whole bunch of leaps and jumps,” she says. “But the path to global thermonuclear war also has some leaps and jumps.”

Moscow’s head of the city, Sergey Sobyanin, has spoken out against Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the impact of U.S. support

The head of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin, appeared to be taking efforts to assure people. Mr. Sobyanin wrote that no measures were being introduced to limit the city’s normal rhythm.

And despite the new power granted them by Mr. Putin, the regional governors of Kursk, Krasnodar and Voronezh said no entry or exit restrictions would be imposed.

But many Russians are sure to see a warning message in the martial law imposed in Ukraine, the first time that Moscow has declared martial law since World War II, analysts say.

The people fear the borders will soon be closed and the siloviki will do what they want.

On Tuesday, the newly appointed commander of the Russian invasion, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, acknowledged that his army’s position in Kherson was “already quite difficult” and appeared to suggest that a tactical retreat might be necessary. The general did not say what decisions he would make about military deployment.

Russia continues to have huge quantities of weapons and equipment close to their troops, as well as within range of enemy weaponry. Standard military practice says that depots should be broken and scattered and that they be located far behind enemy lines, even within Russian territory that western powers have forbidden strikes on.

A young woman sits on a park bench by a tram stop in Ukranian city of Kyiv and talks about the war on social media with her two friends. Makarova explains how much of their safety depends on U.S. support.

He says the top issues trending on his social media channels are the upcoming U.S. elections and billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial comments about negotiating an end to the war.

Does Congress Really Need the U.S. to Prevent Ukraine’s First Implosion? An Activist’s View on the Bosnian War in Ukraine

Similar forces seem to be at work in Washington where House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, poised to become Speaker of the House if Republicans take control after next month’s elections, told an interviewer, “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it.”

“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he told Punchbowl News in an interview published Tuesday.

Several Republican members who have reservations about aid toUkraine did not applaud when Zelensky was introduced.

A line of Ukrainian politicians, activists — even soldiers — have been traveling to Washington in advance of the midterms to keep up relations and lobby for more aid.

Yevheniia Kravchuk is a member of parliament with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party. She’s traveled twice to Washington since the beginning of the war to meet with administration and congressional leaders, making sure to meet with both Democratic and Republican leaders.

Kniazhytskyi has concerns about the influence of a vocal group of Republicans and other conservatives who are against the billions of dollars going to Ukraine.

A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 32% of Republican and Republican-leaning independents believe the United States is providing too much support for Ukraine in the war. This is an increase from March, when it was 9%.

In May, 55% of Americans said they were very concerned about Ukraine’s defeat, but in September that percentage dropped to 38%.

Yes. There is an enormous aid package in the works and it is part of a consistent drumbeat from the Biden administration. The message is simple: even though the US can provide more aid, that aid will not stop as Ukraine gets as much aid as Washington can provide.

Zelenskyy came close to submitting a request to announce an investigation into the Biden family, after whichUkraine was sucked into Trump’s first impeachment.

Another factor contributing to fears about the U.S. midterms is that many Ukrainians don’t understand U.S. politics, says Volodmyr Dubovyk, the director of international studies at Odesa Mechnikov University.

“When there is a Member of the House who talks about why they want to spend money on a country that is not winning and people in Ukraine hear that, it means they’re interested in what’s going on.”

He thinks that the balance of power in Washington means that a few Republicans can’t change the direction of US support for the war. He says thatUkraine has more problems than U.S. politics.

That said, the battle lines since the withdrawal of the forces west of the Dnipro last fall have been fairly static, although Russian forces have made grinding, incremental and very costly gains in villages around Bakhmut in southeast Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are having to commit additional forces to defend the areas under pressure.

Inflation and the frustration of the Italian people: the Dean Obeidallah Show host and CNN’s CNN Special correspondent, Simonetta Belardi

The Italian capital, Rome. The retired women were shopping at the pasta counter at the outdoor market in Rome and discussed how the price had gone through the roof.

Simonetta Belardi, 69, a self-proclaimed socialist who argued that inflation has stripped away her savings and that she sacrificed her support forUkraine in the war due to the high costs, said that prices have gone up on everything. She was no fan of Russia, but the time had passed for a shift to diplomatic negotiations for peace in the country and for an end to military support for Ukrainian forces. She said more and more people she knew, in need of economic relief, were losing their patience, too.

It is a sentiment — impatience, even inchoate anger, at the inflation fueled by the war — that transcends the shoppers in Rome’s piazzas and can be found among the weekly protests in Germany or in the swelling ranks of French strikers. And it has leaders nervous.

Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program, “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. You can follow him through his verified account. The opinions he gives in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The U.S. Army and Cold War in Ukraine, as Spoken by Rep. Joe Biden and CNN’s Cheney on “Meet the Press”

The GOP senate candidate in Ohio later stated that he wanted the Ukrainians to succeed. But as The Washington Post detailed on Sunday, Vance’s original remark is causing Ukrainian Americans who are lifelong Republicans to support his Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, in that too-close-to-call Senate race.

President Joe Biden criticized McCarthy and other Republicans for wanting to end aid to Ukraine, as he said last week. It’s a lot bigger than Ukraine — it’s Eastern Europe. It’s NATO. It’s real, serious, serious consequential outcomes.”

“The notion that now Kevin McCarthy is going to make himself the leader of the pro-Putin wing of my party is just a stunning thing. It is dangerous, according to Cheney on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“He knows better, but the fact that he’s willing to go down the path of suggesting that America will no longer stand for freedom, I think, tells you he’s willing to sacrifice everything for his own political gain.”

Meanwhile, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — who recently declared that if Republicans win the House in next month’s elections that she expects McCarthy “to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway” — blamed Ukraine for the war shortly after Russia’s attack, saying that “Ukraine just kept poking the bear and poking the bear, which is Russia, and Russia invaded.”

Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are among the stars of Fox News who have been working with the Republican base to prepare them for the possibility that US assistance for Ukraine could end.

And just last week, Ingraham derided former Vice President Mike Pence for referring to the United States as the “arsenal of democracy” and suggested our massive military is too depleted to help other countries such as Ukraine. 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 may or may not get it. There is only one person who gets it, and that is Boris Putin. If the GOP takes control of the House, they will have a lot to celebrate.

David A. Andelman is a contributor to CNN and the author of a book called A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars that Might Still Happen. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views he expresses are of his own. View more opinion at CNN.

First, he’s seeking to distract his nation from the blindingly obvious, namely that he is losing badly on the battlefield and utterly failing to achieve even the vastly scaled back objectives of his invasion.

Towards a resolution of the EU’s energy crisis, with particular emphasis on the asset and gas market roleplaying for the Kremlin’s legacy

The ability to keep going depends on a number of variables, among which are availability of critical and affordable energy supplies for the coming winter, popular will across a broad range of nations, and conflicting priorities.

In the early hours of Friday in Brussels, European Union powers agreed a roadmap to control energy prices that have been surging on the heels of embargoes on Russian imports and the Kremlin cutting natural gas supplies at a whim.

The Dutch Title Transfer Facility, a benchmark European gas trading hub, and permission for EU gas companies to create a group to buy gas on the international market are included in these.

While France’s President was happy about the summit, he admitted that the European Commission had only a “clear mandate” to start working on a gas cap mechanism.

Still, divisions remain, with Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, skeptical of any price caps. The energy ministers have to work with Germany to come up with a solution that would not result in higher consumption.

These divisions are all part of Putin’s fondest dream. It could be argued that Manifold forces in Europe are the central part of achieving success from the Kremlin’s viewpoint.

Germany and France are at odds over a number of these issues. The German Chancellor and the French president scheduled a conference call for Wednesday in an effort to get some sort of compromise.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/25/opinions/putin-prolonge-war-ukraine-winter-andelman/index.html

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the Ruling of the War in the Shadows of Left-Right Symmetry

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 coalition partners has expressed admiration for Putin.

Berlusconi stated in a LaPresse audio that he returned Putin’s gesture with bottles of Lambrusco wine, as he knew him as a peaceful and sensible person.

Matteo Salvini, named deputy prime minister of Italy on Saturday, said during the election campaign that he would not want sanctions against Russia to hurt those who imposed them more than those who were hit.

Poland and Hungary, the two most important countries for right-wing sympathies in the EU, have disagreed over the future of Russia. Poland has taken deep offense at the pro-Putin sentiments of Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orban.

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.

Hours later, caucus chair Mia Jacob, facing a firestorm of criticism, emailed reporters with a statement “clarifying” their remarks in support of Ukraine. The Secretary of State called Dmytro Kuleba to make sure that America was well taken care of.

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

Kim Jung-un, the leader of North Korea, has also tried to establish black market networks abroad to source what he needs for his war machine. 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 has laid out charges against people and companies for trying to smuggle high tech equipment into Russia in violation of sanctions.

What Did You Think Before Nov. 24th? The Crisis in Ukraine in the Early 1900s and its Impact on the Middle East, NATO, and the United States

How were people thinking about Ukraine before Feb. 24, 22? Mail-order brides and shaven-head mobsters could have been conjured from a post-Soviet Chernobyl. Most probably did not think about Ukraine at all. The country popped up on most people’s radar only in connection to Western political scandals and Russian war making. Few Westerners visited it, and those who did might have concluded — as one Western journalist confessed to me recently — that “Ukraine was just like Russia but without all the crap.”

The strengthening relationship between Moscow and Tehran has drawn the attention of Iran’s rivals and foes in the Middle East, of NATO members and of nations that are still – at least in theory – interested in restoring the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which aimed to delay Iran’s ability to build an atomic bomb.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that a victory for Russia would cause a return to wars of aggression and would cause most nations to reject the idea of invasions of one country by another.

Much of what happens today far from the battlefields still has repercussions there. 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. The Saudis deny an accusation.

Weapons supplies to Ukraine have become a point of dispute with Israel, which hasdeveloped highly effective defense systems against incoming missiles. Israel refuses to provide the Iron Dome and other systems because of its own strategic concerns.

The effect of months of military aid. CNN reported last month that the US is running low on some weapons systems for the purpose of aiding the Ukrainians. Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives next month, which will make it easier for them to scrutinize the US aid to Ukraine.

In fact, the war in Ukraine is already affecting everyone, everywhere. The price of fuel has gone up because of the conflict.

Family budgets are affected by higher prices. When they come with such powerful momentum, they pack a political punch. Political leaders in many countries are on the defensive because of inflation.

Demilitarization of a dirty nuclear power plant in Ukraine and the IAEA’s seven pillars. A critical assessment of Russia’s propaganda

The apocalyptic language from Russian state TV is not new. There are no baseless allegations about the preparation of a dirty bomb in Ukranian. In fact, experts say, the language coming from Russia’s propaganda organs hasn’t changed much at all.

One popular account with nearly 100,000 followers uploaded a video in early February claiming to show a far-right Ukrainian organization constructing such a bomb: Hands clad in black gloves adjusted a radiological meter atop a barrel, supposedly, of nuclear material. In the event of an invasion the bomb would be used against Russians, according to the account.

The video was quickly discredited by the Ukrainian fact-check organization StopFake, which found the video is rife with spelling errors and lacks industrial equipment. Over the last eight months, the basic claim appeared in hundreds of posts and was viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

The demilitarization of the site should be performed as quickly as possible, due to the IAEA’s call. The nuclear safety and security protection zone is a more complex matter.

Next, there needs to be a Security Council resolution and a new convention before the IAEA’s seven pillars can be put into international law. Additional protocol can be added. I should remove any right to attack a nuclear power plant when there is a conflict. The threat to civilian life, ecosystems and economies from a large-scale radiation release is too grave.

There is concern over the integrity of the reactor cores and storage pools. If fuel rods are exposed, a core meltdown and uncontrolled release of radiation is likely, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 19792. If you stop the working of the generators, then you have a hour and a half before the reaction starts, said Herman Halushchenko, the energy minister of Ukraine.

Russian control of the plant also delayed the IAEA from conducting its required annual inspection, which is crucial for ensuring safety and verifying the secure disposal of nuclear fuel and preventing its diversion for military uses1.

Globally, 57 units to supply 60 gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear power are under construction, mostly outside Europe3. China plans to quadruple nuclear power generation to 180 GW by 2035, adding 150 new reactors to its existing 47, at a cost of US$440 billion. Seven new reactor have been built by Turkey, Bangladesh, and the United Arab emirates, while India has 22.

Turkey has a problematic border with Iraq and Syria because of conflict with the Kurdish minority and the rise of the radicalism of the Islamic State. Since the 1999 Kargil War, relations between India and Pakistan are more stable but border fighting is still going on. India–China relations are also tense, but a Ukraine scenario seems unlikely. The most immediately concerning situation would be the deployment of troops from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan, which has three civilian nuclear reactors.

Given the old designs of many nuclear plants and the large amounts of waste in above-ground storage, such concerns will persist for decades as the conflict landscape changes.

The five-yearly review conference of the treaty, in August, was fractured by division and ended in a stand-off. The treaty was meant to be strengthened by considering the safety and security of nuclear-power plants in armed conflict zones, but Russia prevented it from being adopted.

The protocol has a get-out clause. It permits strikes on “other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations only if they are used in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support”.

The UN Security Council would be right to demilitarization of the site. How could this situation be monitored and secured? A small, neutral international peacekeeping force tasked with supporting the IAEA’s mission there is one option. However, if attacks on the plant continue, they might be faced with the need to suppress troop incursions or rocket or artillery strikes on the site. This requires rapid access to air power and poses a lot of risks.

Nuclear Forces in the Cold War and Beyond: The Challenge for Nuclear Research in the 21st Century and the Future of Nuclear Physics in the United States

There is no value to a truce if it is linked to negotiations. A truce gives Russia, its back increasingly to the wall militarily, vitally needed breathing room.

The controlling of the plant and the annexation of the Zaporizhzhia region by Russia are problematic. Russia needs to recall the pragmatic spirit of the cold war, when, despite their bitter conflict, the superpowers cooperated to reduce the risks of nuclear war and proliferation in the global security interest. Today is another such time.

Scholars, non-governmental organizations, the civilian nuclear industry, and the IAEA also need to devote more resources to research into making nuclear plants safer5.

New reactor, fuel-storage and site designs are needed that can withstand armed and terrorist attacks. It was the report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that Congress commissioned after the 9/11 Commission found that al-Qaeda had considered crashing planes into US nuclear plants. It did not consider the danger of military attack. Industry resisted the recommendations because of their cost, and similar analysis for nuclear plants outside the United States is sparse.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03580-0

The U.N., Ukraine, and the era of ‘atoms for peace’: I. What will we learn from the next few months?

If the Ukraine war ends without disaster at Zaporizhzhia, eastern Europe will be lucky. The world should be ashamed that, nearly 70 years after US President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed the era of ‘atoms for peace’, people are depending on luck. The governments of the world have the power to stop disasters. Will they act?

And Ukraine will be watching America’s midterm election results this week, especially after some Republicans warned that the party could limit funding for Ukraine if it wins control of the House of Representatives, as forecast.

Also Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will host Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Erdogan insists Sweden must meet certain conditions before it can join NATO.

The I Atomic Energy Agency report is to be discussed by the UN General Assembly on Wednesday.

Russia rejoined the U.N. brokered deal to export grain and other agricultural goods fromUkraine on Nov. 2. Moscow had suspended its part in the deal a few days prior after saying Ukraine had launched a drone attack on its Black Sea ships.

The new deal will likely include the supply of guidance kits, or Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), which Ukraine can use to bolt on to their unguided missiles or bombs. They will be able to increase their accuracy by using this. Money from the $1.8 billion will go to replacements and stocks.

Xi and Putin: The perfect moment to discuss the Cold War and the fate of the Ukranian government in the 21st century

The talks went according to plan. The Chinese appreciated them asthorough, frank and constructive. Biden said that he and his friend were willing to try to avoid a new Cold War. The president said the two sides were less likely to start a war because it was not “Kumbaya”.

After taking office, the president declared that the United States had to prove that democracy works. Future generations will do a PhD on the issue of autocracy or democracy, according to him.

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.

The President of the Ukranian government, Volodymyr Zelensky, returned to the ruined city of Kherson after meeting with the two leaders.

Putin’s adventure turned to disaster as the Ukrainians defended their country with unexpected tenacity and as Biden rallied allies in a muscular push to support Ukraine.

China had done very little to support Russia by the time Xi and Putin met again in September. More recently, after the Russian President thinly threatened to use nuclear weapons, Xi rebuked him.

Tellingly, Putin chose not to attend the G20 summit in Bali, avoiding confrontations with world leaders as he increasingly becomes a pariah on the global stage.

Why is the first anti-aircraft rocket in Poland landed from a Russian missile? Inconclusive lessons for the world from China’s President Xi

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 is essentially the absolute ruler of a mighty country for many years to come.

And yet Xi faces a mountain of daunting problems. The economy has slowed down so much that China is reluctant to reveal its data. China’s Covid-19 vaccine, once a tool of global diplomacy, is a disappointment. As the world slowly returns to normal after the flu, China is imposing stringentures as a way to keep people indoors.

Showing that democracy works, defeating the efforts of autocratic countries such as China and Russia to undermine it, and proving that unprovoked wars of aggression, aimed at suppressing democracy and conquering territory, won’t succeed, are some of the important things that will be important to the competition between

Polish and NATO leaders suspect that the first missile to have landed in Poland may have come from a Ukrainian anti-aircraft rocket, though they are not certain if it came from a Russian missile or not. (President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has insisted the missile was not Ukrainian)

Whatever the exact circumstances of the missile, one thing is clear. “Russia bears ultimate responsibility, as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Wednesday.

The Russian War on the War: Confronting the Cold War with the Mid-Atlantic Space Teleportation (MDS) Effort

The hotline and Telegram channel have taken off, booking some 3,500 calls in its first two months of operation, designed to assist Russian soldiers eager to defect.

While he would like it if this weren’t the case, a leading Russian journalist who has settled in Berlin said he would accept the reality of never returning to his homeland.

Some good has come from this debacle. Europe is aware that it must get off its dependence on Russian gas immediately as economic dependence on fossil fuels can’t bring long-term stability.

Putin hoped that the conflict would drive further wedges into the Western alliance but it hasn’t been that way. The long-stalled French and German project for a next- generation jet fighter at the heart of the Future Combat Air System was beginning to move forward on Monday.

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.

According to an opinion article by CNN’s Peter Bergen, retired American General and former CIA chief David Petraeus said the conflict would come to an end in a “negotiated resolution” when Putin realized the war is unsustainable on the battlefield.

Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the CNA think tank and a leading expert on the Russian military, told me in an interview that a premature truce allows both parties to re-arm.

Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Monday that the current rate ofUkraine’s expenditure on military equipment is much higher than the country’s current rate of production.

According to Kofman, some factories in Russia have gone from making two to three bombs a day, which is a huge change from the days when two bombs a day were the standard. He said that this showed that they wouldn’t double and triple shifts if they had component parts.

What will the Russians do if they don’t understand what is happening in a war? A former Ukrainian president’s response to the Council on Foreign Relations

When peace can be achieved, seize the chance to negotiate. Seize the moment,” General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff said recently.

“Please imagine how Ukrainians understand negotiations,” former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday. “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. Let’s have a negotiation.’ What would be your reaction?”

“As well as giving the Russians time to regroup and rearm, importantly it would relieve the pressure on their forces at the moment,” General Mick Ryan, a fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me in an email exchange. They have been working hard for nine months. Their forces are tired.

The French newspaper Le Monde has conducted an analysis showing how the Russian arsenal has been damaged by Ukrainian attacks.

That’s “basically any big command post or ammo dump they pulled back beyond the 80-kilometer range,” he explained. In many cases, just inside Russian territory, whereUkraine has given Washington assurances it would not target with rocket systems supplied by the US.

He said that at some point they will get tired of this war. Russian mindset may become “we could not have everything we wanted”. But we’ll have a big chunk of the Donbas and will annex that into Russia and we’ll hold onto Crimea. I think that’s their bet right now.

A truce would allow the west to replenish their rapidly-depleted weapons, as well as upgrade what it has been supplied.

It is not known if the US and its allies will be prepared to return to a war that many think is over by months or years.

The Great Peter the Great and the War of the Cold War: a Televised Statement by Putin on Nuclear Forces in the Russian-Occupied Region

Putin said that the land gains were a significant result for Russia, as the Sea of Azov has become Russia’s internal sea. He referred to the great Peter the Great as someone who fought to get access to that body of water.

“If it doesn’t use it first under any circumstances, it means that it won’t be the second to use it, either, since the possibility of a nuclear strike on our territory will be very limited,” he said.

Putin rejected Western criticism that his previous nuclear weapons comments amounted to saber-rattling, claiming they were “not a factor provoking an escalation of conflicts, but a factor of deterrence.”

We have not gone mad. We are fully aware of what nuclear weapons are,” Putin said. He added, without elaborating: “We have them, and they are more advanced and state-of-the-art than what any other nuclear power has.”

In his televised remarks, the Russian leader didn’t address Russia’s battlefield setbacks or its attempts to cement control over the seized regions but acknowledged problems with supplies, treatment of wounded soldiers and limited desertions.

New concrete anti-tank barriers, known as “dragon’s teeth”, were posted in open fields by the governor. The governor said on Tuesday that a fire broke out at an airport in the region after a drone strike. In neighboring Belgorod, workers were expanding anti-tank barriers and officials were organizing “self-defense units.” Belgorod has seen numerous fires and explosions, apparently from cross-border attacks, and its governor reported Wednesday that Russia’s air defenses have shot down incoming rockets.

Ukraine hit targets in the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol, including a church reported to be used as a Russian military base. Officials said Ukrainian forces used long-range artillery to reach targets in the city in southeastern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

The power grid was damaged by Moscow’s strikes on residential buildings and civilian infrastructure. Private Ukrainian power utility Ukrenergo said temperatures in eastern areas where it was making repairs had dropped to as low as minus 17 degrees Celsius (near zero Fahrenheit).

More than 1.5 million people were without power after the city of Odesa was hit by Russian drones, said President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The repeated assaults on the plants and equipment that Ukrainians rely on for heat and light have drawn condemnation from world leaders, and thrust Ukraine into a grim cycle in which crews hurry to restore power only to have it knocked out again.

In his remarks Saturday night, Mr. Zelensky said that blackouts have persisted throughout various parts of Ukraine including in the capital, Kyiv. He categorized them as emergency outages because of attacks. Others are what he called “stabilization” outages, or planned blackouts on a schedule.

He urged people to reduce their power use as the power system is in a state of disrepair.

A Week and a Half on Ukrainian War-Dec-12: The U.S. Case for Volodymyr Zelensky

The morning of December 7, 1941 was terrible at Pearl Harbor, and remember it. Zelensky said to just remember. “Remember September 11, a 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.”

Ukrainian authorities have been stepping up raids on churches accused of links with Moscow, and many are watching to see if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy follows through on his threat of a ban on the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron hosts European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store for a working dinner Monday in Paris.

On Tuesday in France, a conference is set to be held with a video address from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After almost 10 months in Russian custody, the U.S. basketball player was freed on December 8. Her release came in exchange for the U.S. handing over convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. Griner is back in the U.S. and reunited with her wife. Bout is back in Russia and is reported to have joined an ultranationalist party.

Russian oil revenue was targeted by new measures on December 5. There is a price cap on most Russian oil imports as well as an embargo on Russian oil imports from the EU.

Zelenskyy said the city of Bakhmut was turned into burned ruins. Fighting has been fierce there as Russia attempts to advance in the city in the eastern Donbas region.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1141827823/latest-on-ukraine-a-weekly-recap-and-look-ahead-at-russias-war-dec-12

The Donaldson-Born-Infeld-Rosen invasion provoked by the anti-US air defense system, the Patriot defense system and the Russian army

The leaders of France and Turkey, as well as President Zelenskyy, had a phone call with President Biden on the 11th of December in a seeming step up of diplomacy over the 9 1/2-month Russian invasion.

news first reported by CNN that the US is getting ready to send a system to Ukraine caused a warning from Russia’s US embassy.

Zakharova said that many experts questioned the rationality of the step, which would lead to an escalation of the conflict and increase the risk of the US army going into combat.

The US Army’s system, called thePatriot, is considered one of the most capable long-range air defense systems on the market as it is an acronym for Phased Array Tracking Radar.

The Pentagon’s press secretary said Thursday that the system would be provocative. Those comments won’t have an effect on US aid to Ukraine, according to Gen. Pat Ryder.

“I find it ironic and very telling that officials from a country that brutally attacked its neighbor in an illegal and unprovoked invasion … that they would choose to use words like provocative to describe defensive systems that are meant to save lives and protect civilians,” Ryder told reporters.

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.

Unlike smaller air defense systems, the larger the batteries, the more skilled the personnel are to operate them. The United States usually takes multiple months to train for the deployment of its missiles, and now will have to deal with daily attacks from Russia.

War, Fortifications and the History of Ukraine in the Thirty-Year-Oct. 1918 In Kyiv House of Teachers

Zelensky rejected the idea that Russia should be blamed for taking land from Ukraine if they want to restore control over areas like the rest of the country.

There was old Ammunition. 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 said that you cross your fingers that the bullets will fire or explode when you load them.

In the trenches. CNN’s Will Ripley filed a video report from trenches and fortifications being built along Ukraine’s border with Belarus, where there is growing concern about Russia once again assembling troops. Ripley talks to a sewing machine repairman turned tank driver.

The Russian empire began to expand with the Ukranian people. In the mind of many Russians, their empire cannot exist without Ukraine. That’s why they keep coming back,” said Volodymyr Viatrovych, a member of Ukraine’s parliament and a prominent historian.

He lives near the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, which the Russians pulverized in the first days of the war. Before the Russians invaded Ukraine, Viatrovych took his wife and son to western Ukraine for their safety.

Martial law was declared in Kyiv by the parliament after he drove there. He joined the security forces after receiving a rifle by 2 o’clock that day.

Ukraine first declared independence from Russia in 1918, doing so in an elegant, whitewashed building in the center of Kyiv that still stands and now serves as the offices for the Kyiv House of Teachers.

A reminder of that history came just two months ago, on Oct. 10. A Russian missile hit the street outside the Kyiv House of Teachers.

The blast blew out the windows, as well as parts of the glass ceiling in the hall where independence was declared in 1918. The windows have been boarded. Shards of glass still cover the floor.

Steshuk Oleh, the director of the House of Teachers said there were parallels to a century ago. “This building was also damaged in the fighting back then. And now it’s damaged again. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. We are going to rebuild everything.

“If you look at all the hardships that Ukraine experienced in the 20th century, and they’re vast, this is the moment where all the wrongs of the last hundred plus years need to be redressed,” he said.

He said that if he’s losing a war, he doesn’t survive. “The outcome may signal the end, not just of Putin’s era, but the era of the empire. It’s a new century. It’s time for powerful people to go.

Kasparov entered politics in Russia 15 years ago, and began challenging the hold on power of Putin. When it became clear his safety was at risk, he left Russia, and now lives in New York.

Zelensky in Ukraine: How Vladimir Putin walked up to the Elysée Palace during the French Revolution and in the days after Russia invaded

Many military analysts warn the war is unlikely to produce a clear resolution on the battlefield. They believe it will need negotiations and compromises.

Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s former ambassador to the United States, said the region would be more stable if Ukraine wins the war and joins NATO. This is what Ukraine’s government wants, though joining the alliance is highly unlikely in the near term.

Being a buffer zone or gray zone isn’t good from a strategic point of view. “If you are a gray zone between two security blocs, two military blocs, everybody wants to make a step. This has happened with one of the countries.

“I believe our generation has an opportunity to put an end to this. He said that Ukrainians are ready to fight than they were in 1918.

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 host of the event was the French president, who hugged Putin and then shook hands with Zelensky.

Zelensky was in a downward trajectory in his popularity ratings in the last few days before Russia invaded, from the all-time high he reached in the first days of his administration.

Zelensky was exposed to rough and tumble neighborhoods in central Ukraine where he learned how to deal with people who were mean.

He knew exactly what he needed to do when he was being bullied, as he had just his intuition, according to Yevhen Hlibovytsky.

The leader when offered an escape by the US as Russia started its full-scale invasion joked, “I need bullets, not a ride.”

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 seems a long, long way since Zelensky celebrated his victory with his supporters in a Kyiv nightclub, where the fog of war still clouds the sky. He looked as if he’d never seen anything like it while standing on stage with the confetti.

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. Even Americans early in the war rated Zelensky highly for his handling of international affairs – ahead of US President Joe Biden.

His bubble includes many people from his previous professional life as a TV comedian in the theatrical group Kvartal 95. During the war, a press conference held on the platform of a Kyiv metro station featured perfect lighting and camera angles to emphasize a wartime setting.

His nightly television addresses brought solace to the people of Lviv during air raid sirens and explosions, and he was a comforter in chief.

Introducing Zelensky into the international fraternity: A conversation with Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, aka Fashion historian and author of Red, White, and Blue on the Runway

“By wearing T-shirts and hoodies, the youthful, egalitarian uniform of Silicon Valley, rather than suits, Zelensky is projecting confidence and competence in a modern way, to a younger, global audience that recognizes it as such,” Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, a fashion historian and author of “Red, White, and Blue on the Runway: The 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style,” told NPR.

She said that he was more comfortable than Putin when he was on camera. Both of them want to come across as accessible and personable, although Zelensky is definitely doing a better job of balancing authority with accessibility.

Zelenska has shown herself to be an effective communicators in international fora by projecting a sense of humor and smarts. Most recently, she met with King Charles during a visit to a refugee assistance center at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in London. Zelenska was not included on the cover of Time magazine, but there was a reference in the supporting text.

There are signs that Zelensky might be losing his international influence. 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.”

An official announcement is expected on a European Union cap on natural gas prices, the latest measure to tackle an energy crisis largely spurred by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Zelensky, the U.S. Prime Minister, and the United States in the Crisis of Ukraine, as Trapped in Blood, During the November 1st Ukrainian-Russian War

The prime minister of the United Kingdom will be making his first appearance in front of the Commons Liaison Committee on Tuesday, where the issues of the Ukraine war and other global issues are discussed. Sunak had a meeting on Monday with members of the European military force.

Russian news reports say that Putin and Chinese leader Xi will have a virtual talk in the month of August.

The Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations of the Ukrainian and Russian people will be their first since the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Nuclear safety and security experts will be sent to each of the Ukraine’s nuclear power plants under an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

An American was freed from Russian-controlled territory as part of a 65-person prisoner exchange. Suedi Murekezi told ABC News he spent weeks in a basement, where he was tortured, and months in a prison in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.

There seems to be no idea that the West will let up on its support for Ukraine. Europe recently committed to raise its funding by $2 billion in the year 2023, and both the US and Europe appear intent on seeing Ukraine through this winter and beyond.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the White House on Wednesday will demonstrate to the world that the United States is still a key player in the war for Ukraine’s survival.

Zelensky compared his nation’s resistance against Russia with Britain’s lonely defiance of the Nazis in the days before the US entered World War II during a video address to the UK Parliament earlier this year, and his arrival in the US capital will sharpen the parallels to the earlier meeting of Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt.

His visit is happening under extraordinary security. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t even confirm the early reports that she’d welcome Zelensky to the US Capitol in an unexpected coda to her speakership, saying on Tuesday evening, “We don’t know yet. We just don’t know.”

Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who visited Ukraine earlier this month, said on CNN’s “AC360” that Zelensky was coming to Washington on a specific mission. “What he is trying to do is draw a direct correlation between our support and the survival and support and future victory of Ukraine,” Gallego, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said.

“I do think this is a critical moment,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told NPR. The battlefield is bloody and difficult, and this will be one factor that will influence the decision on whether or not to go to it.

— To Putin, who thought he would topple Zelensky and his nation in a February blitzkrieg, he sent a signal of heroic resistance embraced by the US – after flying to Washington on an US Air Force jet, seeking to show Russians are now fighting a war that can never be won.

His visit to Congress will also play into an increasingly important debate on Capitol Hill over Ukraine aid with Republicans set to take over the House majority in the new year. Billions of dollars in US funds sent to the Ukrainians should be used to increase border patrols with a surge of migrants imminent, warn pro-Donald Trump members in the Republican Party.

The War Between the United States and the Cold War: The Example of the Battle of the Bulge: Zelensky, Franklin Roosevelt and the Fate of the First World War

Zelensky excelled at public relations theater and historical allusion. 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 invoked the bravery of the US soldiers who dug into the cold foxholes of the battle of the Bulge, which was won by the Allies. And he cited wartime President Franklin Roosevelt to promise a certain, hard-won victory for freedom.

On December 22, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt met the wartime British leader at a hotel in Washington, DC, after he sailed to the United States on the HMS Duke of York, dodging U-boats in the wintery Atlantic.

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.

“I am far away from my family and country but I know that the key to defeating Hitler was US involvement in World War II”, said the British Prime Minister during his visit.

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.

If any one of a wide range of events is not preferred by Russia, there will be an increase in the likelihood of a Third World War.

That sets a disastrous example for other aggressive powers around the world. It says possession of nuclear weapons allows you to wage genocidal wars of destruction against your neighbors, because other nations won’t intervene.

If that is not the message the US and the West want other aggressor states to get, then they should develop a more direct and assertive means of dissuading Moscow.

There are two key headline deliverables: first, the Patriot missile systems. Complex, accurate, and expensive, they have been described as the US’s “gold standard” of air defense. NATO preciously guards them, and they require the personnel who operate them – almost 100 in a battalion for each weapon – to be properly trained.

The second are precision-guided munitions for Ukrainian jets. Ukraine, and Russia, largely are equipped with munitions that are “dumb” – fired roughly towards a target. Western standard precision weapons like missiles and Howitzers have been supplied to the Ukrainians.

With the exception of its nuclear forces, Moscow is struggling to equip and rally its conventional forces. China and India have joined the West in open statements against the use of nuclear force, which has made that option even less likely.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Biden wants to get Putin to hear about the billions of dollars in aid that will come, as well as push European partners to help more.

This is trickier. Kevin McCarthy, the likely Speaker of the House, has warned the Biden administration that the new GOP-led House will not give them a blank cheque.

Zelensky: The American Dream of Vladimir Putin During the Ukraine War and What We Don’t Want to Tell the U.S.

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

Realistically, the bill for the slow defeat of Russia in this dark and lengthy conflict is relatively light for Washington, given its near trillion-dollar annual defense budget.

She said Zelensky’s historic address “strengthened both Democrats and Republicans who understand what is at stake in this fight against Putin and Russian aggression and now with their ally, Iran, as well.”

The speech “connected the struggle of Ukrainian people to our own revolution, to our own feelings that we want to be warm in our homes to celebrate Christmas and to get us to think about all the families in Ukraine that will be huddled in the cold and to know that they are on the front lines of freedom right now,” Clinton said on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” Wednesday.

Clinton was the US Secretary of state when she met Putin, and said at the time that it was difficult to predict how the leader would react to the Ukraine war.

“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.

This story was adapted from the December 22 edition of CNN’s Meanwhile in America, the daily email about US politics for global readers. Click here to read past editions and subscribe.

The Ukrainian president was forced to wear a green military uniform on his first trip abroad since Russia invaded his country. He expressed heartfelt gratitude for America’s multi-billion dollar weapons and ammunition lifeline – but made clear he’d never stop asking for more.

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

At an emotional peak of his speech in the House chamber, Zelensky handed Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris a Ukrainian flag he retrieved from the hottest battle front at Bakhmut on Tuesday.

“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.

His broader message was that Ukraine’s fight was not just some flashpoint over an ancient grudge on the fringes of the old Soviet empire. It was stated that his fight was to hold back tyranny and save global democracy.

— To Americans, Zelensky professed deep thanks for tens of billions of dollars in weapons and aid offered and to come. He argued they could not abandon their independence hero without also suppressing some of their own patriotism.

— To the incoming House Republican majority, some of whose members want to halt aid, the Ukrainian leader’s hero’s welcome in the chamber suggested they would be shamed if they choose to forsake him.

End of the War in Iraq, and Russia’s Cold War, during Zelensky’s Visit to the White House on Wednesday: Implications for Security and Security

Zelensky was able to show that the West is united and that Biden means it when he said Wednesday that he believes in an end to the war in Iraq.

We will have a celebration at Christmas or maybe candlelit. Not because it’s more romantic, no, but because there will be no electricity,” he said. “We’ll celebrate Christmas and even if there is no electricity, the light of our faith, in ourselves, will not be put out.”

But Zelensky’s inspirational rhetoric and heroic bearing couldn’t disguise the uncertainties and risks of a war in which the US is effectively now fighting a proxy battle with its nuclear superpower rival, Russia.

Zelensky said that his nation was still outgunned despite the US’s largesse and that Biden’s announcement of the high-tech weapons would make the situation worse.

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.

It has been shown that the international power dynamic has changed after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to be pushed to send tanks alone to Ukraine and demanded that US President Joe Biden join him.

There is no guarantee that Congress will be able to fund their government next year, because of partisan fury that will erupt in Washington.

Moscow said that the war in Ukraine was set for a long confrontation with Russia after President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington.

Russia’s foreign ministry condemned what it called the “monstrous crimes” of the “regime in Kyiv,” after US President Joe Biden promised more military support to Ukraine during Zelensky’s summit at the White House on Wednesday.

“As the leadership of our country has stated, the tasks set within the framework of the special military operation will be fulfilled, taking into account the situation on the ground and the actual realities,” Zakharova added, referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Peskov added that “there were no real calls for peace.” Zelensky stressed the need for peace during his address to the US Congress.

Peskov told journalists, however, that Wednesday’s meeting showed the US is waging a proxy war of “indirect fighting” against Russia down “to the last Ukrainian.”

The Kremlin has also been selling that line to the Russian public, who is largely buying it, says Sergey Radchenko, a Russian history professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The US has been helping the country defend itself against Russian aggression, but Zelenskyy and Ukraine have made clear that they want a “just peace,” and all they have been accused of is a proxy war.

There are signs that Russia is preparing for a new offensive in southern Ukraine, according to a Ukrainian military spokesman.

“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 does not want missiles to be shot down, it should not send them into Ukrainian territory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday used the word “war” to refer to the conflict in Ukraine, the first known time he has publicly deviated from his carefully crafted description of Moscow’s invasion as a “special military operation” 10 months after it began.

“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 have been and will continue to strive for this.”

Nikita Yuferev, a municipal lawmaker from St. Petersburg who fled Russia due to his antiwar stance, on Thursday said he had asked Russian authorities to prosecute Putin for “spreading fake information about the army.”

“There was no decree to end the special military operation, no war was declared,” Yuferev wrote on Twitter. “Several thousand people have already been condemned for such words about the war.”

A senior US official told CNN that Putin’s remark was probably a slip of the tongue and not intentional. However, officials will be watching closely to see what figures inside the Kremlin say about it in the coming days.

Putin and Shoigu said that the Russian government would make a lot of investment in the military. The initiatives include increasing the size of the armed forces, accelerating weapons programs and deploying a new generation of hypersonic missiles to prepare Russia for what Putin called “inevitable clashes” with its adversaries.

“It’s like the central nervous system of the human body: If you mess with it, you put all sorts of systems out of whack,” says Rajan Menon, a director of the Defense Priorities think tank who recently returned from a trip to the Ukrainian capital, speaking about Russia’s power grid attacks. It is an enormous economic cost, which is why it is an inconvenient thing to do. This is an attempt to create pain for the civilian population, to show that the government cannot protect them adequately.

Menon notes, however, that every single one of his comments could apply to Russia’s earlier waves of cyberattacks on the country’s internet, as evidenced by NotPetya, the malicious software that caused hundreds of digital networks to be destroyed five years earlier. “They’re different in the technicalities, but the goal is the same,” he says. The treatment of civilians is degrading and punishing.

At least two people were killed in attacks on Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region. Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said that critical infrastructure was the intended target of the four rockets that hit the city.

Russia is threatening to plunge the country into darkness in two years as it prepares a large-scale assault on the power grid, in time for the New Year and Christmas holidays.

When Anastasiia Hryn, a 34-year-old Kyiv resident, woke up to the sound of air raid sirens followed by an explosion, she and her son descended to the basement shelter beneath their building. But they did not let it affect their spirits.

Hryn said: “After the sirens gave the all clear, my neighbors and their child walked down the elevator to the cinema to watch the new movie.” People continued with their holiday plans despite the fact that parents took their children to school.

The crisis in Ukraine has left many people angry: anti-LGBT, cybercrime, and Internet censorship in the wake of the Kiev war

A 14-year-old girl and two other people were pulled from a home on Thursday, and at least three others were injured. Homes, an industrial facility and a playground in the capital were damaged in attacks on Kyiv, according to the city military administration.

In western Ukraine, Lviv Mayor Andrii Sadovyi said 90% of the city was without power, cautioning that the city’s waterworks could also to stop working with electricity down.

At that time, Putin said his forces were embarking on a limited military campaign that would conclude in 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.

Draconian laws passed since February have outlawed criticism of the military or leadership. Nearly 20,000 people have been detained for demonstrating against the war — 45% of them women — according to a leading independent monitoring group.

Lengthy prison sentences have been meted out to high profile opposition voices on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army by questioning its conduct or strategy.

The group that co-recipitatingly won the World’s Most Admired Human Rights Group in 1992 was forced to halt its activities due to violation of the foreign agents law.

The war in Ukraine has led to the state greatly expanding Russia’s restrictive anti-LGBT laws, which they say is due to a larger attack on traditional values.

For now, repressions remain targeted. Some of the new laws are still unenforced. But few doubt the measures are intended to crush wider dissent — should the moment arise.

Leading independent media outlets and a number of vibrant, online investigative startups had to close or relocate abroad due to the new “fake news” laws that criminalized them contrary to the official government line.

Restrictions extend to internet users as well. American social media giants were banned in March. Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin’s internet regulator, has blocked more than 100,000 websites since the start of the conflict.

Technical workarounds such as VPNs and Telegram still offer access to Russians seeking independent sources of information. Older Russians like to listen to state media propaganda, with TV talk shows spreading conspiracy theories.

War Against Ukraine Has Left Russia Isolated And Struturing With More Torturb Ahedricahedral-Formation

Many perceived government opponents were left in the war’s earliest days because of concerns of persecution.

Meanwhile, some countries that have absorbed the Russian exodus predict their economies will grow, even as the swelling presence of Russians remains a sensitive issue to former Soviet republics in particular.

Helped by Russian price controls, the ruble regained value. Several brands, including Mcdonald’s, were relaunched under new names and Russian ownership. The economy declined 2.5% by the end of the year, far less than many economists had predicted.

There are no changes to the government’s tone in relation to Russia’s military campaign. Russia’s Defense Ministry gives daily briefings about their successes on the ground. Putin, too, repeatedly assures that everything is “going according to plan.”

Yet the sheer length of the war — with no immediate Russian victory in sight — suggests Russia vastly underestimated Ukrainians’ willingness to resist.

The number of Russian men who have lost their lives is not publicly known, but remains a highly taboo topic at home. Western estimates place those figures much higher.

NATO is set to expand towards Russia’s borders with the addition of long-neutral states, like Sweden, as a result of Russia’s invasion.

In Soviet times, it would have been extremely foolish for Russia’s actions to be criticized by long time allies in Central Asia. China and India have bought Russian oil at discounted prices but have not fully supported Russia’s military campaign.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/31/1145981036/war-against-ukraine-has-left-russia-isolated-and-struggling-with-more-tumult-ahe

Zelensky’s Year of War in Ukraine Revisited: During the First Year of the Russian Revolution, President Putin’s Big Press Conference was canceled

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

The big press conference, which allows the Russian leader to handle questions from pro-Kremlin media, was tabled until the year 2023.

The Kremlin has given no reason for the delays. Russian leader has run out of good news to share after a decade of war and no sign of victory.

In his New Year’s Eve speech, Zelensky said that the year began on Feb. 24 with fear over the Russian invasion, but that he was hopeful for victory.

Standing in darkness with a Ukrainian flag rippling gently in the breeze behind him, Mr. Zelensky recounted in a videotaped speech many notable moments from the war — including the attack on a maternity hospital, the intense fighting at the Azovstal steel plant, the destruction of a Russian bridge to Crimea, the retaking of Kherson, the sinking of a Russian flagship — as the video cut to footage that underscored his words.

He said that this year struck his hearts according to the translated transcript on his website. “We’ve cried out all the tears. All the prayers have been yelled. 311 days. We have something to say about every minute.”

The War Between Ukraine and the Cold War, and the Role of the Soviet Union in the Security and Security of the United States – A Tale of Two Different Faces

My initial shock and fear turned into a desire to act through sports. Athletes can fight against propaganda from their country in the best way. We just had to tell the truth about the war and Ukrainians – how strong, kind and brave we are. How we have united to defend our country.

Mr Zelensky said that the world has rallied around the people of Ukraine, from their halls of government in foreign cities to the squares of foreign capitals.

Eventual threat of nuclear weapons was not an oxymoron, as the destruction brought by them was complete, for everyone on the planet.

Europe is not welcoming in an era of greater security despite the decline of the Russian Federation. At a time when the defining issue of European security is being revealed to be less dangerous, calls for greater defense spending are louder than ever.

Russia has also met the West, which was more than happy to send some of its items to the eastern border. Western officials may be surprise that Russia constantly changes its red lines, as Moscow knows how limited its non-nuclear options are. This wasn’t supposed to happen. So, what does Europe do and prepare for, now that it has?

The person is Petraeus. I believe it can be solved by Putin recognizing that the war is unsustainable on both the battlefield and at home, and that the soviets took many times the losses they took in Afghanistan.

This has been done before by America. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous nuclear confrontation so far, the Soviet Union’s position shifted in a matter of days, ultimately accepting an outcome that favored the West. America might have accepted a compromise that would have weakened its security and credibility if red lines had been in place.

The Fate of Autocracy: What Happened When Democracy Becomes an Open System? How Many Americans Believe that Democracy is Over

Notice that it was an open question. Many people believed that autocracy would prove to be the better system. How many believe that today?

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

The public display of autocracy’s fatal flaws has diminished its appeal due to the fact that democracy is far from over. Even catastrophic ones will be made by leaders, if you can’t tell them they’re wrong. Even if the ruler leads the nation to a cliff, no one will challenge his wisdom because he is so powerful and ruthless.

With the headway democracy just made – a poor showing for election deniers in the US midterm elections, an exodus of Russians from their own autocratic country, an upsurge of support for embattled Ukraine – democratic leaders need to show they can navigate the economic challenges of the coming months. 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. For 16 consecutive years, according to the non-partisan democracy monitor Freedom House, democracy was losing ground. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in Free countries, according to research by the organization.

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.

Some of the credit goes to Putin, whose imperialist ploy to conquer neighboringUkraine struck like a thunderbolt. No longer was freedom a vague idea. No longer was the battle for democracy a metaphor. This war was a real one with missiles and carnage.

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

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

The Last Three Years: The Case for the “Woman, Life, Freedom” Against the Censorship of the Communist Party

The rules and regulations that were in place for the past three years were simply tossed aside. But China had not used the time to push for increased vaccination or stock up on certain drugs. Estimates of hundreds of millions of infections and over a million deaths are based on reports from China’s top health officials.

No one could have predicted that the activists of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” would continue to defy the regime. How far will they go? Will the regime go out of its way to eradicate them? How will the world respond?

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

The 2016 Russian-American War: The Case for a Resolution of the Russia-Russia War-Casablanca Unification Conjecture

Donald Trump has begun a new presidential campaign. The British called it a lead balloon. He’s becoming an increasingly isolated, rather pathetic figure after many of his top choices failed in the midterm elections and election deniers fared badly. His calls for Republicans to unite behind Kevin McCarthy seemed to do little to quell the rebellion this week. And while the struggle over the speakership may have seemed dysfunctional, it was democracy, in all its messy wrangling, on display. And of course, Trump’s legal troubles seem endless.

In Brazil, Trump’s doppelganger, Jair Bolsonaro, lost his bid for reelection. Like Trump, he refused to admit defeat or attend the inauguration of the man who defeated him, President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Bolsono was decamped to Florida.

Boris Johnson lost the premier’s position in the UK after he fell in love with Liz Truss, who later 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. French President Emmanuel Macron defeated his populist opponent, Marine Le Pen who, like other European populists, had to run from her record of closeness to Putin.

Regardless of whether Russia lost 400 men as Ukraine claims, or 89 as Moscow says, the result of the attack is the same: Russia’s highest single-incident death toll since the war began more than 10 months ago.

The cell phones that novice troops were using in violation of regulations allowed the Ukrainian forces to target them most accurately if the Russian account is correct. Ukraine has not explained how the attack was executed. The implications for how Russia is conducting its war now are larger and deeper.

It is clear that President Putin called for a temporary truce after an 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 that four rockets were launched at the school and that they were close to a large arms depot. Two more rockets were shot down by Russian air defenses.

Chris Dougherty of the Center for New American Security in Washington told me that Russia’s failure to break up or move large arms depots is a function of the reality that their forces cannot communicate adequately.

It is a view shared by other experts. James Lewis, the director of the Strategic Technologies Program at CSIS, told me in an e-mail that bad communication is a standard practice in the Russian Army.

The troops killed in Makiivka seem to have been recent conscripts, part of a larger picture of Russian soldiers being shipped to the front lines with little training and deeply sub-standard equipment and weapons.

Indeed, a number of the most recent arrivals to the war are inmates from Russian prisons, freed and transferred immediately to the Ukrainian front. It’s hard to imagine how appealing the use of cell phones would be to the prisoners who have been in isolation for a long time.

Semyon Pegov, who was awarded the Order of Courage by the President of the Russian Federation two weeks ago, objected to the Ministry of Defense’s attempts to implicate the troops in using cell phones.

He wondered if the location of soldiers in a school building could not have been determined using drones or local sources.

A month earlier, the defense ministry underwent a shakeup when Col. Gen. Mikhail Y. Mizintsev, known to Western officials as the “butcher of Mariupol,” was named deputy defense minister for overseeing logistics, replacing four-star Gen. Dmitri V. Bulgakov, who had held the post since 2008. The location of the arms depot, adjacent to the Makiivka recruits, would likely have been on Mizintsev’s watch.

As recently as Saturday, Shoigu told his forces in a celebratory video: “Our victory, like the New Year, is inevitable.”

Germany was late to recognize Russia’s threat, reorientation was needed, and the military needed to be intensified as part of the plan to destroy Russia in the region. He said Germany would coordinate supplies of Leopard 2 from allies to Ukraine, an act that would be illegal if any purchaser of country’s war-fighting hardware sold it to a third state.

Russia invested a lot of money in the undersea route that goes from Russia to Germany to increase global sales and economic leverage over Europe. Germany, a leading consumer, was on board from the get-go. Washington wasn’t.

The United States didn’t want the new, high-capacity subsea supply to supplant old overland lines that transited Ukraine, providing vital revenue to the increasingly Westward-leaning leadership in Kyiv.

Germany’s moment of steely leadership in the epoch of war: From Russia’s aggression to the Kremlin, Moscow’s defense secretary said: “We are not afraid of the future”

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. Decades of a reasonably unshakable reliance, if not complete trust, in the US, has been replaced by stubborn European pragmatism – and Germany leads the way.

Former Chancellor Merkel was Europe’s moral compass. In Germany, Scholz won a thunderous applause in the chamber of the parliament as he showed steely leadership by flashing a rare Moment of Steely Leadership.

He said that they wouldn’t put you in danger. He spelled out how his government had already handled Russia’s aggression and how fears of a freezing winter and economic collapse were not realized. “The government dealt with the crisis,” he said, adding: “We are in a much better position.”

The applause at each step was louder than his words. In short, Scholz got it right for Germany, bringing with him a population typically averse to war and projecting their own power, and deeply divided over how much they should aid Ukraine in killing Russians and potentially angering the Kremlin.

In Moscow he doesn’t think that Scholz’s new vigor changes much, even though he seems to have wrestled some vestige of influence over America in the Ukraine war.

Russia’s ambassador to Germany said Berlin’s move to send tanks was “extremely dangerous” and accused Scholz of refusing “to acknowledge its [Germany’s] historic accountability to our people for the horrific crimes of Nazism.” The White House and Biden were accused 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

Why did Putin and Lavrov in South Africa lose their independence? — CNN’s Joyce Davis, an opinion columnist for the Patriot-News in Pennsylvania

CNN spoke to some people in Russia that were confused by the statements made by Biden and Scholz on tanks confused. Some said Russia would win regardless, and lumped the US and Germany together as the losers, but a significant proportion were worried about the war, dismayed at the heavy death toll and frustrated that Putin ignored their concerns.

Zelensky will likely be told that weapons supplies will be on more of a German leash and that they are not going to be led by the US.

Joyce M. Davis is an outreach and opinion editor for PennLive and The Patriot- News in Pennsylvania. She has worked for many media companies, including National Public Radio, Knight Ridder Newspapers, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The opinions are of her own. You can read more opinions at CNN.

Russia seems to be outmaneuvering the United States in Africa. In recent days, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underscored that stark reality as he toured four African capitals.

As much as President Joe Biden would like African countries to join the Western alliance in isolating Russia over its brutality in Ukraine, Russia is making a show of bolstering ties with some powerful players on the continent.

Instead of being treated like a global pariah as the US wants, leaders in South Africa, Eritrea, Angola and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) treated Lavrov like a cherished friend during his visit.

In South Africa, Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor welcomed him with open arms. She didn’t use the meeting in Pretoria last Monday to repeat calls for Russia to stop killing Ukrainians. And she brushed off criticism, saying it would be “simplistic and infantile” to do so.

Pandor said that South Africa will soon conduct naval drills with Russia and China, calling them exercises with friends. The US and Europe were not amused.

At the United Nations in March, 17 African countries abstained from condemning Russia for invasion of Ukraine. Eight people didn’t vote.

Eritrea was one of only four countries globally – the others being Belarus, North Korea and Syria – to openly side with Russia, which has a history of military co-operation with these decidedly undemocratic, authoritarian regimes.

He doesn’t care that Eritrea’s president Isaias Afewerki has been unelected since 1993 and that Human Rights Watch says the country has no legislature, no independent civil society organizations, and no independent judiciary.

He doesn’t even care that Human Rights Watch says Mali’s government security forces are responsible for extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrests, and detentions of suspected armed fighters.

Russia’s private military group is bolstering authoritarian regimes throughout Africa, including in Mali, Sudan, Central African Republic, Mozambique and Libya. And human rights organizations say it is guilty of atrocities on the continent.

During a time of crisis when the United States sought to unify condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s influence in Africa had a dramatic impact. Look at voting at the UN.

America has been accused of aiding and abetting authoritarian regimes and ignoring human rights abuses. The atrocities done by the American government in the Democratic Republic of theCongo and other places in Africa must not be forgotten.

But democracies can hold their leaders accountable and do. Western democracies need to care about the rule of law. Putin doesn’t. And no one holds him accountable for anything.

How well does Russia and the West bolster the Ukraine war? The security and defence of a long-term war in Ukraine, as observed by CNN

President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion in economic, health, and security aid over three years not only helps counter Russia’s influence but China’s, as well.

Last week, the US Treasury Secretary used her trip to promise more money. She announced American plans to expand partnerships with Africa on conservation, climate change, and access to clean energy. And she said the United States will provide over $1 billion to support African-led efforts to combat climate change.

According to the African Youth Survey, the majority of young Africans say democracy is superior to any other form of government, even if they do not want to be like the West.

Russia is gearing up for a “maximum escalation” of the war in Ukraine, potentially as soon as the next few weeks, according to a top Ukrainian national security official.

The Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council told Sky News that the months would be defining in the war.

In February and March there will be a very active phase of hostilities, that’s what the representative of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence said.

The ministry said that military representatives from the two countries are going to practice joint planning of the use of troops.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a surprise Europe tour, meeting leaders in London, Paris and Brussels, and reiterating his call for allies to send fighter jets to Ukraine.

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.

There’s “strong indication” Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead to supply anti-aircraft weapons to separatists in Ukraine, according to the international team investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014.

It’s hard to get exact numbers on exactly what weapons individual nations currently hold in their arsenals due to the sensitivity of the information. But multiple European defense and security sources have told CNN that there are serious concerns at just how much of Europe’s ammunition has been used on the battlefield and not replaced. Even the biggest supplier of weapons to Ukraine and the world’s top military exporter, the United States, is having trouble keeping up with the demand, as CNN reported late last year.

Policy makers in Europe have kept a low stock of armor because they assumed there would not be a land war similar to World War I or II.

Nick Witney is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

policymaking is often based on convenient assumptions of best-case scenario, because of the impending ammunition crisis. After all, taking no action, in the short-term at least, is often cheaper than taking action.

The First Open-Source War: The Case of Russian Army and Military Operations in the Dnipro River Province — A Brief History of Russia and the Challenges for Strategic Leaders

“It’s unlikely Russian forces will be particularly better organized and so unlikely they’ll be particularly more successful, though they do seem willing to send more troops into the meat grinder,” a senior British official told CNN.

A senior Ukrainian diplomat told CNN that they had amassed enough manpower to take a few small cities. “Underwhelming, compared to the sense of panic they were trying to build in Ukraine.”

Lloyd Austin, the Defense Secretary of the United States, said Tuesday that the US is not seeing Russiamass its aircraft before an aerial operation against Ukraine.

Is this the first truly open-source war? The war in Ukraine is being fought in part on social media by Zelensky; commercial overhead satellites capture Russian battle groups moving around in real-time, and the social media accounts of Russian mercenaries in the Wagner Group document what they are doing.

Petraeus: Putin has been given a failing grade so far. Let’s recall that the first and most important task of a strategic leader is to “get the big ideas right” – that is, to get the overall strategy and fundamental decisions right. Putin clearly has failed abysmally in that task, resulting in a war that has made him and his country a pariah, set back the Russian economy by a decade or more (losing many of Russia’s best and brightest, and prompting over 1,200 western companies to leave Russia or reduce operations there), done catastrophic damage to the Russian military and its reputation and put his legacy in serious jeopardy.

It didn’t gain as much as it had in the province. The only forces west of the Dnipro River were withdrawn because the Ukrainians took out the headquarters and logistics sites that supported them, and isolated them from the rest of the Russian elements east of the river.

There are some hints of what the future of warfare may look like. Ukrainians use drones to identify Russian targets for US precision weaponry, which will double in range when it arrives in Ukrainian), because they see them as aerial observers.

Perhaps most notably, of course, we see a war taking place, for the first time, in a context that includes the widespread presence of smart phones, internet connectivity, and social media and other internet sites.

How Russian Drones Exploded the Cold War: How Russian Forces Look, How Russia Managed Operations, and How We Can Continue to Operate

There would be vastly more capable drones in every domain, not just in the air, but also at sea, in the ground, in outer space, and in cyberspace.

I recall being told in the Cold War days that if it can be seen, it can be hit and if it can be killed. In those days we didn’t have the capabilities necessary to “operationalize” that adage. In the future, absolutely everything will be seen and susceptible to being hit and destroyed, unless there are substantial safeguards to protect those assets.

We have to take a lot of actions to transform our forces and systems. We must deter future conflict by making sure there are no questions about our abilities and willingness to use them, and we must also make sure that competition among great powers is not turned into conflict.

Bidens leadership has led to NATO being more than just a military alliance. But political conditions in Washington and allied nations are not static and could shape Putin’s thinking.

All of the above and more are what Petraeus said. The list is long, including poor campaign design; wholly inadequate training (what were they doing for all those months they were deployed on the northern, eastern, and southern borders of Ukraine?); poor command, control, and communications; inadequate discipline (and a culture that condones war crimes and abuse of local populations); poor equipment (exemplified by turrets blowing off of tanks when fires ignite in them); insufficient logistic capabilities; inability to achieve combined arms effects (to employ all ground and air capabilities effectively together); inadequate organizational architecture; lack of a professional noncommissioned officer corps; a top-down command system that does not promote initiative at lower levels and pervasive corruption that undermines every aspect of their military – and the supporting military-industrial complex.

Petraeus: Not at all. Russia still has enormous military capacity and is certainly still a nuclear superpower, as well as a country with enormous energy, mineral and agricultural blessings. It has a population that is almost double that of the next biggest European country, Turkey, with around 80 million.

How the Ukraine War Ends? Comment on The Unstable State of the Art” by L. Petraeus and L. Bergen

And it is still led by a kleptocratic dictator who embraces innumerable grievances and extreme revanchist views that severely undermine his decision-making.

Bergen: You know the observation sometimes attributed to Stalin: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” Russia has a far bigger population than Ukraine: Will that make a critical difference to the Ukraine war over the long term?

Nonetheless, it is estimated that as many as 300,000 new recruits and mobilized reservists are being sent to the frontlines, with up to 100,000-150,000 more on the way. And that is not trivial – because quantity does, indeed, matter.

Petraeus: All of those technologies have proven very important, and the Ukrainians have demonstrated enormous skill in adapting various technologies and commercial applications to enable intelligence gathering, targeting and other military tasks.

To be sure, there have been times when I have felt that we should have decided to provide various capabilities (e.g., HIMARS, longer-range precision munitions, tanks, etc.) sooner than we have.

Ukraine is going to have to transition from eastern bloc aircraft to western ones eventually. They don’t get any more MiGs, so they have more pilots than aircraft.

So, we might as well begin the process of transition, noting that it will take a number of months, regardless, to train pilots and maintenance personnel. All that said, again, I think the Administration has done a very impressive job and proven to be the indispensable nation in this particular situation – with important ramifications for other situations around the world.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/opinions/petraeus-how-ukraine-war-ends-bergen-ctpr/index.html

Is the Black Sea sinking sinking of Moskva a threat to the Chinese, or how the Soviet Union is trying to invade Taiwan?

Bergen reports that the force that Putin sends into the toughest battles is the quasi-private Wagner Group. Any thoughts on using mercenaries, many of whom are convicts, as a tactic?

Petraeus: What Russia has done with what are, in essence, mercenaries, as you note, is somewhat innovative – but also essentially inhumane, as it entails throwing soldiers (many of them former convicts) into battle as cannon fodder, and with little, if any, concern for their survival.

These are not the tactics or practices that, at the end of the day, foster development of well-trained, disciplined, capable, and cohesive units that have trust in their leaders and soldiers on their left and right.

Do the lessons ofUkraine for the Chinese if they are to launch an invasion of Taiwan, which would not be over a neighboring land border but over a 100 mile body of water? Is the sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea navy, changing the minds of the Chinese?

The target of the operation should have a large population who is willing to fight for its survival and be supported by major powers.

Petraeus: I believe that is the case. This is the first war in which smartphones and social media have been so widely available and also so widely employed. The result is unprecedented transparency and an extraordinary amount of information available – all through so-called “open sources.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/opinions/petraeus-how-ukraine-war-ends-bergen-ctpr/index.html

The Russian Invasion: How Does the War in Ukraine End? A Cold War in the Cold and Cold, and a Cold War with NATO and the Western Allies

The Russian forces have limitations in their professional capabilities and their inability to generate combined arms effect, which makes it hard to come up with an innovative new plan.

Beyond that, I believe we will see Ukrainian forces that are much more capable than the Russians at achieving the kind of combined arms effects that I described earlier and that thus enable much more effective offensive operations and can unhinge some of the Russian defenses. We may not see all this, however, until the spring or even summer, given the amount of time required for Ukrainian forces to receive and train on the new western tanks and other systems.

Bergen: In 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq War, you famously asked a rhetorical question: “Tell me how this ends?” How does the war in Ukraine end?

Ahead of next week’s anniversary of the Russian invasion, US and Western leaders are gearing up for a show of unity and strength designed to establish once and for all that NATO is in the conflict for the long haul and until Moscow’s defeat.

“Russia has lost – they’ve lost strategically, operationally, and tactically,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said on Tuesday. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned Wednesday that Putin can’t win and explained why NATO was rushing arms to the Ukrainians. 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.”

The Western rhetorical and diplomatic offensive will ratchet up further as Vice President Kamala Harris heads to the Munich Security Conference this week. President Joe Biden will meanwhile visit Poland and a frontline NATO and ex-Warsaw pact state next week, bolstering his legacy of offering the most effective leadership of the Western alliance since the end of the Cold War.

The Russian-Putin conflict and the American-Russian dialogue after the February 23, 2022 Russian-Supesirbation War

The world knows that Putin is not thinking of quitting the war because he has no diplomatic framework for truce talks.

Fiona Hill, a leading expert on Russia and Putin, who worked in Trump’s White House, said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday that there were few signs Putin’s determination is waning.

There was no chance that China would support Putin for an end to the war before this month’s incident, which resulted in the cancellation of several Chinese trips to the US.

“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.

February 23, 2022 is the evening. The head of a news site relaxes with a 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.

In the space of a year, the war has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions more. It has wreaked havoc, decimated cities, driven a food and energy crisis and tested the resolve of western alliances.

Zaporizhzhia, February 23, 2022. I left Russia in 2022 with a wife and a husband in charge

Zaporizhzhia, February 23, 2022. I dreamed that I would celebrate my husband’s birthday the next day. Our life was getting better with each passing day. My husband was running his own business. Our daughter had started school and made friends there. We were lucky to have arranged support services and found a special needs nursery for our son. I finally had time to do my job. I felt happy.

Completely exhausted, crushed and scared, we had to brace ourselves and come to terms with our forced displacement. I will forever be indebted to all the people who helped us get to know each other in a foreign land.

My husband got a job thanks to the opportunities provided by the Czech Republic. 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 studies remotely in her Ukrainian school and goes to a Czech school.

That morning we woke up to learn that the invasion started. I wrote an open letter denouncing the war, which was co-signed by 12 Russian writers, directors and cultural figures. Tens of thousands of Russians added their signatures after it was published.

On the third day we, my husband and I, left Russia. I felt like I had an obligation to do it. I couldn’t stay on the territory of the fascist state I had grown up in.

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 of not reading the signs earlier. I too am responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine. As are my contemporaries and our forebears. Regrettably, Russian culture is also to blame for making all these horrors possible.”

The whole year has been hard on everyone. I read the news about people close to me killed by Russians – a teammate, the director of a sports school, or a friend’s parents.

The war of history began with the forced deportation of 2.5 million Ukrainians and ended with the theft of Ukrainian grain and the destruction of Ukrainian museums, libraries, churches.

My father is haunted by the darkness in his eyes when he tells the chilling stories of relatives who were shipped to the Soviet prison camp never to return. The stories of Ukrainians who died in the famine of 1932-33 are told here.

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

I expected to die from addictions a long time ago, but some of my former classmates have volunteered to fight them. My hairdresser, whom I expected to remain a sweet summer child, turned out to have fled on foot from the Russia-occupied 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. These dark winter nights, one sees so many stars over Kyiv which the Russians have only managed to bring closer to eternity.

Andrei Kolesnikov is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He wrote a book called “Five Five- Year Liberal Reforms” about the political and social history of Russia. There were beginnings of Russian Modernization and Egor Gaidar.

It seems that since February 2022 we have experienced several eras. The first was joy when the population gave Putin an 80% approval rating, after a long time of stagnant ratings.

The future was canceled because he aborted the past. When your superiors decide what to do for you, it is easier to live this way.

It is impossible for me to adapt to what happened to my family. As an active commentator on the events, I was labeled by the authorities as a “foreign agent,” which increased personal risk and reinforced the impression of living in an Orwellian anti-utopia.

I bathed my dog, washed my house and lit a candle on the night of February 23. I have a one-bedroom apartment in northern part of the city. I loved taking care of it. I loved the life I had. All of it – the small routines and the struggles. It was the last night that my life mattered.

The next morning my phone was buzzing from all the messages and missed calls. The Kyiv Independent website had a red headline with a picture of a war being waged on Ukrain.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/opinions/one-year-anniversary-putin-war-ukraine-russia-wrap-opinions-ctpr/index.html

Fighting in the First World War II: How Do We Become Better? What Have We Learned in My Life? How We Are Today and Where Do We Will Go?

I remember talking to colleagues, trying to assemble and coordinate a small army of volunteers to strengthen the newsroom. My parents have to organize buying supplies.

I knew the life I was in was falling apart soon after, starting with the small things. I don’t care about how I dressed, what cup of tea I used, or even if I took a shower. Life itself no longer mattered, only the battle did.

Just a few weeks into the full-scale invasion it was already hard to remember the struggles, sorrows and joyful moments of the pre-war era. 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.

I was no longer concerned with my personal ambitions. The only goal was important to raise our flag and show that we are fighting even in these circumstances.

I couldn’t enjoy my victories on the track. The only way they were possible was because so many defenders had died. But I got messages from soldiers on the frontline. They were happy to follow our achievements, and that was the primary motivation for me to continue my career.

Life values have changed. I enjoy seeing or talking to friends of mine, like never before. I believe that all of us will come back to our country, just like the other Ukrainians. We need the help of the world.

This leads me to the question, who do we document all these crimes? The head of the Center for Civil Liberties told us. I’m a human rights lawyer, and I document human pain in order for the Russians to be brought to justice.

Taiwan’s Foreign Minister During the Ukraine War: “We are all looking for a solution,” Yukawa told PP-Newton

Taiwan is keeping a wary eye on China because of the war in Ukraine, Taiwan’s foreign minister said in an interview.

“They have expansionist motivation. 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.

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 seven bullets in his body after the attack.

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

Tribute to “The Strange Case of Bjorken in the Dark Sector” (with an Appendix by Danny Hajek)

Danny Hajek produced and edited the audio for the story. Additional editing and production help from Carol Klinger, Denise Couture and Nina Kravinsky. Hanna Palamarenko and Tanya Ustova provided reporting and translation help.