Alexander Gabuev, Opinion | It’s Not Just Putin. Russia Needs China, Too. – The New York Times

By Alexander Gabuev

Mr. Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote from Berlin.

“Vladimir Putin’s trip to Beijing this week, where he will meet with Xi Jinping and top Chinese officials, is another clear demonstration of the current closeness between Russia and China.

Yet many in the West still want to believe that their alliance is an aberration, driven by Mr. Putin’s emotional anti-Americanism and his toxic fixation on Ukraine. Once Mr. Putin and his dark obsessions are out of the picture, the thinking goes, Moscow will seek to rebuild ties with the West — not least because the bonds between Russia and China are shallow, while the country has centuries of economic and cultural dependence on Europe.

This wishful view, however appealing, overlooks the transformation of Russia’s economy and society. Never since the fall of the Soviet Union has Russia been so distant from Europe, and never in its entire history has it been so entwined with China. The truth is that after two years of war in Ukraine and painful Western sanctions, it’s not just Mr. Putin who needs China — Russia does, too.

China has emerged as Russia’s single most important partner, providing a lifeline not only for Mr. Putin’s war machine but also for the entire embattled economy. In 2023, Russia’s trade with China hit a record $240.1 billion, up by more than 60 percent from prewar levels, as China accounted for 30 percent of Russia’s exports and nearly 40 percent of its imports.”

Opinion | J.D. Vance: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up – The New York Times

By J. D. Vance

Mr. Vance, a Republican, is the junior senator from Ohio.

“President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.

Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.

The Biden administration has applied increasing pressure on Republicans to pass a supplemental aid package of more than $60 billion to Ukraine. I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war. Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.

The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.”

David Lindsay:   Such hogwash. I recommend the comments, which show patriotism, and calculus over math.  Leadership over  cringe-worthy defeatism. Here are the two top comments:

Mook

Charlotte8h ago

So according to Senator Vance, we should just give up on Ukraine and cede it to a despot that violated their sovereignty? Strong Neville Chamberlain vibes and I am thankful as an American that people like him were not in charge in 1941. The world is a better place when we support other democracies.

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JRS commented 8 hours ago

J

JRS

Massachusetts8h ago

Dear Senator Vance. I could not disagree with you more. Who am I? A retired physician, former Air Force Officer who deployed with NATO at the end of the Cold War and during Desert Storm. First, Russia is not our friend. Their goal continues to be the degradation of our military, economic and political power. They were and are still a totalitarian country that leads by murder , imprisonment and force. Period. Second, our reduced manufacturing capability that is actively damaging our national security, is not a reason to stop supplying munitions to a country invaded by Russia who does not want to be occupied by a totalitarian army. Rather it is a reason to have industrial policies to enhance our ability to produce such material. I do not recall you advocating for any legislation that would improve our manufacturing of munitions, ships and other defense materials. Third, one never negotiates from a position of weakness. Starving the Ukraine of ammunition and then claiming we can successfully negotiate with Putin is laughable. He wants the whole country and has said so. In fact, he wants the previous Soviet Union boundaries. Shall we give up Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and the rest of eastern Europe next? Finally, history shows that appeasing an aggressor never resolves an issue. Rather it encourages more aggression. I suggest you go to Kyiv. Tour the damage. See what Putin has done. These people want freedom. You need to reflect on what is worth fighting for.

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DL:  Of course we and Europe can outpend Russia. The Russian ecomomy is roughly the size of the economy of Tennessee.  1.8 trillion.

And: from Google:     “Russia’s economy is slightly larger than Brazil’s, but much smaller than California’s ($3.4 trillion) or Texas’ ($2 trillion). In 2021, Russia’s economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP), was less than $1.8 trillion, while the United States’ GDP was $23.3 trillion. As of 2023, the USA’s GDP is $26.9 trillion, while Russia’s is $2.1 trillion.”

Opinion | Dan Coats: Why Aid for Ukraine’s Fight Against Russia Matters – The New York Times

By Dan Coats

Mr. Coats, a former senator from Indiana, served as the director of national intelligence from 2017 to 2019. (Under President Trump)

“Since Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, a rare consensus has formed in Washington around this conviction: America must provide military support to Ukraine’s resistance. Three administrations and large majorities of both parties in Congress have consistently held that President Vladimir Putin’s aggression cannot be tolerated. When has such deep solidarity last occurred on any difficult subject?

Now members of Congress are arguing that we must turn away from spending more money to help Ukraine, choosing instead to focus on our own needs, pursuing our own interests. This is a false choice.

The choices facing America are always based on the same foundation: what best serves our nation. The choice is not America first or something else first. America is always first. The real question, in this complicated and uncertain world, is what course of action will most likely serve our core national interests — security and economic prosperity.

Those interests are inextricably linked to the strength of our global alliances and the international system of law and cooperation in which American democracy survives and prospers. And the strength of those networks, in turn, depends on our role as a trusted ally and friend, on our credibility and — frankly — on our virtue.” . . . .

Havana Syndrome and Russia’s Unit 29155. – The New York Times

Pinned

Serge Schmemann

Editorial Board Member

Havana Syndrome and Russia’s Unit 29155

A joint investigation by Russian, American and German reporters has produced evidence that is chilling and plausible, albeit not conclusive, that Havana syndrome — painful and debilitating medical episodes experienced by scores of American diplomats and intelligence officers over the past decade — is the work of a special Russian spy unit dedicated to assassination and mayhem.

The reporting by The Insider, a Russia-focused investigative news outlet, in collaboration with the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and CBS’s “60 Minutes,” sharply challenges earlier assertions by U.S. intelligence agencies that what they called anomalous health incidents were very unlikely to be the work of a foreign power.

In typical cases, victims reported sudden and acute pain, usually to one side of the head, followed by prolonged bouts of headaches and dizziness. The Biden administration and Congress have nonetheless enacted legislation providing compensation to victims, some of whom have been unable to continue work.

Drawing on interviews with victims and an impressive mastery of online snooping, the investigative reporters found various links between the attacks and Unit 29155, a division of the Russian military intelligence agency G.R.U., known to U.S. intelligence agencies for conducting lethal operations and sabotage the world over. Operatives of Unit 29155 were placed at sites of several anomalous health incidents; more damningly, the reporters discovered that senior members of the unit had received awards for work on “nonlethal acoustic weapons,” which in Russia refers to directed-energy devices based on sound or radio frequencies.

One of the key pieces in the puzzle was supplied by the wife of an official at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, who was struck with acute pain in her head while doing laundry at home. Spotting a car on the house’s security camera, she managed to get to the street in time to see a tall, thin man and to photograph his car. She subsequently identified a photograph of Albert Averyanov, an operative of Unit 29155 and the son of the founding commander of the unit, Gen. Andrei Averyanov.

Opinion | Everyone Wants to Seize Russia’s Assets. The Repo Act Is a Terrible Idea. – The New York Times

By Christopher Caldwell

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

“The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, has brought a glimmer of hope to supporters of the Ukrainian war effort. He suggested to Fox News on March 31 that he would try to rally his divided party behind the so-called REPO Act. That piece of legislation would allow President Biden, working with European allies, to seize Russian currency reserves frozen in the West and use them to aid Ukraine.

Grabbing these reserves would be politically convenient. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States and its allies have thrown more than a quarter-trillion dollars into the war, to little ultimate effect. Ukraine has lately suffered a string of battlefield defeats. Prolonging the war is a project that Americans of all political leanings have been steadily less willing to fund through taxes.

Mr. Johnson backs Ukraine’s war effort, and sees supporting it as a responsibility of American leadership. But his caucus — more in tune with the Republican voter base — has stymied him. The REPO Act might offer both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Biden a way to duck controversy.”

“. . . . The REPO Act carries additional risks. The very act of seizing Russian assets would pose dangers to the U.S. economy, because other countries, not just Russia, would view it as an act of brigandage. This could weaken the dollar’s status as the main global reserve currency.

The dollar is probably the most valuable strategic asset the United States has. We exercise a degree of control over the world economy because the world, for trading purposes, allows its transactions to pass through our currency. This leaves us with cheaper transaction costs and lighter financial burdens. It gives us leeway to run up debt ($34 trillion of it so far) that other countries lack.” . . . .

If Russia, China and other diplomatic rivals were to decide that their dollar assets were vulnerable and that they could no longer trust the dollar as a means of exchange, we would feel the pain of that $34 trillion in debt in a way that we don’t now. Retaining the advantages of a reserve currency depends on our behaving as a trustworthy and neutral custodian of others’ assets. If we start stealing people’s money, that could change.

Rajan Menon, Opinion | Putin Has Already Lost – The New York Times

By Rajan Menon

Mr. Menon is the director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities, an American foreign policy think tank.

“As the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, it has become a commonplace that time favors President Vladimir Putin. With Ukraine running low on weaponry and ammunition, American military assistance in doubt and Russia determined to fight on, Ukrainian victory now seems out of reach. Some influential experts go further, insisting that Kyiv will suffer only more death and destruction by persisting and should seek a political settlement with Moscow — even if it requires sacrificing territory.

And yet, for all that, Mr. Putin’s war has failed. As Carl von Clausewitz famously stressed, war is not ultimately about killing people and destroying things: It’s a means to achieve specific political ends. Those who start wars expect to be in a better strategic position once the gunfire stops. But even if this war ends with Russia retaining all the Ukrainian land it now holds — a scenario Ukrainians would find more than unpalatable — Moscow’s position will be worse. No matter what, Ukraine will go its own way. For Mr. Putin, more concerned by Ukraine than any other country that arose from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, that alone is tantamount to defeat.

If the fundamental purpose of Mr. Putin’s war was to keep Ukraine within Russia’s orbit — politically, culturally and economically — it has had the opposite effect. Ukraine’s leaders and citizens, particularly those from younger generations, have decided that their future lies with the West, not Russia. The prevalence of this mind-set became increasingly palpable over the course of four trips I have taken to Ukraine since the invasion; no visitor to Ukraine will fail to be struck by its many daily manifestations. Everywhere you go, Ukrainians speak Western languages, particularly English, in seemingly ever greater numbers.

Ukraine tends to be depicted as an uneasy amalgam of two national communities: one in the country’s western regions, defined by Ukrainian ethnicity and language, the other in its Russophone east and south. If this was ever wholly accurate, it is no longer. To take one example, any visitor to Ukraine’s eastern and southern front lines will encounter soldiers who speak to one another in Russian and may not even know Ukrainian. But they see themselves as citizens of Ukraine committed to preventing Russia from subordinating their homeland — a cause for which they are prepared to die.

More than any other event, Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 has contributed to this sentiment. Ukrainian nationalism today, transcending region and language, reflects a deep determination to forge an identity defined by separation from, even antipathy toward, Russia. Indeed, Mr. Putin may go down in history as one of its main, if unwitting, catalysts. Given his conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are really one people, such a result is especially ironic.

His war has backfired not only in Ukraine but also in Europe. The European Union, jolted into action by the invasion, summoned a common spirit in its support for Ukraine. Previously somewhat divided in its approach to Russia, the bloc has acted in near unanimity — Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary being the only exception — to oppose Mr. Putin’s act of aggression. Equally important, Ukraine’s journey toward E.U. membership, for years fiercely opposed in Moscow, is now very much in train, even if it won’t be a short ride. One sign of progress: Along with Moldova, Ukraine officially began negotiations to join the bloc late last year.

Then there’s NATO. Russia’s invasion was undeniably an attempt to forestall the alliance’s eastern encroachment, which Mr. Putin has long regarded as a threat. In the event, Russia’s assault on Ukraine impelled two more countries, Finland and Sweden, to seek NATO membership. Neither had shown the slightest inclination to sign up before the invasion and both have first-rate armies. With their addition, Russia will be even more hemmed in, not least in the Baltic Sea and by the 830-mile land border it shares with Finland.

What’s more, Russia’s attack jolted non-U.S. NATO countries into rethinking their longstanding aversion to boosting military expenditure. According to NATO estimates, the combined annual military spending of Canada and the European members of the alliance increased to 8.3 percent in 2023, from 2 percent in 2022. This year, 18 member states are reportedly set to meet the goal of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their militaries — a sixfold increase in a decade. Even in Germany, historically sensitive to Russia’s security interests and an advocate of engagement with Moscow, the mood has shifted. Its defense minister now warns that Russia has become a serious, growing threat.

Ukraine, of course, is keen to join the alliance: a nightmare scenario for the Kremlin. But even if that desire remains unfulfilled — as seems likely, at least in the near term — Ukraine will continue looking to NATO countries for help in training its soldiers, equipping its armed forces and building modern defense industries by signing agreements for technology transfers and joint production. Even a non-NATO Ukraine will not quite be nonaligned because of its substantial and increasing defense ties with the West.

The pessimists may be right: If American military assistance were to cease, Ukraine would find it far harder, perhaps even impossible, to reclaim more of its land and may even lose additional territory. Yet even a smaller Ukraine will remain strategically important. When it became independent in 1991 it ranked — Russia aside — first in Europe in size and fifth in population. Even a truncated Ukraine would be among Europe’s biggest countries, its heft added to by a battle-tested army of 500,000 that is already far larger than that of any European NATO country and that will only become stronger and more modern.

Mr. Putin sees Ukraine as a peerless prize, even a Russian entitlement. But the war he started to possess it has guaranteed that it will never be his.” -30-

Nadya Tolokonnikova, Opinion | Navalny Is Dead, but Putin Can’t Kill His Putin Can’t Kill His Vision of the Future- The New York Times

 

By Nadya Tolokonnikova

Ms. Tolokonnikova is a founder of Pussy Riot.

“It’s 2007, a warm, sunny spring day in Moscow. It’s my first rally, and I’m nervous. I’m 16, silly and shy, falling in love with courageous and loud people around me. I hear my quiet voice join others screaming, “Russia without Putin.” We lock our arms and together push the police out of the street. Russia could be free: It’s a new feeling for me. This is where I see Aleksei Navalny for the first time.

For the next 17 years, I watched my friend Aleksei rise from a Moscow blogger to a global moral and political figure, giving hope and inspiration to people around the world. He helped me and millions of Russians realize that our country doesn’t have to belong to K.G.B. agents and the Kremlin’s henchmen. He gave us something else, too: a vision he called the “beautiful Russia of the future.” This vision is immortal, unlike us humans. President Vladimir Putin may have silenced Aleksei, who died last week. But no matter how hard he tries, Mr. Putin won’t be able to kill Aleksei’s beautiful dream.

In the autumn of 2011, Mr. Putin announced he was going to become president once again, making it clear that he planned to rule Russia for the rest of his life. My feminist friends and I went to an opposition conference in Moscow to figure out our next steps. Young, riotous and radical, we walked like zombies through all the usual boring panels with sad speakers, poetry readings and sleep-inducing talks on human rights and democracy. It wasn’t inspiring because it was neither practical nor attractive. Yes, we all believed that Russia had to be free. But how do we get there?

And then Aleksei spoke about his anticorruption investigations. I can divide my life into before and after that speech. “We take a stick and poke at the bad guys with this stick, and you can do it with me,” he said. For all of us in that packed room, Aleksei made it feel not only that a free Russia was possible but also that we could get there with joy, laughter and camaraderie. No matter how long the path, you have to break it down into steps and take them one at a time.

That day, Pussy Riot was born. I realized that we needed to create our own set of tools to bring about change: direct, attention-grabbing actions that would be easily replicable, giving birth to a movement. Aleksei gave me the push I needed to create the first Pussy Riot music video, which was based on dozens of dangerous guerrilla performances in Moscow. I was too proud to ever admit it to Aleksei in person, but the idea to make the video came from his speech that day.

We made it our goal to become as effective and loud as Aleksei but with a feminist and queer lens. Months later, when my Pussy Riot colleagues and I were on trial for supposedly inciting religious hatred, there — standing in the courtroom among our family members and activists — was Aleksei.

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Three members of Pussy Riot in a courtroom in 2012, with the author on the far right.Credit…Maxim Shipenkov/European Pressphoto Agency

Despite the support, we were sent for two years to a penal colony, a gloomy and hopeless place, where once again my only hope for political change in Russia came from Aleksei. It was 2013, and he was running a remarkably popular campaign to become the mayor of Moscow. In an attempt to silence him, the government sentenced Aleksei to five years in prison. Infuriated, Russians filled the streets, demanding his immediate release. Miraculously, he was released the next day, pending an appeal. I can’t recall any other opposition force in Russia ever having such power.

People say Mr. Putin feared Aleksei. But I think the reason he wanted to get rid of Aleksei was another emotion — a darker, more sinister one. It was envy. People loved Aleksei. With his jokes, irony, superhero-like fearlessness and love for life, he led with charisma. People followed Aleksei because he was the kind of person you wanted to be friends with. People follow Mr. Putin because they fear him, but people followed Aleksei because they loved him. Mr. Putin clearly envied this appeal. No amount of money in the world can buy love; no amount of missiles and tanks can conquer people’s hearts.

As a feminist, I’ve always found it inspiring that Aleksei, unlike many others in Russian politics, chose to surround himself with strong women — Maria Pevchikh, Kira Yarmysh, Lyubov Sobol — and trusted them in the highest positions of power in his camp. And of course, there was his love and respect for his wife, Yulia. It’s a stark contrast with Mr. Putin, known for his cavemanlike sexism, bragging, “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days.” Truly confident men don’t need to build their self-esteem at women’s expense.

“How is life in prison?” Aleksei asked me on the phone in 2013. “Not ideal but not too bad,” I answered. “One can survive here.” Aleksei’s team later told me that he recalled our conversation when he decided to go back to Russia after his poisoning in 2020. It was a characteristically brave decision. From his return to his death, it was just three years.

People say hope died with Aleksei. I see it differently: With Aleksei’s passing, a new sense of responsibility has been born. For many of us in Russia, Aleksei was like an older brother or a father figure, someone who was always there to clean up your mess. We lost him so painfully early, so prematurely. Now there’s no one else in the room. We owe it to Aleksei and his dream for a new beautiful Russia to carry on the fight.

Thomas Friedman | A Trip to Ukraine Clarified the Stakes. And They’re Huge. – The New York Times

“. . . . . What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil. He has trumped up any number of shifting justifications — one day it was removing a Nazi regime in power in Kyiv, the next it was preventing NATO expansion, the next it was fending off a Western cultural invasion of Russia — for what ultimately was a personal flight of fancy that now requires his superpower army turning to North Korea for help. It’s like the biggest bank in town having to ask the local pawnshop for a loan. So much for Putin’s bare-chested virility.

Image: Russian shelling struck a residential area of Kharkiv, Ukraine, in April 2022.Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

What is so evil — beyond the death and pain and trauma and destruction he has inflicted on so many Ukrainians — is that at a time when climate change, famine, health crises and so much more are stressing Planet Earth, the last thing humanity needed was to divert so much attention, collaborative energy, money and lives to respond to Putin’s war to make Ukraine a Russian colony again.

Putin lately has stopped even bothering to justify the war — maybe because even he is too embarrassed to utter aloud the nihilism that his actions scream: If I can’t have Ukraine, I’ll make sure Ukrainians can’t have it, either.

“This is not a war in which the aggressor has some vision, some outline of the future. Rather, on the contrary, for them, everything is black, formless, and the only thing that matters is force,” Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, remarked on a panel we did together at a conference in Kyiv last weekend.

Being in the city has been clarifying for me in three regards. I understand even better just how sick and disruptive this Russian invasion is. I understand even better just how hard, maybe even impossible, it will be for Ukrainians to evict Putin’s army from every inch of their soil.

Perhaps most of all, I understand even better something that the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed almost 30 years ago: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”

Most Americans don’t know a lot about Ukraine, but I say this without any hyperbole: Ukraine is a game-changing country for the West, for better or for worse depending on the war’s outcome. Its integration into the European Union and NATO someday would constitute a power shift that could rival the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Ukraine is a country with impressive human capital, agricultural resources and natural resources — “hands, brains and grains,” as Western investors in Kyiv like to say. Its full-fledged integration into Europe’s democratic security and economic architecture would be felt in Moscow and Beijing.

Putin knows that. His war, in my view, has never been primarily about countering NATO expansion. It has always been much more about stopping a Slavic Ukraine from joining the European Union and becoming a successful counter example to Putin’s Slavic thieving autocracy. NATO expansion is Putin’s friend — it allows him to justify militarizing Russian society and to present himself as the indispensable guardian of Russia’s strength. E.U. expansion to Ukraine is a mortal threat — it exposes Putinism as the source of Russia’s weakness. And the Ukrainians I met, to a person, seemed to understand that they and Europe were bound up together in an epochal moment against Putinism — a moment, though, that cannot succeed without a steadfast United States. Which is why one of the most frequent — and worried — questions I got on my visit were variations of “Do you think Putin’s pal Trump can be president again?”. . . . . . .

UK’s MI6 Chief Says Putin Cut a Deal to End Wagner Revolt – The New York Times

By Megan Specia and Julian E. Barnes

reporting from London and Aspen, Colo.

• July 19, 2023

“The chief of Britain’s intelligence agency, MI6, said on Wednesday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had “cut a deal” with Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, during Mr. Prigozhin’s failed rebellion last month.

The comments from Richard Moore, the head of MI6, in a rare speech in Prague at an event hosted by Politico, offer insights from a Western intelligence official into the stunning but short-lived revolt by Mr. Prigozhin last month.

The Wagner leader staged a mutiny against Russia’s military last month, which saw his mercenary forces marching toward the capital before abruptly halting. More than two weeks later, the Kremlin disclosed that Mr. Prigozhin and other Wagner leaders had met with Mr. Putin for three hours in the days after the rebellion ended.”

Nicholas Kristof | How Putin Broke Russia – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“TALLINN, Estonia — Vladimir Putin has compared himself to the czar Peter the Great. But to travel through Eastern Europe is to see how much he has instead caused Russian influence to shrink.

I’ve been on a road trip through Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — and it’s clear that Putin has managed to unite nearly everyone against Russia. Even Russian speakers who often used to feel loyalty to Moscow are now fund-raising for Ukraine.

One of my first memories is of a trip to Poland in the 1960s to visit my grandparents (Kristof is short for Krzysztofowicz). What I remember is that Communist Poland seemed endlessly bleak and depressing. Later, when I began to travel around Eastern Europe as a law student and aspiring journalist, my main impression was that in the Communist bloc you didn’t need color film.

Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who was in Vilnius for the NATO summit, told me that when he first visited the country in 1979, he had the same impression: “It looked like everything had been whitewashed with gray paint. It was drab and lifeless.” Flash forward, and today these countries are almost unrecognizable: vibrant, colorful and far wealthier than Russia. Poland has become a sophisticated manufacturing base for Europe, and Intel just announced that it would build a $4.6 billion chip plant near Wroclaw.

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Street sweepers in Poland in 1961.Credit…Ernst Haas/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

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A shopping mall in Krakow, Poland, 2023.Credit…Artur Widak/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

Poland has been able to serve as a model for countries to the east,” Mark Brzezinski, the American ambassador to Poland, told me. And Russia has been a model of a different kind.

“Putin’s actions since February 2022 have proven the thesis that Russia under Putin is interested in leadership by terror and authoritarianism,” Brzezinski added. “For other countries of the former Soviet bloc, if they ever were wobbly about joining the West, they certainly have had a clarifying experience.”

The improvements in the Baltics have been as pronounced as those in Poland. Estonia is now a jewel of Europe, the global model of a high-tech and prosperous “e-state.” It has nurtured countless high-tech start-ups, including Skype, and as I walked through Tallinn, the capital, I shared a sidewalk with a robot delivering a takeout dinner to a nearby home.

In contrast, Russia and the places that have remained in its orbit like Belarus and Transnistria remain dismal and oppressive. A glimpse of that side of the chasm: One of the world’s bravest journalists, Elena Milashina, who has reported on human rights in Russia, was attacked recently in Chechnya; thugs beat her, shaved her head, poured dye on her and left her with a brain injury.”