NYT Editorial | Putin Began His Unjust War One Year Ago. Here’s What Ukraine Needs Now. – The New York Times

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

“A year since Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to invade Ukraine, the war is far from over. However bravely Ukrainians fight on, and however muddled the performance of Russia’s military, Ukraine cannot prevail without continued and substantial Western assistance. Since the invasion, that has swelled to over $150 billion in American and European spending, and the weapons supplied to Ukraine now include the latest Western tanks and antiaircraft systems.

The United States and its major allies have been steadfast in their resolve to support Ukraine in its fight, and their people have largely accepted the enormous cost. In the United States, the political resistance has been limited largely to a few voices on the far right and far left. But questions will become only more common as the war drags on. As Representative Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, a Republican and a strong supporter of Ukraine, has warned, “There should be no blank check on anything.”

He’s right.

Outside Europe and the United States, support for the Ukrainian cause is much less solid, making efforts to punish Russia for its aggression less effective. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview recorded Saturday for “Meet the Press” that China is providing nonlethal aid to Russia and is “strongly considering providing lethal assistance to Russia.” Mr. Blinken expressed his “deep concern” to his Chinese counterpart.

To strengthen the alliance supporting Ukraine, as the second year of this terrible and unnecessary conflict begins, it is useful to examine why it is in the interest of the United States and other democracies to expend so much wealth, and to take so great a risk in confronting a nuclear power.

Nicholas Kristof | Biden Should Give Ukraine What It Needs to Win – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“Russian Air Force pilots are scaredy-cats who have been surprisingly absent over Ukraine. Russian ground forces are being mowed down as cannon fodder, and one of the best known examples of Russian military discipline involves an officer using a sledgehammer to execute a fellow Russian.

But the Russian war effort does excel in some areas:

• It stands out at committing atrocities. In my interviews in Ukraine, I was struck by how commonly Russian troops engaged in torture, rape and pillage.

• Russia’s government has become a leader in child trafficking, transferring more than 6,000 Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-controlled territory, with some put up for adoption.

• Russia has manipulated Western fears that it might use nuclear weapons, thus deterring the United States from fully supporting Ukraine in this war. We give Ukraine enough to survive but, so far, not enough to win.

So a year after Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, it’s time for President Biden to reassess and give Ukraine what it needs to end this war and save Ukrainian and Russian lives alike.

“We are well past the point of trying to measure this a few systems at a time,” said James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and supreme allied commander at NATO. “Putin is all in, and we should be as well. That means fighter aircraft, ATACMS, high-end anti-ship cruise missiles — the kitchen sink.” “

‘Our Losses Were Gigantic’: Life in a Sacrificial Russian Assault Wave – The New York Times

By Andrew E. Kramer

Feb. 13, 2023Updated 9:18 a.m. ET

6 MIN READ

“LVIV, Ukraine — Creeping forward along a tree line late at night toward an entrenched Ukrainian position, the Russian soldier watched in horror as his comrades were mowed down by enemy fire.

His squad of 10 ex-convicts advanced only a few dozen yards before being decimated. “We were hit by machine-gun fire,” said the soldier, a private named Sergei.

One soldier was wounded and screamed, “Help me! Help me, please!” the private said, though no help arrived. Eight soldiers were killed, one escaped back to Russian lines and Sergei was captured by Ukrainians.

The soldiers were sitting ducks, sent forth by Russian commanders to act essentially as human cannon fodder in an assault. There are two main uses of the conscripts in this tactic: as “storm troops” who move in waves, followed by more experienced Russian fighters, and as intentional targets, to draw fire and thus identify Ukrainian positions to hit with artillery.”

David Lindsay Jr.

NYT Comment:

Excellent reporting. thank you Andrew Kramer et al. This is stomach churning, especially, if you are Russian, which thank God, I am not. It is a wasteful and evil war, may it end soon, in victory for the attacked Ukrainians.

InconvenientNew.net

Nigel Gould-Davies | The U.S. Should Define Russia’s Red Lines – The New York Times

By Nigel Gould-Davies

Mr. Gould-Davies is the senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

” “What are Putin’s red lines?”

This question, asked with growing urgency as Russia loses its war in Ukraine but does not relent in its aggressions, is intended to offer analytical clarity and to guide policy. In reality, it is the wrong question, because “red line” is a bad metaphor. Red lines are red herrings. There are better ways to think about strategy.

“Red lines” implies there are defined limits to the actions that a state — in this case, Russia — is prepared to accept from others. If the West transgresses these limits, Russia will respond in new and more dangerous ways. A red line is a tripwire for escalation. Western diplomacy must seek to understand and “respect” Russia’s red lines by avoiding actions that would cross them. Russia’s red lines thus impose limits on Western actions.

There are three flaws to this reasoning. First, it assumes that red lines are fixed features of a state’s foreign policy. This is almost never the case. What states say, and even believe, that they would not accept can change radically and quickly. In 2012 President Barack Obama said that Syrian use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would invite “enormous consequences.” Yet when Syria killed hundreds of civilians with the nerve agent Sarin the following year, as numerous watchdog groups reported, the U.S. response was muted. The Taliban’s return to Kabul in August 2021 — an outcome the West had spent two decades and trillions of dollars preventing — was the brightest of red lines until, in the face of changing priorities and a different view of costs and benefits, it suddenly wasn’t.

These are not exceptions. In truth, red lines are nearly always soft, variable and contingent — not etched in geopolitical stone. While national interests, as Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, said, may be eternal, the way they manifest themselves as specific commitments will reflect temporary, shifting circumstances — among them, relative power, perceptions of threat, domestic calculations and wider global trends. Diplomacy should therefore seek not to avoid an adversary’s red lines, but to change them.”

Strong clear logic above, good comments below.

G

George

MIJan. 1

Yawn. There is no appeasing a dictator but defeat. Once we give the weapons that Ukraine needs to fight to win the sooner this war will be over. Simple math – better weapons sooner equals less deaths and destruction later.

8 Replies551 Recommended

Mountain West commented January 1

M

Mountain West

USAJan. 1

Putin will not stop. Putin’s Russia will not stop. If you know Russian language, then look at Russian state media, or read Telegram social media Russian accounts, both official government sources and Russian civilians accounts. Or read translation into English. The movement towards a return to USSR and indeed Stalinism is much broader than merely nostalgia, it is becoming a juggernaut of political and social will in Russia. Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Finns and many others understand this clearly. Thank you to Ukraine for fighting for democracy and freedom.

3 Replies529 Recommended

William Neil commented 3 hours ago

W

William Neil

Maryland3h ago

Yes, very good. In a recent 53 minute online discussion, the historian Niall Ferguson and Russian specialist Michael Kofman shared their views with Ferguson being freer by occupation to be candid. At around minute 19 he shared his fears: that Russia badly wants to drag this war out into one of attrition, counting on holding ground militarily while destroying Ukraine’s will to fight by shredding its civilian life. Ferguson fears exactly what this column is about: that the U.S. and NATO deny Ukraine exactly the weapons it needs and wants to take the battle into the Russian sources of its torment, deterred by more imagined than real Russian “red lines.” That has been my position since the war started, that there is no satisfactory conclusion which does not involve Ukraine winning the war by pushing Russia back to the 1991 borders. I don’t believe Ukraine can accomplish this without better aircraft, longer range attack missiles to reach deep into Russia and Crimea – military targets, and more artillery and those modern German tanks. And of course, the best air defense systems the West possesses. Here’s my logic, close to Gould-Davies and Ferguson: https://williamrneil.substack.com/p/ukraine-on-the-ropes-again-as-the

4 Replies410 Recommended

Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Rhetoric: How Concerned Should We Be? – The New York Times

By Julian E. Barnes, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt

Nov. 2, 2022

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia began ramping up his nuclear rhetoric this fall, raising the specter that he could use such a weapon in Ukraine. As Mr. Putin was making threats, senior Russian generals were discussing the circumstances when they might possibly use a tactical nuclear weapon, The New York Times reported.

American officials said they have seen no movement of Russian nuclear weapons and do not believe that the Russian government has decided to detonate such a device. But as Russia suffers setbacks on the battlefield, even talk about using one has raised alarm.”

Bret Stephens | Putin Is Starting to Do What Won Him a War 7 Years Ago – The New York Times

“. . . The strategy is clear. Putin’s armies might be falling back in the field. But if he can freeze, starve and terrorize Ukraine’s people by going after their water supplies and energy infrastructure — while waiting for winter to blunt Ukraine’s advance — he might still be able to force Kyiv to accept some sort of armistice, leaving him in possession of most of his conquests.

That would count as a victory in Putin’s books, however wounded he might otherwise be. It would also be encouragement to China’s Xi Jinping as he eyes Taiwan and Iran’s Ali Khamenei as he tries to suppress weeks of protest that are starting to have the color of a revolution. Much more is at stake in the outcome in Ukraine than the fate of Ukraine itself.

What can the Biden administration do? More. And more quickly.

So far, we’ve had a policy of nick-of-time delivery of critical weaponry, such as the Javelin and Stinger missiles that saved Kyiv at the beginning of the war and HIMARS, the rocket systems that turned the tide of war over the summer. We need to switch to an approach that stays consistently ahead of the pace of war and weather.

On Tuesday the administration announced that it would soon be delivering to Ukraine two National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or NASAMS, with ranges of up to 30 miles. But there’s a hitch: Only “in the next few years,” according to a report in The Times, will Ukraine get to take delivery of the next six systems.

Ukrainians, whose country is nearly the size of Texas, need the systems now. If the United States can’t deliver them quickly, we can at least provide Ukrainians with unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.s) that can give them vastly improved detection and defensive capabilities over much longer ranges.

The Biden administration has been considering the sale of four of the U.S. Army’s long-endurance U.A.V.s armed with Hellfire missiles since June, but the request has been held up in the bowels of Pentagon bureaucracy for months over excessive fears that some of its technologies could fall into Russian hands. Why not approve the sale, increase the numbers and start training Ukrainians on the systems immediately?” . . . .

The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine – The New York Times

“On the night of July 28, 2016, as Hillary Clinton was accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in Philadelphia, Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, received an urgent email from Moscow. The sender was a friend and business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik. A Russian citizen born in Soviet Ukraine, Kilimnik ran the Kyiv office of Manafort’s international consulting firm, known for bringing cutting-edge American campaign techniques to clients seeking to have their way with fragile democracies around the world.

Kilimnik didn’t say much, only that he needed to talk, in person, as soon as possible. Exactly what he wanted to talk about was apparently too sensitive even for the tradecraft the men so fastidiously deployed — encrypted apps, the drafts folder of a shared email account and, when necessary, dedicated “bat phones.” But he had made coded reference — “caviar” — to an important former client, the deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled to Russia in 2014 after presiding over the massacre of scores of pro-democracy protesters. Manafort responded within minutes, and the plan was set for five days later.

Kilimnik cleared customs at Kennedy Airport at 7:43 p.m., only 77 minutes before the scheduled rendezvous at the Grand Havana Room, a Trump-world hangout atop 666 Fifth Avenue, the Manhattan office tower owned by the family of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Shortly after the appointed hour, Kilimnik walked onto a perfectly put-up stage set for a caricature drama of furtive figures hatching covert schemes with questionable intent — a dark-lit cigar bar with mahogany-paneled walls and floor-to-ceiling windows columned in thick velvet drapes, its leather club chairs typically filled by large men with open collars sipping Scotch and drawing on parejos and figurados. Men, that is, like Paul Manafort, with his dyed-black pompadour and penchant for pinstripes. There, with the skyline shimmering though the cigar-smoke haze, Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin’s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine.”

Thomas Friedman | Putin and M.B.S. Are Laughing at Us – The New York Times

“. . . . While America can still theoretically take care of most of its own needs for oil and gas today, unlike Europe, we do not have enough to export at the scale required to make up for Putin’s and OPEC Plus’s cutbacks and ease Europe’s transition to a decarbonized future.

But the green progressives never got that message. At a House committee hearing two weeks ago, Representative Rashida Tlaib demanded to know if JPMorgan Chase C.E.O. Jamie Dimon and other banking executives appearing before the panel had any policies “against funding new oil and gas products.”

Dimon answered, “Absolutely not, and that would be the road to hell for America.”

Tlaib then told Dimon that any students who had student loans and bank accounts with JPMorgan should retaliate by closing their accounts. Have no doubt: This kind of juvenile moral preening by Tlaib surely made Vladimir Putin’s day. She’s nowhere nearly as bad as the G.O.P. senators who were inspired for years by ExxonMobil lies that climate change is a hoax, and then used that to block our transition to clean energy. But Tlaib still made Putin’s day.

What lifted Putin even more was when he watched Bernie Sanders, House progressive Democrats and the whole G.O.P. last week come together to kill a bill backed by President Biden and the Democratic leadership to streamline the permitting process for domestic energy projects, particularly permitting for gas pipelines and wind and solar transmission lines — one of our biggest impediments to a stable green transition.

Hard to know who is worse, the progressives who did not understand how much solar and wind energy require quicker transmission permitting to safely scale clean energy or the Republicans, who knew oil and gas companies need quicker pipeline permitting to grow gas production, but killed it so Biden would not have another success. As Joe Manchin, a fossil fuel-friendly Democrat who championed the bill, put it: “What I didn’t expect is that Mitch McConnell, my Republican friends, would be signing up with Bernie or trying to get the same outcome by not passing permitting reform.”

All in all, Putin had a bad month in Ukraine — but a good month in the U.S. Congress.

This is not complicated, folks: Do you want to make a point or do you want to make a difference? If we want to make a difference, we need to maximize our energy security, natural security and economic security, all at once. The only way to do that effectively is to incentivize our market to produce a stable and secure supply of energy, with the lowest possible emissions at the lowest possible costs as fast as possible.

The only truly effective way to do that is with a strong price signal — either taxes on dirty stuff or incentives for clean stuff — plus steadily increasing clean energy standards for power generation along the lines proposed by Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis in their new book “The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet.”

As long as we are not ready to do that, we’re just faking it, indulging in virtue signaling on the left and the right — and Putin and M.B.S. are laughing all the way to the bank.”  -30-

Paul Krugman | War, Inflation and Squandered Credibility – The New York Times

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

“What does Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, understand that Vladimir Putin doesn’t?

OK, I know that may sound like a trick question, or a desperate effort to offer a counterintuitive take on recent events. We may say that the Fed has gone to war against inflation, but that’s just a metaphor. Russia’s war on Ukraine, unfortunately, is all too real, leading to tens of thousands of deaths among both soldiers and civilians.

Yet the Fed and the Putin regime have this in common: Both took major policy actions this week. The Fed raised interest rates in an attempt to curb inflation. While Putin announced a partial mobilization in an attempt to rescue his failed invasion. Both actions will inflict pain.

One important difference, however — aside from the fact that Powell is not, as far as I know, a war criminal — is that the Fed is acting to maintain its credibility, while Putin seems determined to squander whatever credibility he might still have.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:

Did I write before that I love Paul Krugman. His columns are almost always excellent, and always challenging. It is good for the brain, like doing a hard jig saw puzzle, only you learn more reading Krugman than doing a jig saw puzzle,– about economics, politics and the world. The commenters here think Krugman has made a mistake in his assumption that a dictator has to worry at all about his credibility. They are wrong. Remember the French revolution. Where they might be on to something, it is hard to think of many examples were credibility is more important than raw power. There are more examples if you scrape. The Confederacy miss-estimated that England would support their uprising, because England valued their cotton more than it valued the human rights of slaves. My fear is that Putin will use these poor, pressed, 300,000 young men to secure the large eastern part of the Ukraine, and keep it. So I want NATO and the US to dramatically increase its support, and possibly even take over the Black Sea, for humanitarian reasons. The United States might have to go onto a war footing, without declaring war, to fight two wars at once. We need a war to slow the climate crisis, and a war to stop the spread of Putinism and fascist overreach. But we should not get confused. The climate crisis is the larger danger to our national and personal security. David Lindsay Jr is the author of the Tay Son Rebellion on 18th century Vietnam and blogs at InconvenientNews.Net.

Marlene Laruelle | Russia’s Putin Is in Trouble – The New York Times

Marlene Laruelle

Ms. Laruelle is a professor at the George Washington University and the author of “Is Russia Fascist?”

“In the wake of a stunning counteroffensive in which Ukrainian forces reclaimed over 1,000 miles of territory, Russia is uneasy.

The country’s political talk shows, usually so deferential, have given the floor to more critical voices. Opponents of the war have weighed in — about 40 officials from municipal councils signed a petition requesting the president’s resignation — and previously loyal figures have begun to mutter about the regime’s failings. In a sign of general discontent, Alla Pugacheva, Russia’s most famous 20th-century pop star, has come out against the war. Six months of consensus has started to crack.

That consensus wasn’t as cast-iron as it might have seemed. While many Western observers tend to view the Russian regime as a monolith, the reality is more complex. Though the war has significantly reduced the scope for dissent, there are still several competing ideological camps within the ruling elite capable of making their voices heard. For example, the so-called systemic liberals, mostly concentrated in state financial institutions and among oligarchs, have expressed concerns about the war’s consequences for the Russian economy. But it is another group, emboldened by the Kremlin’s failure to deliver victory in Ukraine, that is putting ever more pressure on the regime.

Call it the party of war. Made up of the security agencies, the Defense Ministry and outspoken media and political figures, it encompasses the entire radical nationalist ecosystem — and its adherents have been mounting a sustained critique of the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine. Powerful, well positioned and ideologically committed, they want a much more aggressive war effort. And judging from Mr. Putin’s address on Wednesday — where he announced the call-up of roughly 300,000 troops, gave his support to referendums in the four occupied regions of Ukraine on joining Russia and repeated the threat of nuclear escalation — they seem to be getting their way.”