World

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks — designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine — is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks “the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran.” Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways. Consider also the fate of 400 western-owned commercial aircraft that were leased to Russian airlines before the invasion in February 2022. Now stuck in Russia or its satellites, unmaintained to western standards and unfit to fly back into our airspace, they’re a potential multibillion loss for their owners and insurers.

It was December 1968, and I was a twelve-year-old English schoolboy seriously obsessed with cricket. The sport’s headline news at the time concerned a thirty-seven-year-old South African-born, dark-skinned player named Basil D’Oliveira. The previous August, D’Oliveira had scored a magnificent century (baseball fans need only think of Reggie Jackson hitting three consecutive homers in the clinching game of the 1977 World Series to get the flavor) while representing his adopted home team of England in a match against Australia. Despite this achievement, just days later the English team’s selectors omitted D’Oliveira from a tour of South Africa that was due to follow in the winter. Was the decision taken on purely technical cricketing grounds?

Venezuela has been leading the United States on, maintaining the pretense that they will ensure that the upcoming presidential elections are free and fair. That's despite the US relieving sanctions, releasing prisoners and months of “diplomacy.” The Nicolás Maduro regime has also gone on offense, threatening to take back the Esequibo, an area now under Guyana’s jurisdiction, where American oil companies have invested billions. This Wednesday, Maduro mocked the Biden administration once again, arresting two high-level officials from opposition candidate María Corina Machado’s team and issuing arrest warrants against several others.

The “Trump of the Tropics,” former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, was indicted Tuesday for falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination status for his Florida vacation. The indictment is the first faced by the conservative leader, who has already been barred from running for office. More are headed his way, in what he is describing as a lawfare effort spearheaded by President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The indictment was signed by Detective Fábio Alvarez Shor, who says in his report that the former president and his aides “issue[d] their respective [vaccination] certificates and use[d] them to cheat current health restrictions.

Money is often a substitute for strategy in US foreign policy. We spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, only to lose the country the minute our troops began to pull out. How much will it realistically cost, then, to beat Russia in Ukraine? Will the next $100 or $200 billion do the trick? This is not a question that supporters of war-spending ask themselves. As in Afghanistan, spending is a way to defer thinking about actually winning — or facing the serious possibility of losing. Our aid buys delay, not results. Ironically, while the specter of World War Two is invoked every time there’s a conflict, our experience then teaches the same lesson as recent attempts to purchase victory.

It was not a Super Tuesday for either Senator Kyrsten Sinema or State Department official Victoria J. Nuland. Each announced that they were stepping down from their positions. Sinema is declining to run once more in Arizona for the Senate. Nuland is exiting her post as the number three official at State, where she was widely seen as the champion of a hawkish approach to foreign policy. Sinema delivered a mawkish message that essentially blamed the American people for failing to recognize, let alone value, her valorous attempt to restore American power and prosperity. Nuland, by contrast, had to be satisfied with a statement from secretary of state Antony J. Blinken: “She always speaks her mind.

The Haitian government declared a state of emergency Sunday evening, following two prison breaks, as major gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier seeks to oust prime minister Ariel Henry. “Barbecue” — a nickname that originates either from having set people on fire, his mother having worked as a fried chicken vendor or both  — is a former cop who is now the head of the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, a twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan illegal immigrant, was charged in connection with the gruesome murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student at the University of Georgia last week. Another Venezuelan, thirty-two-year-old Renzo Mendoza, was arrested last week on two felony charges for sexually assaulting an underage child in Virginia.  These cases, along with a series of others connected to Venezuelan migrants, have become central to the debate on immigration policy. Tuesday morning, for instance, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for more information about Ibarra.

The death of Alexei Navalny has dramatically increased the risk for other key figures currently imprisoned by Vladimir Putin, whether for reasons of dissident behavior, protest against the war in Ukraine or supposed suspicion of espionage. The fact that Putin would cross this line, and do so with impunity in the midst of both the Munich Security Conference and a western influence push spearheaded by willing patsy Tucker Carlson, is a sign that we are now in a new reality — one that it is the duty of the next administration to irrevocably reverse. In the past, when the United States’s top officials identified an American citizen or important dissident held in another nation and said “do not touch this person, lest you find out what terror awaits you,” it meant something.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader and a constant irritant to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime for more than a decade, has died in a remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle at the age of forty-seven. The news was greeted with shock, outrage and sadness across the US and Europe and came at a time when the West’s most high-profile politicians and security figures were in Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference.   There’s no denying Navalny’s bravery. Most high-profile Russian figures who criticize Putin and live long enough to tell the tale choose to live a life in exile. Navalny, however, was never interested in that option.