Moscow

I have a bone to pick with Tulsi Gabbard. I had thought, six months into Donald Trump’s second term, that I could safely say “sayonara” to the Russia Collusion Delusion and all its works. I started to count how many columns I had written about that embarrassing effort to destroy Donald Trump, but gave up. The answer is: many.   I had hoped I had finished with the subject forever. But now the president’s Director of National Intelligence, that same T. Gabbard, has weighed in with what she rightly describes as “historic” evidence of a plot, directed by Barack Obama with various high-ranking lieutenants, to undermine the first Trump administration.  Is there anything new in her evidence? Some say no, not really.

Spectacular. Stunning. Game-changing. These are just three of the adjectives news reporters have used to describe Ukraine’s attack deep within Russia last weekend. There’s no doubt that the “Spiderweb” operation was technologically ingenious, well-concealed and brilliantly executed. Ukraine claimed its 117 drones destroyed or damaged some 41 strategic Russian bombers and caused $7 billion worth of damage to the Russian armed forces. But can an attack really be game-changing if the game doesn’t change? US officials have suggested the strikes hit only 20 Russian aircraft and, while Spiderweb must have shocked Russia’s leadership, the Kremlin is still more than willing and able to continue bombing Ukraine with relative impunity.

At a summit meeting in Moscow, Ronald Reagan was asked about his basic approach. He famously answered, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.” Vladimir Putin has the same strategy for Ukraine. That is certainly his first response to President Trump’s offer to mediate an end to the war and bring a reluctant Ukraine to the negotiating table. If “we win, they lose” is Putin’s final response, then the war cannot end without Ukraine’s surrender or Russia’s collapse. Putin’s initial reply, filled with his maximalist demands, indicates he is still committed to the conquest of his neighbor, whose independence and sovereignty he has long rejected.

On the back of President Trump’s victory November 5, the end of the election season will open an interesting eleven-week window. President Biden will assume lame-duck status and be freed from any concern that a more aggressive posture toward Russia might hurt Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Biden might also be considering the implication of handing over Ukraine policy to an individual who has repeatedly signaled his pro-Putin views. Both of these factors argue for Biden breaking from his self-imposed restrictions and supporting Ukraine striking targets in Russian territory during this lame-duck period. Imagine a moderately successful Ukraine attack now, after the November 5 election, on a moderately relevant target, such as a railroad terminal fifty miles inside of Russia.

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?

Tucker Carlson has been radicalized by a Russian supermarket. There’s a sentence you never expected to read. As part of his tour of Moscow, the week before Putin critic Alexei Navalny “died in prison,” the firebrand commentator visited a grocery store and was stunned by the low prices. “That’s when you start to realize,” Carlson marveled: …that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought… Corruption… If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person, you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country.

LVIV — The Japanese have a concept of forest bathing for health. Joe Rogan promotes daily ice baths for a little shock to get you going in the morning. But in Ukraine, people often experience missile-and-drone baths, and so it was in the early hours of last Friday, when Russia launched what seems to have been its biggest ever sky assault upon Ukrainian cities. It was the first major Russian attack upon Ukrainian since the summer, when Ukraine disrupted Moscow’s missile-launching Black Sea Fleet.  Since then, it’s been a brutal New Year.  Just before 5 a.m.

Sweden and Finland officially applied to join NATO last May, overturning their long-standing policies of neutrality. If their membership goes through, it will be one of the most consequential accessions in NATO history, bringing two technologically advanced militaries right on Russia’s doorstep into the fold. But as the eight-month mark approaches, neither nation has received the unanimous support from the other members that it needs. To date, twenty-eight members of the alliance have approved the Scandinavian nations’ memberships, with Hungary and Turkey as the two holdouts. Hungary has indicated it will vote to accept the accession in early 2023, which will leave NATO’s most undemocratic and troublesome member, Turkey, as the last hurdle.

Six months ago this week, the United States and its European allies enacted one of the most comprehensive, stringent sanctions regimes against a major economy in history. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24 not only shocked the West’s sensibilities, but pushed Washington and Brussels to take actions that would have been unthinkable only a few weeks prior. As far as the West is concerned, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is nothing less than a dangerous pariah state — and its aggression against a neighboring country meant it had to be treated as one.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran last week brought attention to a growing partnership between Russia and Iran. The Russian shook hands with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a rare gesture since both men are notorious coronaphobes. The old cleric expressed support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while the old KGB man offered Iran supplies of grain. US intelligence even claims Iran will open its drone arsenals to Russia. This strange friendship has its limits, but its growth could spell trouble. History does not suggest this is a natural partnership. The list of grievances between Iran and Russia is long. Great powers are often rough with middle-power neighbors.

On February 24, Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedic actor-turned-president of Ukraine, addressed his countrymen at the same hour Russian missiles were landing in multiple Ukrainian cities simultaneously. Clad in olive garb and sporting a light stubble on his face, Zelensky promised his citizens victory for Ukraine and defeat for the Russians — and he implored the Russian people to protest the actions of their government in Moscow and St. Petersburg. As the war entered its sixth month this Sunday, Zelensky — this time dressed in a camouflage army uniform with a full beard — is just as defiant and sure of victory today as he was on that depressing February night. "Even the occupiers admit that we will win,” Zelensky boasted during his daily speech to the nation.

When the European Union finally made the decision to ban 90 percent of Russia’s crude oil imports by the end of the year, the bureaucrats in Brussels were jubilant. The EU’s adoption of oil sanctions was thought be a big blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who depends on the revenue generated by his country's oil exports to fund his war in Ukraine. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why European officials were so thrilled. The EU imported 2.2 million barrels per day of Russian crude last year, amounting to tens of billions of dollars in profits for the Kremlin every month.

“Victory Day” is one of the most solemn events on the Russian calendar. Every year on May 9, the country gets together to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany in what Russians call “the Great Patriotic War,” in which as many as 26 million Soviet troops and civilians perished. It’s a time for reflection, for an appreciation of history, and, yes, for pomp and circumstance, with Russian troops decorated in dazzling uniforms marching in unison throughout Moscow's Red Square. This year’s Victory Day celebrations, however, had much of the world on edge. In next-door Ukraine, Russian forces were taking a beating, with smaller but nimbler and more determined Ukrainian units continuing to mount stiff resistance against a Russian military offensive in the Donbas.