ukraine Archives

Wednesday

March 16, 2022

Zelensky basks in the world’s spotlight

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is flying high. The contrast between Zelensky, who virtually addressed Congress this morning, and Russian president Vladimir Putin, who rarely appears publicly, becomes starker almost by the day. Putin believed that he could launch a Blitzkrieg attack that would topple Zelensky but the very opposite has occurred. It is Putin who is cornered while Zelensky basks in the world’s spotlight. In his address, it was shrewd of Zelensky to fold Ukraine’s struggle for independence into the American saga. Essentially, he appealed to the New World to redress the balance of the Old World.

Tuesday

March 15, 2022

Peter Wood

The strange ideology that could be driving Putin

Vladimir Putin’s motives in attacking Ukraine have become the subject of many deep and searching speculations. Is he seeking a personal legacy by attempting to reassemble the parts of the Soviet Union that fell asunder? Is he pursuing Russian national security by making sure Ukraine never becomes the frontline of NATO? Is he gleefully taking advantage of a weak and incompetent US president? Is he vindicating the glorious history of the KGB? These theories are not mutually exclusive, and there are many more possibilities. I want to enter the discussion from my nearly pristine ignorance of Russian geopolitical designs.

Matt Purple

When the establishment cries treason

Last week, former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard released a video calling for a ceasefire in areas around American-funded biolabs in Ukraine. She also called for the United States to reconsider its support for these facilities, which experiment with pathogens that could be accidentally released in a time of war. For the crime of preferring that Europeans not die en masse from biological poisons, Gabbard was accused by Senator Mitt Romney of "parroting false Russian propaganda" and spreading "treasonous lies." Gabbard quickly responded with tweets of her own, citing plenty of evidence that, yes, Washington is funding these biolabs, and no, this isn't just a Kremlin talking point. And really, it was all a bit much, this accusation of treason from a sitting senator.

Anastasiia Vozovych and Tim Ogden

Yes, Putin could use biochemical weapons in Ukraine

The Russian Defense Ministry held a briefing last week claiming that they have discovered US-led biological laboratories in Ukraine. Moscow stated that a rapid halt was brought to the facilities’ activities, adding that Kyiv and Washington had violated the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons. The Kremlin did not feel the need to provide evidence of its claims, par for the course in Putin’s Russia.

Daniel DePetris

Is Putin nuts?

As Russian forces level Ukrainian cities with artillery, missiles and airstrikes, there's a concerted effort to get inside the mind of Vladimir Putin: from pundits, former US national security officials and current heads of government. What could possibly get the man to stop the bombardment and support a ceasefire? Is Putin intent on conquering all of Ukraine? Or is there some combination of concessions the Ukrainian government and the West could offer that would end the war and bring about a full Russian troop withdrawal? The fact is none of us know what Putin’s endgame is. Putin’s own advisors, especially those kept out of the inner circle, may not even understand what the Russian leader is planning.

Monday

March 14, 2022

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Russia is the West’s great tragedy

The books written about the tragedy of the Russo-Ukrainian War will be legion. In the meantime, there's another book that ought to have been written 20 years ago about a previous tragedy concerning Russia: how, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and with it the demise of the communist regime, Russia and the West failed to “converge” in some way. Why did the two did not come to embrace each other politically, economically, and culturally? The rivalry between East and West has since 1917 been fundamentally an ideological and not a nationalist one. Historically, before the Bolshevik Revolution, Washington had been on cordial terms with Moscow, from which it had purchased the Russian territory of Alaska in 1867.

Sunday

March 13, 2022

Harry J. Kazianis

Russia’s war is a global cancer

One thing I have always found fascinating about Russia is that when they tell us they are going to do something, they usually do it. So when Moscow struck a military base near the Poland-Ukraine border that was a staging ground for arms shipments, we shouldn't have been surprised. They told us that was their next plan of action just twenty-four hours before they did it. But that’s just the beginning of what Russia likely has in store for the West, NATO, and the entire world if we aren’t careful. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plan seems simple: chaos on a scale that will extend far beyond Ukraine. You see, Putin is starting to come to grips with the fact that he can’t win the war in Ukraine — at least on paper — unless he destroys Ukraine.

Saturday

March 12, 2022

Roger Kimball

Kamala Harris laughs at a war

It’s nice to be prescient. On Thursday, in a column titled “Kamala Invades Poland,” I introduced the world to “cackle diplomacy.” “Silly partisan hyperbole!” I nearly heard as the social media-ites had their say. But then the vice president of the United States did me proud. Just a few hours after my column posted, there she was, holding a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda. Some say the people who run our government sent Kamala Harris to Eastern Europe in order to give her a chance to shine in the sphere of international relations. Watch her performance and tell me what you think. “I am here, standing here. On the northern flank...on the eastern flank...talking about what we what we have in terms of the eastern flank and our NATO allies.

Friday

March 11, 2022

Tim Ogden

Peace and its consequences in Ukraine

It is now a matter of consensus that Vladimir Putin never intended to fight the type of war that now faces him in Ukraine. What was plainly meant to be a blitzkrieg-style assault has devolved into a war of attrition, with death, destruction and violence on a scale unseen in Europe since the disasters of the last century. It is quite plain that the Kremlin, despite its bluster, is aware of this. The Kyiv government's claims of Putin dismissing his generals and raving in fury at his security services are consistent with events on the battlefield; indeed, after two weeks of fighting, Russia has only managed to decisively claim one Ukrainian city.

Matt Purple

Foreign policy is not SimCity

History is relayed through anecdotes. And there's one anecdote about foreign policy in particular that keeps coming back to me. It was 2013 and President Barack Obama's advisors were weighing what to do about Syria. Dictator Bashar al-Assad was then waging a bloody civil war against an increasingly jihadist-dominated rebellion, destabilizing the Middle East and feeding a refugee crisis. Enter that ridiculous balloon John Kerry, then the secretary of state, who at a White House principals meeting stood up and began bloviating about the need to bomb the Assad regime. Kerry was interrupted in the midst of his JFK LARPing by General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Michael Warren Davis

Why won’t Pope Francis condemn Russia?

On February 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pope Francis met with Aleksandr Avdeyev, Russia’s ambassador to the Holy See. Yet rather than summoning Mr. Avdeyev to the Vatican, Francis called at the Russian embassy, just two blocks from the Castel Sant’Angelo. The visit was a violation of diplomatic protocol. Heads of state don’t just pop ‘round to the local embassy. Over the next couple of days, it became clear that Francis wouldn’t be paying the same honor to Ukraine’s ambassador. Even more strikingly, Francis refused to condemn Russia for the attack. Vatican-watchers fumed. On February 28, the Vatican’s secretary of state released a video condemning the conflict “unleashed by Russia against Ukraine.

Peter Van Buren

Ukraine and the war for your mind

Deterrence works. Russia's nukes are the only thing keeping the US from full-out war in Ukraine just six months after retreating from Afghanistan. The unprecedented propaganda effort by Ukraine and its helpers in the American mass media to drag the US and NATO directly into the fight has failed — so far. But the struggle — the one for your mind space — is not over. To understand what follows, you have to wipe away a lot of bull being slung your way. Insanity is not the only explanation for Putin’s actions of the past few weeks.

Wednesday

March 9, 2022

Jonathan Bydlak

Sanctions on Russia will shake the world economy for years

The war in Ukraine will dominate the news for the foreseeable future. But while the bombings will eventually cease, the economic consequences for the world have just begun. That’s because in an era of increasing interconnectedness, economic impacts don’t stop at borders. Most attention has been focused on the immediate impacts of sanctions on Russia, and they are significant. In the past, sanctions have proven largely ineffective at punishing foreign enemies. President Barack Obama, for example, failed to use them effectively in 2014 during the last Ukrainian-Russian dispute. But this time, the actions taken against Russia were largely unprecedented, with even traditionally neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden calling for restrictions that are “as big as they can be.

Tuesday

March 8, 2022

Daniel DePetris

Putin the reckless gambler

Vladimir Putin’s two-week-long war in Ukraine is not going as planned. What the Russian strongman thought would be a romp of the Ukrainian army in a matter of days has turned into a slow-motion train-wreck, with thousands of Russian soldiers killed in battle, images of burned-out tank husks littering the roads and Russia’s economy circling the drain. CIA director William Burns told the House Intelligence Committee today that Putin is increasingly frustrated about the level of progress achieved thus far in the campaign. "He was confident that he had modernized his military and they were capable of quick, decisive victory at minimum cost,” Burns said during his testimony. “He’s been proven wrong on every count.

Guy Shepherd

Time for Europe to man up

The End of History has ended. It officially ended with Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History in the early Nineties. It's a book that captures the optimistic zeitgeist of that decade — born of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communism. The basic idea was that once communism faded away — the reality, not the ideal, which will forever exist in the minds of many intellectuals — the world would become a more liberal, democratic and commercial place. It was an argument with real legs. East Germany was digested by the West without a burp. The Baltic states prospered. Asia took off. A rising commercial tide lifted all boats.

Cockburn

Republican hawks squawk at each other

Cockburn has never been much of a hawk, unless you count his begrudging deficit hawkery over the massive tab he ran up at his local bar. But many elected Republicans are very hawkish on foreign policy, supporting "peace through strength," as Ronald Reagan put it, as well as occasionally war through strength. So how are the GOP's highest-flying hawks handling Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Cockburn was surprised to find them divided. Nearly every Republican lawmaker (and Democrat for that matter) agrees that we need to throttle Russia with economic sanctions. It's on the question of whether the United States should implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine that the cracks begin to show.

Monday

March 7, 2022

Matt Purple

Vladimir Putin, deep statist

Vladimir Putin's brutality in Ukraine is only going to get worse. The Ukrainians have fought valiantly, far better than anyone expected, but then that only means the Russians will have to up the slaughter in the coming days. As for Putin, he's reportedly fuming over his army's setbacks, threatening reprisals, while hunkering down in — I'm not making this up — his "mountain lair" deep in the Urals. If that makes Putin sound like a Bond villain, then that's just one of the many images of him that's emerged in recent days (the most popular is Putin as Hitler). The seemingly insane nature of his Ukraine invasion has left observers grasping for a reference point. Is Putin addled by cabin fever? Under the sway of extremists? Mentally ill? Who is this Vladimir Putin anyway?

Bill Wirtz

What Erdogan is thinking about Ukraine

Turkey’s twentieth-century experience was very different from that of most European countries. During World War One, the late Ottoman Empire joined forces with Germany, a decision the sultans not only came to regret but that ultimately led to the fall of their monarchy. The Turkish War of Independence followed, touched off by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who transformed the Ottoman Empire into the secular Turkish Republic that still exists today. During World War Two, Turkey remained neutral, because of its previous experiences with joining a German military campaign, but also because it was in dire economic shape. In 1952, Turkey joined NATO, and has since been an ally of the West.

Bill Zeiser

Watch out for Ukrainian social media propaganda

Stop me if you’ve heard the one about the Ukrainian beauty queen who volunteered to fight the invading Russian forces. If you’ve been on social media these past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the striking photo of the woman clad in tactical gear and holding a rifle. “We are living in a materiel world, and I’m a materiel girl,” the stunner says to the viewer through her steely glare. Or the one about the Japanese ambassador to Ukraine kitted out in his ancestor’s samurai gear and ready to defend his adopted homeland? You’ve surely heard about the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot who has been terrorizing his Russian counterparts, accomplishing the feat — uncommon in contemporary air combat — of becoming an ace.

Sunday

March 6, 2022

Harry J. Kazianis

Putin will escalate

“I can’t tell you how this ends. All I can tell you is that I just hope millions of people don’t die, or that both Ukraine and Russia aren’t both destroyed in some way thanks to this war.” Those words, spoken to me on an encrypted smartphone app yesterday, are from a Ukrainian commander actively fighting Russian soldiers that I have known for years thanks to wargames I helped organize that brought together national experts, military officials, and policymakers from around the world.