Vladimir putin

Since Moscow launched the invasion of Ukraine in February, the deaths of Russian oligarchs seem to be constantly in the headlines. Despite the official causes of death given, Cockburn has a sneaking suspicion that Vladimir Putin might have something to do with it. Death by unusual, news-making circumstances is a hallmark of his regime. The Russian leader intends for such deaths to make the news and for the world to blame the Kremlin for them. It forms part of his strategy of intimidating potential opponents and dissidents. Enemies of Putin that have gone to the West have faced radiation poisoning and attacks with powerful nerve agents. Those who have countered Putin in Russian politics have been jailed or gunned down in the streets. Now, apparently, oligarchs are in the crosshairs.

So much for "don’t mention the war!" Russian president Vladimir Putin has called the conflict in Ukraine a war for the first time on Thursday. Cockburn is quite flummoxed — this is the same Putin who has made an industry out of locking people up who refused to call the war a “special military operation”. On December 22, while addressing the situation in Ukraine, Putin said, “Our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war.” The irony alone of this statement is too much to handle. The man who invaded his neighbor and disregarded the laws of war is now saying he does not want to “spin the flywheel of military conflict”?

Was WNBA star Brittney Griner the subject of so much White House attention because she was an important showpiece? Nobody can claim they are unhappy Griner is home safely. No one can sit here and say she should have been left to suffer in Russia. But at the same time, Griner, through all fault of her own, ended up in the middle of a foreign policy struggle.

The war in Ukraine is being fought on two fronts: the battlefield and the information space. From the beginning of Russia’s interference in Ukraine in 2014, the information war has been a key factor in the Kremlin’s strategy for victory. Because of this, Ukraine has taken a series of wartime measures to stabilize and protect itself, from political restrictions to media regulations. Some in the West have used these measures to paint Kyiv as undemocratic, but such rhetoric rings hollow. What these criticisms miss is the fact that Ukraine, unlike other Western democracies, has been in a state of war for eight years.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday, a missile struck the town of Przewodow in eastern Poland close to the Ukrainian border, killing two. The incident immediately set off alarm bells around NATO and the world, as Poland, a member of the military alliance, could invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, bringing all 30 members to its defense. The Polish government is considering invoking Article 4 of the treaty, which allows any member state to call a meeting of all members to discern if "territorial integrity, political independence or security… is threatened." NATO was due to meet on Wednesday anyway, but the tragedy in Poland has superseded the gathering’s planned lineup.

With the recapture of the key southern port city of Kherson, Ukraine has achieved yet another success in its nearly nine-month war with Russia. But as winter approaches and conditions worsen, both sides will face new challenges, and the West’s support will be tested. As the Institute for the Study of War indicated in a recent assessment of the conflict, it is unlikely that combat activity will drop significantly in the coming months. As the early winter rains roll over Ukraine, the region’s infamous mud will prove to be an impediment to maneuver warfare. That period will then give way to the freezing temperatures that characterize the Eastern European winter. Those temperatures will put an end to the mud, allowing forces to more effectively continue operations.

If you listened only to the rhetoric of so-called national conservatives, you would think progressives were their polar opposites. But on the issue of foreign policy, it seems like they can find some common ground. It was reported on Tuesday that the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to President Biden asking him to negotiate with Russia. It was later reported that the same letter had been hastily withdrawn after massive backlash within the Democratic Party. The missive was apparently written and signed in June, updated recently, and somehow carelessly published without all of the signatories’ consent. Either way, it seems to represent something real within the Democrats' progressive wing.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu haven’t really been on speaking terms. That is, until last weekend, when the two defense chiefs conversed with each other twice in three days. The readouts released by the Defense Department are about as brief as brief can get. They don’t tell us much about what was said, other than the general observation that Austin, a former four-star army general, swatted away Moscow’s explanations for the war in Ukraine. What the conversations illustrate more than anything is just how rare they've been. Indeed, the reason why so many news outlets wrote about the Austin-Shoigu calls was because they were extraordinary.

Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine is coming up on its eighth month, and the costs to the Kremlin’s military have been immense. Increasingly isolated on the world stage, Vladimir Putin has joined the world’s club of pariah states, the only group willing to give him support. Chief among his allies is the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state with similarly imperialistic designs and global isolation. This axis has been brewing for some time — the two nations worked together extensively in Syria, for example — but the relationship has reached new heights as the Russian armed forces buckle under the strain of war. Perhaps the most potent symbols of this relationship are the hundreds of Iranian drones flooding into Ukraine to fill a gap in Russia’s weapons inventory.

What’s more alarming than President Trump trying to frighten Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury”? President Biden trying to frighten Americans with Putin. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” the president riffed at a New York fundraiser, while fretting to supporters about his need to find that elusive off-ramp for the Russians. Biden’s loose talk about Putin’s formidability contrasted with US handwringing fits a pattern. Pervasive throughout Putin’s war has been far too much focus on what the United States should do to help Putin find these mythical off-ramps, and on how to restrain Ukraine to prevent it from getting nuked.

Vladimir Putin is mad: not in the cognitive but in the emotional sense of the word. He is an odd mixture of the cold, the plotting, the calculating, and the bloodless; the emotional, the impulsive, the hotblooded, and the sentimental. He is mad, in other words, in precisely the way that Adolf Hitler was mad. And like Hitler, Putin is disconnected from the world of fact but not of logic. This is a fundamental truth about the man that I think the West had never experienced before February. His condition became apparent in the diatribe against the West that he gave on Friday, which corresponded almost exactly to Hitler’s customary rants.