American media covers the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, but ignores the protests in Israel, usually led by the families of the hostages who were seized on October 7. Rescuing the hostages was one of the main goals of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, but that goal has taken a back seat to the other goal—eliminating Hamas. Prime Minister Netanyahu seems determined to pursue the destruction of Hamas, but the brutality of the invasion guarantees the emergence of new terrorists.
Yesterday, Hamas released a video featuring one of the hostages. Such videos must be seen with the understanding that the hostage is in captivity and is not free to say what he wants. Yet his plea to rescue the hostages is heartfelt. Many of the hostages, he says, have already died. Some were killed by Israeli bombs, some by the negligence or brutality of their captors.
And yet this young man’s voice must be heard. This terrible, violent, vengeful war must end. The killing must stop. The only solution is a two-state solution. Despite Hamas’ determination to eradicate the state of Israel, Israel will survive.
The only way the war will end is through pressure by other nations on the combatants and negotiations.
The fact that Israel was protected from Iran’s massive bombardment of drones and missiles by not only the U.S., the UK, and France, but by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab nations suggests hope for a new Middle East. There is a new longing for peace, stability, and regional cooperation. This new world can’t emerge until the violence ends.
Harsh Goldberg-Polin was seriously wounded in Hamas’ attack at the Nova festival on October 7, and appears in the video with an amputated arm. Hundreds of protesters march in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in what they’re calling a ‘rage demonstration’ prompted by the video’s release.
Hamas released a video on Wednesday showing Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin who was kidnapped to Gaza on October 7 – the first sign of life from his time in captivity.
Goldberg-Polin had attended the Nova festival at Kibbutz Re’im with friends and sought refuge in a shelter when Hamas stormed the outdoor rave. He sustained serious wounds and is seen in the video with an amputated arm.
He was born in California to Rachel and Jon and moved to Israel in 2008. He celebrated his 24th birthday four days before he was kidnapped.
Shortly after the video was released, hundreds of protesters, including friends of Goldberg-Polin, marched towards the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, lit a bonfire, and called for his release. At least two protesters were arrested. Police deployed skunk water against demonstrators blocking streets.
The video, approved for release by Goldberg-Polin’s family, begins with Goldberg-Polin introducing himself and recounting his abduction. “I went out to have fun with my friends, and instead, I found myself fighting for my life with severe wounds all over my body after trying to shield myself and others because there was no one to protect us that day,” he said.
He addressed the prime minister, saying, “Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government, you should be ashamed for abandoning me and thousands of citizens on that day. You should be ashamed. For almost 200 days, we’re here, and all the IDF’s attempts to rescue us have failed.”
Goldberg-Polin further stated that “Air Force bombings killed around 70 hostages like me, and you should be ashamed that every deal that comes to the table, you and your government reject. Don’t you want to end this nightmare already?”
“Benjamin Netanyahu and members of the government, while you sit and celebrate holidays with your families, think of us, the hostages who are still here, in hell beneath the ground. Without water, without food, without sunlight, without the medical treatment I so desperately need,” Goldberg-Polin added.
“I demand from you, Prime Minister, and your government and cabinet: Every day we’re here is another day you abandon us, another day you allow our blood to be shed. Do what’s expected of you already, and bring us home now. Or is that too much for you? It’s time to clear out your offices, and go home,” he said.Open gallery view
In the end of the video, Goldberg-Polin addressed his family, saying: “One last thing, and most importantly: Mom, Dad, Libby, and Orly, I love you very much and miss you terribly, and I think of you every day I’m here. I know you’re doing everything possible to get me home as soon as possible. I need you to stay strong for me and keep fighting until each one of the hostages comes home safely. I expect and hope to be with you soon, after all this is over. I won’t be here anymore, but I hope I’ve given you some peace of mind this holiday.”
Timothy Snyder, the Yale University scholar of European history, tries to disentangle Putin’s lies about the terrorist attack on a concert hall in the suburbs of Moscow. ISIS-K claimed responsibility but Putin blames Ukraine. Of course.
Snyder writes:
A week ago, four men associated with Islamic State attacked civilians in a concert venue near Moscow known as Crocus City Hall. Islamic State (IS-K) claimed responsibility for the horrifying mass murder, and released videos recorded the terrorists’ perspective (don’t watch them). Russia has since apprehended four men, who seem to be the perpetrators.
Russia has been engaged with Islamic State for some time. Russia has been bombing Syria since 2015. Russia and Islamic State compete throughout Africa for resources. All four of the accused are Tajiks, a people subjected to discrimination inside Russia.
These are the facts, subject to further verification and interpretation — and inherently unpredictable, as facts always are. What was entirely predictable (and predicted) was that, regardless of the facts, Putin and his propagandists would place the blame for the attack on Ukraine and the United States. On the internet (and in the Russian and Serbian press) this version is present.
It is not hard to see why. If Ukraine and the West are guilty, then Russian security services do not have to explain why they failed to stop Islamic terrorists from killing so many Russians, because Islamic terror vanishes from the story. And if Ukrainians are to blame, then this would seem to justify the war that Russia is prosecuting against Ukraine.
Aftermath of Russian ballistic missile strike on Kyiv, 25 March
Russian officials make a highly circumstantial argument: the terrorists’ car was stopped near Bryansk, which is in western Russia, and so vaguely near Ukraine, which means that the four Tajiks in a Renault were intending to cross the Ukrainian border, which means that they had Ukrainian backers, which means that it was a Ukrainian operation, which means that the Americans were behind it. The reasoning here leaves something to be desired. And the series of associations rests on no factual basis.
The suspects were in a car near the west Russian city of Bryansk. This much seems to be true. The first version of the story was that they were headed for Belarus, which would make more sense, given the route. Anyone with local knowledge would make a still more telling point. Because of the special relationship between Russia and Belarus, the Russian-Belarusian border is porous. Once inside Belarus, it is relatively easy to pass into the European Union, because the Belarusian regime enables human smuggling into Lithuania and Poland. Four Tajiks in a Renault would have been, in this sense, welcome in Belarus. They would have had a decent chance to pay a smuggler to get them into the Schengen zone and thereby escape.
The idea that the suspects were headed for Ukraine seems to be entirely invented and is extremely implausible. As of this writing, none of the suspects seem to have said anything about Ukraine, despite the fact that they have been tortured, presumably with such a confession in mind. And the notion of a Ukrainian escape route makes no sense. The Russian-Ukrainian border is a place where Russian security forces are concentrated. It is a site of combat. It is the last place terrorists would want to go. Four Tajiks in a Renault would have needed some very, very high-level Russian protection to get anywhere near the Russian-Ukrainian border.
Russian propagandists have told the population that it was not Islamic State but Ukraine who is to blame. ISIS is just a “fake.” The propagandists need not give reasons, and don’t. In the press, one finds the wildest chains of association. Britain is to blame for the attack (goes one claim) because one of the suspects was once in Turkey and the Turkish president knows the head of British foreign intelligence.
Only Putin is permitted to set the theoretical tone for the argument for Ukrainian involvement, and yesterday (25 March) he gave that a shot. His version went like this: Ukrainians are Nazis; Nazis do bad things; a bad thing happened; therefore Ukraine is to blame. One does not have to be a logician to find the holes. They are disturbingly large. While it is true that Nazis do bad things, it does not follow that all bad things are done by Nazis.
And the factual premise is empirically false. One should not have to say this at this point of the war, but the Ukrainians are not the Nazis in this conflict. The Ukrainian far right has never done well in elections, and is far less prominent than in any European state you care to name, let alone the United States. Ukrainians have an active civil society, a vibrant press, multiple political parties, and freedom of speech. Ukraine’s president won a free and fair election. He is also, incidentally, Jewish. The Ukrainian minister of defense, for that matter, is a Muslim. The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces was born in Russia, where his parents still reside. This kind of political and social pluralism is unusual by any standards.
By contrast, Russia under Putin is a one-man dictatorship. If “Nazi” stands for dictatorship, suppression of speech and the press, then Russia is the Nazi state.
Thom Hartmann wrote an ominous column about the possible origins and consequences of the terrorist attack in Moscow that killed scores of people at a concert.
He fears that Putin may use this horrific event as a pretext to step up his attacks on Ukraine and do to Ukraine what he did to Chechnya, which was to reduce the would-be breakaway region to a wasteland.
In his article, he recalls the Reichstag fire, which Hitler used as a pretext to initiate his dictatorship, crush democratic institutions, and round up dissidents.
He draws other analogies of leaders who were warned of pending catastrophes, but chose to ignore the warnings in order to solidify their hold on the population and secure their power.
In that group, he includes President George W. Bush, who ignored warnings about 9/11, and Benjamin Netanyahu, who ignored warnings about a likely attack by Hamas from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has written about the IDF “spotters,” the young women who watched activity at the Gaza border and warned their superiors about the military exercises they observed; they were ignored. Almost every one of these unarmed 18-and 19-year-old women were killed or taken hostage.
Hartmann wrote:
Like Hitler, Netanyahu, and Bush all did, Putin just claimed that up is down, that the terrorist attack he knew was coming was an unprovoked surprise, and that it came from Ukraine, not ISIS-K…
Friday, a group of ISIS extremists claimed credit for the attack on a Moscow theater that killed at least 133 people and left the building a smoldering ruin. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his public comments today, didn’t mention ISIS-K: instead, he placed the blame on Ukraine….
We’ve seen this movie before, both here, in Israel, and Germany, and it never ends well…
Ukraine, of course, has denied any involvement or knowledge of the attack. But don’t be surprised if Putin uses this as an excuse to massively bomb Kiev the way he utterly destroyed Grozny the capital of Chechnya, to subdue that nation. The attacks could begin as early as this coming week.
If that happens, it could provoke a stronger response from EU countries who see Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Moldova as being next on Putin’s menu: both he and his spokesmen have already said as much.
And that could lead to a major escalation of the Ukraine war beyond the borders of Ukraine and into Poland or the Baltics, triggering Nato’s Article 5 mutual defense provision, which would instantaneously draw the US directly into the conflict.
All because Republicans have convinced Putin that they can prevent further US aid, so he believes now is a good time to use the time-tested “pretext of an unexpected attack” strategy to go from a “military operation” to an all-out war.
That Ukrainian conflict, particularly if Putin-aligned Republicans like Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Mark Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc. are able to continue to prevent the US from helping Ukraine push Russia into a stalemate, could make China’s dictator Xi Jinping think it’s a great time to attack Taiwan.
And that, particularly since we recently stationed troops on Taiwanese territory, throws us straight into WWIII, regardless of Republican obstructionism and isolationist rhetoric.
I hope I’m wrong. Praying, frankly, that I’m wrong.
McFaul speaks with great authority about Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin, and the war in Ukraine. McFaul talks about the importance of passing new aid to Ukraine and appeals directly to Speaker Mike Johnson to let the funding bill come to a vote.
Ignatius asks him what additional sanctions might be imposed on Russia to deter its brutal invasion of Ukraine. He says the U.S. and Europe should transfer to Ukraine the billions of Russian assets that are now frozen.
When asked about the future of Russia, McFaul says that Russia is in decline now because it has driven out a million of its “best and brightest,” who have fled to other countries. If Putin had turned to democracy in 2000, he said, Russia would now be one of the richest nations in the world.
Michael McFaul on Russian presidential election and Alexei Navalny’s legacy
The death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has sparked worldwide condemnation and renewed questions about political freedom in Russia. On Monday, March 4 at 1:00 p.m. ET, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul joins The Post’s David Ignatius to assess Navalny’s legacy, Russia’s upcoming presidential election and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
There is a strange malady in Russia since Vladimir Putin decided to be the new Stalin. His critics die of a bullet to the head or the heart, they die of poisoning, they fall out of buildings, they commit suicide. In the most recent case, Alexei Navalny died in an Antarctic prison camp, and no one knows for sure what happened. But one thing is certain: he’s dead and can no longer mock Putin or challenge his rule.
Just weeks ago, Maxim Kuzminov, a young Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine was murdered in Spain, where he thought he was safe. Five quick bullets aimed at his heart, and he was dead.
Moscow — Russia’s spy chief on Tuesday said a pilot who defected to Ukraine with a military helicopter and was reportedly shot dead in Spain last week was a “moral corpse.” Maxim Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 helicopter into Ukraine in August in a brazen operation, saying he opposed Russia’s military offensive.
Reports in Spanish media said Kuzminov was found shot dead in the southern town of Villajoyosa last week, where he had moved after receiving Ukrainian citizenship for switching sides.
The Guardian published a story last fall about the sudden deaths of Putin critics.
The form of the attacks has varied, from underwear daubed with the nerve agent novichok and polonium-laced tea to more straightforward assassinations by bullet, but throughout Vladimir Putin’s 23 -year rule, Kremlin critics, journalists and defected spies have met with similarly ruthless treatment for opposing the Russian president.
The fatal crash of a private jet carrying the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin two months after he spearheaded a mutiny against Russia’s top army brass two months ago appeared to have added a new method to the Kremlin’s extensive assassination menu.
Ravil Maganov, chairman of the national oil company Lukoil, fell from a Kremlin Hospital window under suspicious circumstances, according to reports: CCTV cameras had been “turned off for repairs”, President Putin was visiting the hospital the same day, and associates did not believe he was suicidal.
Another mysterious death among Russian top executives last week drew further attention to the ever-increasing number of suspicious demises among the oligarchs and critics of President Vladimir Putin, raising questions on whether they have become all too common to be completely coincidental.
Ivan Pechorin, a top manager at the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, was found dead in Vladivostok after allegedly falling off his luxury yacht and drowning near Cape Ignatyev in the Sea of Japan two days before, according to the local administration.
One of the oft-told tales is about Ukraine’s failure to make a deal with Russia at the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022. But, writes Yaridlov Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, there was a catch to the deal: Russia wanted Ukraine to capitulate, not to negotiate.
He writes:
The lead Ukrainian negotiator, David Arakhamia, pointed to a bottle of sanitizing gel on the table, covered by a crisp white cloth, as Russian and Ukrainian peace delegations gathered in Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace.
“That’s an antiseptic,” Arakhamia told his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin’s adviser Vladimir Medinsky.
“Ah, I thought it’s vodka,” Medinsky joked.
There was plenty of tension behind the jovial appearances during that pivotal meeting on March 29, 2022. Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, had just publicly advised Ukrainian negotiators not to accept any beverages from the Russians and not to touch any surfaces, lest they be poisoned. After all, Russian forces were still at the gates of Kyiv, trying to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government.
What actually happened on that momentous Tuesday and in the immediate aftermath has since turned into a matter of fundamental disagreement among Ukraine, Western nations and Russia. The Istanbul meeting has also emerged as a key point of discord in America’s own debate about the war, as indispensable U.S. aid to Ukraine remains stalled in Congress because of Republican opposition. Some argue that Ukraine blew a chance at the time to end the war. The real story paints a different, and far more complicated, picture.
The first meeting between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators happened on Feb. 28, 2022, in the Belarusian city of Gomel, four days after Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border. At that encounter, Medinsky recited a long list of the Kremlin’s demands. It included the replacement of Zelensky’s administration with a puppet regime, Ukrainian troops handing over all their tanks and artillery, the arrest and trial of “Nazis”—a Russian euphemism for any Ukrainian opposed to Moscow’s rule—and the restoration of Russian as Ukraine’s official language. Medinsky even demanded that city streets named after Ukrainian national heroes be returned to their old Soviet names.
“We listened to them, and we realized that these are not people sent for talks but for our capitulation,” recalled one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Zelensky’s adviser Mykhailo Podolyak. Yet to gain time the Ukrainians agreed to keep talking.
The story continues. The point remains the same. Putin had nothing to offer. He had demands.
Thom Hartmann connects the dots: the Republican Party is now controlled by Vladimir Putin. The Republicans do only what is in the interest of Putin. His goal, as it was in 2016 and 2020, is to get Trump elected. Trump is subservient to Putin. Trump wants to block American aid to Putin. So does House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called a two-week recess as Ukrainian forces are running out of ammunition. How do you define GOP these days? Guardians of Putin? Goons of Putin? Other ideas?
Thom Hartmann
There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy.
Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.
Over the past two years, as America was using Russia’s terrorist attacks on Ukraine to degrade the power and influence of Russia’s military, Putin was using social media, Republican politicians, and rightwing American commentators to get Republican politicians on his side and thus kill off US aid to Ukraine.
The war in Gaza is making it even easier, with Putin-aligned politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeting: “Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.”
Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands of hits on Fox “News” and all over rightwing hate radio — turns out to have been a Russian intelligence operation originally designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. The Russian spy who’d been feeding this phony info to “Gym” Jordan and James “Gomer Pyle” Comer is now in jail.
Russia’s battlefield, in other words, has now shifted from Ukraine to the US political system and our homes via radio, TV, and the internet, all in the hopes of ending US aid to the democracy they’ve brutally attacked.
And the momentum is following that shift: Russia is close to having the upper hand in Ukraine because of Putin’s ability — via Trump and Johnson — to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda.
Now, with Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives so nobody can offer a discharge petition that would force a vote on Ukraine aid (and aid for Palestinian refugees, Taiwan, and our southern border), it’s becoming more and more clear that Vladimir Putin is running the Republican party via his well-paid stooge, Donald Trump.
I say “well paid” because Donald Trump would have been reduced to homelessness in the early 1990s if it weren’t for Russian money, as both of his sons have said at different times. He’d burned through all of his father’s estate, even stealing a large part of it from his siblings. He’d lost or hidden almost two billion dollars running a casino.
As Michael Hirsch noted for Foreign Policymagazine:
“By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.”
He’d been forced to repeatedly declare bankruptcy — sticking American banks for over a billion dollars in unpaid bills — after draining his businesses of free cash and stashing the money in places he hoped nobody would ever find.
No American bank would touch him, and property developers in New York were waiting for his entire little empire to collapse. Instead, a desperate Trump reached out to foreign dictators and mobsters, who were more than happy to supply funds to an influential New York businessman…for a price to be paid in the future.
He sold over $100 million worth of condos to more than sixty Russian citizens during that era, and partnered with professional criminals and money launderers to raise money for Trump properties in Azerbaijan and Panama. According to Trump himself, he sold $40 to $50 million worth of apartments to the Saudis.
He then partnered with a former high Soviet official, Tevfik Arif, and a Russian businessman, Felix Sater, who’d been found guilty of running a “huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.”
As the founders of Fusion GPS wrote for The New York Times in 2018:
“The Trump family’s business entanglements are of more than historical significance. Americans need to be sure that major foreign policy decisions are made in the national interest — not because of foreign ties forged by the president’s business ventures.”
Thus, when it came time to run for president, Trump had to pay the price. He and the people around him were inundated with offers of “help” from Russians, most associated directly with Putin or the Russian mafia.
Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been paid millions by Putin’s oligarchs and ran Trump’s campaign for free. Reporters found over a dozen connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and during the 2016 campaign Trump was secretly negotiating a deal to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Trump’s son and his lawyer met with Putin’s agents in Trump Tower.
Putin’s personal troll army, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based out of St. Petersburg but operating worldwide, began a major campaign in 2016 to get Trump elected president.
Manafort fed Russian intelligence raw data from internal Republican polling that identified a few hundred thousand individuals in a half-dozen or so swing states the GOP thought could be persuaded to vote for Trump (or against Hillary), and the IRA immediately went to work, reaching out to them via mostly Facebook.
Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Democratic-leaning voters and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.”
A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times:
“‘The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,’ the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.
“The report says that while ‘other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively by dozens.’ In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.
“A Senate inquiry has concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group… more than African-Americans.’ …
“Thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube accounts created by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supporting Donald Trump, the committee concludes.
“More than 66% of Facebook adverts posted by the Russian troll farm contained a term related to race.
“African-American community voters were discouraged from voting, and from supporting Hillary Clinton.”
Between the information compiled by Oxford Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all mictotargeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots.
So now Trump has succeeded in making the entire GOP a party to his long-term debt to Putin and his oligarchs. “Moscow Mike” Johnson has blocked any aid to Ukraine for over a year; the last congressional appropriation for foreign aid was passed in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House.
Meanwhile, under Trump’s and Putin’s direction, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to damage the people of the United States.
They believe it will help them in the 2024 election if they can ruin the US economy while convincing American voters that our system of government is so corrupt (“deep state”) that we should consider replacing democracy with an autocratic strongman form of government like Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson is even suggesting that Russia is a better place to live than the US.
They revel in pitting racial, religious, and gender groups against each other while embracing a form of fascism that pretends to be grounded in Christianity, all while welcoming Putin’s social media trolls who are promoting these divisions.
Republican-aligned think tanks are working on Project 2025, a naked attempt to consolidate power in the White House to support a strongman president who can override the will of the people, privatize Social Security and Medicare, shut down our public school system, fully criminalize abortion and homosexuality (Sam Alito called for something like that this week), and abandon our democratic allies in favor of a realignment with Russia, China, and North Korea.
Trump got us here by openly playing to the fears and prejudices of white people who are freaked out by the rapid post-1964 “browning” of America. Putin jumped in to help amplify the message a thousandfold with his social media trolls, who are posting thousands of times a day as you read these words.
Now that Putin largely controls the GOP, today’s question is how far Republicans are willing to go in their campaign to bring the USA to her knees on behalf of Putin and Trump.
— When Congress comes back into session next week, will they take up Ukraine aid?
— Will they continue their opposition to comprehensive immigration and border reform?
— Will they keep pushing to privatize Social Security with their new “commission”?
— Will they work as hard to kneecap Taiwan on behalf of President Xi as they have Ukraine on behalf of Putin?
— Will they continue to quote Russian Intelligence propaganda in their effort to smear President Biden?
— Instead of just 7 Republicans going to Moscow to “celebrate” the Fourth of July, will the entire party move their event to that city like the NRA did? Or to Budapest, like CPAC did?
Or will the GOP suddenly start listening to the rational voices left in their party, the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys who still believe in democracy (even if they want to gut the social safety net and turn loose the polluters)?
Heather Cox Richardson brings us back to that terrible day two years ago when Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine. He expected the government to collapse within a matter of days or weeks. Yet Ukraine stands. Entire cities, such as Mariupol, have been obliterated. The inhabitants of towns such as Bucha were subjected to murders, rapes, and torture. Yet Ukraine stands. Europe supports Ukraine because they fear what Putin will do next. Will he storm Poland or Lithuania? The extreme right wing of the GOP has turned against funding Ukraine because Trump, their cult leader, is opposed. As usual, he will do thing to offend his very good friend Putin.
Richardson wrote:
Two years ago today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to the people of Russia, begging them to avoid war. He gave the speech in Russian, his own primary language, and, reminding Russians of their shared border and history, told them to “listen to the voice of reason”: Ukrainians want peace.
“You’ve been told I’m going to bomb Donbass,” he said. “Bomb what? The Donetsk stadium where the locals and I cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend’s mom lives?” Zelensky tried to make the human cost of this conflict clear. Observers lauded the speech and contrasted its statesmanship with the ramblings in which Putin had recently engaged.
And yet Zelensky’s speech stood only as a marker. Early the next day, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. He claimed in a statement that was transparently false that he needed to defend the people in the “new republics” within Ukraine that he had recognized two days before from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.
Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. He planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.
But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded:
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
That statement echoes powerfully two years later as Ukraine continues to stand against Russia’s invasion but now quite literally needs ammunition, as MAGA Republicans in Congress are refusing to take up a $95 billion national security supplemental measure that would provide aid to Ukraine.
Instead, Republicans spent the day insisting that they do not oppose in vitro fertilization, the popular reproductive healthcare measure that the Alabama Supreme Court last Friday endangered by deciding that a fertilized human egg was a child—what they called an “extrauterine” child—and that people can be held legally responsible for destroying them. Since the decision, Alabama healthcare centers have halted their IVF programs out of fear of prosecution for their handling of embryos.
Republicans who oppose abortion have embraced the idea that life begins at conception, an argument that leads naturally to the definition of IVF embryos as children. But this presents an enormous problem for Republicans, whose antiabortion stance is already creating warning signs for 2024. Today a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) noted that 86% of the people they polled support increased, not reduced, access to IVF procedures.
The good news for the Republicans is that their frantic defense of IVF means that the media has largely stopped talking about the news of just two days ago, the fact that the man whose testimony congressional Republicans relied on to launch an impeachment process against President Joe Biden turned out to be working with Russian operatives. House leaders have quietly deleted from their House Impeachment website the Russian disinformation that previously was central to their case against Biden.
But today, as Republican House members remain on vacation, President Biden announced new sanctions against Russia, and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was in Ukraine, where he challenged House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to pass the national security supplemental bill. “The weight of history is on his shoulders,” Schumer told reporters in Lviv. “If he turns his back on history, he will regret it in future years.”
“Two years,” Ukraine president Zelensky wrote today. “We are all here…. Together with representatives of Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Egypt, Estonia, the EU, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, the Holy See, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Thailand, Türkiye, the UAE, the United Kingdom, the USA, Viet Nam, as well as international organisations….”
Heather Cox Richardson writes about the ascendancy of “the Putin wing of the Republican Party.” It’s headed, of course, by Donald Trump, who remains deferential to Putin. He continued to compare himself to Navalny, who was murdered by Putin, since he thinks of his trials as akin to Navalny’s experience.
Aid to Ukraine is stalled in the House of Representatives, where Marjorie Taylor Greene leads the opposition.
Richardson writes:
Both global and national affairs appeared to shift over the holiday weekend. Events of the past week or so highlighted the global stakes of not stopping the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In turn, those global stakes highlighted that Trump’s MAGA Republicans are strengthening Putin’s hand.
Since October, MAGA Republicans have managed to delay a national security supplemental bill that would provide additional aid to Ukraine. Although a bipartisan majority of Congress supports the measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recessed the House on Thursday without taking it up, just days after former president Trump attacked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and suggested he would urge Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to U.S. allies if they didn’t meet a guideline of spending 2% of their gross domestic product on their own military forces.
On Friday, February 16, Russian authorities murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, where he was being held on trumped-up charges, and on Saturday, Russian forces advanced into the front-line city of Avdiivka.
The Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering on international security policy, met this year in the midst of these events, from Friday, February 16, to Sunday, February 18. At Saturday’s lunch, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark made a surprise announcement. Denmark, she said, will donate all its artillery to Ukraine. She suggested other countries, too, could do more than they already have.
According to Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer of Foreign Policy, Frederiksen’s announcement “left attendees grappling with some existential questions: Are they prepared not just to help Ukraine but also to defend Europe from a possible Russian attack on a NATO country? Are democracies capable of standing up against the threat of territory-grabbing dictatorships like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s?”
Sweden today announced it will donate about $682 million in equipment and cash to Ukraine, its 15th aid package to Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion. The European Union today announced it is committing 83 million euros, or about $89 million, in humanitarian aid for those in Ukraine and Moldova affected by the war. Three weeks ago it approved $54 billion in military aid.
There is increasing pressure, as well, to transfer Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine. On Saturday, February 17, the U.S. Justice Department, which is in charge of a task force called “KleptoCapture,” transferred $500,000 in forfeited Russian funds to Estonia for fixing Ukraine’s electrical transmission and distribution systems. Biden promised more sanctions against Russia on Friday and has again called for House Republicans to pass the national security supplemental bill.
Indeed, the real elephant in the room is the fact that MAGA Republicans in the House are refusing to commit more U.S. aid. The Institute for the Study of War, a nonprofit research organization, assessed on Sunday that “delays in Western security assistance to Ukraine are likely helping Russia launch…offensive operations along several sectors of the frontline in order to place pressure on Ukrainian forces along multiple axes.”
MAGA Republicans are refusing that aid although it is popular both in Congress and among Americans at large. A Pew study released Friday, before news of Navalny’s murder broke, showed that 74% of Americans believe the war in Ukraine is important to U.S. interests; 59% say it’s important to them personally.
House speaker Johnson condemned Putin as “a vicious dictator” over the weekend and said he was “likely directly responsible” for Navalny’s death. But on Monday he posted to Twitter a photograph of him standing alongside Trump, apparently at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club, flashing a smile and a thumbs-up sign. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has vowed to try to throw Johnson out of the speaker’s chair if he even brings Ukraine funding to the floor. Trump himself referred to Navalny’s murder on Sunday simply by calling it a “sudden death” before launching into an attack on the United States.
On Sunday, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) came out and said it: the Republican Party has a “Putin wing.” She said: “The issue of this election cycle is making sure the Putin wing of the Republican Party does not take over the West Wing of the White House.” Conservative pundit Bill Kristol agreed, in italics: “The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro–Vladimir Putin.This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.”
Russian authorities have cracked down on those expressing sorrow for the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and are refusing to hand over his body to his mother and lawyer, who flew to the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle to reclaim it, saying they need to keep the body for “chemical analysis.”
Meanwhile, a Russian who defected to Ukraine last year has been killed in Spain, and Russian authorities have arrested for “treason” a dual Russia-U.S. citizen who lives in Los Angeles as she traveled in Russia after having participated in pro-Ukraine rallies.
Putin is facing an election next month, and he may have intended the murder of Navalny to frighten other opponents and intimidate Russian voters. But it is possible it had the opposite effect.
Yesterday, Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, stepped into his place, saying: “Putin didn’t only kill Alexei Navalny as a person. He wanted to kill our hope, our freedom, our future. But the most important thing we can do for Alexei and for ourselves is to go on fighting. I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work. Continue to fight for our country. I call on you to stand alongside me. To share not only the grief and unending pain that has enveloped us and won’t let go. I also ask you to share the fury and hate for those who dared to kill our future. I speak to you in the words of Alexei, in which I believe truly: There is no shame in doing little. There is shame in doing nothing. In allowing them to scare you…. By killing Alexei, Putin has killed half of me. Half of my heart and my soul. But I have another half and it tells me that I don’t have the right to give in.”
Today she urged the European Union not to recognize the results of Russia’s March election, saying that “a president who assassinated his main political opponent cannot be legitimate by definition.”
In the U.S., there has not been any apparent move from House Republicans to come back into session to approve the national security package. Indeed, Trump appears to be strengthening his hand over the mechanics of the Republican Party, with the state parties he salted with loyalists lining up behind him, supporters in Congress killing legislation at his demand, and lawmakers who are interested in actually making laws exiting Congress out of fear or frustration.
But the apparent support of MAGA Republicans for Putin is unlikely to play well in the U.S. Today, Republican candidate for president Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, tricked the Fox News Channel into covering live what she said was a major speech, likely leading producers to think she was withdrawing. Rather than doing so, she came out swinging with an attack on Trump.
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded her comments, spoken with the backdrop of the past week in everyone’s mind. Americans “deserve a real choice,” she said, “not a Soviet-style election where there’s only one candidate and he gets 99 percent of the vote.”
RIGA, Latvia — Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most formidable opponent, vowed on Monday to carry on her husband’s crusade against the Russian regime, striving to build “a free, peaceful, happy Russia, a beautiful Russia of the future, which my husband dreamed of so much.”
Navalnaya, 47, made her announcement in a video statement on YouTube, in which she accused Russian authorities of fatally poisoning Navalny in the Arctic prison where he died suddenly on Friday at age 47.
“Putin did not only murder the person, Alexei Navalny,” she said, clad in black and her voice occasionally trembling during the dramatic video address. “He wanted, along with him, to kill our hope, our freedom, our future.”
Navalnaya also accused the Russian authorities of refusing to hand over Navalny’s body to his 69-year-old mother so they could cover up the cause of death.
“They lie pathetically, and wait for the traces of another Putin’s Novichok to disappear there,” said Navalnaya, referring to the class of nerve agent that international investigators said Russian security agents used in an August 2020 attempt to assassinate her husband.
“My husband could not be broken, and that’s exactly why Putin killed him, in the most cowardly way,” she continued. “He did not have the courage to look him in the eye or even say his name. And now they are also cowardly, hiding his body, not showing him to his mother, not giving it to her.”
Three days after Navalny’s sudden death Friday, the location of his body was still unclear on Monday and his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, was again rebuffed by morgue officials in the Arctic town of Salekhard, 33 miles from the prison colony where he died, Navalny’s press secretary said.
Navalny’s grieving family and political team have demanded the return of his remains since Saturday but have faced an extended, almost surreal, struggle to recover his body or even to establish its location — with Russian officials seemingly determined to obstruct any independent investigation into the cause of death and delay a funeral.
Navalnaya was in Brussels on Monday to address European Union foreign ministers who invited her in a show of solidarity and as a follow-up to her emotional appearance at the Munich Security Conference on Friday shortly after the news broke of her husband’s death. At the meeting in Brussels, she sat next to the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, surrounded by diplomats and officials, looking exhausted but determined.
“We expressed the E.U.’s deepest condolences to Yulia Navalnaya,” Borrell posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Vladimir Putin & his regime will be held accountable for the death of Alexei.” … “As Yulia said, Putin is not Russia. Russia is not Putin,” Borrell continued. “We will continue our support to Russia’s civil society & independent media.”
Navalnaya also met with European Council President Charles Michel.
In her video statement, Navalnaya vowed that she and her husband’s team would find out those directly responsible for her husband’s death and expose exactly how it was done. “We’ll name names and show faces. But the main thing we can do for Alexei and for ourselves is to keep fighting,” she said. “I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny,” Navalnaya proclaimed, adding:
“By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul. But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up. I will continue Alexei Navalny’s cause.”
She also directly addressed one of the resonant questions in the West about her husband: Why did he return to Russia in 2021 after recovering from the poisoning attack in Germany, risking likely arrest and possible death, when he could have lived peacefully with his family in exile?
“He could not,” she said, fighting back tears. “Alexei loved Russia more than anything else in the world, loved our country, loved you. He believed in us, in our strength, in our future and in the fact that we deserve the best.”
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