As the Russian military pounded targets across Ukraine with an array of bombs and missiles, a small team of Ukrainian border guards on a rocky, desolate island received an ominous message: Give up or be attacked.
“I am a Russian warship,” a voice from the invaders said, according to a recording of the communications. “I ask you to lay down your arms and surrender to avoid bloodshed and unnecessary deaths. Otherwise, you will be bombed.”
The Ukrainians responded boldly. “Russian warship,” came the reply, “go f— yourself.”
The Russians opened fire, eventually killing 13 border guards.
President Zelensky announced that the 13 would be named Heroes of Ukraine, the nation’s highest honor.
Fareed Zakaria said on CNN a few days ago that the Kenyan Ambassador to the UN gave the best response to Putin’s assertion about national borders. Basically, he said that all the borders in Africa were created by the colonial powers, but Africans have agreed to live with them because the alternative would be endless war.
AS EUROPE FACES the grim prospect of a land war on a scale it has not seen since World War II, it was Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Kimani, who delivered a message that struck at the heart of the crisis: a lingering nostalgia for empire.
At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, called to discuss the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Kimani did not just condemn the threat to Ukrainian sovereignty by President Vladimir Putin’s government. He went further, highlighting how an unceasing obsession over territory and borders is continuing to drive violence around the world, long after the European empires that drew those demarcations have vanished from the map. He offered an alternate vision of peace through acceptance of the borders created by the collapse of empires and nations in the 20th century, calling for economic and cultural integration instead.
“Kenya, and almost every African country, was birthed by the ending of empire,” Kimani said. “Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart. Today, across the border of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders we inherited.”
Kimani’s remarks, which went viral on social media and in the African media, also criticized what he called the “dangerous nostalgia” for empire that leads countries to redraw borders by force to reunite with citizens of other nations with whom they share cultural affinity — the exact argument the Russian government has used to justify its invasion of Ukraine in support of Russian speakers there. Instead, Kimani called on Europe to follow the rules of the U.N. charter as the African Union countries have sought to do, respecting the sovereignty of neighboring countries “not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater forged in peace.”
Now, let’s do a thought experiment and consider what it would mean if we reverted to the borders of olden times.
We Americans might start by returning Texas to Mexico, as well as large swaths of the Southwest, including the southern half of California.
Then we could give Florida back to Spain.
And if we are being truly considerate of historical claims, we should give everything else back to the Native Americans/American Indians who originally lived on the land.
A few days before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Putin justified the decision to make war by claiming that Ukraine did not exist. It was a fake nation, invented by Lenin.
The reality is that Ukrainian culture and language have existed for centuries and a Ukrainian nationalist movement sprang up in the mid-1800s, angering the czars. While parts of what is now Ukraine was part of the Russian empire, the rest of the state was, at various times, under the control of Poland, Lithuania and Austria-Hungary. Moreover, when Ukrainians were given a choice of remaining with Russia in a 1991 national referendum, 84 percent of eligible voters went to the polls — and more than 90 percent, including many non-Ukrainians, cast ballots for independence.
Putin made the absurd claim that Ukraine posed a threat to Russia because it was developing nuclear weapons.
The fact is that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for recognition of its sovereignty. Russia signed the agreement, called the Budapest Memorandum.
Kessler writes:
This is sheer fantasy. There is no evidence that Ukraine wants to develop nuclear weapons — or that it even has the capacity to do so, given the ruined state of the economy.
There was a cache of more than 1,000 strategic nuclear weapons on Ukraine’s soil when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. That made Ukraine instantly the world’s third biggest nuclear power, with more weapons than Britain, France and China combined. But the country gave up the stockpile for what seemed like a good deal at the time. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, along with the United States and Britain, agreed to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” in exchange for Ukraine’s joining the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Now that Russia has essentially ripped up the Budapest Memorandum, some Ukrainians have wondered whether it was a bad bargain. “Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech this month at the Munich Security Conference. “We don’t have that weapon. We also have no security.”
Shortly before the massive invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine, President Zelensky tried to reach Vladimir Putin on the telephone. Putin refused to take his call.
Then Zelensky made an emotional appeal to the people of Russia, addressing them in Russian, yet fully aware that the state-controlled media would block his words on Russian media.
Putin said he had to invade to “denazify” Ukraine, which threatened Russia, but this was an absurd lie. Zelensky is Jewish and certainly not a Nazi. He reminded listeners that eight million Ukrainians died in the war against Nazi-ism.
The Washington Post wrote about his appeal:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded with the Russian people late Wednesday to stop their leadership from sending troops across the border and into his country, recording an emotional video appeal that underscored the close ties between the two nations and warned of the despair that would come from a needless war.
Zelensky, speaking in Russian, said Moscow had approved the movement of nearly 200,000 troops into Ukrainian territory, along with thousands of armored vehicles lined up at the border. He said an incursion risked becoming “the start of a big war on the European continent.”
“You are being told this is a plan to free the people of Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “But the Ukrainian people are free.”
His words appealing for peace stood in sharp contrast to a speech delivered Monday by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who delved into Russian history to undermine the notion of Ukraine as an independent nation. He also launched a barrage of accusations against the government in Kyiv that were widely seen as a prelude to an invasion.
By turns wrenching and defiant, Zelensky sought to break through the wall of state-controlled Russian newscasts that have depicted Ukraine as a nation run by Nazis threatening Moscow, though he conceded that his words probably wouldn’t be shown on Russian television.
“The Ukraine on your news and Ukraine in real life are two completely different countries — and the main difference is ours is real,” Zelensky said. “You are told that we are Nazis. How could a people that lost more than 8 million people in the fight against Nazism support Nazism?
“How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky, who is Jewish, asked, noting that his grandfather spent the entire war as a Soviet soldier but died in an independent Ukraine.
Zelensky said Russians are being told that he is preparing an offensive to retake separatist territory in the Donbas region and “bomb it without questions.” But, he asked, who he would be attacking?
“Luhansk? The house where my best friend’s mother lives? The place where the father of my best friend is buried?” Zelensky said.
“This is our land. This is our history. What are you fighting for and with whom?” he said. “Many of you have been to Ukraine. Many of you have relatives in Ukraine. Some have studied in Ukrainian universities. Some have made friends with Ukrainians. You know our character. You know our people. You know our principles.”
“The people of Ukraine want peace,” he said. “The government of Ukraine wants peace.”
For weeks, Zelensky has complained that the U.S. government has been overly alarmist in warning about the possibility of a large-scale Russian war against Ukraine, damaging the country’s economy in the process.
But on Wednesday, his tone had transformed into that of a leader worried for a people who stand alone against the might of the Russian military despite planeloads of Western weapons and aid.
He warned Russians that if their military invades Ukraine, his nation would defend itself.
“We know for sure we do not need a war — not a cold one, not a hot one, not a hybrid one,” he said. “But if these forces attack us, if you attempt to take away our country, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. Not attack — defend. And in attacking, you are going to see our faces. Not our backs, our faces.”
Zelensky spent much of the address warning about the costs of war, which Ukrainian territory has seen more than most.
“War is a grave tragedy, and that tragedy has a great cost in all senses of the word,” Zelensky said. “People lose money, reputations, quality of life, freedom … but most of all people lose their loved ones … They lose themselves.”
Vladimir Putin’s super-yacht, worth at least $100 million, left its port in Hamburg before repairs were finished. It is heading for a safe port in Russia. Putin wants to make sure it is not seized as new sanctions are imposed by NATO governments after his invasion of Ukraine. It’s likely that sanctions will be placed on the personal assets of Russian oligarchs, including Putin.
I just watched the film called WINTER OF FIRE, an amazing documentary about the Ukrainian uprising against the government in the winter of 2013-2014. It is streaming on Netflix.
It’s a story of patriotism and courage. You will see the incredible determination of the Ukrainian people to live lives of freedom and dignity.
I urge you to watch it. It shows up the bobble-head pundits who claim to have the inside track as fools.
Robert Hubbell is a blogger who is always informative and insightful. Today he digs into Putin’s aggression and its frightening implications for the other states that were once part of the Soviet Union. Be sure to open the link to Charlie Sykes’s review of the Republicans who are shilling for Putin, led by Tucker Carlson. For more on Putin’s useful idiots, see what Hubbell wrote yesterday.
He writes:
In quick succession on Monday, Putin recognized two Ukrainian provinces as independent nations, endorsed a “mutual aid” treaty with the newly recognized states, and announced that Russia would send “peacekeeping troops” into territory that every other nation in the world recognizes as part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine. One European diplomat described Putin’s lies as follows:
Putin just put Kafka and Orwell to shame: no limits to the dictator’s imagination, no lows too low, no lies too blatant, no red lines too red to cross. What we witnessed tonight might seem surreal for the democratic world. But the way we respond will define us for the generations to come.
There is much to understand about what happened Monday on the ground in Ukraine, but the most consequential development occurred inside the Kremlin—a speech in which Putin effectively claimed dominion over former Soviet republics. Putin denied the legitimacy of Ukraine as a sovereign nation, saying, “modern Ukraine was entirely and completely created by Russia” and “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”
Putin’s theory of Russian dominion can be employed against every former Soviet republic and therefore poses a threat to the peace and stability of Europe. That is why the current crisis over Ukraine matters to the United States— and why the GOP’s embrace of Putin is so dangerous. Indeed, Putin is relying on political division in the U.S. to provide cover for a war against Ukraine that will kill thousands of innocent civilians, politicians, journalists, and people who do not conform to Putin’s view of what constitutes “normal” human behavior. Republicans are providing aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States—a scandal of historic proportions that defies explanation.
Russia’s gambit of “recognizing” regions of sovereign nations as independent states as a pretext for invasion is a recurring theme. Putin used similar strategies to invade parts of Georgia in 2008 and the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula in 2014. His strategy will not end with the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2022—and Republicans are fools to believe otherwise. The world must punish Russia severely for this latest invasion so that it will never resort to the same strategy again. If we fail to do so, we signal to Putin that his unfounded theory of Russian dominion justifies future expansion. Tonight, that is the message that Republicans are sending to Putin. Charlie Sykes, writing in The Bulwark, has cataloged the sorry list of Republican apologists for Putin. See Charlie Sykes, Putin’s Right-Wing Shills.
As Republicans fall over themselves to praise Putin, President Biden has handled the Ukrainian situation expertly. It is doubtful that any U.S. president could have avoided Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but few could have handled the situation as well. See Loren Thompson in Forbes, Whether Russia Invades Or Not, Biden Has Handled The Ukraine Crisis Well. Thompson writes,
Within the geopolitical and military constraints that limit Washington’s options, President Biden and his security team have exhibited a clear sense of purpose, a willingness to act decisively, and a good deal of imagination in addressing the Russian threat. . . . Meanwhile, the Biden administration has persevered in preparing the diplomatic battlefield for whatever comes next.
The road ahead with Ukraine will be difficult, and there will be plenty of opportunities for failure and disappointment. Every decision Biden makes will be second-guessed by armchair experts who will operate with the benefit of hindsight and an astonishing lack of humility. But everyone who hopes for a strong America on the global stage should support Biden as he tries to navigate a challenge that would test any American president. You can help Biden by knowing the facts about how he is succeeding and ensuring that others know, as well.
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Me: My concern is not how America is perceived on “the global stage.” I worry about Putin’s ambition to restore the USSR, which was a brutal dictatorship. I worry about the future of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and all the other former puppet states that gained freedom from a repressive regime when the USSR collapsed. It’s been three decades since that happy moment, and most people under the age of 50 have no memory of the Gulags, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The Guardian in the U.K. reports on a study finding that parents in England are unhappy with the past three decades of “school choice.” By contrast, parents in Scotland are satisfied with their local public schools.
Three decades of school choice in England has left parents feeling more “cynical, fatalistic and disempowered” than their peers in other parts of the UK, according to new research.
A study comparing parents in England, where families can name up to six state schools for their children to attend, with those in Scotland, where children are generally assigned to local state schools, found Scottish families were still more likely to be satisfied with the outcome.
While 75% of parents in England said they had enough choice of schools, 76% of those in Scotland said the same, despite their lack of explicit choices within the admissions process.
Parents in England were more likely to express frustration and disempowerment, with several calling the current school choice policies an “illusion”, in surveys and interviews conducted for the research published in the Journal of Social Policy.
Aveek Bhattacharya, the chief economist at the Social Market Foundation and the author of the paper, said: “This research adds to the growing evidence that school choice policies have failed to bring the benefits they were supposed to.
“For all the emphasis that policymakers in England have put on increasing choice, parents south of the border are no happier with their lot than their Scottish counterparts. Indeed, many are disenchanted and dismayed.
“These findings show that parents offered a range of options for their children’s school are no happier than parents who have less choice about education.”
In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and took control of the Crimean Peninsula, which was then absorbed into Russia. Presently, Putin has stationed at least 100,000 troops on Ukrainian borders, and leaders in the West are fearful that he intends to invade and seize control of all Ukraine. Ukraine has a long and terrible history under Russian control. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Stalin collectivized Ukrainian agriculture and sent troops to export Ukrainian crops to Russia. Millions of Ukrainians were killed or starved to death in the ensuing famine. Historian Robert Conquest wrote a history of these events callled Harvest of Sorrow. It is a terrifying history. Today, it appears that Vladimir Putin wants to reassemble the Soviet Union. He once called its dissolution the worst geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.
Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace discusses NATO, Ukraine and Russia.
Defence Secretary in Olsztyn, Poland.
I have lost count of how many times recently I have to had to explain the meaning of the English term “straw man” to my European allies. That is because the best living, breathing “straw man” at the moment is the Kremlin’s claim to be under threat from NATO. In recent weeks the Russian Defence Minister’s comment that the US is “preparing a provocation with chemical components in eastern Ukraine” has made that “straw man” even bigger.
It is obviously the Kremlin’s desire that we all engage with this bogus allegation, instead of challenging the real agenda of the President of the Russian Federation. An examination of the facts rapidly puts a match to the allegations against NATO.
First, NATO is, to its core, defensive in nature. At the heart of the organisation is Article 5 that obliges all members to come to the aid of a fellow member if it is under attack. No ifs and no buts. Mutual self-defence is NATO’s cornerstone. This obligation protects us all. Allies from as far apart as Turkey and Norway; or as close as Latvia and Poland all benefit from the pact and are obliged to respond. It is a truly defensive alliance.
Second, former Soviet states have not been expanded ‘into’ by NATO, but joined at their own request. The Kremlin attempts to present NATO as a Western plot to encroach upon its territory, but in reality the growth in Alliance membership is the natural response of those states to its own malign activities and threats.
Third, the allegation that NATO is seeking to encircle the Russian Federation is without foundation. Only five of the thirty allies neighbour Russia, with just 1/16th of its borders abutted by NATO. If the definition of being surrounded is 6% of your perimeter being blocked then no doubt the brave men who fought at Arnhem or Leningrad in the Second World War would have something strong to say about it.
It is not the disposition of NATO forces but the appeal of its values that actually threatens the Kremlin. Just as we know that its actions are really about what President Putin’s interpretation of history is and his unfinished ambitions for Ukraine.
We know that because last summer he published, via the official Government website, his own article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. I urge you to read it, if you have time, because while it is comprehensive on his arguments it is short on accuracy and long on contradictions.
We should all worry because what flows from the pen of President Putin himself is a seven-thousand-word essay that puts ethnonationalism at the heart of his ambitions. Not the narrative now being peddled. Not the straw man of NATO encroachment. It provides the skewed and selective reasoning to justify, at best, the subjugation of Ukraine and at worse the forced unification of that sovereign country.
President Putin’s article completely ignores the wishes of the citizens of Ukraine, while evoking that same type of ethnonationalism which played out across Europe for centuries and still has the potential to awaken the same destructive forces of ancient hatred. Readers will not only be shocked at the tone of the article but they will also be surprised at how little NATO is mentioned. After all, is NATO ‘expansionism’ not the fountain of all the Kremlin’s concerns? In fact, just a single paragraph is devoted to NATO.
The essay makes in it three claims. One: that the West seeks to use division to “rule” Russia. Two: that anything other than a single nation of Great Russia, Little Russia and White Russia (Velikorussians, Malorussians, Belorussians) in the image advanced in the 17th Century is an artificial construct and defies the desires of a single people, with a single language and church. Third, that anyone who disagrees does so out of a hatred or phobia of Russia.
We can dispense with the first allegation. No one wants to rule Russia. It is stating the obvious that just like any other state it is for the citizens of a country to determine their own future. Russia’s own lessons from such conflicts as Chechnya must surely be that ethnic and sectarian conflicts cost thousands of innocent lives with the protagonists getting bogged down in decades of strife.
As for Ukraine, Russia itself recognised the sovereignty of it as an independent country and guaranteed its territorial integrity, not just by signing the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 but also its Friendship Treaty with Ukraine itself in 1997. Yet it is the Kremlin not the West that set about magnifying divisions in that country and several others in the Europe. It has been well documented the numerous efforts of the GRU and other Russian agencies to interfere in democratic elections and domestic disputes is well documented. The divide and rule cap sits prettiest on Moscow’s head not NATO’s.
Probably the most important and strongly believed claim that Ukraine is Russia and Russia is Ukraine is not quite as presented. Ukraine has been separate from Russia for far longer in its history than it was ever united. Secondly the charge that all peoples in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are descendants of the ‘Ancient Rus’ and are therefore somehow all Russians. But in reality, according to historian Professor Andrew Wilson in his excellent essay for RUSI entitled “Russia and Ukraine: ‘One People’ as Putin Claims?” they are at best “kin but not the same people”. In the same way Britain around 900AD consisted of Mercia, Wessex, York, Strathclyde and other pre-modern kingdoms, but it was a civic nation of many peoples, origins and ethnicities that eventually formed the United Kingdom.
If you start and stop your view of Russian history between 1654 and 1917 then you can fabricate a case for a more expansive Russia, perhaps along the lines of the motto of the Russian Tsar before the Russian Empire “Sovereign of all of Rus: the Great, the Little, and the White” – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus respectively. And crucially you must also forget the before and after in history. You must ignore the existence of the Soviet Union, breaking of the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty, and the occupation of Crimea. Far more than footnotes in history, I am sure you will agree.
Ironically, President Putin himself admits in his essay that “things change: countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!” However, he then goes on to discard some of those “historical circumstances” to fit his own claims.
Dubious to say the least, and not in anyway a perspective that justifies both the occupation of Crimea (in the same way Russia occupied Crimea in 1783 in defiance of the Russo-Turkish Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji in 1774) or any further invasion of modern Ukraine, as an independent sovereign country.
The last charge against the West by many in the Russian Government is that those who disagree with the Kremlin are somehow Russophobes. Leaving aside that GRU officers deployed nerve agents on British streets or that cyber hacking and targeted assassinations emanate from the Russian state, nothing could be further than the truth.
Russia and the UK share a deep and often mutually beneficial history. Our allegiances helped to finally defeat Napoleon and later Hitler. Outside of conflict, across the centuries we shared technology, medicine and culture. During the 18th Century Russia and Britain were deeply tied. Between 1704 to 1854, from age of Peter the Great through Catherine the Great and well into the 19th Century the British were to be found as admirals, generals, surgeons, and architects at the highest level of the Russian Court. The father of the Russian Navy – one Samuel Greig – was born in Inverkeithing in Fife.
That shared admiration is still true today. The British Government is not in dispute with Russia and the Russian people – far from it – but it does take issue with the malign activity of the Kremlin.
So, if one cold January or February night Russian Military forces once more cross into sovereign Ukraine, ignore the ‘straw man’ narratives and ‘false flag’ stories of NATO aggression and remember the President of Russia’s own words in that essay from last summer. Remember it and ask yourself what it means, not just for Ukraine, but for all of us in Europe. What it means the next time…
Italy has restricted the activities of the unvaccinated to protect the vast majority who are vaccinated and to curb the spread of COVID. The Washington Post reported on the constrained life of a musician.
OSIGO, Italy — After many rounds of rules targeting the unvaccinated, the chamber musician’s new life is unrecognizable from the old. Claudio Ronco once performed all over Europe, but now he can’t even board a plane. He can’t check into a hotel, eat at restaurant or get a coffee at a bar. Most important, he can’t use the water taxis needed to get around Venice, his home for 30 years — a loss of mobility that recently prompted him to gather up two of his prized cellos, lock up his Venetian apartment and retreat with his wife to a home owned by his in-laws one hour away in the hills.
“Isolation,” Ronco called it, on the fourth day in a row that he hadn’t left the house.
At this complicated stage of the pandemic, the lives of unvaccinated people are in major flux, at the mercy of decisions made everywhere from courts to workplaces. But their lives are changing most dramatically in a handful of countries in Western Europe, including Italy, where governments are systematically reducing their liberties, while beginning to return the rest of society to a state of normalcy. And while regular testing, until recently, was permitted as an alternative to vaccination, even that option has now been largely removed as countries harden their mandates. For people like Ronco, the choice is to get inoculated or face exclusion.
Diane Ravitch's blog 