Category Archives: Biden-Harris Administration

The Ukraine War on the U.S. Home Front

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News stories say Emmanuel Macron of France spoke to Vlad Putin this week and learned that Putin intends to take all of Ukraine. Of course he does; I hadn’t realized that wasn’t obvious. And it will take several more days, at least, maybe weeks. And a lot of people will die horribly. And it is all so pointless. Putin may win in the short run, but I don’t see how he can win in the long run.

On the American Right, you’ve got your hard-core nutjobs who still stand with Putin, and you’ve got your old-school national security hawks who never liked Putin anyway. In between are a lot of people who may or may not be making adjustments. Greg Sargent writes that Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance are having a moment of self-doubt over Putin, in which Tucker once again shows off his spectacular talent for being an asshole:

“The invasion of Ukraine already is a legitimate disaster for Europe and the world,” Carlson told his viewers. “We’ve been taken by surprise by the whole thing. We’re not the only ones who were. But we’re willing to admit it.” …

… But then Carlson blamed Vice President Harris for his mistake. His logic: If the Russian threat were all that dire, President Biden wouldn’t have sent Harris abroad to handle diplomacy!

Carlson then launched into a creepily obsessive segment of cherry-picked clips meant to portray Harris as stupid and unprepared. But never mind that garbage. More notably, Carlson has little to say about what the administration actually did do in the run-up to the invasion.

This was a few days after Tucker had called for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT Score. And apparently he gets his feelings hurt when people call him a “racist.” Poor baby.

Oh, and J.D. Vance has had to tap-dance around a lot of recent comments to the effect that Ukraine just isn’t important. We should only care about our own borders, especially the southern one where brown people get through. America First! Now he’s having to admit that, well, okay, Russia’s invading Ukraine was bad.

Jennifer Rubin hopes that the Ukraine crisis will bury America First!, because people will see that what goes on beyond our borders is important. Considering that World War II didn’t bury isolationism completely for all time I am skeptical. But Rubin wrote,

Donald Trump and his allies (even the crowd that joined the administration by rationalizing their expertise would prevent debacles) believed, in particular, that international organizations impeded our sovereignty, sucked up our resources and helped the enemies of the United States. They told us we had been played for “suckers” and would do better when we did not need to collaborate, cooperate and coordinate with others. …

… Then came Ukraine.

Never before has the value of NATO been so apparent. The same Republicans who used to whine that NATO allies did not shoulder their obligations now appear to be peeved that Europe is “leading.” (The accusation is disingenuous, of course, because President Biden was the one to revive and energize the alliance.)

Meanwhile, a whole lot of “freedom” truck convoys are still headed to D.C., but they aren’t getting covered on national news that I’ve seen. You can track them only through local news coverage. Hint to truckers: Nobody cares. You’re old news. Go home.

Among the hard-core nutjob Right, I read that not only is Vladimir Putin still admired; they’ve figured out the Real True Reason anyone cares about Ukraine. This is from Mother Jones:

Anti-vaccine influencers claim that the United States owns a network of secret biolabs in Ukraine where dangerous infectious disease research takes place. For them, it’s just obvious that Biden is sending aid to Ukraine in order to protect those assets. 

Sure. Some of the nutjobs claim there are “reports” that Putin is targeting the biolabs. Here’s another one:

Sherri Tenpenny, the anti-vaccine activist who has claimed that Covid shots make people magnetic, suggested in a Monday post to more than 150,000 followers that Jews were using the Ukraine conflict to distract the world from a meeting in Europe about pandemic preparedness.

And, of course George Soros figures into this somehow. Can’t leave him out.

On the Left, the “blame America first” crowd had a field day blaming the CIA and the United States and NATO for making Putin attack Ukraine. I’m seeing a bit less of that as the attacks go on, but then I’ve unfriended a few people. The most common accusation from Lefties is that NATO broke an agreement about not expanding NATO eastward, so Putin had no choice but to attack, because NATO was threatening him. And it was Ukraine’s fault that Russia attacked it because Ukraine wanted to join NATO. They should have been neutral, see, instead of pro-western. What was Putin supposed to do?

This argument is right up there with telling women they won’t get raped if they just stay home and keep their doors locked. But then I remember reading a news story about a rapist who got into a house by climbing a tree and removing a second-floor window air conditioner.

NATO doesn’t “threaten” anybody who isn’t a threat to others, but never mind. If you hear the one about the agreement, know that there was never any such agreement. There was discussion way back when, before the Soviet Union broke up, but nobody ever agreed to anything. If there had been an agreement, it would have been with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists.

I agree with Rubin that Putin is demonstrating why NATO is still important. Just think — if Ukraine had been admitted to NATO, would Putin be attacking it now? I rather doubt that. I suspect Estonia, Latvia, probably Lituania, would have been crushed by Russia already were it not for their NATO membership. But heaven forbid that countries bordering Russia would have sought out the protection of a mutual defense alliance.

The Significance of Yesterday’s Court Filing

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The January 6 House committee is still going strong. Here’s what I know about yesterday’s court filing.

The filing in a California federal court was in response to a suit filed by John Eastman, the Trump attorney who appears to be one of the architects of the scheme to overturn the election. Eastman is trying to block the committee’s subpoena for his documents on the Trump campaign, claiming attorney-client privilege.

The committee argued that communication is no longer privileged if the attorney is helping the client commit a crime. They asked the judge to privately review evidence the committee has so far gathered to understand Eastman’s culpability.

“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the filing says.

The filing also says, “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump and members of his campaign knew he had not won enough legitimate state electoral votes to be declared the winner of the 2020 Presidential election during the January 6 Joint Session of Congress, but the President nevertheless sought to use the Vice President to manipulate the results in his favor.”

It’s expected that the committee eventually will refer their findings to the attorney general, where they may either be acted upon or disappear into a big hole somewhere. It’s extraordinarily frustrated for a  year to have passed after an event in which we all bleeping saw what Trump was doing, and yet he’s still a free man.

Greg Sargent writes that it’s important for any future prosecutor to prove that Trump knew good and well he had lost the election.

For instance, the filing notes that Trump’s attorney general publicly announced that the Justice Department had found no serious fraud. It says the committee has collected information demonstrating that department officials privately advised Trump of this as well. It notes that Republican election officials also confirmed this for Trump, and that extensive media fact-checks also demonstrated this beyond any doubt.

Here’s why this matters: Because in spite of knowing all this, Trump continued to press his vice president, Mike Pence, to abuse his powers to delay the electoral count. And Trump and his co-conspirators also sought to do this in other ways, by trying to get friendly state legislators to send sham electors, and by leaning on at least one GOP senator to delay it while violence raged.

And of course, Trump incited the mob to go after Pence, which could amount to an effort to weaponize his supporters to intimidate Pence into disrupting the electoral count, which Pence had refused to do.

To demonstrate criminality, it must be shown that Trump corruptly tried to carry this out, i.e., that he did so knowingly on fraudulent pretenses, which is what the filing seeks to illustrate. (The filing also suggests Trump might be similarly vulnerable to criminal charges of conspiring to defraud the United States.)

And, remember, some time this spring there will be televised hearings. Yesterday’s filing may very well be a sneak preview.

Update: Jennifer Rubin caught this:

On Wednesday, we saw a matter-of-fact announcement from the Justice Department: “A regional leader of the Oath Keepers pleaded guilty today to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding for his actions before, during and after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His and others’ actions disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the presidential election.” The announcement continued: “Joshua James, 34, of Arab, Alabama, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol breach. As part of the plea agreement, James has agreed to cooperate with the government’s ongoing investigation.”

So there is an investigation at the Justice Department.

John Eastman

SOTU and Ukraine

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I watched Biden’s State of the Union speech last night, and overall I think he did well. Here’s a transcript, if you want to review. One could always quibble that he might have said more about this or that, and at one point he did say “Iranian” when he meant “Ukrainian.” But overall, I believe he may have accomplished a lot. Most people who watched gave it positive reviews.

I didn’t watch the Republican response, but I understand it sucked. Of course, I’m getting that from partisan sources.

In Ukraine — it appears that Kherson is about to be overcome, although it hasn’t been overcome yet. The Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv is stalled. No one seems to no for certain why.

Putin’s Folly and the End of Cold Wars

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First, if you missed The war in Ukraine isn’t working out the way Russia intended in the Washington Post, from yesterday’s blog post, be sure to take a look. And then follow that up with Fred Kaplan at Slate.

Michael Kofman, a military analyst at CNA, an Arlington, Virginia–based think tank, who has been following the battle closely, tweeted late Sunday afternoon, “It’s taken me a while to figure out what [the Russian military is] trying to do, because it looks so ridiculous and incompetent.” B.A. Friedman, a military historian and tactician, went further: “This isn’t a good army executing a bad plan. It isn’t a good army executing outdated or out-of-context tactics. It’s a bad army!”

Then Kapan goes on for a few paragraphs about all the military mistakes the Russians made going into Ukraine. The word “amateurish” comes to mind. Do take a look.

There is a larger factor here: The Russian army is composed, by and large, of one-year conscripts, who are poorly trained (even within the confines of Russian military training), badly treated, and uninspired by ideology or any other motivating spirit. Hence the stories of captured Russian troops who had no idea why they were in Ukraine. At least a few didn’t even know that they were in Ukraine—they thought they were still doing exercises in Belarus. Others have reportedly been found knocking on village doors for food or, in one case, asking a local police station for fuel.

The Russian army is not trained to improvise if the plan worked out at headquarters falls apart. “In politics and in warfare, the small elite on top doesn’t want subordinates to get too creative—if they did, they might take over,” Kaplan writes. If Step 2 doesn’t work,  the Russians will still go on to Step 3, because that’s all they know. “Therefore, large troop-transport planes tried to land, even though the airport hadn’t been completely secured and Ukrainian air defense systems hadn’t been destroyed. As a result, two Il-76 transport planes, each carrying 100 airborne troops, were shot down.”

You’ve probably heard about the massive Russian convoy slowly lumbering toward Kyiv. We’ve all seen the satellite images. The tanks and other military vehicles are not being escorted by infantry, and I understand there are no combat planes above, protecting them. If it weren’t such a one-sided war, I imagine those tanks would have been bombed to oblivion already. Were it not for nukes, I’m sure somebody else’s bombers would have taken care of it. Unfortunately, the convoy is still moving as I write this.

Speaking of planes, see The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force. I don’t know anything about this site or the author, but it does describe a puzzling lack of coordination on the Russians’ part.

This is not to say that the Russians are going to lose, because they still have overwhelming advantages over the Ukrainians. And the Russian troops are about to be reinforced by troops from Belarus and Chechnya, I understand. But it does suggest that the Russian military isn’t as formidible as it was cracked up to be. Putin’s move into Ukraine revealed a huge weakness.

Looking at Russia from another angle — Paul Krugman is calling Russia a “Potemkin Superpower.”

Before Putin invaded Ukraine, I might have described the Russian Federation as a medium-size power punching above its weight in part by exploiting Western divisions and corruption, in part by maintaining a powerful military. Since then, however, two things have become clear. First, Putin has delusions of grandeur. Second, Russia is even weaker than most people, myself included, seem to have realized.

First, Krugman says, Russia’s economy is so small — a little more than half the size of either Britain’s or France’s — it seems remarkable that it could support a world-class military. And, in fact — maybe it couldn’t.

Further, Russia’s standard of living “is sustained by large imports of manufactured goods, mostly paid for via exports of oil and natural gas,” Krugman writes. This left it vulnerable to sanctions that might disrupt trade.

Before the invasion it was common to talk about how Putin had created “fortress Russia,” an economy immune to economic sanctions, by accumulating a huge war chest of foreign currency reserves. Now, however, such talk seems naïve. What, after all, are foreign reserves? They aren’t bags of cash. For the most part they consist of deposits in overseas banks and holdings of other governments’ debt — that is, assets that can be frozen if most of the world is united in revulsion against a rogue government’s military aggression.

I googled for the current value of the ruble, and got this —

I got this from an economist friend today — this is the chart of a Russian bank listed on the London stock exchange.

This is a new thing. We’ve never seen so much of the world rise up to impose such crippling sanctions on a rogue nation before. This could change the entire calculus of warfare. Perhaps the U.S. doesn’t need to be spending so much on being prepared to fight World War II again. Or, as long as we don’t plan to invade anybody, I suppose.

Back to Krugman —

But Europe mainly burns gas for heat; gas consumption is 2.5 times higher in the winter than it is in the summer. Well, winter will soon be over — and the European Union has time to prepare for another winter without Russian gas if it’s willing to make some hard choices.

Of course, gas is going up here, too. The Right is going overboard blaming Biden for our dependence on foreign oil, when they (and some centrist Democrats) are the ones who have blocked investment in alternative energies all these years. If we’d gotten started on weaning ourselves from fossil fuels back when people first started talking about it, the price of gas wouldn’t be an issue now, would it?

See also The Intercept, Saudi-Russian collusion is driving up gas prices. If the sanctions succeed in destroying Putin, send a note to Mohammed bin Salman — “You’re next.”

I keep reading that we’re on the brink of a new Cold War, but I don’t think so. I could be wrong, but what I’m seeing may just be the last gasp of the old Cold War and the beginning of a time in which the world’s democracies rely on other kinds of power to keep the despots in check. Let’s hope so.

Update: See In just 72 hours, Europe overhauled its entire post-Cold War relationship with Russia 

Today in Ukraine, and the U.S.

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The ruble is worthless now, I understand. Even Switzerland has frozen Russian accounts. Russia is in for a world of hurt.

Do read The war in Ukraine isn’t working out the way Russia intended in the Washington Post. In brief, the ground invasion of Ukraine has been shockingly incompetent. The Russian troops are undertrained and, apparently, undermotivated.

This is more recent:

In Kharkiv, home to nearly 1.5 million people, three areas came under heavy daylight bombardment, experiencing some of the most intense shelling and street fighting since the start of the invasion — an apparent escalation of the attack from Russian President Vladimir Putin. At least 11 people were killed and dozens hospitalized, according to the head of the regional government. But both Kharkiv and Kyiv, the capital, remained in Ukrainian hands as Russia faced more resistance than it was expecting, the Pentagon reported.

It appears Russia will rely less on tanks and more on artillery and bombs. I am so sad for Ukraine. No one should have to experience this.

Closer to home, Aaron Blake writes, the tide has turned against the Russia apologists — and the neutrals. Polls show overwhelming support for Ukraine and opposition to Russia. A huge majority of Americans now see Russia as an enemy. A clear majority thinks that what is happening in Ukraine is a threat to America’s vital interest.

Fox News hosts and others who cast U.S. intelligence on the imminent Russian invasion as dubious or even an elaborate ruse have reverted to decrying the thing they suggested might be a hoax. Carlson has acknowledged that the piddling “border dispute” spearheaded by the not-necessarily-a-bad-guy Putin, which was of no concern to us, is now worthy of sanctions amid a potential “world war.” Former Trump secretary of state Mike Pompeo went full Russia hawk days after echoing Trump’s praise for Putin’s formidability and saying he had “enormous respect” for Putin. Even Trump, after praising Putin’s strategy in the run-up to the invasion and declining to warn him off it, on Friday alluded going further than sanctions. “There are things you can do that could be very powerful if you want to get it ended,” Trump said, while declining to get into specifics for some reason.

Trump’s praise for the invasion as “genius” is going to be used to bash him from now on.

The World to Russia: Bleep You

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The unfolding war is unlike any other, I believe. Russia is being pummeled by financial sanctions. Ukraine citizen militias are organizing on social media, and a head of state is addressing his people and the world on Twitter. There are some good ones on this Twitter feed. Fighters on the front lines are providing updates on Twitter.

Oh, and this seems significant —

So is this:

The Russian people won’t have to take their sons and possibly daughters back in body bags, I guess. Many families may never learn what happened to their loved ones.

Okay, one more.

I understand that Russians have very limited access to the Web outside of Russia, but “very limited” is not “zero.” Russians are going to find out what’s really going on eventually. And it sounds as if a lot of them have found out already — see Furious Russians turn on Putin – mass arrests as thousands protest in St Petersburg, just posted at The Express (UK).

This morning we woke to the news that Russia was putting its nuclear forces on alert. Nuclear weapons are a power that creates weakness and limits options. It’s because of nuclear weapons that other nations are not sending their own troops to defend Ukraine, but instead the world stands by and watches. Ukraine will be sacrified before risking a nuclear World War. But the world is not standing by helplessly; the sanctions appear to be having an effect.

Today the Pentagon said, in so many words, that since the original blitzkrieg plan was stopped, the Russian military appears to be falling back on the time-honored Plan B — a seige. This is not good news for civilians. Will the Russians interpret attempts to send food and medical supplies to Ukraine’s cities as acts of war?

Now Alexander Vindman is tweeting that there are reports Putin has fired the head of the Russian military, Valery Gerasimov. This hasn’t hit the news yet, if it’s true. It may not be.

If Putin is rational — some are questioning this — he must realize that even if his military does take Ukraine, this will not be the end of the story. The global community will not accept a Russian occupation Ukraine, never mind Ukrainians. There will be robust subversion and guerrilla war. It will cost Russia big time to hang on to Ukraine. And the sanctions continue to pile on.

See the Finantial Times, Vladimir Putin’s grand plan is unravelling.

Unable to achieve the easy victory that he anticipated, Putin seems unlikely to back down. Pride, paranoia and his own personal survival point to the use of ever more radical and dangerous tactics. One senior western official predicted to me that “Putin will only dig in and this will get very ugly”.

Western security analysts have been warning of the possible use of thermobaric missiles in Ukraine — “flame-thrower” bombs which Russia has deployed in Chechnya and Syria and can cause huge loss of life. The nuclear threats that Putin is deploying, while clearly intended to intimidate, cannot be entirely discounted given his state of mind.

Do read the entire article; it’s very informative. But it’s possible the rest of the world will be drawn into a larger war, like it or not. However, I believe Russia will be alone. I don’t think Xi Jinping is deluded enough to back up Russia militarily. What’s in it for China? Nothing I can see.

Best-case would be for the oligarchs gang up on Putin and oust him.

One more tweet — Kyiv’s defenders are sending videos to the Russian troops surrounding their city.

Ukrainians attend a rally in central Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2022, during a protest against the potential escalation of the tension between Russia and Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden are to hold a high-stakes telephone call on Saturday as tensions over a possibility imminent invasion of Ukraine escalated sharply and the U.S. announced plans to evacuate its embassy in the Ukrainian capital. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Ukraine Is Rewriting the Scripts

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We keep hearing that Ukraine is fighting bravely, and that the Russians are advancing more slowly than expected. As I write, Ukraine is still in control of Kyiv. We also keep hearing that there is precious little chance Ukraine won’t be crushed eventually. I have no military experience whatsoever and have no idea how to interpret the many reports.

Germany has a long-standing policy of not allowing lethal weapons to be sent to conflict zones. But a short time ago it relented and will not oppose shipping arms from EU and NATO countries to Ukraine. Now the Netherlands is preparing to send rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and Germany is sending 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles. The U.S. Department of State insists it is throwing assistance to Ukraine as fast as it can, although it’s not clear to me how this is going. I assume the U.S. is sharing intelligence about Russian troops with Ukraine.

European countries are still debating whether to cut Russia off of the SWIFT banking system. “Blocking Russia from the system will require the agreement of all the EU’s 27 members,” it says here. This is a big lift, and it would cause some pain on the EU side. But the threat is real enough that it’s making Russia nervous.

Ukraine is asking Turkey to block Russian access to the Black Sea. There is no indication Turkey will comply. The Moscow Times reports that Turkey is urging Russia to end the “conflict” and has offered to mediate negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

At the same time, there are reports that Russia is also threatening Sweden and Finland with consequences if they even think of joining NATO. At this point I doubt Sweden or Finland are too worried. Well, maybe Finland.

The man of the hour is Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine. He is certainly rising to the moment. The U.S. offered to help him and his family to evacuate; Zelensky responded that he needs weapons, not a ride. But if Russians get their hands on him, they’re going to kill him. I worry for him. One headline commended him for “going down with the ship.”

And then there’s this meme:

This crisis could well be one of the unforeseen events that sends U.S. politics off on a new trajectory, like September 11 or Hurricane Katrina. Although that’s yet to be seen. It has already changed our ongoing political “discourse,” if you want to call it that, and I think it could be changed even more. Republicans may find they’ll have to rework their rhetorical strategies.

The recurring clown show known as CPAC — it’s supposed to be annual, but it seems to come along about every three months — is going on in Orlando. NBC News reports that the speakers are steadfastly ignoring Ukraine.

As Moscow launched missiles at Ukraine, CPAC speakers were firing away at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his country’s public health restrictions. The agenda had one breakout session devoted to China, but none on Russia, and China was more frequently invoked as a bigger problem for the United States.

Those speakers who did mention Ukraine blamed President Biden for whatever is happening there. I still say their divisiveness encouraged Putin. And, of course, I have no idea how Fox News is covering the crisis, if at all. And I’m not going to look.

But all the meatballs whining about how mask mandates violate their freedoms just look ridiculous now. They were ridiculous before, of course, but the contrast makes them truly absurd. And then there’s Ron DeSantis:

In his 20-minute speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ron DeSantis hit on everything from immigration and “mob violence” to critical race theory, the Bill of Rights and the peril of a “biomedical security state.”

One thing the Florida governor — who is a U.S. Navy veteran and former member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — did not mention on Thursday was Ukraine….

… Ukraine drew mention from some Republican politicians. Yet attendees heard more about banned books, “Marxist” leftists, Covid mandates and the fantasy that the 2020 election was rigged. 

Tucker Carlon, after weeks of signalling that the kewl kids want Vlad to sit at their lunch table, and Ukrainians are poopy heads, had to moderate a bit and admit that Putin is to blame for what is happening in Ukraine. And then he pivoted to racial slurs of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Ukraine Invasion Enabled by U.S. Right

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I strongly suspect that the only thing that would stop Putin from further aggression is if the oligarch class in Russia rose up against him. That may be what the sanctions are designed to do. This is from a just-released fact sheet at WhiteHouse.gov, which is what President Biden said today.

Today’s actions include sweeping financial sanctions and stringent export controls that will have profound impact on Russia’s economy, financial system, and access to cutting-edge technology. The sanctions measures impose severe costs on Russia’s largest financial institutions and will further isolate Russia from the global financial system. With today’s financial sanctions, we have now targeted all ten of Russia’s largest financial institutions, including the imposition of full blocking and correspondent and payable-through account sanctions, and debt and equity restrictions, on institutions holding nearly 80% of Russian banking sector assets. The unprecedented export control measures will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, restricting Russia’s access to vital technological inputs, atrophying its industrial base, and undercutting Russia’s strategic ambitions to exert influence on the world stage. The impact of these measures will be significantly magnified due to historical multilateral cooperation with a wide range of Allies and partners who are mirroring our actions, inhibiting Putin’s ambition to diversify Russia’s brittle, one-dimensional economy. 

Further down, there is this:

Additional full blocking sanctions on Russian elites and their family members: Sergei Ivanov (and his son, Sergei), Andrey Patrushev (and his son Nikolai), Igor Sechin (and his son Ivan), Andrey Puchkov, Yuriy Solviev (and two real estate companies he owns), Galina Ulyutina, and Alexander Vedyakhin. This action includes individuals who have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian state, and have elevated their family members into some of the highest position of powers in the country. It also includes financial figures who sit atop Russia’s largest financial institutions and are responsible for providing the resources necessary to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This action follows up on yesterday’s action targeting Russian elites and their family members and cuts them off from the U.S. financial system, freezes any assets they hold in the United States and blocks their travel to the United States.

Some commenters have pointed out that there are no sanctions yet on Putin himself. There are also complaints that Biden has not cut Russia off from the SWIFT Banking System, but that’s not something the United States can do by itself. Other nations would have to agree. Reuters reports that the EU nations in particular are unlikely to agree to cut Russia off from SWIFT because it would hurt them as much if not more than Russia. And, anyway, Russia has been building an alternate payment system.

And in addition to sanctions on Russian financial institutions, Belarus is facing penalties for allowing Russian troops to use it as a staging area.

This is good, although it’s not clear to me that this is all that could be done. In a fascinating interview by Greg Sargent of Edward Fishman, a former State Department official, Fishman talks about completely freezing all state-owned banks in Russia out of the global financial system. Some of that has been done, but I don’t know if all banks are affected. And Fishman says that all of the wealth held by the oligarchs outside of Russia must be identified and frozen. I sounds as if some of that is being done, but I can’t tell how much is being done.

Fishman says he believes Putin may be overconfident in his ability to absorb the costs of sanctions. Russia was sanctioned in 2014 and survived. This round of sanctions is going to be much, much harder. Fishman adds, “Substantial agitation among the Russian elite could potentially impact Putin’s calculus. It’s anyone’s guess what the right vector of influence is, but it’s incumbent upon the U.S. to try all of them.”

I trust that President Biden is examining every option very carefully and will put more into effect in the next few days. I think his position overall is correct.

The Right continues to blame Biden for being “weak” and allowing Putin to act up, as if any President could have stopped him. They have no specific ideas about what might be done differently, mind you; they just somehow think nothing bad would happen were Biden not such a noodle.

One strongly suspects that the American Right’s perpetual ridicule of Joe Biden factored in to Putin’s decision to move on Ukraine. Putin could count on much of the U.S. public not rallying around their President, and if that’s what he thought, he would have been right. Here’s a statement released today from Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House.

“After just one year of a weak, feckless, and unfit President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief, the world is less safe. Rather than peace through strength, we are witnessing Joe Biden’s foreign policy of war through weakness. For the past year, our adversaries around the world have been assessing and measuring Joe Biden’s leadership on the world stage, and he has abysmally failed on every metric. From kinetic and deadly attacks on our allies and partners, to the catastrophic withdrawal and surrender in Afghanistan, to the cyber attacks impeding American industry and infrastructure, to today’s Russian invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden and his Administration have failed America and the world.”

It’s past time to turn this crap back on the Right, which is acting as a fifth column in service to Putin. Yesterday Alexander Vindman compared Tucker Carlson to Tokyo Rose; that’s a start.

My old buddy Josh Hee-Hawley has stopped insisting we should not extend any effort on behalf of Ukraine because we need to keep an eye on China. Today he said in a tweet that “I will introduce legislation on Monday when the Senate returns to session to lift Joe Biden’s shut down of the American energy sector and return American energy to full production. No more weakness.” The “shut down of the American energy sector” refers, I assume, to Biden’s shutting down of oil and gas leases on public lands.

But, you know, if the Right all this time had not been fighting the inevitable, and instead had supported robust investment into renewable energy technology these past several years, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in now about petroleum prices, would we? Righties want to keep us tied to fossil fuel, and it keeps getting us into trouble because it keeps us dependent on countries controlled by despots, or else it requires risking other resources, such as coastlines, wildlife, air, water, and the entire freaking planet. I guess that petroleum industry money is a resource they just can’t quit.

Jennifer Rubin, who almost seems a different columnist from what she was in the Bush years, writes  Dear media: Ask Republicans why they are normalizing support for Putin. “Most Republicans remain cultishly devoted to defeated former president Donald Trump, even as he openly praises Vladimir Putin for dismembering Ukraine, a democratic ally,” she writes. “Imagine a leader of an American party praising the Soviets as their troops crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956.”

See also Putin’s Useful Idiots by David Graham at The Atlantic.

And meanwhile, in Russia, thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest their nation’s invasion of Ukraine. And thousands were swiftly detained. The Associated Press reports,

In Moscow and other cities, they moved swiftly to crack down on critical voices. Litvinovich was detained outside of her residence shortly after posting the protest call. OVD-Info, a rights group that tracks political arrests, reported that 1,745 people in 54 cities had been detained by Thursday evening, at least 957 of them in Moscow.

Russia’s Investigative Committee issued a warning Thursday afternoon reminding Russians that unauthorized protests are against the law.

Meanwhile, a bunch of mostly white men in big trucks are heading to Washington DC to clog up traffic and otherwise cause trouble because they think they’ve been denied their “freedoms.” Although the trucker convoys are ostensibly about covid restrictions,  “they’re also demanding action on a lot of issues that have nothing to do with COVID-19, ranging from ‘justice’ for January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt to reversing the renaming of two streets in Scranton in honor of President Joe Biden,” Margaret Hartmann writes at New York magazine.

But the “freedom” activists do love them some Vlad Putin, because he’s a friend of Donald Trump, you know.

Republicans Can’t Settle on Ukraine Message

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[Update: The attack on Ukraine has begun.]

Republicans are united in criticizing President Biden for the Ukraine crisis. However, they don’t agree on why Biden should be criticized.

Some are blaming Biden for being weak. This wouldn’t have happened if Biden were strong, like Trump. See Bess Levin, Republicans Claim Putin Wouldn’t Have Invaded Ukraine Under a Beefy Piece of Man Meat Like Trump, in Vanity Fair. (I had to link to that, just for the title.)

Claiming that “Biden becoming president is the best thing that ever happened…for Vladimir Putin,” Senator Ted Cruztold Fox News on Sunday that “Europe is on the verge of war because of the weakness, the fecklessness of Joe Biden.” The Texas lawmaker, who has been happy to do his part to spread Russian propaganda that benefits a man who claimed Cruz’s own father helped kill JFK, followed that up with a press release on Monday declaring that “Biden–Harris officials are to an enormous extent directly responsible for this crisis.”

Echoing those comments on Monday was Marco Rubio who, incidentally, has reportedly been happy to acceptpolitical donations from Len Blavatnik, a billionaire with “longstanding ties to oligarchs close to” Putin. Without referring to the president by name, though the reference was more than clear, the senator from Florida tweeted: “Weakness always invites aggression. And weakness in response to aggression always invites others to be aggressive as well.” Senator John Barrassotold Fox News last week that Biden “talked tough but Putin doesn’t respect statements, he only respects strength,” claiming the president of Russia “views President Biden as weak and ineffective and indecisive.” In January, Senator Tom Cotton blamed Putin’s aggression on “a year of Joe Biden’s impotence and incompetence towards Russia in particular and in foreign policy more generally,” somehow forgetting that Trump spent four years passionately kissing Putin’s ass.

I have reason to believe that Levin wrote this before Trump called Putin’s move on Ukraine “genius.”

Now, exactly what do these people mean by “strength? Is it standing submissively next to Putin in Helsinki and confessing he believed Putin’s “strong and powerful” denials over the analysis of U.S. intelligence agencies? Was it fawning over Putin like a lovesick puppy during World War I commemorations in France?

Many people have pointed out that the Republicans have not proposed a different approach to dealing with Ukraine. Seriously, they haven’t. They just think Biden should be stronger. But what does that mean?

Paul Waldman:

Though some Republicans say the sanctions at the center of Biden’s strategy should have started earlier, you’ll have a hard time finding one who can specify in any detail what Biden’s “weakness” toward Russia has consisted of to this point, nor what a “strong” president would be doing instead. Mounting a ground invasion to take Moscow? Launching nuclear weapons? What?

If the answer is “What Biden is doing, but, you know, more,” that’s not very persuasive. But as far as they’re concerned, “strength” isn’t something presidents demonstrate with their actions; it’s more of an ineffable quality that Republican presidents possess by definition while Democratic presidents lack.

I clearly remember that last week some people believed that Biden was the one causing the crisis in Ukraine, or at least he was causing panic over a non-crisis in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson has had a grand time making fun of Biden’s predictions that Russia would invade Ukraine. Now that the invasion has begun, it’s Joe Biden’s fault because he was too weak to stand up to Putin.

Waldman continues,

Consider Trump. Short of literally getting down on his hands and knees to shine Putin’s shoes, there’s almost no way you could imagine Trump having been weaker toward Putin than he actually was. Trump continually praised the Russian dictator, dismissed his misdeeds and went out of his way to denigrate NATO — just as Putin would want.

It culminated in the utterly disgraceful display at the 2018 summit in Helsinki, when Trump was asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election and declared he was taking Putin’s word over the analysis of U.S. intelligence agencies, because “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”

It was so embarrassing that even Republicans were shocked; then-Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said Trump “made us look like a pushover.” Sen. John McCain called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Nevertheless, today Republicans claim that when it came to Russia, Trump was a paragon of strength.

Yeah, not so strong. But the prize goes to Maria Bartiromo at Fox, who declared last week that the Ukraine crisis was a hoax.

“What about this hysteria that the State Department went through all weekend?” she asked. “Because on Friday, you’ve got [national security adviser] Jake Sullivan telling us that Russia would invade Ukraine today. I mean, to be so specific and all the leakers leaking that it was today, Wednesday to be so specific and then Joe Biden telling us, get out of Ukraine immediately.”

“Was this a ruse?” she continued. “Was this whole thing an effort to take everybody’s attention away from what Hillary Clinton did and what we know to be a complete hoax over this Russia investigation?” After all, she continued, Sullivan worked for Clinton, and he had been involved in “peddling this Russia collusion lie.”

Then there’s another faction of Republicans who have decided that the United States should just ignore what Putin is doing in Ukraine. From Politico,

But a vocal GOP minority on and off Capitol Hill — represented by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, among others — has taken a third path, actively arguing against any U.S. involvement in the region while still dinging Biden. They argue that expanding the U.S. commitment to NATO is a mistake, and that the president should instead focus on countering China and securing America’s southern border.

Ol’ Hee-Hawley is in way over his Ivy League-educated head, I bellieve. Poor Jack Danforth, who was a respectable Cold War-era Republican back in the day, must be mortified he helped Hawley get a start in politics.

This situation isn’t good for anybody. Expect energy prices to skyrocket; that’s hardly something Biden wants. But no, Josh, we can’t ignore this.

 

Putin on the Edge of Starting a War

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First off, here are a couple of articles I found extremely helpful to sort out the historical and political relationship of Ukraine and Russia. See How the West Gets Ukraine Wrong — and Helps Putin As a Result by Rory Finnin at Politico and The increasingly complicated Russia-Ukraine crisis, explained by Jen Kirby and Jonathan Guyer at Vox. And see also Six ways Russia views Ukraine — and why each should worry the West by Robyn Dixon at WaPo. I hope especially that those of you with more knowledge of that part of the world will take a look and share your opinions.

Now we’re in the “was this the invasion?” phase of the crisis. What’s happened so far is either the beginning of the invasion or a feint meant to achieve concessions. But if the latter, it’s not working.

I was a bit surprised to learn that Germany has, apparently, killed the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. “The $11 billion pipeline is designed to double the amount of gas flowing from Russia to Germany and it was completed late last year. But German regulators had yet to give the green light to the pipeline to officially allow it to operate.” Putin probably was not expecting that. President Biden appears to have done a good job pulling the NATO powers together.

My sense of things is that this is all about Putin’s inner demons and his need for power.

Someone on teevee last night said that Russia is essentially a big gas station. Its GDP is much smaller than California’s. It’s not investing in innovation. Its economy is seriously not diverse. What it has is oil and natural gas, and energy profits are enjoyed mostly by the oligarchic class. Two-thirds of its exports are either petroleum or its distillates, it says here. The compulsion to annex a former Soviet member is both a means to distract citizens from their economic deprivations and to put the world on notice that Russia is still a world power. This could backfire on Putin eventually, but not before he has caused a lot of suffering.

Your thoughts?