Since it is hard to keep up with developments regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I thought it might be useful to share several links that readers with interest may benefit from.
The WSJ had a useful roundup of the sanctions the Biden administration and EU have implemented in the last day.
From the “Studies in Bravery” file, “Prominent Russians join protests against Ukraine war amid 1,800 arrests.” One emblematic quote:
“Our future is being taken from us,” said Yuri Shevchuk, the frontman of classic Soviet rock band DDT and a veteran anti-war campaigner, who went to Chechnya in 1995 as part of a peace tour. “We’re being pulled like through an ice hole into the past, into the 19th, 18th, 17th centuries. And people refuse to accept it.”
The Charlemagne columnist at the Economist sounds as if he or she works at the Cato Institute, authoring a column entitled “Europe is the free-rider continent”:
Europe is the free-rider continent. For decades its defence has been underpinned by America—leaving it in a supporting role even as war breaks out on its own borders. Economically it has piggybacked on innovation from elsewhere, keeping up with rivals, not forging ahead. Even the feel-good environmental ambitions crafted in Brussels are made possible in part by importing from afar the products once made in carbon-spewing factories Europe shut down long ago. How clever it seems to some. All this money saved and effort outsourced has made it possible to live a fine life while working 35-hour weeks and retiring in one’s prime…
The Spectator’s Owen Matthews voices a concern that has arisen in the last week: “Has Putin lost the plot?”
As Putin’s hour-long address announcing official recognition of the breakaway republics of Donbas went out on Monday, a producer on Kremlin-controlled TV texted me: ‘Boss okhuyel [the boss has wigged out].’
Indeed. Putin’s rambling and uncharacteristically emotional address to the nation and the bizarrely staged Security Council meeting that preceded it carried the distinct whiff of the dying days of the USSR. The ministers standing by to publicly agree (some more convincingly than others) with the boss; the formulaic tropes about protecting Russian-speaking people from ‘genocide’; the clichés about the ‘illegitimate’ government in Kiev. The spectacle resembled nothing so much as Leonid Brezhnev’s slurred 1979 announcement that the Soviet Union had to fulfil its ‘internationalist duty’ to protect the people of Afghanistan.
How did Putin, the three-dimensional chess player whose cynical but often brilliant opportunism leveraged Russia from a middling regional power to world player, come to this?
Finally, I had a piece in Inkstick Media, echoing Matthews’ worries about Putin’s isolation and mental state and pointing out that there was no U.S. military solution that would have rescued Ukraine at an acceptable cost and risk:
President Joe Biden is right to make clear that US troops will not defend Ukraine. The amount of US firepower that would be required to overwhelm more than 150,000 Russian troops around and now inside Ukraine would be immense, and that says nothing of the risk of nuclear escalation inherent in such a war. More generally, the US military exists to defend the US and its citizens, not to repel aggression across the world. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, not covered by Article 5 provisions, and Biden has made clear that US troops would not protect it from Russia.
