I’m having an unusually busy day today and I’m getting a late start at blogging. I probably will be posting this evening.
Meanwhile, I think this is an interesting video:
Are you going to watch Biden’s State of the Union speech tonight?
Open thread 3/1/22
Let’s escape together:
Switzerland has frozen Russian assets
Switzerland will adopt all the sanctions that the European Union has imposed on Russian people and companies and freeze their assets to punish the invasion of Ukraine, the government said in a sharp deviation from the country’s traditional neutrality.
“We are in an extraordinary situation where extraordinary measures could be decided,” President and Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis told a news conference in Bern on Monday, flanked by the finance, defence and justice ministers.
Only history would tell if such a move could happen again, he said. Swiss neutrality remained intact but “of course we stand on the side of Western values,” he added…
Switzerland also adopted financial sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, effective immediately, and closed its airspace to most Russian aircraft…
It added that [Switzerland] had also banned five oligarchs close to Putin from entering the country, without naming them.
I repeat: really really unusual.
See this for some background about Switzerland and the Nazis during WWII.
Isn’t the Russian pipeline still flowing in Europe, though?
Putin’s goals
Angelo M. Codevilla wrote this piece in 2014. That’s quite a while ago, but it gave me some insight on the question of why Putin has decided to attack the entirety of Ukraine.
I already felt I knew the “why now?” of the attack; Putin is well aware of the current weakness of the west, as I’ve said before. But I had thought he would be more incremental in his approach, as he’s been before, and just try to peel off this section and then that section with the most inhabitants of Russian ethnicity, and the world would keep on sleeping just as it did with Crimea and portions of Georgia.
I didn’t doubt that he wanted all of Ukraine and more. I just thought he’d go about it differently.
Here’s Codelvilla in 2014:
Vladimir Putin is playing for the highest geopolitical stakes. Can the U.S. government afford to do less?…[T]here is no doubt at all about his long term objective: to recapture trouble-making power over Ukraine, to use that trouble-making power to restore Ukraine as the crown jewel of the Russian Empire, then to squeeze the rest of the former Soviet empire back into Moscow’s fold, and then to overawe Europe.
Well, yes.
Codevilla goes on to recommend a harder line by the US in terms of powerful sanctions:
…[The US should regard] the struggle over Ukraine as a wake up call to treat the Putin regime for what it is, an enemy of the United States.
Treating the Putin regime as an enemy would involve cutting its sources of foreign exchange by the U.S. initiating its own antitrust prosecution of his regime’s cash-cow, Gazprom, freezing all Russian accounts in U.S. banks (thereby forcing the world’s banks to choose between dealing with Russians or with the U.S. financial system), as well as forcing foreign countries to choose between allowing Russia’s liquefied gas ships to their ports, and doing business with the U.S.
Serious economic sanctions against the Putin regime would include a full-court press against its mainstays: the network of self-interested oligarchs who are Putin’s only real constituents.
…There is really one and only one way to achieve that: namely for the United States, after consultation with major allies, to announce secondary sanctions on this new Nomenklatura’s travel and finances.
That’s how sanctions are supposed to work to starve the regime of the means to do damage. We know that for a variety of reasons, the squeeze was not put on Putin when it might have mattered.
Here’s Codevilla on why he thought Putin wasn’t going for just the eastern, Russia-dominated sections of Ukraine:
Nor is Putin trying to unite the Eastern Ukraine to Russia, because doing so would preclude achieving his long-term objective of taking back all of that country politically. The departure of the East would leave a people composed almost exclusively of Ukrainian-speaking Catholics, unshakably oriented to the West, united, wholly foreign to Russia. In such a country, Russia would have no levers to pull.
After all, it was precisely to forestall the emergence of such a unit within the Soviet Union that Stalin originally drew Ukraine’s borders to include lots of Russians.
That answer makes a lot of sense to me.
Canada’s trucker convoy may be over, but the problems are hardly over for the truckers – and for the rest of us
From David Solway of Canada:
The partial triumph of the truckers turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory, for it is the truckers who have suffered most.
Our blue-collar benefactors now face the consequences of the scorched-earth policies adopted by the anointed class. Many have lost their rigs. Operating licenses have been revoked. Criminal charges have been laid. Bans on trucker commerce have proliferated. Bankruptcy looms for many. Livelihoods have been demolished. Families have been obliterated. Marriages are bound to collapse. And I suspect that suicides will mount as desperation sees no escape from ruination. In effect, Justin Trudeau declared war on those who kept the goods and services flowing through the ersatz pandemic and who enabled the populace to weather the government-induced travesty…
The truckers who protested the draconian and useless vaccine mandates have been crushed and their lives ruined. And the majority of Canadians do not care. Some believe the truckers got what they deserved, gloating over the misfortune of their betters. Others do not give them a second thought. The feeble-minded claim to be suffering from “phantom honking.” Some hover over the top like a helicopter pilot surveying rush hour traffic and move on: nothing very significant to see here. Their sympathies go out to the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression. The victims of government oppression in their own country are an afterthought.
My sympathies go out to both. The domestic tyranny in Canada and in this country has been a focus of mine for years and continues to be an enormous concern. What’s happening in Ukraine is also a concern. But the two are actually related in a strange way – or maybe not so strange – because I believe that the timing and scope of Putin’s attack is a direct result of his evaluation of the fallen nature of the west, including its moral weakness and its abandonment of its own bedrock principles.
Open thread 2/28/22
Reading Putin’s mind
[NOTE: I don’t usually post on Sundays, but so much is happening that I thought I’d just put up a brief one and start a new thread that way. So here it is.]
Wish I was a mind reader, but I’m not. One question I’d like answered is whether Putin has really gone off the deep end or whether he’s just being threatening as a negotiating tactic. It could be some strange combination of the two, of course, but which predominates? His actions have already seemed over-the-top in launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and in throwing even more forces into the fray.
The threat of nuclear weapons is now more explicit from him, although it’s always been in the air. There is a surreal quality about it all, but it’s very real nonetheless.
Dueling violin prodigies playing Winter in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons
Christian Li is fourteen years old here. This seems to be a rehearsal. I love the way prodigies get a very adult and focused look on their faces when they play. His delivery is very fast, with lots of attack. Too fast for my taste, though. I think it’s impressive but that it sacrifices a bit of tone:
Chloe Chua is eleven years old here. The first piece she plays in this video is modern. I don’t like it that much but I left it in because she performs it so very well. The Vivaldi “Winter” starts around 5:51, and the video shows more of it than the previous clip does:
Musical prodigies such as these seem almost otherworldly to me.
Germany and Russia and Poland and Ukraine: some history and some speculation
I’ve been thinking about 20th Century history lately. At the beginning of WWII, not only did Hitler invade Poland, but Stalin did as well in the days when they were buddy-buddy for a while. And it was Stalin who took the elite of Poland into Katyn forest and murdered them:
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (“People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs”, the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940.
…Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be “intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests”. The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews including the chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg.
Then of course after the war Poland was controlled by the USSR for a long long time. It has no interest in now becoming part of Putin’s Russia, or coming under Russia’s aegis again.
Ukraine is east of Poland and shares a border with it. During WWII some Ukrainians initially (accent on that “initially”) greeted the Germans as liberators, because millions of them had died because of Stalin’s Holodomor – the famine that was made much worse by USSR policy. Then after the war they came under the thumb of Russia again as did so many of the small countries in that area (Belarus seems to still be under its thumb, perhaps from choice?).
The Ukrainians weren’t angels either. They kept massacring their Jews between the two world wars, so much so that enormous numbers of Jewish survivors of those massacres left during that time. The Einsatzgruppen found a home there, too, with many willing executioners among the Ukrainians. But that’s not the Ukrainian population of today (eighty years later), who elected Zelenskyy – a Jew whose grandfather fought for the Red Army during WWII and who lost three brothers in the Holocaust.
Today’s Russians aren’t the Russians of the Soviet Union, either, and Putin isn’t Stalin. But he’s a strongman who wants to recreate Stalin’s empire, and he’s stated that rather clearly for many years. Europe is shocked and stunned at the eruption of a hot war in its territory, as a result of Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Did Putin think people there would just shrug when he invaded Ukraine? He could be forgiven for thinking so, because the west has shown so little spine in recent years.
Putin’s actions regarding the large scope of the attack on Ukraine, however, are somewhat puzzling. If he had kept his attack to the eastern parts of Ukraine where there are a lot of people of Russian ethnicity, I doubt he’s be getting the same amount of pushback and I doubt that Ukraine would be getting as much sympathy as now.
Is this report true?:
“I wish I could share more,” Rubio tweeted. “But for now I can say it’s pretty obvious to many that something is off with #Putin. He has always been a killer, but his problem now is different & significant. It would be a mistake to assume this Putin would react the same way he would have 5 years ago.”
Do we have more than one world leader of an enormous country who’s getting befuddled and having trouble with impulse control? It’s not all that farfetched a notion. Putin is now 69, a spring chicken compared to Biden. But still…it’s possible.
How’s Putin’s war going?
First, a general caveat: we have the fog of war, so there’s no reason to trust any reports. But still, there’s a general drift, and it may be correct.
The general drift is that Putin is surprised that the Ukrainians are putting up quite a battle. My personal opinion – based on little more than what I’ve observed of Putin and what I read in the newspaper – is that he expected one of two things: either the Ukrainians really would welcome Russia with open arms, or that the leaders of Ukraine would flee and general panic would ensue among the public, leading to widespread surrenders on the part of the Ukrainian military. He probably pegged Zelenskyy for a coward and a fool, and it never occurred to him that Zelenskyy would demonstrate personal courage.
Putin thinks he’s the only man in the room.
There are so many news articles about the Ukraine invasion that I’m sure you can find your own, but here are some to read with excerpts from a few. First we have a reported strike on a Russian airbase. Then we have this brilliant diplomatic move by the Biden administration in the lead-up to the war – appealing to China for help, with China promptly betraying the extremely misplaced trust.
Now that Ukraine has shown some resolve to fight, and the reality of the situation has set in for Europe, other countries who feel threatened by Putin are deciding they’d rather fight him now in Ukraine than on their own soil some day. And so some help in terms of armaments are going to be coming Ukraine’s way:
Former Soviet Union satellite state Slovakia — as part of now-defunct Czechoslovakia — is urgently sending millions of dollars worth of aircraft fuel and artillery ammunition to embattled Ukraine…
…The initial shipment includes 12,000 rounds of 120-millimeter caliber ammunition, 10 million liters (2.64 million US gallons) of diesel fuel, and 2.4 million liters of aircraft fuel.
Germany on Saturday reversed a historic policy of never sending weapons to conflict zones, saying the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an epochal moment that imperiled the entire post-World War II order across Europe…
From its own stockpile, the German government will send 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger anti-aircraft defense systems to Ukraine. The government has also authorized the Netherlands to send Ukraine 400 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and told Estonia it ship over send nine howitzers.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a turning point,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a statement. “It threatens our entire post-war order…
Germany’s shift comes as numerous Western allies are mobilizing to send Ukraine more guns, ammunition and even anti-aircraft defense systems as Russian forces bear down on major Ukrainian cities.
The reversal could mean a rapid increase in European military assistance for Ukraine…
Estonia, in particular, had said it wanted to send old howitzers but was prevented from doing so because Germany was withholding its approval. Estonia bought the weapons from Finland, which gave its sign-off, but Germany also has to OK the transfer because it originally sold the howitzers to Finland…
Poland has started sending ammunition by land, while Estonia and Latvia on Friday said they were beginning to truck fuel, Javelin anti-armor weapons and medical supplies to the Ukraine border for hand-off to Ukrainian forces. Elsewhere, the Czech Republic said it would send guns and ammunition, and Slovakia said it would send ammunition, diesel and kerosene.
On Saturday, more countries started chipping in.
The Netherlands said it will send 200 Stinger anti-aircraft defense systems to Ukraine — often the top-requested type of military aid among Ukrainian soldiers and officials (apart from Western powers sending their own planes and forces to fight with Ukraine). And Belgium announced it would supply Ukraine with 2,000 machine guns and 3,800 tonnes of fuel.
Across the Atlantic, the United States on Saturday also upped its ongoing military assistance to Ukraine, authorizing up to $350 million to help bolster Ukraine’s defenses, funding that will include “further lethal defensive assistance.”
In addition to its stance on weapons shipments, Germany has also taken flack from some allies for its opposition to barring Russia from the SWIFT international payment system, which European countries notably use to buy energy from Russia. While there was some initial resistance across the EU to such a ban, the opposition has rapidly dwindled following the invasion and amid pressure from Ukraine. EU countries like Poland are now publicly leaning on Germany to follow suit.
All of that represents a real sea-change, and must be giving the Ukrainians a boost of anticipatory energy, as well as angering Putin (and making him even more paranoid about Europe and NATO than he already is, which is a lot).
Zelenskyy recently issued this appeal to Europe, describing the war as one in which Europe itself is threatened. They have memories of the Cold War, which wasn’t that long ago:
Roundup
News stories that are not about Russia or Ukraine:
(1) Was the reason Trudeau pulled back from the Emergencies Act that there was a run on banks? That’s my leading theory, anyway.
(2) Biden names Ketanji Brown-Jackson as his SCOTUS pick:
Not a huge surprise — Biden just picked the most extreme left-wing SCOTUS nominee in our nation’s history. Ketanji Brown-Jackson will make Sonya Sotomayor look like Sarah Palin. She’ll become the most predictable vote on the court — pro abortion, pro gender ideology, everything.
— Terry Schilling ?? (@Schilling1776) February 25, 2022
I think that anyone Biden would have nominated would be a reliable vote for the left, however. Brown-Jackson might be the most leftist of all the possibilities, but does that really matter when any such nominee would very likely be voting the same way as she? Also, perhaps – and it’s a big “perhaps” – her extreme leftism may mean that she won’t get the votes of the usual GOP suspects (Collins, Graham, Murkowski, Romney, etc.). My guess is that she probably will get their votes, though.
(3) The CDC continues its retreat from mask recommendations.
(4) Another George Floyd case verdict has come down, and I believe that it’s a terrible miscarriage of justice. Here’s a piece at Legal Insurrection about it. An excerpt:
Three former Minneapolis police officers were convicted Thursday of violating George Floyd’s civil rights, as a federal jury rejected their arguments that inexperience, improper training or the distraction of shouting bystanders excused them from failing to prevent Floyd’s killing.
Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane were convicted of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care as the 46-year-old Black man was pinned under fellow Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee for 9 1/2 minutes while handcuffed, facedown on the street on May 25, 2020. Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back, Lane held his legs and Thao kept bystanders back.
Thao and Kueng were also convicted of failing to intervene to stop Chauvin in the videotaped killing that sparked protests in Minneapolis and around the globe as part of a reckoning over racial injustice.
I know that legally, because Chauvin was found guilty, the word “killing” would be considered appropriate. But I think that grave doubt remains as to whether it was a killing or not.
Also:
This is injustice. Finding guilt for Chauviun is one thing, but the other officers actually did express concern for Floyd and were overruled by a senior officer.
This is a media conviction. https://t.co/KPRGTyGnw6
— Rekieta Media (@RekietaMedia) February 24, 2022
I’m in agreement with that tweet.
Open thread 2/26/22
Music, then and now: