RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/02/the-failure-of-bidens-friends-and-allies-strategy/

For two years, from the campaign trail through to the White House, all of Joe Biden’s foreign policy pronouncements have been punctuated with one phrase: the pledge to “work with friends and allies”. It’s a mantra that everyone associated with his administration has clearly been instructed to repeat, ad nauseum. Biden and his minions have pledged to “work with friends and allies” to solve the border crisis, to protect Taiwan, to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal, to contain the Taliban, to promote democracy, to prevent global warming—you name it, and you can Google it.

But not with Russia. In response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Biden administration updated its catchphrase to allies and partners. Boris Johnson apparently missed the memo, sticking with friends and allies. So did the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington, Oksana Markarova. So the friends are out, and the partners are in. Maybe that’s because the friends failed to deliver.

Biden claims to have imposed “profound sanctions” on Russia that “exceed anything that’s ever been done” before. These include a prohibition on Russia raising dollar-denominated debt, penalties on Russia’s leading banks, personal restrictions on the travel of influential Russians, and a re-suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline connecting Russia directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine (a Trump suspension that Biden lifted last May at the behest of erstwhile friend and ally Angela Merkel). Unspecified further sanctions await the cooperation of allies and partners.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18274/first-round-to-putin

Initially, aware that he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] must cast himself as victim in order to win sympathy in Western public opinion that warms up to figures like Saddam Hussein or George Floyd, he presented Russia as a victim of NATO “expansion” and his saber rattling as an act of self-defense.

Never mind that NATO is a defensive pact and not allowed to attack anyone unless one of its own members is first attacked. Even then, Article V under which military action is allowed is not automatically applicable and hasn’t been applied since the alliance was created. In contrast, led by the now defunct Soviet Union, the rival Warsaw Pact was used for military interventions in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia to crush popular uprisings against Russian domination.

[U]nder NATO rules, a country that has unsettled irredentist disputes with its neighbors cannot be admitted as a member. That rule applies to both Ukraine and Georgia, another country invaded by Putin, both of which are barred from NATO membership because of their territorial disputes caused by Russian aggression.

Thus, Putin was making a song and dance about something that couldn’t happen under NATO’s own rules.

[Putin] can no longer play wolf disguised as sheep. Even his apologists, not to say mercenaries among Western politicians and journalists, are able to defend his latest move let alone presenting him as a victim of “Imperialism”.

Putin would be wrong to think that with the passage of time the rest of the world will endorse his “conquest”, just as no one ever recognized the annexation of the Baltic republics by Stalin.

The spectacle of ancient Russian tanks and armored vehicles creeping into Donbass showed how antiquarian Putin’s arsenal is.

At first glance, the latest twists and turns in the Ukraine poker game might present Russian President Vladimir Putin as the winner.

After all, he is reaping what he sowed eight years ago, when he incited ethnic Russian secessionists to set up breakaway “people’s republics” in parts of Ukrainian territory, in Donetsk and Lugansk. By stationing troops in the two enclaves, Putin makes official an occupation that he had indirectly exercised through Wagner mercenaries and local militias. Imposing two “cooperation treaties” on the breakaway “republics,” he also shows their annexation in all but name by Russia.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/26/the_growing_threat_of_a_world_run_by_dictators_147250.html

Early Thursday, an authoritarian ruler deployed troops into an embattled democracy in clear defiance not only of that country’s sovereignty, but of condemnation and threats from the rest of the democratic world. The Putin regime’s incursion into Ukraine is just the latest symptom of a much larger pattern of antidemocratic aggression.

In 2021, for the 16th consecutive year, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report found that respect for political rights and civil liberties declined globally. Military coups proliferated, and authoritarian regimes staged utterly uncompetitive elections in Hong Kong, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, and elsewhere. An astonishing 8 out of 10 people in the world now live in countries rated by Freedom House as Not Free or Partly Free.

Fueling the spread of authoritarian practices has been a new kind of mutual aid society for dictators – less formalized than the Communist International (Comintern) of the Cold War era, but perhaps more effective. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the global dominance of democratic states meant that all nations needed to move or – appear to move – toward democratic standards of governance in order to gain credibility, access international trade and financing, and receive development or military aid. Over the last decade and a half, however, wealthy and powerful authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and the Middle East have made it possible for an increasing number of despots to openly pursue antidemocratic systems, safe in the knowledge that any repercussions from the world’s democracies will be offset by assistance from their autocratic friends.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have long been propped up by other authoritarian regimes: Havana, Moscow, and Beijing in the former case and Tehran and Moscow in the latter. More recently the practice has benefited Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and the leaders of military coups in Myanmar and Sudan.

When tens of thousands of Belarusian citizens turned out to protest the fraudulent presidential election of August 2020, Russia’s Vladimir Putin came to Lukashenka’s aid – not only with words of support, but also with a $1.5 billion loan. The Kremlin sent propagandists to “report” on the election when real journalists in Belarus went on strike, provided security forces to backstop the regime’s brutal crackdown, and dispatched election observers to validate the farcical results.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/putin-sizes-biden-invades-ukraine-robert-spencer/

Russian troops are advancing briskly into Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has brushed off Old Joe Biden’s sanctions and made it abundantly clear that he is not afraid of Biden, as Democrat operatives and their propaganda arm, the establishment media, have long insisted.

This is what happens when America has a feeble president, an obvious figurehead, and our military is compromised by Leftist ideologues. Clearly Putin is taking advantage of Biden’s obvious weakness and the decimation of our Armed Forces by wokeness and Covid hysteria. He knows that there is little likelihood that Biden will touch off World War III by committing American troops to the defense of Ukraine. Putin also likely considers that even if the American military does end up confronting Russian forces, that the U.S. military’s concentration on pushing Critical Race Theory and other Leftist agendas on the troops, as well as the culling that took place due to vaccine mandates, have left our military in such a weakened, distracted, and confused state that it will not pose any significant threat anyway.

Meanwhile, Putin emphasized in his remarks announcing the beginning of the operation against Ukraine that “in December 2021 we once again made an attempt to agree with the United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything was in vain. The US position did not change. They did not consider it necessary to negotiate with Russia on this important issue for us, continuing to pursue their own goals and disregarding our interests.”

If this is an accurate summation of what happened, and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t, then the fecklessness of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is as much to blame for this conflict as Putin is. The questions must be asked: was it really necessary to begin maneuvering to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, and to ignore all Russian entreaties that may have led to the formulation of an agreement that was mutually acceptable to both parties? Were State Department officials too preoccupied with implementing the woke agenda to bother to negotiate with Putin over NATO?

https://www.city-journal.org/understanding-putins-ukraine-gambit

Is Russian president Vladimir Putin mad? While it’s natural for people waking up to a war having broken out on the European continent to ask themselves this question, it is the wrong question to ask.

It’s wrong because it leads to strategic mirroring. In the run-up to today’s outbreak of hostilities, the Biden administration admirably focused much of its energies on keeping allies on the same page. It aggressively shared detailed information about plans behind the scenes across European capitals, and by earlier this week had managed to cobble together a united front against Putin’s increasingly threatening posture.

But in seeking to deter Putin, the Biden team made several mistakes. It kept waving the threat of sanctions, sure that the thought of economic pain would make the Russian leader flinch. After all, to a modern, liberal-minded leader, the looming threat of material privations feels like a heavy cost to bear. Putin himself punctured that fantasy in his speech on Monday, saying that he fully anticipated heavy sanctions to be applied no matter what. The whole tone of his speech, dripping with hateful grievance, indicated that material privation was a small sacrifice to right what he insists are historical wrongs. Now that sanctions are set to roll out, we will see if Putin misjudged how much stress the Russian state can bear. As a means of deterrence, however, sanctions failed miserably.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/02/eurasianism-putins-new-world-order/

The West was forewarned. It has been no secret that a grand imperialist vision of a vast new Eurasian empire drives Vladimir Putin and the cadre of Russian ultra-nationalists who surround him. Central to this vision are the heartland states of Russia and Ukraine, which is why the latter must be subordinated to the Kremlin as the first step in this grand strategy.

Tragically, the globalist elites who dominate Western politics have refused to even recognize the existence of this vision, much less acknowledge its ideological and psychological power. These elites have displayed only weakness and lack of direction and resolve, confirming Putin’s conviction that the West is in sharp decline and that the time for a new autocratic world order has arrived.

Neo-Eurasianism. At the centre of this vision is the political religion of Neo-Eurasianism, exemplified by the work of its high priest, Aleksandr Dugin (above), whose spiritualized neo-fascist imperialism is based on an all-encompassing rage against liberalism, globalization, modernity, and the West in general – what he and his followers call the ‘Atlanticist World Order’, exemplified by NATO, the EU, and a terminally weakened US.

Dugin & the Radical Right. Only recently have commentators been able to foreground the importance of Dugin in the development of an elaborate anti-liberal ideology and establish links between it and major ideological movements on the Radical Right in the West. For example, Benjamin R. Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (2020) explores the close ideological association between Dugin and Steve Bannon, a one-time key aid to Donald Trump. Dugin also has a chapter devoted to him in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, edited by Mark Sedgwick (2019), a key scholar in this field and author of Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004). Central to these analyses is the political use being made by Dugin of the esoteric new religious movement of Traditionalism, which we will discuss later.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/02/24/is-putins-next-target-the-baltic-states-n1561480

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sent a wave of unease across Eastern Europe, especially in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. The three Baltic States joined NATO in 2004, but that might not matter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has out-guessed and outmaneuvered U.S. President Joe Biden and the rest of NATO since the crisis began.

Indeed, the question asked during the Ukraine crisis is the same one that would be asked if Putin invaded one of the Baltic states: Would NATO risk world war, and possibly nuclear war, to save Lithuania?

The Baltic states aren’t so sure.

Associated Press:

Along with Poland, also a NATO member, the small Baltic countries have been among the loudest advocates for powerful sanctions against Moscow and NATO reinforcements on the alliance’s eastern flank.

Baltic government leaders in recent weeks have shuttled to European capitals, warning that the West must make Russian President Vladimir Putin pay for attacking Ukraine, or else his tanks will keep rolling toward other parts of the former Soviet empire.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ukrainian-officials-warn-of-fighting-in-chernobyl-exclusion-zone/

Russian forces captured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after battles in the nuclear exclusion zone on Thursday evening local time, Ukrainian officials said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s office of the president, confirmed that the reactor was in Russian hands, according to Reuters.

Ukrainian officials warned earlier that damage to nuclear storage facilities could send “radioactive dust” across Europe.

“Russian occupation forces are trying to seize the” Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Twitter post. “Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated….This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”

The Chernobyl reactor was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, when the core of the reactor melted down. Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior, wrote on Facebook that Russian forces had moved to Chernobyl from Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/russian-government-cracks-down-on-widespread-anti-war-protests/

The Russian Government is cracking down on its own citizens in cities across the country as protesters take to the streets to register their opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Despite Putin’s efforts to convince his populace that the Ukrainian Government was prosecuting a genocide against Russian-speakers in the country’s easternmost region, many Russians are showing up in the streets to register their discontent with the already bloody conflict.

Numerous videos circulating on social media show large crowds gathering in Russian cities — including Moscow and St. Petersburg.The Russian government has responded by instructing its people to “refrain from unsanctioned protests” and warning that those who violate that order will be “arrested & brought to responsibility.” It’s citing the coronavirus pandemic as its justification for the crackdown.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-attacks-ukraine-drawing-broad-condemnation-11645682406

Biden calls move an unprovoked attack, pledging further action against Moscow; senior Ukrainian official says he believes hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers have died

KYIV, Ukraine—Russian troops and tanks pushed into Ukraine and airstrikes hit the country’s capital and more than a dozen other cities early Thursday after President Vladimir Putin said he ordered a military operation to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine” and bring its leaders to trial.

Ukrainian officials said an initial wave of strikes targeted military installations, airfields and government facilities across the country, as well as border force installations. Ukraine’s border service said its troops came under attack all along the country’s frontiers with Russia and Belarus.

In Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine’s largest city, residents said a large fire was visible in the morning darkness, after what appeared to be a hit at a weapons depot. Heavy shelling targeted the city of Mariupol on the Azov sea. Air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv after 7 a.m.

In a televised early-morning address, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called on citizens to remain calm. “We are working, our army is working,” he said. “Don’t panic, we are strong, we are ready for anything, we will overcome.”