High interest rates and macroeconomic instabilities are adding pressure on the private sector.
Russia’s economy appears resilient after two years of war with Ukraine, but a rising number of companies in the country are in trouble.
The number of companies in Russia that have gone bankrupt has soared in the first two months of 2024, Russian business daily Kommersant reported on Thursday.
In January, 571 companies in Russia declared bankruptcy — a rise of 57% from 364 a year ago, Kommersant reported, citing data from the federal register for bankruptcy.
In February, 771 companies declared bankruptcy — 60% higher than the 478 that did so a year ago.
Russia has imposed two moratoriums on bankruptcy in recent years. The first came during the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020; the second came after the West imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The moratoriums expired in 2021 and late 2022, respectively.
Ilya Torosov, Russia’s first deputy economy minister, told Kommersant that this is merely a return to pre-pandemic levels.
On-the-ground difficulties in Russia
The uptick in corporate bankruptcies highlights the difficulties faced on the ground in Russia. It also stands in contrast to the rosy official statistics the Kremlin releases, which show that Russia’s GDP grew 3.6% in 2023.
Thanks to government spending, Russia’s wartime economy is resilient — but high interest rates are biting. The Bank of Russia has hiked interest rates up to 16% to cool the economy and tame inflation.
“Companies are experiencing problems with refinancing as the effects of monetary tightening are starting to kick in,” Bartosz Sawicki, a market analyst at Conotoxia, a Polish fintech firm, told Business Insider.
Apart from war-related sectors such as arms production, the Russian economy looks “far from rosy,” Sawicki said.
“Although Russian companies are doing their utmost to dodge sanctions, international trade has become a significant issue for plenty of them,” Sawicki wrote in an email.
“The private sector also feels the pressure of macroeconomic instabilities, which deepen as the economy is on the verge of overheating,” he added.
It could get worse.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime is coming under tightening Western trade restrictions, including secondary sanctions against companies doing business with the country.
Putin has also pledged to give Russians billions of dollars in lifestyle upgrades weeks before they head to the ballot for the country’s presidential election later this month.
While it’s unclear where the extra budget for Putin’s promises will come from, the Russian leader has proposed changes to the tax system that are designed to result in more taxes from high-income individuals and businesses — which could put even more pressure on private companies.
Russia’s presidential election is set to take place over three days, from March 15 to March 17. Putin is expected to win the election against three opponents.
Who are the Russian dissidents still serving time after Alexei Navalny died behind bars?
Dasha Litvinova and Katie Marie Davies – March 8, 2024
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, center, attends a rally in Moscow on Sunday, Jan. 28, 2018. During his 24-year rule, Russian President Vladimir Putin has gone from tolerating dissent to suppressing any challenger. Most Russian opposition politicians are in prison or exile. (AP Photo/Evgeny Feldman, File) Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza gestures while standing in a glass cage in a courtroom during the announcement of the verdict on appeal at the Moscow City Court on July 31, 2023. Kara-Murza was convicted of treason last year over a speech denouncing the war in Ukraine. He is serving a 25-year prison term in a Siberian prison colony, the stiffest sentence for a Kremlin critic in modern Russia. (AP Photo, File) Ilya Yashin, a Russian opposition activist and former municipal deputy of the Krasnoselsky district, gestures and smiles as he stands in a defendant’s cubicle in a courtroom prior to a hearing in Moscow, on Dec. 9, 2022. Most Russian opposition figures are currently either in prison or in exile abroad. Still, many persist in challenging the Russian authorities, including by speaking out from behind bars. (Yury Kochetkov/Pool via AP, Pool, File)Andrei Pivovarov, the former head of the Open Russia movement, stands behind glass during a court session in Krasnodar, Russia, on June 2, 2021. Pivovarov, serving four years for running a banned political organization, must clean his solitary cell for several hours a day and listen to a recording of prison regulations, says his wife, Tatyana Usmanova. (AP Photo, File)Lilia Chanysheva makes a heart gesture as she stands in a cage during a hearing in Kirovskiy District Court in Ufa, Russia, on Wednesday, June 14, 2023. Chanysheva, who used to head imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s office in the Russian region of Bashkortostan, was convicted of extremism charges and sentenced to 7.5 years in prison. (AP Photo, File)Oleg Orlov, the co-chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights organization Memorial, gestures while standing in a glass cage after he was taken into custody in the courtroom during a court session for a new trial on charges of repeated discrediting the Russian military, in Moscow on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024. (AP Photo, File)exei Gorinov holds a sign “I am against the war” standing in a cage during hearing in the courtroom in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, June 21, 2022. Gorinov, a former member of a Moscow municipal council serving seven years for speaking against the war in Ukraine, suffers from a chronic lung condition. His health deteriorated during six weeks in solitary confinement, and he is still recovering. (AP Photo, File)
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to secure his fifth term in power this month on the heels of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in prison, which devastated Kremlin critics and spurred concerns about the safety of other imprisoned dissidents.
The charges against Kara-Murza, who has been behind bars since his arrest in 2022, stem from a speech that year to the House of Representatives in Arizona, where he denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The 42-year-old political activist, who started out as a journalist, was an associate of Russian opposition leader and fierce Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
In 2011 and 2012, Kara-Murza and Nemtsov lobbied for passage of the Magnitsky Act in the United States. The law was in response to the death in prison of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had exposed a tax fraud scheme. The law has enabled Washington to impose sanctions on Russians deemed to be human rights violators.
Kara-Murza has twice survived poisonings he blamed on Russian authorities. He has rejected the charges against him as punishment for standing up to Putin, and likened the proceedings to the show trials under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Since September 2023, Kara-Murza has been serving his sentence in solitary confinement in the Siberian city of Omsk. In January, he was moved to another penal colony in the city and was put in solitary again. That move has been widely seen as an attempt to pressure a man who, even behind bars, remained a vocal critic of the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine.
ILYA YASHIN, SERVING 8 ½ YEARS
One of the few well-known Kremlin critics to stay in Russia after the start of the war, Ilya Yashin, 40, was arrested in June 2022 while walking in a Moscow park. He was sentenced to 8 ½ years in prison after he was convicted for spreading false information about Russian soldiers.
The charge stemmed from a YouTube livestream in which he talked about civilians slain in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. After Russian forces withdrew from the area in March 2022, hundreds of corpses were found, some with their hands bound and shot at close range.
Yashin, member of a Moscow municipal council, was a vocal Navalny ally and a close associate of Nemtsov’s. He is serving time in Russia’s western Smolensk region.
His harsh sentence didn’t silence Yashin’s sharp criticism of the Kremlin. Yashin’s associates regularly update his social media pages with messages he relays from prison. His YouTube channel has over 1.5 million subscribers.
“So far the authorities have failed to shut me up,” he said in a letter from prison to The Associated Press in September 2022.
ANDREI PIVOVAROV, SERVING 4 YEARS
Andrei Pivovarov, 42, headed the opposition group Open Russia, which authorities declared an “undesirable” organization before it was disbanded in 2021. Days later, as he attempted to leave the country, Pivovarov was pulled off an airliner due to take off from St. Petersburg for Warsaw.
The authorities accused him of carrying out activities of an “undesirable organization.” He rejected the charges as politically motivated and driven by his plans to run for a seat in the parliament in the 2021 election. While in pretrial detention, he still managed to run a campaign, but didn’t get on the ballot. In July 2022, when the war in Ukraine was in full swing, Pivovarov was sentenced to four years in prison.
In a written interview conducted when he was behind bars in December 2022, Pivovarov told the AP that his sentence did not come as a surprise.
“By the summer of 2022, the political field was completely purged. Those who hadn’t left ended up behind bars just like me,” Pivovarov wrote.
He has been serving time in isolation in a remote penal colony in Russia’s northwestern Karelia region.
LILIA CHANYSHEVA, SERVING 7 ½ YEARS
Lilia Chanysheva, the 42-year-old former head of Alexei Navalny’s office in the Russian Bashkortostan region, was arrested in November 2021. A court ruling several months earlier had designated Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and its regional offices as “extremist organizations.”
Following a closed-door trial, Chanysheva was sentenced to 7 ½ years in prison in June 2023 after being found guilty of calling for extremism, forming an extremist group and founding an organization that violates rights. She was also fined 400,000 rubles (about $4,700).
Chanysheva rejects the charges as politically motivated. Russian media reported this week that the authorities are now seeking a harsher sentence of 10 years for the former activist.
The 70-year-old co-chair for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial was charged over an article he wrote denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In 1995, when Chechen rebels in the city of Budyonnovsk took thousands of people hostage in a hospital, Orlov was among the human rights activists who offered themselves as hostages in exchange for the release of civilians.
Orlov was convicted and sentenced to a fine of 150,000 rubles (about $1,500 at the time) in October 2023, significantly less than the lengthy prison terms some other Russians have received for criticizing the war. Underscoring Putin’s low tolerance of criticism of the invasion of Ukraine, the prosecution appealed the fine and sought harsher punishment.
In a statement, Memorial called Orlov’s sentence “an attempt to drown out the voice of the human rights movement in Russia and any criticism of the state.”
ALEXEI GORINOV, SERVING 7 YEARS
Alexei Gorinov, a member of a Moscow municipal council, was the first person to be sentenced to prison under the law penalizing the spread of “false information” about the Russian military after the invasion of Ukraine.
He was arrested in April 2022 after criticizing the war at a municipal council meeting. A YouTube video showed him voicing skepticism about holding a planned children’s art competition in his constituency while “everyday children are dying” in Ukraine. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
The long sentence for a low-profile activist shocked many. In written comments to AP from behind bars in March 2023, Gorinov, 62, said “authorities needed an example they could showcase to others (of) an ordinary person, rather than a public figure.”
Gorinov has a chronic respiratory condition and had part of a lung removed before he was imprisoned. His health deteriorated during six weeks in solitary confinement in a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow. He is still recovering.
15 promises Donald Trump has made so far in his campaign for a second term
Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Abby Turner – March 6, 2024
Former President Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican nominee, has made a number of promises on the campaign trail, including rolling back car pollution rules, building 10 new cities and appointing a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden and his family.
While some of Trump’s plans are lacking in detail, here are some of the policies he says he would enact if elected for a second term.
Immigration
Trump has made immigration and the border a central campaign issue, successfully pressuring Republicans to reject a major bipartisan border deal last month and making a trip to the southern border on February 29, where he touted his previous hard-line immigration policies.
In a Des Moines Register op-ed published roughly a week before winning the Iowa caucuses in January, Trump vowed to use the “Alien Enemies Act to remove known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the United States.”
“We will shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement — including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS,” he wrote.
In a video posted on Truth Social in late February before his border visit, Trump also promised to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
After the Israel-Hamas war began last October, Trump also promised to terminate the visas of “Hamas’ sympathizers.”
“We’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country, if that’s OK with you,” he added.
Drug cartels
The former president has also made waging “war” on drug cartels a priority for his second term. If elected, Trump said in his November 2022 campaign announcement that he would ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and human traffickers can receive the death penalty for their “heinous acts.”
Trump also vowed to “take down” drug cartels by imposing naval embargos on cartels, cutting off cartels’ access to global financial systems and using special forces within the Department of Defense to damage the cartels’ leadership.
Education
Trump announced plans in a September 2023campaign video to close the Department of Education and send “all education and education work and needs back to the states.”
“We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it,” he added.
The former president has also promised to “put parents back in charge and give them the final say” in education. In a January 2023 campaign video, the former president said he would give funding preferences and “favorable treatment” to schools that allow parents to elect principals, abolish teacher tenure for K-12 teachers, use merit pay to incentivize quality teaching and cut the number of school administrators, such as those overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Trump also said in that campaign video that he would cut funding for schools that teach critical race theory and gender ideology. In a later speech, Trump said he would bring back the 1776 Commission, which was launched in his previous administration to “teach our values and promote our history and our traditions to our children.”
The former president said he would charge the Department of Justice and the Department of Education with investigating civil rights violations of race-based discrimination in schools while also removing “Marxists” from the Department of Education. A second Trump administration would pursue violations in schools of both the Constitution’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, which prohibit the government establishment of religion and protect a citizen’s right to practice their own religion, he said.
Health care
Last November, Trump promised to replace the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, in a series of posts on Truth Social. A Trump-backed effort to repeal andreplace Obamacare failed in 2017 after three Republicans senators joined with Democrats to vote against the bill.
“Getting much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump Administration,” he said.
“It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH. America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!,” he continued. He also doubled down on his vow during a speech in early January.
Trump also vowed in a June 2023 campaign video to reinstate his previous executive order so that the US government would pay the same price for pharmaceuticals as other developed countries. Some of the former president’s pharmaceutical policies were overturned by Biden.
Gender care
“I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” Trump said at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference last March.
Trump added in a campaign video that he would issue an executive order instructing federal agencies to cut programs that promote gender transitions, as well as asking Congress to stop the use of federal dollars to promote and pay for gender-affirming procedures. The former president added that his administration would not allow hospitals and health care providers to meet the federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare if they provide chemical or physical gender-affirming care to youth.
Justice system
Trump has promised to use the Department of Justice to attack critics and former allies. In several videos and speeches, the former president also laid out plans to gut the current justice system by firing “radical Marxist prosecutors that are destroying America.”
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said in June 2023 remarks. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”
Trump said in a campaign video last year that he would reinstate a 2020 executive order to remove “rogue” bureaucrats and propose a constitutional amendment for term limits on members of Congress.
To address what he labeled the “disturbing” relationship between technology platforms and the government, the former president said in a January 2023 video that he would enact a seven-year cooling off period before employees at agencies such as the FBI or CIA can work for platforms that oversee mass user data.
Trump added in multiple campaignreleases that he would task the Justice Department with investigating online censorship, ban federal agencies from “colluding” to censor citizens and suspend federal money to universities participating in “censorship-supporting activities.”
In a September 2023 speech at the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, DC, Trump also touted plans to continue appointing conservative judges.
“I will once again appoint rock-solid conservative judges to do what they have to do in the mold of Justices Antonin Scalia; Samuel Alito, a great gentleman; and another great gentleman, Clarence Thomas,” he said.
Trump has also pledged to “appoint U.S. Attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros District Attorneys and others that are being appointed throughout the United States.”
In a September 2023 speech in Washington, DC, Trump also announced that he would appoint a task force to review the cases of people he claimed had been “unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration.” Trump noted that he wanted to “study the situation very quickly, and sign their pardons or commutations on day one.”
It’s a move that could lead to potential pardons of many rioters from the January 6, 2021, insurrection – which he suggested he would do at a CNN town hall in May 2023.
Crime
Trump said in two February 2023 campaignvideos that if “Marxist” prosecutors refuse to charge crimes and surrender “our cities to violent criminals,” he “will not hesitate to send in federal law enforcement to restore peace and public safety.”
Trump added that he would instruct the Department of Justice to open civil rights investigations into “radical left” prosecutors’ offices that engaged in racial enforcement of the law, encourage Congress to use their legal authority over Washington, DC, to restore “law and order” and overhaul federal standards of disciplining minors to address rising crimes like carjackings.
Addressing policies made in what Trump calls the “Democrats’ war on police,” the former president vowed in a campaign video that he would pass a “record investment” to hire and retrain police, strengthen protections like qualified immunity, increase penalties for assaulting law enforcement officers and deploy the National Guard when local law enforcement “refuses to act.”
The former president added that he would require law enforcement agencies that receive money from his funding investment or the Department of Justice to use “proven common sense” measures such as stop-and-frisk.
Foreign policy
Trump has continued his attacks against member countries of NATO, a European and North American defense alliance. At a South Carolina rally last month,Trump said he would not abide by the alliance’s collective-defense clause and would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” if a member country didn’t meet spending guidelines.
“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
The former president has also previously pledged to end the war in Ukraine, though he’s offered no details on how he would do so.“Shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump said at a New Hampshire campaign event last year, adding in another speech that it would take him “no longer than one day” to settle the war if elected.
Trump further addressed his strategy of stopping the “never-ending wars” by vowing to remove “warmongers,” “frauds” and “failures in the senior ranks of our government,” and replace them with national security officials who would defend America’s interests. The former president added in a campaign video that he would stop lobbyists and government contractors from pushing senior military officials toward war.
Trump said in multiple campaignvideos that he would spearhead an effort to build so-called “Freedom Cities” to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”
In his plan, the federal government would charter 10 new cities on federal land, awarding them to areas with the best development proposals. The former president said in a campaign video that the Freedom Cities would bring the return of US manufacturing, economic opportunity, new industries and affordable living.
In the March 2023 video, Trump added that the US under a second Trump administration would lead in efforts to “develop vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for families and individuals,” not letting China lead “this revolution in air mobility.” The former president said these airborne vehicles would change commerce and bring wealth into rural communities.
Electric vehicles
Trump has promised to roll back new car pollution rules at the Environmental Protection Agency that could require electric vehicles to account for up to two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032. Biden’s electrical vehicle-related policies, Trump claimed at a Michigan rally last September, “spell the death of the US auto industry.”
“On day one, I will terminate Joe Biden’s electrical vehicle mandate, and I will cancel every job-killing regulation that is crushing American autoworkers,” Trump added.
Energy
Trump has promised to reduce energy prices by increasing domestic production. In several campaign appearances, he has laid out plans to end delays in federal drilling permits and leases.
“We’re going to ‘drill, baby, drill’ right away,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, during a victory speech after winning the state’s Republican caucusesin January.
At a South Carolina rally in February, he pledged to remove limits on American natural gas exports.
Trade
At the same rally in South Carolina,Trump pledged to impose “stiff penalties on China and other trade abusers.”
“It’s called you screw us, and we screw you,” Trump said.
Under his proposed “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act,” the former president said if other countries impose tariffs on the US, the country would impose “a reciprocal, identical” tariff right back.
It was the same pledge Trump made in a campaign video in 2023: to impose the same tariffs that other countries may impose on the US on those countries. The goal, the former president said then, is to get other countries to drop their tariffs.
As part of a larger strategy to bring jobs back into the US, Trump also said he would implement his so-called “America First” trade agenda if elected. By setting universal baseline tariffs on a majority of foreign goods, the former president said Americans would see taxes decrease as tariffs increase. His proposal also includes a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, as well as stopping China from buying up America and stopping the investment of US companies in China.
The former president has particularly focused on China, vowing in a January 2023 campaign video to restrict Chinese ownership of US infrastructure such as energy, technology, telecommunications and natural resources. Trump also said he would force the Chinese to sell current holdings that may put national security at risk. “Economic security is national security,” he said.
Economy
Trump has promised to extend the cuts from his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, notably the TCJA’s individual income tax breaks. The former president has also talked about reducing the corporate tax rate from the current 21% to 15%.
“I will make the Trump tax cuts the largest tax cut in history,” the former president said last month at the Black Conservative Federation’s Honors Gala in South Carolina. “We’ll make it permanent and give you a new economic boom.”
Trump has also pledged to repeal Biden’s tax hikes, “immediately tackle” inflation and end what he called Biden’s “war” on American energy production.
Second Amendment
“I will take Biden’s executive order directing the federal government to target the firearms industry, and I will rip it up and throw it out on day one,” Trump said at the 2023 National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action leadership forum last April.
The former president also promised in the speech that the government would not infringe on citizens’ Second Amendment rights and that he would push Congress to pass a concealed carry reciprocity.
Equity
“I will create a special team to rapidly review every action taken by federal agencies under Biden’s ‘equity’ agenda that will need to be reversed. We will reverse almost all of them,” Trump said in a campaign video.
Trump added in multiple campaignvideos that he would revoke Biden’s equity executive order that required federal agencies to deliver equitable outcomes in policy and conduct equity training. If elected, Trump said he would also fire staffers hired to implement Biden’s policy, and then reinstate his 2020 executive order banning racial and sexual stereotyping in the federal government.
CNN’s Tami Luhby, Kate Sullivan and Kristin Holmes contributed to this report.
Yellen Sees Moral Case to Use Russian Assets to Aid Ukraine
Viktoria Dendrinou and Christopher Condon – February 27, 2024
Yellen Sees Moral Case to Use Russian Assets to Aid Ukraine
(Bloomberg) — US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called on the world’s largest advanced economies to find a way to “unlock the value” of immobilized Russian assets to help bolster Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion and for long-term reconstruction after the war.
“There is a strong international law, economic and moral case for moving forward,” Yellen said Tuesday in Sao Paulo in remarks before meeting with counterparts from the world’s top economies. “The G-7 should work together to explore a number of approaches that have been suggested.”
Her comments come as Group of Seven nations are debating what to do with sovereign assets that were frozen at the outbreak of the invasion, with Ukraine’s financing needs remaining persistently high and the war now in its third year with no sign of abating.
The European Union, G-7 nations and Australia have frozen about €260 billion ($282 billion) in the form of securities and cash, with more than two-thirds of that immobilized in the EU. The parties all agree that those funds should remain off-limits to Russia unless it agrees to assist in Ukraine’s reconstruction, but they’re at odds over the legality of seizing the assets outright.
Yellen said that beyond simply seizing the assets, other ideas include using them as collateral to borrow from global markets.
Unlocking the assets to help Ukraine “would be a decisive response to Russia’s unprecedented threat to global stability,” Yellen said. “It would make clear that Russia cannot win by prolonging the war and would incentivize it to come to the table to negotiate a just peace with Ukraine.”
In the wake of the freezing of Russian assets and far-reaching sanctions on the country, a number of emerging nations have called for reducing the role of the dollar in global trade and finance. But Yellen in her remarks Tuesday suggested little concern on that front.
Read More: De-Dollarization Wins Applause at BRICS Summit
Group Effort
“Realistically there are not alternatives to the dollar, euro, yen, so I’m not too worried about that,” she said. “With regard to financial stability I suppose a risk would arise if there were a massive shift away from currencies, but I think that is extremely unlikely — especially given the uniqueness of this situation, a situation where Russia is brazenly violating international norms.”
The Treasury chief noted that the US didn’t move unilaterally to capture Russia’s assets. “A group of countries representing half of the global economy and all of the currencies that really have the capacity at this point to serve as reserve currencies, we all act together.”
Discussions on using Russian assets have intensified as President Vladimir Putin’s forces gain momentum on the battlefield. As Republicans in Washington continue to set hurdles for new aid for Kyiv, the Biden administration is keen to offer Ukraine another important signal of its support.
The US and UK have been pushing G-7 allies to seize the central bank assets outright, but the group’s European members, especially France and Germany, are currently opposed to the move over legal concerns and worries that it could damage the stability of the euro as well as set a dangerous precedent.
Earlier: France and Netherlands Back Plan to Buy Non-EU Ammo for Ukraine
The position of EU member states is crucial as the vast majority of the funds are in Europe, mostly at the Belgium-based clearing house Euroclear. The clearing house and the European Central Bank are both skeptical of the right to seize the assets.
Still, G-7 nations are discussing options. Among the ideas under discussion is using the funds as collateral to raise debt or as guarantees for loans.
The EU is slowly making progress on plans to at least apply a windfall tax to the profits generated by the immobilized funds. Last year, the funds enabled profits of €4.4 billion.
(Adds tout before ‘Group Effort’ subheadline. A previous version of this story was corrected to reflect the assets were frozen not seized.)
Yellen urges world leaders to ‘unlock’ frozen Russian Central Bank assets and send them to Ukraine
Fatima Hussein – February 27, 2024
FILE – Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Feb. 6, 2024, in Washington. Yellen is offering her strongest public support yet for the idea of liquidating roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets and using them for Ukraine’s long-term reconstruction. The U.S. and its allies froze Russian foreign holdings in retaliation for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday offered her strongest public support yet for the idea of liquidating roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets and using them for Ukraine’s long-term reconstruction.
“It is necessary and urgent for our coalition to find a way to unlock the value of these immobilized assets to support Ukraine’s continued resistance and long-term reconstruction,” Yellen said in remarks in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors are meeting this week.
“I believe there is a strong international law, economic, and moral case for moving forward. This would be a decisive response to Russia’s unprecedented threat to global stability,” she said.
The United States and its allies froze hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian foreign holdings in retaliation for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Those billions have been sitting untapped as the war grinds on, now in its third year, while officials from multiple countries have debated the legality of sending the money to Ukraine. More than two-thirds of Russia’s immobilized central bank funds are located in the EU.
Using the assets to help Ukraine “would make clear that Russia cannot win by prolonging the war and would incentivize it to come to the table to negotiate a just peace with Ukraine,” Yellen said.
The idea of using Russia’s frozen assets has gained traction lately as continued allied funding for Ukraine becomes more uncertain and the U.S. Congress is in a stalemate over providing more support. But there are tradeoffs since the weaponization of global finance could harm the U.S. dollar’s standing as the world’s dominant currency.
Yellen said Tuesday that it is “extremely unlikely” that tapping the frozen funds would harm the dollar’s standing in the global economy “especially given the uniqueness of the situation where Russia is brazenly violating international norms. Realistically there are not alternatives to the dollar, euro and yen,” Yellen said.
Earlier this month, the European Union passed a law to set aside windfall profits generated from frozen Russian central bank assets. Yellen calls that “an action I fully endorse.”
Brazil kicked off its presidency of the Group of 20 nations this month, with finance ministers meeting this week. Topics for discussion include poverty alleviation, climate change and the wars in the Gaza Strip and in Ukraine. G20 leaders are slated to gather at a Nov. 18-19 summit in Rio.
Trump’s CPAC speech showed clear signs of major cognitive decline — yet MAGA cheered
Chauncey DeVega – February 26, 2024
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Donald Trump was in his full glory over the weekend at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference. For his MAGA people, Republicans, and other neofascists and followers, Trump is like a father figure, preacher, teacher, confessor, lover, and god messiah prophet all in one person. In that way, CPAC is Donald Trump’s “church family” – only the church is full of fascism, hatred, wickedness, cruelty, and other anti-human values, beliefs, and behavior. Trump masterfully wields and conducts this energy.
Donald Trump’s speech at this year’s CPAC was truly awesome. As used here, “awesome” does not mean good, but instead draws on the word’s origins as in “inspiring awe or dread.” In his keynote speech on Saturday, Trump said that America is on a “fast track to hell” under President Biden and the Democrats and that “If crooked Joe Biden and his thugs win in 2024, the worst is yet to come. Our country will sink to levels that are unimaginable.”
He continued with his Hitler-like threats of an apocalyptic end-times battle between good and evil and that the country would be destroyed if he is not installed in the White House. Of course, Trump continued to amplify the Big Lie about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him and the MAGA people. He also made great use of the classic propaganda technique, as though he learned it personally from Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels: Accuse your opposition of that which you are guilty of.
If Mr. Biden is re-elected for a second four-year term, Mr. Trump warned in his speech, Medicare will “collapse.” Social Security will “collapse.” Health care in general will “collapse.” So, too, will public education. Millions of manufacturing jobs will be “choked off into extinction.” The U.S. economy will be “starved of energy” and there will be “constant blackouts.” The Islamist militant group Hamas will “terrorize our streets.” There will be a third world war and America will lose it. America itself will face “obliteration.”
On the other hand, Mr. Trump promised on Saturday that if he is elected America will be “richer and safer and stronger and prouder and more beautiful than ever before.” Crime in major cities? A thing of the past.
“Chicago could be solved in one day,” Mr. Trump said. “New York could be solved in a half a day there.”
“I stand before you today not only as your past and future president, but as a proud political dissident….“For hard-working Americans Nov. 5 will be our new liberation day — but for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and impostors who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day…. Your victory will be our ultimate vindication, your liberty will be our ultimate reward and the unprecedented success of the United States of America will be my ultimate and absolute revenge.”
Here, Donald Trump sounded like an evil version of President Thomas Whitmore in the 1996 movie “Independence Day.”
He also used stochastic terrorism to encourage violence by his MAGA followers and other supporters with the lie that they are somehow being “victimized” or “persecuted” in America: “I can tell you that weaponized law enforcement hunts for conservatives and people of faith.” Echoing those themes, Trump, who believes that he is above and outside the rule of law, described his finally being held responsible for his many obvious crimes against American democracy and society as “Stalinist Show Trials,” as The Guardian further details:
Facing 91 criminal charges in four cases, Trump projected himself as both martyr and potential saviour of the nation. “A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell,” he continued.
“And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now because the fact is, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy – really is a threat to democracy.”
Speaking days after the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump hinted at a self-comparison by adding: “I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident.”
The crowd whooped and applauded. Trump noted that he had been indicted more often than the gangster Al Capone on charges that he described as “bullshit”. The audience again leaped to their feet, some shaking their fists and chanting: “We love Trump! We love Trump!”
Trump argued without evidence: “The Stalinist show trials being carried out at Joe Biden’s orders set fire not only to our system of government but to hundreds of years of western legal tradition.
“They’ve replaced law, precedent and due process with a rabid mob of radical left Democrat partisans masquerading as judges and juries and prosecutors.”
Trump is an expert on leveraging everyday people’s pain points and personal fear. In his CPAC speech, Trump triggered this by focusing on real economic anxieties and feelings of vulnerability and precarity about rising energy costs, the cost of living, and the “American Dream” more broadly.
To this point, President Biden and the Democrats have not been able to effectively counter such attacks by Donald Trump and his spokespeople and other agents. Appeals to the facts about how historically great Biden’s economy is, are no salve for how everyday people are experiencing hardship and increasingly view Donald Trump and Trumpism as a viable alternative to the Democrats and “democracy.”
Trump also spun up a horror story version of the United States as a country overrun by black and brown migrants and “illegal” immigrants who are like the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs.” Trump’s solution: mass deportations and concentration camps.
During his speech, Donald Trump would continue to valorize the Jan. 6 terrorists who attacked the Capitol as fascist saints and martyrs of the MAGA movement – a group who Trump vowed to pardon when/if he takes power in 2025. They will in turn become his personal shock troops. Trump’s megalomania and claims to god-like power, were on full display during his speech on Saturday, where the ex-president, described himself in the third person, telling the audience that “Trump was right about everything.”
In an excellent article at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer shared what she learned from embedding herself at last week’s CPAC conference (she did not attend as a credentialed reporter) and how in the Age of Trump and American neofascism that event is a festival of extreme right-wing politics and the hatred and intolerance that are among its most defining features:
Exiled from the press pen, I was just part of the audience, a space previously off-limits to reporters. To say the least, it was enlightening. On Friday, for instance, I listened to a main-stage speech from Chris Miller, a Republican running for governor of West Virginia. Because of its tax-exempt status, CPAC bans speakers from openly campaigning there, so he was listed on the program simply as “businessman.”
Like virtually every other speaker at the event, Miller devoted several of his allotted five minutes to railing against transgender healthcare. “Woke doctors are literally making boys into girls,” he declared. “They’re practicing mutilation, not medicine. They should be in prison.” At that point, a burly man in a giant black cowboy hat sitting next to me leaned over conspiratorially and proclaimed, “I think we should hang them all! I really do.” And he laughed like we were in on the same joke. I confess that I was too cowardly to tell him I was with the left-wing fake news.
Later, during a speech by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, I was sitting next to a woman in full-on MAGA gear. When Noem declared, “There are some people who love America, and there are some people who hate America,” my neighbor gave me a small heart attack. “Get the FUCK OUT!” she yelled furiously, ready to rumble. “Get the FUCK OUT!” Meanwhile, the old man in the camo Trump hat next to her had somehow fallen asleep.
Mencimer then reflected on the devolution of CPAC, describing it as, “[W]hat passed for policy discussions at CPAC this year was largely limited to mass deportations and attacks on trans athletes. The sober panels about the national debt, balancing the budget, or Social Security reform that once commanded top billing were a relic of another era before CPAC became an extension of Trump Inc., devoted to all the MAGA grievances like racial equity, the evils of windmills, or bans on gas stoves.”
However, one must be cautious and understand that Trump’s apparent mental, emotional, and overall cognitive decline, and other indications of a damaged mind, are largely irrelevant to his followers. Donald Trump is a symbol more than a man. His MAGA people and other loyalists and voters ignore, reconcile, and more generally make sense of Trump’s apparent cognitive and speech difficulties by telling themselves that he is “just like them” and “speaks a language they can understand” because he is “authentic” and “not a traditional politician.” By definition, the Dear Leader is infallible. Fake right-wing populism can be bent and shaped to accommodate any absurdity.
Donald Trump’s speech at CPAC is but more evidence that he is giving his MAGA people and other followers and supporters in the Republican Party and the larger right-wing and “conservative” movement what they want. Public opinion polls and other research have consistently shown that there are tens of millions of Americans who yearn for an American dictator or others strongman-type leader, who will “break the rules” to “get things done” for “people like them.” In addition, Republican and other Trump voters specifically support his taking power as a dictator and ending democracy. And as has been widely documented, a significant percentage of white voters do not support democracy if it means that their “racial” group does not have the most influence and power and privilege in American society as compared to black and brown people.
Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party and the larger right-wing and neofascist movement have successfully tapped into what is a centuries-old vein of white supremacist herrenvolk nightmare dreams and white rage in American society and life. The CPAC conference featured speakers and panels that reinforced that today’s Republican Party and “conservative movement” have rejected multiracial pluralistic democracy and seek to replace it with a White Christofascist Apartheid plutocracy.
In contrast to Donald Trump’s awfully awesome speech at CPAC on Saturday, President Biden solemnly warned reporters, again, that the 2024 Election is an existential battle for the country’s democracy and the soul of the nation where our most fundamental freedoms as Americans are imperiled.
The most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard a president say did not come from Donald Trump.
It came from Joe Biden. Speaking with reporters in California on Thursday, the president said this about Donald Trump. “Two of your former colleagues not at the same network personally told me if he wins, they will have to leave the country because he’s threatened to put them in jail,” Biden told Katie Couric. “He embraces political violence,” Biden said of Trump “No president since the Civil War has done that. Embrace it. Encourages it.”
Perhaps I should have been shocked at the revelation that Trump, should he return to power, would jail reporters. I wasn’t of course. I had to fight him (and beat him) three times in court during his first administration to keep my White House press pass. I had already privately heard Trump’s threats. It was just disturbing to hear Joe Biden confirm it publicly. …
That is why the world cannot see Trump back in the White House. He knows nothing but divisiveness. And Biden was right to point out that Trump wants to jail reporters.
Trump supporters don’t care. But I’ve eaten Texas jail food, so I do.
When Einstein fled Germany he fled the poison of nationalism and longed for a country of civil liberty and tolerance. The closest he found was here in the United States. Where is it today? More importantly, where will it be after the November general election?
As always, believe the autocrat-dictator or other such political thug. He or she – in this case Donald Trump – is not kidding or joking.
Echoing Karem’s experience, I have talked to members of the pro-democracy movement (specifically journalists and reporters), and they have shared with me how they are in the process of deciding if they will stay here in the United States or flee the country if Dictator Trump and his regime takes power in 2025.
On Election Day, which will be here very soon, the American people have a choice to make. Last weekend’s CPAC conference was just one more escalation in the direct and transparent threats and dangerousness of Trumpism and American neofascism. If Trump wins on Election Day, the American people cannot say they were surprised by the hell he and his regime and followers will unleash on the country. The American people were told repeatedly what would happen and through both their active and tacit support for Trumpism and neofascism (indifference or otherwise not voting for President Biden and by implication American democracy in this decisive moment) allowed it to happen. How great is the American people’s drive to self-destruction? We will soon find out in eight or so months.
Putin’s Allies Accused of Plotting Another Russian Land-Grab
Shannon Vavra – February 26, 2024
Reuters/ Sergei Savostyanov/ Sputnik
An opposition official in Transnistria, the Kremlin-backed breakaway region in Moldova, has warned that the pro-separatist government will be holding an extraordinary session of congress to formally request Russian annexation this week.
“A request should be voiced, on behalf of citizens living on the Left Bank, to Russia, to accept Transnistria into the Russian Federation, and on February 29, Putin will announce this in his address,” Chorba said in a post on social media.
Moldova has long been warning of a Russian destabilization plot that has threatened to upend its existing pro-western government and influence elections. Last year, U.S. and Moldovan officials told The Daily Beast that a “very intense” Russian influence operation intended to undermine the government was underway.
Moldovan president Maia Sandu, who is running for reelection this fall, has also warned of a Russian plot to stage a coup against her administration.
Concerns about Russia and Transnistria potentially unifying coincide with a concerted effort by the Moldovan government to join the European Union. Last year, the European Council announced it was opening negotiations for Moldovan accession.
Moldova declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, but officials believe that Russia has desires to envelope it back into its fold.
Just last week, the European Union imposed sanctions on a paramilitary group and six individuals for allegedly destabilizing Moldova.
“Serious and increasingly intense attempts to destabilize the country are being made again and again,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, said in a statement announcing the sanctions this week.
Chorba warned Sandu that Putin and his allies are unlikely to be deterred.
“Mrs. President Sandu, your surroundings frightened you in any way that Russia would strike the territory of Moldova,” he said. “You didn’t take into account one thing that the psychology of the current Russian leadership, particularly Putin, is very similar to the psychology of Hitler, in the late 1930s. Attempts to pacify people like Putin lead to only one thing—a growing appetite of the aggressor.”
Officials in neighboring Ukraine have voiced doubt about whether Transnistria will follow through with an annexation request.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday he is not convinced they will move forward. “I am not sure that the Transnistrians—or whoever is present at the congress—will take this step next week. I am not sure based on the information I have,” he said, adding that Ukraine has not received any requests from Moldova to supply military aid.
At any rate, Ukraine has made its position on Transnistria clear. Senior Ukrainian diplomat Paun Rohovei met with Moldovan officials to discuss the threat last week, after which the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry issued a statement vowing to “resolutely” respond to such provocation.
“Ukraine stands solely for the peaceful settlement of the Transnistrian issue with the preservation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova within its internationally recognized borders,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said. “At the same time, Kyiv will resolutely respond to any provocations aimed both at dragging the Transnistrian region into Russia’s war against Ukraine and at destabilizing the situation in Moldova as a whole.”
31,000 Ukrainian troops killed since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Zelenskyy says
Associated Press – February 25, 2024
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy answers media questions during his press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Sunday Feb. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives before a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Sunday Feb. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in action in the two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
Zelenskyy said that the number was far lower than estimates given by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government.
“31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000, not 150,000, not whatever Putin and his deceitful circle have been lying about. But nevertheless, each of these losses is a great sacrifice for us”, Zelenskyy said at the “Ukraine. Year 2024” forum in Kyiv.
The Ukrainian leader said that he wouldn’t disclose the number of troops that were wounded or missing. He also said that “tens of thousands of civilians” had been killed in occupied areas of Ukraine, but said that no exact figures would be available until the war was over.
“We don’t know how many of our civilians they killed. We don’t,” he said.
It’s the first time that Kyiv has confirmed the number of its losses since the start of Russia’s full-scale war on Feb. 24, 2022.
Russia has provided few official casualty figures. The most recent data from the Defense Ministry, published in January 2023, pointed to just over 6,000 deaths, although reports from U.S. and U.K. officials put that number significantly higher.
A U.S. intelligence report declassified in mid-December 2023 estimated that 315,000 Russian troops had been killed or wounded in Ukraine. If accurate, the figure would represent 87% of the roughly 360,000 troops Russia had before the war, according to the report.
Independent Russian news outlet Mediazona said Saturday that about 75,000 Russian men died in 2022 and 2023 fighting in the war.
A joint investigation published by Mediazona and Meduza, another independent Russian news site, indicates that the rate of Russia’s losses in Ukraine is not slowing and that Moscow is losing about 120 men a day.
Perspective: Two years into the war, language has become a symbol of Ukrainian strength
Mariya Manzhos – February 24, 2024
Ukrainian flags were on display during a rally commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine-Russia war, at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Saturday, Feb. 25, 2023. | Ryan Sun, Deseret News
Two years ago, I was in Southern California when I got the news that Russia had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was my daughter’s 5th birthday and on the docket were a visit to the zoo, cake with cousins and a long-awaited trip to Disneyland the next day. While physically I was with my children, my mind was at home in Kyiv, Ukraine — with my parents.
There, the panic had begun within hours of Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a “special military operation.” People were scrambling to find transportation to evacuate, highways westward jammed with traffic. Horror stories spread quickly and nobody knew what would happen next. I wrote about evacuating my family from Ukraine for Deseret in March of 2022.
The past two years became a process of learning how to live with grief and uncertainty, and how to inhabit two realities at once: one of my life stateside — safe, quiet, predictable — and one in which missiles and shrapnel are destroying homes every day, killing soldiers and children, while the end of the war in my homeland seems to grow increasingly distant.
More than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have died in the war, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and about 70,000 soldiers have been killed, according to U.S. officials. Since February of 2022, more than 6 million people have left the country and nearly 3.67 million are internally displaced. And it’s estimated that 83,000 Russian soldiers died in the war, according to new data from two independent Russian media outlets.
Today, two years since the invasion and 10 years since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the war has stalled due to the shortage of artillery ammunition, with Ukraine recently losing Avdiivka last week, an industrial city in the Donetsk region.
And while the path forward as the war drags on is uncertain, Ukrainians themselves have never been more sure of who they are.
Despite the recent disappointments on the battlefield, the unity and sense of national identity that were forged at the expense of tragedy and lives have not waned. A recent study from the Ministry of Culture asked 3,200 Ukrainians from several regions to rank their Ukrainian consciousness — how Ukrainian they felt — regardless of where they were born (most identified as Ukrainian citizens). The study found in two years of the war people self-identify more strongly as Ukrainians, and cited deepened interest in the country’s history and culture. The common cultural heritage fueled the emotional resolve to resist the occupants, the study said.
I, too, have grown closer to my Ukrainian culture and language since the invasion by reading poetry, learning new vocabulary and discovering Ukrainian music. In the face of the looming threat of losing my native culture, clinging to it feels urgent and necessary.
This week, as the world marked the second anniversary of the invasion, Ukrainians on Feb. 21 celebrated International Mother Language Day, a UNESCO holiday that found particular resonance with Ukrainians this year. In honor of the occasion, I had a chance to speak about my efforts to return to my native Ukrainian language with students at Odesa National University in a virtual event — which had to be rescheduled due to a prolonged air raid.
Growing up in the 1990s in Kyiv, I spoke Russian at home with my family, even though Ukrainian was the dominant language at my school and in more formal settings. Making an intentional effort to speak Ukrainian has felt like tapping into the part of my Ukrainian identity that’s often been overshadowed by my American one, since I have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years. As I listened to the Ukrainian language and literature professors from Odesa National University, I was struck by their earnest commitment to the language that, unlike me, they use and teach every day. For them too, Ukrainian was no longer just a language of communication, but a way of fighting this war.
One professor spoke about the disagreements in 1917 over whether Russian or Ukrainian should be the language of Orthodox church services and how language separatism led to a religious one. Literature expert Tetyana Shevchenko spoke about drawing strength in times of despair from the poetry of Taras Shevchenko (no relation), a national bard of Ukraine who spent half of his life in serfdom under the Russian empire. She read a few lines from his poem about casting out an adversary from the Ukrainian land.
“I trust his words, and I know this is exactly how it’s going to be,” she said. “Sometimes, when I feel lost, I start reading Shevchenko; his words help me believe in the freedom that I know will come.”
Philologist Larysa Shevchuk invited the students to raise their future children speaking Ukrainian. “We’re in the existential battle for the survival of our nation and our language,” she said. The idea that language is the symbol of Ukrainian defiance and the means all Ukrainians can employ to fight the war resonated with me.
The celebration of my daughter’s birthday — she turned 7 this year— and the day of the full-scale invasion will always remain mutual reminders of one another, and polar opposites in the feelings they stir up. My daughter’s brightness helps me sustain hope that a peaceful future will come to Ukraine. But I also know the costs we will pay to get there.
Opinion: Smirnov indictment pushes GOP impeachment probe of Biden off the edge
Opinion by Dennis Aftergut – February 19, 2024
Editor’s Note: Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, is currently counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to preserving the rule of law. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
On Thursday, the Justice Department indicted Alexander Smirnov, a former FBI informant, for lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s involvement in negotiations with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. Smirnov is a central witness in the House Republicans’ Biden impeachment inquiry, which was already circling the drain as committee leaders have persisted in pursuing baseless allegations for political gain.
According to the indictment, Smirnov lied to the FBI by claiming that officials at Burisma, where Hunter Biden served on the board years ago, bribed then-Vice President Biden and his son so the vice president would interfere with a criminal investigation into the company. Smirnov now faces charges for making false statements to the FBI and creating false records.
Smirnov’s testimony has been the “heart” of House Oversight Committee Republicans’ stumbling “investigation” into impeaching President Biden. News of Smirnov’s indictment had Oversight Committee Chair James Comer of Kentucky beating a strategic retreat: “The impeachment inquiry,” he said on Thursday, “is not reliant on the FBI’s [interview of Smirnov]. It is based on a large record of evidence.”
That’s to be expected from politicians trying to salvage an investigation whose key witness has been exposed. With Smirnov’s indictment for fabricating claims, the air is out of the House inquiry’s tires. For those in the fact-based world, the oversight committee’s impeachment car, driven by Comer, is stuck on the edge of a cliff with two wheels hanging in thin air.
The Smirnov episode is Exhibit A in what happens when politicians grinding partisan axes make serious public charges without evidence against elected officials. That shameless behavior erodes citizens’ precious trust in government.
Prosecutors learn early that, in white-collar crimes, you’d better have indisputable documents or witnesses whose testimony is thoroughly corroborated before seeking an indictment. Otherwise, you can get seriously burned in the backfire.
As Hannah Arendt, the dean of 20th century political theorists, wrote in 1971 about years of government lies revealed in the Pentagon Papers amidst the Vietnam War, “There always comes the point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive.”
Politicians like Comer and GOP Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, could learn something from Arendt and from capable prosecutors about tossing aside facts and truth. Unfortunately, the MAGA committee chairs seem to have neither time nor interest in thought, care, competence or real evidence. All that seems to matter to them is repeating the charges enough times for them to sink into the public consciousness.
In 2016, there was no there there with House Republicans’ Benghazi investigation, but the smear looked like it had an adverse effect on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So Republicans have apparently decided, “Let’s do it again.”
But don’t expect it to work this time. The very smart Democrats now on the House Oversight Committee learned from experience and are onto Comer’s political stunts. His claims have been called out by New York Rep. Dan Goldman, a former prosecutor who worked on the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump, and ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a constitutional scholar who served on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
As Yale professor Timothy Snyder, the eminent historian of 20th century totalitarianism, has written, “Students of democracy have argued since ancient times … that the truth matters, and that truth needs defenses.” We are lucky to have capable defenders of truth whose counter-punches have been stronger than Comer’s feckless jabs. They don’t carry the power of reliable facts.
With Smirnov, Comer has led with his jaw. When you are dealing with a shaky witness whose testimony is the key to your fight plan, you need to muscle up with corroboration. Comer has none.
Indeed, Comer and Jordan have overhyped Smirnov’s testimony so many times, according to the progressive watchdog Congressional Integrity Project, that it’s hard to keep count. To cite just one example, last June, Comer told Fox News’ Sean Hannity, “This is one of the highest paid, most respected, most trusted, most effective human informants. So what we learned is what the whistleblowers told Sen. Grassley all along. The FBI never investigated this.”
That last claim is yet another falsehood. This whole investigation into Burisma goes back five years. In early 2020, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s disgraced lawyer who was trying to dig up dirt on Hunter’s father, handed documents over to Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr. According to CNN reporting, Barr told reporters at the time, “‘We can’t take anything we receive from Ukraine at face value.’ Former Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady oversaw the FBI investigation of the Giuliani claims. The 1023 document [memorializing Smirnov’s interview] demanded by Comer is among the products of that investigation. … The FBI and prosecutors who reviewed the information couldn’t corroborate the claims.”
There’s the rub. And Comer’s face plant by relying on Smirnov’s alleged lies is just the latest in a long string of leaning on witnesses who have provided no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. They include the president’s bookkeeper, Hunter Biden’s business associates, his art dealer and a host of others who’ve said that President Biden is a loving father but was not involved in his son’s business deals. Comer seems to have gone to the ends of the Earth to find dirt on the president. But the congressman has ended up with an empty dustbin.
Impeachment is the most serious non-criminal charge that Congress can bring against a federal official. It is no place to be inflating allegations and to be relying on witnesses whose testimony is not corroborated. Doing so drains public confidence in impeachment as a guardrail on executive abuses of power. Wild charges without basis in reliable evidence insult fact and truth, the foundations of democracy.
New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat put it this way in her seminal book “Strong Men”: “The decay of truth and democratic dissolution proceed hand in hand.” Snyder makes the same point: “Once factual truth is no defense in politics, all that remains is spectacle and force.”
From Comer and Jordan, we’ve seen plenty of spectacle but an absence of light. These point men for Trump and truthlessness are dangers to democracy.
