Photos: Putin keeps his distance during meetings

Yahoo! News

Photos: Putin keeps his distance during meetings

David Knowles and Yahoo News Photo Staff – February 28, 2022

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin held two meetings with advisers and Cabinet members that yielded more extraordinary images of the lengths he has gone to in recent weeks to socially distance himself from others.

With the ruble tumbling 30 percent on Monday as nations around the world unified to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, Putin met at the Kremlin with economic advisers, all of whom were gathered at one end of a long table while Putin sat alone at the other.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sits at one end of a long table with his advisers at the other.
Russian President Vladimir Putin leads a meeting on economic issues in Moscow on Monday. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

A second socially distant meeting on Monday included Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Again, Putin is seen at the head of the table, separated from his guests by several yards.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sits at one end of a long table with Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, head of the general staff of the armed forces, at the other.
Putin with Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, second from left, and Valery Gerasimov, head of the general staff of the armed forces, in Moscow on Sunday. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has, by most accounts, not gone according to plan. Rallied by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s military and civilian defense forces have mounted an unexpectedly robust defense of cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv, galvanizing world opinion against Putin and Russia in the process.

Putin toasts with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who stands on the opposite side of a large rug.
Putin toasts with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev after talks in the Kremlin on Feb. 22. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

During a Feb. 22 meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, pool photographers captured the two leaders toasting one another from across the room.

Putin, with Aliyev at a far-off desk, during a news conference.
Putin and Aliyev during a news conference at the Kremlin on Feb. 22. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Putin’s meeting with Aliyev came one day before the Russian leader gave the order for his troops to begin their offensive in Ukraine. Russia has been one of Azerbaijan’s main suppliers of military hardware, and at the Feb. 22 meeting, Putin and Aliyev signed a declaration that Azerbaijan’s leader said “brings our relations to the level of an alliance” in that it strengthened the ties between the two nations.

Putin speaks Aliyev from across a long table.
Putin and Aliyev during their meeting in the Kremlin on Feb. 22. (Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

But with world sentiment mounting against Putin over the Russian invasion, Aliyev seemed to have second thoughts. On Saturday, Zelensky said in a video message that Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had offered to help broker peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

Putin chairs a security council meeting at the Kremlin, with his advisers seated on the opposite side of the room.
Putin chairs a security council meeting at the Kremlin on Feb. 21, days before the invasion of Ukraine. (Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In an extraordinary meeting with his security council on Feb. 21, Putin again kept his distance from those he was speaking to, sitting several yards away in a columned hall in the Kremlin. Asking the security council members to offer their views on his plan to officially recognize the independence of two Ukrainian separatist regions, Putin berated Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian spy service, over what he perceived as insufficient answers.

“To what degree is he now just acting all by himself? Because I actually can’t imagine for an instant that his decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was supported by a majority of his own top officials,” Catherine Belton, a Reuters journalist and former Moscow-based correspondent for the Financial Times, told the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast. “And you could see that on their faces when he held that security council meeting on Monday. You could see the fear in their eyes and that, really, they didn’t want to be there. They all looked deeply uncomfortable.”

Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sit at opposite sides of a long table.
Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during talks in the Kremlin on Feb. 15. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Days before Putin declared the two separatist regions independent and announced he was sending in the Russian army to act as peacekeepers, he met at a comically large table opposite German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Scholz would announce harsh sanctions on Putin’s government, cancel the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and approve new arms shipments to Ukraine.

Putin meets at a distance with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Putin meets at a distance with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Feb. 14. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

One of the members of Putin’s Cabinet to find himself targeted by NATO and U.S. sanctions was Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who met in the Kremlin across a very long table from Putin on Feb. 14.

Putin with French President Emmanuel Macron at opposite ends of a very long table.
Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron on Feb. 7. (Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

When French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Moscow on Feb. 7 for a meeting with Putin at the Kremlin, Russian officials demanded that Macron allow them to administer a COVID-19 test before he saw the Russian leader. Macron, who had been tested before arriving, refused.

French diplomatic sources told Reuters that it was believed that Putin would try to obtain Macron’s DNA through the PCR test.

“We knew very well that meant no handshake and that long table. But we could not accept that they get their hands on the president’s DNA,” one source told Reuters.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that because of that refusal, the two men were seated at opposite ends of a very long table.

“In some situations, Putin meets with his guests sitting very close by one another; they shake hands,” Peskov told reporters. “With others, negotiations are held at a table, at a distance of approximately 6 meters. This is due to the fact that some leaders follow their own rules and they do not interact with the host side in sharing tests. We treat this with understanding, this is a normal global practice, but in this case, there is a protocol of additional measures to protect the health of our president and our guests as well. A larger distance is applied.”

Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, on opposite sides of a large rug, toast each other.
Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán toast after talks in the Kremlin on Feb. 1. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

A close Putin ally, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, was also obliged to keep his distance from the Russian leader during a Feb. 1 visit to the Kremlin. Like many states that border Ukraine, Hungary is poised to see an influx of refugees fleeing the conflict.

While Orbán’s government has sought to stay neutral since Russia invaded Ukraine, its foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said Monday that Hungary would not allow weapons to be supplied to Ukraine through its territory.

Global sanctions will trigger a ‘Russian depression’: Bill Browder

Yahoo! Finance

Global sanctions will trigger a ‘Russian depression’: Bill Browder

Max Zahn and Andy Serwer – March 1, 2022

Stock trading on the Moscow Exchange remained closed on Tuesday — a day after the ruble fell about 30% against the dollar and the Russian central bank more than doubled interest rates in an effort to prevent the currency from plummeting even further.

The economic disarray owes to an escalation in sanctions from the U.S. and its allies amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration added severe sanctions against the Russian central bank on Monday, and before that joined European countries in a ban of some Russian banks from SWIFT, a crucial messaging service that links financial institutions across the globe.

But the worst economic damage is yet to come, says Bill Browder, an asset manager who for years specialized in investments into major Russian firms. Sanctions will eventually cause the Russian economy to fall into a full-fledged depression, Browder told Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer in a new interview.

“I think that this is going to lead to a Russian depression,” says Browder, the CEO of London-based Hermitage Capital Management. “I can’t imagine how the stranglehold doesn’t really drive the GDP down like 20%, 25%. It’s remarkable all the steps that are being taken right now.”

The measures imposed by the Biden administration in recent days include direct sanctions on Russian banks and individuals, export controls that prevent foreign and domestic companies from sending much-needed products to Russia, and a freeze on Russian central bank assets.

The steps taken by the U.S. emerged alongside a robust sanctions regime from nations in Europe and elsewhere. Notably, Switzerland, a country known for its longstanding commitment to neutrality, announced on Monday that it would adopt EU sanctions on Russia and freeze assets belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“What [Putin] is doing is exactly in character,” Browder says. “The sea change is how the West has reacted.”

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Browder’s firm delivered stellar returns by exposing corruption at major Russian companies, bringing about company shake-ups, and boosting share prices. In 2005, Browder was denied re-entry to Russia and later became the victim of a Russian government scheme to undermine his firm, he says. Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer hired by Browder to investigate Russian corruption, was arrested and died in Russian custody.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Governor of Saint Petersburg Alexander Beglov in Moscow, Russia March 1, 2022. Sputnik/Alexey Nikolskyi/Kremlin via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Governor of Saint Petersburg Alexander Beglov in Moscow, Russia March 1, 2022. Sputnik/Alexey Nikolskyi/Kremlin via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY.

Alongside the sanctions imposed on Russia, a slew of corporations have sold off investments in Russian companies or severed partnerships with Russian counterparts. British petroleum giant BP exited its 20% stake in Russian oil company Rosneft and Disney said it will stop releasing films in the country, among other moves taken in the private sector.

“The sanctions lists are important — government activity is important,” Browder says. “But if every Western company stops doing business with the Russians, it’s really dramatic.”

Browder called on people to “pressure every single Western business, to divest, to stop doing business, to stop supplying goods, to stop supplying services to Russia.”

Speaking to Yahoo Finance, Browder voiced support for an economic response that imposes maximum financial pain on Putin.

“The strategy has to be to raise the price as high as possible, and most importantly, to just deplete Vladimir Putin of resources,” Browder says. “So that this war becomes so expensive, and he just doesn’t have the money.”

The Day After, all over again

The Week

The Day After, all over again

Joel Mathis, Contributing Writer – February 25, 2022

The Day After
The Day After Screenshot/The Day After

On Nov. 20, 1983, my hometown was devastated by a nuclear attack and just about everybody watched.

Lawrence, Kansas, was the setting of The Day After, an all-star TV movie that depicted nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, along with its terrible aftermath in an all-too-typical Midwestern community. Hundreds of my city’s residents dressed up as injured blast survivors to play extras. Viewers watched Jason Robards survive the blast, only to slowly succumb to sickness from the radioactive fallout. The film ends with John Lithgow calling plaintively on a radio to the outside world, getting no answer.

It was terrifying.

The Day After was also hugely influential. More than 38 million households tuned into the broadcast, one of the largest television audiences of all time. President Ronald Reagan screened the movie at Camp David, then wrote in his diary that it left him “greatly depressed.” Henry Kissinger, William F. Buckley, and Secretary of State George Shultz went on TV to debate nuclear weapons. Many of the rest of us were left with a seemingly permanent sense of dread. By the early 1980s, the era of “duck and cover” had long since passed — the expectation was that an actual nuclear war would amount to Armageddon, the end of humanity itself. The Day After “was a piercing wake-up shriek,” the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists later observed.

One of the best things about the end of the Cold War was that all that dread receded into the background. Yes, the U.S. and Russia still had enough weapons to effectively set the entire planet on fire — but without the everyday possibility of armed conflict, it just didn’t seem that likely.

Now the dread is real again, and rising.

The possibility of nuclear war undergirds the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the world’s response to it. President Biden keeps telling us that no U.S. troops will be sent to defend Ukraine because the possibility of getting into a fight with another state armed with atomic bombs is too much to risk. Vladimir Putin all but explicitly threatened that possibility Wednesday night, warning that countries that interfere with his invasion will suffer “consequences you have never faced in your history.” Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, felt free to push back: “Yes, I think that Vladimir Putin must also understand that the Atlantic alliance is a nuclear alliance,” he said Thursday. “That is all I will say about this.”

Just to underline the point, Russian troops reportedly seized the former Chernobyl nuclear plant during their early attacks.

Even now, for many of us, there is a sense that what is happening is happening over there. But The Day After remains a reminder that in a world where missiles can carry unthinkable destruction around the world within minutes, that’s not entirely true. You don’t have to be directly threatened by the violence in Ukraine to fear what might happen next.

Denmark resumes construction of Norway-Poland gas link

Reuters

Denmark resumes construction of Norway-Poland gas link

March 1, 2022

Construction site of Baltic Pipe gas pipeline in at Houstrup Strand

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Construction of the Danish part of Baltic Pipe, which will connect Poland to Norwegian gas fields, is resuming following a 33-month hiatus, Danish grid operator Energinet said on Tuesday.

The pipeline is designed to reduce Poland’s reliance on Russian gas but construction was halted in May 2019 due to environmental issues.

Energinet said it had now received a new environmental permit and it still expects the pipeline to be partially operational from Oct. 1 this year and running at full capacity of up to 10 billion cubic metres from Jan. 1, 2023. The suspension has already delayed the start date by three months.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered worries that Russian gas supplies to Europe could be cut, highlighting the need for diversification of supplies.

Construction on two parts of the pipeline has been suspended since 2019 following the rescinding of an environmental permit by a Danish public appeals committee due to concerns over the pipeline’s impact on protected mice and bat species.

Russia’s Gazprom supplies half of Poland’s 20 billion cubic meters of gas consumption, but the long-term contract expires at the end of this year and Warsaw doesn’t plan to renew it.

Poland aims to replace these supplies with shipments via Baltic Pipe.

A natural gas pipeline linking Poland to a liquefied natural gas terminal in Lithuania, called GIPL, will open on May 1, Lithuania said on Monday, earlier than the scheduled mid-2022 start.

(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen; Editing by Susan Fenton)

Why Does Everything the GOP Touches Cause Poverty, Disease & Death?

Thom Hartmann – Daily Rant

Why Does Everything the GOP Touches Cause Poverty, Disease & Death?

Turns out this is about more than the GOP just embracing policies that lead to disease and death – those same policies also win elections while making their morbidly rich campaign donors even richer

Thom Hartmann – March 1, 2022

Image by Gabriele M. Reinhardt from Pixabay

Senator Marco Rubio says he won’t attend the State of the Union address because it requires a Covid test and he’s too busy to swab his nose. Rubio’s bizarre behavior is right in line with the GOP’s embrace of poverty, disease, and death.

According to a popular meme, comedian Noel Casler (the guy who outed Trump’s drug abuse and diaper wearing) asks, “How come everything the Republican Party stands for involves other people dying?”

He then goes on to note GOP support for assault weapons, opposition to masks and vaccines, opposition to saving the environment, and their all-out war on Obamacare and Medicare-for-All. 

Casler may have just been being glib, doing the written equivalent of a standup routine, but his question deserves a serious answer, so let’s look at the evidence.

It’s undeniably true that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:

But are all these things, along with widespread GOP support for Putin, happening because Republicans hate their citizens and worship poverty, death and disease? 

Or is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and stratgegies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes?

It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism that the GOP has been using for forty years to get access to billions of dollars and win elections.

Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in.

We’ve seen it over and over again around the world: it’s happening today in India, The Philippines, Brazil, and Hungary, for example. And the GOP has spent the past 40 years marinating itself in both.

Here’s how it happened here in America:

The GOP first openly embraced racism in 1964 when the party’s presidential candidate that year, Barry Goldwater, proudly refused to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

It was a huge shift for the party of Lincoln, and when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, the South did a collective “what the hell?!?”

As LBJ told Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”

So the newly publicly proclaimed belief in white supremacy became an official part of GOP ideology in the 1960s, leading directly to Richard Nixon’s explicitly racist 1968 “Southern Strategy.”

It was later replicated by Reagan speaking about “states’ rights” at his first campaign speech near the scene of the murder of 3 civil rights workers, George HW Bush’s Willie Horton ad campaign, and Donald Trump’s rants about Mexican rapists and people from what he called “shithole countries.”

But racism alone can’t explain the entire list above.  There had to be something else. 

The second element embraced by the GOP that filled out the rest of the list above happened in 1980 when they hooked up with religious grifters and greedy rich people. 

Prior to that election year, George HW Bush and his wife Barbara were big advocates for Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose an abortion.  Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, had signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law and was also an outspoken supporter of Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood.

Similarly, the white evangelical movement prior to 1980 was largely supportive of abortion rights.  They were furious, however, when the Supreme Court banned preacher-led school prayer and in the late 1970s Jimmy Carter pulled the tax exemptions of segregated schools run by white evangelicals.

Jerry Falwell had started his “Moral Majority” in 1978 and uber-Christian Paul Weyrich (co-founder of The Heritage Foundation and the guy who famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote!”) signed up for the Reagan campaign. 

As Donne Levy writes for George Washington University’s History News Network:

“Weyrich and Falwell realized that the tax exemption issue based on racial discrimination had limited value, but opposing abortion was a moral issue cutting across racial and religious lines. That was their thinking on the eve of the 1980 elections.”

The election that year saw the first major merger in American history between a political party and a religious movement largely run by grifters. 

Republicans started talking about God (the word appeared in their platform for only the second time since the Party’s formation in 1856), and preachers and televangelists began to openly push GOP candidates from the pulpit in defiance of nonprofit law and the IRS.

The GOP also adopted Falwell’s call for a return to school prayer, hostility to sex education, rejection of women’s rights, assertion of patriarchy, and open hatred of homosexuality.

Championing what today we’d call the “culture wars,” Republicans fully embraced the anti-science perspective of Falwell and his colleagues, questioning for the first time the theory of evolution and scoffing at concerns about pollution causing cancer and other diseases. 

Within a decade they were even claiming, as Mike Pence wrote in a 2000 op-ed, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”

As the GOP went deeper down their religion-induced rabbit hole, their hostility to science was logically accompanied by a hostility to education and educated people.  George HW Bush and Rush Limbaugh began talking about “pointy-headed liberals in ivory towers,” openly trashing higher education to bring blue-collar voters into the party. 

That was followed by a sustained Republican attack on public education itself by pushing for-profit privatized “charter schools,” an ironic position in that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had probably done more to advance public education than any president in the 20th century. 

Thus was set up the GOP’s 2020 hostility to masks and Covid quarantines and their 2021 attacks on vaccination. 

The other big turning point for the GOP in 1980 was Reagan’s open embrace of America’s oligarchs. 

Just four years earlier, in their Buckley v Valeo decision, the Supreme Court ruled that when a rich person showered so much money on a politician that that politician pretty much only voted the way the rich person wanted, that was no longer bribery but, instead, First Amendment-protected “free speech.” 

In 1978, in a decision written by Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo fame), the Court extended that right to buy politicians to American corporations (it was extended to international billionaires and corporations in 2010 by Citizens United.)

President Jimmy Carter had championed the average person and the rights of working class people: he even walked from the Capitol to the White House after his inauguration rather than take a limousine.  Reagan not only brought back the limousine, he turned his inaugural balls into a lavish celebration of wealth and economic power.

The Democratic Party was still, at that time, mostly funded by labor unions; the GOP, however, picked up the opportunity offered them by the Supreme Court four and two years earlier and put up a “for sale” sign, inviting into the party any wealthy person or corporation who’d put up enough money for a Republican candidate to win an election.

The result of this whole sad history is that Red states have been turned into sacrifice zones for Reagan’s racial and religious bigotry and the neoliberal raise-up-the-rich and crap-on-unions economic policies he inflicted on America.

The TV preachers have become multimillionaires with private jets, their parishioners have slid deeper and deeper into poverty and addiction, and the unholy alliance of church and state that Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton warned us about is now arguably — behind great wealth — the second most powerful political force in America.

Turns out Noel Casler was right, but the story is a bit more detailed than the GOP just embracing death and disease.  Those same policies also make the morbidly rich — from oil barons to televangelists — vastly richer, and those rich people and their businesses and churches return the favor by pushing their followers and cycling part of their profits back toward Republican politicians.

Now you know the rest of the story.

A super-yacht owned by a sanctioned Russian billionaire has reportedly anchored in the Maldives

Business Insider

A super-yacht owned by a sanctioned Russian billionaire has reportedly anchored in the Maldives, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US

Kate Duffy – March 1, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) and billionare, businessman Oleg Deripaska (L) are seen visiting the RusVinyl Russian-Belgian joint polymer plant, near Nizhny Novgorod, 430 km. East of Moscow. Putin is having a one-day trip to Nizhny Novgorod region
Oleg Deripaska, left, with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
  • A superyacht owned by a sanctioned Russian billionaire arrived in the Maldives on Monday, AFP said.
  • The White House said Saturday it could seize the yachts of sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
  • The Maldives doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.

A superyacht owned by a US-sanctioned Russian billionaire has arrived in the Maldives, Agence France-Presse reported Tuesday. It’s one of several Russian-owned pleasure craft believed to be headed to the sunny island nation, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.

The yacht, Clio, is owned by Oleg Deripaska, the founder of the Russian aluminum group Rusal who was sanctioned by the US in 2018. Clio dropped anchor off Malé, the capital of the Maldives, on Monday, AFP said, citing port officials.

At least two other superyachts owned by Russian billionaires set sail for the Maldives shortly after Western nations threatened to seize assets from sanctioned oligarchs, according to data from MarineTraffic reported by CNBC.

In a tweet Saturday, the White House said: “This coming week, we will launch a multilateral Transatlantic task force to identify, hunt down, and freeze the assets of sanctioned Russian companies and oligarchs — their yachts, their mansions, and any other ill-gotten gains that we can find and freeze under the law.”

Deripaska’s 73-meter Clio “was designed for long voyages around the world and self-sufficient living for several months at a time,” according to its maker, Lürssen.

Deripaska was one of two Russian billionaires who spoke out on Sunday against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying in a Telegram post, “Peace is very important.”

The Biden administration recently targeted 10 Russian oligarchs as part of a sweeping package of sanctions against Russia. The sanctions aim to financially cripple the country’s wealthiest members in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Insider’s Avery Hartman reported on Monday that Russian billionaires were still crisscrossing the globe on private jets and yachts despite the sanctions.

Belarusian president displays map suggesting Putin plans to attack Moldova

The Week

Belarusian president displays map suggesting Putin plans to attack Moldova

Grayson Quay, Weekend editor – March 1, 2022

Alexander Lukashenko
Alexander Lukashenko MAXIM GUCHEK/BELTA/AFP via Getty Images

Russia may be planning aggressive moves against the Republic of Moldova, according to a map Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko displayed during a meeting of his country’s security council.

Lukashenko is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He seemingly allowed Putin to use Belarus as a staging ground for his invasion of Ukraine and is reportedly planning to commit his own country’s troops to the conflict.

The map, which Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon shared on Twitter, shows Ukraine split into its four operational command districts and features red arrows that appear to indicate planned troop movements.

One of those arrows originates in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which Russian troops have not yet reached, and terminates on the other side of the Moldovan border.

Image

In January, Ukrainian intelligence warned that Russia could initiate false flag operations in Moldova to justify intervening in the pro-Russian separatist-controlled region of Transnistria, according to Al Jazeera.

Transnistria, a narrow strip of land with around 400,000 inhabitants, is internationally recognized as part of Moldova, but the Moldovan government has exercised no authority over the breakaway republic since 1992. Russian troops have been stationed in Transnistria ever since.

In 2014, after Putin seized control of Crimea, the head of Transnistria’s parliament requested to join Russia, BBC reported at the time.

What would a ‘no-fly zone’ mean in Ukraine?

Yahoo! News

What would a ‘no-fly zone’ mean in Ukraine?

Christopher Wilson, Senior Writer – March 1, 2022

Ukrainian officials and two Republican members of Congress have pushed for the United States to implement a no-fly zone as Russia’s invasion continues, but doing so would mark a major escalation in the war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, via a statement to Axios on Monday, called on President Biden and NATO to impose a no-fly zone over “significant parts” of his country, saying that “if the West does this, Ukraine will defeat the aggressor with much less blood.” Zelensky tweeted Tuesday morning that he had told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that Europeans supporting Ukraine needed to “close the sky.”

In an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandra Ustinova continued to make the case.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Monday. (Presidency of Ukraine/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

“We need to protect our sky, and that’s why we need a no-fly zone,” Ustinova said. “I know this is something that nobody wants to talk about because everybody is scared of Vladimir Putin. … My only question here to the international community would be, what is the red line for him? What is the red line when you actually step in? How many children have to die?”

On Friday, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., called for the implementation of a no-fly zone, stating that it would “disrupt Russias air [operations] to give the heroic Ukrainians a fair fight. It’s now, or later.”

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., joined him on Monday.

“Clearly, in the absence of a U.N. resolution, which Russia would veto, a strong coalition of like-minded nations should step in and seriously consider this,” Wicker told HuffPost in an interview.

“Tens of thousands of women and children fleeing from Kyiv west have created a humanitarian situation that the international community needs to step in and be involved in,” he added. According to the United Nations, more than 100 civilians have already been killed since Russia launched its invasion last week, although the real number could be higher than that.

To actually enforce a no-fly zone, NATO would likely need to shoot down any Russian aircraft that violated the declaration, an open attack on a nation with nearly 6,000 nuclear weapons. (On Monday, Biden said Americans should not be worried about nuclear war with Russia.)

The U.S. and its allies have implemented multiple no-fly zones in recent decades over countries with much less powerful militaries, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s and Libya in 2011.

A flight-tracker map shows no aircraft flying over Ukraine.
Flight tracker website Flightradar24 shows no aircraft flying over Ukraine following the Russian attack. (Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The concept of a no-fly zone over Ukraine appears to have gained no traction with the Biden administration. Press secretary Jen Psaki said at Monday’s White House briefing that implementing one would require “deploying U.S. military to enforce, which would be … potentially a direct conflict, and potentially a war with Russia, which is something we are not planning to be a part of.”

During Monday’s Department of Defense briefing, a reporter asked Pentagon press secretary John Kirby whether mounting civilian casualties could lead the U.S. to implementing a no-fly zone. Kirby answered, “No,” and moved on with the briefing.

There was bipartisan support of that position from Capitol Hill.

“There’s been a lot of loose talk from smart people about ‘close air support’ and ‘no fly zones’ for Ukraine,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tweeted. “Let’s just be clear what that is — the U.S. and Russia at war. It’s a bad idea and Congress would never authorize it.

“Military equipment for Ukraine, humanitarian support for Ukraine, crippling sanction on Russia, movement of U.S. troops to the eastern flank of NATO — these are all the right moves,” he continued. “But direct war between the world’s two nuclear powers should be a non-starter.”

“People have to understand what that means,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told reporters Monday evening when asked about the possibility of a no-fly zone. “That means a willingness to shoot down Russian planes. And that would mean World War III.”

President Biden at the White House.
President Biden at the White House on Monday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

International allies in Europe also ruled out the possibility. United Kingdom Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last week that implementing a no-fly zone would put “British fighter jets directly against Russian fighter jets” and that “NATO would have to effectively declare war on Russia because that’s what you would do.”

“We have no intentions of moving into Ukraine, neither on the ground or in the airspace,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told NBC News in a Monday interview. “We have a responsibility to make sure that this doesn’t spiral out of control and escalate even further into concern for full-fledged war in Europe involving NATO allies.”

‘Show this to Putin’: A 6-year-old girl killed in Ukraine

CNN

‘Show this to Putin’: A 6-year-old girl killed in Ukraine

Photographs by Evgeniy MaloletkaFebruary 28, 2022

'Show this to Putin': A 6-year-old girl killed in Ukraine

A mother stands by as a paramedic performs CPR on her daughter inside an ambulance at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Sunday, February 27. Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

Editor’s note: This gallery contains graphic images. Viewer discretion is advised.

A wounded 6-year-old girl arrived at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Sunday.

Her mother wept outside the ambulance. Her father was at her side, covered in blood.

The family was at a supermarket on the outskirts of the southeastern port city when Russian shelling started, according to the Associated Press.

Now, a medical team was racing to save the young girl’s life.

“Take her out! Take her out! We can make it!” a hospital worker shouted.

They placed her onto a gurney and wheeled her inside, where doctors and nurses fought to revive her.

But she could not be saved.

A doctor who was pumping oxygen into her looked into the camera of an Associated Press videojournalist in the room.

“Show this to Putin,” he said. “The eyes of this child, and crying doctors.”

The girl, whose name was not immediately known, was injured by shelling in a residential area, according to the Associated Press. At left is her father.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

Hospital workers transport the girl onto a gurney to take her inside the hospital.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

Doctors and nurses inside the hospital fight to revive the girl. She could not be saved.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

The girl’s lifeless body lies in the hospital room, covered by her jacket.

Russia says it won’t yield to sanctions pressure over Ukraine

Reuters

Russia says it won’t yield to sanctions pressure over Ukraine

March 1, 2022

A view shows the area near the regional administration building in Kharkiv

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Western sanctions will never make Russia change its position on Ukraine, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.

Responding to a barrage of Western sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said: “They are counting on forcing us to change our position. This is out of the question.”

Peskov told reporters that President Vladimir Putin had been briefed on a first round of talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials on Monday but it was too early to judge the outcome.

There were no plans for talks between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he said, adding that Moscow still recognised Zelenskiy as Ukraine’s leader.

Zelenskiy, he said, could prevent further casualties if he gave the command to lay down arms.

Ukraine has refused to surrender and its forces have put up strong resistance to Russia’s assault from the north, east and south, which Moscow describes as a special operation to demilitarise and “denazify” the country – a justification dismissed by Kyiv and the West as war propaganda.

Peskov dismissed allegations of Russian strikes on civilian targets and the use of cluster bombs and vacuum bombs as fakes. He categorically denied that Russia had committed war crimes.

Ukraine says large numbers of civilians have been killed. Peskov said, without providing evidence, that Ukrainian nationalist groups were using people as human shields.

Peskov declined to comment on whether the Kremlin considers the capital Kyiv to be under the control of Nazis, referring the question to the Russian military.