3 House Republicans voted against a bipartisan resolution to stand ‘steadfastly’ with the Ukrainian people
Grace Panetta – March 2, 2022
Reps. Matt Rosendale, left, Paul Gosar, top right, and Thomas Massie, bottom right, were the only three House members to vote against a bipartisan resolution supporting UkraineAndrew Harnik/AP, Scott J. Applewhite/AP, Susan Walsh/AP
Three House Republicans voted against a bipartisan resolution supporting Ukraine on Wednesday.
Reps. Paul Gosar, Thomas Massie, and Matt Rosendale were the only “nay” votes on the measure.
The three congressmen all embrace an isolationist view of foreign policy.
Just three members of the US House — all Republicans — voted against a bipartisan congressional resolution expressing support for the Ukrainian people and Ukraine’s territorial integrity as the country battles the Russian invasion.
Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana were the only nay votes on House Resolution 956, titled “Supporting the People of Ukraine.” The resolution passed the House on Wednesday with 426 votes in favor.
The non-binding resolution, among other things, says the House “supports, unequivocally, Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “states unambiguously that it will never recognize or support any illegitimate Russian-controlled leader or government installed through the use of force.” It also calls for the US and other nations “to deliver additional and immediate defensive security assistance.”
It ends by stating the House “stands steadfastly, staunchly, proudly, and fervently behind the Ukrainian people in their fight against the authoritarian Putin regime.”
The three congressmen have all embraced an isolationist view of foreign policy.
Gosar tweeted “God be with the people of Ukraine” on February 23, but subsequently blamed both President Joe Biden and NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for Russia’s war in the country.
“NATO has no business inviting Ukraine into membership. This is Russia’s backyard. Biden failed to recognize this geopolitical reality,” Gosar tweeted.
The House resolution emphasizes “that NATO’s relationship with Ukraine is a matter only for Ukraine and the 30 NATO allies.”
Massie, a libertarian, was one of three House Republicans, along with Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act on Tuesday.
“If you want to fight communists in Eastern Europe, head on over,” Massie tweeted at a critic on February 25. “I’m worried about the abandonment of our Constitutional Republic and troubling shift toward communism and autocracy here.”
Rosendale said in a February 24 statement that the United States “has no legal or moral obligation to come to the aid of either side” in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“In talking to folks across Montana, they are much more concerned with stopping the invasion taking place in our country by millions of illegal aliens than they are the invasion of an Eastern European country halfway across the world,” he said.
The US, along with other European nations, has sanctioned Russia over its invasion. But Biden has repeatedly said the US does not plan to send troops into Ukraine to fight Russia.
Both Rosendale and GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina have introduced legislation limiting the US from providing material aid to Ukraine until more resources are put towards US border security and, in the case of Rosendale’s proposal, building a wall on the US-Mexico border.
“The American people are sick and tired of career politicians consistently putting the interests of foreign nations above our own, we must put America first,” Rosendale tweeted on Monday.
NATO Countries Pour Weapons Into Ukraine, Risking Conflict With Russia
Steven Erlanger – March 2, 2022
Equipment and munitions provided by the United States, including nearly 300 Javelin antitank missiles, arrives at the airport in Boryspil, just outside Kyiv, Ukraine, on Jan. 25, 2022. (Brendan Hoffman/The New York Times)
BRUSSELS — The Dutch are sending rocket launchers for air defense. The Estonians are sending Javelin anti-tank missiles. The Poles and the Latvians are sending Stinger surface-to-air missiles. The Czechs are sending machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols and ammunition.
Even formerly neutral countries like Sweden and Finland are sending weapons. And Germany, long allergic to sending weapons into conflict zones, is sending Stingers as well as other shoulder-launched rockets.
In all, about 20 countries — most members of NATO and the European Union, but not all — are funneling arms into Ukraine to fight off Russian invaders and arm an insurgency, if the war comes to that.
At the same time, NATO is moving military equipment and as many as 22,000 more troops into member states bordering Russia and Belarus, to reassure them and enhance deterrence.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought European countries together, minds concentrated by the larger threat to European security presented by the Russia of President Vladimir Putin.
“European security and defense has evolved more in the last six days than in the last two decades,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, asserted in a speech to the European Parliament on Tuesday. Brussels has moved to “Europeanize” the efforts of member states to aid Ukraine with weapons and money and put down a marker for the bloc as a significant military actor.
But whether European weaponry will continue to reach the Ukrainian battlefield in time to make a difference is far from certain. However proud Brussels is of its effort, it is a strategy that risks encouraging a wider war and possible retaliation from Putin. The rush of lethal military aid into Ukraine from Poland, a member of NATO, aims, after all, to kill Russian soldiers.
Putin already sees NATO as committed to threaten or even destroy Russia through its support for Ukraine, as he has repeated in his recent speeches, even as he has raised the nuclear alert of his own forces to warn Europe and the United States of the risks of interference.
World wars have started over smaller conflicts, and the proximity of the war to NATO allies carries the danger that it could draw in other parties in unexpected ways.
Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, hit his constant themes again Tuesday as he visited a Polish air base. “Putin’s war affects us all and NATO allies will always stand together to defend and protect each other,” he said. “Our commitment to Article 5, our collective defense clause, is ironclad.”
“There must be no space for miscalculation or misunderstanding,” Stoltenberg said last week. “We will do what it takes to defend every inch of NATO territory.”
But for now the fight is in Ukraine, and while NATO and the EU have made it clear that their soldiers would not fight Russia there, they are actively engaged in helping the Ukrainians to defend themselves.
Western weaponry has been entering Ukraine in relatively large but undisclosed amounts for the past several days. If it can be deployed quickly, it will have impact.
Speed is of the essence as the Russian invasion of Ukraine proceeds and while Ukraine’s border with Poland remains open. Russian troops are trying to surround cities and cut off the bulk of the Ukrainian army east of the Dnieper River, which would make resupply much more difficult.
While 21 of the 27 EU countries are also members of NATO, the effort to move equipment and weapons rapidly into Ukraine from Poland is being carried out by individual countries and is not formally either a NATO or EU operation.
The French say that the E.U.’s military staff is trying to coordinate the push. Britain and the U.S. are doing the same, setting up something called, deliberately blandly and neutrally, the International Donors Coordination Center. It is doubtful that Putin will be fooled by the name.
In fact, even if no NATO soldier ever crosses into Ukraine, and even if convoys of materiel are driven to the border by nonuniformed personnel or contractors in plain trucks, the European arms supplies are likely to be seen in Moscow as a not-so-disguised intervention by NATO.
Supplying Ukraine to allow the resistance to bloody Russia’s nose is a good idea, “but the more it ramps up you wonder how Putin will respond,” said Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense research institute. “What happens if he attacks on the other side of the border? We pursue terrorists across borders, why not him?”
From the Russian point of view, NATO military veterans who are now contractors helping the Ukrainians and training them, Chalmers said, “might be viewed by Moscow as the Western equivalent of ‘little green men,’” the Russian soldiers without identifying insignia who first moved in to annex Crimea.
Then there is always the possibility of Russian aircraft straying into NATO airspace as they try to interdict convoys or chase Ukrainian planes. Something similar happened the only time a NATO country shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet, near the Turkish-Syrian border in 2015.
More supplies of ground-to-air missiles like Stingers and antitank weapons like the Javelin are crucial, as is secure communications equipment, so the Ukrainian government can continue to be in contact with its military and its people if the Russians take down the internet, said Douglas Lute, a former lieutenant-general and U.S. ambassador to NATO.
“On NATO territory, we should be the Pakistan,” he said, stockpiling materiel in Poland and organizing supply lines to the Ukrainians as Pakistan supplied the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The European fund being used to buy lethal arms is called the European Peace Facility.
The fund is 2 years old and is intended, at least, to prevent conflict and strengthen international security. It has a financial ceiling of 5.7 billion euros — about $6.4 billion — for the seven-year budget of 2021 to 2027. If Ukraine needs more money, the EU official said, it can be provided.
According to NATO, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Britain and the U.S. have already sent or are approving significant deliveries of military equipment to Ukraine, as well as millions of dollars, while other member states are providing humanitarian aid and welcoming refugees.
On Feb. 25, the day after Russia attacked Ukraine, the White House approved a $350 million package of weapons and equipment, including Javelins and Stingers. Pentagon officials said shipments began flowing within days from military stockpiles in Germany to Poland and Romania, from where the materiel has been shipped overland through western Ukraine.
Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, promised Ukraine to provide tens of thousands of shells and artillery ammunition, anti-aircraft missiles, light mortars, reconnaissance drones and other reconnaissance weapons. Poland, Hungary and Moldova are also welcoming thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the war.
Sweden, not a member of NATO, announced that it would send Ukraine 5,000 antitank weapons, 5,000 helmets, 5,000 items of body armor and 135,000 field rations, plus about $52 million for the Ukrainian military. Finland, similarly, has said it will deliver 2,500 assault rifles and 150,000 rounds of ammunition for them, 1,500 antitank weapons and 70,000 combat rations.
But NATO has also moved to sharply reinforce its deterrence in member states on its eastern flank, to ensure that Russia does not test NATO’s commitment to collective defense.
The U.S. alone has deployed 15,000 extra troops to Europe — 5,000 to Poland, 1,000 to Romania and 1,000 to the Baltic States — while committing another 12,000 troops, if necessary, to NATO’s Response Force, being used in collective defense for the first time.
Washington has also deployed more fighter jets and attack helicopters to Romania, Poland and the Baltic States.
In other examples of the rapid NATO effort to beef up its eastern borders, France sent its first tranche of troops to Romania on Monday, to lead a new NATO battalion there, and provided Rafale fighter jets to Poland.
Germany, which already is the lead nation of a NATO battalion in Lithuania, has sent another 350 troops and howitzers there, six fighter jets to Romania, some troops to Slovakia and two more ships to NATO’s maritime patrols. Berlin also said it would send a Patriot missile battery and 300 troops to operate it to NATO’s eastern flank, but did not specify where.
Britain, the lead nation of the NATO battalion in Estonia, has sent another 850 soldiers and more Challenger tanks there, plus 350 more troops to Poland. It has also put another 1,000 on standby to help with refugees, and sent another four fighter jets to Cyprus, while sending two ships to the eastern Mediterranean.
Canada has sent some 1,200 soldiers, artillery and electronic warfare units to Latvia, as well as another frigate and reconnaissance aircraft, while putting 3,400 troops on standby for the Response Force.
Italy sent eight fighter jets to Romania and put 3,400 troops on standby, while the Dutch have sent 100 troops to Lithuania and 125 to Romania, and assigned eight fighter jets to NATO duties.
Denmark is sending a frigate to the Baltic Sea and will send 200 soldiers and deploy four fighter jets to Lithuania and some to Poland to support of NATO’s air-policing mission, while Spain has sent four fighter jets to Bulgaria and ships for maritime patrols.
This is hardly a complete listing, but gives an indication of the seriousness with which NATO is taking the threat of further Russian aggression or of a spillover of the war into NATO territory.
Vladimir Putin has united much of the world in opposition to his barbarism in Ukraine, and he has also united a Fox News talking head and a Washington Post columnist in a particular assessment of the situation: the Russian dictator and the state he controls are getting “cancelled.” “We are witnessing the first geopolitical ‘cancellation’ of the 21st century,” said the WaPo‘s Jason Willick. Monica Crowley, once of the Trump Treasury Department, offered that “Russia is being cancelled” and cited the sweeping international sanctions levied against its economy, its ejection from international sporting competition, and…the Ukrainian military resistance?
To be fair, both seem to think the cancellation is justified. Willick called it “righteous.” But it remains hilarious, if concerning, to watch people attempt to cram a land war in Europe into the tiny box of a worldview that seems to be entirely defined by culture wars here at home. Sometimes, the tired maxims of America’s ritualized political combat are not suited to the moment, particularly when the moment is dominated by an international crisis. Putin and his oligarchy are being punished and isolated in perhaps an unprecedented way. At the very least, we’ve never organized such a crushing sanctions regime against an economy of Russia’s size. But maybe this requires a different term than the one we use for Louis C.K.
This is all enlightening, though, because the admission here is that there are scenarios in which people are justifiably cancelled. The handwringing about Cancel Culture usually revolves around cases that are unjustified, and they certainly exist, though it’s worth interrogating whether the worst outcomes are primarily the fault of the Woke Mob or corporate H.R. departments that overreact to an incident of public shaming. A Georgetown Law professor made a fool of himself regarding Biden’s Supreme Court pick, but that doesn’t mean he should lose his job. Jennifer Jacquet, a professor at New York University and the author of Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool, sees shame as necessary and useful. The problem is not that members of the public will organize to engage in public opprobrium against someone they think has done something unacceptable according to the norms of our society. It’s that, when these pitchfork brigades roll into town—sometimes with excessive force, or targeting someone based on a misreading of what they said—the target’s employer folds too easily and destroys their livelihoods. Public shaming is inevitable in a free society, it’s about how institutions respond in these moments.
And as Jacquet told me for an article in January 2018—and as has become fairly obvious to everyone in the time since—shame is in precipitous decline as a social force. Shamelessness is now a superpower. Our siloed media ecosystems and political tribalism have blunted shame considerably. A sitting member of Congress addressed a conference organized by a white nationalist last weekend and was welcomed to speak at a mainstream event alongside all the most prominent figures of the Republican Party the next day. Will she face any real repercussions within the congressional caucus, beyond a passing rebuke from the House Minority Leader? Seems like a problem for the ball club, particularly when you’ve got players in the farm system venturing even father into the abyss. The decline of public opprobrium, a nonviolent way to sanction people for antisocial behavior, is dangerous in a democratic context. It allows people to get away with ghastly shit, and leaves those who oppose them with few options in response.-
So maybe it’s time to be clear that all of us have a line that we draw, and on the other side is behavior we consider completely unacceptable in today’s society. We are fighting over where to draw it. Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing star of yesteryear, has seen his career destroyed after video emerged of him offering his particular thoughts on pedophilia. This seems entirely appropriate. There are cases where Cancellation is justified, and cases where it is not. We ought to evaluate them individually, along with the responses from powerful institutions that can determine the fate of those involved. And we probably ought to use a different term when we attempt to punish a dictator for war crimes. Let’s pull our gaze away from our own navels for a minute, shall we?
Russia has been accused of using ‘vacuum bombs’ in Ukraine. What are those?
Gabriela Miranda, USA TODAY – March 1, 2022
Russian forces have been accused of using the widely banned and dangerous weapons known as vacuum bombs that “obliterate” their victims.
Amnesty International accused Russia of using vacuum bombs, or thermobaric weapons, to attack a preschool in northeastern Ukraine while civilians took shelter inside. CNN reported that one of its teams had spotted a Russian thermobaric multiple rocket launcher near the Ukrainian border early on Saturday afternoon.
Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, told reporters after meeting with members of the U.S. Congress on Monday that Russia had used a thermobaric weapon.
“They used the vacuum bomb today,” Markarova said after a meeting with lawmakers. “The devastation that Russia is trying to inflict on Ukraine is large.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she had seen reports but did not have confirmation that Russia had used such weapons. Psaki added that if it’s true, “it would potentially be a war crime.”
What are thermobaric weapons, and how dangerous can they be?
How do ‘vacuum bombs’ work?
The thermobaric weapon, also known as a fuel-air explosive, uses a container of fuel and two separate explosive charges, according to a study by the Human Rights Watch.
The Humans Rights Watch is an international nongovernmental organization in New York City that focuses on human right issues.
The weapon is fired or dropped, and the first explosive charge spreads the fuel in a cloud that sucks up oxygen and then flows “around objects and into structures.” As the fuel cloud spreads, the second charge detonates. The explosion creates a blast wave that is most destructive in enclosed spaces, buildings and foxholes.
Amnesty International said international humanitarian law prohibits the use of inherently indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions and thermobaric weapons.
In 2000, Human Rights Watch reported and condemned Russia’s suspected use of the weapons in Chechnya, a Russian republic, as “a dangerous escalation” with “important humanitarian implications.”
In August 1999, the Russian military reportedly used FAE bombs against the Dagestani village of Tando, Russia. The U.S. used similar thermobaric bombs in Islamic State group caves in Afghanistan in 2017, The New York Times reported.
How dangerous can they be?
A CIA study said the weapons are “prone to indiscriminate use,” and people closest to the explosion are “obliterated.”
The pressure wave of the vacuum bomb is said to kill its victims by “rupturing lungs,” and if the bomb doesn’t detonate, the victims will inhale the burning fuel, according to a CIA study.
“Since the most common FAE (fuel-air explosive) fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as with most chemical agents,” the study said.
In addition, when multiple thermobaric weapons are detonated, they reinforce one another and create a stronger, more dangerous blast, the Human Rights Watch reported.
People close to the blast can experience injuries “including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness,” according to the study.
Biden is sending Stinger missiles to Ukraine for the first time, which could be used to shoot down Russian helicopters
Jake Epstein and John Haltiwanger – March 1, 2022
The US is sending the Stinger Portable Air Defense System (MANPADS) used by the American military to Ukraine.Sgt. Aaron Daugherty/US Army
President Joe Biden for the first time is sending Ukraine Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
The missiles could be used to shoot down Russian helicopters.
It’s part of a $350 million military aid package for Ukraine approved by the US on Friday.
President Joe Biden for the first time is sending Ukraine Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which could be used to shoot down Russian helicopters.
The direct delivery of Stinger missiles is part of a military aid package approved last week by the US, Army Times reported on Monday.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that he authorized the Defense Department to send Ukraine $350 million in military aid “to help defend itself from Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war.”
On Saturday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said his country planned to send 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles to Ukraine.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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.
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.”
Joel Mathis, Contributing Writer – February 25, 2022
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.
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
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?
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
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.
