Category: Uncategorized

The Reason Putin Would Risk War

By Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic Column –  February 3, 2022

There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?

Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game?

[Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is naive about Russia. Ukraine can’t afford to be.]

To explain why requires some history, but not the semi-mythological, faux-medieval history Putin has used in the past to declare that Ukraine is not a country, or that its existence is an accident, or that its sense of nationhood is not real. Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic—though it is true that the Soviet ties of the Russian president, most notably his years spent as a KGB officer, matter a great deal. Indeed, many of his tactics—the use of sham Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his war in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a puppet government in Crimea—are old KGB tactics, familiar from the Soviet past. Fake political groupings played a role in the KGB’s domination of Central Europe after World War II; sham separatists played a role in the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine itself in 1918.

Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders.

But the most significant influence on Putin’s worldview has nothing to do with either his KGB training or his desire to rebuild the U.S.S.R. Putin and the people around him have been far more profoundly shaped, rather, by their path to power. That story—which has been told several times, by the authors Fiona Hill, Karen Dawisha, and most recently Catherine Belton—begins in the 1980s. The later years of that decade were, for many Russians, a moment of optimism and excitement. The policy of glasnost—openness—meant that people were speaking the truth for the first time in decades. Many felt the real possibility of change, and they thought it could be change for the better.

[Kori Schake: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is backfiring]

Putin missed that moment of exhilaration. Instead, he was posted to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he endured the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy. As the world’s television screens blared out the news of the Cold War’s end, Putin and his KGB comrades in the doomed Soviet satellite state were frantically burning all of their files, making calls to Moscow that were never returned, fearing for their lives and their careers. For KGB operatives, this was not a time of rejoicing, but rather a lesson about the nature of street movements and the power of rhetoric: democracy rhetoric, antiauthoritarian rhetoric, anti-totalitarian rhetoric. Putin, like his role model Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution there, concluded from that period that spontaneity is dangerous. Protest is dangerous. Talk of democracy and political change is dangerous. To keep them from spreading, Russia’s rulers must maintain careful control over the life of the nation. Markets cannot be genuinely open; elections cannot be unpredictable; dissent must be carefully “managed” through legal pressure, public propaganda, and, if necessary, targeted violence.

But although Putin missed the euphoria of the ’80s, he certainly took full part in the orgy of greed that gripped Russia in the ’90s. Having weathered the trauma of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to the Soviet Union and joined his former colleagues in a massive looting of the Soviet state. With the assistance of Russian organized crime as well as the amoral international offshore-money-laundering industry, some of the former Soviet nomenklatura stole assets, took the money out of the country, hid it abroad, and then brought the cash back and used it to buy more assets. Wealth accumulated; a power struggle followed. Some of the original oligarchs landed in prison or exile. Eventually Putin wound up as the top billionaire among all the other billionaires—or at least the one who controls the secret police.

This position makes Putin simultaneously very strong and very weak, a paradox that many Americans and Europeans find hard to understand. He is strong, of course, because he controls so many levers of Russia’s society and economy. Try to imagine an American president who controlled not only the executive branch—including the FBI, CIA, NSA—but also Congress and the judiciary; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, and all of the other newspapers; and all major businesses, including Exxon, Apple, Google, and General Motors.

Putin’s control comes without legal limits. He and the people around him operate without checks and balances, without ethics rules, without transparency of any kind. They determine who can be a candidate in elections, and who is allowed to speak in public. They can make decisions from one day to the next—sending troops to the Ukrainian border, for example—after consulting no one and taking no advice. When Putin contemplates an invasion, he does not have to consider the interest of Russian businesses or consumers who might suffer from economic sanctions. He doesn’t have to take into account the families of Russian soldiers who might die in a conflict that they don’t want. They have no choice, and no voice.

And yet at the same time, Putin’s position is extremely precarious. Despite all of that power and all of that money, despite total control over the information space and total domination of the political space, Putin must know, at some level, that he is an illegitimate leader. He has never won a fair election, and he has never campaigned in a contest that he could lose. He knows that the political system he helped create is profoundly unfair, that his regime not only runs the country but owns it, making economic and foreign-policy decisions that are designed to benefit the companies from which he and his inner circle personally profit. He knows that the institutions of the state exist not to serve the Russian people, but to steal from them. He knows that this system works very well for a few rich people, but very badly for everyone else. He knows, in other words, that one day, prodemocracy activists of the kind he saw in Dresden might come for him too.

Putin’s awareness that his legitimacy is dubious has been on public display since 2011, soon after his rigged “reelection” to a constitutionally dubious third term. At that time, large crowds appeared not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but several dozen other cities as well, protesting electoral fraud and elite corruption. Protesters mocked the Kremlin as a regime of “crooks and thieves,” a slogan popularized by the democracy activist Alexei Navalny; later, Putin’s regime would poison Navalny, nearly killing him. The dissident is now in a Russian jail. But Putin wasn’t just angry at Navalny. He also blamed America, the West, foreigners trying to destroy Russia. The Obama administration had, he said, organized the demonstrators; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of all people, had “given the signal” to start the protests. He had won the election, he declared with great passion, tears seeming to well up in his eyes, despite the “political provocations that pursue the sole objective of undermining Russia’s statehood and usurping power.”

In his mind, in other words, he wasn’t merely fighting Russian demonstrators; he was fighting the world’s democracies, in league with enemies of the state. Whether he really believed that crowds in Moscow were literally taking orders from Hillary Clinton is unimportant. He certainly understood the power of democratic language, of the ideas that made Russians want a fair political system, not a kleptocracy controlled by Putin and his gang, and he knew where they came from. Over the subsequent decade, he would take the fight against democracy to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, where he would support extremist groups and movements in the hope of undermining European democracy. Russian state-controlled media would support the campaign for Brexit, on the grounds that it would weaken Western democratic solidarity, which it has. Russian oligarchs would invest in key industries across Europe and around the world with the aim of gaining political traction, especially in smaller countries like Hungary and Serbia. And, of course, Russian disinformation specialists would intervene in the 2016 American election.

[David Frum: Fox News abandons the GOP on Russia]

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia. But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin. Young Ukrainians were chanting anti-corruption slogans, just like the Russian opposition does, and waving European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals that Putin hates at home and seeks to overturn abroad. After Ukraine’s profoundly corrupt, pro-Russian president fled the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began showing pictures of his palace, complete with gold taps, fountains, and statues in the yard—exactly the kind of palace Putin inhabits in Russia. Indeed, we know he inhabits such a palace because one of the videos produced by Navalny has already shown us pictures of it, along with its private ice-hockey rink and its hookah bar.

Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution. The invasion also violated both written and unwritten rules and treaties in Europe, demonstrating Putin’s scorn for the Western status quo. Following that “success,” Putin launched a much broader attack: a series of attempted coups d’état in Odessa, Kharkiv, and several other cities with a Russian-speaking majority. This time, the strategy failed, not least because Putin profoundly misunderstood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial nostalgia. They did not. Only in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine where Putin was able to move in troops and heavy equipment from across the border, did a local coup succeed. But even there he did not create an attractive “alternative” Ukraine. Instead, the Donbas—the coal-mining region that surrounds Donetsk—remains a zone of chaos and lawlessness.

It’s a long way from the Donbas to France or the Netherlands, where far-right politicians hang around the European Parliament and take Russian money to go on “fact-finding missions” to Crimea. It’s a longer way still to the small American towns where, back in 2016, voters eagerly clicked on pro-Trump Facebook posts written in St. Petersburg. But they are all a part of the same story: They are the ideological answer to the trauma that Putin and his generation of KGB officers experienced in 1989. Instead of democracy, they promote autocracy; instead of unity, they try constantly to create division; instead of open societies, they promote xenophobia. Instead of letting people hope for something better, they promote nihilism and cynicism.

Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail.

These are big goals, and they might not be achievable. But Putin’s beloved Soviet Union also had big, unachievable goals. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors wanted to create an international revolution, to subjugate the entire world to the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. Ultimately, they failed—but they did a lot of damage while trying. Putin will also fail, but he too can do a lot of damage while trying. And not only in Ukraine.

Daily Beast

Putin’s Army Forces Ukraine’s Frontliners Into ‘Fight or Flight’ Hell

Stefan Weichert, Emil Filtenborg, Noor Ibrahim and Allison Quinn

February 11, 2022

PERVOMAIS’KE, Ukraine—The torturous, months-long “will he, won’t he” guessing game that Vladimir Putin has forced upon the world may soon end in bloodshed and devastation, as there is now little doubt that the Russian president will make the earth-shattering decision to invade neighboring Ukraine, according to multiple reports citing NATO and U.S. officials that emerged on Friday.

With Russian aggression along Ukraine’s border escalating at lightning speed, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Friday that though the White House has not definitively concluded that Putin has already ordered an invasion, the threat is now “a very, very distinct possibility” that could take place as early as next week, and encouraged all U.S. citizens to leave the country within the next 48 hours.

Military Exercises Feared to Be Cover for Putin’s Secret Weapons Plan

Meanwhile, in the Eastern Ukrainian town of Pervomais’ke, which is only a couple of kilometers from the frontlines, thousands anxiously await what’s to come—whatever that may be—with no option to leave. That includes 28-year-old handyman Evgeny Linkin, who spoke with The Daily Beast this week in between scattered gunfire and sudden explosions in the distance.

“If Russia wanted to take all of this, I think that it would be very easy,” Linkin told The Daily Beast, as he stood next to his rusty old bicycle on a snow-covered field on his way back from work. If an invasion does take place, Linkin said, “I will fight to protect my home.”

The real-life consequences of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are painfully visible here in the outskirts of Pervomais’ke. Countless residents have been displaced and over 14,000 killed since 2014, when war broke out between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists in the Eastern Donbas region. Residents now fear another escalation on a scale the world has not seen in decades.

“I think that we should do anything to stop the war,” said Linkin, even if that means giving into Putin’s demands that Ukraine never joins NATO or the E.U. “It is really hard to live here. There is almost nothing.”

Russia has more than 100,000 thousand soldiers stationed near the Ukrainian border, the largest number since the 1990s. With them, a terrifying supply of artillery, tanks, and missiles that have raised alarm bells in Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean. Given that Moscow’s troops are stationed along the south, east, and northern parts of Ukraine, a strike could come from virtually any direction. The threat is so imminent that U.S President Joe Biden has deployed some 3,000 troops to Eastern Europe to protect the region. Roughly 1,700 will go to Poland. Others will go to Romania.

During the intense fighting in Pervomais’ke back in 2014 and 2015, 54-year-old Aleksij Savgira knew that it was just a matter of time before his house would get hit. One early morning back in 2015, when he was asleep with his family, it finally happened. A mortar hit a house nearby and fragments penetrated his house and destroyed his roof, but spared him and his family.

“It wasn’t any surprise,” Savgira, who has no plans to evacuate, told The Daily Beast. “I have my family here, my mother lives here. I was born here, so why should I leave? I have nowhere to go,” he said. “I really hope that no new invasion will happen, but if it does, I will stay here. I don’t want Russia to take this place, it would be really difficult to live here if they do, but I will have no choice but to stay.”

Like many others near the frontline, Savgira cannot grasp “what it is that Russia would want from this poverty-stricken city.” “My neighbor has very good tomatoes in the summer. I can go to him and ask for a few, even propose to buy a few from him, but I don’t go and steal them,” he told The Daily Beast. “I cannot understand that Russia did this. You don’t just go and invade.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. and its allies have been working on getting “the mother of all sanctions” ready to deter Russia from an invasion. It is still unclear what exactly these measures will look like, but they’re expected to include personal sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his innermost circle, as well as the closure of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in Europe.

Through all the turmoil, Putin has denied plans to go into Ukraine, even as Western intelligence agencies accused Russia of planning a false-flag operation to use as a pretext for an invasion. Instead, Moscow has labeled NATO the provocateur, demanding the alliance adhere to its list of security demands, which include a guarantee that NATO will limit its military activity in Eastern Europe and a cast-iron commitment that Ukraine will never join.

The U.S. and NATO have staunchly refused to give in to those demands, leading to a dangerous stalemate that—despite the efforts of French President Emmanuel Macron and other Western leaders who tried to talk down Putin this week—might soon erupt into all-out war.

As war began to seem more and more likely on Friday night, Russia’s foreign ministry took things up a notch by accusing Western journalists of being in on a worldwide “conspiracy” to stoke tensions in Ukraine.

In a lengthy diatribe on its official website, the foreign ministry claimed there was a “conspiracy by authorities of Western countries and the media to escalate artificial tension around Ukraine” by publishing “fake” stories about an impending Russian invasion. The claim, which flies in the face of the tens of thousands of Russian forces surrounding Ukraine’s borders, risks putting journalists on the frontlines in the crosshairs, much like similar propaganda did in the early days of the conflict in the Donbas.

Back in Pervomais’ke, 42-year-old Ekaterina Shulgina heads one of only two kiosks in the city. When asked why she remains in the city, Shulgina repeats a common phrase heard all over Eastern Ukraine’s frontline: “I have nowhere to go,” she told The Daily Beast.

“This was a good town before. We had buses going to Donetsk every day and everyone had work. Now, we have one bus every 14 days, taxis are too expensive, so we are just stuck here,” said Shulgina, the mother of a 4-year-old son.

Shulgina wants peace even if it means giving concessions to Russia, like granting autonomy to territories held by the separatists. According to her, the people who argue that peace can only be achieved through sheer military might are often the ones who live “far away from here.” “They should come here and see for themselves. Experience how it is to live here,” she said.

Pervomais’ke was taken under separatist control back in 2014 for a few months. Shulgina recalls waking up one day to separatists driving into the city, telling her that this is now Russian territory. Back then, she just kept on with her life, the same way she did when the Ukrainian army later claimed the area.

That is also her plan this time around. “I will do the same if Russia attacks,” she told The Daily Beast. “Hide until the fighting is over, and then go back to my life.”

USA Today

Why is Vladimir Putin threatening Ukraine? Respect, fear, power at play in Russian leader’s motivations

Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY – February 12, 2022

WASHINGTON – Steven Pifer has a vivid recollection of his conversation with Russia’s deputy foreign minister after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

Pointing to his head, the Russian official said he understood that Ukraine was now an independent country. Pointing to his heart, the official said it would take awhile to get used to that reality.

Pifer, who was ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, sees echoes of that sentiment in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats against Ukraine, with one big difference.

“I don’t think Vladimir Putin has ever reconciled himself to that,” Pifer said of the loss of Ukraine, which has sought to align itself with the West since declaring independence from the Soviet Union.

With U.S. officials warning that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be imminent,Putin’s designs on Russia’s neighbor goes beyond nostalgia.

It’s also about bolstering Putin’s standing on the world stage – and inside Russia. It’s about testing the United States and dividing Europe. It’s about protecting Russia’s sphere of influence and staving off perceived security threats.

Putin’s next move is fraught with risk – for himself and for the rest of the world.

The brinkmanship is “probably the most sensitive and dangerous crisis we’ve gone through in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” said Russian expert George Beebe, director of studies at the Center for the National Interest.

Here’s a look at the dynamics motivating Putin, a former KGB officer who has jailed his opponents and cemented his grip on the Kremlin.

Putin ‘won’t stop’ with Ukraine: Why Americans should care about Russia’s aggression against its neighbor

Boosting Putin’s world stature

President Joe Biden has surmised that Putin seeks to regain the stature Russia lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“He is trying to find his place in the world between China and the West,” Biden said during a Jan. 19 news conference, his most extensive remarks about the standoff.

As the United States increasingly focuses on China as its top rival, Putin is eager to show Russia is still one of the world’s biggest players, experts say.

“The core driver of much of this, the background to this crisis, is that he wants the West to treat Russia as if it were the Soviet Union, that is to say, a great power to be respected and to be feared,” said Angela Stent, a former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia.

Alexandra Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, said that Russians do not feel they’ve been taken seriously since the end of the Cold War and that “enough is enough.”

“They have everybody’s attention now,” she said. “I think they’re not necessarily interested in owning Ukraine, but they are interested in being taken seriously as kind of the big power on the European continent.”

Seth Jones, director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sees the moves on Ukraine as an extension of Russia’s power plays in recent years that have included seizing Crimea, establishing a large footprint in Syria and building a naval base in Sudan.

“There has definitely been an expansion of Russian power and influence in a range of countries,” he said. “They don’t have the economic might of the Chinese or certainly the U.S., but they’re back as a major power.”

Opinion: U.S. can still stop the horror of Putin’s war in Ukraine. But time is running out.

Keeping spheres of influence

Russia has always seen the ring of countries around it, which used to be part of the Soviet Union, as a buffer zone between Russia and countries that might invade, Vacroux said.

“Russia has a history of being invaded and feeling encircled by enemies,” she said. “And so one of the arguments (for Russia’s actions) is that Putin is basically reestablishing a kind of buffer between Russia and its enemies.”

Putin is not trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union, according to George Breslauer, a veteran Russian scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. But he is asserting that independent states in Russia’s neighborhood cannot be turned against Moscow because that poses an unacceptable security threat.

He also wants those buffer countries to be friendly to Russia and Russian businesses interests and to defer to Moscow on major geopolitical decisions, said Pifer, a William Perry fellow at Stanford University.

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia lost essentially almost all of its sphere of influence,” Jones said. The Baltic states became members of NATO, as did members of the Warsaw Pact collective defense treaty.

Russia has long complained that NATO and the U.S. promised at the end of the Cold War that their security alliance would not extend beyond the borders of the former East Germany, Vacroux said.

“So I think Putin sees this as one of the last things that he hasn’t fixed about the 1990s, which is pushing NATO back from Russia’s border,” she said.

Russia’s demands include blocking Ukraine from joining NATO. Putin also wants to keep NATO missiles from being in striking distance and stop the alliance from deploying forces in former Soviet bloc countries that joined NATO after 1997.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Putin’s top goal is not putting the Soviet Union back together but destroying NATO and the transatlantic alliance.

“I think that’s really important to understand as we decide how to react to his threatened invasion,” Murphy said. “Because if NATO splits up over our response to the threatened invasion, that is a big win for Putin.”

What is NATO? Military alliance in spotlight as Russia tries to forbid Ukraine membership

Boosting Putin’s domestic popularity

Russia’s unstable economy means Putin must look elsewhere to remain popular at home, according to M. Steven Fish, an expert on authoritarianism at the University of California, Berkley. Fish notes that Putin’s stock was highest after he annexed Crimea and took over parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Thomas Pickering, who was ambassador to Russia from 1993 to 1996, called Putin’s domestic political calculations a significant factor in his recent actions.

“Much of what he has propounded, either in red lines or charges against the U.S. and the West, is something which can appeal to the nationalism that has always been present in Russia,” Pickering said. “While he goes up and down in public popularity, a certain amount of this activity, on his part, is orchestrated, I think, at critical times for him to reinforce it.”

Taking advantage of a ‘weakened’ US

Putin may also be trying to take advantage of Biden’s domestic troubles.

“I think the Russians also have sensed, whether rightly or wrongly, that the U.S. is weak right now after the withdrawal from Afghanistan (and) political polarization in the U.S.,” Jones said. “I think from Putin’s perspective, this is about as good a time as any to make a move in Ukraine.”

Fiona Hill, a former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, said Putin is trying to give the U.S. “a taste of the same bitter medicine Russia had to swallow in the 1990s” when it was in a weakened position at home and in retreat abroad.

“All Moscow’s moves are directed against Washington,” Hill wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.

Murphy, however, rejects the idea that Putin’s timing is connected to a calculation that the Biden administration will have difficulty responding. Former President Donald Trump, Murphy said, was always “bending knee” to Putin.

“If Putin was making his decision on when to invade Ukraine based upon the most likely time for a weak response from the U.S. government,” Murphy said, “he would have invaded during the Trump administration.”

What are Joe Biden’s options in Ukraine?: That all depends on Putin’s next move.

Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia

Now to the nostalgia factor.

In Russian, Ukraine is called “Malorossiya” – or “small Russia.”

The history and culture of Russia and Ukraine are “thoroughly intertwined,” according to Pifer.

“This actually goes back 1,000 years,” he said.

Putin elaborated on his often-repeated assertion that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” in a lengthy essay the Kremlin posted in Russian, Ukrainian and English in July.

“I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole,” Putin wrote. “These words were not driven by some short-term considerations or prompted by the current political context. It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe.”

The fact that Putin made the essay compulsory reading for the Russian military, including the soldiers lining up on Ukraine’s border, means it’s “pretty serious,” said Jones, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It is designed, in part, not just to influence external audiences,” Jones said, “but also internal ones that may fight and die in Ukraine for the Russian cause.”

Ukraine has been moving further and further away from Russia over the past eight years – much to Putin’s consternation, according to Murphy.

“And everything short of a full-scale invasion that Putin has tried, in order to win back Ukraine to the Russian orbit, hasn’t worked,” the senator said.

Visual explainer: How US and its allies could respond to Russian invasion of Ukraine

Risky strategy

Putin’s moves come with huge risks.

If he sends 100,000 troops into Ukraine, they will need extremely long supply lines that will be hard to support, Vacroux said.

“It’s possible that … it’s not a quick operation and then they’re bogged down in Ukraine, and that’s just going to be a huge mess,” she said. “It’s especially messy if Ukraine gets more than supportive words and defensive weapons from NATO, and from the United States, which is all they’ve gotten so far.”

Biden has threatened severe sanctions intended to seriously damage Russia’s economy should Putin attack. And the U.S. president said he was considering personal sanctions targeting the Russian leader’s own pocketbook as well.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of sanctions on Russia, I think we’re at about a 3 now,” Pifer said. “So they could ratchet it up.”

And some Russian parents have expressed concerns on social media about their sons being sent to fight, and possibly die, in Ukraine, said Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of NATO who is now at Stanford University.

In Ukraine, by contrast, one recent poll showed a third of the country saying they would be willing to take up arms if Russia invaded. So even though Russia has much greater military might, they could take heavier casualties than anticipated.

“I can see Putin’s ideal scenario, but I can also see that it goes badly for him,” Pifer said.

And Putin’s fears about NATO encroachment could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any invasion of Ukraine would be met with a buildup of NATO forces along the Russian border, Jones said. The Pentagon has announced the deployment of several thousand U.S. troops to Germany, Poland and Romania amid the crisis.

On the other hand, if NATO’s response isn’t forceful and if China helps Russia get around sanctions, Putin may be able to annex at least a large portion of Ukraine.

That, Jones said, would send a very clear message to any country in Eastern Europe or Central Asia “that this is what happens if you even think about joining” NATO.

Maureen Groppe has covered Washington for nearly three decades and is now a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. 

The Courier Journal

‘I hope they clog up cities’: Sen. Rand Paul hopes Canada trucker protest spreads to US

Lucas Aulbach, Louisville Courier Journal – February 11, 2022

Sen. Rand Paul has watched the protests in Canada over coronavirus restrictions shut down several blocks in Ottawa for weeks and bring traffic along key nearby crossings to a halt.

Now, he’s ready to roll out the welcome wagon for the protesters in the U.S.

In an interview Thursday with the Daily Signal, a conservative media site, the U.S. senator from Kentucky said “it’d be great” if the protests spread to Washington, D.C., when asked about his thoughts on the protests and how the nation’s capital would react if they spread south across the border.

“The thing is, it wouldn’t shut the city down because the government workers haven’t come to work in two years anyway, so I don’t know if it’d affect D.C.,” Paul joked. “It’d be nice change. We’d actually have some traffic.”

Just under 25% of office workers in Washington, D.C., were working out of their offices as of September 2021, according to a survey from the DowntownDC Business Improvement District, as more employees opted to work from home amid the pandemic, which has frequently closed schools and upended child care options.

The protests in Canada, referred to as the “Freedom Convoy” by supporters, are set to enter their third consecutive weekend. Led by a group of truck drivers who started in British Columbia and drove to Ottawa, the country’s capital, protesters involved have called for the government to put an end to a mandate approved by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that requires truckers entering the Canada from the U.S. to have been fully vaccinated or face additional quarantining and testing.

The protesters have set up camp in downtown Ottawa, shutting down several city blocks and disrupting day-to-day life in the city’s core, with Mayor Jim Watson at one point calling a state of emergency due to “serious danger and threat to the safety and security of residents.” A separate state of emergency was put in place for the entire province of Ontario by Premier Doug Ford on Friday as three border crossings have been closed due to the demonstrations.

Paul, a frequent critic of U.S. COVID policies, told the Daily Signal that the protests were an example of civil disobedience – a “time-honored tradition in our country.”

“I hope the truckers do come to America, and I hope they clog up cities,” Paul said. “We’re seeing a break in the dam now. Several Democratic governors are finally sort of relinquishing. What they’re finding is moms and dads are upset about this, they’re not just Republicans. Everybody is upset about this.”

Paul might just get his wish.

The Super Bowl is set to take place Sunday in Los Angeles, and the Department of Homeland Security warned state and local law enforcement departments Tuesday that protests could potentially begin in California before convoying through the U.S. to make it to the nation’s capital by March 1, the day President Joe Biden is set to give his State of the Union address.

“While there are currently no indications of planned violence, if hundreds of trucks converge in a major metropolitan city, the potential exists to severely disrupt transportation, federal government operations, commercial facilities, and emergency services through gridlock and potential counterprotests,” the memo said, according to USA TODAY.

Paul’s office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday.

Switching From Red Meats to Plants Increases Life Expectancy, Study Finds

Olivia Rosane – February 11, 2022

Vegetables typically found in the Mediterranean diet. fcafotodigital / E+ / Getty Images

Eating a more plant-based diet isn’t just good for the planet. It could add years to your life as well. 

A new study published in PLOS Medicine on Tuesday found that opting for plants, fish, legumes and whole grains over red meats and processed foods could extend a human lifespan by up to 13 years. 

“A sustained dietary change may give substantial health gains for people of all ages both for optimized and feasible changes,” the study authors wrote. 

Scientists and health experts have long sung the praises of a Mediterranean diet. That’s a diet based on moderate amounts of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, legumes, olive oil, seafood, poultry and dairy. It’s been rated the best diet over all five years in a row by U.S. News and World Report, and one study suggests it may even help protect against the impacts of certain types of air pollution. 

To compare the impacts of choosing a typical “Western” diet to an “optimized” diet that closely resembles the Mediterranean diet, the Norway-based research team relied on computer models, CNN explained. They calculated what would happen if a man or woman from the U.S. began eating different diets at different points during their lives, according to the study.

A woman who began eating the optimized diet at 20 could extend her lifespan by slightly more than 10 years, while a man who began at the same time could extend his by 13 years, CNN reported. However, there were still benefits to eating healthier later in life. A man who began the optimized diet at 60 could add nearly nine years to his life and a woman, eight. Both men and women could add around 3.5 years to their lives by starting the optimized diet at 80.

The researchers have now turned their findings into a public tool called Food4HealthyLife, that anyone can use to calculate how dietary changes would impact their life expectancy.  

Outside researchers said the findings were not necessarily surprising. 

“The notion that improving diet quality would reduce the risk of chronic disease and premature death is long established, and it only stands to reason that less chronic disease and premature death means more life expectancy,” Dr. David Katz, a nutrition and lifestyle medicine expert who was not involved in the research, told CNN. 

However, some people find the idea of shifting to a mostly plant-based diet intimidating. The researchers also calculated the impacts of a middle option they called a “feasibility approach.” For a woman, adapting a feasibility approach diet from the age of 20 could improve her life expectancy by 6.2 years, while a man making the same change at the same time could add 7.3 years to his life.  

This suggests that eating more plants is always a positive choice, even if you can’t entirely change your diet.

“I think when people hear plant-based diet or they hear a definition they get very intimidated. This does not have to be an all-in thing,” ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton, who was not part of the research, told Good Morning America Wednesday, as Yahoo News reported. “You can make small changes with, let’s say, a meatless Monday or just one meal of every day.”

In addition to the health gains, there are also environmental reasons for opting for plants over red meat. A 2018 study found that shifting to a vegan diet is probably the single biggest thing an individual can do to reduce their contribution to the climate crisis, land use and water use, nutrient pollution and other human activities. 

HuffPost – Politics

Canadian Judge Blocks Money For Truckers From U.S. Right-Wing Christian Fundraising Site

GiveSendGo claims Canada has no jurisdiction across borders, even as it funds a protest in another country.

By Mary Papenfuss – February 12, 2022

A Canadian judge has issued an injunction blocking money for the anti-vaccine trucker protesters in Ottawa collected by the right-wing U.S. Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo.

The Ontario government petitioned for the order from Canada’s Superior Court of Justice, which was issued Thursday. It prohibits “any and all parties with possession or control over these donations” from distributing the money.

The criminal code allows for such an action against any “offense-related property,” meaning assets collected as part of or supporting illegal activity, according to a spokesperson for Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

GiveSendGo defiantly declared in response to the court order: “Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo.”

GiveSendGo has raised some $9 million for the “Freedom Convoy” and via the site’s “Adopt a Trucker” program. The site also encourages “prayers” for the controversial trucker “warriors” in their third week of protesting against vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 precautions at the U.S.-Canadian border.

GiveSendGo has raised money for several far-right causes, and even for violent organizations, including the extremist Proud Boys, which is classified as a “terrorist” organization in Canada.

Trucker protest leader Chris Barber ominously threatened that the judge’s order would “blow up in their faces” in an interview with The Ottawa Citizen.

“Bring it on … we are not going anywhere,” added Barber, who insisted there’s money coming in from other sources.

The order was part of a multi-pronged attack this week against the truckers who have paralyzed downtown Ottawa and blocked a key bridge into the U.S.

A province-wide state of emergency was declared Wednesday and police on Saturday began enforcing an injunction against the truckers’ blockade of the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor, Ontario into Detroit. The blockade choked off an already challenged supply chain to American automakers. A report estimated that U.S. workers and businesses have already lost some $51 million in damaged commerce and wages due to the action.

By late Saturday blockade trucks on the bridge were gone in the wake of the police action, though protesters on foot remained, The Detroit Free Press reported.

The anti-precautions protest began more than two weeks ago as hundreds of truckers, many driving massive semi-trucks, descended on downtown Ottawa, honking ear-piercing air horns, paralyzing traffic and shutting down stores and offices. They’ve been accused of harassment, even assault, and of ripping masks off the faces of area residents.

Yet the truckers were immediately hailed as heroes by right-wing American lawmakers and others, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, Elon Musk, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Donald Trump and son Donald Trump Jr. 

GoFundMe earlier this month shut down a site that had raised close to $10 million for the truckers after Ottawa police reached out to the company to complain of illegal activity by the truckers. That’s when GiveSendGo stepped in.

Members of Ontario’s House of Commons this week heard testimony from deputy directors of Canada’s financial intelligence operation revealing that it doesn’t directly track sources of money pouring into crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe or GiveSendGo GlobalNews reported.

Representatives from GoFundMe will reportedly testify before a committee next week about what measures it has taken to prevent being a funding conduit to extremists.

Michael Kempa, an associate criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, views the truckers’ anti-vaccine fight largely as cover for a deeply authoritarian movement funded by American and global interests out to undermine the rule of law and Canada’s government. Canada Unity, one of the organizers of the trucker protest, has called for the dissolution of Canada’s Parliament.

“They’re people interested in undoing the conventional state system, and replacing the Canadian democratic model with something that is much more grassroots authoritarian and far-right conservative,” Kempa told CBC-TV in an interview. “They’re not interested in the … liberal system we have here in Canada.”

Major Canadian trucker associations have disavowed the protesters, saying the vast majority of drivers are vaccinated and are continuing to work.

Bucks County Courier Times

Guest Opinion: Trump’s comments should be a warning to us all

Dick Newbert – February 12, 2022

“They are being treated so unfairly.” — Donald Trump (Jan. 29, 2022)

As the 2022 midterm elections approach, Donald Trump continues to focus on his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Perpetuating allegations of election fraud, Trump has taken a page from “Mein Kampf’s” rulebook: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong.

Tragically for America, despite a lack of any evidence whatsoever to support his claims and numerous audited recounts reaffirming Joe Biden’s victory, some Republicans continue to blindly believe Trump’s fiction.

Months before the election, the former president began the drumbeat the only way he could lose in 2020 was if there was election fraud. In the wake of his loss, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election have been delegitimized by all of the nation’s intelligence and cybersecurity agencies and even Attorney General Barr, reaching a unanimous conclusion there is no evidence of “systemic or broad-based fraud” that would change the result of the election.

Trump’s rhetoric culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, inflaming hundreds of fanatical supporters, urging them to march on the Capitol. What resulted was a violent assault on the Capitol with the clear intent to influence Congress’ responsible counting of the electoral college’s ballots and on a fundamental institution of our democracy.

While his supporters ran wild throughout the Capitol building, the defeated president relished the mayhem from the security of The White House; despite pleas from leading Republicans and even his daughter to stop the insurrection. Only after several hours did Trump reluctantly speak, concluding his brief remarks with a message to the rioters, “We love you. You’re very special.”

Trump has hinted he might run in 2024 and; “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”

Donald Trump’s willingness to pardon people whose actions were a direct threat to our democracy should scare the pants off of every American, particularly those who have taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.

Republican Liz Cheney’s admonition must be taken seriously, “He crossed lines no American president has ever crossed before. When a president refuses to tell the mob to stop, when he refuses to defend any of the coordinate branches of government, he cannot be trusted, [is] unfit for future office [and] clearly can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.”

Dick Newbert lives in Langhorne.

TIME – Business

Almost All U.S. Eggs Will Soon Be Cage-Free, Thanks to Public Pressure on Farms

Scott McFetridge, AP – February 11, 2022

This 2017 photo shows cage-free chickens on a Versova farm in Iowa. The nation’s egg producers are in the midst of a multi-billion-dollar shift to cage-free eggs that is dramatically changing the lives of millions of hens in response to new laws and demands from restaurant chains. Versova via APBY 

DES MOINES, Iowa — Without much fuss and even less public attention, the nation’s egg producers are in the midst of a multibillion-dollar shift to cage-free eggs that is dramatically changing the lives of millions of hens in response to new laws and demands from restaurant chains.

In a decade, the percentage of hens in cage-free housing has soared from 4% in 2010 to 28% in 2020, and that figure is expected to more than double to about 70% in the next four years.

The change marks one of the animal welfare movement’s biggest successes after years of battles with the food industry. The transition has cost billions of dollars for producers who initially resisted calls for more humane treatment of chickens but have since fully embraced the new reality. Pushed by voter initiatives in California and other states as well as pressure from fast food restaurant chains and major grocers, egg producers are freeing chickens from cages and letting them move throughout hen houses.

“What we producers failed to realize early on was that the people funding all the animal rights activist groups, they were our customers. And at the end of the day, we have to listen to our customers,” said Marcus Rust, the CEO of Indiana-based Rose Acre Farms, the nation’s second-largest egg producer.

Josh Balk, vice president for farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States, noted the abruptness of the about face. This is “an entire industry that at one point fought tooth and nail not to make any changes,” he said.

To a great extent, the industry concluded it didn’t have another choice.

Beginning in about 2015, McDonald’s, Burger King and other national restaurant chains as well as dozens of grocers and food manufacturers responded to pressure from animal welfare groups by announcing their commitment to cage-free eggs. That was followed by laws requiring cage-free housing in California and similar rules in at least seven other states — Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington.

McDonald’s, which buys about 2 billion eggs annually, said it gradually shifted to cage-free after concluding it was desired by customers. Many companies widely promoted their move to cage-free as good for their brand’s image.

Earlier, animal welfare groups, especially the Humane Society, had organized shareholder campaigns, conducted undercover investigations of chicken farms and filed federal complaints. A Gallup poll from 2015 found that nearly two-thirds of Americans thought animals deserved protection from harm and exploitation.

Animal rights groups have made allowing animals room to move a priority in their campaigns but the results have been mixed. The pork industry is fighting to block the California initiative that required more space for breeding pigs and veal calves, and a state judge recently delayed implementation of new rules.

The egg industry also initially sought national standards that would allow cages but ultimately relented, said J. T. Dean, president of Iowa-based Versova, a leading egg producer. Egg companies house about 325 million laying hens, so shifting many out of cages where they couldn’t move and into spaces where they could walk and roost was an expensive proposition, Dean said.

Besides building structures with more space, companies had to figure out how to feed birds that could move about and how to collect their eggs. More workers and more feed were also needed because hens moving around would work up more of an appetite.

The key, said Dean, was getting long-term commitments for guaranteed buyers of eggs at a higher price.

“When you start talking about needing billions of dollars, you have to try every avenue you can,” Dean said.

The exact cost of the switch on egg producers is hard to estimate, in part because some updating of buildings and equipment is done periodically anyway. The cost to people at grocery stores is clearer.

Jayson Lusk, who heads the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University, found that after a mandatory shift on Jan. 1 to cage-free in California, the price of a dozen eggs in the state jumped by 72 cents — or 103% — over the average U.S. price, although the gap could shrink as the market adapts.

At Des Moines’ Gateway Market, which specializes in organic and specialty food, shoppers said they think it’s worth paying more for eggs if it improves lives for hens.

“I feel as though I want the chicken to be happy,” said Mary Skinner, of Des Moines. “How would we feel if we were stuck in a cage?”

Gregg Fath, a Des Moines resident who enjoys eating three eggs for breakfast, said he thinks “people are learning to be more aware.”

Looking years into the future, egg company leaders said they think the demand for cheaper eggs from caged hens will remain roughly 25% or more of the market, but Balk at the Humane Society said he expects it to become a tiny percentage of overall sales.

Balk notes that hundreds of national retailers, restaurants, grocers and food manufacturers either have implemented cage-free requirements or plan to do so within a few years.

“This is the future of every state in America,” he said.

Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

EDITORIAL: A courageous stand for America’s founding principles

Anchorage Daily News, Alaska – February 12, 2022

Feb. 13—The inexplicable war on objective reality sank to a new low recently, when the Republican National Committee sought to redefine the assault on the Capitol that took place Jan. 6, 2021, as “legitimate political discourse.” The attempt at doublespeak came as the RNC overwhelmingly voted to censure two U.S. representatives from its own party, Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, for their part in helping a bipartisan panel get to the bottom of what happened that day in Washington, D.C. In a piece of political spin that boggles the mind, the RNC claimed that by helping investigate the events that day, Cheney and Kinzinger are doing work that “has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.”

To anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the violence perpetrated that day in an effort to overturn the result of a fairly conducted election, the RNC’s statement is absurd. The irresponsible lies and violence-mongering by those seeking to subvert the will of the American people were responsible for a death and many serious injuries among rioters and police alike.

Fortunately, two members of Alaska’s Washington, D.C., delegation have had the decency to stand up to their own party in the name of the continued existence of our republic. “We must not legitimize those actions which resulted in loss of life and we must learn from that horrible event so history does not repeat itself,” wrote Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “As Americans we must acknowledge those tragic events, and we cannot allow a false narrative to be created.”

Rep. Don Young struck a similar note: “I was appalled at the violence and destruction at the Capitol on January 6th,” he wrote on Twitter. “What transpired was criminal, un-American, and cannot be considered legitimate protest.”

Those seeking to defend the RNC’s censure of Cheney and Kinzinger have flaccidly claimed that the “legitimate political discourse” mentioned in the censure resolution referred to those who protested peacefully in Washington D.C., that day. But you can read it yourself: The resolution makes no attempt to distinguish between those who only attended former President Donald Trump’s rally and those who stormed the Capitol, beating police officers, stealing from Congress members’ offices and smearing feces on the walls. More to the point, the Jan. 6 committee isn’t investigating those who abided by the law; its members are trying to determine how and whether the violent attempt at insurrection was organized. Kinzinger and Cheney should be lauded for their part in trying to unravel that issue, not declared persona non grata by their party brass.

After initially declining comment despite repeated requests by the ADN for a statement, Sen. Dan Sullivan offered a later, more muted response to the RNC’s censure resolution, condemning the violence at the Capitol and saying that violence can never be considered legitimate political discourse, but refraining from comment on the party’s action in censuring Cheney and Kinzinger and following up by saying that the important thing is to rein in the Biden administration. Sen. Sullivan should speak out more forcefully, and show the courage of Sen. Murkowski and Rep. Young.

Murkowski and Young, by virtue of their longevity and stature, have earned a reputation for periodically bucking their party on issues like this one. But chalking their stance up simply to their political capital doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a deeper tradition in it, of doing the right thing for Alaska and its people rather than going along to get along. It might serve both of their political fortunes better to be in good with the RNC and its deep-pocketed donors, but who does it serve to undermine the foundation of American democracy?

Even in the depths of partisanship we find ourselves in, there must be some bright lines that can never be crossed — and violently overturning the results of a free and fair election must never be rebranded as legitimate discourse.

CORRECTION: An initial version of this editorial stated Sen. Dan Sullivan had not yet offered comment on the RNC’s resolution; he has done so.

Daily Beast

Trump Owes It All to McConnell’s ‘Disgraceful Dereliction of Duty’

Anthony L Fisher – February 11, 2022

One year ago, the U.S. Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump, who just a couple of weeks earlier had been the President of the United States. Three years from now, he could be that again, thanks to the Republicans who knew better but nonetheless let him off the hook.

The vote was 57-43 in favor of convicting Trump for inciting the Capitol riot, which was the citizen militia portion of Trump’s months-long attempted coup that had begun in earnest when he convinced tens of millions of Americans of the bald-faced lie that a massive, multi-state conspiracy of voter fraud had denied him re-election.

Seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote with every Democrat and independent to hold Trump accountable for his high crimes, and to bar him from ever holding office again—but the effort failed by 10 votes, short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict.

Following the verdict, quite a few senators delivered impassioned remarks on the trial, the failed coup, and the damage Trump’s Big Lie continued to inflict on basic democratic norms.

McConnell Unleashes on ‘Shameful’ Trump—Moments After Voting ‘Not Guilty’

I watched most of them (for work, of course), but only one stood out for me at the time and continues to do so today. It was an impassioned, righteously furious, and enthralling speech.

“January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.

Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president,” the senator began.

“They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth—because he was angry he’d lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty,” the senator continued, laying out just how insane the basic facts about the impeachment really were.

Then the senator made a no–bullshit and succinct case for conviction:

“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”

The senator who delivered this Beltway-meets-Braveheart monologue for the ages was a Republican. And not just any Republican—it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the boss of the congressional GOP.

This was the speech McConnell gave explaining why he voted to acquit Trump, thus leaving the person “practically and morally responsible” for Jan. 6 unpunished, and free to serve as president again.

The TL;DR version is an interpretation (disputed by about as many who support it) which holds that the Senate has no authority to convict a private citizen. If Trump were still president, the argument goes, Mitch would have voted to convict.

Knowing McConnell’s shameless ability to go back on his word and serve the interests of the Republican Party above all else, it’s hard to believe he would have done so unless there was zero chance that he’d be the deciding vote (and probably not even then).

Trump’s acquittal provided McConnell the cover to have his words lambasting Trump and his crimes entered into the congressional record, for posterity. For history.

But in the here and now—one year later—Trump is still the de facto favorite (and there isn’t a close second) for the 2024 GOP nomination.

Worse, the Republican Party on Feb. 4 of this year censured GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their heretical insistence that Jan. 6 was a high crime that deserves a proper investigation, embodied by their participation in the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

The two members of Congress were contributing to the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” said the Republican Party.

And though the GOP quickly clarified that it was not referring to the actual Capitol rioters, but the other very fine people who believe lies the president told them (and which the rest of the GOP leadership was too cowardly to forcefully repudiate.)

The weasel-wording aside, let’s be clear about what the Republicans have done here: they legitimized belief in the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and they tacitly provided cover for those angry enough about the Big Lie to storm the Capitol.

I don’t care if you think Cheney and Kinzinger are self-interested hacks or how much you hate their politics. In this case, they’re doing the right thing.

Mitch McConnell Says He’ll Support Trump in 2024 After Blaming Him for Capitol Riot

Any Republican who would describe the baseless denial of election results and shattering the norm of “peaceful transfer of power” as “legitimate discourse” can no longer credibly claim to value American democracy more than the consolidation of political resources, and, perhaps, “owning the libs.”

Trump’s political career could have been permanently ended a year ago if McConnell and nine other Republicans had voted their consciences to convict.

They could have rebirthed their party, if only they had shown a modicum of principle, and remained steadfast against the ire of MAGA dead-enders.

Instead, the GOP is now the party of permanent Trump. They’ve codified the Big Lie, an attempted coup, and the Jan. 6 riot as part of the “legitimate political discourse.”

And it looks like McConnell has at least some regrets.

He recently took a rare swing at his own party—rebuking the RNC for its censure of Cheney and Kinzinger, and calling the Capitol riot an insurrection committed by a “mob” that used “fear and violence” to intimidate Congress after being “fed lies” by “the president and other powerful people.” But he still doesn’t support the Jan. 6 Commission, making his latest stab at bravery only half-courageous.

McConnell’s post-impeachment speech was a sermon fit for a prosecuting attorney’s closing remarks to the jury. But his words are meaningless, because he kept Trump’s political fortunes alive, and left the former president’s crimes against America unpunished.