We start today with Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz writing for Foreign Affairs wondering if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the beginning of the end for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Together, repression and information control could help prevent Russia’s antiwar protests from catching on. So far, the regime has arrested more than 5,000 people for actively demonstrating against Russia’s invasion, which may deter others from joining. While other Russians may be willing to risk arrest if they think the demonstrations will snowball, censorship makes it difficult for potential protesters to know how many citizens are upset with the war. Most likely, the Putin regime will only further ratchet up repression to deal with a more restive Russian public. Personalist regimes are more likely to use repression in response to protests than are other autocracies, and they are especially likely to do so when engaging in expansionist territorial conflicts (as Putin has with Ukraine). Moreover, many of the Russians fed up with Putin will opt to leave Russia, as some already have, reducing the pressure mounting against the regime. [...]
But there are also good reasons that the tides might turn. Despite the repression, protests have taken place in more than 58 cities across Russia. The early demonstrations are remarkable not just for the bravery that they reflect, but also for the potential that they hold—protests in highly repressive regimes are more likely to be successful than protests in less repressive environments. That is because when people take to the streets even when the costs of doing so are high, it sends a powerful signal to other citizens that their dissent is shared. In this way, these early antiwar protests have the potential to trigger cascading opposition. The fact that Russians view Putin’s war as being unjust and egregious makes it especially likely to prompt widespread backlash. It is moments of acute injustice that have the greatest ability to mobilize people—as when Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after local officials humiliated him and confiscated his wares, launching the Arab Spring in 2011.
The war also has famous and influential domestic opponents—and they are not just known dissidents. Several Russian celebrities have signed letters opposing the war. Russian tennis star Andrei Rublev wrote “no war please” on a TV camera. The Russian head of a delegation at a major UN climate conference apologized for his country's invasion of Ukraine, and the daughter of Putin’s press secretary reportedly posted “no war” on her Instagram account. (She deleted it hours later.) There are even signs that Putin’s cozy oligarchs are getting uncomfortable. Former energy magnate Anatoly Chubais posted a picture of Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader murdered in front of the Kremlin, on his Facebook page. Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska called for peace and negotiations.
For the moment, it looks unlikely that Putin will be put on trial anytime soon. And Khan — and other legal investigators — will be looking at violations by all parties to the conflict. But there’s no doubting that this week’s assault has raised the Russian leader’s exposure to justice, according to legal experts and human rights advocates interviewed by POLITICO.
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To make war crimes charges stick against somebody who was not directly involved, prosecutors need to prove three things: that the accused had effective control over subordinates who were carrying out the crime; that they knew or should have known about the crimes being carried out; and that they did nothing to stop or punish those directly responsible.
With Putin, “the effective control part, which can often be very difficult, is easy,” said Kevin Jon Heller, a professor of international law at the University of Copenhagen. “He has effective control over everyone in the Russian military because he is the commander-in-chief.”
“The real questions … in a specific situation then are … did he know about the crimes? Should he have known about the crimes? And if so, did he do everything that was reasonable [to stop or prosecute them]?” Heller continued.
Svetlana Reiter of the Russian independent media outlet Meduza interviews Russian political scientist and sociologist Grigory Yudin about the overall reactions of Russian society to the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine.
MEDUZA: Is it possible that protests will escalate?
YUDIN: It’s possible, yes. The initial situation was largely unexpected, and in fact studies showed that people in Russia weren’t interested in the topic of Ukraine. Hence the certainty that there wouldn’t be any war.
The danger here is that, when you’re not interested in something, then after a shocking event you’re ready to accept any convenient interpretation on offer. Which is exactly what happened — many people are clinging to the most immediate explanation, courtesy of
government propaganda. That’s the most comfortable choice: everyone wants to avoid problems, especially in wartime.
But already there’s a factor that introduces dissonance into the picture — it’s obvious that the blitzkrieg failed. It’s becoming harder and harder to pretend that all of this is happening somewhere far away and will soon be over — on the contrary, it’s already an obviously significant military conflict. Lots of people on the Russian side have already been killed or wounded, with many more to come. Russians have many relatives in Ukraine, and, according to numerous reports, the Russian air force has begun using cluster bombs, which means a lot of civilian deaths...
Apparently, Ms. Osipova is 81 years old and not 76.
Renée Graham of The Boston Globe connects the struggle for democracy in Ukraine with the continuing struggle for democracy here in the United States.
I won’t characterize this war for Ukraine as democracy’s “reckoning,” since that word has the shelf life of a trending hashtag. Yet this seminal moment reiterates that no nation can afford to be smug about the sanctity of its freedom. In America, the invaders have never needed to amass at our borders. They’ve always been in our neighborhoods and workplaces. They’ve been elected to Congress and state legislatures. They’ve occupied the White House. And whether they stormed the US Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, are complicit in that day’s deadly violence, or support bills and laws that gut the constitutional right to vote, they are just as dangerous to our democracy as Putin’s missiles are to Ukraine’s.
Of course, Putin defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as people with “political demands,” which sounds an awful lot like the Republican National Committee’s recent characterization of that day’s horrors as “legitimate political discourse.” Probably not a coincidence, and not the last anti-democratic echo between Putin’s Russia and America’s Republicans.
In Ukraine, grandmothers are learning to make Molotov cocktails and accountants have Kalashnikov rifles slung on their shoulders. Anyone who has ever placed their bodies in front of water cannons, dogs, bullets, or a phalanx of police stands with every Ukrainian staring down Putin’s tanks. As Fannie Lou Hamer, the great civil rights activist, once said, “If I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.”
John M. Donnelly of Roll Call writes that the United States needs to be prepared to assist with an insurgency campaign waged within Ukrainian borders.
Ukraine has all the elements that contribute to a successful insurgency, Vickers said: external support, a motivated population, a mobilized force of military personnel and citizen militias, plus neighboring territory in Eastern Europe for resupply, training, recovery and safe haven.
“Ukraine has all the conditions going for it,” said Vickers, who also served in senior Pentagon positions in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
But the United States needs to take certain steps "right now" to get ready for this shadow war, said Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer who was deputy director of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff before becoming an analyst at CSIS.
The U.S. government must quickly develop more intelligence sources inside Ukraine and identify who will be the leaders of a possible insurgency, and they may not come from the ranks of Ukraine’s military, Harding told the CSIS audience.
Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer report for The New York Times about the potential of a criminal case against former president Donald Trump that is being investigated by the Jan. 6 Committee.
In a court filing in a civil case in California, the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had accumulated evidence demonstrating that Mr. Trump, the conservative lawyer John Eastman and other allies could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people.
The filing also said the men might have broken a common law statute against fraud through Mr. Trump’s repeated lies that the election had been stolen.[...]
The committee added information from its more than 550 interviews with state officials, Justice Department officials and top aides to Mr. Trump, among others. It said, for example, that Jason Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior campaign adviser, had said in a deposition to the committee that Mr. Trump had been told soon after Election Day by a campaign data expert “in pretty blunt terms” that he was going to lose, suggesting that Mr. Trump was well aware that his months of assertions about a stolen election were false.
The evidence gathered by the committee “provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated” the obstruction count, the filing, written by Douglas N. Letter, the general counsel of the House, said, adding: “The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post wonders how some GOP lawmakers and foreign policy experts will reconcile their pro-Ukraine/pro-Trump positioning.
A parade of GOP lawmakers has attempted the impossible: to clamber onto the pro-Ukraine, pro-democracy bandwagon without repudiating Russia’s favorite enabler and ongoing PR helper, former president Donald Trump. The majority of Republicans — from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — have twisted themselves into pretzels. They denigrate President Biden for weakness (despite orchestrating the most robust sanctions in history) while refusing to acknowledge Trump’s role (and thereby their own complicity) in enabling Putin, sowing dissension in NATO and undermining Ukraine. (Certainly, Senate Republicans must recall acquitting Trump for extorting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by threatening to withhold vital military aid.)
The same conundrum afflicts a segment of Republican foreign policy pundits who heretofore have not broken with Trump. Take the Vandenberg Coalition, a who’s who of GOP national security experts that includes both consistent opponents of Trump and his Putin appeasement, and many who have never spoken an ill word about the former president. (Some even joined the administration.) The coalition put out a tough-minded statement, declaring that “we must reject the moral equivalency that refuses to distinguish between aggressor and victim, and the isolationist arguments that the United States has no interest in resisting aggression in Europe.”
Great! So does that mean they’ve all now broken with Trump and his undermining of NATO, and they would never support Trump for president, let alone serve in a (God forbid) second Trump administration? Well, oddly, it’s not easy to get those who didn’t break with Trump years ago to make that logical, consistent argument.
Christina M. Greer of The Grio reviews President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address.
Biden wants to unify his “fellow Americans” and the divisions in our party system. That may be a touch naïve for this president. It appears the president truly wants Congress to return to a functioning bipartisan body filled with public servants who want to preserve democracy and work on behalf of all Americans. Sadly, the right-wing faction of the Republican Party has taken control of the party. It was dismaying to see the number of Republicans who refused to stand when President Biden proposed policies that all elected officials should agree upon—gun safety, voting rights and rights for immigrant and LGBTQ+ Americans. It should be noted that Republicans did stand when Biden urged Congress to continue to fund the police. Take that as you will, but I will be looking forward to the type of legislation Congress puts forth when it comes to policing, addressing crime, and mass incarceration, and I pray they will avoid a return to the draconian policies of the mid-1990s.
First things first: I don’t want to put too much stock in a State of the Union speech. It is one part pomp and circumstance where elected members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the joint chiefs of staff in their military regalia and a few select guests convene to hear the president’s policy platform. The policy platform then transforms into a budget prescription for the president and Congress to enact said policies. Biden has always stated that a budget is a moral document, so it should come as no surprise that Biden mentioned our commitment to helping Ukraine and promoting democracy abroad as well as fighting to pass the American Rescue Plan early in his speech.
Biden mentioned so many significant policy positions in his first State of the Union. What I’ll be paying attention to are the actions of Congress in the subsequent days, weeks and months as Democrats try to pass legislation on issues pertaining to cancer funding, veteran benefits, job creation, supporting the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, and universal background checks for gun ownership.
While I liked Ms. Greer’s emphasis on the necessity of Congress to pass legislation in order for Biden’s agenda to be fulfilled as much as possible, I have no idea what possessed her to say that Vice President Kamala Harris “has been relatively absent from the public eye.” Perhaps she was talking specifically about immigration issues but she knows full well that VP Harris was quite visible at the Munich Security Conference, just to give one example.
Congressional bureau chief for The Washington Post Paul Kane jumped into a time machine and went back six years and found Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson being interviewed for a Supreme Court vacancy by the President; a vacancy for which current-U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland, was nominated.
“I was hoping that he would pick an African American woman,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) told Roll Call at the time.
That selection turned into one of the biggest defeats Obama suffered: The Republican majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), refused to allow Garland to even be considered, Republicans rallied around the blockade to gin up their conservative base, and Democrats put up no fight for their nominee.[...]
Once Democrats had the Senate majority, Garland easily won confirmation as attorney general and Biden quickly nominated Jackson to replace him on the appellate court, winning over three GOP votes and every member of the Democratic caucus. That nomination served as a warm-up for the Supreme Court hearings slated for later this month, giving her a level of gravitas she lacked six years ago as a U.S. District Court judge.
In Obama’s view, these events confirmed how he approached that Scalia vacancy back in 2016. He met with Jackson, just 45 at the time, as part of his interview process to choose a nominee, according to member of Obama’s inner circle who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
I do remember that there was intense discussion of selecting a black woman as a Supreme Court nominee to replace Judge Scalia but the judge that I remembered being most discussed at the time was Leah Ward Sears, former Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court; a name that came up in one Atlanta-based Black newspaper for the current open seat.
FWIW, I think that Senator Durbin is correct that McConnell was determined not to fill that seat.
Amanda Coakley of Al Jazeera reports about the students of color now being subjected to racism as they attempt to leave Ukraine.
Students from countries such as India, Nigeria, and Morocco have helped to make Kharkiv a vibrant university city and their fees have contributed to the local economy. Many have stayed in Ukraine after graduating and taken jobs in the country’s hospitals and businesses.
But some international students said their schools did not offer them assistance to leave the country as Russian forces launched the invasion. In an email seen by Al Jazeera, dated February 24, the day of the invasion, students at one university received an email notifying them that classes would move online. Two days later, students at the same institution received an email announcing a “vacation” from February 28 to March 12.
“No one helped us to leave or coordinated anything, we were just left on our own,” said Deborah, a 19-year-old student from northern Nigeria. She asked Al Jazeera not to use her real name.
“My friends went to the Polish border and were treated awfully by the Ukrainian guards. It wasn’t just Black people like me; it was anyone who wasn’t white,” she added.
Finally today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian of The Philadelphia Inquirer decodes a few words and phrases used in media coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The goal of “civilization” has long been a justification for war and colonialism. But in most cases, words like civilized and European are a stand-in for white. Cobiella doesn’t even bother with the substitutions.
At the same time, terms like impoverished and conflict raging, and the name-checking of specific Middle Eastern countries, are all ways to keep the suffering of nonwhite people at arm’s length. When they die — through either war or poverty (which itself is a kind of war visited upon a people) — those deaths somehow don’t count for as much.
Moreover, comments like these, which weaponize the first-person plural, reinforce the “we” who are telling the story: “like us,” “live next door,” “look like ours.” They center whiteness and push its supremacy at every stage of the narrative — all of which affects how viewers feel about the conflict itself.
Everyone have a great day!