We begin today’s roundup with analysis of the Russian invasion and attacks in Ukraine, starting with an op-ed by Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in The Washington Post:
Of course, evil has always taken root under different circumstances. But we can’t push aside that we are witnessing a barbaric effort to redraw borders by brutal force and erase national identity and self-determination with no room for compromise. [...]
Hitler’s rise and aggressions were enabled by the inability to confront him early on. The crocodile ate appeasers one by one. The price to put a stop to his global ambitions was devastating. We can’t afford to repeat the same mistakes that were made eight decades ago. “Never again” means acting before it’s too late. “Never again” means stopping the aggressor before it can cause more death and destruction. “Never again” means not letting fear paralyze us.
Here’s Eliot Cohen’s take on The Atlantic on the way forward:
A broader world order is at stake; so too is a narrower European order. Putin has made no secret of his bitter opposition to NATO and to the independence of former Soviet republics, and it should be expected that after reducing Ukraine, he would attempt something of a similar nature (if with less intensity) in the Baltic states. He has brought war in its starkest form back to a continent that has thrived largely in its absence for nearly three generations. And his war is a threat, too, to the integrity and self-confidence of the world’s liberal democracies, battered as they have been by internal disputes and backsliding abroad.
Bridget Read at The Cut writes about nuclear anxiety:
“That was my awakening, in the moment where that nuclear alert became the most real for me,” [Cynthia Lazaroff, disarmament activist and documentarian] told me on the phone from Hawaii last week. When I asked her how she feels about the looming threat to which she has dedicated her life zooming back into popular conversation, she insisted we should be concerned about nuclear weapons all the time, not just because of recent international conflict the threat had always been pressing. “Nuclear weapons, just by their existence, and by statistics — if we don’t eliminate them, as long as we have them, they’re very likely to be used by accident, miscalculation, or mistake,” she said.
Masha Gessen at The New Yorker on the new Putin symbol of violence:
The new Russian politics of aggression now has a symbol: the letter “Z.” The symbol does not appear to have been conceived in the Kremlin. Rather, it seems to have come to prominence organically, to satisfy some need for an expression of national unity in a time of war—even if Russia continues to claim that there is no war.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait lays out the Putin-Trump relationship:
Trump, of course, was impeached the first time for pressuring Zelenskyy to smear Biden, and his motive was primarily to gain an advantage over his opponent. But he also had clearly absorbed Putin’s idea that Ukraine was a corrupt and undeserving of sovereignty. Trump regularly flummoxed his staff by insisting Ukraine was “horrible, corrupt people,” and “wasn’t a ‘real country,’ that it had always been a part of Russia, and that it was ‘totally corrupt,’” the Washington Post reported. (The element of Russian propaganda here is not the claim that corruption exists in Ukraine, which is true, but the premise that this somehow destroys its claim to sovereignty or justifies subjugation to its far more corrupt neighbor.)
By the end of Trump’s presidency, the distinction between his agenda in Ukraine and the Russian agenda in Ukraine was difficult to discern. In the aftermath of the first impeachment, Rudy Giuliani inherited Manafort’s role as a liaison to the pro-Russian elements in Ukraine’s polity. In his travels through the country, Giuliani linked up with Party of Regions apparatchiks, as well as known Russian intelligence agents, ginning up business proposals and allegations to fling against Biden. Trump’s agents, Russian agents, and pro-Russian Ukrainian apparatchiks were speaking in almost indistinguishable terms.
And on a final note, on International Women’s Day, here is an excellent piece by law professor Melissa Murray on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson:
Much has been made in recent days of the racial and gender diversity that President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would add to the Supreme Court. But there has been surprisingly little discussion of the fact that she would join Justice Amy Coney Barrett as the court’s second working mother. [...]
Will Judge Jackson’s status as a working mother be similarly deployed as the confirmation process takes shape? While Democrats have touted her sterling qualifications and the historic nature of her nomination as the first Black woman to the court, few have leaned into her identity as a mother, as the Republicans did with Justice Barrett. [...]
Whatever the reason, discussion of Judge Jackson’s bona fides as a working mother has been notably absent among Democrats, who have been focusing on the consequential nature of her nomination. But critically, those qualities have also made her a target of the right. Already, Republican leaders have sniped about Mr. Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman, ignoring — or, in the case of Tucker Carlson, challenging — her superlative credentials and record of public service. It will surely get worse as the confirmation process begins in earnest.