We start today with Jeremy Bowen of BBC News reporting from the horrific scene that continues to unfold in Bucha, Ukraine, where the bodies of dead civilians have been found lying in the streets. (Warning: graphic pictures at that BBC link)
Moscow says, without proof or any reliability, that its war aims in central Ukraine have been achieved, and they never included capturing Kyiv.
The truth is that unexpectedly fierce and well organised Ukrainian resistance stopped them outside the capital, and the evidence includes the rusting and twisted wreckage of the column that still lies where it was destroyed on that suburban street. [...]
Young conscripts ran away, begging, local people said, not to be turned over to Ukrainian territorial defence. A man of around 70 who called himself uncle Hrysha, said: "I felt sorry for them. They were so young, 18 to 20, with their whole lives ahead of them."
It looks as if Russians, as they prepared to pull out of Bucha, had no such pity. At least 20 dead men were lying in the street as Ukrainian troops entered the town. Some of them had their hands tied behind their backs. The mayor said they had buried 280 people in mass graves.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker writes that the Ukrainians, themselves, seem to be defining how far NATO/the EU will go in their defense.
In the five weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, the policy response from the West has grown increasingly expansive. A direct military confrontation with Russia, in the form of a NATO-imposed no-fly zone, was ruled out from the start. Everything else now seems to be on the table. From Washington, cash is flowing: $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, including several billion dollars to purchase military equipment. Some four thousand and six hundred Javelin anti-aircraft missiles, more than half the total purchased by the Pentagon in the past decade, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have been sent to Ukraine in the past month. Famously neutral Switzerland and Sweden have strayed from their usual positions; Germany halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a controversial eleven-billion-dollar project. The Central Bank of Russia, whose activities were restricted by an alliance of Western countries last month, is the largest and most significant economic entity ever sanctioned. A status quo that had long tolerated Putin and his oligarchs is showing some signs of shifting. For many weeks, it was taken as an article of faith that no U.S. official would say anything to hint that Washington meant to foment a regime change in Moscow. Then, on March 26th, President Biden travelled to Warsaw and, addressing a crowd of thousands, said, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!”
Ukrainian military success has been one reason for these changes. “Before the war, the Biden Administration was trying to deter it by threatening sanctions,” Daniel Fried, who was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and is now at the Atlantic Council, told me. “They assumed the Russians would be militarily victorious. That assumption is now questionable. It is now an open question as to who wins. Let that sink in for a minute. Russia attacks Ukraine, it’s an open question as to who succeeds. That’s a kind of ‘Oh, shit, really?’ moment.”
Ukraine’s appeals to solidarity have also activated something in Western politicians—in Biden perhaps most of all. Fried had been the Polish desk officer at the State Department in 1989, during the Solidarity movement. He said that, in Biden’s Warsaw speech, he heard clear echoes of Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” address in Berlin. To him, this underscored the differences between Biden and Obama. “All Biden’s points of reference are different,” Fried said. “He was an adult before Vietnam.” But, if this is a hawkish phase, in which escalation is again a possibility, then it isn’t defense contractors or cold warriors in Washington who have defined it. It is the Ukrainians. Every few days, Zelensky has appeared via video link to a standing ovation of Western legislators (in Congress, the U.K. Parliament, the Bundestag) to ask for more material help: more severe sanctions, more financial assistance, more military equipment, a no-fly zone. In these appearances, he is posing a version of the question Ustenko posed to me: Having defined this as a conflict between a democracy and a war criminal, how far are Western politicians prepared to go to help the democracy?
Paul Krugman of The New York Times notes that the Russian defense of the ruble has been much more effective than the Russian military endeavors in Ukraine … but at what cost?
One thing worth noting is that Russia’s economic officials appear to be more competent than its generals. Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank — a role equivalent to that of Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve — is especially well regarded by her peers abroad. Nabiullina reportedly tried to resign after the invasion started, but Putin wouldn’t let her leave.
Unwilling as she may have been to stay in her job, Nabiullina and her colleagues pulled out all the stops to defend the ruble. They raised the key interest rate — more or less equivalent to the federal funds rate in the United States — from 9.5 to 20 percent, to induce people to keep their funds in Russia. They also imposed extensive controls to prevent capital flight: Russians have faced restrictions on moving their money into their foreign bank accounts, and foreign investors have been prohibited from exiting Russian stocks, and more.
But there’s a mystery here. No, it’s not puzzling to see the ruble recover given such drastic measures. The question is why Russia is willing to defend its currency at the expense of all other goals. After all, the draconian measures taken to stabilize the ruble will probably deepen what is already looking like a depression-level slump in Russia’s real economy, brought on by surprisingly wide and effective sanctions imposed by the free world (I think we can resurrect that term, don’t you?), in response to its military aggression.
Russian independent media news outlet Meduza summarizes some heavy investigative reporting by another Russian independent investigative news outlet, Proekt, about Vladimir Putin’s medical history, including an apparent interest in alternative medicines (one of Meduza’s own journalists, Svetlana Reiter, contributed reporting to the project).
During a flower-laying ceremony at the Monument to Minin and Pozharsky on Unity Day in 2012, Putin had a noticeable limp. As Proekt notes, TV broadcasts tried not to show Putin, footage of the event was never posted on the Kremlin’s website, and news agencies were strictly forbidden from mentioning that the president had been limping. By the end of 2012, Putin’s limp had worsened — and because of this all events involving the president were limited to one hour.
It was at this time that the Kremlin first started using pre-recorded videos of Putin’s meetings with his subordinates, Proekt writes. This “canned footage” allowed the president to quietly disappear from public view for periods of time as needed. “As time went by, the number of these disappearances increased. As did the number of his health problems,” Proekt claims. Pre-recorded footage of Putin was rolled out during noted absences in March 2015, August 2017, February 2018, and September 2021.
Proekt’s full investigative report is here. Some of the reporting does read like a bit of urban legend, IMO.
There are a few important national elections taking place in Europe and Asia.
We begin international elections coverage with Gilles Paris of Le Monde reporting on the ghosts of presidents past haunting the upcoming first round of the French national elections.
Some are relatively inoffensive, like the phantom of Charles De Gaulle who haunts every presidential campaign with the punctuality of a comet. It is a prerequisite for all candidates to quote De Gaulle on foreign affairs, the pomp and grandeur of France, liberty, fraternity, or really anything at all. De Gaulle wrote so many books filled with magnificent rhetoric that he is the perfect president to paraphrase. It works even if you’re a far-right candidate (far-right plotters tried to assassinate him on several occasions in the early 1960s). A political contortionist like Eric Zemmour is even able to praise De Gaulle, the hero, and Philippe Pétain the traitor almost in the same sentence.
Other ghosts are less obliging. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) is at the moment the tormentor-in-chief of Conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse. They belong to the same Les Républicains party but they are not in sync. The latter considers herself to be a heir of late president Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), who himself openly disliked his successor Sarkozy, which doesn’t help. Pécresse’s fading hopes of reaching the second round of the election make her situation even more complicated.[...]
Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo is facing another kind of problem. She can’t complain that her ghost remains silent. On the opposite, he is far too chatty. Former Socialist president François Hollande (2012-2017) attended her rally in Limoges last week. At first, his move could have been seen as compassionate, as Hidalgo looks set to achieve the worst result ever in her party ’s history on April 10. But in reality, Hollande seemed mostly interested in talking to the press about what he could do to rebuild the party after her expected defeat.
With Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP party expected to win today’s parliamentary elections, Wojciech Przybylski of POLITICO Europe writes about the growing rift between Warsaw and Budapest.
With Warsaw leading the charge in Europe against Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression, and Budapest doing its best not to pick a side between the West and the Russian president, the once like-minded governments have found themselves on opposite sides of one of the worst crises in recent memory.
Since the ascension of the conservative Law and Justice party in Poland in 2015, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has made common cause with the government in Warsaw. With both under fire for their attacks on the media and judiciary, they formed an ideological bloc — backing each other when Brussels or other European capitals accused them of democratic backsliding.
Together with the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Poland and Hungary had formed what became known as the Visegrád Group of Central European countries, which led to their joint accession to NATO and the EU. But Orbàn hijacked this agenda in 2014, becoming its confrontational ringleader, especially on the divisive subject of migration.
In Pakistan, AlJazeera reports that Prime Minister Imran Khan has survived a no-confidence vote through procedural maneuvering, the president has dismissed Pakistan’s parliament and early elections have been called.
Imran Khan has survived a move to oust him as Pakistan’s prime minister, getting a reprieve when the deputy speaker of Parliament blocked a no-confidence motion as unconstitutional.
Khan, whose fate was not immediately clear, later advised the country’s president to dissolve Parliament, leading to fresh political instability in the nuclear-armed country of 220 million people.
The National Assembly deputy speaker, of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, dismissed the move against Khan on Sunday, saying it went against Article 5 of the Constitution.
Later on Sunday, a statement from the presidency confirmed that the National Assembly had been dissolved which means elections will be held within 90 days.
“The President of Pakistan, Dr Arif Alvi, has approved the advice of the Prime Minister,” a statement from his office said.
Saif Khaled and Hamza Mohamed of AlJazeera are running a live blog of what looks like a hot mess in Islamabad right now.
Nathaniel Sher of The Diplomat writes that with Moscow being bogged down in Ukraine, it appears that Chinese President Xi Jinping “miscalculated” his guarded “support” for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
From the beginning, the Russian military has been bogged down by logistical and intelligence failures. After only four weeks, NATO officials estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, or captured, and some estimates suggest that the war is costing Russia $20 billion per day. As a result of sanctions, some forecast that the Russian economy will face its worst crisis since 1998. The longer the war drags on, the more likely Russia is to become a weaker, more isolated, and less valuable strategic partner to China.
Putin’s mess is Xi’s miscalculation. Russia’s offensive has not only unified the transatlantic alliance, but increased Europe’s commitment to its own defense. Moscow’s bungled invasion could lead Europe to gain more confidence in its defense capabilities, allowing the United States to shift its focus to the Pacific. The gradual drain on Russian forces will hinder its ability to provide Beijing with support in the face of mounting pressure from the United States, undermining the main strategic benefit to Beijing’s partnership with Moscow. [...]
The worst-case scenario for Xi is one in which Putin not only loses the war in Ukraine, but loses his grip on power. While the Russian leader has devoted significant resources to stamp out political opposition at home, the combined humiliation of military defeat and prolonged economic malaise could lead to widespread discontent. As domestic pressure grows, China will have little recourse to stave off a transfer of power in Moscow, even if Xi continues to show diplomatic support. Were the Russian leader to fall, moreover, his “no limits” partnership with Xi would become a relic of history, and the Chinese populace could begin to question its leader’s choice to cozy up to Putin in the first place.
Jack Nicas and Flávia Milhorance report for The New York Times from Rio de Janeiro that LinkedIn was forced to change its policy in Brazil regarding job listings that state preferences for historically disadvantaged groups.
For Brazil, the ad was innocuous. Many Brazilian companies have started to explicitly seek out Black and Indigenous workers to diversify their ranks, a step to reverse the deep inequality that has racked the country since the area was first settled centuries ago.
Then LinkedIn, which is dominant in Brazil, removed the listing, setting off a debate over why a company based in California should be controlling how a country in South America deals with its racist past and present. Over the next month, dozens of large companies protested, federal prosecutors opened inquiries and activists sued.
This past week, LinkedIn reversed its stance. The company, which is owned by Microsoft, said it had learned from the experience in Brazil and changed its global policy to allow job listings that explicitly pursue candidates who are “members of groups historically disadvantaged in hiring.”
I’m reminded a little of World War II when racial segregation was occasionally enforced in some French and English establishments to accommodate the racially segregated American armed forces.
Ben Jacobs of The Atlantic reports that Republicans are in disarray not only over their cocaine-fueled orgies but also with regard to foreign policy, especially the support for Russian President Vladimir Putin by some in the Republican caucus.
The conference, Up From Chaos, was a summit of all the wings of the right that would prefer a more hands-off American response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The organizers were The American Conservative, the paleoconservative publication founded by Pat Buchanan; and American Moment, a newer organization that tries to sell the next generation of the right on its version of national conservatism. “We were acutely worried that the seven years of foreign-policy gains that we made [since Donald Trump launched his campaign] were going to go away,” Saurabh Sharma, one of the conference’s organizers, told me.
The event wasn’t a Putin apologia like those found in some corners of the right. Instead, the phrase of the day seemed to be “Putin is bad, but …” The attendees, who included paleocons, libertarians, and hard-core MAGA acolytes, offered variations on that tune according to their policy preferences: Putin is bad, but we don’t want a nuclear war. Putin is bad, but why should we trust the American foreign-policy establishment? Putin is bad, but the media is in thrall to the U.S. intelligence apparatus. The broad consensus: Putin is bad, but why is that our problem? [...]
The most common object of the attendees’ ire was not the Democrats, but instead the traditional enemy of the isolationist right, neoconservatives. Time and time again, speakers mocked foreign-policy hawks and criticized Republicans who had supported the Iraq War. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was the target of repeated scorn. Perhaps the biggest applause line of the entire conference was delivered by the Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance, who mocked the intelligence of Bill Kristol, the neoconservative pundit and Never Trumper. Donald Trump’s greatest foreign-policy triumph was not so much any of his decisions, but rather that he “broke the neocon Republican orthodoxy,” Dan Bishop, a second-term representative from North Carolina, told the crowd.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley of the Daily Beast report about the hiring and firing memos that Ginni Thomas gave to TFG.
Ever since she became a welcome guest at Trump’s residences, Thomas—an influential and longtime conservative activist, and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—had perfected a proven formula of enthralling and manipulating the president’s emotions and mood. On multiple occasions throughout the Trump era, Thomas would show up in the White House, sometimes for a private meeting or a luncheon with the president. She often came armed with written memos of who she and her allies believed Trump should hire for plum jobs—and who she thought Trump should promptly purge—that she distributed to Trump and other high-ranking government officials.
The fire lists were particularly problematic, as they were frequently based on pure conjecture, rumor, or score-settling, where even steadfastly MAGA aides were targeted for being part of the “Deep State” or some other supposedly anti-Trump coalition, according to people who saw them during the Trump administration. The hire lists were so often filled with infamous bigots and conspiracy theorists, woefully under-qualified names, and obvious close friends of Thomas that several senior Trump aides would laugh at them—that is, until Trump would force his staff to put certain names through the official vetting process, three sources familiar with the matter said.
During the Trump years, these memos would astonish various administration officials, including those working in the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Some of these officials noticed that as the Trump term went on, the Thomas lists would increasingly feature a disproportionate share of names more suited to an OAN guest line-up than any functional government. (To be fair, well before Ginni Thomas became a recurring visitor, Trump would routinely hire people because they had entertained or excited him, via Fox and other cable-news appearances.)
The spouse of a sitting Supreme Court Justice...
Aaron Blake of The Washington Post analyzes polling numbers which indicate a strong distaste that the American public has for the manner in which Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was treated in Senate confirmation hearings by Republicans.
The reviews are in. And not only do Americans support Jackson’s confirmation significantly more than they supported other recent nominees — they also view Republicans’ handling of it about as poorly as they view Democrats’ handling of Kavanaugh, if not worse.[...]
Across both cases, independents viewed the opposition party’s conduct similarly: On Kavanaugh they disapproved of Democrats 58-30, and with Jackson they disapprove of Republicans 54-25.
If there’s a difference between the two confirmations — beyond the public’s support for the nominee — it’s that neither side came out of the Kavanaugh hearings with good reviews. In fact, Republicans’ handling of it was viewed in a similarly negative light as Democrats’. But when it comes to Jackson, Democrats earned more positive reviews (42 percent) than negative ones (34 percent). So this isn’t just a matter of people simply disliking all politicians.
The very important question from there is why people disapproved of the GOP’s handling of Jackson’s hearings. It’s nearly 2-to-1 negative, after all, because many in their own party didn’t approve of their tactics. Just over half (52 percent) of Republicans give the thumbs-up, while 26 percent disapprove.
And now for the University of Michigan football “propaganda” section of the APR featuring Detroit ABC affiliate WXYZ’s Jeanna Trotman and her interview with former San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick at Michigan Stadium, where Kaepernick was made an honorary captain by Michigan head coach (and former 49er HC) Jim Harbaugh for today’s spring game.
Finally today, Michael Wines of The New York Times writes about the public release of the records of the 1950 United States Census records.
Those millions of census forms, painstakingly filled out by hand in ink, were posted online by the National Archives and Records Administration, which by law has kept them private until now. The records, searchable by name and address, offer an intimate look at a nation on the cusp of the modern era — for the merely curious, a glimpse of the life parents or grandparents led, but for historians and genealogists, a once-in-a-decade bonanza of secrets unveiled.
“This is the Super Bowl and the Olympics combined, and it’s only every 10 years — it’s awesome stuff,” Matt Menashes, the executive director of the National Genealogical Society, said in an interview. “What’s so great about these points of data is that it helps you paint a picture — not just relationships, but what society was like.”
The last release of similar data was in 2012, when the National Archives made details of the 1940 census public. The government has imposed a 72-year ban on the release of census records since 1952, when the Census Bureau turned over to the National Archives all the data it had collected since the first census in 1790.
To this point, I have spent about five hours looking for (and finding) records for this 1950 census, which would be the first census that listed my mom and dad. (I found them both … and some of the data further confirmed some of the oral family histories that I’ve heard over the years.)
Everyone have a great day!