It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, February 21, 2022
Stunning sea of 'snow monsters' take over volcanic mountainside in Japan By Zachary Rosenthal, Accuweather.com Visitors walk before illuminated "Juhyo," trees covered with frozen snow, during a night event at the Zao hot springs ski resort in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. Also called "snow monsters," the Juhyo phenomenon happens when small particles of crystallized ice and snow strike coniferous trees under the strong winter winds. File Photo by Franck Robichon/EPA-EFE
Feb 21 -- At an elevation of more than 6,000 feet near the top of a volcano exists a land of snow monsters, a mountainside that is home to fleeting figures that come each winter and then fade along with the cold weather as spring approaches.
It might sound like material for a scary children's book, but these monsters are nothing to fear -- they're just one of nature's quirky and unique creations that materialize in wintertime.
On the summit of the volcanic Mount Zao in Japan, about 220 miles north of Tokyo, an unusual natural phenomenon gives birth to snowy, monster-like figures every year.
The strange occurrence, which the Japanese call "Juhyo," leads to the creation of thousands of "snow monsters" that rest on the mountain during the winter.
Those who come to see the monsters can safely walk near them, ski or snowboard alongside the creatures, or view them from the comfort of a cable car while enjoying stunning views of Japan.
The snow monsters can look even cooler at night, as some of the monsters are illuminated in a variety of flashy colors. Drone footage captured recently from above shows a frozen sea of snow monsters festooning the mountainside.
According to reporting from The Atlantic, the seemingly mystical occurrence can be explained by the unique mechanics of a few different weather conditions that all come together in just the right way.
The snow monsters are created through the repeated process of high winds blowing snow onto rime ice that then binds to trees and tree branches, creating snow clumps that appear monster-like.
Strong high winds also blow water from a nearby lake toward the mountainside, and the water droplets freeze on the branches. Also, fresh snow can fall and also bind to the ice. This process happens over and over throughout the winter.
Much like a snowflake itself, the chaotic process that forms the monsters ensures that no two snow monsters are entirely identical.
The unusual snow creatures are considered by many to be one of Japan's best winter attractions. Thousands of tourists travel across Japan each year to see the so-called snow monsters, which typically are around from the end of January through mid-March.
TOURIST HAVEN
Dominican Republic starts building border wall with Haiti
Mon, February 21, 2022 The Dominican Republic on Sunday began constructing a wall that will cover about half of its 244-mile border with Haiti.
The wall is an effort to stop the smuggling of goods, weapons and drugs as well as illegal migration from Haiti, according to Reuters.
"The benefit for both nations will be of great importance," Dominican President Luis Abinader said of the wall before officially beginning the construction efforts, Reuters reported.
The president started the project just before the anniversary of the Dominican Republic's independence from Haiti on Feb. 27, 1844. He noted that the first part of the wall should be finished within nine months, the news service added.
Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the Americas and the Dominican Republic's only land neighbor, has been riddled with crime and scandal following the assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse.
Earlier this month, investigators and a judge alleged that Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry was involved in the assassination. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic has seen recent success as a Caribbean tourist destination. Given the contrast of the two countries, many Haitians have traveled to the Dominican Republic seeking work.
As of the most recent immigration survey, which took place in 2018, 500,000 Haitians along with tens of thousands of their descendents lived in the Dominican Republic, which has a total population of around 11 million people, Reuters noted.
‘It’s a powerful feeling’: the Indigenous American tribe helping to bring back buffalo
Matt Krupnick in Wolakota Buffalo Range, South Dakota Sun, February 20, 2022, 4:00 AM·6 min read
A trio of bison has gathered around a fourth animal’s carcass, and Jimmy Doyle is worried.
“I really hope we’re not on the brink of some disease outbreak,” said Doyle, who manages the Wolakota Buffalo Range here in a remote corner of south-western South Dakota in one of the country’s poorest counties. The living bison sidle away as Doyle inspects the carcass, which is little more than skin and bones after coyotes have scavenged it.
“If you don’t catch them immediately after they’ve died, it’s pretty hard to say what happened,” he said.
So far, at least, the Wolakota herd has avoided outbreaks as it pursues its aim of becoming the largest Indigenous American-owned bison herd. In the two years since the Rosebud Sioux tribe started collecting the animals on the 28,000-acre range in the South Dakota hills, the herd has swelled to 750 bison. The tribe plans to reach its goal of 1,200 within the year.
“I thought we had an aggressive timeline on it, but the thing’s gotten a lot of support,” said Clay Colombe, CEO of the Rosebud tribe’s economic development agency. “It’s been a snowball in a good way.”
With their eyes on solving food shortages and financial shortfalls, restoring ecosystems and bringing back an important cultural component, dozens of indigenous tribes have been growing bison herds. Tribes manage at least 55 herds across 19 states, said Troy Heinert, executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
The pandemic, which has hit tribes particularly hard, added to the urgency of bison restoration, said Heinert, who is also the minority leader in the South Dakota state senate. The first animal harvested by Wolakota helped feed homeless residents of the Rosebud Sioux reservation.
“It did highlight the fact that many of our areas on tribal lands do have some kind of food insecurity,” he said. “When trucks stopped coming in, it was rural and reservation communities that got hit hardest. Our people don’t have the ability to travel long distances to find new food sources.”
Millions of bison, also referred to as the buffalo although they are different animals, once roamed the US. Photograph: CampPhoto/Getty Images
Although the words are used interchangeably, bison and buffalo are different animals. Bison – named the US’s national mammal in 2016 – are found in North America and Europe, while buffalo are native to Asia and Africa.
“I used to be a stickler for calling them bison, but I’ve heard them called buffalo a lot around here,” said Doyle, who is also a wildlife biologist. “I feel like it rolls off the tongue more easily, and it’s just fun to say.”
Millions of bison once roamed the US, but they were hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th century, partly to suppress Indigenous Americans as they were forced on to reservations. In many areas, bison were replaced by cattle, which overgrazed the western US and killed off native vegetation.
Indigenous American leaders are hoping Congress will help tribes bring back the bison. The Indian Buffalo Management Act, modeled after a bill that provided federal help to fishing tribes, was passed by the House in December and is awaiting Senate approval.
“For Indian tribes, the restoration of buffalo to tribal lands signifies much more than simply conservation of the national mammal,” said Ervin Carlson, president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, at a House hearing last year. “Tribes enter buffalo restoration efforts to counteract the near extinction of buffalo that was analogous to the tragic history of American Indians in this country.”
Not all the tribes that would benefit from the federal funds are in places where buffalo previously roamed. The Alutiiq tribe on Alaska’s Kodiak Island has been raising bison since 2017 to combat food insecurity. The tribe has nearly 90 animals – including three bulls from Yellowstone national park that were sent part of the way via a specially outfitted FedEx plane – and expects to reach at least 150 this year, said herd manager Melissa Berns.
“People are excited to be able to harvest right in our own back yard,” she said. “It’s clean meat and we know exactly where it came from.”
While food security is most often cited as the reason for the recent interest in bison, tribes also hope that returning bison to the land will restore ecological balance. At Wolakota, for instance, bison have been eating the yucca plants that became plentiful after native grasses disappeared, tearing them up by the roots and allowing grasses to return. The grass regeneration increases carbon capture.
The bison also is tightly connected to the culture of Great Plains tribes such as the Sioux. The animals provided food, tools and shelter for indigenous people, and some tribes consider them to be family.
“It’s a powerful feeling bringing our relatives home,” said TJ Heinert, Troy’s 27-year-old son who lives on the Wolakota range with his family and helps manage it. On a recent winter morning he was dressed in camouflage as he prepared to hunt coyotes as part of a tribal benefit for his mother, who is recovering from cancer surgery.
“If our buffalo nation is healthy, we’re healthy,” he said.
It takes a lot of work to keep that buffalo nation healthy. Doyle and TJ spend hours each day crawling over dirt roads that test the suspension on their trucks.
“It’s bumpy out here,” Doyle said as he navigated his truck through rolling hills dotted with running coyotes. “It will really rattle your kidneys if you spend a full day bumping around.”
Much of the past two years has included replacing 40 miles of fences to keep neighboring cattle ranchers happy. Another 40 miles will be replaced or added this year. In the winter, employees must constantly chop up frozen watering holes with axes to keep the animals hydrated. About once a year the bison need to be vaccinated against an array of diseases and the females checked for pregnancy.
As with grass-fed cattle, the bison are herded from one pasture to another to prevent overgrazing. On a recent day, nearly all the animals were confined to a 2,000-acre pasture, except for a few “ornery” bulls that Doyle said had been reluctant to move with the rest of the herd and were left behind.
“We’re trying to strike a balance of letting the buffalo express their natural behaviors, making sure they have plenty of room to roam,” Doyle said as he drove toward a group of about two dozen bison, “and being able to manage where they’re grazing so we can make sure we’re still improving the range health and habitat quality for other wildlife.”
With millions of dollars donated to the project in the past two years, the Wolakota herd has grown quickly. That growth has been aided by donated animals from at least nine sources, most of them federal wildlife refuges and national parks. Doyle expected to bring in 60 additional bison from Montana in the coming days.
“I think the rapid growth of this project is a sign of how much support there is for projects like this,” said Dennis Jorgensen, who coordinates the World Wildlife Federation’s bison initiative and has helped Wolakota get off the ground. “I really think there’s an energy among the American people to return bison to the native people.”
Scientists study a 'hot Jupiter' exoplanet's dark side in detail for the first time
Astronomers have mapped the atmospheres of exoplanets for a while, but a good look at their night sides has proven elusive — until today. An MIT-led study has provided the first detailed look at a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet's dark side by mapping WASP-121b's altitude-based temperatures and water presence levels. As the distant planet (850 light-years away) is tidally locked to its host star, the differences from the bright side couldn't be starker.
The planet's dark side contributes to an extremely violent water cycle. Where the daytime side tears water apart with temperatures beyond 4,940F, the nighttime is cool enough ('just' 2,780F at most) to recombine them into water. The result flings water atoms around the planet at over 11,000MPH. That dark side is also cool enough to have clouds of iron and corundum (a mineral in rubies and sapphires), and you might see rain made of liquid gems and titanium as vapor from the day side cools down.
The researchers collected the data using spectroscopy from the Hubble Space Telescope for two orbits in 2018 and 2019. Many scientists have used this method to study the bright sides of exoplanets, but the dark side observations required detecting minuscule changes in the spectral line indicating water vapor. That line helped the scientists create temperature maps, and the team sent those maps through models to help identify likely chemicals.
This represents the first detailed study of an exoplanet's global atmosphere, according to MIT. That comprehensive look should help explain where hot Jupiters like WASP-121b can form. And while a jovian world such as this is clearly too dangerous for humans, more thorough examinations of exoplanet atmospheres could help when looking for truly habitable planets.
CURISOR AND CURISOR ... China denies rocket set for moon crash was from 2014 Chinese mission
The moon is seen during a partial lunar eclipse in Shanghai
Mon, February 21, 2022,
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's foreign ministry on Monday denied a U.S. report that a spent rocket booster forecast to crash on the far side of the moon next month was debris from a Chinese lunar mission in 2014.
The rocket booster, expected to crash on the moon on March 4, was initially identified by an independent researcher as a used Falcon rocket stage from Elon Musk's SpaceX.
However, earlier this month the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said its analysis showed that the object was likely to be the booster rocket from China's Chang'e 5-T1 mission launched in 2014.
China launched the uncrewed Chang'e 5-T1 spacecraft to the moon in October 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket, which has three stages.
The mission was to test the ability of the spacecraft's capsule to re-enter Earth's atmosphere. The capsule landed back on Earth that same month.
"According to China's monitoring, the Chang'e 5 (rocket) has safely entered Earth's atmosphere, and has completely burned," said Wang Wenbin, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, when asked by reporters if the object was from the Chinese mission.
The near decade-long voyage of the suspected rocket booster has re-ignited discussion about space debris and who is legally responsible for tracking junk floating outside the Earth's atmosphere.
"China follows international law for development of space affairs, and will safeguard the long-term development of outer space activities and conduct wider consultations with relevant sides," Wang said.
(Reporting by Emily Chow and Ryan Woo, Editing by William Maclean)
Ahead of lunar rocket crash, astronomers call for better space debris tracking China launches the Chang'e-5 T1 in October 2014 on a Long March rocket.
Photo by CNSA
ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 21 (UPI) -- A mixup among leading astronomers about a rocket that will crash into the moon on March 4 has led to calls for better debris tracking of Deep Space manufactured objects.
Independent astronomer Bill Gray, of Maine, one of few astronomers who track human-made objects in Deep Space, discovered in January that a section of a discarded rocket would crash into the moon.
Due to earlier miscalculations and a general lack of data available, he thought the object was a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage that launched the U.S.'s Deep Space Climate Observatory, in early 2015.
But later, he and others in the astronomy community realized the accidental moon collider is part of a Chinese Long March rocket that sent the Chang'e-5 T1 lunar test probe into space in 2014.
A Chinese Long March 3 rocket launches from China in 2019. Photo courtesy of CNSA
"As far as I know, I'm the only one keeping track of these objects, using observations made by the asteroid tracking community," Gray told UPI in an interview.
Most satellites orbit the Earth in a low orbit about 600 miles up, including the International Space Station. Many others orbit within about 22,000 miles from Earth, known as geostationary.
But Gray tracks a few dozen pieces of space trash that fly in very high orbits, closer to the moon, which is 238,900 miles from Earth.
"In the past, everyone has been rather careless about where high-orbiting debris went," Gray said. He wrote software known as Project Pluto to track such objects, which astronomers use as part of their hunt for near-Earth asteroids that could pose a threat.
But Gray said new Deep Space missions to the moon and Mars make it more important to know where such items are headed.
Gray's initial suggestion that SpaceX was the originator prompted media around the world to report on his finding. Students at the University of Arizona studied the composition of the object, and confirmed it matched Chinese rockets, not Falcon 9.
After he corrected himself, some accused him and the media of being unfair to SpaceX.
Gray suggests a new organization be established to track such debris, and that nations agree to require accurate data for any Deep Space launches -- if not requiring such missions ensure that space debris is disposed of safely somehow.
As it is, Gray said the object probably won't cause significant damage on the moon, but it may create a crater about the size of a tractor-trailer truck in diameter when it hits around 7:25 a.m. EST on March 4.
The impact won't be visible from Earth due to the curvature of the moon, but satellites may observe the impact crater afterward.
Other astronomers have followed the moon collision predictions as they unfolded with interest, including Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.
"Really, we should know where our space junk is, right? There's a due diligence factor here that should apply," McDowell, who studies satellite tracking data and works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, told UPI in an interview.
But like others, McDowell focuses mostly on low-Earth orbit where the vast majority of satellites are. He said Deep Space is like the Wild West of space tracking, and no one is really funded to track such objects. Radar on Earth isn't strong enough to track such debris, so telescopes are required.
Debris close to the moon is even harder to track because calculations of how lunar gravity influences an orbit aren't certain to be accurate without radio telemetry, and most debris isn't sending signals, he said.
"Someone should do it, particularly with astronauts heading to the moon again," he said. "I think it would be better if NASA were given the job, rather than the Space Force, because it will be important for civil and military missions in the future."
The International Space Station is pictured from the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour during a flyaround of the orbiting lab
Putin Orders Troops to Ukraine After Shocking Declaration
Barbie Latza Nadeau, Allison Quinn, Noor Ibrahim Mon, February 21, 2022 SERGEY BOBOK
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian “peacekeeping” troops to the pro-Kremlin regions of Luhansk and Donetsk after unilaterally declaring that the two chunks of Eastern Ukraine should be considered independent states.
The dramatic escalation, which many fear could lead to all-out war, followed an address to his nation on Monday, in which the Russian president formally announced “the immediate recognition” of the pro-Kremlin regions of Luhansk and Donetsk—which stretch over 6,500 miles—as independent of Ukraine.
In a decree released shortly after his speech, the president ordered Russia's defense ministry to “ensure ….. implementation by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of functions to maintain peace on the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.”
Before his formal recognition of the break-away states, Putin had spent the better part of his address lambasting Ukraine, NATO, and the U.S. for failing to address “security threats” raised by the Kremlin in recent months. He baselessly accused Ukrainian forces of perpetuating “genocide” and blamed Kyiv for any future “continuation of bloodshed” in those regions.
“If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia,” the Russian leader said. He undermined Ukraine as a country that has “never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” accused the U.S. of “blackmailing” Russia with threats of sanctions, and warned of Western efforts “to try to convince us over and over again that NATO is a peace-loving and purely defensive alliance,” adding, “we know the real value of such words.”
Though Putin did not directly address growing fears that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine, he appeared to be laying the groundwork for war by characterizing a potential Russian military offensive as an act of self-defense. Moscow “has every right to take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security,” he said. That is exactly what we will do.”
The move follows a spectacularly bizarre meeting by Russia’s Security Council, where Putin appeared like a mob boss testing his underlings, as officials, one after another, spoke out in favor of recognizing the self-proclaimed republics.
It was another grotesque spectacle on a day when the drum beats of war grew deafening. The aggressive and totally unjustified territorial claim followed a series of apparent false-flag operations where the Russians tried to blame Ukrainian forces for a number of attacks.
The Russian military claimed that five so-called “saboteurs” were assassinated early Monday after crossing into Russia from Ukraine.
The report mirrors almost exactly what the Biden administration warned could be “false flags” or trigger points that Russia will respond to as a pretext to launch its invasion.
“As a result of clashes, five people who violated the Russian border from a group of saboteurs were killed,” the Russian military said in a statement, according to Reuters. No Russians died in the alleged border infraction. Russia also said Ukraine had destroyed a border outpost used by the FSB (Federal Security Service) in early morning shelling.
Russia has also claimed in recent days that Ukrainian forces are staging attacks on Luhansk and Donetsk.
Ukraine has denied any such incursion or attacks took place. The Minister of Foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, took to Twitter Monday to dismiss the claims with big red ‘X’s denying an attack on Donetsk or Luhansk, or that it sent saboteurs over the Russian border, or that it shelled Russian territory or border crossings.
After the latest round of supposed Ukrainian aggression, the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics published video appeals pleading with Putin to recognize their independence, as they claimed Ukrainian forces were preparing to attack.
Despite a flurry of last-minute attempts at diplomacy—including talk of a summit between presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin—all hell seems soon to break loose in Ukraine.
Monday, Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan warned that Russia’s imminent attack on Ukraine will be “extremely violent” and that it could begin literally at any moment.
“We believe that any military operation of this size, scope and magnitude of what we believe the Russians are planning will be extremely violent,” he told NBC Today show on a frenzied circuit of morning TV on President’s Day. “It will cost the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and military personnel alike.”
He told the network that new intelligence garnered in recent days suggest “an even greater form of brutality because this will not simply be some conventional war between two armies.” He went on to say Russia will target the Ukrainian people “to repress them, to crush them, to harm them.”
He then appeared on ABC Good Morning America, telling them that “all signs look like President Putin and the Russians are proceeding with a plan to execute a major military invasion of Ukraine.” That plan was bolstered over the weekend with Russian military hardware painted with an ominous white “Z” lettering rolling toward strategic points along the Ukrainian frontier. “We have seen just in the last 24 hours further moves of Russian units to the border with no other good explanation other than they’re getting in position to attack.”
Over the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron invited Biden and Putin to a summit, which Biden signaled he would attend on the condition that Russian not invade Ukraine, but the Kremlin called reports of any such meeting “premature.”
As Sullivan reiterated that any attack on Ukraine would be met with the “full force of American and Allied might,” unsubstantiated news reports of ceasefire infractions along the border continue unabated. Video posted on Twitter showed a fuel station burning on the front line in Eastern Ukraine as civilians fled against a backdrop of gunfire. The European Union, which will feel the impact of an eventual war first-hand, approved an emergency package with $1.36 billion to support Ukraine through loans, according to a statement by the European Union Council released Monday. “It intends to provide swift support in a situation of acute crisis and to strengthen Ukraine’s resilience.”
Russia orders troops into eastern Ukraine
Nabih Bulos Mon, February 21, 2022 A temporary refugee shelter in Taganrog, Russia, on Monday. (Associated Press)
In an almost-hourlong address that alternated between furious anti-Western rhetoric and the excoriation of Ukraine as a puppet nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday recognized two Ukrainian breakaway republics as independent, a move certain to further incite animosities with the West and escalate fears of an invasion that could ignite fighting reminiscent of World War II and redraw the map of Eastern Europe.
Putin's speech to the Russian people drew swift rebuke and condemnation from Washington and across European capitals. President Biden and the European Union announced economic sanctions aimed at cutting trade and business with the breakaway enclaves. By day's end, with Moscow ordering troops into the republics, it appeared diplomacy was failing and the region was veering inexorably toward war.
Sitting back in his chair behind a wooden desk equipped with a bank of telephones and a computer, Putin began a speech that detailed Ukraine’s origins and its territorial evolution across history. He said, in essence, Ukraine was a Bolshevik-constructed amalgam created entirely by Russia. "Ukraine was never a true nation," he said.
In his telling, Ukraine had now become a Western puppet, a corruption-riddled government that has delivered only "bankruptcy in a country that produced rockets and space technology" back when the country was one of the Soviet Union's republics. The blame, he said, lay with Western organizations and governments that had effectively plundered the country's resources and left the state with no power. "There's just no independent Ukrainian state," he said.
Putin also touched on Ukraine’s geopolitical importance and was adamant that if Ukraine was ever granted NATO membership it would be a "direct threat" to Russia. He recited with growing fury — as if a speech out of the Cold War — the list of countries that had joined NATO and were now close enough to Russia's border to present a danger. He dismissed assurances that Ukraine’s membership was a far-away prospect, if it happened at all.
“OK, not tomorrow, but what about after tomorrow?” he said.
“What does that change for the change for the historical prospects? Nothing.”
For those reasons, he said, "I consider it necessary to make a long overdue decision: to immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic," Putin said, using the official name of the two Russian-created enclaves. He asked Russia's Federal Assembly to support the decision, and ratify the treaties "of friendship" and — critically — "mutual assistance" with both republics.
"And from those who seized and hold power in Kyiv, we demand an immediate cessation of hostilities," he said. "Otherwise, all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be fully and wholly on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine."
Putin watched as separatist leaders Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik signed the decree. Putin then — with a slight smirk — scribbled his signature on the papers.
Waves of reproach and outrage came quickly, especially among European leaders for whom Putin’s words invoked the ghosts of some of the continent’s most bloody episodes, from World War II to the Balkans wars of barely a single generation ago.
And U.S. officials, who have for weeks been predicting such actions of conquest from Putin, announced they were imposing new sanctions designed to inflict pain on anyone attempting to do business with the enclaves — although it was unclear how many American businesspeople are investing in the region. The sanctions are more limited than measures the U.S. and Europe have been threatening if Putin invaded Ukraine.
While Biden administration officials huddled in consultations, the president spent more than a half-hour on the telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the White House said, reassuring him of U.S. support. Zelensky confirmed the call and said he and Biden discussed "the events of the last hours" and that he'd also taken a call from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
"Putin’s address tonight, together with the military forces around Ukraine, represents the most outrageous rejection of the rules based order for European peace we’ve seen since WWII," Henry Bolton, a British international security expert and former politician, said on Twitter. "He’s threatened Ukraine’s right to exist and may well fabricate the excuse for a full invasion."
In Washington, where the cause of Ukrainian sovereignty has attracted rare bipartisan support, a group of lawmakers who attended last week's critical Munich security conference vowed unity and resolve in opposing "Russian aggression."
"No matter what happens in the coming days, we must assure that the dictator Putin and his corrupt oligarchs pay a devastating price for their decisions,” the group said in a statement.
The independence declaration could have massive consequences: The separatists claim all the Donbas region as territory for their republics. But they control only part of it. If they intend to take the full territory with Russian help, it would lead to full-on clashes between Ukrainian and Russian troops, setting the stage for an escalation sure to embroil Western nations.
Putin's announcement came after a meeting with his security council, which urged him to demand independence for the republics. The meeting followed Russia’s assertion that Ukrainian army units had breached its border Monday, another in a series of claims the West fears will provide Russia with a supposed justification for an invasion of its neighbor.
Putin's new strategy would mean the end of the Minsk agreements, the much-reviled accords — signed after Russia-backed separatist forces surrounded several thousand Ukrainian soldiers — that have maintained a threadbare cease-fire in the Donbas since 2015. But more immediately, it could also provide the cover for Moscow to begin its blitz into Ukraine.
Russia’s forces seem poised to strike for just such a moment. Some 150,000 troops and a large-scale arsenal of Russia's top land, air and sea materiel is now assembled on Ukraine’s borders. Moscow has repeatedly denied it has plans for an invasion but has warned that Western failure to engage with its security demands, including a pledge never to allow Ukraine to join NATO, would trigger a “military-technical response." The Kremlin has not elaborated on what that would mean.
Frenzied shuttle diplomacy — chiefly from French President Emmanuel Macron, engaging in as diplomatic broker with President Biden and Putin — has failed to stop what appears to be an inevitable path to war.
The Russian leader has previously accused the Ukrainian government of pursuing "genocide" in Donetsk and Luhansk, the vast majority of whose populations are ethnic Russians. The U.S. and NATO have accused Moscow of planning so-called false flag operations in the area to justify an all-out invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday, Russia’s military said it killed five saboteurs crossing into its territory from Ukraine and destroyed two Ukrainian army combat vehicles. But the Ukrainian military dismissed those claims, which were reported by Russian state news agencies, as “completely fake.”
Since 2014, fighting between Kyiv's forces and the Russia-backed secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk, which make up Ukraine's Donbas region, has killed more than 14,000 people. A cease-fire has been breached multiply by both sides. In recent weeks, as Russian troops massed near Ukraine's borders, Russian-aligned media and digital actors have churned out constant stories of Ukrainian atrocities against ethnic Russians as part of a disinformation campaign to paint the government in Kyiv as a cabal of violent far-right nationalists.
White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said on NBC's “Today” show Monday that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be "extremely violent" and appeared to be days, if not hours, away. The Biden administration has insisted for several days that a Russian assault was imminent.
"This will not simply be some conventional war between two armies. It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them," Sullivan said. "We believe the world must mobilize to counter this kind of Russian aggression should those tanks roll across the border."
Sullivan said Biden remained open to a summit with Putin — which Macron has tried to broker — but downplayed the likelihood that one would occur. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday — as long as there has been no invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. says.
"Every indication we see on the ground right now in, terms of the disposition of Russian forces, is that they are in fact getting prepared for a major attack on Ukraine," Sullivan said. "We will go the extra mile on diplomacy, but we are also prepared with our allies and partners to respond decisively if Russia attacks."
The Russian army’s Southern Military District — which operates in areas neighboring Ukraine — said Monday that troops and border guards had prevented an incursion of what it called a “sabotage and reconnaissance group” coming in from Ukraine into Russian territory.
"Five violators of the Russian Federation's border from a sabotage and reconnaissance group were eliminated in an armed clash," said a statement from the army, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. The statement said the incursion occurred around 6 a.m. near Mityakinskaya, a Russian border village about 22 miles east of the city of Luhansk.
During the clash, a pair of Ukrainian army vehicles entered Russian territory but were destroyed by Russian military units using anti-tank systems, the statement said, adding: "No Russian Armed Forces and Federal Security Service members have been hurt."
A spokesman for the Ukrainian military's Joint Forces Operation rejected the Russian allegations, saying that “all information about a possible incursion by a reconnaissance group is false. We haven’t done any assault operations. It’s completely fake.”
In Moscow, the deputy chairman of the security council, Dmitry Medvedev, told Putin that if Russia went ahead and recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics, it would face "unprecedented pressure" internationally but that there was no choice. He said Russia's previous recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been a lesson to the West that Russia could not be ignored, according to a translation of Medvedev's comments by the Al Jazeera news channel.
Putin said the use of Ukraine "as an instrument of confrontation with our country poses a serious, very big threat to us." Moscow's priority, he said, was "not confrontation, but security."
Times staff writers Erin B. Logan, Jennifer Haberkorn, Eli Stokols and Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and Henry Chu in London contributed to this report.
Putin's Baseless Claims of Genocide Hint at More Than War
Max Fisher Sun, February 20, 2022 A protester throws a Molotov cocktail at riot police near Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine, Feb. 20, 2014. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)
Moscow, in another escalation toward a possible invasion of Ukraine, is issuing a growing drumbeat of accusations, all without evidence, that center on a single word. “What is happening in the Donbas today is genocide,” President Vladimir Putin of Russia said Tuesday, referring to Ukraine’s east. Senior Russian officials and state media have since echoed Putin’s use of “genocide.” Russian diplomats circulated a document to the United Nations Security Council accusing Ukraine of “exterminating the civilian population” in its east.
On Friday, Russia-backed separatists, who control parts of Ukraine’s east, claimed that Ukraine’s military was about to attack, and ordered women and children to evacuate. Extensive coverage on Russian state media portrayed Russian minorities as fleeing a tyrannical Ukrainian military, and President Joe Biden called such incidents ploys fabricated as pretext for a Russian invasion.
The Kremlin has long asserted that Ukraine’s government persecutes ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking citizens. The charge, backed by lurid and false tales of anti-Russian violence, served as justification in 2014 for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its invasion of eastern Ukraine.
The recent resurgence of such language, now voiced directly by Putin, indicates what analysts and Western governments say may again be a prelude to invasion.
But invocations of genocide represent more than just a superficial casus belli. They reflect Moscow’s sincere belief that, in a world dominated by a hostile West, it is the rightful protector of Russian populations throughout the former Soviet republics.
In that worldview, any break from Moscow’s influence within its sphere constitutes an attack on the Russian people as a whole — particularly in Ukraine, which Putin considers effectively Russian.
Claims of genocide, then, are a way to assert Russia’s sovereignty throughout an ethnic Russian empire that extends well beyond its formal borders — and a right to control that empire with force. Clashes of Civilizations
“There’s a long history of use and abuse of genocide rhetoric in post-Soviet countries,” said Matthew Kupfer, an analyst based in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, who has studied Moscow’s use of such claims.
Since the Soviet Union fell, and with it the ideological basis of its constituent states, those countries have reorganized their identities around the memory of World War II.
Genocide, as a symbol of the Nazis, became shorthand for anything deemed “absolute evil,” Kupfer said, making opposition to that evil a national imperative.
In the turmoil of 1990s Russia, nationalist writers like Sergei Glazyev won large audiences by calling Western policies an “economic genocide” against the Russian race.
And when relations between Moscow and some of its former satellites broke down in the mid-2000s, charges of genocide became the language of confrontation.
Pro-democracy uprisings in several former Soviet republics installed new governments, which championed their newly dominant non-Russian majorities.
Ukraine’s leaders, for instance, moved to elevate the Ukrainian language’s official status starting in 2004 and to label a devastating famine in the 1930s as a deliberate Soviet campaign of genocide.
Some Russian nationalists returned the charge, accusing those new governments of plotting to marginalize or even exterminate the Russian minorities within their borders.
As Russian nationalists rose in influence — in 2012, Putin appointed Glazyev as a senior adviser on regional matters — a view took hold in Moscow that any threat to its influence over former Soviet republics imperiled the Russian race as a whole.
In 2014, Ukrainians again revolted, initially over their president’s decision to reject a trade deal with the European Union, in favor of one with Russia.
The protests snowballed into demands to turn away from Russia and embrace a fully separate Ukrainian identity, which confirmed Moscow’s worst fears of a threat to Russian influence. Kremlin allies again leveled accusations of genocide, at first mostly as a generic expression of condemnation.
This became more than rhetorical as Moscow exploited Ukraine’s demographic divisions, in which Russian speakers were, at first, wary of Kyiv’s moves toward Europe.
Russia invaded the mostly Russian region of Crimea and backed militants in Ukraine’s mostly Russophone east, presenting itself as protecting populations to which it held a special responsibility.
Sectarian division served Moscow’s agenda, which meant that so did the specter of Ukrainian atrocities against the Russian minority.
State media saturated Russian homes with false stories, including ones about mass graves filled with Russian minority civilians and a 3-year-old boy crucified by Ukrainian forces that had retaken a separatist-held town. Russian citizens’ support for Moscow’s incursions surged.
The Russian World
Putin, seizing on Moscow’s successes acting as protector of Russians in Ukraine, began energetically championing what he termed the “Russian world.” In his telling, it is a sphere of influence rooted in ethnicity — an ethnicity that faces continuing threats of genocide.
This new mission solves several problems for Putin. It presents Russia’s interventions in neighboring states, typically to weaken unfriendly governments or prop up friendly ones, as defensive.
It tells Russian citizens, who have suffered under eight years of Western-led sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, that they are sacrificing for a heroic struggle akin to World War II. It gives them a great empire to once more feel pride in.
And, maybe most important, it provides an ideological justification for a government, otherwise associated with corruption, that offers citizens fewer rights or opportunities.
As Moscow’s challenges have grown, so have its claims of a great struggle to protect the Russian race, often centered on Ukraine.
In 2015, as Russia’s economy cratered, Putin criticized Ukraine’s efforts to isolate Russia-backed separatists: “It smells of genocide,” he said. His government pledged to investigate the “genocide of the Russian-speaking population” in Ukraine.
And, in 2018, amid diplomatic crises that left Russia internationally isolated, a Kremlin-allied lawmaker accused Ukraine of seeking “a genocide against Russian people in the Donbas” while Russia’s foreign minister warned of “genocide through sanctions.”
The claims were hardly bluster alone. Many coincided with a military escalation in Ukraine, either by Russian armed forces or pro-Moscow separatists.
But each round also revealed a Kremlin growing steadily more paranoid and confrontational as its sphere of influence has come under greater pressure from crisis in Belarus, an uprising in Kazakhstan and an increasingly hard-line stance toward Moscow in Ukraine.
An Uncertain Escalation
In December, with Russia’s military beginning to build up on Ukraine’s borders, Putin repeated a familiar justification, saying the situation in Ukraine’s east “looks like genocide.”
“Claims of ‘genocide’ of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine have been a constant background hum on Russian state propaganda channels” ever since, said Alexey Kovalev, a Russian journalist who heads a fact-checking organization.
But, unlike in 2014, Kovalev has written, Russians do not appear to be responding. There has been little of the past groundswell of outrage or sympathy.
Russian views of Ukraine, once fiercely hostile, are 45% favorable and 43% negative, a recent poll found. Although Russians widely backed the 2014 invasions of Ukraine, they express little enthusiasm for another.
“People are kind of burned out from Ukraine being on TV all the time,” Kupfer said. Although state media has pushed some tales similar to those in 2014, it has done so more sparingly.
“It may simply be that they recognize war will not be popular with the public,” Kupfer added of the Kremlin.
Tellingly, Russian claims of genocide during this crisis have often been aimed abroad, rather than at home, and come from figures with diplomatic weight.
In a Facebook post Thursday, Russia’s ambassador to the United States cited long-debunked “atrocities” in Ukraine to accuse the United States of abetting “a policy to force the Russian-speaking population out of their current places of residence.”
Thomas de Waal, a Russia expert for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called such high-level comments “worrying” and said they indicated an “official rhetorical escalation.”
As with so many of Russia’s recent provocations, de Waal said, it is difficult to say whether such statements are intended to telegraph, or merely feint at, a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In either case, the escalation may reflect the national mission increasingly central to Putin’s Russia: a strong, defiant protector of Russians abroad who will never be safe without it.
In two ominous signs that Vladimir Putin may be readying an invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president on Friday signed a decree calling Russian military reservists to active training, while pro-Kremlin leaders in two breakaway “Russian-occupied” territories in eastern Ukraine ordered mobilization of men ages 18 to 55 to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s Donbas region, which holds the two Russian-controlled territories — Donetsk and Luhansk — has been the site of intensified shelling as well as gas line explosions and a car bombing on Friday. Women, children and the elderly in the area have been ordered to evacuate to Russia. Kremlin-backed separatist leaders in Donbas dubiously assert that the Ukrainian army is to blame for the open hostilities, while the U.S. believes they are so-called false flag operations committed by the separatists themselves that Russia may use to justify actively invading Ukraine’s East.
Former Russian Deputy Minister of Energy Vladimir Milov, now an opposition politician living in Lithuania, views eastern Ukraine as key to Putin’s strategy.
“I believe Putin’s ultimate aim, or one of his ultimate aims, is to formally put the Russian flag in the occupied territories of Donbas,” he told Yahoo News. “It would be a relatively low-cost exercise that would be presented as another geopolitical victory.”
Unlike many other analysts, however, Milov thinks Putin may not venture further than Donbas. “To occupy a large part of Ukrainian territory, including major cities like Kyiv, Putin would need 300,000 to 400,000 full-scale combat-ready troops,” he said. “Russia does not have that amount.”
Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia and current foreign policy director of the think tank Centre for European Reform, told Yahoo News that if Putin’s goal is to seize Donetsk and Luhansk, it “would significantly damage Ukraine’s economy because they’ve got a lot of heavy industry there.” But given Russia’s influence over the region already, limiting an invasion to those areas of Donbas would be “a bit of a consolation prize,” Bond said, that might not “justify the impact on the Russian economy that Western sanctions might have.”
Map of Ukraine, including Russian-controlled areas of the Donbas region. (Yahoo News)
Further ratcheting up tensions, on Saturday Russia’s military conducted drills for its strategic nuclear arsenal across various parts of Russia and in the Black Sea. Meanwhile, shelling continued in Donbas, where several members of Ukrainian President Volodymry Zelensky’s party, including the minister of the interior, were forced to take cover in shelters, according to Ukrainian media.
Like the pro-Russian separatists, Putin has baselessly accused Ukrainians in Donbas of committing genocide in the eastern part of the country. Military analyst Gustav Gressel of the European Council on Foreign Relations said Putin will likely try to use that as a pretext for invading the region.
“I’d keep a close eye on that front,” Gressel told Yahoo News. “My guess is the Russians will try to provoke an escalation.”
Brussels-based analyst Roland Freudenstein, vice president of the think tank GLOBSEC, has been observing with increasing concern Ukraine’s divided Donbas region, site of a Moscow-backed proxy war that’s killed 14,000 over eight years, as a possible site of a Russian invasion. Freudenstein points to indicators such as the vote last Tuesday in the Duma, the Russian Parliament, calling upon Putin to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk as independent from Ukraine as well as the “increase in genocide propaganda by the Russians saying that Ukrainian military is attacking Russian-speaking civilians in Donbas.”
But with the world waiting to see what Putin will do next, some analysts believe Russia may not be content to limit its military strike to Donbas.
While stressing that he’s “not a military man,” Bond said he was looking at the possibility of an attack on Kyiv. Russia might also “make amphibious landings along the Black Sea coast near Odessa,” he added, thereby “effectively cutting off Ukraine from the sea.” Cities along the Black Sea, where over 30 Russian warships have been conducting military exercises over the past week, are seen as vulnerable by other analysts as well.
Civilians from Donetsk and Lugansk, located in Donbas region, at a camp after their evacuation to Rostov, Russia, Feb. 19, 2022. (Fedor Larin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Andrii Klymenko, a defense analyst with Ukraine’s Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, told Yahoo News via a translator, that he also views Odessa as a potential target. He sees it as a possible site of a false flag operation “that would distract attention” from what he sees as the likely first moves of a Putin offensive: declaring independence for the Donetsk and Luhansk occupied areas, and securing more territory, with the help of amphibious troops, in Donbas and the Sea of Azov, including perhaps the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which is crucial to Ukrainian maritime trade.
Robert, a European military and cybersecurity expert focused on Russia, who requested that his real name not be used for this article, also sees the Black Sea as a high-risk zone. “This idea of tanks rolling through Ukraine to me is a bit like movies of the Second World War,” he told Yahoo News. “Things could look very differently now — with an attack coming from the Black Sea trying to take Mariupol.”
Like others, including Bond and Gressel, Robert sees Kharkiv, a northeastern Ukrainian city of 1.4 million sitting 22 miles from the Russian border, as another potential site of invasion. If Russia took the city that is a center of industry, science and technology, “it would be a severe blow to Ukraine,” he said. Like Gressel, he suspects that Russian infiltrators are planning to stir up anti-Ukrainian protests or false flag operations there, giving Russia a reason to invade.
On the other hand, notes Centre for European Reform’s Ian Bond, Putin might use diplomatic pressure from France and Germany, who helped engineer the controversial ceasefire agreement called the Minsk Protocol, which Ukraine and Russia interpret differently, to try to whip Ukrainians into a frenzy, when all reports are they are calm and ready to fight Russia.
“If I’m Putin, I want to get people panicking and thinking there’s no point in fighting because they’re just going to get steamrolled.” Putin, he said, “could use the next few next days to ramp up diplomatic pressure, and get the French and Germans telling Zelenksy, ‘You’re not going to get any help from NATO, you need to fulfill the Minsk Agreements the way Russia wants them fulfilled.’”
“I’m sure,” Bond added, “Putin would rather achieve his objectives without having to go to war. But to do that, he’d have to increase the level of threat to the point where the opposition surrenders without having to fight.”
A member of the Donetsk People's Militia stationed in the rural town of Staromikhailovka, west of Donetsk. (Valentin Sprinchak\TASS via Getty Images)
Former NATO analyst Edward Hunter Christie, now senior fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, thinks that the West should skip the talk about diplomacy at this stage. “Western nations should probably start to impose sanctions already,” he told Yahoo News.
Zelensky agrees. “We don't need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders, or after we will have no economy,” the Ukrainian president told CNN on Saturday. “Why would we need those sanctions then?”
Waiting around for Putin to reveal his next move only plays into Russia’s hands, Christie said.
“It's much better to make clear to the Russian Federation that we don’t believe anything they say, we don’t want to do business with them, we will cancel many projects, we will not start new commercial projects with them, we will deliberately reduce economic exchanges with them as much as possible. And we should minimize diplomatic exchanges with them,” Christie said. “Engaging in diplomatic discussions with Russia is a waste of time.”
MAYDAY, MAYDAY
Lithium-ion batteries are fueling the fire on a burning cargo ship full of Porsches MARINHA PORTUGUESA/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS
All this water and nothing to put the fire out with.
Published February 21, 2022 The cargo ship Felicity Ace is aflame from bow to stern with a lithium-ion battery fire that can’t be put out with water alone.
The fire has been burning since Wednesday (Feb. 16), as the ship drifts in the Atlantic about 200 miles southwest of Portugal’s Azores Islands. Its 22-person crew abandoned ship and was rescued on Thursday.
The ship left Germany on Feb. 10 and headed for the US with about 4,000 Porsches, Bentleys and other luxury cars aboard, and some of those were electric vehicles. It’s not clear if the batteries contributed to the fire starting in the first place—a greasy rag in a lubricant-slicked engine room or a fuel leak are the usual suspects in ship fires—but the batteries are keeping the flames going now. A forensic investigation will take months to determine the cause.
On Saturday, João Mendes Cabeças, captain of the port of Faial, the nearest Azorean island, told Reuters that the batteries in the ship’s cargo are “keeping the fire alive.” Cabeças added that reinforcements with specialist equipment to extinguish the fire were on their way. At the time of the interview, the fire hadn’t reached the ship’s fuel tank, but was closing in.
Large quantities of dry chemicals are needed to smother lithium ion battery fires, which burn hotter and release noxious gases in the process.
Pouring water onto the Felicity Ace wouldn’t put out a lithium-ion battery fire, Cabeças told Reuters, and the added water weight could make the ship more unstable. Lithium-ion batteries pose a special fire risk
Electric vehicle fires are rare, but pose their own kind of flammability risk, and one that becomes heightened as EVs go mainstream. Large numbers of EVs grouped together, as when they are transported by cargo ship, or electric buses parked in an overnight lot, raise the risk that one flaming battery could ignite a chain reaction in adjacent batteries. According to a research proposal at the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board, “Lithium-ion battery fire risks are currently undermanaged in transit operations.”
There have been more than 35 large lithium-ion battery fires since 2018, Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium fires, told the Financial Times, including a 13-ton Tesla megapack storage battery in Victoria Australia that burned for three days. An electric ferry in Norway caught fire in 2019, and in April 2021, a battery fire at a Beijing mall killed two firefighters.
In addition, car-carrying ships and ferries can face higher risks from fires, according to insurer Allianz Global’s head of marine risk. Due to the internal areas not being divided to make it easier to transport cars, when a fire starts it can spread more easily.
Firefighters struggle to douse fire on luxury cars vessel off Azores islands
Ship Felicity Ace burns more than 100 km from the Azores island
Sun, February 20, 2022
LISBON (Reuters) - Firefighters are struggling to put out a fire that broke out on Wednesday on a vessel carrying thousands of luxury cars, which is adrift off the coast of Portugal's Azores islands, a port official said, adding it was unclear when they would succeed.
The Felicity Ace ship, carrying around 4,000 vehicles including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, some electric with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday. The 22 crew members on board were evacuated on the same day.
"The intervention (to put out the blaze) has to be done very slowly," João Mendes Cabeças, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Reuters late on Saturday. "It will take a while." Lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles on board are "keeping the fire alive", Cabeças said, adding that specialist equipment to extinguish it was on the way.
It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the fire.
Volkswagen, which owns the brands, did not confirm the total number of cars on board and said on Friday it was awaiting further information. Ship manager Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cabeças previously said that "everything was on fire about five meters above the water line" and the blaze was still far from the ship's fuel tanks. It is getting closer, he said.
"The fire spread further down," he said, explaining that teams could only tackle the fire from outside by cooling down the ship's structure as it was too dangerous to go on board. They also cannot use water because adding weight to the ship could make it more unstable, and traditional water extinguishers do not stop lithium-ion batteries from burning, Cabeças said.
The Panama-flagged ship will be towed to a country in Europe or to the Bahamas but it is unclear when that will happen.
(Reporting by Catarina Demony in Lisbon; Additional reporting by Victoria Waldersee in Berlin; Editing by Barbara Lewis)
Guest Opinion: Russians rightly unsettled by NATO's eastward creep
“Russia warns of retaliation if its demands are not met.”
“U.S. allies are stepping up to counter Russia’s Ukraine threats.”
“Blinken: No concessions in response to Russia on Ukraine.”
“Will there be a war over Ukraine?”
It’s enough to keep you awake at night. Russia may no longer be the Soviet Union, but it’s still the original Evil Empire: unrepentantly aggressive, a bully, eager to needle the West at every opportunity, willing to risk war to achieve its selfish aims.
Or so our government and our mainstream media would have us believe. But once again — as Americans have always been so adept at — we ignore the facts in order to present ourselves as the righteously aggrieved.
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union quickly gobbled up all of eastern Europe, installing sympathetic governments and creating the Warsaw Pact. Proof positive of Communist aggression.
But during that war, the Soviet Union lost 27,000,000 soldiers and civilians — more than half of all casualties suffered by all of the nations involved in that war. I am not for a moment arguing that Joe Stalin was a nice guy, but he was protecting his country from future depredations by a hostile West by making sure that the next time the West attacked Russia, they’d have to kill a lot of other people before they actually got to the Russians.
Ukrainian Military Forces servicemen of the 92nd mechanized brigade use tanks, self-propelled guns and other armored vehicles to conduct live-fire exercises near the town of Chuguev, in the Kharkiv region, on February 10, 2022. - Russia's deployment for a military exercise in Belarus and on the borders of Ukraine marks a "dangerous moment" for European security, NATO's chief said on February 10, 2022.More
And then there was the Cuban missile crisis. Imagine the gall of those war-mongering Russians (O.K., Soviets) to put nuclear missiles only 90 miles from our very shores. Talk about naked aggression. How much more blatant can you get?
Only years later did we learn that just prior to the Soviet introduction of missiles into Cuba, the U.S. had installed ballistic nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. So the U.S. is not threatening Russia with missiles on or near its borders, but when the Russians reciprocate, they’re obviously completely unjustified.
And what did Nikita Khrushchev ask for in return for removing the missiles from Cuba? Simply that the U.S. remove its missiles from Italy and Turkey. And he didn’t even demand that we admit we’d put missiles there in the first place. So the American missiles were quietly removed while the whole dangerous affair was portrayed as a great American victory and proof that we could and would stand up to the Russian bully.
And that brings us to the current crisis. There is a good deal of disagreement as to whether or not the U.S. promised Russia after the breakup of the USSR that NATO would not try to expand to include former members of the Warsaw Pact. But promise or not, it must surely be unsettling to anyone living in Russia that NATO now includes three former Soviet Socialist Republics, all with borders on Russia, and six former Warsaw Pact nations, several of these bordering directly on Russia.
Once again, don’t mistake me. I am not saying that Vladimir Putin is a nice guy. But I’d like to know how Americans in general and the U.S. government in particular would respond if Russia signed a military alliance with Canada and Mexico. By way of NATO, we’ve already done much the same thing to Russia, and now we want to include Ukraine in NATO as well?
Moreover, what purpose does NATO serve these days? NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Turkey is in the North Atlantic? Albania is in the North Atlantic? And Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia? And then consider that nations like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey make American democracy look like the Golden Age of Athens.
I have no illusions, and certainly no expectation, that the Biden administration will muster the courage to choose the sensible and reasonable course of action here: promise Putin that Ukraine will never be part of NATO in return for a Russian promise not to invade Ukraine.* After the pummeling Biden got for ending our forever war in Afghanistan, I expect he feels enormous pressure to demonstrate that he’s really a tough leader who won’t back down from aggression.
And of course, if we do go to war with Russia, most of you reading this won’t actually be doing anything or going anywhere at all. It’ll just be that tiny little 1% of our citizenry who will bear the blood price while the rest of us stand up and remove our hats for the Star-Spangled Banner at basketball games and hockey matches.
But I can tell you one bunch that's going to be really happy to see the U.S. and Russia go to war: that would be the Chinese. I just hope it doesn’t go nuclear. *Here’s another fact few Americans know: ever since 1918, the Russians have never once broken any treaty they’ve signed with the U.S., though the U.S. has broken a number of the treaties it’s signed with the USSR/Russia. W.D. Ehrhart, Ph.D., received the Purple Heart Medal, Navy Combat Action Ribbon, and a Division Commander’s Commendation for his service as a Marine in Vietnam. He grew up in Bucks County and now lives in Bryn Mawr.
