Monthly Archives: September 2022

Ukraines major western allies have yet to sign up to establish a tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his inner circle for the crime of aggression, wanting to leave space for future relations with Russia, according to Ukraines top officials.

Its big politics. On the one hand, countries publicly condemn the aggression but on the other, they are putting their foot in the closing door on relations with Russia so that it doesnt close completely, said Andriy Smyrnov, deputy head of Ukraines presidential administration, who is leading the countrys effort to establish the international tribunal.

They are attempting to keep some space for diplomatic manoeuvres, said Smyrnov. We know that agreements with Russia are not worth the paper they are written on.

His claims come as the US president, Joe Biden, said on Monday that Russia should not be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, something Ukrainian officials and some US politicians had pushed for. Russia had previously said such a designation would mean Washington had crossed the point of no return.

Ukrainian officials say that since April, they have been trying to convince their western allies to establish an ad hoc tribunal which would hold Russias senior leadership responsible for the crime of aggression for invading Ukraine. Aggression is viewed as the supreme crime under international law because without the transgression of borders during an invasion, subsequent war crimes would not have been committed.

So far only the Baltic states and Poland have pledged support for the tribunal, said Ukraines officials. We are expecting broader support, said Ukraines prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin. For us, the support of the UK and the US is very important as well as the rest of the civilised world, said Smyrnov.

The UKs newly elected prime minister, Liz Truss, told Times Radio in May, when she was foreign secretary, that she would consider supporting the tribunal. The Council of Europe is due to discuss support for such a measure on 13 September.

At an event in Brussels on Monday, Andriy Yermak chief adviser to Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy asked why there was a delay in creating the tribunal and said some European officials seemed convinced the international criminal court (ICC) was enough.

At the same event, the European commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders, said he was open to the idea, but talked mainly about help the EU is giving to compile war crimes which can be referred to the ICC.

Ukraine favours a one-off international tribunal to try the Russian leadership for aggression, which is not within the ICCs jurisdiction. The court is set to bring cases of war crimes which require prosecutors to identify the direct perpetrators of a crime and then trace the command structure upwards, making it difficult to reach the top echelons of the Russian regime.

Western allies have, however, been reluctant to move to try Putin and other senior figures, an act that would probably end all relations. Ukraine believes this is an indication that, despite the scale of atrocities and public declarations against Russia, some of its allies envisage possible negotiations with Russias current leadership.

It will be like trying the concentration camp directors and letting Hitler and his team walk free, said Oleh Gavrysh, part of Smyrnovs team in the presidential office. During the Nuremberg trials after the second world war, Nazi leaders were tried for the crime of aggression, which was then known as the crime against peace.

Ukraines officials say the case would not need much investigation and would act as a straightforward mechanism to ensure the Kremlins decision makers face responsibility since the fact that the act of aggression took place was overwhelmingly accepted by a vote at the UN general assembly and has been supported by a resolution of the European parliament. It has also been repeatedly admitted by Putin and his circle.

The legal arm of the Open Society Foundations has drawn up a preliminary indictment of Putin and seven of his closest allies for the crime of aggression. It said it hoped the document can demonstrate the feasibility of such a tribunal.

When you help the ICC, you donate to the independent judicial authority and you are not linked somehow to the result, said Kostin, Ukraines chief prosecutor. When you support [a] tribunal, you act as a state, its a political act and not all of them, at the moment, are ready to politically support this.

He added: Russia is like terra incognita (unexplored territory) for many of them and some of them want to keep some room to, if not be friends again, but to have some relations, which I dont understand and no Ukrainians will understand.

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Some states have viewed the idea of the tribunal with scepticism because Putin and his men would probably be tried in absentia, said Smyrnov.

The main thing I want to say to the sceptic countries is that the creation of this tribunal is not a question of symbolism, said Smyrnov.

It makes no difference if Putin is personally present at this tribunal. [If] the majority of civilised countries in the world sign this international agreement to establish the tribunal we will narrow down and limit the international allies of Putin.

If Putins circle is narrowed down to North Korea and Syria that will be very good and if [Putin] dies in his own country labelled as an international criminal, that will be concrete punishment.

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West reluctant to put Putin on trial, say Ukrainian officials - The Guardian

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian businessman, has called on Russians still inside the country to launch a wave of sabotage against state structures, with the aim of derailing Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine and destabilising his government.

Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in jail between 2003 and 2013 and now lives in London, said Putins invasion had completely changed the agenda for Russias political opposition, and claimed that armed resistance may play a role at some point in the future.

We need to explain to people what they can do, persuade them that they should do it, and also help people if as a result they end up in a dangerous situation, Khodorkovsky told the Guardian.

He said potential actions should depend on each persons tolerance for risk, and could range from painting anti-war graffiti in the streets to sabotaging railway deliveries linked to the war or burning down conscription offices.

But we are very clearly against terrorist methods that harm unarmed people, he said, criticising the killing of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a Russian imperialist ideologue, last month, which was claimed without any evidence by a hitherto unknown group of Russian partisans.

Khodorkovsky was speaking in his first interview about his new book, The Russia Conundrum, which is out later this week. Part memoir and part analysis of Putins years in office, the book lays out a template for western states on how to deal with Moscow.

Khodorkovsky has one of the most remarkable personal stories of post-Soviet Russia, rising from economic beginnings in the Youth Communist League during Mikhail Gorbachevs reforms in the late 1980s to become Russias richest businessperson through his chairmanship of Yukos oil company.

In the book, Khodorkovsky describes his early meetings with Putin, which he left convinced that the new Russian president was an ideological ally. His technique is to look at you and mirror what you are saying Hes a chameleon who leaves everyone thinking hes on their side, he writes.

Looking back, he admits he completely misread Putin. I wasnt sharp enough to see it. He has that professional KGB skill of adapting to his interlocutor, but he also just has a personal talent for it Back then, he didnt feel stable in his position and he didnt want to create enemies who would unite against him. Of course he never had any liberal views.

In 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges widely seen as political, after he publicly criticised government corruption during a meeting with Putin, and promised to fund opposition parties. His arrest was seen as one of the first milestones in Putins gradual tightening of the screws over the past two decades.

Khodorkovsky said Putins decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine had shocked him anew, and completely changed his views on how best to oppose the regime.

Of course, [the invasion] was an absolutely fundamental moment. My impressions and feelings before and after 24 February are completely different, he said.

All four of Khodorkovskys grandparents were either Ukrainian or spent time living in Ukraine, and as a young child, he used to spend summers at his great-grandmothers house near Kharkiv. Nevertheless, he always identified as Russian.

It always felt normal, nothing to be ashamed of to be Russian. Now every time you say youre Russian, there is an internal discomfort, he said.

Like many Russians, Khodorkovsky has had arguments in recent months that have ended longstanding friendships. He said even among friends who supported him through his years of imprisonment, some had turned out to be fans of the Ukraine invasion.

Imagine, you know people since you were both seven years old, and now youre both nearly 60 and you just cant speak to them, he said.

Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning

However, he also said it was important for the west to focus on the many Russians who did not support Putins regime or the war in Ukraine. He is strongly against the policy being floated in some European capitals of a full ban on tourist visas for Russians.

The west has ideological allies inside Russia, who think that Russia should develop on a European path, he said.

If Putin lives another 10 or 15 years it would really lower the number of European oriented Russians, and I dont think this is good for anyone except Putin.

During his decade in London, Khodorkovsky has remained an active commentator on issues inside Russia, and funded various civil society movements through his Open Russia foundation, which was ruled an undesirable organisation by Russian courts back in 2017 and ceased operations.

He was one of many opposition figures to address the so-called Congress of Free Russia, which took place in Lithuania last week and aimed to come up with a coordinated platform for opposition to Putin. But critics say much of the opposition is now disconnected from life inside the country. Associates of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny declined to take part in the Lithuania congress, dismissing it as a meaningless talking shop. For now, it is hard to see a mass opposition movement being possible inside Russia.

Khodorkovsky said that, sooner or later, Putins regime would fall. One key element in this will be Ukraine winning the war, he hopes. Then, Russia should be reformatted as a loose parliamentary federation. There was a path to this outcome that did not involve bloodshed, he claimed, but its rather unlikely.

The most important thing, he said, was for the west not to write Russia off completely, so that when the crunch moment did come, there would be more chance of post-Putin Russia being liberal and pro-western.

This is a nightmare, but this nightmare does not mean that Russia and Europe have separated for ever. Its extremely important that in this difficult emotional background, we keep a sound mind, pragmatism and a vision of the future, of a democratic, European Russia, he said.

The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putins Power Gambit and How to Fix It by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with Martin Sixsmith, will be published on 8 September by WH Allen, 20

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Exiled Russian calls on those still in country to sabotage Putins war - The Guardian

Declarations

In the early morning of the first day of the war on Feb. 24, President Vladimir Putin defined the objectives of the countrys "special operation" as "protecting the inhabitants of Donbas, demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine," and "bringing to justice those who have committed innumerable bloody crimes."

Continuing a Soviet tradition the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and Afghanistan in December 1979 Putin said that he had "decided on a special military operation" in response to a request from the leaders of Donbas. And he stressed that "Russia has no plans to occupy Ukrainian territories.

Two and a half months later, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complimented his boss, saying that the special military operation was designed to put an end to the reckless expansion and the reckless course of total U.S. domination." Four months later he corrected Putin: "the geographical objectives of the 'special operation' have changed. Now it is not only the DNR and LNR [Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples Republics], but also a number of other territories." And one of the generals even issued the enigmatic statement that "control over the South of Ukraine is another path to Transnistria [a Moldovan break-away state supported by Russia], where facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population are also being observed."

Ultimate goals multiplied in the statements of various Russian officials, from security chief Nikolai Patrushev and parliament chairman Vyacheslav Volodin, Sergei Lavrov and presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, and Putin himself. Now they included "preventing war from starting on the territory of Ukraine"; "restoring the statehood of the LNR and DNR within the borders of 2014; and "achieving a guarantee of Ukraine's real neutral status."

The "demilitarization" of Ukraine? In the six months of war Ukraine has received the most modern Western-made weapons worth tens of billions of dollars that it did not have before. Just the latest tranche for weapons, air defense systems, surface-to-air missiles, radars and artillery from the U.S. government was valued at $2.98 billion.

Denazification of Ukraine? It seems that no one except the Russian Chekists doing reconnaissance has seen them, and if someone else did see some Nazis, there were about as many of them in Ukraine as there are on Moscows Pushkin Square on Adolf Hitler's birthday. None of the dozens of journalists from around the world who broadcast their reports from Ukraine have met any Nazis or fascists. But the rhetoric from various Russian official and quasi-official speakers makes us think that some of the thousands of recordings of Hitlers speeches were put to good use.

Protecting the Russian-speaking population of the eastern and southern regions? Where were they protected in the almost completely destroyed city of Mariupol, where more than 89% of the population considered Russian their spoken language? Or in Kharkiv, which has been mercilessly bombed for week after week, killing civilians, and where 95% of the population speak (spoke?) Russian? Or Mykolaiv, where over 50% of the population, according to the census, speak Russian as their mother tongue, and which is being destroyed by cluster bombs, according to a Philadelphia Inquire reporter who was just there? A curious defense strategy: pile up the corpses of the people youre defending.

Putin, and Peskov after him, called the goal of the military operation the restoration of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk republics to their 2014 borders. Today Russian troops control almost all of the Luhansk region and less than 60 percent of the Donetsk. Judging by reports from the fronts, this situation is not going to change any time soon.

It certainly doesnt look like it. A year before the war, in February 2021, there were 4,650 soldiers and officers under NATO command, and now there are almost ten times as many 40,000. In the near future, the number of NATO troops will increase to 300,000. This, military analysts say, is the largest increase in NATO strength since the end of the Cold War. The border between Russia and NATO countries also doubled after Finland and Sweden joined the alliance from 1,207 to 2,575 km.

And now the cost. According to American intelligence, the irrecoverable losses of the Russian Armed Forces in the six months of the war amounted to 70-80,000: 15-20,000 dead (during the 9 years and 2 months of the Afghan war about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were killed), and 60,000 wounded and captured (in Afghanistan over 110 months about 35,000).

Over the six months of war, the Russian army has lost 3-4,000 tanks and armored personnel carriers. Almost all the countrys high-precision weapons have been used, and the production of new missiles is held up because they cant get microchips and semiconductors, which are under sanctions. Anti-ship missiles and Soviet Grads, which have a range of several hundred meters, are being used for strikes.

The shortage of hardware has forced the Russian army to scavenge for weapons, transfer them by quasi-trade ships from the military base in Syria, buy drones from Iran, and even consider North Korea's offer to buy artillery from them.

The situation with manpower is even worse. Due to their heavy losses, Russia is carrying out voluntary mobilization. According to various estimates, 30-35,000 volunteers have been sent to training camps with subsequent deployment in the active army. Soldiers are also being recruited from high-security prisons and deployed in private security companies. Battalions that carried out peacekeeping duties in Nagorno-Karabakh and troops from de facto annexed South Ossetia are also being sent to the front.

Each day of the war costs taxpayers about $500 million. In July, Finance Ministry statistics showed a federal budget deficit of 892 billion rubles, a drop of 22.5% in oil and gas revenues despite high energy prices, and a nearly 30% drop in revenue from tax collection. The expected loss of GDP by the end of the year is 8%, with a further contraction of the economy over the course of a year and a half or two years. These are the calculations for the summer of 2022, when many private Russian banks can still to conduct transactions with the rest of the world and the country is not cut off from SWIFT. But there can be no doubt that the West will choke the Russian economy before it begins to be choked by its own declining level of technological development, and the Russian military-industrial complex will no longer a threat to Europe and the world.

An investigation by Washington Post journalists indicates that Putins initial goal was to totally occupy all of Ukraine.

This seems strange, given that Stratfor military analysts played out five or six scenarios for Russia's war with Ukraine back in 2015 and concluded that the Russian Armed Forces would need between 91,000 and 135,000 troops just to seize the so-called left bank of Ukraine and an equal number to hold the occupied territories. The total is 182,000 to 270,000 troops needed. Military analyst Alexander Goltz wrote in a 2014 article for The New Times that Russia would need at least 100,000 troops to hold southeastern Ukraine alone. Note that both analyses came out before the Ukrainian Armed Forces were reformed and equipped with the most modern weapons.

Today there are approximately 170,000 Russian soldiers and officers on the Ukrainian fronts, and 20% of Ukrainian territory is occupied. A simple extrapolation shows that Russia would need about a million men to occupy and hold the entire country. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin signed an order to increase the army by 137,000 starting on January 1, 2023.

My Moscow sources who met with Putin on the eve of the military operation do not believe that the Federal Security Service deceived the Russian president by convincing him that everything was ready by Feb. 24 for a quick capture of Kyiv or a blitzkrieg. This was much discussed in the first months of the war and recently covered by the Washington Post.

First of all, they said that in the week before operation began, Putin listened to a variety of people, both those who supported the war and those who opposed it. It is highly unlikely that Chekists or army officers gave him false information, but they probably gave him the information that he wanted to see.

Secondly, they say that there was no plan for the army to occupy the entire country. The goal was to eliminate President Vladimir Zelensky (or force him to leave the country), and then, the KGB officers thought, there would be a domino effect: mayors and regional leaders would either run or swear allegiance to Russia in droves. The logic was as follows: Yanukovich, a "tough guy" with experience of prison and gangster capitalism, was so frightened by the Maidan demonstrations away in 2014 that he fled the country. So what could anyone expect from "that clown Zelensky"? The fact that Zelensky did not leave, did not surrender, did not ask for peace came as a great surprise to Putin: the habit of thinking that the world is run like it is in Russia and that politicians everywhere are a priori greedy and opportunistic has once again let the Kremlin down.

Then what does Putin want? "To tear Ukraine to pieces," said a source at the top of the Russian political elite. "But now I think the Kremlin is ready to codify the status quo," said another. That is, Putin is ready for peace talks concerning a map in which 20% of Ukrainian territory is controlled by Russian troops.

I am often asked why there is no widespread anti-war protest in Russia. My answer is to cite the figures quoted by OVD-Info. More than 16,000 people have been detained and over 20,000 cases were opened under Article 20.2 of the Code of Administrative Offences ("Violation of the established order of organizing or holding meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches or pickets").

Almost every day the few surviving regional websites report that in one place a man with a "No to War" T-shirt came outside and was immediately handcuffed; and in another place a woman held up a "Putin is a war criminal" banner and was, of course, taken away; or even that in a third place a person held up a Mir (Peace) state credit card and was taken in for protesting.

In recent months 3003 people were convicted of committing misdemeanors under laws of military censorship for "discrediting the army" and hundreds have been charged with "intentionally spreading deliberately false information. What false information did The New Times, for example, disseminate, for which it received four administrative penalties? We wrote about the bombing of Kharkiv, Odesa and Mykolaiv. But since the information the outlet published had not been published on the website of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the judge concluded that it hadn't happened. Besides, according to the prosecution, as early as Feb. 24, the Commander-in-Chief said that a special military operation was being conducted in order to protect Russia from an invasion ... from the territory of Ukraine.

According to lawyer and human rights activist Pavel Chikov, 85 criminal cases have been opened to date for "discrediting the army. A certain unspoken rule has been established for well-known people: first, the authorities provide three "administrative cases," followed by a window of 3-4 weeks for the person to leave, and if he/she does not leave, there is a search just before 6 a.m. and then arrest.

This was the case, for example, with Ilya Yashin, Marina Ovsyannikova, and Evgeny Roizman. Alexei Gorinov, a municipal deputy in the Krasnoselsky District, did not get an administrative conviction. He was immediately sentenced to a criminal offense for "military fakes" and sentenced to seven years in prison.

So, the first and foremost reason for the lack of large-scale anti-war protest is fear, which had been the main tool of the KGB during the long years of Soviet power.

When I asked people at a market in Tver, What do you think of the special military operation, only unequivocal supporters replied. Everyone else either declined to answer or slipped behind phrases like, we don't know everything" or "who knows who started it? People who agree to speak in a pre-arranged place asked not to specify their profession or place of work since "the town is small and theyll figure it out.

In Pskov, Pskovskaya Guberniya journalists and Yabloko activists were beaten up as early as March 5. After that, many well-known people in the city left for the neighboring Baltic states. The ones who stayed behind dont even post on social networks, leave alone take part in any street actions.

In Novgorod, in front of the hotel where I was staying which I had intentionally not booked in advance there was a large black SUV from which photographs were very obviously taken of all the people Id arranged to meet. They don't talk to strangers about the war there, and if they do agree to answer questions, its because they have a relative in, say, Kharkiv, and they speak with horror about what is happening.

In Serpukhov, none of the people interviewed agreed to speak under their real name. They are afraid of losing their jobs, although one said confidentially that he and a friend agreed that if they are forcibly mobilized, they will immediately surrender to the Ukrainian armed forces.

The second reason for civil passivity is the lack of leaders.

Some like Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza are already in jail, while others many tens of thousands went into exile in the early weeks of the war. People live by example: if celebrities and well-known people have left, I was told, then it means "we will be trampled. They try to find Polish, Baltic, or Jewish roots and leave.

Finally, the restriction on access to information plays an important role. Since the beginning of the war the General Prosecutor's Office and the courts have blocked about 7,000 websites on the basis of laws about military censorship; all independent mass media, central and regional, agencies, foundations are blocked without exception; entire editorial boards have emigrated from the country. Hundreds of politicians, journalists, and public figures have been given the vile label of "foreign agent" in my case, for the money earned from a YouTube channel. At the same time, the number of VPN downloads has risen sharply by 25 times! since the beginning of the war. In July 25 million Russians were using VPNs. In other words, Russians dont only have access to propaganda television channels; they can find alternative information on the Internet.

This does not make life any easier: a whole range of websites, services and banks, from state services to Yandex cards to Kommersant and RBC sites, do not work if the VPN is turned on, phones heat up and their batteries drain at an alarming rate. But the main problem is something else.

During the six months of the war, I did not meet a single person who was more or less well-known, or high-ranking, or rich, who openly supported the war. I was told, however, that one former deputy prime minister and now head of a state corporation came to the offices of the Presidential Administration wearing a black T-shirt with a defiant "Z" on his chest. Whether this person was trolling the administration or wearing the T-shirt as a sign of eternal loyalty remains unknown.

Another source began his conversation with a statement: "The election of a retired KGB officer as president was a mistake, it should never happen again. I didnt argue the point, of course, but it would have been better if this realization had come 22 years ago. A third source insisted we talk on a balcony and stand so close that we were practically embracing. The fourth was so afraid that the Chekists would tap our conversation that he suggested we meet in a restaurant a couple of dozen kilometers from Moscow. The fifth repeated several times that "society has completely failed to thoroughly consider the implications of using Novichok against opponents." Apparently the terror that the door handle of your luxury palace or car might be smeared with a military nerve agent never leaves many of the top Russian ruling elite for a moment. That fifth source also complained bitterly that he could not use his private plane. "All planes immediately stopped getting software updates. Of course, we could ask a young man with a black briefcase to come in and hack the software. But I asked the pilot of my plane, Could there be a glitch with the system when we're in the air? Of course, he replied. We have to fly Aeroflot, although even their software was probably updated by the same young man with the same briefcase."

I asked a variety of people what percentage of the top Russian ruling class supported the war. The answers ranged from a low of 10% to a high of 30%. Hundreds if not thousands of people at the top have lost millions and billions of dollars, expensive real estate in delightful European countries and the United States because of sanctions and/or the collapse of the stock market. All they get for their loss is endless lamentations from wives and mistresses that "living in this Russia" was not part of the deal. Children studying at Western universities and boarding schools in Britain, Switzerland, and the United States were forced to return to Russia when their educational institutions refused to accept their parents' toxic money.

That said, people mentioned the names of a couple of billionaires who, despite the sanctions and huge personal losses, called for "striking" Ukraine with nuclear weapons. There is also grumbling in the middle stratum of power brokers, who have lost a lot in mutual funds and especially in cryptocurrency.

No one can predict how the political situation in Russia will develop now. Some give the regime until the spring of 2023, others predict a further intensification of repression in the coming months and are confident that the regime has enough strength to survive another ten years. They insist that the upcoming 2024 elections and the next round wont change a thing.

I'm not so sure. I'm not sure that Putin's ruling class, which is made up of dollar millionaires and billionaires and is used to making money in Russia and spending it all over the world, will agree to live and die in a cage.

But we shall see.

This article was first published in Russian in The New Times.

The views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of The Moscow Times.

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Six Months of War: What Putin Wanted; What Putin Got - The Moscow Times

Vladimir Putin is "utterly deluded" if he thinks he can succeed "by blackmailing or bullying" Britain, Boris Johnson said in his farewell speech.

Speaking outside Downing Street in his last hours as Prime Minister he credited the Government for its response to the war in Ukraine.

He said: "People who organised those prompt, early supplies of weapons to the heroic Ukrainian armed forces, an action that may very well have helped change the course of the biggest European war for 80 years.

"And because of the speed and urgency of what you did, everybody involved in this government, to get this economy moving again from July last year despite all the opposition, all the naysayers. We have and will continue to have that economic strength to give people the cash they need to get through this energy crisis that has been caused by Putin's vicious war.

"And I know that Liz Truss and this compassionate Conservative Government will do everything we can to get people through this crisis. And this country will endure it and we will win."

Originally posted here:

Liberation of key checkpoint shows Putin's forces are being pushed back - Express

Allister Heath writing in the Telegraph:

Britain is now in grave danger of falling into Vladimir Putins trap. His kamikaze economic war on the West will eventually take down his disgusting coterie of war criminals, but in the meantime it is beginning to inflict immense, permanent damage on the Western way of life, to the great delight of Moscows siloviki hard men.

We risk ending up with calamitous poverty, civil disobedience, a new socialist government by next year, a break-up of the UK, nationalisations, price and incomes policies, punitive wealth taxes and eventually a complete economic and financial meltdown and IMF bailout.The situation in the EU is, if anything, worse.

He says that Britain was right to back Ukraine to the hilt, and must not back away from that commitment. But it's going to cost. More:

Cheap and plentiful energy is essential to our consumerist societies. We cannot be delusional about the scale of the developing catastrophe. Household energy and vehicle fuel costs will jump from 4.5 per cent of household spending in early 2021 to some 13.4 per cent by April next year, much higher than at any time during the past 50 years, including the 1970s, according to Carbon Brief. Households may face a rise in energy costs of 167billion, or 7 per cent of GDP, taking total expenditure to 231 billion, more than government spending on health, and that is before the hit to business is accounted for. The rise for consumers alone is more than the combined defence and education budgets.

He concludes:

Why, oh why, did Britain and Europe allow themselves to become Putins hostages?

Wait ... what?! As Gavin Ashenden puts it:

Except that it wasnt Putins trap, it was NATO & the EU trapping itself with globalist expansion. But so much easier to blame Putin.

If you haven't done so yet, now is the time to read Christopher Caldwell's excellent essay, "Why Are We In Ukraine?" Excerpt:

Russia was never without an excuse to meddle in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are an ancient people. But rather like the Kurds they inhabit a dangerous neighborhood, and for most of their modern history have been unable to found a real nation-state. Under Communism Ukraine became one of the Soviet socialist republics. This was an administrative statehood, not a real sovereignty. Still, it was better than what they got in the decade after Communism fell. Living standards plummeted by 60%. Corruption rose to levels unique in Europe.

The cultural lines between Russia and Ukraine have always been blurry. They are fraternal peoples and arch-foes. They are, it seems, the entities for which the word frenemy was coined. In many parts of the countrynotably the Crimean peninsula, with its ports and its centuries-old Russian naval bases, and in the eastern mining and manufacturing region called the Donbasspeople feel themselves considerably more Russian than Ukrainian. In 1944 Stalin complicated the situation (or, by his lights, simplified it) when he deported the Muslim Tatars who had been resident there, primarily in Crimea, for centuries. Russian has for generations been the lingua franca of business and culture in Ukrainealthough its public use has been suppressed since 2014.

That was a hinge year. Ukrainian diplomats had been negotiating an association agreement with the European Union that would have created closer trade relations. Russia outbid the E.U. with its own deal, which included $15 billion in incentives for Ukraine. President Viktor Yanukovych signed it. Protests, backed by the United States, broke out in Kievs main square, the Maidan, and in cities across the country. By then the U.S. had spent $5 billion to influence Ukraines politics, according to a 2013 speech by State Department official Victoria Nuland. Russia now viewed this activity as having funded subversion and revolt. Like every Ukrainian government since the end of the Cold War, Yanukovychs government was corrupt. Unlike many of them it was legitimately elected. When shootings near the Maidan in Kiev left dozens of protesters dead, Yanukovych fled the country, and the United States played a central role in setting up a successor government.

Meddling with vital Russian interests at Russias doorstep turned out to be more dangerous than orating about democracy. Rather than see the Russophone and pro-Russian region of Crimea transformed from a Russian naval stronghold into an American one, Russia invaded it. Took over might be a better verb, because there was no loss of life due to the military operation. Whether the Russian takeover was a reaction to American crowding or an unprovoked invasion, one thing was clear: In Russias view, Ukraines potential delivery of Crimea to NATO was a more serious threat to its survival in 2014 thanto take an exampleIslamic terrorism had been to Americas in 2001 or 2003. Understanding that Russia would respond accordingly to any attempt to wrest it back, Russias European and Black Sea neighbors tended thenceforth to treat Crimea as ade factopart of Russia. So, for the most part, did the United States. The Minsk accords, signed by Russia and Ukraine, were meant to guarantee a measure of linguistic and political autonomy in the culturally Russian Donbass. (Russia claims the violation of these accords as acasus belli.)

Anyone who watched the first Trump impeachment in 2019 will know that U.S. Ukraine policyand the personnel carrying it outdid not change, in its essence, between the Obama and Trump administrations. Through steady deliveries of weaponry and military know-how, the failed state of 2014, defended by a ramshackle collection of hooligans and oligarch-sponsored militias, was transformed by 2021 into the third-largest army in Europe, fully interoperable with that of the United States. Ukraine, with a quarter-million men under arms, was outmanned only by Turkey and Russia. The real caesura came not with Trumps arrival but with his departure. In the first weeks of 2021, Joe Biden committed his administration to a considerably more aggressive Ukraine policy. Last November 10, Blinken signed a strategic partnership that not only reasserted the Bush Administrations commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO, but also reopened contested sovereignty questions, including that of strategically vital, culturally Russian Crimea.

The Mearsheimer account culminates with an implicit question: What did youthinkRussia would do?

Similarly, when Western leaders responded to Putin's invasion with an open attempt to destroy the Russian economy -- I quoted some of the statements by EU figures here yesterday -- what did they think Russia would do? It's incredible that seemingly intelligent people in the West live under the illusion that because Russia's invasion of Ukraine is illegal and immoral, that Russia should sit back and allow the West to destroy its economy without retaliating.

Viktor Orban said from the beginning of this conflict that the West had better pursue peace, because it cannot afford the cost of an energy war. "Putin symp!" they all screamed. But Viktor Orban was right.

I don't know what it was like in the United States this spring and summer; I've been in Europe for almost the entirety of the Russia-Ukraine war. But I well remember that here in Europe at least, there were widespread condemnations of all things Russian. When I arrived in Vienna in early June, you could see handbills around the city saying that you cannot love Dostoevsky or Tchaikovsky without also loving Putin -- that is to say, they were calling for a total boycott of all things Russian, even Russian culture. We didn't even see such madness during the Cold War, when Russia was ruled by an imperialistic totalitarian regime far worse than the Putin government (which is bad enough). All things Russian were hysterically demonized, and Russians who may not even have supported the war were treated like trash.

So, how can we be surprised that Russia is using its energy weapon against the West? Again: we in the West have been waging economic war on Russia since the invasion (as well as sending Ukraine weapons and intelligence). You may think that waging economic war was and is the right thing to do morally, but you surely cannot be such a hypocrite as to say that Russia has no right to do what it's doing to the West now -- and you surely cannot be such a fool as to believe that this was not inevitable.

If Viktor Orban could see this coming back in February, when the war started, why couldn't every other European leader? Why couldn't Washington?

To be clear: none of this excuses Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The loathing of Putin and Russia over this invasion, though, made it impossible for very many people in positions of leadership to think clearly about what was at stake in this conflict. It caused them to believe, somehow, that the West was invulnerable, and could do what it wanted to Russia, with impunity.

Well.

And now Britons and Europeans who don't understand why they have to be broke and cold in the dark, and live through the destruction of their economies and livelihoods, for the sake of Ukraine, are probably not going to be in the mood to be told that objecting to the idiotic leadership that got their countries into this mess means they are nothing but a pack of Putin symps who love dictatorship.

I wish Allister Heath would go visit this coffeeshop in Ireland and explain to its owner why this is necessary, to stand for Ukraine:

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Here, via an Irish newspaper, is a photo of Poppyfields Cafe. Take a good look -- it will surely be closing soon. Maybe Geraldine Dolan can tweet "Slava Ukraini" from the unemployment line this winter.

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Putin's Last Laugh - The American Conservative