Month: March 2022

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump takes a look at the work of Bellingcat the open-source investigations group that is documenting war crimes in Ukraine:

In a phone call with The Washington Post, Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, explained the importance of geolocating such videos as part of the process of documenting possible infringements of international law. Over the past several years, Bellingcat and its partners — including Mnemonic and the Center for Information Resilience (CIR) — have built a system for collecting, verifying and storing evidence from conflict zones that might eventually be used to enforce the rules of war.

“The main thing we try to find out at the moment is the location of each of these videos because the intent is to make them searchable for future accountability processes,” Higgins explained. Once geolocated, the information is put in a spreadsheet that’s maintained by Bellingcat and CIR. The evidence itself is archived by both Bellingcat and Mnemonic, and the data used to populate a map created by CIR.

[…]

What’s remarkable about the conflict in Ukraine is that Russia made it far more likely that any potential criminal activity would be documented by open-source investigators because of its history in the region. Bellingcat was founded in 2014, days before a Russian antiaircraft battery accidentally shot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over Ukraine. The MH17 investigation became one of Bellingcat’s most notable, pitting the group against Russian misinformation regularly. But that and the ongoing conflict between Russian proxies and Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine helped build a community of people trained in observing and identifying actions in Ukraine.

“We had an ad hoc, amateur online community who are sharing, engaging, geolocating and working to counter Russian disinformation from Day One of the conflict,” Higgins said — something that took years to develop as they sought to build a similar accountability system in Syria. “Even before the conflict in Ukraine started, we had people tracking the movements of Russian vehicles. … What we’re seeing happening in Ukraine in the moment is quite unique. I think it really shifted the balance of power within the information system that has emerged around Ukraine.”

Lots of eyes and cellphones on the ground. Lots of outside observers ready to figure out where documentation occurred. A system for tracking and storing those videos and that evidence. The only question, then, is whether criminal courts will use that evidence in potential investigations and indictments. And that, given the novelty of the system, is still not entirely settled. While Bellingcat’s evidence (and testimony from staffers) was used in MH17 legal proceedings, war crimes probes are something else entirely.

“This could be the first time that this evidence is used directly in accountability processes, so we’re trying to engage very early on with those different accountability processes to talk them through exactly what we’re doing, get feedback from them,” Higgins said. He has served for several years on the technology advisory board for the International Criminal Court where he has advocated for using open-source evidence. “We’ve been collaborating with various organizations to build the best process possible to meet what their expectations would be for this kind of evidence,” Higgins said.

It’s important to recognize that other fields, including the media, have embraced the techniques of open-source investigation. The New York Times hired a Bellingcat researcher to aid its visual investigations team, for example. The evolution of documentary evidence in the social media age — starting, Higgins pointed out, with the Arab Spring more than a decade ago — has meant revisiting assumptions about how to conduct investigations of such conflicts.

“A big part of the open-source community,” he added, “is the idea that it’s better to work together and share information than it is to get exclusives and scoops.” The media having overcome that instinct to embrace open-source investigations offers some cause for optimism that investigators might do that, too. Bellingcat researchers have participated in mock trials aimed at evaluating the strength of their evidence, with success.

One would be forgiven for being skeptical about bad actors being held to account on the international stage. But if there is an effort to prove that Russian officials violated international law in their use of munitions in Ukraine, conviction may end up hinging in part on a video uploaded to social media, located by volunteers and indexed and validated by groups like Bellingcat and Mnemonic.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion has been stymied by the strength of the Ukrainian public. His team might be held to account by the global public more broadly.

Check this out:

these are highly dangerous weapons but i would think the Russian Federation should sit out discussions of military anti-aircraft weapons being used to shoot down civilian jets https://t.co/8YHQG9iT6p

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 10, 2022

If you have time to read or listen to one thing today, I highly recommend this fascinating interview by Ezra Klein with Fiona Hill. Here’s the introduction:

If there is to be an off ramp in Ukraine, a deal, something to stop the fighting here, it’s going to need to be something that Putin, Zelensky, and the West can all agree on. And as hard as that kind of deal was to imagine a month ago, it is harder now, because — think about how all of the actors and factors here have changed. Vladimir Putin, he had a very optimistic view of how this was going to go.

He thought he was going to roll in, and Ukraine would be full of people with ethnic Russian heritage, with Russian fellow feeling. They’re going to welcome the Russians as liberators. That is not how they welcomed the Russians. So now, Putin fears the thing he fears most, which is humiliation. He’s trying to secure not just Ukraine, but now his regime survival, and his very place in history. The stakes of this war have completely changed for him.

The Ukrainian people have united under President Zelensky’s remarkable leadership. Their sense of national identity, their sense of who they are and where they belong in the world is completely different now. They are not going to allow themselves to be mere pawns in games of great power politics. The idea that this could just be carved up between Russia and the U.S. and Europe, that’s a fantasy.

And on that, the meaning of Ukraine, the stakes of Ukraine, they’ve changed for the United States and Europe too. To the extent the West thought much about Ukraine, they thought about it in terms of Russia, or just a troubling geopolitical conundrum. But now, Ukraine represents the values of the West, or at least the values West claims to hold, made manifest. And values, values are a lot harder to compromise on.

I’m recording this on Monday, and the Kremlin has just made new demands. They want Ukraine to forswear joining any security blocs like NATO. They want Ukraine to recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and to declare much of Eastern Ukraine as independent and functionally under Russian control. And then, depending on how you read their comments, they are insisting on the complete demilitarization of Ukraine.

It is very, very, very hard to imagine Zelensky agreeing to much of that at all, but is there something here that could be agreed to — is there a deal that could give all sides here a way out? If anyone would know the answer, it is my guest today. Fiona Hill served as a National Intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She was senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council under President Trump.

She’s the author of the books “Mr. Putin: Operative In The Kremlin” and “There Is Nothing for You Here.” And she’s been thinking about the strategic and geopolitical and national questions of the region for decades. And so she lays out the factors, forces, and the psychology of the various players really well here

Hill makes several points that are super important to understand. First, all the things we have seen and heard about Putin’s ambitions seem to be true. Yes, he sees himself in the mode of Peter the Great and wishes to restore the old Russian Empire. And he obviously miscalculated the Ukrainian and global response to his actions. She makes this observation which I think is so important:

EZRA KLEIN: Putting aside the question of malevolence, is he on some level right that the U.S. and the West are in the business of regime change, not just in Russia, but in Ukraine, in some of the other places you mentioned and didn’t mention. I’ve been thinking a bit about this narrative by the political scientist, Samuel Charap, who has been arguing that you can’t understand Russia’s actions in the region without understanding this is a two way contest for influence in Ukraine.

We’ve done a lot over the past 15, 20 years to try to bring them closer to us, not just opening NATO, but supporting Western leaders, training a generation of military officers, actually arming them, integrating them into E.U. licensing and trade and regulatory regimes. And so he sees that there’s being a genuine, constant expansionary pressure from us that he’s now trying to beat back. Is there a validity to that view?

FIONA HILL: Well, sure. I mean, that’s the way that Putin definitely sees things. And, you know, for many people in the United States, elsewhere, see that too, as that kind of competition. There is still a lot of holdover. But what that does is totally deny any agency on the part of Ukraine, or any other country for that matter. So we’re always framing it like this — with all due respect to all my colleagues who do this from the IR perspective.

If you think around the world as well, many countries have fought for their independence precisely because people themselves want to. What about the United States, for example? We look back in U.S. history, this is like 1812. And the US has had the French, we’ve had the Spanish. We’ve had the British Empire, obviously. We’ve had all kinds of manifestations, and we have our own version of our own history. We might look very different, you know, from a different vantage point.

Think about all of the other countries of Europe that have got their independence from the dissolution of empires, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, Finland. You know, Sweden was once an empire, and had kind of basically dominion over many of these lands as well. The United Kingdom — you know, Ireland is an independent country now as well. A lot of what’s happening now is a kind of a post-colonial, post-imperial impulse on the part of Russia, this kind of feeling that it can’t possibly be lands and peoples want to go their own way.

But there must be some other malevolent force there. And when a country makes an appeal to another country for association, or to different international franchise — let’s put it that way — and wants to be part of that, that’s seen as that other entity, be it NATO or the European Union, or bilateral relations with the U.S. or anything else, that the other— those countries are acting with malevolent force to pull them away.

So what Putin can’t make sense of — in fact, most people are looking at it seem to not be able to make sense of — the people of Ukraine actually kind of want to live like people of Ukraine, in their own state, and make their own decisions. If they want to associate with the European Union and NATO offers their security, then a lot of that is their decision as well. So when we frame it that way, we completely and utterly negate the opinions and the beliefs and the aspirations of the people on the ground.

That’s what Putin is trying to do all the time. So he’s really doing a great job in propaganda, internationally. And we feed into it all the time. And to get this framed as a conflict, a proxy conflict between Russia and the United States, Russia and NATO for Ukraine — well, why do we want Ukraine? People keep asking that. We don’t want Ukraine. The United States does not want Ukraine. Just to make it very clear, we don’t want to annex Ukraine. It’s not going to become like Puerto Rico, you know, like an additional state.

We’re not annexing part of it. This is not World War II or the Cold War. We are not occupying Europe anymore.

EZRA KLEIN: There’s something he’s been emphasizing that seems to me to be very much part of that idea, which is — I think we’re comfortable in a geopolitical moment, like this talking about security interests, Ukraine and NATO, Ukraine and the E.U., Ukraine and Russia, arms, training. Something that Putin has emphasized in a number of speeches is identity.

FIONA HILL: Yes.

EZRA KLEIN: Language, ethnicity — and this seems, to me, to have been a profound miscalculation in exactly the way you just described. But he seems to understand Ukraine is full of Russians. I mean, of course, it does have many people who were part of Russia, who speak Russian, who identify as more ethnically Russian. But he does — he seems to have vastly overestimated the potency and ubiquity of that identity, such that he seemed to believe he’d get a lot less resistance than he has.

But also his fear, as far as I can tell from some of his speeches, is not just that Ukraine is going to fall into a NATO security umbrella, but there’s going to be a Westernization or even a Ukrainianization of the identity of the Ukrainian people. And once that is done, then Russia can’t get them back, because then you are just occupying a land, not reintegrating with your brothers and sisters.

And that seems very important in his thinking, and also to have been very wrong in a way that, now, if anything, he’s made it even worse, right? I mean, nothing has done more for Ukrainian identity than this invasion. But I’m curious what you think of that, because he talks about it a lot, but I don’t hear it discussed very often.

FIONA HILL: Ezra, you’re spot on. So it’s very possible to be living in Ukraine and be somebody like Volodymyr Zelensky, Volodymyr being a name that would suggest Ukrainian nationalist version of Vladimir — by the way, after the great grandparents of Kyiv that Putin is also fighting over, it’s being fought over, the versions of the name. Volodymyr, Ukrainian version, Vladimir, the Russian version. And Putin is — it’s the battle of the Volodymyr’s and the Vladimir’s.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy also happens to be a Russian speaking Jew. And I think he’s blowing Putin’s mind, because in that kind of capacity, he can’t figure him out. He’s trying to say that Ukrainians are being led by a bunch of — this is bizarre labeling — drug addled, neo-Nazi fascists. Well, it’s a little hard to say that about somebody who’s completely sober, very clearly — Volodymyr Zelensky — and happens to be Jewish, and who has lost family in the Holocaust, and is very proud of his Jewish identity as well as Ukrainian identity, and his identity as a Russian speaker.

And this is the problem that everybody is falling into in the modern era right now. Putin has been trying to put himself forward in many respects as the kind of leader, not just of the Slavic part of the world, the Russian part of the world, this idea of Russkiy Mir — all of the Russian speakers who are scattered around not just Ukraine, but also Belarus and northern parts of Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Republics, or the Russian diaspora abroad, which he reaches out to.

But he’s got this idea of — kind of a white, Christian, Russian Orthodox Russia that is leading, then, the kind of peoples who are opposed to these other kinds of identity politics. So he’s right there in the middle of it, and I think he’s talked himself in to that idea that there can only be one particular form of identity. And just as you say, I think the main impetus for this is he saw that Ukraine was moving away.

So what we’re seeing here is almost, in a way, a kind of a battle for people to be able to espouse their own identities, as complex as they may be, because Ukraine is full of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. There are many Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians in Russia, but who would be Russian speaking. There are millions of Ukrainian citizens working in Russia. And there are lots of people in Ukraine who speak Russian, but now feel a very strong identity tied to place, and to history and shared culture, especially for the last 30 years.

They don’t want to go back to whatever version of Ukraine, or multiple versions of Ukraine — because it seems that Vladimir Putin wants to carve the whole country up — that he is presenting to them. They want the right to decide for themselves.

That’s just a small part of the interview and there is much more to chew over. The situation is extremely complicated and without any easy answers. Hill suggests that the bellicose rhetoric coming from some quarters (Lindsey Graham, obviously, although she doesn’t name him) is counter productive and that the US and Europe need to ensure that the focus their public comments on Ukraine and not some great clash of superpowers. And she sees some possibilities for leverage with the sanctions, which is good to hear. She sees this playing out over years.

Again, highly recommend.

It figures that the disinformation and propaganda would proliferate around the Ukrainian war. And it makes sense that those spreading them would use the United States’ pre-existing conspiracy theory platforms to do it. We have a lot of them:

A new conspiracy theory has become popular among some of the online communities that formed around QAnon — one simultaneously being promoted by the Kremlin as a justification for its invasion of Ukraine. The false claim: the United States is developing bioweapons in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin has stepped in to save the day and destroy the weapons.

QAnon’s core prophecy has always been that there is a “plan” and that former President Donald Trump will rid the world of an evil cabal, culminating in the unmasking, imprisonment or even execution of cabal members. But that prophecy dates back to when Trump was actually president — now that he’s not, believers have been convincing themselves there is evidence that the plan is still very much in place, maybe even more so than ever before. In the Kremlin’s disinformation, some have seen that hope.

There are US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, that much is true. But they are not building bioweapons. Actually, it’s the opposite: Part of the reason for their creation was to secure old Soviet weapons left behind in the former Soviet republics. The State Department has described the claims as nonsense — and the US and Ukrainian governments have repeatedly, and for years now, tried to bat down conspiracy theories about the labs and spoken about the work that is actually being done in them

Russia’s falsehoods about labs like this have not been limited to Ukraine. Similar claims were made about a lab in Tbilisi, Georgia; those were proven false. Dr. Filippa Lentzos, co-director of the Centre for Science & Security Studies at King’s College London, visited the lab along with other experts and debunked the Russian claims. She told CNN the Russians are spreading the same lies about labs in Ukraine.

It goes a bit like this. The Russian government makes suggestive statements, leaving breadcrumbs that are dutifully repeated by official Russian state media — and then, increasingly importantly, by dozens of faceless websites (some of which the US has alleged are tied to Russian intelligence). Social media accounts push the idea further, build on it, make it more fantastical — and those more fantastical claims eventually end up getting picked up by official Russian media and the cycle begins again.Russia has been pushing various bits of disinformation about the US and biological weapons since the Cold War — infamously publicizing, for instance, the false idea that the US manufactured the HIV/AIDS virus.

Matt Field, an editor with the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, told CNN disinformation about US-supported bio-labs seems to peak when Russia finds itself under increased international scrutiny — the allegations about the Tbilisi lab, for instance, bubbled up in 2018 amid the international scandal after Russia was found to have poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England.The methods used to spread this kind of disinformation are not new, either. Former KGB agents have said the KGB would plant stories in obscure or small publications in foreign countries and then those stories would be cited as sources in official Russian media.

That process can happen a lot more easily today. Instead of having to go to the trouble of convincing an editor at a newspaper to publish disinformation, Russia can push it out on seemingly independent websites that present themselves as news outlets but are no more than Kremlin cut-outs. The US government has identified websites working in tandem with Russia’s FSB security service.

Sadly, it’s not only the right wing nuts or the conspiracy theory weirdos spreading this conspiracy theory and others:

As the Russian economy strains under the weight of economic sanctions, U.S. public schools struggle against collapse from the strain of two years of Covid restrictions and the weaknesses it exposed.

“Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues,” writes George Packer in The Atlantic, echoing Clemenceau. More than earnings potential and protecting the little dears from ideas parents find threatening are at stake. I’ve written plenty about conservative attempts to eradicate public schooling, a foundational function of the republic since before ratification of the Constitution. President George W. Bush wanted to turn over Social Security funds to Wall Street. Avaricious investors see hundreds of billions in annual education spending mandated by states and they see dollar signs. If only they could eliminate the public from public schools. Covid has been an unlikely ally in capitalists’ drive to turn every human interaction into a transaction. They should care more about the polity that sustains their enterprises, but they don’t.

Packer asks a question more basic than who profits:

What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,” Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”

School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn’t get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think. In an authoritarian or rigidly meritocratic system, schools select the elites who grow up to make the decisions. A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.

“Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves?” Packer asks. “Possibly, but I doubt it’s ever been more necessary.”

What’s being taught in many homes is radical freedom. Not freedom for anything, just freedom. More is better. And damn the erosion of the polity’s ability to govern itself. To the point of eradicating democracy and dissolution of the republic. Americans are so infatuated with their freedoms that they have neglected what it takes to maintain it, just as they have neglected their roads and bridges.

Packer offers suggestions for how we might reclaim education for citizen-making.

A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars. In “The Propaganda of History,” the last chapter of his great study of Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”

Children need to be taught how to think. That is something many parents (as well as demagogues) find even more threatening than them learning what to think.

The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents. This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support. “We have a desperate shortage of teachers,” David Steiner of Johns Hopkins said, just as we’re making teaching more difficult by “politicizing education.” It’s easy and satisfying for adults to instruct children that America is an exceptional experiment in freedom, or a benighted system of oppressions. It’s harder, but infinitely more useful, to free them to think about history for themselves.

The obstacle we face is a culture that values profit over personhood. That culture sees no value in literature or history, subjects we once valued for their person-making rather than profit-making potential. America may not last through another generation of students defined by test and credit scores, Packer believes.

“American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think.”

That is so obvious it should not be controversial, but it is.

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Russians bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine on Wednesday during what was to be a cease-fire. Three people died, including a child. Seventeen suffered wounds. Vladimir Putin’s two-week-old invasion has killed hundreds of civilians. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky declared the bombing a “war crime” and “proof that the genocide of Ukrainians is taking place.“

The New York Times this morning tells the story behind the now-infamous photo of a Ukrainian family hit by a mortar attack as they fled Kyiv. Serhiy Perebyinis survived, but lost his wife, Tetiana, and his two children. The dead are not simply statistics. Nonetheless, they grow in such numbers that, amid shelling in Mariupol, Ukrainians have no option but to push bodies wrapped in carpets or bags into mass graves.

More than 2.3 million people have had to flee Russian bombardment.

As the world reacts in horror, Rev. William Barber II reminds crowds in this country that violence comes in many forms. On Sunday, Barber paraphrased a speech by Coretta Scott King made just months after her husband’s assassination (via Charles Blow):

“I remind you that starving a child is violence,” King said in 1968. “Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her child is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of willpower to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.”

King ended the passage by saying that “the problems of racism, poverty and war can all be summarized with one word: violence.”

Violence doesn’t always involve blood. But it does in Ukraine. Right now. Violence is violence. More is coming. And perhaps chemical weapons, human pesticides, one tool of genocide (The Guardian):

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Wednesday that Russia had been making “false claims about alleged US biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine”, and added that the allegations had been echoed in Beijing.

“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them,” she tweeted.

Her comments came after western officials said at a briefing “we’ve got good reason to be concerned about possible use of non-conventional weapons” by Russia, reflecting the experience of chemical weapon use during the Syrian civil war.

The concern arose partly because Russia’s foreign ministry had been engaged in “setting the scene” by making “false flag claims” about a biological weapons programme operating inside Ukraine.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will have Ukraine. Zelensky and his constituents will submit or die. Perhaps both. Fierce resistance by Ukraine likely means Putin, now “angry and frustrated,” will double down on slaughter with extermination.

Washington Post interviews with 17 administration officials, diplomats, policymakers and experts indicate the Biden administration sees no end in sight. Experts see an overthrow of the government followed by a prolonged occupation by Russia as untenable and costly for Russia, painfully so. If Putin has an endgame, few know what it is, perhaps not even Putin.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan offers a model for how Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of us end this horror show and stop the largest humanitarian disaster in our lifetimes. “The challenge is that the deal must give Putin something that he can tout as a victory, without rewarding him for starting the war and shelling civilian targets. At the same time, Zelensky can’t (and shouldn’t) look as if he’s surrendering; he has to be rewarded for being in the right and heroically holding out.”

1. Ukraine agrees not to join NATO (Putin takes a win). But can form military alliances with neighboring NATO nations, buy their weapoins, etc. It will not install or host any missiles capable of reaching Russia. “Since Ukraine has no intention to do either, this would be no concession on Zelensky’s part; since Putin claims that Ukraine is doing both, he can take it as another win.” EU membership remains an option for Ukraine.

2. Ukraine concedes Crimea. This simply recognizes reality. Most residents “regarded themselves as Russians already,” Kaplan suggests.

3. Russia withdraws all military forces, not just from Ukraine, but back to their original bases. On a timetable. Noncompliance voids the ban on Ukraine joining NATO.

4. Ukraine holds a UN-supervised referendum on whether the Donbas region want to remain in Ukraine, become an autonomous republic within it, or be annexed to Russia.

If Russia wins Donbas in this referendum, it would actually be something less than a victory. Keeping Donbas inside Ukraine, as an autonomous region with representation in the government, would give pro-Russia delegates an outsize influence over the country’s policy, including its foreign policy. To the extent that Ukrainians want to move the country westward (as most of them do, especially since Russia’s brutal invasion), it might be best to let Russia peel Donbas away.

5. Western sanctions are lifted gradually as the West sees Russian compliance.

There are a couple of issues here. Ukraine’s constitution includes a commitment to joining NATO (as well as the EU). That cannot be waived away. Putin has already declared his intent to see a full dismantling of Ukraine’s military. Putin is not likely to accede to leaving it in place and strengthened by alliances with neighbors.

But if the slaughter and exodus is to cease, some flexibility must be found to stop it before Putin’s invasion exhausts itself by flattening Ukraine’s cities. Putin shows no sign of relenting.

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Trump always said that he was the only person who could run for president and make money at it and apparently he’s right. And why not? He’s the shoo-in for the GOP nomination in 2023 and he stands a good chance of winning. It’s a fine investment. He does favor loyalty and it could pay off handsomely if he gets another term and can run it his way:

A bank’s decision to loan Donald Trump’s company $100 million is the latest evidence the former president might survive fraud investigations and a business-world backlash over his efforts to stay in office after losing the 2020 election.

San Diego-based Axos Bank finalized the loan with the Trump Organization on Feb. 17, according to documents filed with the city Tuesday.

That’s just three days after public revelations that the Republican’s longtime accountants had disavowed a decade’s worth of his financial statements amid allegations by New York’s attorney general that they had exaggerated his wealth.

The Axos loan is being used to pay back an old loan backed by commercial space at Trump Tower that was coming due in September.

If anyone thought the business community would permanently abandon him, they were kidding themselves.

A year ago, it looked possible that Trump might become a pariah after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop a vote certifying President Joe Biden’s election win. Banks, insurers and other business partners all cut ties following the riot.

Last year, the Trump Organization was indicted in New York on charges it helped executives evade taxes. And for two years, the company has been the subject of civil and criminal investigations by New York Attorney General Letitia James and the Manhattan district attorney.

But in the fall, Trump struck a deal to sell his Washington hotel for far more than expected. And a partnership he’s involved with that owns two office towers recently took out new loans for far more than needed to pay off old ones coming due.

“He bounces back,” says Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive who is not a fan and even urged people not to vote for him.

“If a guy brings me a property with good cash flow, a good location and good tenants, why do I care what his politics are?” says Mike Offit, a former Deutsche Bank lender to Trump who now consults on real estate finance. “Trump has good buildings and manages them well.”

Sure. And if you scratch a gangster president’s back, there’s every reason to think he’ll scratch yours, amirite?

Asked for comment for this story, one of Trump’s sons lashed out at journalists for depicting the family company as struggling.

“We should have never been underestimated,” Eric Trump said in an emailed statement, adding, “We have very low debt, are sitting on tremendous amount of cash and have extremely profitable properties.”

Assessing the Trump Organization’s overall financial health is challenging, given that it is a private company that releases few figures publicly.ADVERTISEMENT

During his presidency, Trump’s name was stripped off hotels and residential towers in several cities. His Scottish golf course lost millions, and condos in his apartment buildings have been selling at deep discounts.

Coronavirus shutdowns added to the trouble. Revenue at the company’s biggest golf property, the Doral outside of Miami, plunged $33 million in the two years through 2021, down 44%, according to financial records obtained by a government ethics agency.

Then came the Capitol riots and a rush to exits as Trump’s longtime commercial office broker, his two biggest lenders, the PGA of America and others cut ties.

The company helping him shop around his Washington hotel severed its relationship, too, after removing it from the market for a lack of demand. New York City announced it was canceling all city contracts with Trump, including the rights to operate a public golf course in the Bronx. Eric Trump branded the city’s move a product of “cancel culture” and vowed to fight it.

The city’s decision to kick Trump off the course has been tied up in court and now, several months after Trump was supposed to leave, he is still running it, his name spelled out on a hillside in giant paving stones seen from miles away. The Trump Organization says that it will go but that the city has to pay it $30 million first.

Meanwhile, Trump’s biggest office buildings, though suffering, have not seen a widescale exodus of tenants.

One of its biggest commercial tenants, Gucci, decided last year to extend its Trump Tower lease for another 16 years, according to financial documents from commercial lending research firm Trepp.

That building pulled in $19 million in revenue in the first nine months of last year, down from previous years, but enough to pay expenses and interest.

Axos previously made loans backed by at least two properties owned by the Kushner Cos., the family real estate firm once run by Trump son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner. The bank also benefited from a policy change in the Trump administration allowing high interest loans.

The Trump Tower loan follows other deals to refinance mortgages on a building in San Francisco and for a Sixth Avenue tower in New York, both 30% owned by the Trump Organization and 70% owned by publicly traded real estate giant Vornado.

On at least one of those deals arranged by Vornado, the partnership borrowed more money than it owed on the old loan, and Trump’s share of that extra cash could have been as much as $200 million, based on the size of his stake.

Trump’s company still has plenty of other loans to refinance, including a $125 million one involving Doral, due next year.

More than a dozen hotel brokers and experts who talked to The Associated Press in recent months had estimated Trump was unlikely to make money off a sale of his long-term lease of the Old Post Office building, a federal property he started turning into a hotel nearly a decade ago.

But then a Miami firm joined with former Yankees star Alex Rodriguez to offer $375 million for the money-losing property. The deal still needs to be approved by a federal agency overseeing the building.

Mar-a-Lago — Trump’s property in Palm Beach, Florida — is doing brisk business, too, with initiation fees rising as GOP groups and politicians regularly hold events there in hopes of a visit from the president, and possibly a coveted imprimatur.

It’s all a racket. All of it.

And what of his vaunted new social media company being run by the former cow farmer Devin Nunes?

Trump’s social media company, aiming to take on Twitter, had a botched launch full of glitches and freezes as people who had signed up were locked out and left fuming.

Still, investors have kept the stock of the company tied to the Truth Social app aloft in the belief that he will prevail against the naysayers. At current prices, Trump’s personal stake could be worth billions.

Yep. They’d better hope the Republicans can get all those partisans installed in strategic electoral offices to guarantee him a win in 24. Otherwise, he might just be a bad bet. Remember, he’s the only guy in America who couldn’t make money with casinos.

You can’t help but respect the bravery of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and feel a surge of admiration for his heroic leadership in this terrible moment. He is a person who has found out what he’s made of, as have millions of Ukrainians who are literally fighting for their lives.

It feels unseemly to talk about our own leaders’ “performance” in that context but it’s important to assess it anyway. The US is still the most powerful country on earth, for better or worse, and its influence and power is vast. Looking at the situation with our limited access to the inside, I agree with Franklin Foer on his assessment of Biden’s handling of the crisis:

When Hillary Clinton sought to sow doubts about Barack Obama, her rival for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, she ran an attack ad tarnishing him as dangerously inexperienced. As the screen shows images from a suburban house, a husky-voiced narrator intones: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep, but there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing.” There’s clearly been a terrible international incident. The narrator asks, “Who do you want answering the phone?”

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unfolded, the narrator’s question has rattled around my head. The invasion is a moral test, because Putin has committed atrocities that demand the strongest possible response. And it is a strategic test, because the strongest possible response could very plausibly escalate into a nuclear conflict.

Joe Biden hasn’t received the full credit he deserves for his statecraft during this crisis, because he has pursued a policy of self-effacement. Rather than touting his accomplishments in mobilizing a unified global response to the invasion, he has portrayed the stringent sanctions as the triumph of an alliance. By carefully limiting his own public role—and letting France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz take turns as the lead faces of NATO—he has left Vladimir Putin with little opportunity to portray the conflict as a standoff with the United States, a narrative that the Russian leader would clearly prefer. He’s shown how to wield American leadership in the face of deep European ambivalence about its exercise.

His handling of the domestic politics of the crisis has been just as savvy. Although he could justifiably have portrayed Republicans as the party of Putin apologists, he refrained from dinging his political enemies. During his State of the Union address, he actively encouraged Republicans to feel as if they were his partners in a popular front.

This is surely redolent of the bipartisan foreign policy that Biden nostalgically yearns to revive.  But it’s also an important tactic. By depoliticizing the issue, he has made it likely that Congress will quickly fund aid and arms for the Ukrainian military. And as gas prices spike, it will be rhetorically harder for Republicans to effectively pin the blame on him, because they have been fully supportive of sanctions.

Even as Biden has built a bipartisan consensus, he’s resisted pressure to pursue a more hawkish course. As a Democrat who lived through the 9/11 era, he remembers well how he and other leaders of his party adopted chest-thumping policies to defuse accusations of weakness. For decades, Democratic aspirants attempted to demonstrate their own steel in order to avoid evoking the politically fatal image of Michael Dukakis in a tank.

The same dynamic could have easily transpired with Ukraine. But Biden’s faith in his own foreign-policy chops leaves him unconcerned about proving his bona fides. He knows the dangers of bluster and has steadfastly avoided them. When Putin announced that he was putting his nuclear arsenal into “special combat readiness,” Biden quickly made clear that he wouldn’t reciprocate. He has brushed off calls to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. From the start of his administration, he has tried to telegraph his thinking to Putin, so that the Russian leader could never misunderstand his intentions, and would never mistakenly assume that an American strike against Russia was imminent.

After Afghanistan revealed a failure to imagine the worst-case scenario, Biden’s response to Russia’s war has been marked by its creativity. In advance of the invasion, the administration surreptitiously hastened its shipments of arms to Ukraine, bestowing on it an armament well suited to the eventuality of urban combat. By preparing a suite of unconventional sanctions long before Putin’s troops crossed the border, the administration avoided the need to cobble together policy and the scramble to inform allies of its plans. The legwork was already done. Most impressively, it broadcast its intelligence about Russia to the world in anticipation of an invasion. (Having a veteran diplomat as CIA chief helps.) Because its assessment of Russian intentions proved to be painfully accurate, the maneuver has helped reclaim the lost trust of allies and the global public.

Foer calls it a quietly bravura performance and says “in the middle of Joe Biden’s 3 a.m. call, I find myself grateful that he’s the one answering the phone.” Me too.

It’s hard to believe, but in this lawsuit by Smartmatic voting machines against Fox News, Tucker Carlson’s alleged skepticism about voter fraud in November 2020 may be what dooms his employer:

It’s a pretty remarkable state of affairs when a judge is approvingly citing Tucker Carlson’s journalistic rigor, but that’s precisely the situation we find ourselves in now.

And rather ironically, that could be bad news for Fox News.

New York Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen has now ruled that voting-machine company Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and Rudolph W. Giuliani can proceed. The case involved numerous false and baseless claims made on Fox about voter fraud involving the company’s voting machines.

In the ruling, the judge notably dropped Fox host Jeanine Pirro and former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell from the lawsuit — Pirro because her statements didn’t so directly accuse Smartmatic of illegality, and Powell because New York doesn’t have jurisdiction over her.

But the case against Fox, its other hosts and Giuliani can proceed. And in allowing it to, the judge previewed a tough road ahead for them in this monumental defamation case.

The ruling repeatedly says Fox hosts, Giuliani and Powell made claims “without any evidence” and “without any basis.” It also says that claims made by Giuliani, Fox host Maria Bartiromo and now-former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs could meet the legal standard of claims being “so inherently improbable that only a reckless person would have put [them] in circulation.”

“Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Cohen wrote.

“While we are gratified that Judge Cohen dismissed Smartmatic’s claims against Jeanine Pirro at this early stage, we still plan to appeal the ruling immediately,” Fox News Media said in a statement. It called the lawsuit “baseless” and a “full-blown assault on the First Amendment which stands in stark contrast to the highest tradition of American journalism.”

But perhaps the ruling’s most biting — and also potentially legally important — section involves Carlson.

In the course of laying out the legal requirements for Smartmatic to prove its case, the judge noted that the company must prove Fox met the standard of acting with “actual malice” — i.e. not merely promoting false claims, but doing so with malice. And on that count, the judge says the best evidence that it did is Carlson.

That’s because Carlson, unlike the others, applied significant actual skepticism to the claims — and broadcast it.

It’s an episode many might have forgotten in the long and sordid run-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. But there was a time in which none other than Carlson stepped forward to question the “stolen election” narrative that had taken hold in the Trump movement and in certain corners of his network. Carlson said on Nov. 19 that Powell’s claims were serious, but he also (rightfully) noted that she had yet to substantiate them. He said he had asked, over the course of a week, for the evidence and offered her his platform, but that she had declined.

Carlson said Powell “never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.” He said that when he invited her on his show, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

The episode alienated some Trump allies. But it also, in Cohen’s estimation, speaks to the possibility that Fox might meet the “actual malice” standard.

Of course there was actual malice. And no doubt Carlson was even more malicious than the others. But for some reason on that day, he didn’t go along with the party line and it may end up costing his company a whole lot of money.

Lest you think Tucker was fighting back against the Big Lie, he wasn’t. This is from the same week:

“You’ve heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines, and this is a real issue no matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. Electronic voting is not as secure as traditional hand counting, period. It never will be as secure,” Tucker said at the beginning of his opening monologue.

“The people now telling us to stop asking questions about voting machines are the same ones who claim that our phones weren’t listening to us,” he continued. “They lie.”

He added: “Going forward, we need to find out exactly what happened in this month’s presidential election. We need to find out, no matter how long it takes the investigation to unfold or how much it costs. And once we get answers from that investigation, we ought to revert immediately to the traditional system of voting — the one that served our democracy for hundreds of years. What we’re doing now is not working. That’s an understatement. As of tonight, the state of New York still hasn’t managed to count the votes in five house races thanks to mail-in voting. That’s a disaster, let’s stop pretending that it’s not.”

While Carlson tried to put up a facade of legitimacy by calling out former Trump attorney Sidney Powell last week, which resulted in backlash from his audience, he continues to embrace far-right conspiracies surrounding the election.

On Monday, he also outright accused the left of rigging the election by way of social media and claimed that Trump lost Pennsylvania because of a lack of presence from the NRA.

“Democrats used the coronavirus to change the system of voting. They vastly increased the number of mail-in ballots because they knew their candidates would benefit from less secure voting, and they were right,” he continued.

“They used the courts to neutralize the Republican party’s single most effective get-out-the-vote operation, which for generations had been the National Rifle Association. Not enough has been written about this, but anyone on the ground saw it. Thanks to legal harassment from the left, the NRA played a vastly reduced role in the election, and that made a huge difference in swing states like Pennsylvania and others.”

“But above all, Democrats harnessed the power of big tech to win this election. Virtually all news in the English speaking world travels through a single company: Google. A huge percentage of our political debates take place on Facebook and Twitter. If you use technology to censor the ideas that people are allowed to express online, ultimately you control how the population votes, and that’s exactly what they did. They rigged the election in front of all of us, and nobody did anything about it.”

He was all in.

This fine fellow says it all.

Far-right "journalist" Patrick Howley explains why he is rooting for Putin and Russia: "They want me to care about Ukraine so much and I don't that it just makes me happy to see when they're sad. Their misery, their failure, their disappointment is funny and gratifying to me." pic.twitter.com/wr61e0wJXl

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 9, 2022

Listening to him reminds me of this guy in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right rally:

It was Saturday, and the police had finally called for everyone to clear the park. As I filmed officers opening up a blocked street, a young man ran into view, screaming for help. He wore the khaki-and-white uniform of the white nationalist group Vanguard America. He had been separated from them and was being chased by at least one protester. He ripped off his shirt and begged the crowd for mercy. He wasn’t actually into white power, you see.

“Barely,” he clarified to me. As he shoved his polo shirt into a plastic bag, the fear on his face settled into a smirk. “It’s kind of a fun idea,” he explained. “Just being able to say ‘white power,’ you know?”

They just think being an asshole is fun …

And while these are voices of the right, I’m sad to say that they speak for some on the left as well…

Perry Bacon of the Washington Post is a super smart political analyst and I am almost always persuaded by his arguments. But I agree with Steve M that this one was off the mark:

Perry Bacon of The Washington Post thinks America has four major parties, not two. He thinks there are two Democratic parties, and he’s more or less correct, even if he gets some of the specifics wrong.

… the Center-Left Democrats … is the party of, for instance, President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the policy group Third Way and the MSNBC show “Morning Joe.”

… the surprisingly strong 2016 campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reignited the left wing of the Democratic Party and created … a Left-Left Democratic Party. This party includes Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, publications such as the American Prospect and the Intercept, and groups such as the Working Families Party.

Bacon says his “own views are closest to” those of the Left-Left Democrats, though I think he’s somewhat off base when he writes this:

There is an ideological divide between the two Democratic parties, certainly, but their differences are also generational and attitudinal — the Left-Left Democrats tend to be younger, newer to politics and more confrontational with the Republicans than the Center-Left Democrats are.

I guess it’s hard not to be “more confrontational with the Republicans than the Center-Left Democrats are,” because the Center-Left Democrats aren’t confrontational with Republicans at all. But the salient point about the Left-Left Democrats is that they’re confrontational with Republicans and Center-Left Democrats more or less equally, or possibly more confrontational with their center-left party mates, so the net quantity of criticism directed at Republicans is effectively the same as the centrists’: zero. You can say there are two Democratic parties, but neither one of them consistently sticks up for the Democratic Party.

The old adage that liberals can’t take their own side in an argument is sadly true. On the other hand, I’ve seen more unity and less internecine acrimony in the last year than we’ve had in decades so it seems as if it might be changing, at least a bit.

But as for the Republicans, Bacon gets it wrong about the Republicans with this analysis:

A small bloc within the Old Guard, such as Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, isn’t just Trump-skeptical but outright anti-Trump.

Steve M notes:

Er, Romney voted with Trump 79% of the time in the two years following the 2018 midterms. But go on.

There are policy differences between these two Republican parties. Old Guard Republicans are more conservative on foreign policy, for instance, while the Trump ones fall to the right of the Old Guard on immigration.

Yet many Trumpists — e.g., Marjorie Taylor Greene — are rushing to proclaim opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, while claiming that Donald Trump would have maintained “peace through strength” if he were president. (Trump himself has adopted this framing.) If it doesn’t involve China, Muslims, or undocumented immigrants, most Trumpist Republicans are largely indifferent to foreign policy, and thus fairly flexible.

But I think the biggest difference between these two groups comes down to style: The Old Guard is resistant to America becoming a more multicultural, multiracial country, but not in the loud, aggressive way that the Trump Party opposes that evolution.

Then there’s hardly any difference between the two parties at all. (Bacon is right — even before Trump entered politics, the Old Guard pursued immigration reform and outreach to Hispanic voters under President Bush, then abandoned both without a struggle when it became clear that the party’s base voters wasn’t interested.)

“McConnell wants more establishment-style Republicans in power and to keep pushing the traditional Republican agenda of low taxes and regulation,” said Seth Masket, a University of Denver political scientist. “The Trump wing is less interested in challenging that agenda than on changing how elections are done. They’re trying to make it easier for their side to win elections and to contest those they lose.”

The only big legislative accomplishment of the Trump years was a purely Old Guard tax bill custom-tailored for the rich — and Trumpists never complained. And most Old Guard Republicans haven’t put up much of a fight with the Trumpists on the subject of elections. Even the ones who aren’t actively trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory insist that the 2020 election was rife with irregularities.

At this point, unless we’re talking about dead House members walking (Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger) or outgoing Northeastern governors (Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker), just about every Old Guard Republican is, effectively, a Trump Republican.

The only split right now is between the Trumpists and the batshit crazy Trumpists — you know, like this one:

Midway through a white nationalist’s conference in Orlando last month, one speaker drew applause calling for gruesome violence against “traitors” after excoriating critics of the “honorable” Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and proponents of the “bioweapon” coronavirus vaccine.

“We need to build more gallows,” the speaker said, adding that such a deadly fate would “make an example of these traitors who’ve betrayed our country.”

… Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican lawmaker … represents tens of thousands of constituents and has found a rising national profile as a face of the radicalized wing of the GOP.

Rogers’s trajectory shows the political and financial incentives of going to extremes….

She raised nearly $2.5 million in 2021, outraising even statewide candidates for governor, attorney general and secretary of state, according to campaign finance records. Nearly $2 million of that money came from small donations from outside Arizona as she traveled the U.S. calling for the 2020 election to be overturned and demanding audits of the vote without credible evidence of fraud.

And this one:

Robert Regan, a Republican-backed nominee for a Michigan state House seat, shared a meme from a pro-Nazi website claiming that feminism “is a Jewish program to degrade and subjugate white men.” He also used Facebook to share a piece from a fringe site claiming that Jewish people, led by the Rothschild family, were responsible for 9/11; assassinated Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy; and control the banks and media, among other purported misdeeds.

Regan, needless to say, also wants his state’s 2020 election results decertified.

At this point, nearly every Republican is an election truther. Nearly every Republican is a pandemic truther. Nearly every Republican is an immigrant-basher. If there’s a party schism, it’s between those who openly embrace neo-Nazi ideas and the summary execution of political enemies, and Republicans who aren’t ready to go that far — at least for now.

Sure, a lot of Republicans wish Trump would shut his pie hole and move on. But they are all willing to put up with him as long as he delivers the cult and they can stay in power. They have all adopted the Q slogan, “where we go one, we go all.”