What Happened Today: Feb 24, 2022
Russia invades Ukraine; Ukrainian Jews to Israel; Canada lifts Emergency Act
The Big Story
Russia invaded Ukraine before dawn this morning. Within hours, dozens of civilians and hundreds of Ukrainian military members had been killed, a death toll that continues to climb quickly as Ukraine defends itself against a Russian attack by land, sea, and air. In a televised statement to his people, President Zelensky said, “It’s not just rocket explosions, fighting, and the roar of aircraft” heard across Ukraine, but “the sound of a new Iron Curtain, which lowers and closes Russia from the civilized world.”
Following a call by Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov for all available Ukrainian citizens to enlist, civilians have flocked to the recruitment offices of the Ukrainian military, which is substantially outnumbered by Russia’s deployment of 190,000 troops, the largest armed mobilization since World War II. Ukraine’s state-owned railway has evacuated several thousand residents from eastern cities under attack, with residents fleeing the capital city of Kyiv under missile and long-range artillery attack by Russian forces coming through Belarus in the north and Russia-controlled Crimea in the south. As of this afternoon, Russian military occupied the Antonov airport 15 miles outside Kyiv, and reports from The Kyiv Independent said Russian forces have overtaken Ukrainian soldiers who were defending the highly radioactive 1,000-square-mile Chernobyl site, an area that includes a direct route from Belarus to Kyiv. An explosion at the storage unit encasing the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that melted down in 1986 could cause radioactive dust to spread across and cover Ukraine and several European Union nations, according to a statement from Anton Herashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s interior minister.
In remarks from the White House this afternoon, President Biden said the United States would not send American forces into Ukraine. Instead, he said, the United States will be implementing a range of debilitating sanctions and freezing trillions of dollars in Russian assets. “America stands up to bullies,” President Biden said, adding that he did approve the deployment of troops to NATO allies in Eastern Europe. Pentagon officials confirmed that 7,000 American troops would soon be deployed to the continent. “The United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power,” said President Biden. Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a similar announcement to his parliament this afternoon, revealing the largest set of sanctions Britain has thus far levied against Russia.
Read More: https://kyivindependent.com/national/russia-attacks-wide-range-of-targets-in-ukraine-live-updates/
Back Pages: Review of Etran de L’Aïr’s album, Agadez
The Rest
→ Analysts anticipate that economic sanctions against Russia will be offset to a significant degree by support from China, including access to Chinese exports and lines of credit at Chinese-owned banks. “The level of Chinese support for Russian actions could be an influential factor in shaping an evolving crisis,” Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Tom Rafferty told the Financial Times today. The Chinese envoy to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, urged Western nations to not act hastily in their responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this morning, saying the “door to a peaceful solution” was not entirely closed. Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, offered additional support to the Russian effort and accused the United States of being a “culprit” of escalating tensions and “creating panic.”
→ Videos of anti-war protests in Russian cities have streamed onto social media platforms throughout the day, as have videos of Russian law enforcement arresting protestors.
→ Responding to criticisms of racial profiling, the Biden administration has shut down the China Initiative, the Justice Department program focused on combating Chinese espionage. Launched by former attorney general Jeff Sessions in November 2018, the program has led to criminal charges against academics who’ve conducted U.S.-funded research while hiding grants and payments related to their involvement with China’s Thousand Talents program. Representatives from the Justice Department have said that the end of the program does not equate to an abandonment of their defense against national security threats from China, but rather a new integration of Chinese counterespionage efforts into similar campaigns against Russia and Iran. “I’m convinced that we need a broader approach, one that looks across all of these threats and uses all of our authorities to combat them,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen said yesterday.
→ The Israeli government is currently reviewing potential options to expedite its laborious process for Jews to immigrate there under its Law of Return, as some 100 immigrants have already arrived to Israel from Ukraine, and the Jewish Agency, the office that handles the program, has been inundated with calls for Ukrainian residents. “We are ready to accept thousands of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine,” said Integration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata. An estimated 200,000 Jews reside in Ukraine.
→ Contrary to the silence or muddled statements of many organizations involved in geopolitical affairs, the Auschwitz Memorial has issued a powerful statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
→ A new American Sociological Review study finds that while women continue to academically outperform men by growing margins, gay men are the exception to the rule. “If America’s gay men formed their own country, that country would be the world’s most highly educated by far,” said Joel Mittleman, a University of Norte Dame author of the study that found gay men are 50% more likely to earn an advanced degree than their heterosexual counterparts, while gay women fare worse academically than straight women.
Read More: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224221075776
→ The Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Ottawa’s Parliament Hill has ended, replaced by a police occupation of the same area, as seen in this map (below) of road closures and checkpoints posted last week by city officials on social media. Some of those closures have been opened up, while most will remain in effect through the weekend after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement last night that he was going to lift the Emergencies Act, the unprecedented government powers he evoked to freeze and monitor the financial transactions of both protestors and their supporters. The temporary use of the act required ratification by both the Canadian House and Senate; following a supportive House vote, members of the Senate expressed skepticism, criticizing the lack of transparency and justification for the sweeping government crackdown. Sen. Glen Patterson, who split with the Conservative Senators Group because of his skepticism of the group’s alignment with the Freedom Convoy, was nonetheless critical of how Trudeau implemented his emergency powers. “There is a certain amount of ‘trust us’ in the government’s justification of these extreme measures,” Patterson said.
→ In an effort to discourage energy use while snowstorms crippled Texas’ energy infrastructure, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the Lonestar State’s grid, kept prices at their maximum level last February. Consumers were infuriated by the move, paying exorbitantly high energy bills even when the storm outages meant people couldn't heat their homes. At the time, Gov. Greg Abbott’s spokesperson said the governor was not “involved in any way” in the energy-pricing decision, a claim contradicted by the testimony in court this week. Class action lawsuits and bankruptcies have rippled across Texas’ energy sector since the storm, many attributable to the storm price fluctuations.
David Grossman reviews Etran de L’Aïr’s newest album, Agadez
One of the most interesting record labels in the world these days might be Sahel Sounds, a Portland, Oregon-based label with a focus on the music of the West African Sahel, which extends from the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Fourteen nations have land within the Sahel, which encompasses more than 3,000 miles. But a Wikipedia-style explainer hardly gets across what makes the region’s music, especially what’s known as “desert blues,” so fascinating.
A great entry point is Etran de L’Aïr’s newest album, Agadez. There’s a lot of geography in that one sentence alone: The band’s name translates to “the Stars of the Aïr,” which is the mountainous region of northern Niger, and Agadez is the region’s largest city. Etran de L’Aïr, which was founded in 1995 and first made waves in the United States in 2018 with their album No. 1, is best known back home for being a wedding band.
Agadez is a “guitar town,” says Sahel Sounds, but its electric guitar sounds radically different from the chorus-and-riff-based music most famous in the West. Rather, its sound is one of swirling repetition, where it’s easy to get lost in one melody after another. One popular influence is Jimi Hendrix, who’s cited by another artist from the region who has made a splash in the United States, Mdou Moctar.
Etran de L’Aïr doesn’t shred as hard as Moctar does, and it looks more to African influences. The band’s rhythms are inescapable. “Toubouk Ine Chihoussay,” for example, works itself around a guitar rhythm, vocals, and drums in an elongated sense. Somewhere between a jam band and surf rock, the musicians have a steadiness and tightness in their performance. The band knows exactly where every sound is leading, and there’s a certain level of wonder in hearing it all unfold. A track like “Nak Derannie” has effects that make it sound like acid rock, and deep grooves in which listeners can easily get lost.
There is perhaps no worse classification in music than “world,” forcing dozens upon dozens of separate styles to brush up against each other with nothing in common except how they don’t come from the United States or England. Just like any other artist group, Etran de L’Aïr has soaked up a wide variety of influences, creating a pan-African style ranging from Northern Malian blues to Congolese soukous. If you haven’t heard any of these, it’s okay. Etran de L’Aïr blends them seamlessly to create a sound all its own.
Just as significant as any cultural influence on Etran de L’Aïr is the presence of electricity. When the band started, access to both electricity and electric guitars was rare. Having formed around an acoustic guitar and a gourd hit with a sandal, the band has expanded into electrification with gusto. Made up entirely of family members, this is a band whose sound has been shaped by forces unfamiliar to many American listeners. Yet it only takes one listen to understand their music. That’s something you could never get from Wikipedia.
David Grossman is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn and is on Twitter at @davidgross_man.