What Happened Today: March 1, 2022
Babi Yar struck; China’s gambit; What’s the U.S. interest in Ukraine?
The Big Story
The grim scenario described here yesterday—that with Russia’s advance stalled, Moscow could turn to more brutal attacks on Ukrainian population centers—came to pass Tuesday. Under the cover of an intensifying bombing campaign against Ukraine’s civilian centers, a miles-long armored convoy stalled outside of Kyiv, according to U.S. officials, due to possible logistical shortages or perhaps in an effort to refine planning before resuming its effort to seize the city and install a new Putin-friendly regime. At roughly 8 p.m. local time in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, video reports began to spread online showing massive explosions from missiles hitting the apartment blocks in the city of some 1.5 million people. “A missile targeting the central square of a city is open, undisguised terrorism,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Most of the shelling in the city appeared to have come from Grad rockets, fired by vehicle-mounted multiple launch rocket systems that released a hail of munitions, possibly including cluster munitions, which would constitute a war crime.
While explosions were still being reported from Kharkiv, Reuters reported 10 people killed and 35 wounded in the city. Earlier in the day, Ukraine’s Ministry of Interior Affairs adviser Anton Herashchenko wrote on his Facebook page that the bombing had left “dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded.” Some 300 miles west of Kharkiv in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Russian missile strikes targeted the city’s communications infrastructure. In one strike, five people were killed; the television tower was taken out; and the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial—the site where 33,371 Jews were murdered in 1941–was hit.
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-forces-target-ukrainian-civilian-areas-as-missile-hits-central-kharkiv-11646124675
In The Back Pages: What’s the U.S. interest in Ukraine?
The Rest
→ Perhaps the most significant change in the disposition of the war on Tuesday was China offering to “play a role” in brokering a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine. The offer was coupled with a shift in tone from Beijing, which released a statement saying it is “extremely concerned about the harm to civilians,” which has some observers speculating that we may be seeing a rift emerge in the critical China-Russia alliance. That’s possible, but given what we know about Chinese-Russian intelligence sharing and discussion of Moscow’s war plans prior to the invasion, it is at least equally possible that the current moves are part of a choreographed diplomatic sequence aimed at preserving Beijing’s international standing while buying Moscow space to maneuver.
Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/e32aaff8-af24-46e1-8c7c-2a7d09387e45
→ It’s hard to know what to expect from President Biden’s inaugural State of the Union address scheduled for tonight now that the war in Ukraine has become the focal point of attention. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York has pointed out, the media has already begun to run with the narrative that it is a turning point for Biden, with The New York Times writing this week that the week-old war in which the United States is not directly involved is “already redefining the arc of his presidency.” But even on that issue, the president’s approval ratings, which are hovering at or just under 40% in most polls, are low. In a new Suffolk poll, only 35% of respondents voiced approval of how Biden has handled the attack on Ukraine, while 49% said they disapproved. It may still be possible for Biden to turn those numbers around, but it will take more than a speech.
→ Russia’s rouble crashed to record lows Monday after the news that the European Union would exclude Russia from using the Belgian-based financial messaging system SWIFT, which acts as the global clearing system for transactions between banks across the world. While the ban had yet to be implemented on Tuesday, the Russian economy appeared to be heading for a crash under broad sanctions that have expanded far beyond the country’s leaders to target the country’s financial and monetary system, a policy that may increase leverage over Vladimir Putin but will also create significant hardships for Russian citizens.
→ Matthew Lawrence Perna, a 37-year-old Pennsylvania man who was awaiting sentencing for charges related to entering the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riots last year, died last Friday after committing suicide. The author of an obituary for Perna writes that he “died of a broken heart” after “constant delays in hearings and postponements dragged out for over a year.” Perna faced up to 20 years in prison. The author of his obituary writes that Perna “entered the Capitol through a previously opened door (he did not break in as was reported) where he was ushered in by police. He didn’t break, touch, or steal anything. He did not harm anyone, as he stayed within the velvet ropes taking pictures.”
→ Three San Francisco school board members lost their seats in a recall election last month, largely because of their decision to change the admissions criteria for Lowell, the city’s premier public high school from a merit-based admissions system to an open lottery. Voters were successfully mobilized over the issue, but it turns out the admissions policy at Lowell will not—indeed, cannot—return to the previous merit-based system. The San Francisco school board has acknowledged that Lowell’s merit-based system violated a California law requiring “that selection of pupils to enroll in the school is made through a random, unbiased process that prohibits an evaluation of whether a pupil should be enrolled based upon the pupil’s academic or athletic performance.”
→ Tonight at 6 p.m. EST, Tablet is hosting a conversation on Zoom between Ukraine correspondent Vladislav Davidzon and the eminent strategic analyst Edward Luttwak.
Sign up here to attend: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0YbxFIRnTcyjRs970147kw
→ Last month, Intel acquired Tower, an Israeli computer chip manufacturer, for $5.8 billion. Now the Histadrut, Israel’s largest labor union, is organizing Tower’s workers around demands for job security and bonuses. Organizers argue that Tower, which employs 1,500 people, has not been forthcoming about its plans for workers or the implications of the lucrative sale. Histadrut hopes that its organizing efforts with Tower will create a beachhead for organizing more of Israel’s 335,000 tech employees—at present, fewer than 4,000 tech-sector workers belong to a union. Until recently, union membership in Israel was in steep decline. In the 1980s, 80% of workers belonged to unions, which dropped to 23% by 2012. In the past 10 years, however, union membership in Israel has risen to 25%.
→ While the international community has held off on sanctioning Russia’s energy sector over fears of how such sanctions would impact global markets, companies are beginning to withdraw their oil and gas operations from Russia. Shell and BP have announced divestments from Russia that will cost the companies billions of dollars. These companies were also responding to market pressures. Gazprom and Rosneft—Russia’s state-owned energy companies that were Shell’s and BP’s partners in the region—saw their stock prices crater in the wake of the invasion and the sanctions. While the divestments will hurt Russia’s economy, they could also fortify the Sino-Russian alliance. Some analysts believe that China could step into the vacuum left by the Western energy companies as Russia and China announced $117.5 billion worth of oil and gas deals in early February.
Why Can’t America’s Leaders Think in Terms of the National Interest?
There’s something to admire in the example of Germany’s leadership, which responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by breaking with some of its most deeply held positions on foreign affairs. It’s unfortunate that it took Russia shelling Kyiv to get Berlin to reconsider a strategic partnership that empowered Putin while dividing the rest of Europe—and there’s reason to think that the German leadership’s change of heart won’t last—but it suggests, at the least, an ability to rethink fundamentals of the national interest.
The United States’ current leaders and political class seem to lack even this basic ability as they respond to every new crisis with the same handful of historical clichés and policy maneuvers.
Can anyone say for sure what the United States is trying to accomplish in Ukraine at the moment and how it serves the vital interests of American citizens? The White House seems to be not just unsure of the answer but openly uninterested in the question as it goes about managing perceptions of the war as if it were another crisis to be managed through public opinion.
“This, my friends, is our moment,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared last week, “this is the Sudetenland, that’s what people were saying there.” The World War II metaphors, which flood the zone in moments like these, are little more than placeholders, asserting moral convictions instead of viable American commitments.
Republicans like Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) meanwhile have called for the United States to establish a “no-fly zone over Ukraine.” That is extremely unlikely to happen, and the White House, to its credit, has already shot down the idea because it would require U.S. troops to police Ukrainian airspace in order to target Russian aircraft that violated it. In other words, it would directly involve the United States in a conflict with a nuclear-powered Russia over a matter in which the White House has yet to establish a direct national interest. Kinzinger previously called for the United States to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria, to give you a sense of how the same ideas get recycled regardless of local context.
The real intellectuals of the American national security establishment, like the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes and the former president of the Council of Foreign Relations Richard Haas, have gone directly to calls for regime change in Russia. This is a truly psychotic idea that is redeemed only slightly by the fact that it’s tossed off as idle bluster on social media. It’s Putin’s arrogant and bullying effort to install a new regime of Ukraine without the consent or participation of the people who live there that we’re meant to condemn in the first place—but, if that’s not enough, again, there are the nukes.
For Haas, Wittes, Kinzinger, Pelosi, and the other fixtures of the permanent D.C. establishment, these are the only options. They respond to every conflict in the world with the same moldy Hitler metaphors and calls for regime change because it doesn’t matter to them whether the policies actually “work” in any sense greater than promoting their own political interests.
To come up with new ideas that are applicable to the present and have a chance of working, they would have to return to first principles and ask what the purpose of war is and how it relates to the United States’ interests. Angelo Codevilla, the American historian of statecraft who died last year, made this point over and over. The United States did not lose wars because it made bad strategic decisions, Codevilla argued, but because its leaders have come to think of themselves as a class apart from the rest of the country and lost the ability to define the nation’s essential interests and envision the strategic means to achieve them.
Is the sovereignty of Ukraine a vital interest for the United States? Our leaders’ rhetoric assures us that it is, but their actions show that it is not—the opposite of Codevilla’s counsel that an effective foreign policy should always underpromise and overdeliver.
Wittes is a twit putting the sword in some else’s hand re Russia. Enraged re his denial of influence by HRC defeat presumably by the Russians - it could not have been the Dems own delusional pretensions. His boss once said the IG FISA abuse report was not worth a podcast on lawfare. She is now in a national security post in the Biden admin. LOL.
I despise Putin but what is the counter? I see more EU resolve than US and less leadership or planning from the leader of the free world, and NATO.Just a hopeful let’s wait and hope to wag the dog vibe.