“U.S. President Joe Biden acknowledged that Americans’ bills would rise but said it was necessary to restrict Russia’s ability to wage war.
“The American people will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine,” he said.
Britain said it would phase out Russian oil by the end of 2022, while the European Union published plans to cut its reliance on Russian gas by two thirds this year.
China, which signed a friendship pact with Russia three weeks before the invasion, has yet to join the West in condemning Moscow or imposing sanctions.”
“The Polish government stunned Washington on Tuesday by announcing it was ready to transfer its 28 MiG-29 fighter planes to the U.S., with the understanding that they would be handed over to Ukrainian pilots fighting off the Russian invasion.
The move, which came with a request that the U.S. supply Poland with used jets with “corresponding capabilities,” came after a week of back-and-forth negotiations between Washington and Warsaw over transferring the jets to Ukraine, which needs replacement jets to fight off the Russians.
After vociferous denials by Warsaw that it was even considering donating MiGs to Ukraine, the offer arrived completely unexpected.
A senior administration official told POLITICO that the U.S. intelligence community and the Defense Department have been opposed to the transfer of the Polish planes to Ukraine, due to the complications in getting them over the border and into the hands of Ukrainian pilots. The Polish government also didn’t consult with their U.S. counterparts before making the announcement.
A statement by Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby reflected that deep concern late Tuesday, saying “we do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one,” and it is “simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it.”
Kirby signaled the logistics were problematic: refitting the aircraft to allow non-NATO Ukrainian pilots to fly them, along with “the prospect of fighter jets … departing from a U.S./NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” he said.”
“the U.S. should “make the smart move and take away the men and women Putin needs to win” the fight in Ukraine. “The United States could, with a stroke of a pen, totally destroy the capacity of Russia to compete militarily or economically with us by offering a green card to any Russian with a technical degree who wishes to emigrate to the United States,” Zubrin continued. Such a move may not stop the current invasion, but it would hobble Russia’s ability to participate in the high-tech economy—fully in line with a central thrust of Biden’s announced sanctions against the Kremlin.
Getting Russian brainpower out of Putin’s hands will undoubtedly benefit America. The U.S. has a history of accepting great minds fleeing rival nations, from the scientists who escaped the Axis and later staffed the Manhattan Project to the many artists, athletes, and authors who defected from the Soviet Union. Immigrants are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans, a trend that fully applies to Russian migrants. Accepting Russian immigrants, as with other groups, would help create jobs for native-born Americans—not take them away.”
“Russia is getting deplatformed from the world. The war in Ukraine is in many ways a traditional military clash involving tanks, missiles, diplomats, and supply lines. But nonstate actors have started taking sides—well, taking one side—in ways that the world hasn’t seen before, with private sector businesses and international organizations responding to Russia’s attack on its neighbor by cutting ties with Moscow, and in some cases sacrificing huge sums of money. Combined with the sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe (and perhaps motivated by them too), this mass exodus of foreign capital is demonstrating how the market can punish even powerful states for dangerous and unjustified behavior.
Shell, General Motors, BP, and other major firms have announced plans to leave Russia. FedEx and Germany-based shipping firm DHL are suspending deliveries to Russia, and Denmark-based Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, says it is considering suspending all shipments to Russia.
“Companies are basically saying, ‘We don’t want to be part of this,'” Nick Tsafos, an expert on energy and geopolitics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells The Washington Post. The Post notes that some of these moves are being made despite huge costs: Shell is abandoning several joint projects with Russia-based Gazprom, sacrificing more than $3 billion.
When the Cold War ended, Bloomberg reports, businesses poured into Russia to take advantage of a freshly open market with millions of new customers and the country’s vast natural resources. The past few days have been a stunning reversal of that same rush, with energy companies, major international law firms, and exporters either announcing plans to scale down their operations in Russia or exit the country entirely”
“”Frankly, I think…kicking every Russian student out of the United States,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.) on CNN last week, should “be on the table.” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.) backed him up, tweeting, “These Russian students are the sons and daughters of the richest Russians. A strong message can be sent by sending them home.”
This is a misguided proposal that will drive a wedge between the U.S. and people who would be well-served by American values. Rather than expelling Russian nationals who are uninvolved in the sins of their government, we should be welcoming them with open arms and encouraging them to engage with our values.
Some 5,000 Russian students were studying at American universities in 2021, according to the Institute of International Education. Demand among young Russians to study abroad has grown steadily over the past several decades. In 2019, roughly 75,000 Russians were attending foreign universities, at least four times higher than the early 2000s level. As of 2015, the U.S. ranked only behind Germany as the top destination for Russian students completing their educations abroad.
Even during the days of the Soviet Union, the U.S. recognized the importance of maintaining cultural exposure. America welcomed “some fifty thousand…scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists,” and others from the Soviet Union under exchange programs between 1958 and 1988, per former U.S. diplomat Yale Richmond. Cold War–era exchange programs “fostered changes that prepared the way for [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War,” Richmond argued. President Dwight D. Eisenhower even “wanted to bring 10,000 Soviet students to the United States” at one point, according to Richmond.
It’s true that Russians from influential and wealthy families seek out an American education. But to claim that each of the 5,000 Russian students here is rich—and that sending them all home would hit Putin where it hurts—is simply incorrect. And if massive, debilitating sanctions meant to cut Russia off from the global economy haven’t yet convinced Putin to stop his assault on Ukraine, it’s hard to see how expelling Russian students would. “The more likely outcome,” Stuart Anderson of Forbes writes, “would seem to be ruined education plans and sympathetic coverage in Russian state media of young people, it would be argued, who were unfairly targeted by the U.S. government.”
Anderson points out, correctly, that a blanket expulsion policy would harm some Russian students fleeing persecution themselves.”
“I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.
Back then I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia. And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia.”
…
“It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.
Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.”
…
“The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.
The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.
So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.
It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared. That’s exactly what he wants us to be. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.”
…
“similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions”
…
“Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done.”
“The 2014 penalties were narrower in scope and failed to deter Putin from further land grabs. Now, administration officials say they learned key lessons. Among them: They needed to share more information with the Europeans in advance and to work together on aligning their reaction for maximum impact.
“We were more resistant to doing that in the [Obama] administration, for all the obvious reasons of trying to protect sources and methods,” a senior Treasury official said about intelligence sharing. “But being able to do that, to find a way to get the information to our friends and allies, was critical.”
That strategy was made easier by the fact that Biden administration officials now overseeing sanctions became thoroughly familiar with the nuance of sanctions policy during Russia’s last military campaign and developed extensive relationships with their European counterparts.”
…
“The U.S. took pains to carve out Russian energy as much as possible from the punishment, in part because any direct actions focusing on oil could result in higher global prices — and thereby even help the Russians, but also in recognition of Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas. U.S. officials also worked with allies and major natural gas producers to ensure that Europe would have adequate energy supplies if Putin decided to cut off shipments that flow through Ukraine.”