These are miscalculations, not signs of madness. They’re the kind of miscalculations you make if you are very divorced from reality, because you lead the life of a czar, in vast — if hideous — palaces, surrounded by people who are terrified of you and tell you what they think you want to hear. If I put myself in Putin’s position, I don’t think he’s trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. He’s looking back even further and trying to bring back the Russian Empire, with himself as “Czar Vladimir.”

It’s an ideology of conservative, orthodox nationalism that Putin offers, that has nothing to do with the Soviet legacy. A lot of people get this wrong.

He has a huge incentive to speed up the defeat of Ukraine, using more brutal methods if that’s what it takes. Because if he doesn’t win, then I think his position at home will become very vulnerable.

If I’m him, the crucial thing now is to achieve victory over Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian army as fast as possible so that we can get to some peace negotiation from a position of strength. In that negotiation, Putin might be willing to make some concessions to get the sanctions reduced or removed.

Read it all.

#China has ambitions in Central and East Asia that pose a potential threat to #Russia, notes historian Niall Ferguson. "At some point their relationship begins to fray because, in truth, neither side really trusts the other."https://t.co/dDfabxZvO8

— Nikkei Asia (@NikkeiAsia) March 14, 2022

In the days since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, shelling and airstrikes have killed hundreds of people in Kharkiv, a city of 1.4 million about 20 miles from the Russian border. Residents spend their days and nights huddled in the subway. Above them, explosions devastate their city.

At least 400 high-rise apartment buildings have been hit, Kharkiv city authorities said. Strikes have damaged the art museum, with its collection of famous Russian painters including Repin and Shishkin, and the Korolenko library, which houses priceless manuscripts.

“Everyone is in shock here,” said Ihor Terekhov, the city mayor. “We used to think of the Russians as our brothers. Even in our worst nightmares, we never imagined that they would destroy our city.”

Russia’s attempt to use rapid thrusts by armored columns and assaults by paratroopers and special forces to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and other cities, overthrowing the country’s government, has stalled in the face of fierce resistance. Now, Moscow is resorting to a punishing, wholesale destruction, shelling and bombing residential neighborhoods and historic downtowns.

Read it all.

We went to Kharkiv today. It is grim beyond belief. Ukraine’s second largest city is being pulverized by Russian air strikes that have gutted its historical downtown. https://t.co/9DdzWTtvyj

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) March 11, 2022

Christian charities and churches are hard at work in Eastern Europe to address the plight of those affected by the war in Ukraine.

More than 2.1 million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion on 24 February, according to UN figures on Tuesday, in what is the largest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

USPG and the diocese in Europe have put together an emergency appeal to help those caught up in the conflict. Funds are supporting the work of Anglican chaplaincies in neighbouring Poland and Hungary — but also in Western Europe, where many refugees are now arriving.

On Wednesday, the diocese’s Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Caspari, said that the chaplaincies’ community relationships and cross-continent links meant that they were ideally positioned to support refugees. They have been distributing aid, as well as individual grants.

Read it all.

Agencies focus on fleeing Ukrainians https://t.co/jurWD7hF7W

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 11, 2022

To grasp Mr Putin’s appetite for violence, look at how the war is being fought. Having failed to win a quick victory, Russia is trying to sow panic by starving Ukrainian cities and pounding them blindly. On March 9th it hit a maternity hospital in Mariupol. If Mr Putin is committing war crimes against the fellow Slavs he eulogised in his writings, he is ready to inflict slaughter at home.

And to gauge Mr Putin’s paranoia, imagine how the war ends. Russia has more firepower than Ukraine. It is still making progress, especially in the south. It may yet capture the capital, Kyiv. And yet, even if the war drags on for months, it is hard to see Mr Putin as the victor.

Suppose that Russia manages to impose a new government. Ukrainians are now united against the invader. Mr Putin’s puppet could not rule without an occupation, but Russia does not have the money or the troops to garrison even half of Ukraine. American army doctrine says that to face down an insurgency—in this case, one backed by nato—occupiers need 20 to 25 soldiers per 1,000 people; Russia has a little over four.

If, as the Kremlin may have started to signal, Mr Putin will not impose a puppet government—because he cannot—then he will have to compromise with Ukraine in peace talks. Yet he will struggle to enforce any such agreement. After all, what will he do if post-war Ukraine resumes its Westward drift: invade?

Read it all.

The truth is sinking in that, by attacking Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has committed a catastrophic error. As the scale of his failure becomes clear, Russia will enter the most dangerous moment in this conflict https://t.co/jTTz9pddGc

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 10, 2022

For one thing, Putin’s attack has underscored the financial and technological dominance of the Western world. There is simply no precedent for the speed and severity with which the U.S. and its allies have punished Putin, almost totally isolating Russia from the global economy.

Sanctions are inflicting severe damage on Russia; a stock-market collapse, import problems and a debt default all loom. China is watching from the sidelines as the world’s leading democracies have shown the willingness and ability to pummel international aggressors economically. Although China, with a larger, more diversified, more globally integrated economy, is a far harder target that Russia, Xi must be wondering what economic carnage awaits his country if it attacks Taiwan.

Second, Russian aggression has activated antibodies to Chinese power. Japan, Singapore and Taiwan joined the anti-Putin sanctions team because they worry that unchecked aggression in Europe will tempt Beijing to make moves in the Pacific. If Putin sets a precedent of successful conquest, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida has said, “it will have an impact on Asia, as well.”

Warnings that Beijing might use force against Taiwan in the next few years no longer seem so hyperbolic, which means that Putin’s gambit could result in more determined, multilateral containment of China.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

The Ukraine war may push China and Russia closer together. Even so, Beijing may be learning that proximity to a violent predator has its price.
⁦@bopinion⁩ ⁦@KissingerCenter⁩ ⁦@AEIfdp⁩ https://t.co/ibZ36w05w0

— Hal Brands (@HalBrands) March 10, 2022

The Archbishop of Westminster and dozens of other clergymen from the Christian Leadership of London have written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson urging him to extend the visa programme to all Ukrainian refugees.

The letter, sent on Wednesday, said the group was “encouraged” by the Government’s family sponsorship programme and “welcomed the intention to establish a pathway to humanitarian sponsorship”.

But they called for “urgency” and to “act swiftly and without delay”, criticising the visa forms process.

“How can mothers with young children, the elderly and the disabled, who have travelled a thousand miles, be expected to complete online application forms in a language foreign to them?”, the letter reads.

Read it all.

Religious leaders urge PM to extend Ukrainian visa scheme https://t.co/u6hYSic49k

— The Independent (@Independent) March 10, 2022

News coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has touched on religious dimensions of the longstanding conflict between the two countries. Russia and Ukraine are home to some of the world’s largest Orthodox Christian populations, but the Orthodox Church of Ukraine gained independence from the Russian Orthodox Church in 2019 amidst the ongoing political turmoil. Now, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has sought to justify the invasion, although other Russian Orthodox clergy have expressed opposition to the war.

Around the time of the split between the Ukrainian and Russian churches, we published a blog post based on data from a Pew Research Center survey of Central and Eastern Europe conducted in 2015 and 2016. The analysis found that even before the split between the two churches, a plurality of Orthodox Ukrainians (46%) looked to the leaders of the Ukrainian national church (either the patriarch of Kiev or the metropolitan of Kiev and all of Ukraine) as the highest authority of Orthodoxy, while just 17% saw the patriarch of Moscow as their spiritual leader. The patriarch of Moscow received higher levels of support in eastern Ukraine than in western Ukraine, consistent with a broader geographic pattern of views toward Russia within Ukraine at the time of the survey.

Prayers will be led by the island’s bishop and the Manx Youth Band and the Manx Concert Brass will conclude a minute’s silence by playing the Ukrainian National Anthem.

Organiser Claire Christian MHK said coming together to “demonstrate the strength of the Manx nation’s support for the Ukrainian people and world peace” was the “right thing to do”.

“In doing so, the people of the Isle of Man can join the chorus of voices around the globe condemning Russia’s aggression and calling for peace,” she said.

Read it all.

A candlelit vigil will be held in the Isle of Man's capital to show support for the people of Ukraine. https://t.co/LRxk0ogzJu

— BBC Isle of Man (@BBCIsleofMan) March 8, 2022

Unless it receives urgent help, Moldova faces a catastrophe. The government estimated before the invasion that it could accommodate just 15,000 Ukrainians. Already, refugee centres are full, the border guards are overstretched and stocks of relief supplies are running dangerously low. If nearby Odessa, a city of 1m people just 50km from the border, comes under Russian assault, as seems entirely possible, tens of thousands more will come. “The prospects are dire,” says Mr Popescu. “We are talking about a major threat to the whole state system.”

The government intends to ask the eu to deploy Frontex, the eu’s border agency, to support its own border police. But it is financial support, above all, that is needed. The European offer of just €15m ($16.5m) to help allay the immediate crisis is meagre. The government is already running a big and growing deficit, owing in part to the rising price of natural gas imported from Russia. The economy has suffered two recessions in recent years, the most recent because of the pandemic. Without generous help, Moldova will not cope. Yet many Moldovans feel that they have been forgotten, as aid and praise rain down on Ukraine’s far richer neighbours in the eu.

Moreover, the refugee crisis may only be the first part in what many fear will be a two-act tragedy. There is widespread nervousness that Russia does not intend to leave Moldova alone if it is successful in Ukraine.

Read it all.

Son ⁦@Jacob_Judah is in Moldova:⁩ The tinderbox – Will Moldova be dragged into Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine? | Europe | The Economist https://t.co/GnZZgYNwz1

— Tim Judah (@timjudah1) March 9, 2022

In the coming weeks it will become more and more obvious that our biggest problem with Putin in Ukraine is that he will refuse to lose early and small, and the only other outcome is that he will lose big and late. But because this is solely his war and he cannot admit defeat, he could keep doubling down in Ukraine until … until he contemplates using a nuclear weapon.

Why do I say that defeat in Ukraine is Putin’s only option, that only the timing and size is in question? Because the easy, low-cost invasion he envisioned and the welcome party from Ukrainians he imagined were total fantasies — and everything flows from that.

Putin completely underestimated Ukraine’s will to be independent and become part of the West. He completely underestimated the will of many Ukrainians to fight, even if it meant dying, for those two goals. He completely overestimated his own armed forces. He completely underestimated President Biden’s ability to galvanize a global economic and military coalition to enable Ukrainians to stand and fight and to devastate Russia at home — the most effective U.S. coalition-building effort since George H.W. Bush made Saddam Hussein pay for his folly of seizing Kuwait. And he completely underestimated the ability of companies and individuals all over the world to participate in, and amplify, economic sanctions on Russia — far beyond anything governments initiated or mandated.

Read it all.

In Opinion

“In the coming weeks it will become more and more obvious that our biggest problem with Putin in Ukraine is that he will refuse to lose early and small,” Thomas Friedman writes. “The only other outcome is that he will lose big and late.” https://t.co/577L8AYRbU

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 9, 2022

Church leaders in Ukraine have deplored the growing number of civilian deaths in the current war and have backed calls for firmer Western action, as the Patriarch of Moscow disregarded worldwide appeals for him to condemn the invasion and urge a halt to the fighting.

“All the people of Ukraine are suffering hourly from the terrible realities of war — and these are innocent sufferings, since they have done no harm to Russia,” the leader of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany Dumenko, said in a Sunday message to his clergy.

“Let us be comforted by the realisation that our innocent sufferings will be crowned inevitably with victory and eternal glory, just as the sufferings of Christ were crowned with them. . . With God’s help we will win — and Ukraine, now crucified by the Russian occupiers, will be resurrected.”

The message was one of several issued by the Metropolitan on Sunday, after talks with the Mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, and the commander of Ukrainian forces defending the capital.

Read it all.

"With God’s help we will win — and Ukraine, now crucified by the Russian occupiers, will be resurrected." https://t.co/fImRjcsxuG

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 8, 2022

There is a reasonable chance that an embargo will set off the internal disintegration of Vladimir Putin’s siloviki regime (KGB mafia), though by what mechanism and on what timetable remains obscure. Will Russia’s patriotic generals agree to devastate the Varingian cradle of Kievan Mother Rus with cluster bombs? I doubt it.

Professor Alan Riley from the Atlantic Council said the combination of central bank sanctions, ejection from the Swift payments system, and an energy embargo could test this brutal but narrow and brittle regime to destruction. “We may reach the point where Putin can’t even pay his troops,” he said.

Those in Europe still baulking at an energy embargo should study what happened in 1935 when Benito Mussolini launched a 400,000-strong invasion of Ethiopia, to the indignation of a world moving beyond imperialism.

Half measures proved to be the worst of all worlds. Calibrated sanctions enraged Mussolini without stopping him. They pushed him into an alliance with Hitler, bringing about what the democracies most feared.

Read it all.

"What is clear is that the Western democracies no longer deem it morally defensible to fund Putin’s war machine with purchases of oil, gas, and coal" | Writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard https://t.co/qhNn86aooS

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 8, 2022

Amen. pic.twitter.com/3HjYfQuAv6

— Taylor Wilton-Morgan 🇺🇦 (@TaylorWMorgan) March 8, 2022

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for peace negotiations in Ukraine and compassion for refugees, as the humanitarian crisis in the country worsens.

Speaking to pupils at a school in Crawley, on Saturday, Archbishop Welby said: “We need negotiation, mediation, getting people to support peace but not creating more war.” He also called for UK citizens to show generosity towards refugees. “We need to turn towards each other and care for each other,” he said.

More than 1.6 million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion on 24 February, according to UN figures.

On Friday, USPG and the diocese in Europe announced an emergency appeal to help those caught up in the conflict. Funds will go to Christian charities and churches working on the ground to support people fleeing Ukraine.

Read it all.

“We need negotiation, mediation, getting people to support peace but not creating more war.” https://t.co/XgylKiJFnE

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 7, 2022

Poland has long warned its Western partners about the risk of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and indeed beyond, and the need to anchor its neighbour in NATO and the EU. Today, as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country is on the frontline of a potentially explosive conflict. The role it seems to play is as important as it is dangerous. Poland is fast becoming the lynchpin of the Western effort to defend Ukraine and deter Russia, a role that exposes it to considerable danger at the same time as it is playing principal recipient of the most extensive and rapid movement of refugees in Europe’s post-war history.

Hundreds of Stinger missiles, Javelin anti-tank weapons and other munitions have been pouring into Ukraine, through Poland and Romania, as part of America’s $350m package to assist the besieged country. Pentagon officials say that most of the weapons have already reached Ukraine. America has also proposed that Poland supply Ukraine with its own MiG-29 fighter jets, and receive American F-16s in exchange, according to Antony Blinken, the secretary of state. So far, Polish officials say they will not be sending warplanes to Ukraine, though there are reports that they may be supplied in unassembled form.

People are making their way across the border as well. Most of the world’s attention has been on the 1.6m Ukrainians who have escaped abroad since the start of the war, including the 1m refugees who have reached Poland. But many are heading in the opposite direction. Over the first ten days of the war, Polish border guards recorded 217,000 crossings into Ukraine. Of these, a large share are by Ukrainians, men and women, coming back home to enlist.

Read it all.

Now it appears that Mr. Xi’s display of solidarity may have, possibly unwittingly, emboldened Mr. Putin to gamble on going to war to bring Ukraine to heel.

A retracing of Beijing’s trail of decisions shows how Mr. Xi’s deep investment in a personal bond with Mr. Putin has limited China’s options and forced it into policy contortions.

Before and shortly after the invasion, Beijing sounded sympathetic to Moscow’s security demands, mocking Western warnings of war and accusing the United States of goading Russia. Over the past two weeks, though, China has sought to edge slightly away from Russia. It has softened its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties. It has cast itself as an impartial party, calling for peace talks and for the war to stop as soon as possible.

The quandaries for China, and Mr. Xi, remain.

Read it all.

Publicly, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin had vowed that the friendship between China and Russia had "no limits." Now it appears that Xi's display of solidarity may have, perhaps unwittingly, emboldened Putin to gamble on going to war. https://t.co/Dd3eMjFM32

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 7, 2022

NATO is already supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons and imposing harsh sanctions on Russia. It can and should do more. One idea is for Poland to give Ukraine some of its old Soviet-made fighter aircraft. It could also bolster Ukrainian air-defences with longer-range systems than the portable Stinger missiles they have received so far. Both would help more than asking NATO pilots to do the job for them.

Another good idea would be to degrade Russia’s economy further by imposing embargoes on buying Russian oil and gas. The current sanctions avoid energy, but Russia desperately needs hard currency from oil and gas exports to pay for its imports, because existing sanctions have frozen its reserves.

Both arms supplies and an embargo also risk escalation. And sanctions on Russian energy would come at a high price to the world economy. But they entail less risk and a lower price than a no-fly zone would. What is more, they might actually work.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

A no-fly zone is an alluring proposal. It is also wrong-headed https://t.co/hNUVuzs6zd

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 6, 2022

Mayor Ihor Kolykhaiev laid out the new rules in a Facebook post. His constituents could leave home in groups no bigger than two. Cars should drive at low speed. Arrangements were made to collect corpses of Ukrainians killed in the main square and other parts of town, which the city said numbered at least 49, mainly civilians.

“We are experiencing colossal difficulties with collecting and burying the dead, delivering food and medicines, rubbish removal, accidents removal, etc,” Kolykhaiev said.

“For now, the flag flying above us is Ukrainian,” he added. “And in order to stay that way, these requirements must be met. This is all I can offer for now.”

Alongside Kherson, smaller cities that fell to Russian forces this week are Berdyansk and Melitopol, which were captured on Sunday and Monday, respectively.

However, Ukrainians say the Russian hold on these cities has been incomplete and that the occupiers have shown little sign they are equipped to run them, or interested in doing so.

Read it all.

Russian military rule in Kherson: no groups larger than two people. Cars must drive slowly. The dead should be collected from the main square. "For now, the flag flying above us is Ukrainian. And in order to stay that way, these requirements must be met." https://t.co/sc6uYXCp6A

— Mark MacKinnon (@markmackinnon) March 4, 2022

Mr Biden has been keen on arms control since he first ran for the Senate, the same year that Nixon went to China. Last year he extended the New start treaty, which limits American and Russian deployments of strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 each. He has also tried to entice China into arms-control talks. And he has argued that America should shift to a doctrine declaring that the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack.

Such a change now looks unlikely. China is fast building up its nuclear warheads. The Pentagon reckons a total in the “low-200s” in 2020 might reach 1,000 or more by 2030. America’s allies have lobbied hard for America to preserve “extended deterrence”, which leaves open resorting to nuclear weapons against superior conventional forces. Russia’s threats supply a powerful new argument. Mr Abe says Japan should think of hosting American nuclear weapons, as Germany does. This would be a big shift from Japan’s long-standing “three non-nuclear principles”: not making nukes, not possessing nukes, and not allowing nukes to be stationed in the country.

Like much of the new geopolitics, the effect on nuclear strategy around the world will depend to some extent on what transpires in Ukraine. “If Putin’s threat is seen to be successful, it could spur further proliferation,” says James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. “If the threat ends up being seen as bluster because nuclear weapons are not usable, then it might end up actually reducing proliferation pressures.”

But some worries apply however the war ends. A wounded but victorious Russia may feel emboldened to further threaten nato; a Russia bogged down by a Ukrainian insurgency may want to lash out at those equipping Ukrainian fighters; a Russia which tries to topple its leader will be unstable. The early years of the cold war, notes Thomas Wright of Brookings, were filled with danger—from the Soviet Union’s blockade of West Berlin in 1948-49 to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—before detente eventually brought greater predictability. As Mr Wright points out, “We are at the beginning of a new era, and beginnings can be dangerous.”

Read it all.

How the war in #Ukraine is changing geopolitics. Democracy v autocracy; Europe sheds its pacifist robes; Russia cleaves to China; nuclear escalation; and whether America can stitch together its alliances on the Eurasian "Rimland" https://t.co/6q4POINIzB

— Anton La Guardia (@AntonLaGuardia) March 3, 2022

Religious leaders in Ukraine have urged its citizens to continue resisting the Russian invasion…, as churches around the world condemned the war, and Anglicans in Europe held a special service for peace.

“Remember firmly that the truth is on our side — and where the truth is, there is God and victory,” the leader of the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany Dumenko, told Christians this week.

“Defenders of Ukraine, brothers and sisters, you have ruined the aggressor’s intentions for a quick victory. The whole world admires how Ukraine has successfully resisted Russian aggression.”

The message was released as Russian tanks continued to advance on Kyiv, despite aborted peace talks. By mid-week, dozens of Ukrainian civilians had been reported killed by missiles and shells in the country’s second city, Kharkhiv.

In a new sign of its distancing itself from the Moscow Patriarchate, the Primate of the Moscow-linked Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Metropolitan Onufriy Berezovsky, instructed all parishes to pray for God’s mercy amid the “cries and groans of the Ukrainian people” and “making the authorities wise and strengthening our army with courage”.

Read it all.

“Remember firmly that the truth is on our side — and where the truth is, there is God and victory.” https://t.co/xaJccdOXA6

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 2, 2022

Record food commodity prices are an ordeal by fire for some 45 poorer countries that rely heavily on food imports: the Maghreb, the non-oil Middle East, swaths of Africa, Bangladesh, or Afghanistan. The World Food Programme warned of “catastrophic” scarcity for several hundred million people last November. The picture is worse today.

“Everything is going up vertically. The whole production chain for food is under pressure from every side,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, the ex-head of agro-markets at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

“I have never seen anything like it in 30 years and I fear that prices are going to go much higher in the 2022-2023 season. The situation is just awful and at some point people are going to realise what may be coming. We’re all going to have to tighten our belts, and the mood could get very nasty even in OECD countries like Britain,” he said.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

"A billion of the world’s poorest people will go even hungrier thanks to Putin’s deranged misadventure, and some will starve. Our next moral mission is to help them" | Writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard https://t.co/EldrZ5NhzV

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 4, 2022

From the start the Russian campaign has been hampered by political objectives that cannot be translated into meaningful military objectives. Putin has described a mythical Ukraine, a product of a fevered imagination stimulated by cockeyed historical musings. His Ukraine appears as a wayward sibling to be rescued from the ‘drug addicts and Nazis’ (his phrase) that have led it astray. It is not a fantasy that Ukrainians recognize. They see it as an excuse to turn their country into a passive colony and this they will not allow. No Russian-backed government would have legitimacy and Russia lacks the capacity for an indefinite occupation to keep such a government in place.

This underlying strategic folly has been reinforced by the tactical ineptitude with which the campaign has been prosecuted. A quick and relatively painless victory, with Kyiv in Russian hands and President Zelensky nowhere to be seen, might have allowed Putin to impose a victor’s peace of some sort, whether in promises of neutrality and demilitarization, new constitutional arrangements, or even territorial concessions.

Instead, the Russian generals chose to show how smart they were by relying on speed and surprise to take key cities, using only a fraction of the assembled force, and not even bothering to gain control of the skies. The arrogance of the plan was shown in the move against the capital. This involved flying in regular units to the outskirts of the capital to meet up with special forces and sundry saboteurs already in its precincts. This ended as an operational shamble.

Read it all.

Today's substack post from @LawDavF.

Now Putin's original plan has failed what might he do next?

Russia's Plan C (and D)https://t.co/rjnJDmwZhh

— Sam Freedman (@Samfr) March 2, 2022

For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.

That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades, worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump.

I wanted to know what she’s been thinking as she’s watched the extraordinary footage of Russian tanks rolling across international borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can offer into his motivations and objectives.

Hill spent many years studying history, and in our conversation, she repeatedly traced how long arcs and trends of European history are converging on Ukraine right now. We are already, she said, in the middle of a third World War, whether we’ve fully grasped it or not.

Read it all.

"People don’t want to talk about Adolf Hitler and World War II, but I’m going to talk about it. We are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again" – Russia expert Fiona Hill on Putin and Ukraine https://t.co/ROiRNeSFP8

— Michelle Boorstein (@mboorstein) March 3, 2022

In the East Village, some of those refugees attend Cornerstone First Ukrainian Assembly of God, where elderly women in traditional headscarves worship alongside young people in sweatshirts. The Pentecostal congregation now includes Russians, Nigerians, and Belarusians, with services in a mix of Ukrainian, Russian, and English.

Many at Cornerstone have family in Ukraine and fear their fate as the war continues day by day. On Sunday, one woman with white hair wept softly through the whole service.

“What can we do but stay in prayer and cry to God?” said elder Peter Pristash, who lived much of his life in Ukraine and is now a US citizen.

As the nuclear threat escalated tensions, people in the service were in disbelief about how quickly the situation had spiraled.

“Our minds fail to understand: How is this possible in this day and age?” said Pristash before the congregation. “God allowed this to happen, and we do not know why. But we know God is sovereign, and he is on his throne. There are people who think if they kill someone it will accomplish a goal.”

Read it all.

On Sunday, Ukrainian evangelicals in New York City gathered to vent and sing.

At one East Village church, people quietly scrolled through news articles on their phones. A woman with white hair wept softly through the whole service.@emlybelz reports:https://t.co/Gqnsv6xqd8

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 28, 2022

But as more than half a million people have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries, global health officials fear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be the latest reminder of a grim lesson — that war and disease are close companions, and the humanitarian and refugee crises now unfolding in Eastern Europe will lead to long-lasting health consequences, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

As Russia’s military campaign accelerates, Ukraine’s hospitals are running out of critical medical supplies as travel is increasingly choked off by the conflict. The country’s health workers and patients are relocating to makeshift shelters, seeking to escape explosions. Meanwhile, officials at the World Health Organization, United Nations, U.S. State Department and other organizations warn of rising civilian casualties and new pressures on the region’s fragile health-care systems.

“What we’re dealing with now in Ukraine is a double crisis,” said Máire Connolly, a global health professor at the National University of Ireland Galway who has studied the link between conflict and disease. In an interview, Connolly said she was worried not just about threats from the coronavirus pandemic but also those from Ukraine’s polio outbreak, which global experts had sought to quell for months. She also said she fears the potential resurgence of tuberculosis during the current conflict.

Read it all.

– Ukraine’s hospitals are running out of critical supplies
– Health workers, patients being forced to makeshift shelters
– Global experts fear covid, polio spikes

A look at war + disease, twin companions.

With @LovedayM, reporting from Lviv, Ukraine.https://t.co/sQ513ea3V9

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) March 1, 2022

In Switzerland, the Lucerne music festival canceled two symphony concerts featuring a Russian maestro. In Australia, the national swim team said it would boycott a world championship meet in Russia. At the Magic Mountain Ski Area in Vermont, a bartender poured bottles of Stolichnaya vodka down the drain.

From culture to commerce, sports to travel, the world is shunning Russia in myriad ways to protest President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Not since the frigid days of the Cold War have so many doors closed on Russia and its people — a worldwide repudiation driven as much by the impulse to show solidarity with besieged Ukrainians as by any hope that it will force Mr. Putin to pull back his troops.

The boycotts and cancellations are piling up in parallel with the sanctions imposed by the United States, Europe, and other powers. Although these grass-roots gestures inflict less harm on Russia’s economy than sweeping restrictions on Russian banks or the mothballing of a natural gas pipeline, they carry a potent symbolic punch, leaving millions of ordinary Russians isolated in an interconnected world.

Read it all.

Not since the frigid days of the Cold War have so many doors closed on Russia and its people. From culture to commerce, sports to travel, the world is shunning Russia in myriad ways to protest its invasion of Ukraine. https://t.co/d4LY4EfHrm

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 28, 2022

How should we respond?

Well here’s three things all of us can do –

Be prepared to make sacrifices ourselves. Sanctions on Russia will also affect us. We have to be ready to pay that price.
Offer generous humanitarian aid. Just think for a moment what it’s like to be a young family living in the middle of Kyiv at the moment, sheltering from bombs in metro stations, fearing for the future. We must offer help.
Be ready to welcome Ukrainian refugees into our country. And, make it easier for them to come.
And, for me, there’s a fourth. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I will be praying.

Yes, for an end to the madness of war and a withdrawal of Russian forces; but also because we people of faith believe prayer changes things, beginning with ourselves.

"Russia invading Ukraine is a terrible, barbarous, illegal act."

The Archbishop of York @CottrellStephen has called on the government to impose the "stiffest possible sanctions" to isolate Russia and "offer safe routes for refugees" from Ukraine 🇺🇦 https://t.co/kbcNORvJB9

— ITV News Calendar (@itvcalendar) February 27, 2022

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Russian forces have launched a heavy bombardment of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, an assault that overshadowed the first direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials since President Vladimir Putin began his invasion five days ago.

Residents of the city said they had come under intense artillery and rocket fire from Russian positions. Video footage shared on social media showed high-rise apartment blocks in Kharkiv being hit by heavy shelling that shrouded the sky with plumes of dark smoke.

“Dozens of civilians are dying,” said regional governor Oleh Sinegubov. “It’s happening during the day when people go to pharmacies, for food, for drinking water. This is a crime.”

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Having seen the pictures we didn’t use for this story, what is happening right now in Kharkiv is horrible.

Russia launches fierce rocket attack on Ukrainian city of Kharkiv via @FT
https://t.co/JnMcPVstkq

— Alice Ross (@aliceemross) February 28, 2022

It seems ever clearer that the Russian elite is appalled—and impoverished—by his paranoid adventurism. The worse his plans go in Ukraine, the sooner cracks will start to appear in his regime and the more the Russian people will take to the streets. If Mr Putin is to hold on to the Kremlin, he may be obliged to impose terror of a severity that Russia has not seen for decades.

Mr Putin’s first mistake was to underestimate his enemy. Perhaps he believed his own propaganda: that Ukraine is not a real country, but a fake erected by the cia and run by crooks who are despised by the people they govern. If he expected Ukraine to collapse at the first show of Russian force, he could not have been more wrong.

Mr Putin’s second mistake was to mismanage his own armed forces. His air force has so far failed to dominate the skies. He has laboured to reassure his people that Russia is not engaged in a war, but just what he calls a “denazification” operation. Soldiers, unsure of what they are supposed to be doing, have turned up in Ukraine expecting to be welcomed as liberators. If he orders troops to slaughter their Ukrainian kin in large numbers, they may not obey. If many of his troops die in the attempt to crush Ukrainian cities, as is likely, he will not be able to cover it up at home.

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When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine he miscalculated. Now that he is wielding the threat of nuclear war, the world must make clear that his actions are unacceptable. He must not miscalculate again https://t.co/5392ZsohL6

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 28, 2022

For those of us who have long wondered why Putin would embark on an aggressive war the core puzzle has been what he could hope to achieve politically. A limited campaign in Eastern Ukraine made some sense as it would carve out an area that could be sustained and defended over time. The current scale of operations makes less sense because it essentially requires regime change in Kyiv. In Iraq and Afghanistan the US and the UK learned through bitter experience how difficult this can be. Put simply even relatively authentic leaders with strong local roots (and it is not obvious that Russia has any of those available) that have been put in place by foreigners have limited legitimacy and will soon be relying on the occupying force to sustain them in power.

Before this, Russian forces needs to find and deal with President Zelensky. He has so far performed with dignity and bravery as an unexpected war leader. Putin will want him out of the way. Zelensky is insisting for the moment that he must stay in Kyiv and direct the war effort, even while reporting that Russian saboteurs are in the city. At some point a hard decision might have to be taken about either relocating to Western Ukraine or even establishing a government in exile. So long as he can continue to operate in Ukraine his leadership serves as a rebuke to Putin.

Even if the government loses control of the capital and is forced to flee, and the command systems for Ukrainian forces start to break down, that does not mean that Russia has won the war. It is only a mind-set that fails to understand the wellsprings of Ukraine’s national identity that could believe that a compliant figure could be installed as Ukrainian president and expect to last for very long without the backing of an occupation force. Russia simply does not have the numbers and capacity to sustain such a force for any length of time. One would have thought that with the memories of the Orange Revolution of 2004-5 and the Euromaidan of 2013-14 that Putin would have some appreciation of the role that ‘people power’ can play in this country, unless again he believes his own propaganda that these movements were manipulated into existence by the Americans and their allies. Ukraine shares a land border with NATO and equipment can pass through to Ukrainian regular forces so long as they are fighting – and then to an anti-Russian insurgency should this conflict move to that stage. This is why it is important not to focus solely on whether Russia achieves it military objectives. It is how it holds what it can seize against civilian resistance and insurgency.

The point about wars (and I have studied many) is that they rarely go according to plan. Chance events or poorly executed operations can require sudden shifts in strategy. The unintended consequences can be as important as the intended. These are the pitfalls surrounding all wars and why they should only be embarked upon with good reason (of which the most compelling is an act of self-defence).

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We are honoured to host the great Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor, @KingsCollegeLon, at the 2022 #OttawaConference. https://t.co/nNaRsRonJ6 pic.twitter.com/WNS2WVJ6Aq

— CDA Institute (@CDAInstitute) February 10, 2022