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Everyone Wants to Seize Russia’s Money. It’s a Terrible Idea.

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The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, has brought a glimmer of hope to supporters of the Ukrainian war effort. He suggested to Fox News on March 31 that he would try to rally his divided party behind the so-called REPO Act. That piece of legislation would allow President Biden, working with European allies, to seize Russian currency reserves frozen in the West and use them to aid Ukraine.

Grabbing these reserves would be politically convenient. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States and its allies have thrown more than a quarter-trillion dollars into the war, to little ultimate effect.…  Seguir leyendo »

Vladimir Putin gives an interview to Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin in Moscow on February 6, 2024. (Photo by Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

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In 2019 Vladislav Surkov, a close advisor to Putin and one of his chief ideologues, wrote: ‘Foreign politicians attribute to Russia interference in elections and referendums across the planet. In fact, the matter is even more serious – Russia is interfering in their brains, and they do not know what to do with their own altered consciousness.’

Surkov has since been disgraced, but Russia’s insidious information warfare escalated to new heights on 8 February with the broadcast of US pundit Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On X (formerly Twitter) alone, the replay has, at the time of writing, garnered over 85 million views.…  Seguir leyendo »

How to Stop Our High-Tech Equipment From Arming Russia and China

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The U.S. government’s efforts to stop Russia and China from using American equipment to boost their defense sectors have resulted in tough rules — but leaky enforcement. As a result, American-made tools keep turning up in Russian missile factories and in Huawei’s supply chain. With war in Europe and China threatening its neighbors, that’s just not good enough.

The United States and its allies make the most advanced tools for both precision metalworking and semiconductor manufacturing. With international tensions rising, the United States and its allies have been right to try to prohibit adversaries from using these tools to manufacture weapons that undermine America’s military edge.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s confidence must be shaken after leaving Washington without the approval of more US military funding for his country amid the ongoing war with Russia.

Although President Joe Biden has stressed the need for Congress to continue supporting Ukraine, Republican opposition to the administration’s request for more than $60 billion in emergency supplemental funding has been stiff. As the GOP demands the passage of stringent border policies from Democrats in exchange for backing the military aid package, the future remains pretty bleak for Ukraine. Even if the two parties end up striking a deal, it’s likely that each subsequent aid package will only face increasing resistance and more roadblocks.…  Seguir leyendo »

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers a statement urging Congress to pass his national security supplemental from the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 6. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden issued what sounded like a desperate call in his bid to help Ukraine sustain its all but stalemated war effort against invading forces from Russia. “This cannot wait”, Biden said in televised remarks. “Congress needs to pass supplemental funding for Ukraine before they break for the holiday recess. Simple as that”.

In fact, there has been nothing simple about the Biden administration’s most recent supplemental budget requests for Ukraine. From the outset, Biden seems to have calculated that by pairing a call to Congress for money for Ukraine with a request for additional funds for Israel, Republican skeptics of the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

Posing with nuclear missiles in Beijing, October 2022. Florence Lo / Reuters

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In a speech this June, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan drew attention to China’s nuclear buildup, Russia’s development of new nuclear capabilities, and the United States’ planned response. His remarks signaled the Biden administration’s assessment that nuclear risks are growing, particularly in the wake of Russia’s suspension of New START, the last U.S.-Russian treaty governing the two states’ nuclear arms, in February. What was most notable about his speech, however, was what he promised President Joe Biden would not do: launch a countervailing U.S. nuclear buildup. On this point, Sullivan was emphatic: “I want to be clear here—the United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), right, speaks with Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) during a House Armed Services Committee meeting on Feb. 2. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

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As Washington turns its focus toward the 2024 presidential campaign, U.S. aid to Ukraine is becoming increasingly vulnerable to partisan politics and the culture wars. When the next tranche comes up for a vote in Congress, the number of Republicans voting no will be high. If the Biden administration wants to preserve the flow of support to Kyiv, it will need to mount a more robust, more honest case about the expected costs and length of the war effort to lawmakers and the American people.

Since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022, the United States has committed $113 billion to military, economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine and other countries impacted by the war.…  Seguir leyendo »

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When an airplane owned by Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin plummeted in a fiery crash northwest of Moscow last week, observers in Russia and around the world immediately recalled two indisputable facts. First, that Prigozhin had openly challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin, and second, that countless others who had defied Putin have met untimely, violent deaths.

In the quest to understand what happened, one other fact was clear: The Kremlin was not the place to seek straightforward, credible answers. The Kremlin’s word is, shall we say, not a good source for independent, reliable truth.

In fact, when Putin’s spokesman dismissed claims that the state had Prigozhin killed as an “absolute lie”, it seemed a pro forma statement, one we’ve heard before as Putin’s critics, one after the other, meet macabre endings.…  Seguir leyendo »

Unexploded cluster bombs collected by members of a sapper group of the Karabakh Ministry of Emergency Situations (Photo by ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

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On 7 July, days before the NATO summit in Vilnius, the US announced that it would supply Ukraine with cluster munitions – until it can ramp up production of other types of ammunition.

It is a controversial decision which is at odds with the views of NATO allies that have foresworn the possession and use of the weapons under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The Biden administration said it had received assurances from Ukraine that the munitions will not be used in areas populated by civilians, that Ukraine will keep records and maps of where they are used, and that it will conduct a post-war clean-up.…  Seguir leyendo »

This is the ‘America First’ case for supporting Ukraine

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As Ukraine begins its spring counteroffensive, a 60 percent majority of Republicans say we should stand with Ukraine until Russia is defeated, according to a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll conducted in March. But GOP support is softening. The share of Republicans who say the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine has steadily increased from 9 percent right after the Russian invasion to 40 percent today, according to a Pew Research Center poll in January.

Many wavering Republicans are frustrated by the lack of a clear strategy for victory from the Biden administration. They hear Ukraine skeptics on the right arguing that the war is costing too much, depleting our military readiness, increasing the risk of nuclear confrontation with Russia and distracting us from the larger threat posed by Communist China.…  Seguir leyendo »

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As Russia prepares for an imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive, and America’s 2024 presidential race takes shape, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes one possible path to victory in his so far unsuccessful war runs through the US election.

The latest evidence that Putin may just expect Western support for Ukraine to end – if only Russian forces hold on until there’s a new president in the White House – came tucked away in a blistering announcement from Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Friday, declaring entry into the country would be “closed for 500 Americans”.

The blacklist, Moscow explained, targets individuals “involved in the spread of Russophobic attitudes and fakes”, as well as principals in companies supplying weapons to Ukraine.…  Seguir leyendo »

¿Putin y Trump en el banquillo de los acusados?

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La acusación del gran jurado de Nueva York contra el expresidente norteamericano Donald Trump, por delitos vinculados al pago de dinero a la actriz de cine porno Stormy Daniels a cambio de su silencio, se produce después de la orden de arresto emitida, hace dos semanas, por la Corte Penal Internacional contra el presidente ruso, Vladimir Putin, por el crimen de guerra de deportar niños desde Ucrania. Estos casos resaltan la creciente, y potencialmente peligrosa, injerencia del derecho en la política -doméstica e internacional.

Ambos acontecimientos son revolucionarios. La acusación de Trump es la primera que se emite contra un presidente en funciones, o un expresidente, en la historia de Estados Unidos.…  Seguir leyendo »

El triunfo de Estados Unidos

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En economía existe una ley conocida como 'ley de las consecuencias inesperadas': una acción A, que se supone que desencadena un resultado B, que conduce a un resultado C, que no es deseado ni deseable. Parece que la ley en cuestión es válida para las relaciones internacionales, como ha aprendido Vladímir Putin por las malas. Difícilmente podía imaginar y, a decir verdad, nadie imaginaba, que su deseo de conquistar Ucrania hace un año tendría como consecuencia principal la restauración del imperio de Estados Unidos. Ni los propios gobernantes de Washington lo previeron. Resulta, recordemos, que Joe Biden sabía de antemano la hora exacta de la invasión rusa.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden meet for a US-Russia summit in Geneva on June 16, 2021. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

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Almost exactly one year ago, I sat in my office at the US Embassy in Moscow, reading reports of Russia’s brutal military assault on Ukraine. I was numb – but not surprised – by the gravity of what was unfolding.

For weeks, I had been telling everyone I could reach that Russian President Vladimir Putin was going to launch a war on the continent of Europe, the scale of which had not been seen since World War II.

Although confident in my pre-war assessment, I was disconsolate. For two years, I had worked hard as US ambassador to make even modest progress in the few areas in which any dialogue was possible with the Russians.…  Seguir leyendo »

Growing public opinion evidence and uncertainty about the future of the war suggests that continued American support for aiding Ukraine should not be assumed.

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One year into Russia’s war on Ukraine, fears that American support for Kyiv would rapidly wane have proven demonstrably wrong. Western financial and military backing has been robust thanks to allied unity and an unexpectedly mild winter. But, as financial analysts constantly remind us, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

People like to back winners. If the anticipated Russian spring offensive looks successful or the counterpart Ukrainian offensive is uninspiring, expect louder US voices calling for a negotiated settlement. The warning signs are already here.

American officials privately express growing apprehension that there will be an early resolution of the conflict.…  Seguir leyendo »

An American M1 Abrams battle tank during a NATO military exercise in Latvia last year. Ints Kalnins/Reuters

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The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war. Not, as far as we can tell, because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have lost heart, but because the war has settled into a World War I-style battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively stable fronts.

Such wars tend to be won — as indeed World War I was — by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold out longest. Russia has more than three times Ukraine’s population, an intact economy and superior military technology.…  Seguir leyendo »

U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Cody Brown, with the 436th Aerial Port Squadron, checks pallets of 155 mm shells ultimately bound for Ukraine on April 29, 2022, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. (Alex Brandon/AP)

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The United States and its NATO allies are engaged in an intense debate over security assistance to Ukraine. The issue at hand is whether they should provide Kyiv with modern, Western-made heavy tanks — weapons that would greatly boost the Ukrainians’ battlefield power, especially for maneuver warfare of the type needed to retake much or most of the roughly 17 percent of Ukrainian territory that Russia still holds. (Britain has announced that it plans to send an unspecified number of its Challenger 2 main battle tanks.) But the larger debate remains unresolved.

If this kind of debate sounds familiar, that’s because it is.…  Seguir leyendo »

Biden needs allies to keep China and Russia in check

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For those who believed that the American era was over, 2022 was a rude surprise. Faced with the biggest land war in Europe since 1945, the United States led a multi-country effort to assist Ukraine. Faced with a belligerent China, the United States embarked on a concerted strategy to arrest Beijing’s military-industrial rise. The Biden administration improvised new tools of statecraft: the freezing of Russia’s foreign currency reserves; the capping of the price paid for Russia’s oil exports; the embargo on semiconductor exports to China. Sweden and Finland opted to join an invigorated NATO. Japan, South Korea, Australia and India were drawn deeper into U.S.-led…  Seguir leyendo »

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a Dec. 20 award ceremony for servicemen in Bakhmut, Ukraine. (AFP/Getty Images)

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s bold Wednesday visit to Washington is an epic piece of theater designed to motivate multiple audiences — in the United States, Europe, Russia and Ukraine itself. The message is simple: With its own bravery in battle and the world’s help, Ukraine will prevail.

By embracing President Biden and addressing a clamorous joint session of Congress, Zelensky will send a riposte to Moscow that’s more potent, in some ways, than the Russian drones and missiles pounding his country. Ukraine has allies; it has staying power; NATO isn’t cracking; even in a polarized America, support for Kyiv is bipartisan and sustained.…  Seguir leyendo »

A woman attending a pro-Ukraine rally in Chicago, October 2022. Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto / Getty

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Before February 24, 2022, most Americans agreed that the United States had no vital interests at stake in Ukraine. “If there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine”, U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “they should speak up”. Few did.

Yet the consensus shifted when Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, Ukraine’s fate was important enough to justify spending billions of dollars in resources and enduring rising gas prices; enough to expand security commitments in Europe, including bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO; enough to make the United States a virtual co-belligerent in the war against Russia, with consequences yet to be seen.…  Seguir leyendo »