The crisis in Ukraine

Finland and Sweden are now on an unencumbered path to joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a major expansion of the Western alliance as war continues in Europe.

Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership in May, a historic shift for two traditionally non-aligned countries. But what many expected to be a rapid and relatively smooth succession process got sidetracked after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan objected to their bids because of what he saw as the countries’ support for Kurdish groups that Erdogan regards as terrorist organizations, and because of the countries’ arms embargoes on Turkey. All 30 NATO countries must approve any new members, so Erdogan’s objection was an effective veto.

American weapons are pouring into Ukraine.

President Joe Biden requested that Congress send $33 billion of emergency aid to the country at war with Russia, and the US House increased the pot to $40 billion, with about 60 percent going toward security assistance in some form or another. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is expected to approve it this week. It’s an unprecedented ramp-up that builds on the rapid transfer of billions’ worth of weapons already sent.

Update, April 12, 2022: Viktor Maruniak was released as of Tuesday, according to his relatives, and is recovering in the hospital.

On March 21, Natali called her father to wish him a happy birthday. It was Viktor Maruniak’s 60th, but, on the phone, he sounded sad and nervous. Maruniak is the starosta, or elected head, of Stara Zbur’ivka, a village more than an hour outside of Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine. Russian forces now occupied it, Maruniak told Natali. He would call her back later. “And I told him, ‘Okay, I will wait for you, please call me back,’” she said.

Almost everyone outside Russia views Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine the same way: as an obscene and unnecessary atrocity.

But that’s because the outside world can see clearly what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine. For the average Russian, the picture looks very different. They know there’s something happening in Ukraine, but it’s not a “war” — it’s a “special military operation.” And if you watch the news, which is controlled by the state, you’re not seeing images of bombed apartment buildings or dead civilians on the streets, because that’s what a war looks like and there’s definitely not a war in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden announced Tuesday he intends to ban oil imports from Russia to target the “main artery” of the country’s economy, fossil fuels. But “the decision today is not without cost here at home,” he acknowledged. Namely, that gas prices, already climbing since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, would continue to climb, and inflation along with them.

Right on cue, gas prices surged again Tuesday to a national average of $4.17 a gallon. To hit a historic high, gas prices still have a ways to go before beating the previous 2008 record of $5.37 (adjusted for inflation). But there’s a good chance they still haven’t hit their peak.

The West’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been swift, unified, and wide-ranging, and brings military, economic, and political tools to bear. But during a global outpouring of support of Ukraine, scholars and activists on the left have pointed out what they see as a glaring inconsistency — the world doesn’t rise up in a similar collective rage every time other countries are attacked, invaded, or occupied.

So, what are progressives for, in a moment when there are constant appeals for the West to do more to stop Putin’s war in Ukraine? People on the left are not just putting forward specific policies. They are calling on America to reckon with its conduct in recent wars. In short, to reevaluate its role in the world.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a world-historical event and the effects of it will likely ripple out for years to come.

Since 1945, the world has done a remarkably good job of preventing wars between great powers and making the costs of unprovoked aggression extremely high. In a matter of days, Russia has upended this system. A major war, if not probable, is at least plausible — and that’s a significant shift.

For 22-year-old Olena, the switch from sunny blue skies over her home city of Kyiv to the constant blaring of airstrike alarms happened unbelievably quickly.

“It felt like spring on February 23, but a day later I already got used to the sound of war,” Olena, a recent graduate in human rights advocacy and a member of the NGO European Youth of Ukraine, told me. (Olena’s last name is being withheld to protect her safety.)

The United States and Europe have avoided direct military conflict with Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine. But they are using a powerful tool to try to push back against Russia and create consequences for its aggressions: an unexpectedly fast and powerful set of financial sanctions meant to shock the country’s economy and hamstring its access to financial resources.

While Russia may have anticipated the measures, what the country perhaps did not anticipate was for so much action to be taken so swiftly. The US and European allies have limited its ability to transact in foreign currencies such as dollars and euros, frozen the assets of multiple Russian banks, and cut off Russia’s banks from the SWIFT messaging system banks use to transmit information globally. Japan said it would join in freezing the assets of Russian leaders and some banks and freezing Russia’s foreign reserves in yen. Even Switzerland, a historically neutral country in conflict, has agreed to join sanctions efforts.

Russia invaded Ukraine last week and one of the recurring questions is: Why?

To the outside world, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in Europe doesn’t make a ton of strategic sense. It will likely be bloody, protracted, and ruinous to the Russian economy.

Russia has violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and international law. The US response has been economic: sanctions against Russia that are the largest ever and yet simultaneously unlikely to alter the shape of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

So, how should we think about the US as a superpower in 2022?

The United Nations has estimated that about 100,000 Ukrainians have already been displaced as a result of the Russian invasion, and that number could ultimately grow to 1 to 5 million. The international community is making preparations to meet their humanitarian needs — though perhaps not quickly enough.

Just hours after Russia’s assault began on Thursday morning, there were massive traffic jams, sold-out train tickets, and long lines at ATMs in Kyiv as people tried to flee with little clue as to how long they might be gone or if they’ll ever return.

On Sunday, Ukrainian voters will go to the polls to elect a president — and their choice is between a comedian who played a president on TV and a former “chocolate king” who has been running the country for five years.

Volodymyr Zelensky, a famous comedian who portrayed Ukraine’s head of state for years on a popular comedy show, is facing off against the incumbent president and former confectionary tycoon, Petro Poroshenko. As of now, it looks like Zelensky will win Sunday’s runoff in a landslide, three weeks after he beat Poroshenko and a former Ukrainian leader in the election’s first round.

Produced by Joe Posner & Joss Fong

Photographs courtesy Getty Images

Fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, where pro-Russia separatist rebels have held control for weeks, rapidly worsened on Monday. The rebels attacked and seized the city’s airport and fought for hours with the Ukrainian military, which appeared to finally push them out of the airport but not out of Donetsk. The fighting is so far inconclusive, but it indicates that the violence is getting a lot worse, putting eastern Ukraine a little bit closer to the full-blown guerrilla conflict that has seemed like an unlikely but dangerous risk.

So it’s clear that the violence in itself is bad news. What’s not clear is why the violence is getting worse and what it means for the Ukraine conflict. But it seems most likely that the pro-Russia insurgency is increasingly breaking away from Moscow’s control and taking on a life of its own. If true, that would be both good and bad for the Ukraine conflict, but more than anything it would be dangerous.

One of the worst possible things that could happen to make the Ukraine crisis potentially even more unstable has just happened: an anti-Russia Ukrainian militia has killed one of the pro-Russia separatists who’ve been fighting the Ukrainian government in the country’s east.

Moscow has been claiming for weeks that Ukraine was being torn apart by far-right militias who were violently targeting Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, and that this threat justified and necessitated Russia’s support of separatist militias, its annexation of Crimea, and its thinly veiled threats of invading eastern Ukraine.

Let me be the first to admit it: President Obama’s strategy for handling Russia and its incursions into Ukraine had seemed to me, as it did to many others, pretty unlikely to succeed.

Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power” acting “out of weakness,” but it was the US that looked weak: it could only cobble together some targeted sanctions that, while tough, appeared to do nothing to stop Russia’s meddling in eastern Ukraine. He needed Europe’s support for broader economic sanctions that would actually hurt the Russian economy and he didn’t get it. Obama implicitly abandoned Crimea, giving no sign that he thought that, weeks after Russia invaded and annexed the territory, it might ever be returned to Ukraine. The official US position has been to threaten broader sanctions that seem unlikely to get the European support necessary to make them hurt, while arguing that Russia’s actions will be so self-defeating that the problem would just sort itself out.

Things are going badly in eastern Ukraine. The pro-Russia separatists who’d taken control of government buildings in some eastern cities announced they would go forward with a referendum on independence on Sunday, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin urging them not to. An enormous Russian invasion force is still massed on the Ukrainian border. The US and Russia are threatening to sanction one another’s economies even more than they are already. The Ukrainian military has tried and failed several times to dislodge the separatists in eastern Ukraine, raising fears that the violence could spiral out of control, and/or that Russia could invade and annex the territory as it did in Crimea. There’s no indication of a peaceful, diplomatic resolution in sight.

But there is one piece of good news. Great news, actually. Pew released the results of a new survey of Ukrainian views of the crisis, and it turns out that Ukrainians overwhelmingly want to keep their country unified. Despite weeks of agitation by pro-Russia separatists widely thought to be backed by Moscow, and Putin’s own rhetoric that sure sounds like he wants to reproduce his Crimea annexation in eastern Ukraine, the actual people in eastern Ukraine don’t want it. Unlike Crimeans, they want to stay unified.

I can’t imagine this not working:

Now Tsvetkov’s got a new one: Europe according to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s actually pretty useful for understanding the ongoing Ukraine crisis, a story that is increasingly shaped by Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and his hostility toward Europe. Here’s the map:

It really is true that Putin sees the European Union — those blue countries — as a competitor, full of morally depraved countries that are forever plotting against Russia. That might actually be my only suggested change to this map: the EU should really be labeled “Union of Incestual Homosexuals Who Are Conspiring For Russia’s Destruction.” That logo over Russia, by the way, is the sickle from the old Soviet flag crossed with a Christian Orthodox cross; actually a neat little summary of Putin’s brand of Russian nationalism.

The rapidly worsening tension between the United States and Russia, not to mention Russia’s invasion and annexation of part of Ukraine, has got lots of people talking about a new Cold War. That’s overstating things, but it’s true that US-Russia relations are at their worst since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Russian foreign policy is at its most aggressive. Even Russia hawks did not foresee things getting quite so badly, quite so quickly.

But someone did: the writing staff at The Simpsons. An old episode, “Simpson Tide,” predicted the return of the Soviet Union and a new Cold War way back in 1998, when Boris Yeltsin was president and relations were good. The show began with Simpsons patriarch Homer Simpson joining the Navy, ending up on a submarine that accidentally gets into a shooting match with a Russian sub, and wandering into Russian waters in what is taken as an attempt to defect.

The White House today announced a tough new set of economic sanctions on Russia, in response for its actions in Ukraine. The Obama administration has had some trouble articulating its Russia policy, though, maybe in part because doing so would require acknowledging some truths that are a little too true. Here, then, is the speech that President Obama might give if he popped a couple of truth pills and addressed the nation tonight.

My fellow Americans, tonight I want to talk to you about the crisis in Ukraine, Russia’s role in it, and where we go from here.

The fighting in Ukraine is getting worse. On Thursday morning, the Ukrainian military again sent troops against the pro-Russia separatists who have seized government centers in some eastern Ukrainian cities. Previously firefights have left several dead, and in some cases with the separatists seizing heavy military equipment to add to their weapons cache.

There are valid reasons to fear that this could escalate to a bigger internal conflict. It’s been over a week and the fighting has only escalated; eastern Ukrainians civilians, already skeptical of the new government put into power by mostly western protesters, might resist the government forces; the militias could get stronger; dissatisfied eastern Ukrainian troops might decide to break off and join the separatists. The country’s broken economy and still-sensitive demographic divide don’t help.

There’s growing fear that Ukraine’s crisis could become a full-on war. Fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russia separatist militias (thought to include undercover Russian special forces) has already killed several people and is getting worse. Russia has tens of thousands of troops massed on the border. Everybody is making threats. Things are looking bad.

Here is a quick rundown on the three kinds of war we’re talking about, why the first two are so unlikely, but why the third is a serious and plausible danger:

It’s no secret that Vladimir Putin is winning in Ukraine. He’s annexed Crimea, fomenting disorder in eastern Ukraine that could lead to war and possibly another Russian invasion, and shrugged off the US and Europe’s targeted sanctions meant to punish him. Meanwhile, there’s not much that the US can do to stop him without Europe’s help, and European countries just don’t seem ready to step up.

President Obama, fed up with Putin, has rightly recognized that it’s time for the United States to adopt a radically different strategy for dealing with Russia, in Ukraine and around the world. That strategy, articulated on Sunday by New York Times reporter Peter Baker and his sources, is what we might call “new containment”: isolate Russia and actively curb its global influence, as we did with the far more powerful Soviet Union.