Putin seems to understand Biden. Putin also seems to understand hollow threats and ineffective sanctions.
Putin, in addition, reduced natural gas exports to Europe by 41% last month… It appears to be a “squeeze play.” Putin would appear to be choking off natural gas supplies to Europe as a wedge, to divide the United States from NATO allies over the threatened “severe sanctions.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday accused the U.S. and its allies of ignoring Russia’s top security demands but said Moscow is willing to talk more to ease tensions over Ukraine.
The comments were his first on the standoff in more than a month and suggested a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine may not be imminent and that at least one more round of diplomacy is likely.
The table tennis coach, the chaplain’s wife, the dentist and the firebrand nationalist have little in common except a desire to defend their hometown and a sometimes halting effort to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian.
The situation in Kharkiv, just 40 kilometers (25 miles) from some of the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed at the border of Ukraine, feels particularly perilous. Ukraine’s second-largest city is one of its industrial centers and includes two factories that restore old Soviet-era tanks or build new ones.
At a State Department press briefing, the department’s spokesperson Ned Price fielded the following question:
QUESTION: Russian officials have warned Moscow could deploy troops to Cuba and Venezuela if the U.S. and NATO insist on the crisis of Ukraine. Is the U.S. concerned about it? Have you seen any movement in that regard?
MR PRICE: Look, we are not going to respond to bluster. If we do see any movement in that direction, we will respond swiftly and decisively.[1]
At a White House Press Conference, US President Joe Biden fielded a question about a hypothetical NATO response to a Russian attack on Ukraine. He answered: “I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion.”[1]
The essence of the crisis in Ukraine is that Russia can gain many benefits from its unspoken threat to invade, but none at all from actually doing so. “Russia will keep piling on the pressure,” a veteran analyst of Ukrainian affairs, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me. “But I can see no upside for Putin in carrying out an invasion.”
Russian troops might be able to capture Kyiv in a week, but this would only be the start of a long war that Russia would find it impossible to win. A more limited Russian offensive in east Ukraine – such as seizing a land corridor between the Russian separatist Donbas and Russian annexed Crimea – is scarcely a more attractive option. It would push the rest of Ukraine further into the embrace of Nato, which would be exactly the opposite of what Russia wants.
There is no doctrinal statement in American diplomatic history that is more fundamental than the Monroe Doctrine. It was designed to draw a strategic line between the New World and the Old, and to alert the European powers that their political influence and presence was no longer welcome in the Western Hemisphere. No doctrinal statement has been enforced as often as the Monroe Doctrine, which has been used to justify U.S. intervention throughout Central America and the Caribbean. The Monroe Doctrine was cited in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a perfect failure, as well as the Cuban missile crisis, a diplomatic triumph.
Beyond its immediate implications for European security, the current crisis at the Ukraine-Russia border highlights the enduring importance of state sovereignty as an ordering principle in world politics, notwithstanding frequent claims that globalization has rendered it obsolete. It also exposes the tendency of governments to invoke, dismiss or reinterpret this bedrock principle to suit their situational needs. In fact, global stability now depends on whether the United States and European Union are able to reaffirm and defend the centrality of state sovereignty against a Russian attempt to dismiss it.
In the latest in a series of military coups in West Africa, a group of army officers in Burkina Faso has overthrown the government of President Roch Kabore. In a televised address on Burkina Faso’s state broadcaster on Monday, the group—which has dubbed itself “the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration,” or MPSR—said that it had deposed Kabore, suspended the constitution, closed the country’s borders and dissolved the government and the legislature. The group affirmed that Kabore remains safe and in good condition.
When historians look back and try to explain how France lost its historical position as the dominant outside actor in West Africa, the oft-repeated line that Ernest Hemingway used to describe how one of his fictional characters went bankrupt will undoubtedly come to mind: gradually, then suddenly.