Carol J. Williams is a retired foreign correspondent with 30 years' reporting abroad for the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press. She has reported from more than 80 countries, with a focus on USSR/Russia and Eastern Europe.
A palpable sense of relief swept France and much of Europe as Sunday’s surprising results showed the success of the New Popular Front’s strategy of uniting parties from far left to center.
Given the rising cost and toll of dead and seriously injured, estimated by British military intelligence to be 500,000, why is Putin trying to provoke a wider conflict with provocations against NATO-allied neighbors and the United States?Â
Putin’s bellicose rhetoric lands on sympathetic ears in Moscow, far from the Ukraine battlefields and the remote Russian areas where its fighters are recruited. But his resurrection of Stalinist-era repression is likely to eventually backfire as the reality of the Ukraine war’s toll on a generation of men becomes apparent.
The bills were delivered to the Senate for approval of the amended package. Biden urged the upper chamber to quickly send the measure to his desk so he can sign it into law and get the weapons and equipment to Ukraine for “their urgent battlefield needs.”
The Kremlin and its puppet journalists blamed Ukraine and its Western allies for the slaughter. They persisted in trying to implicate Kyiv and the United States even after security forces arrested the Tajik suspects.
De facto U.S. capitulation to Putin has alarmed and perplexed allies. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told his country’s main broadcaster last week that he’d witnessed Trump’s “creepy” submission to Putin at international gatherings.
From the paranoid perspective of Putin, Navalny had to be eliminated, just as the last, best hope for a democratic candidate’s survival was eliminated nine years ago in a drive-by assassination of former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov on the doorstep of the Kremlin.
Russia’s vaunted naval forces have dominated maritime civilian and military activity in the Black Sea since Crimea became the southern pillar of the Imperial Russian Navy in 1783. But in less than two years of fierce defiance of the Kremlin invasion, Ukraine has destroyed or disabled half of the Black Sea Fleet.