Mediaboss Marketing

On February 16, more than 1,500 people crowded into the town hall of Montreuil, a working-class but rapidly gentrifying suburb in eastern Paris. Wearing red surgical masks and carrying flags and banners, they were there to celebrate le dfi des jours heureux, literally meaning the challenge of happy days. Hearkening back to the National Resistance Council program that helped orient Frances reconstruction at the end of World War II, this promise of happy days provides the campaign slogan of French Communist Party (Parti communiste franais, PCF) candidate Fabien Roussel, who has in recent weeks emerged as a dark horse for Aprils presidential elections.

Speaking before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Roussel started his speech with a call for a peaceful solution to the crisis in Eastern Europe. But his focus was less on international politics than the hot-button domestic issues deindustrialization, purchasing power, inequality that he has made his calling card since officially declaring his run for the presidency in May 2021.

Here [in the Paris suburbs], successive administrations of both Left and Right have left inequalities to fester, he told the crowd of mostly party loyalists and activists. This class inequality is unacceptable. You are the real heroes of the republic, and you are essential [workers].

Polls suggest the diverse array of left-wing candidates total just over a quarter of the vote, with right-wingers seemingly the main challenge to incumbent Emmanuel Macron. Yet Roussels message seems to be resonating within this subset of the French electorate ahead of the first-round vote on April 10.

In the past month, Roussel has more than doubled his polling average from 1.9 to 4.4 percent, putting him neck-and-neck with Green Party candidate Yannick Jadot and well above Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo, whose campaign has floundered in recent weeks. If elections were held today, the PCF would likely beat the Socialists in a major political race for the first time since the 1973 legislative elections, nearly fifty years ago. This is a remarkable prospect for the Socialist Party, which held the presidency as recently as 2017.

Roussels campaign aims to reassert the once-mighty PCFs identity and reconnect with voters who have drifted away from the Left. In this sense, he has outshone other loosely progressive candidates. But his campaign also illustrates the Lefts much deeper difficulties in rallying the working-class electorate.

In Montreuil and elsewhere, Roussel has presented his platform as Roussellement the opposite of ruissellement, or trickle-down economics. The challenge of returning to happy days also a reference to FDRs New Deal campaign anthem is emblematic of the PCFs project of reconnecting with working-class voters who have increasingly abstained or moved to the far right.

Seeking to illustrate his down-to-earth, bread-and-butter campaign, Roussel has highlighted the importance of good meat, good wine, good cheese made in France a not-so-subtle jab at other left-wing forces, repeated in campaign stops over the past several months.

Roussels campaign has gotten a boost from this straight-talking nature, campaign manager Ian Brossat himself Pariss deputy mayor in charge of housing told Jacobin in a phone interview. A presidential election is of course about a political program, but its also about a candidate, Brossat said. Undeniably, Fabien Roussels personality has helped us to rise in the polls. He is sincere, he is frank, he speaks clearly.

In a divided left where just 25 percent of the overall vote is split among five candidates, both Roussel and Brossat highlighted the need to bring new voters into the fold. This is also about reinvigorating the PCF: it opted not to run its own candidate in 2012 or 2017, which in turn reduced its visibility on the national scale. Yet the party is still struggling to appeal to a working class that has drastically changed and faces accusations of further dividing the Left. In Montreuil, Roussel rejected this idea: My candidacy does not aim to take away votes from other left-wing and green candidates, but to win new ones, he emphasized.

Party members who spoke with Jacobin after the event felt that after years of infighting and reduced national visibility, the party had begun to chart a new course. Now that hes starting to carry some weight [on a national level], its bringing the party together, Julien, a thirty-nine-year-old railway worker from neighboring Drancy and member of the General Confederation of Labor (Confdration Gnrale du Travail, CGT) union, told Jacobin. Its been given a new lease of life.

Like many communist parties, the PCF which celebrated its centenary at the end of 2020 once played a key role in national and local politics, even briefly becoming the countrys biggest political force in the 1940s following the liberation from German occupation.

It was not simply a political party, it was a galaxy of organizations that included unions, associations, and the cultural world, Roger Martelli, a historian and author of multiple works on the French Communist Party, told Jacobin. It was this galaxy that allowed the Communist Party to establish itself, notably in urban peripheries, and which made it an unquestionable national force.

Over the next forty years, however, deindustrialization, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the failure to integrate a growing immigrant population into the partys political project all contributed to the PCFs decline a reversal that was particularly pronounced in national elections. By 1986, fewer than one in ten French voters cast their ballot for the PCF, down from nearly one in three during the partys postwar heyday.

But while Communist Parties in neighboring countries crumbled completely, in France, a combination of alliance-building and strong local activist networks in municipal strongholds like Marseille and the Paris suburbs forming what was once known as the Red Belt around the capital kept the party alive.

According to Martelli, the PCF nonetheless never succeeded or even refused to transform itself to meet the demands of a new working class. The Communist Party, little by little, lost its usefulness, Martelli said. And more recently, this party has seen itself facing competition from other forces.

By the start of the 1980s, the PCF facing already-waning membership was at best a junior partner to the Socialist Party and its leader Franois Mitterrand, whose rule from 1981 to 1996 made him the Fifth Republics longest-serving president. The party largely failed to impose its agenda on Mitterrands first government and by the end of his rule found itself challenged on opposite sides from Trotskyists on the Left to Jean-Marie Le Pens Front National on the far right. In 2002, the PCF failed to win 1 million votes for the first time in seventy years, scoring barely 3 percent of the vote.

But it was the emergence of La France Insoumise (LFI) in 2016 that nearly sounded the PCFs death knell.

Founded by Jean-Luc Mlenchon, a former Socialist Party senator from Marseille, LFI took the French left by storm in the 2017 elections. Its near20 percent of first-round votes were not enough to make it to the runoff but made it a real force on the national level. Much like Roussel today, back then Mlenchon ran on a platform which targeted fchs mais pas fachos angry, not fascist working-class voters who have either started backing far-right candidates or stopped voting altogether. In 2012 and 2017, the PCF backed Mlenchons presidential bids despite disagreements on key subjects including nuclear energy and public security.

But in 2018, the PCF changed tack. Frustrated by what they saw as Mlenchons high-handedness and disdain for the Communists, as well as the Lefts failure to win local races despite broad coalitions, the party elected Roussel as the new national secretary and decided to run an independent campaign.

The PCF judged that [it] had retreated because it had not publicly affirmed its identity enough, Martelli concluded.

For members of Roussels campaign, staying relevant on a national level was more important than joining a coalition of leftists with little chance of winning in the second round, such as Mlenchon, Hidalgo, Jadot, and Christiane Taubira, flagging in polls despite winning a popular primary widely seen as designed to launch her into the race.

The Left is [totaling] 25 percent, and people dont have much hope because they say they will never win, said Haby Ka, a twenty-four-year-old political science student from Montreuil and a member of PCF since 2014.

I think it is the clarity of [Roussels] campaign and the fact that he started campaigning well before [the other candidates], with a real program and without worrying about the popular primary on the Left, that allowed [him] to stand out, she added.

The PCFs recent rise in the polls has chipped away at the momentum of Mlenchons 2022 campaign. According to the Journal du Dimanche, between 7 and 13 percent of Roussels current prospective supporters are former Mlenchon voters. Yet in 2017 an even higher percentage of Roussels voter base supported Socialist candidate Benot Hamon, who has since left politics.

Members of Mlenchons party have criticized Roussel for further dividing the left in the lead-up to Aprils elections.

I regret that Fabien Roussel is more busy distinguishing himself at all costs than thinking about the popular bloc that we embodied together in 2012 and 2017 qualifying for the second round, Adrien Quatennens, who is also director of Mlenchons campaign, tweeted on February 16. If we add up Mlenchons 11-13 percent and his 3-4 percent, we are [in the second round], commented the LFI MP.

Brossat disagreed with this, telling Jacobin that on many issues LFI and the PCF were not aligned.

We dont say the same thing on every subject, Brossat said. On nuclear energy, on security, we dont have the same proposals, and moreover, I dont think we are talking to the same electorate.

Christian Louis, a fifty-three-year-old former train driver from the Nivre region in central France, told Jacobin that after twice voting for Mlenchon, he plans to vote for Roussel this time. He speaks like us, and I have confidence in him, Louis said, adding that he met Roussel in-person at a union event in 2019 and felt like he was close to [the people.]

While Louis voted (and campaigned) for Mlenchon in 2012 and 2017, he said that at least some of his union colleagues and friends had abstained from voting and would not vote for LFI in 2022, even against a right-wing candidate. He had two chances, Louis said of Mlenchon. That didnt do too much to change our daily lives.

In Montreuil, Roussel highlighted his campaigns positive outlook. Everyone, he said, has a right to happiness, a right to respect, adding, We need to speak to those who arent voting.

Brossat echoed this: We want to address people who may have voted left in the past and who have moved either to abstention or even to the extreme right.

Yet early polls show that Roussels campaign, paradoxically, seems to appeal to white-collar workers rather than blue-collar ones. In one poll, 5 percent of white-collar respondents said they intended to vote for Roussel versus just 2 percent of blue-collar ones. According to that same polling institute, the French Institute of Public Opinion (Institut franais dopinion publique, IFOP), in another sample, 9 percent of chefs dentreprise, a category that includes everything from small business owners to CEOs, intended to vote for Roussel.

Were not talking about the same working class who once voted for the Left and who today vote for the RN, but a new generation of workers who have replaced their parents, who have the same jobs, the same trade, but who work in a world that is radically different,

said Florent Gougou, who studies the working-class vote in France. I doubt that we can expect much from the Communist Party in this election.

Despite his intentions to renew the party, Roussels voting bloc still skews old and white, polls show. The candidate, famous for his brusqueness, has also come under fire from various parts of the Left and even his own party for his off-the-cuff comments.

In June 2021, Roussel told a journalist that if migrants dont have a reason to stay on French soil, then they have a reason to go back to where they came from. The comment came the month after Roussel had been criticized by others on the Left for attending a police union protest, a gaffe that one party member considered to have serious consequences, not only for the campaign, but also for the future and perhaps the very existence of the PCF.

In February of this year, after Roussels now-infamous rant on the merits of eating meat went viral on Twitter, French-Algerian militant journalist Taha Bouhafs wrote that Roussels classism in this extract is just alarming. Roussel was later backed up by a column in none other than Le Figaro one of Frances most conservative newspapers in which essayist Cline Pina wrote that the PCF candidate was under attack from the woke left that loves to point fingers but doesnt care about social justice.

On February 20, the French investigative news outlet Mediapart accused Roussel of occupying a fictitious job as a parliamentary assistant at the French National Assembly between 2009 and 2014 a scandal that could slow his momentum and perhaps even further shake up the Left, as a similar accusation did for the Right in 2017.

Despite the controversies, Martelli, who spoke to Jacobin before the Mediapart article appeared, said that he believes Roussel has a genuine desire to go back to the fundamentals and stop the erosion of the working-class vote toward the extreme right.

He does it through a pugnacious style that obviously works well, Martelli said. Will he succeed? We will know in a few weeks.

Link:
France's Once-Mighty Communist Party Is Struggling to Find Its Voice - Jacobin magazine

The Russian government betrayed its promises of peace and stability, leading the country into war and economic catastrophe.

Like any war in history, this one divides us all into poles: for and against. Kremlin propaganda tries to convince us that the nation is united behind the government and that it is the pathetic renegades, the pro-Western liberals and the enemy mercenaries who demand peace. This is an untenable lie. This time, the elders of the Kremlin are in the minority. Most Russians do not want a fratricidal war, even among those who still trust the Russian government. They close their eyes as best they can, so as not to see how the world drawn by Russias propagandists disintegrates before them. Many still hope that this is not a war, much less an aggressive one, but a special operation designed to liberate the Ukrainian people. Terrible footage of brutal bombing and shelling of cities will soon destroy these myths. And then even Vladimir Putins most loyal voters will say: we did not give you consent to this unjust war!

Already today, tens of millions of people all over the country have expressed their horror and disgust at the actions of the Putin administration. These are people of various persuasions. Most, as the propagandists claim, are not liberals. Among them are a great many people of leftist, socialist, or communist views. And of course, these people the majority of our people are true patriots.

We are told that the opponents of this war are hypocrites that they stand not against the war, but for the West. This is a lie. We have never been supporters of the United States and its imperialist policies. When Ukrainian troops shelled Donetsk and Luhansk, we were not silent. Nor will we be silent now, when Kharkiv, Kiev, and Odessa are being bombed on the orders of Putin and his camarilla.

There are so many reasons to fight against the war. For us advocates of social justice, equality, and freedom, several are especially important.

This is an unjust invasion. No threat to the Russian state exists that would warrant sending our soldiers to kill and die. They are not liberating anyone. They are not helping any popular movement. They are nothing but a regular army tearing down peaceful Ukrainian towns at the behest of a handful of billionaires who dream of keeping their grip on Russia forever. This war produces incalculable disasters for our peoples. Both Ukrainians and Russians are paying for it dearly with their blood. Long after the dust has settled, poverty, inflation, and unemployment will affect everyone. It is not the oligarchs and bureaucrats who will foot the bill, but poor teachers, workers, pensioners, and the unemployed. Many of us will have no means to feed our children. This war will turn Ukraine into rubble and Russia into a prison. The opposition media have already been shut down. People are put behind bars for sharing leaflets, innocuous pickets, even for posts on social networks. Soon, Russians will have only one choice: prison or enlistment. War produces dictatorships unlike any that living generations have seen. This war multiplies all the risks and threats to our country. Even Ukrainians who a week ago sympathized with Russia are now enlisting in the militia to fight our troops. With his aggression, Putin has undermined critiques of the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists, and all the intrigues of United States and NATO hawks. Putin has given them the justifications for putting new missiles and military bases along our borders. Finally, fighting for peace is the patriotic duty of every Russian. Not only because we are the custodians of the memory of the worst war in history, but also because this war threatens the integrity and very existence of Russia.

Putin is seeking to connect his own fate with the fate of our country. If he succeeds, then his inevitable defeat will be the defeat of the entire nation. Then, we may indeed face the fate of postwar Germany: occupation, territorial division, the cult of collective guilt.

There is only one way to prevent these catastrophes. We ourselves, the men and women of Russia, have to stop this war. This country belongs to us, not a handful of distraught old men with palaces and yachts. It is time to take it back. Our enemies are not in Kiev and Odessa, but in Moscow. It is time to kick them out. War is not Russia. War is Putin and his government. That is why we, Russian socialists and communists, are against this criminal war. We want to stop it in order to save Russia.

No to intervention!

No to dictatorship!

No to poverty!

Visit link:
A Message From Russians Against the War - Jacobin magazine

The following is based on a report given by Joe Sims at the National Board meeting on March 2, 2022.

Perhaps the most suprizing thing about Bidens State of the Union address the other night is that nary a word was said about the storming of the Capitol. How could that be? A scant few weeks after the coups first anniversary and no mention? What manner of political calculus led Washingtons top Democratic strategists to conclude that it was either impolitic or impolite to mention the most important event in this countrys history? Was it a focus group, a poll, a gut-felt hunch, plain old stupidity, or what?

Gus Hall used to say that the essence of being president was in offending the least number of people, but after January 6th, this is ridiculous!

The answer might lie in the content of a speech pitched smack dab in the middle of center field. After almost 20 minutes of casting fire and brimstone at Putin for invading Ukraine, Mr. Biden called for increased police funding and securing the U.S.s southern border, calls that received standing ovations from both sides of the aisle.

So how are you going to win the midterms by appealing mainly to independents and soccer moms? Hmm.

Four noncontroversial unity proposals were premiered at the joint session of Congress: combating opioid addiction, outlawing ads targeted at children, providing aid to veterans, and renewing the war on cancer. Could these, along with repackaged parts of Build Back Better, be the main planks in this years Democratic legislative agenda?

Hey, Mr. Biden, better call Manchin and Sinema and be ready with some big bucks. You can forget about Mitch McConnell supporting anything you do now or, if you dont change course, in what appears to be your exceedingly short-lived political future.

Now, dont get me wrong: there were some good things in the speech. The president did stress that today, the countrys in a better place. But hell, this was true the second after Trump left office. Unemployment is lower, COVID is receding, and infrastructure legislation has passed.

And the speech did bring attention to voting rights, the PRO-ACT, and trans rights, even though theres zero chance of passage of House-approved legislation on these or any other front in the near term.

In addition, there were strong appeals in the State of the Union to working-class issues like tax fairness, womens equality, and child care. With respect to tax fairness Biden said, Just last year, 55 Fortune 500 corporations earned $40 billion in profits and paid zero dollars in federal income tax. He called for a 15% tax on global corporations in response. Good.

But, while working-class issues were mentioned, they seemed rather muted. By way of comparison, Rashida Tlaib gave a reply to Biden on behalf of the Working Families Party that called for electing a working-class majority to Congress around issues like canceling student debt, raising the minimum wage, recalculating the poverty index, and turning the Rust Belt into a Green Belt. She also took aim at the military budget.

Now thats an agenda one can relate to instead of the other days repositioning. Come on guys! Average is not going to win the midterms! Enough with projecting Bidens sometimes under, sometimes overstated Im-the-normal-guy image and its either me or tbe President of Krazyland.

Indeed, Biden on Tuesday night chose to largely stay away from the sharper issues that have divided the country. This stood in sharp contrast to the GOP reply given by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. Reynolds centered her remarks on inflation, mandates, childrens education (read critical race theory), immigration, and government overreach. The Republicans have no fear of feeding red meat to their base.

Thus, the state of the union remains uncertain and unstable, despite the beginnings of a return to normal. But with inflation and now war in Europe, normal may not be enough. People are fearful and nervous, and one has a very strong feeling that the election is going to turn on the price of gas.

Yes, Russias invasion of Ukraine looms large: it was wrong and in violation of international law. In the words of the CPUSAs National Board, War between states is never an acceptable solution and must be rejected in the strongest terms.

The working class of both countries deserves support and solidarity, as does the growing peace movements there. One million signed a petition for peace in Russia recently. Thats huge!

But look: lets get our priorities straight: The main task has to be to work to develop a peace movement and to change the Biden administrations policy. Thats the best way and only way to support the workers of Russia and Ukraine.

The context set by U.S. imperialisms role over the past months cannot be ignored, including Cold War rhetoric, saber rattling, and what might be called a de facto NATOization of Ukraine. By NATOization is meant the arming of the country beginning with Trump and continued by Biden, and the building of infrastructure with potential military uses along with provocative Western military exercises by U.S. and U.K. armed forces.

In this regard, the building of the peace movement must be considered within the context of fighting the fascist danger. In other words, its imperative that a broad movement be built around the key issues today: a cease fire, withdrawal of troops and setting a date for such, ending sanctions, bringing in the UN. These actions could set the stage for additional future steps for peaceful coexistence, arranging regional security, including ending the supply of arms. Here we should be careful not to substitute anti-imperialist positions for what the broader forces in the peace movement may be ready to endorse.

Strong stances will have to be taken and unity among broad forces fought for. All-peoples unity is necessary. As for an election strategy that soft peddles the January 6th insurrection suggested by its absence from mention in the state of the union, as truckers used to say, The only thing in the middle of the road are white lines and dead jack rabbits.

Wake up yall before its too late: whats going to win this election is a mass movement organized around the issues the movement has to adapt to and meet the political moment. The point here is that the issues cant be determined by elites; they have to be constructed and fought for from the ground up by the broad masses of our class and people.

Images: White House (Facebook); Green jobs, Lihn Do (CC BY 2.0); Peace sign, Dyniss Rainer (CC BY-SA 2.0).

See the rest here:
What Biden didn't say at the State of the Union - Communist Party USA

Administration officials have studied how sanctions would affect each of the big banks, including Sberbank and VTB, Russias two largest banks. Sberbank has about a third of the assets in the countrys banking sector, and VTB has more than 15 percent. Some experts are skeptical that the administration would put those two banks on the S.D.N. list for fear of the consequences for the Russian and global economies. For now, U.S. officials are not ready to cut off all Russian banks from Swift, the important Belgian money transfer system used by more than 11,000 financial institutions worldwide.

The Treasury Department has other sanctions lists that would impose costs while inflicting less widespread suffering. For example, it could put a bank on a list that prevents it from doing any transactions involving dollars. Many international commercial transactions are done in U.S. dollars, the currency that underpins the global economy.

The Treasury Department is also expected to put more Russian officials, businesspeople and companies on the sanctions lists.

By Thursday afternoon in Russia, the nations stock market had fallen nearly 40 percent.

The Commerce Department has been making plans to restrict the export of certain American technologies to Russia, a tactic that the Trump administration used to hobble Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company. The controls would damage the supply chain for some Russian sectors. U.S. officials said their targets included the defense industry and the oil and gas industry.

European officials are expected to announce sanctions similar to many of the ones planned by the United States, as they did this week. However, they have been more wary of imposing the harshest sanctions because of the continents robust trade with Russia.

Although Mr. Biden has said he will contemplate any possible sanctions, U.S. officials for now do not plan big disruptions to Russias energy exports, which are the pillar of the countrys economy. Europe relies on the products, and surging oil prices worldwide would cause greater inflation and more problems for politicians. However, Germany announces this week that it would not certify Nord Stream 2, a new natural gas pipeline that connects Russia and Western Europe. On Wednesday Mr. Biden announced sanctions on a subsidiary of Gazprom, the large Russian energy company, which built the pipeline and had planned to operate it.

What is at the root of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence, and it has grown unnerved at Ukraines closeness with the West and the prospect that the country might join NATO or the European Union. While Ukraine is part of neither, it receives financial and military aid from the United States and Europe.

Are these tensions just starting now? Antagonism between the two nations has been simmeringsince 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, after an uprising in Ukraine replaced their Russia-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimeaand inspired a separatist movement in the east.A cease-fire was negotiated in 2015, but fighting has continued.

How has Ukraine responded? On Feb. 23, Ukraine declared a 30-day state of emergencyas cyberattacks knocked out government institutions. Following the beginning of the attacks, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraines president, declared martial law. The foreign minister called the attacks a full-scale invasion and called on the world to stop Putin.

We have been frank, we have been candid with the American people that our measures the measures we have and are prepared to impose on the Russian Federation certainly wont be cost-free for the Russian Federation, Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said on Wednesday. But they wont be entirely cost-free for the rest of the world as well.

Excerpt from:
Ukraine Crisis: What Happens Next for the Rest of the World? - The New York Times

PARIS President Vladimir V. Putin has ordered Russian troops into Ukraine but made clear his true target goes beyond his neighbor to Americas empire of lies, and he threatened consequences you have never faced in your history for anyone who tries to interfere with us.

In another rambling speech full of festering historical grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot against his country, Mr. Putin reminded the world on Thursday that Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states with a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons.

In effect, Mr. Putins speech, intended to justify the invasion, seemed to come closer to threatening nuclear war than any statement from a major world leader in recent decades. His immediate purpose was obvious: to head off any possible Western military move by making clear he would not hesitate to escalate.

Given Russias nuclear arsenal, he said, there should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country. He added: All necessary decisions have been taken in this regard.

Mr. Putins move into Ukraine and his thinly veiled nuclear threat have now shattered Europes notions of security and the presumption of peace it has lived with for several generations. The postwar European project, which produced so much stability and prosperity, has entered a new, uncertain and confrontational stage.

In the run-up to Mr. Putins invasion of Ukraine, a train of Western leaders made the pilgrimage to Moscow to try to persuade Mr. Putin not to do it. The Americans essentially offered a return to arms control; President Emmanuel Macron of France was prepared to search for a new security architecture if Mr. Putin was unhappy with the old one.

The sincere, perhaps nave, belief of Mr. Macron and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany in the possibility of bringing Mr. Putin to reason suggests the gulf between the worlds they inhabit. The Russian leader was not interested in taking a fine scalpel to Europes security order, but rather a blunt knife to carve out, Cold-War-style, whats mine and whats yours.

Europe has rediscovered its vulnerability. Mr. Macron said on Thursday that Mr. Putin had decided to bring about the gravest violation of peace and stability in our Europe for decades. Of Ukrainians, he said, Their liberty is our liberty.

But no European country, nor the United States for that matter, will put lives on the line for that freedom. The question, then, is how they can draw a line for Mr. Putin.

After his short war in Georgia in 2008, his annexation of Crimea in 2014, his orchestration in 2014 of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two breakaway regions, and his military intervention in Syria in 2015, Mr. Putin has clearly concluded that Russias readiness to use its armed forces to advance its strategic aims will go unanswered by the United States or its European allies.

Russia wants insecurity in Europe because force is its trump card, said Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador. They never wanted a new security order, whatever the European illusions. Putin decided some time ago that confrontation with the West was his best option.

Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvards Kennedy School, said the talk of nuclear conflict was worrisome. But I find it difficult to believe that any world leader, including Mr. Putin, would seriously contemplate using nuclear weapons in any of the scenarios we have here, for the simple reason that they understand the consequences, he said.

Still, history has demonstrated that European wars involving a major global power can spiral out of control. A long war in Ukraine could eventually bleed into Poland, Hungary or Slovakia.

Central Europe and the Baltic States, effectively NATOs front line against Russia, will live with a sense of credible threat for some time.

One ominous scenario remote but less so than before the invasion is that Mr. Putin, who has demanded that NATO pull back out of formerly Soviet-controlled countries to its posture before enlargement in 1997, will eventually turn his attention to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, the small Baltic States that now form the front line of NATO countries.

Feb. 24, 2022, 6:00 p.m. ET

Mr. Duclos suggested Mr. Putins aim may well be to install a puppet Russian government in Kyiv and that, if he succeeded, he will want the same thing in the Baltic States.

All three countries, subjugated in the Soviet empire after World War II, joined NATO in 2004. President Biden has vowed that the United States and its allies will defend every inch of NATO territory, meaning that even a Russian attack on tiny Estonia could trigger a conflagration.

Immediately after the Russian invasion, the three Baltic States and Poland triggered Article 4 of the alliances founding treaty, which allows members to hold consultations when they feel their territorial integrity is threatened. NATO met in an emergency session as a result.

These nations fears were one clear sign of how the Russian invasion has upended European security and European assumptions in ways that appear certain to last.

What is at the root of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence, and it has grown unnerved at Ukraines closeness with the West and the prospect that the country might join NATO or the European Union. While Ukraine is part of neither, it receives financial and military aid from the United States and Europe.

Are these tensions just starting now? Antagonism between the two nations has been simmeringsince 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, after an uprising in Ukraine replaced their Russia-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimeaand inspired a separatist movement in the east.A cease-fire was negotiated in 2015, but fighting has continued.

How has Ukraine responded? On Feb. 23, Ukraine declared a 30-day state of emergencyas cyberattacks knocked out government institutions. Following the beginning of the attacks, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraines president, declared martial law. The foreign minister called the attacks a full-scale invasion and called on the world to stop Putin.

But Mr. Walt noted that if, in Ukraine, Russia cares more than anyone else and has greater means to affect the outcome in the short term, that equation begins to shift if Mr. Putin reaches further afield. At that point, resolve and capabilities start to shift back in our favor. He added that my chances of dying in a nuclear war still feel infinitesimally small, even if greater than yesterday.

European states, particularly France, generally viewed the American conviction that a Russian invasion was almost inevitable as too alarmist, but differences were papered over in the pursuit of diplomacy.

In the end, the diplomatic efforts Europeans believed in were doomed because an increasingly isolated Mr. Putin has worked himself into a revanchist fury. He appears to see himself standing alone against the United States and what he portrays as the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis that the leading NATO countries are supporting in Ukraine.

Mr. Putins steadily mounting anger over the past two decades has been focused on the perceived Western humiliation of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union 31 years ago and on NATOs subsequent expansion eastward to safeguard countries like Poland that suffered during the Cold War under Moscows totalitarian domination.

But the Russian leader has evidently developed his outrage into a consuming worldview of American iniquity. What this will mean in military terms in the coming years remains to be seen.

Nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its law and order, this created bloody, unhealing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism, Mr. Putin said. Americas conduct across the globe was con-artist behavior.

He continued: Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same empire of lies.

Mr. Putin seemed oblivious to the fact that the choreography of the Russian invasion has been one of extraordinary, if predictable, doublespeak.

It has included unsubstantiated accusations of humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime; Russian recognition of the independence of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk so that these peoples republics could ask Russia for help; and the claim that therefore Russia was within its rights, under the United Nations Charter, in responding to a request for assistance by sending troops to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.

In the end, Mr. Putin appears to have had no hesitation in ordering Russia into Ukraine. He accused the authorities in Kyiv all neo-Nazi usurpers, in his view of aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons for an inevitable showdown with Russia.

He appeared to have forgotten that Ukraine once had a vast nuclear arsenal before it gave it up in 1994 under an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum. Russia was one of the countries that signed the accord, promising in exchange that it would never use force or threats against Ukraine and would respect its sovereignty and existing borders.

So much for that.

View original post here:
Beyond Ukraine, the Target Is What Putin Calls Americas Empire of Lies - The New York Times