Global Eyes
Let's take a tour of the world, shall we?
Claire—we’ve been remiss in sending out Global Eyes for the past few days because we’ve been working on writing longer essays, which we’ll publish in the magazine soon.
The French Election Twitter Summit
This is finally getting interesting, but not in a good way. Join Arun Kapil, Jérome Clavel, and moi—along, we hope, with Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, whom we’ll invite—to discuss the election in the run-up to the high-stakes first round tomorrow at 17:00 Paris time. That’s 5:00 pm Paris time for those of you who haven’t yet adapted to the 24 hour clock. Here’s a handy time zone converter. For those of you who missed it, Arun Kapil’s account of the state of the race is a good backgrounder.
Q&A with Tecumseh Court
Have you got questions for Tecumseh Court? Of course you do. Ask Tecumseh Court everything you’ve ever wanted to know about war but were afraid to ask. We mean it, too: We’ll give you a pseudonym, so don’t worry if your questions are dumb. I’ve asked Tecumseh Court dumber questions, I promise. Like the one that prompted Tecumseh Court to explain why, precisely, novice warfighters should be stocking up on buckets. Send your questions today so that Tecumseh Court has time to think about them over the weekend.
Russia and Ukraine
NATO will supply heavy weapons to Ukraine. (Possibly paywalled, depending how many articles you’ve read.)
NATO member states have agreed to supply new types of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, alliance representatives said, as Kyiv prepares for an offensive by Russia in the country’s east. The pledge came after a plea from Ukraine’s foreign minister for western countries to move faster with supplies or risk seeing “many people die … because this help came too late.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “We’re not going to let anything stand in the way of getting Ukrainians what they need, and what we believe, to be effective.” He spoke of “new systems” that have so far not been provided by NATO allies, but he declined to go into details. You may recall what Tecumseh Court had to say about this last week.
Putin has “probably given up” on capturing Kyiv, said US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Austin believes Putin has now “focused on the south and east of the country.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley testified that the US and its allies have supplied Ukraine with 60,000 anti-tank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons. (This was the first time a US defense official publicly put a number on these shipments.) Austin said, “We’re flowing resources into Ukraine faster than most people would ever have believed conceivable.” Actually, I’d believe it. The one thing the US military has always been good at is logistics. Winning wars? Maybe not so much, recently. But getting a lot of stuff from Point A to Point B? You want the Americans.
Milley said that Ukraine wants armored vehicles and artillery for the next phase of the fight, but US systems need months of training, so they’ve been trying to find systems among their allies that Ukrainians can use right away. “The fight in the southeast is different from the north,” he said. “It’s much more open and lends itself to armor, mechanized operations, offensive operations on both sides.”
That sounds ghastly beyond belief. That sounds like World War II.
Update: I’m not the only one who had that thought:
The UN General Assembly on Thursday voted to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council. Believe it or not, the vote was not unanimous:
Here’s the abstention list. Continued, here. (I find the abstention list more shameful than the list of those who just voted against it, because it’s full of countries who make a pretense of being something other than hell on earth. I mean, Vanuatu—what’s up with that? And who knew Barbados was full of Putinverstehers? Oh, and grow a pair, Singapore. You’ll be needing one in your neighborhood, if you get my drift—Claire)
The US Senate has passed a bill to establish a new military assistance mechanism for Ukraine similar to the World War II Lend-Lease program. “If this becomes law, it could lead to a dramatic increase in what has already been a steady flow of weapons, ammunition, and other materiel from the US government to its Ukrainian counterparts.” It had better become law.
The Prime Minister of Slovakia confirmed that Slovakia has provided Ukraine with S-300 air defense systems. “The Ukrainian nation is bravely defending its sovereign country and us, too,” he said. “It is our duty to help, not to stay put and be ignorant to the loss of human lives under Russia’s aggression.”
Via Ukraine war map, the situation (approximately) as of yesterday afternoon:
Ukrainian forces took control of Trudoliubivka, Dobryanka, Novovoznesens’ke, and Osokorivka in the Kherson oblast; Russian forces have reentered Snihurivka, north of Kherson:
Since their redeployment from the north of Ukraine, Russian troops numbers have significantly increased around Izyum. Russian forces have focused their attacks out of Izyum as well as on the cities of Rubizhne and Sieverodonetsk. with no notable change in control:
In Kramatorsk, Russia carried out two missile strikes on the railway station where civilians were being evacuated. Not only did they deliberately target civilians; they used cluster munitions. The victims, reports Cristiano Tinazzi, were for the most part women, children, and the elderly for the most part. He counted at least twenty bodies, and dozens and dozens of wounded. “A massacre.” There are photos and videos of the carnage, as there have been of almost every atrocity committed in this war. They are so revolting that I debated whether to publish them. But I fell on the side of thinking, “Yes, people should see this.” People should grasp what it means when Russians rain missiles on women and children in railway stations. And people should grasp that Galina Aksakova, who posted this video, is absolutely right. They did it because they know they can do anything. We have taught them this, patiently, over many years.
Later today, I’ll publish a conversation with a Syrian friend of mine in which we discuss this: the moment when Russia learned it could do anything and no one would stop them, and the way that forever changed him—and the world.
The mayor of Kramatorsk, Olexander Honcharenko, said that hospitals there can’t cope with the number of wounded. “There are a lot of seriously injured people without arms and legs. They are being operated by thirty or forty surgeons at the same time.” He also said that at the time of the attack, there were about 4,000 people at the railway station, waiting for evacuation.
Zelensky, reacting to the train station attack: “They lack the strength and courage to fight with us on the battlefield, so they’re cynically destroying the civilian population. This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop.”
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry reports that Russia is abducting Ukrainian children en masse. Thousands of Ukrainian orphans from occupied territories are being illegally taken to Russia, they say. The Russian State Duma is hastening to pass a bill on a so-called “simplified” procedure for their “adoption” by Russian families. This is entirely too reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s Lebensborn program, and one suspects it may even be intended to be a solution to the problem of Russian demographic decline—exacerbated now by Russian losses in the war.
It’s worth noting that Russians removed orphaned children from Ukraine during the Holodomor, too. The children were forced to abandon their original names and denounce their parents. The recalcitrant children were shot—within sight of the other orphans.
Throughout Russia’s periphery, news like this reawakens centuries of trauma. In Finland, during what’s known as the Great Wrath—Russia’s invasion and occupation between 1714 and 1721—Russians kidnapped as many as 30,000 children and women as slaves. The population in Finland at the time was about 400,000, so the loss was enormous.
The whole world would benefit from a Ukrainian victory over Russia, writes Chris Alexander of the Atlantic Council. “The first and principal beneficiary would be Ukraine itself,” he writes, but Russia’s defeat would spill over to benefit Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan and other countries in Central Asia; it would benefit victims of Putin’s lesser-known military campaigns and secret wars;
Venezuela might finally turn. Libya would lose a huge source of mischief. Mali and the Central African Republic would be rid of the malevolent Wagner group … after six Putin-linked coups in only three years, a Russian loss in Ukraine might bring some much-needed stability to the Sahel and West Africa …
Moscow has backed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond. A Russian defeat would chasten Iran and weaken many other rogue elements who look to Moscow.
For a number of years, Russia has been aggressively disrupting Western democracies and seeking to exploit existing social divisions wherever possible. Less Russian interference would create room for better policies and decision-making from elected governments in Europe and North America. Without the benefit of artificial amplification from Kremlin troll farms, populists would find it significantly more difficult to gain traction. … the Kremlin’s ability to engage in destabilizing international activities would be dramatically curtailed. Every single free and law-abiding state has a clear and obvious interest in helping Ukraine achieve victory over Russia. A world freed from Putin’s impunity and interference would be a much better place.
Hear, hear.
By Peter Pomarantsev: Ukraine is our past and our future:
Once again a dictator in the Kremlin is trying to break the spirit of Ukrainians, wipe out the very idea of a sovereign Ukraine.
But this time he is being stopped. The cycle is being broken. This matters not just for Ukraine but for the whole world. For the same reason that Ukraine is the crucible of so much horror in history—it has also produced the ideas, stories, and policies that define good from bad for us all. It will again. It must again. …
… The best term of what Putin is up to I actually heard came from a friend who had campaigned endlessly to stop Russia’s atrocities in Syria. What was under attack, she argued, was the “right to exist.” This may be legally hazy, but for me it captured the essence of Putin’s wars in Chechnya, Syria and now Ukraine, as well as his oppression inside Russia. His aim is always to take away the right of people to define who they are, their future, their meaning. He wants to control not just who lives and dies—but reality itself. And he wants to destroy every vestige of humanitarian and human rights law: because impunity is true power.
Ukraine’s “iron general” is a hero, but he’s no star.
If a single person can be credited with Ukraine’s surprising military successes so far—protecting Kyiv, the capital, and holding most other major cities amid an onslaught—it is Zaluzhnyy, a round-faced 48-year-old general who was born into a military family, and appointed as his country’s top uniformed commander by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2021. Zaluzhnny and other Ukrainian commanders had been preparing for a full-on war with Russia since 2014.
That’s an especially interesting profile to read if you’ve read Part II of WAR 101, by Tecumseh Court. It seems Zaluzhnyy is doing it by the book—Warfighting, that is—and Russia is not. And it seems Tecumseh Court was quite right about the utility of that book:
The searing, daily combat experience in Donbas over the past eight years has meant that those troops closest to the fight saw first hand how individual initiative in small unit combat is key. …
… That combat and the hands-on training by NATO in western Ukraine spawned a new generation of small-unit leaders and noncommissioned officers who can think and act independently. The changes weren’t immediate, but the hard-won knowledge from regular skirmishes quickened a “cultural change at the battalion level on down,” Collins said. “An entire generation understood how to lead, and I think the generals understood that it worked.”
This video gave him the nickname “Zalizni Nezlamnyy Zaluzhnyy.” Apparently that’s superbly witty in Ukrainian. It obviously loses something in translation, but it means “Iron Unbreakable” Zaluzhnyy.
Poroshenko: “Compromise with Russia is impossible after Bucha.” The town of Bucha has become the “symbol” of massacres by Russian troops, he said, and Putin, whom he called “the devil,” wants “to have all of us dead.”
Ukraine uses facial recognition software to spot Russian soldiers and spies:
Critics warn, however, that the tech companies could be taking advantage of a crisis to expand with little privacy oversight, and that any mistakes made by the software or those using it could have dire consequences in a war zone.
From the Russian media:
The head of the Russian foreign intelligence service warned this week of “the establishment of complete and undisguised liberal-Nazi dictatorships in the Western area.”
IZVESTIA: What suspending Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council means. “Of course, this deprives Russia of a certain platform, but when we talk about the Council itself, we must remember that it was criticized by many; take the United States under Donald Trump, it left it for some time,” Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council Andrey Kortunov told Izvestia.
NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA: Washington preparing Kiev for prolonged hostilities. “The US and NATO are committed to promptly establishing a new system of more frequent and consistent deliveries of defense items and other material resources to Ukraine in order to rebuild its army,” military expert, retired colonel Nikolay Shulgin told the newspaper. “The Lend-Lease Act that Washington is about to pass might mark a new front line running along Ukraine’s western border. From there, aid from the alliance and the US military will reach far into the country,” he added.
IZVESTIA: What made Russia's currency rebound to 75 rubles per dollar? “Implementing a 12 percent charge for the purchase of dollars, euros, and pounds sterling relieved pressure on the ruble. Furthermore, this money can mostly be converted to cash in rubles,” Head of Global Research Department at Otkritie Investments Mikhail Shulgin explained.
VEDOMOSTI: Russia aims to redirect coal exports from Europe to Asia Pacific. “Reorienting Russian coal exports to Asia-Pacific countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan appears to be the most natural choice, according to Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline Analytics. Another interesting area, he said, is the supply of coking coal to India, which is rapidly building its steel industry.”
Europe
Orbán emerges as the loudest opponent of EU sanctions on Russian oil.
An overwhelming majority of European lawmakers demanded an “immediate full embargo” on Russian oil, gas and coal. European leaders in Brussels, as well as the governments of France, Italy, Poland and the Baltics are all on board to go further in sanctioning Russian energy. Germany is reluctant to move too quickly on energy, even seeking to delay the moment a full ban on Russian coal imports comes into force. But even in Berlin, there’s a growing acceptance that paying Putin for oil will have to stop eventually.
When it comes to Hungary, however, the obstacle remains firm.
Poland’s Kaczyński slams Orbán for refusing to condemn Bucha killings. “We cannot cooperate as we had in the past if this continues,” he said.
Still the same Marine Le Pen. Le Monde writes that her softened image is just that—an image. Underneath is a horror, a “political program … diametrically opposed to democratic and republican values.”
… Marine Le Pen still aspires to a new world order where Russia would be the privileged ally of France—what she called in 2017 when she was in Moscow, the “new world,” symbolized by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. “We are waiting for peace to return,” said her chief of staff Renaud Labaye.
Estonia’s prime minister calls for a vast rise in NATO forces to defend Baltic states. (Paywalled.)
Kaja Kallas said that the military alliance needed “war-fighting capabilities” and permanent bases in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, with a division in the region of up to 25,000 troops, well up from battalions of about 1,000 soldiers in each country.
Kallas and other Baltic officials said these [current, tripwire] forces would not be sufficient to repel a Russian attack and that, under NATO’s current configuration, Baltic states would have to rely on being “liberated” by reinforcements from Germany, Poland, and other European countries
Claire—she’s right.
Middle East
Soaring wheat prices scramble Egyptian economy. The price of wheat and other food has soared owing to the war in Ukraine. This cannot but terrify Arab rulers: One of the driving forces behind the the anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that spread across the Arab world in the early 2010s was the rising price of food.
The Negev Summit’s participants had wildly different goals:
…. Whether the global impacts of the Ukraine war and the Western sanctions on Russia will bring the United States closer to its Middle Eastern allies and push the Biden administration to reinvigorate its policies in the region remains uncertain. What is certain, however, is the disenchantment of Israel and the Arab countries of the Negev Summit with the United States’ role in the Middle East, especially when it comes to security. The summit’s only major takeaway was confirmation of their readiness to explore a future in which Washington is no longer the ultimate guarantor of security—and no longer the only recognized superpower in the Middle East.
Asia
Taiwan’s spymaster Chen Ming-tong leads intelligence efforts to resist China.With Taiwan top of China’s agenda in 2023, the island’s National Security Bureau is reforming to get ready for Xi Jingping’s next move. (Paywalled.)
China threatens retaliation if Pelosi visits Taiwan.
“China resolutely opposes all forms of official contact between the US and Taiwan,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said in a media briefing. “If Pelosi visits Taiwan, this would gravely violate the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-US Joint Communiqués, seriously undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, severely impact the political foundation of China-US relations and send a seriously wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces.”
(Seeing as she’s down with the ‘rona, this probably won’t be a crisis—Claire.)
China’s fear of “Indo-Pacific NATO” accelerates decoupling from the West.
For weeks, Chinese officials and analysts have endorsed Russia’s claims that NATO’s expansion in Europe triggered its invasion of Ukraine. Now they are pointing to a new specter to justify their support of Russia’s war: an “Indo-Pacific NATO” that could ultimately force China to decouple from the West and achieve self-sufficiency in everything from food to semiconductors. …
… Dan Wang at Gavekal Dragonomics, a Beijing-based consultancy, noted that if China ever faced sanctions similar to those imposed on Russia, “they would be devastating for China’s ability to remain a manufacturing superpower”.
What lessons does China take from Putin’s war? A month into the invasion, Beijing is still backing Russia.
Two face sedition charges after allegedly “causing a nuisance” in Hong Kong courts.
The pair were accused of “uttering seditious words” at a January 4 court hearing, when vice-chair of the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China Chow Hang-tung was sentenced.
Africa
Negotiating local business practices with China in Benin
In Benin, Chinese and local Beninese officials engaged in drawn-out negotiations on a deal to construct a business center aimed at deepening business links between Chinese and Beninese merchants. …. Chinese and Beninese authorities negotiated the establishment of the center [and] Beninese authorities made Chinese negotiators adapt to local Beninese labor, construction, and legal norms and put pressure on their Chinese counterparts.
Rangers and troops in DR Congo have been accused of working with soldiers to terrorize and kill members of the indigenous Batwa community in a bid to drive them out of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park. Also, Rwanda marks 28 years since the start of the genocide of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus. President Paul Kagame says too many perpetrators are still at large, hiding out overseas.
Rights groups accuse Ethiopian forces of committing war crimes in Tigray:
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tigrayan civilians had been targeted in “a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing” in the long-contested western Tigray region since the outbreak of Ethiopia's war in November 2020.
Over the ensuing months, several hundred thousand Tigrayans were forcibly expelled from western Tigray in a “coordinated” manner by security forces and civilian authorities through ethnically-motivated rape, murder, starvation, and other serious violations.
Malian troops and Russian mercenaries executed around 300 civilian men over five days during a military operation in the village of Moura, Human Rights Watch says, in the worst atrocity of Mali’s decade-long armed conflict:
The killings took place between March 27 and 31 in Moura, a rural town of around 10,000 inhabitants in the Mopti region, a hotspot of jihadist activity that has intensified and spread to neighbouring countries in the Sahel region.
… Nineteen witnesses told the rights group that Malian and Russian-speaking soldiers arrived by helicopter and exchanged two rounds of gunfire with Islamist fighters, during which rebels, soldiers and a few civilians were killed.
The troops then deployed through the town, summarily executed several men then gathered hundreds of unarmed others from their homes and took them to the bank of a nearby river, the witnesses told HRW. …
Many were traders from surrounding villages who came to attend the town's weekly livestock market. Some were infiltrated militants, the witnesses told HRW.
The men were held for five days under the sun and arbitrarily selected for execution by gunfire during the night.
Bodies were piled into three mass graves, HRW said.
The operation allegedly involved over 100 Russian-speaking men, according to multiple security sources who spoke to HRW.
Mali says it has opened an investigation into the allegation.
Protester killed in Sudan as thousands rally three years after anti-Bashir uprising.
A rural crime wave in Nigeria: How the farm banditry crisis is fueling vigilantes hellbent on reprisals against ethnic Fulanis.
Americas
Ancient cemetery of flying reptiles unearthed in Chile’s Atacama desert.
Stay or go? Mexicans vote on Amlo’s performance in historic recall election.
The Biggest Promoter of Mexico’s Presidential Recall Election? The President.
The vote has the potential to upend the country’s political system. But many fear it will amount to nothing more than a tool for propaganda.
Mexico’s president has stepped up his attacks on a number of media outlets in one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists, calling them “mercenaries” who defend vested interests. Eight Mexican journalists have been killed in the past three months.
Honduran special economic zone adopts bitcoin as legal tender.
I thought perhaps the world was just being touchy about the Peruvian prime minister’s gaffe until I read what he said.
Cartels are on a cop-killing spree in one of Mexico’s most violent states. In the state of Zacatecas, 16 police officers have been killed since 2022 began.
Cuban parents say they’re sick of the brainwashing in their kids’ schools. Apparently they’re being told the US started the war in Ukraine and forced Russia to invade:
“Most parents don’t care, they don’t see how serious the issue is, because they are uninformed, but not me. My brother lives in Spain and sends me news of what is happening. This is a crime and they want, as always, to blame it on the United States. It bothers me that they are brainwashing the children, and you can’t do anything about it, because it’s the school, and they impose it,” she concluded, upset.
Cubans arriving in record numbers along Mexico border. Not since the Mariel boat lift have they arrived in such numbers. The arrival of so many Cubans is apparently straining communities in South Florida.
America must join Europe in the spy war against Putin.
The EU has expelled more than 350 Russian diplomats from embassies on its soil. This represents an unprecedented move outside full-scale war. Beginning in mid-March, EU countries commenced coordinated expulsions of Russian diplomats, mostly spies, across the continent. The effort has ramped up this week in response to reports of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, prominently in the devastated Kyiv suburb of Bucha. … If the White House is serious, it needs to follow the EU’s lead and break down Russia’s spy network in America with aggressive expulsions,
Global
The war will reduce Ukraine’s grain harvest by 20 percent, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said. North African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries that depend on Ukrainian grain are already feeling the impact.
World food prices hit an all-time high in March as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent “shocks” through markets for staple grains and vegetable oils, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said.
The story of Tank
Because we have to end on something less depressing than all of this lest all our readers give up and die—which would be bad for our business plan—here’s the happy story of Tank.
You’re in good hands, Tank.
Putin is Josef Stalin reincarnated. Stalin starved four million Ukrainians to death in the 1930s through a forced famine. Causing others to suffer and die is in the DNA of Putins and Stalins. In fact, that trait is in the DNA of a huge population of Russians.
"Soaring wheat prices scramble Egyptian economy. The price of wheat and other food has soared owing to the war in Ukraine. This cannot but terrify Arab rulers..."
In truth this budding reality is one we all everywhere must fear. As the world trends to scarcity (of basic food stuffs), price(s) will go higher... Until there is nothing to sell.
Russia, the world's #1 exporter of wheat, is busy with its "special operation" right now. Ukraine, the world's #4 exporter of wheat, is trying to keep alive. Meanwhile, the Russians torch Ukraine's fields and devastate the small towns that are part of Ukraine's raw food delivery system so even higher prices are (sorry) baked into the cake. Meanwhile, the USA and Canada suffer a worsening drought so they might not be able to make up the shortfall. Check this map (that is updated weekly)...
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap.aspx
Most, but not all, of the basic food stuffs that grow in the USA occur in that area largely west of the Mississippi that lie under those colors of worsening drought - and the aquifers also dry up, not replenishing this winter. Where will the food come from? Whence comes the water to grow that food?
We are headed for a global famine that might begin in Egypt, then spread initially to the Middle east and Africa, before the famine sweeps the globe... Remember Ukraine, until 6 weeks ago the #4 exporter, will likely become the world's #1 *importer*.
We have a major problem that looks set to get very scary by the end of this year.