🌐👀 Global Eyes
Everything you need to know to be a reasonably well-informed person
It’s been a while since you’ve received a long version of Global Eyes, hasn’t it? If you prefer the short version, don’t worry, I’ll send that out in a few hours—or tomorrow morning, if I fall asleep in the next few minutes.
🇷🇺 RUSSIA
Here’s the full transcript of the foreign policy speech Putin made yesterday at the Valdai Club. The intended audience seems to be the global far right and far left: He’s made a point of using all the catnip clichés and tropes. (The West: arrogant, racist, neocolonialist. Also the West: gay parades, dozens of genders, and cancel culture.) “They simply have nothing to offer the world, except perpetuating their dominance.”
The president of Guinea-Bissau said that Putin asked him to convey to Kyiv that Moscow is “ready for negotiations.” Zelensky replied that Russia should first stop bombing Ukrainian infrastructure, blocking the Black Sea’s ports, threatening the world with nuclear weapons, and using Iranian kamikaze drones to strike Ukrainian cities and kill civilians. Of this, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, “We are talking about complete unwillingness [to negotiate] on the part of Ukraine.”
The Kremlin is headhunting useful idiots:
Russia is waging renewed influence operations in Europe designed to undermine Western support for Ukraine in an attempt to turn the tide in a war that has shifted decisively in Kyiv’s favor over the past month, top Estonian defense officials [said].
Russia threatens to shoot down US commercial satellites. Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of the Russian delegation to the UN, said that US commercial satellites used in Ukraine “for military purposes” would be a “legitimate target.” He was referring to Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals, presumably.
Ramzan Kadyrov said that 23 of his fighters had been killed in a Ukrainian artillery attack.
Anger mounts as Russian draftees thrown into battle without training, equipment: “People understand what mobilization is for, that people are needed. But they don’t understand why draftees are not provided with water or food and people are not given any information.”
Russia says 82,000 conscripts from the emergency draft are already in Ukraine.
Grief and fear in Russia as military planes crash into civilian residences. Yes, that’s planes, plural. First a Su-34 crashed into an apartment building in Yeysk, killing fifteen people, including a whole family of seven. Then another Su-30 crashed into a house in Siberia. Then another jet crashed in Irkutsk, killing both pilots.
Despite modernization drive, Russia’s air force can’t achieve superiority in Ukraine. Maybe because they can barely keep their planes in the air.
The United States and its allies castigated Russia for wasting the UN Security Council’s time with conspiracy theories about American biological weapons in Ukraine. “How much more of this nonsense do we have to endure?” Britain’s UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward asked.
Russia is helping Iran “master” nuclear technology, says Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podolyak. “Zelensky has certain information from Ukrainian intelligence that clearly indicate Russia’s ties to Iran, specifically on the issue of nuclear cooperation,” Podoloyak said. “We understand this is not nuclear for peaceful purposes, and Russia is hardly hiding that it helps Iran master the technology of nuclear weapons.”
The diplomatic nuclear option: If Russia uses a nuclear weapon, we must reconstitute the United Nations without a Russian veto.
The war has further divided Russia’s fragmented society:
There is denial: “Russians cannot be aggressors,” “war crimes are staged,” “the Ukrainians are guilty of everything.” There is despair and disbelief that involve an abdication of responsibility: “Why don’t the Ukrainians just stop? We’re trying to help them!” And there is wishful thinking as a way of coping with denial: “China will reboot the consumer sector (they’ll retool Volkswagen in Kaluga by the spring),” “we will be fine with parallel imports via Kazakhstan,” “energy shortages will soon bring discord to Europe,” “Biden will die.” The people repeating these ideas find it painful to be disabused.
🦇 A host at RT was suspended for saying that any Ukrainian child who has the temerity to say that Russia is an occupier should be drowned or burned. Interesting: There does seem to be something too shameless for them to say.
🇺🇦 UKRAINE
Ukraine is advancing in Kherson:
Ukraine needs more guns, shells, and firepower. Ukraine is pushing the United States to send artillery-launched mines and short-range air defenses that can intercept Iranian drones as ammunition supplies from the West dwindle.
How Western experts got the Ukraine war so wrong:
Western experts got the Russian military and Ukrainian resilience wrong because of the way post-communist studies is structured in universities and think tanks. Western experts continue to believe they are experts on both Russia and the remainder of the USSR. In no other region of the world is this the case. … Russian experts and scholars have therefore tended to look at Ukraine through the eyes of Moscow. Western media outlets and companies were nearly always headquartered in Moscow—as in the USSR—and their journalists and employees rarely traveled to Ukraine.
Russian cash can keep Ukraine alive this winter:
In cooperation with its G-7 allies, the US should begin the process under the international law of transferring the more than US$300 billion in frozen Russian reserves to Ukraine and other afflicted countries as compensation for Mr. Putin’s aggression. …
The US should also propose to the UN that frozen Russian reserves could finance a UN claims commission to compensate low-income countries victimized by Russia’s shock to food supplies.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the Pentagon had no evidence that Ukraine or Russia has any intention of detonating a dirty bomb.
The Ukraine war and the new global liberal order:
Will the Russian invasion ultimately strengthen or weaken America and its allies? To answer this question, we should distinguish between the international and domestic sources of liberal order. Internationally, the war has glued together the US-led system of alliances and institutions. At the domestic American level, however, the glue has been much less evenly applied. The Russian threat is too distant and ambiguous to overcome deep-seated polarization in the United States or convince populist conservatives to invest in the liberal order. The Ukraine War has strengthened global order, but these gains remain vulnerable, and the weak spot lies within America.
Intercepted Calls, August 29 to September 4, from War Translated:
MIDDLE EAST
🇮🇷. IRAN
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