BTW in case you’re wondering what Russians are saying about the Bucha massacre, the Russian Foreign Ministry denies that Russians or the Russian military had anything to do with the massacre of civilians there. They’re pointing the finger at the Ukraine security forces. I’ve also read some claims that “irregulars”, civilian separatists from Donbas, were responsible.

At this point I think the greatest likelihood is that the Russian military was responsible for the murders of civilians in Bucha but I don’t honestly know and, since the Russians have already been found guilty in the media, I doubt we’ll ever really know for sure.

Update

I’m not alone. Reuters reports that the Pentagon can’t confirm it either. I don’t know if it’s true; I don’t know if it’s false. The assumption is that it’s true but it’s just an assumption at this point.

If your sole information source is the American or British media, you may believe that the Russian people will rise up to overthrow Putin, that Putin’s days as Russia’s leader are numbered, and that there is no way he will remain in power. As this piece at Politico by Mark Lawrence Schrad should make clear, it ain’t necessarily so:

Western hopes that the Russian people would rise up and topple Putin in a popular revolution seem further from reality today than at the start of the war. The smattering of protests across Russia during the first weeks of the war have largely fizzled out. Between the Kremlin propaganda machine in overdrive and criminalization of expressions of opposition, Putin’s approval in nationwide polls is now up to 83 percent, with 81 percent support for the “special military operation.”

What’s more, Russian elites appear to be consolidating behind Putin. Rather than diversifying internationally and finding safe havens abroad, powerful oligarchs and cosmopolitan elites—many of them under Western sanctions—now understand that they are tethered to Russia and to Putin personally. Once-feuding factions are realizing they’re all now in the same boat. Few will bolt for greener pastures in Europe or the U.S., even if they could.

In an eye-opening account by independent Russian journalist Farida Rustamova on the tribulations of Russia’s political elites since the war, she quotes a high-ranking source in a sanctioned Russian company as saying “All these personal sanctions cement the elites. Everyone who was thinking about a new life understands that, for the next 10-15 years at least, their lives are concentrated in Russia, their children will study in Russia, their families will live in Russia. These people feel offended. They will not overthrow anyone, but will build their lives here.”

Before the war, the dominant narrative of Kremlin-controlled media was that Russia is a mighty superpower—besieged on all sides by enemies and conspirators, both Western and homegrown—and only Putin could lead them. Lamentably, the coordinated international response to Putin’s bloody war has only solidified and reinforced that us-against-the-world narrative, and largely rallied the Russian people behind Putin.

He also does a good job of explaining something I have mentioned here many times: 21st century isn’t the Soviet Union, isn’t a personalist monarchy like the Russian Empire, and it isn’t a totalitarian dictatorship. Putin is in power because he is doing thing that are supported by the Russian people. Maybe they’re victims of Kremlin propaganda but I don’t think it’s that simple.

So, if you’re longing for a new, liberal democratic Russia to rise from the ashes of the Putin regime, dream on. That is not going to happen.

Please don’t construe this post as supportive of Putin or the Russians in any way. I’m just trying to tell you the honest truth so that when what should have been expected happens it doesn’t come as a surprise.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry over Douglas Schoen’s advice to President Biden at The Hill. His advice boils down to two things:

1. An “all of the above” energy policy.

2. “President Biden needs to tighten his rhetoric and match his tough talk against Russia with corresponding action.”

It reminds me of nothing so much as the old Yiddish proverb: “If my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather.”

He can’t do the first. He’d fracture his own caucus if he did. He’s already risking that by releasing oil from the strategic reserve, something they oppose.

And the best he can do on a Ukraine policy is brinksmanship.

So, what can President Biden to improve his approval rating? Keep doing what he’s doing and hope for the best. That’s pretty bleak advice.

Here’s something that should provide a little food for thought:

All four have Slavic majorities. The Czech language and Slovakian language are closely related West Slavic languages. The Croatian language and Serbian language are closely related South Slavic languages.

The Turks occupied all of Serbia for several hundred years as well as parts of Croatia.

Yugoslavia was never part of the Warsaw Pact. It wasn’t particularly closely aligned with the Soviet Union—it was unaligned if anything.

At DefenseOne Thomas Corbett, Ma Xiu, and Peter W. Singer ask a very good question. What lessons is China taking from the Ukraine War? Unfortunately, the answers they provide aren’t particularly satisfying:

Yet, despite the reorganization of the PLA and widespread prosecution of corruption cases, it still appears to be a major issue. Anti-corruption efforts are ongoing, with Chinese Gen. Zhang Youxia recently calling for innovative measures to keep up the fight. But the fact that Fu Zhenghua, the man brought in to take down the corrupt former security chief Zhou Yongkang, is himself now under investigation for corruption does not bode well for the long-term effectiveness of China’s efforts. The troubled invasion of Ukraine provides a stark real-world example to Xi, the CCP, and PLA about the impact corruption can have on military effectiveness, and will no doubt cause them to redouble their anti-corruption efforts with a newfound urgency. However given its similar authoritarian system and emphasis on career advancement through patronage, systemic corruption may be baked into the system.

Finally, there is the strategic issue of Beijing’s reaction to the global sanctions that have hit the Russian ruble and economy. The swift and severe economic retaliation of the U.S., EU, and others took Moscow by surprise. Even more unexpected was the rapid withdrawal of almost 500 global corporations, pushed on by an effective effort at naming and shaming them into acting to protect their own brands. A longer-term effort targeting essential elements of Russia’s defense industry will hamstring it for years.

However, I have a different question which I think is equally good. What are the lessons that Taiwan is taking from the Russian invasion of Ukraine? I have no idea but I would certainly like to know the answer.

I’m seeing a flurry of articles and posts questioning some of the assertions underpinning U. S. policy, especially with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They range from panicked realization to laments. One of them is Anne Applebaum’s article in The Atlantic urging democracies to unite to oppose autocracy. It amounts to a longer form of the witticism frequently attributed to Benjamin Franklin but which there is no record of his ever having said: “We must all hang together or we shall all hang separately”:

There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

More pointed is the piece by Shivshankar Menon in Foreign Affairs:

The war is no doubt a seismic event that will have profound consequences for Russia, its immediate neighbors, and the rest of Europe. But it will neither reshape the global order nor presage an ideological showdown of democracies against China and Russia. After all, many of the world’s biggest democracies, including India, have so far not joined the U.S.-led economic campaign against Russia or even explicitly condemned the invasion. Far from consolidating “the free world,” the war has underscored its fundamental incoherence. In any case, the future of global order will be decided not by wars in Europe but by the contest in Asia, on which events in Ukraine have limited bearing.

It isn’t just India, the world’s largest democracy, that isn’t falling in behind the United States in its reaction to Russia’s invasion. Neither is the world’s third largest democracy (Indonesia), the fourth largest (Pakistan), the fifth largest (Brazil), the sixth largest (Nigeria), Bangladesh, or Mexico. So, at the very least the notion that the world’s democracies are united in opposition to Russian aggression is an exaggeration and at worst a fantasy.

I believe that Ms. Applebaum’s article misses some basic things. For one thing consider her example, Estonia. Is Estonia a liberal democracy? On paper, yes it is. However, I suspect that were the United States to move to disenfranchise a third of its citizens, which Estonia has done, Ms. Applebaum would express her outrage. In Estonia half of its ethnic Russian citizens think they are discriminated against and that the Estonian government isn’t doing enough about it. That as well as its political corruption are why the country is frequently considered a “flawed democracy”. My point here is not that Estonia has no right to exist but that it is not quite as liberal as advertised. The world is messy and complicated. The world isn’t “us” vs. “them”. It’s actually “us”, “them”, and those in between.

The even more fundamental misconception in Ms. Applebaum’s article is that there isn’t much of an “us”, either. We didn’t force our European allies to diminish their military spending to the point where their armies are comic opera armies. They did that under their own steam. Presently, the only European military at the highest level of readiness is France and the French military is pretty overcommitted already.

And what makes Ms. Applebaum think that the Russian people are not the enemy, Putin is?

But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too.

The sole independent Russian polling organization has determined that Putin’s approval rating has actually increased since the invasion of Ukraine. What is it that makes her think that President Putin isn’t doing what Russians want him to?

So, what do I think we should do? Our first priority needs to be rebuilding our own military capabilities, reducing our present dependence on China’s goodwill in the process. In the meantime we should keep supplying the Ukrainians but both they and we need to understand that’s where our support ends. So far that’s just the line the Biden Administration has tried to tread, to its credit. Our media are pushing for more, playing on Americans’ emotions with back to back stories of Ukrainians’ victimization.

And support for the Ukrainians has become a valence issue: it’s less whether we support them than how much.

I have one more point to make about President Biden’s budget. I’m not as enthusiastic about a nearly 10% increase in our military spending as the editors of Bloomberg are. IMO the issue is less how much is spent than what the priorities are. I think we need to spend less on our offensive warmaking capabilities and more on actual defense. The purpose of the army is to take and hold territory. In part the purpose of the air force is to support the army. Should the air force be a distinct branch?

Basically, I think we should spend more on our navy, our cyberwarfare capabilities, and revitalizing our nuclear deterrent but less on tanks, artillery, “boots on the ground”, and bombers. Whether that translates into spending more, less, or the same I have no idea.

The editors of Bloomberg are gravely disappointed with President Biden’s budget:

If you meant to discredit the U.S. government’s whole approach to budget planning, you’d struggle to improve on the proposal announced this week by President Joe Biden’s administration. Admittedly, these plans rarely tell the public much about what’s likely to happen. But the 2023 budget goes one better: It says next to nothing about what the administration would even like to happen.

Their haruspices have examined its entrails, however, and divined some clues:

Even so, the material can be mined for specks of information. For instance, since the budget assumes that Build Back Better, if it ever happens, will be revenue-neutral, its projections for public borrowing and debt reveal what the administration thinks about fiscal control. The good news is that the plan’s projected deficits are lower than in the Office of Management and Budget’s baseline. In that limited sense, Biden was right to say the plan reduces deficits.

Yet it doesn’t reduce them by much — the average deficit over the next 10 years is still projected to be 4.7% of gross domestic product. Public debt would continue to rise, from 102% of GDP this year to 107% in 2032. In effect, the administration wants to make the massive increase in public debt due to the pandemic permanent. That would be imprudent even if the recent fiscal emergency were sure to be the last — and, needless to say, it won’t be. A responsible budget would instead focus on getting borrowing firmly under control over the next decade.

Some of the plan’s specifics — policies not subsumed in the invisible “reserve” — are also revealing. Most notably, the budget calls for a 9.8% increase in defense spending. In light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a higher priority for national security certainly makes sense. The proposal also envisions higher spending on policing, gun-control measures and other anti-crime initiatives. Most voters would welcome such outlays.

Such tax increases as are planned would be levied on the usual suspects: corporations and the “very rich”. As anyone who has studied the history of U. S. tax policy could tell you, sometimes only if pressed, raising marginal rates is one thing, the easy part; deriving additional revenue from the increased marginal rates is something else again. The “very rich” are different from you and me and can reorganize their holdings to avoid taxation. And that’s if the increases pass legal muster which is not assured.

They conclude:

In short, this proposal — like the budget as a whole — just isn’t happening. That was to be expected. What’s more disappointing is the administration’s continuing failure to wrestle with the implications of its spending ambitions. It’s still working on the assumption that an enormous expansion of government spending can be financed entirely with tax increases on corporations and the very rich. The arithmetic, and the realities of tax enforcement, say otherwise.

As usual I sympathize with the Biden Adminsitration, not in its goals but in its predicament. The Democratic congressional margin is razor-thin and Republicans are providing a pretty unified front against them. They need to placate their entire caucus which is, frankly, impossible. The caucus is at cross-purposes and, as has been documented here in the past, the progressive wing of the party is farther removed from rank-and-file Democrats let alone independents than its moderates. And matters following the midterms are likely to be worse. So they’re putting down a marker. It’s the wrong marker but why the heck not? Amiright or amiright?

After a lengthy exquisition on the likelihood of Russia’s war in Ukraine being long and bloody:

The last time I was in Kyiv, in early September last year, I made a bet with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. My wager was that “by the end this decade, Dec. 31, 2029, a conventional or nuclear war will claim at least a million lives.” I fervently hope I lose the bet. But mine was and is not an irrational angst. As I sat in Kyiv, pondering Vladimir Putin’s likely intentions and Ukraine’s vulnerability, I could see war coming. And war in Ukraine has a track record of being very bloody indeed.

which could be summarized as “war doesn’t obey the persistence theory”, Niall Ferguson updates the answers to some questions he asked about the war in a piece at Bloomerberg. They are:

1. Do the Russians manage to take Kyiv and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a matter of two, three or four weeks or never? He says “never”.
2. Do the sanctions precipitate such a severe economic contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory? He says “not yet”.
3. Does the combination of military and economic crisis precipitate a palace coup against Putin? He says that is the explicit intention of the Biden Administration.
4. Does the risk of downfall lead Putin to desperate measures (e.g., carrying out his nuclear threat)? He suggests it is pretty likely.
5. Do the Chinese keep Putin afloat but on condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker? He says that China will not act as a peace broker but will continue to support Russia.
6. Does our attention deficit disorder kick in before any of this? Did you know that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars?
7. What is the collateral damage? Certainly increased prices for oil and fertilizer, possibly stagflation.

I don’t think he comes close to outlining a worst case scenario. His bet is not it. Think 1,000 times that and the collapse of one or more great power governments with the attendant chaos.