11/8/2023 0 Comments Julia ioffeand NATO also need to react by increasing readiness levels and deploying appropriately. Suspension of trade agreements, bank guarantees, most favored nation status and Russian G-8 and G-20 membership is a minimum starting place, along with the dispatch of EU investigative and monitoring mission to Crimea. and Canada need to respond quickly, strongly and concertedly to the Russian invasion or it will become a fiat accompli. That is because he does not have total, unfettered freedom to follow a course of action that will hurt concentrated Russian economic interests – i.e., “oligarchs” (taken as a group, as Putin is more than capable of taking on and destroying an individual oligarch) – or to create domestic shortages or privation to the extent that will bring masses of ordinary Russians into the street. The kind of pressure most likely to have any impact on Putin is economic pressure. There are not a lot of good options out there: a good option being one that does not end up with a war in Europe with two or more countries possessing nuclear weapons. This is true diplomatically, militarily and economically. There is no organized opposition to his government inside Russia (because it has been suppressed) and western options to respond are limited by to-date ineffective coordination among Europe and the U.S. However, Ioffe’s observation that Putin (a close equivalent to past Russian Tsars – closer in his personal power, in fact, than were General Secretaries of the Communist Party in the former USSR) invaded Ukraine and earlier invaded Georgia “because he can” is very probably true. I’m not a believer in the theory that Russia will always be the “evil empire” or that there is something in the Russian character that demands that the country always be ruled by a Tsar: an absolute monarch with near absolute power. And it will gather whatever spurious reasons it needs to insulate itself territorially from what it still perceives to be a large and growing NATO threat.”In predicting Russian actions, Ioffe adds, “Pessimism always wins.” Why else would a citizen of the U.S.In a recent article (Putin’s War in Crimea Could Soon Spread to Eastern Ukraine, New Republic, March 1, 2014), Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe suggests that Moscow’s invasion of Ukrainian Crimea was an action we should have anticipated, following Victor Yanukovich’s flight from Kyiv, because “Russia was, is, and will be an empire with an eternal appetite for expansion. clearly decided to make use of the visit to sew together their false charges of spying. I’ve been there, as have many others, but now, with the war going on, the F.S.B. On top of that-and this is in no way to fault him for doing his job the arrest is clearly unjustified and horrendous-it seems Gershkovih went to Nizhny Tagil, a famous factory town where Russian tanks are made. In fact, shortly after news broke of Gershkovich’s arrest, Prigozhin commented that he didn’t know where Gershkovich was but that he would happily search for him in Wagner’s torture chambers and some “fresh graves.” Now, despite the fact that Wagner has come out into the open, it seems the danger of reporting on them has not abated. Even before the war, covering Wagner was a uniquely dangerous proposition in Russia: it was a shadowy organization that Prigozhin religiously lied about owning. For one thing, he was out in the Russian provinces, reporting on Wagner, the private military company run by the cartoonishly cruel Evgeny Prigozhin, who has been connected to the deaths and poisonings of several Russian journalists. There is something uniquely stomach-turning about Gershkovich’s arrest, and many aspects of it stick out to me. The charges carry up to 20 years in a penal colony, which is especially horrifying in this case: Gershkovich is quite young, just 31 years old. He was then transported to Moscow, where, in a closed court proceeding, he was charged with espionage and remanded to the notorious Lefortovo prison for the next two months. walked into a cafe where Gershkovich was sitting, arrested him, and led him out with his jacket over his head. citizen, was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. This morning, news broke that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, a U.S.
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