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Princeton houses a large digital collection of posters from Russia and Eastern Europe, almost 5000 total item spanning 101 years (1904-2004). This album on Flickr contains nearly 1500 Russian & Soviet posters from 1917-1991 — not sure how much overlap there is between the two.
Timur Fatkullin is a Ukrainian flying ace who uses his acrobatic flying skills honed before the war to shoot down Russian drones.
When I fly close to the target, I can’t engage because there’s houses or infrastructure underneath. So we keep flying, keeping it in the searchlight, in the spotlight. And we’re not even, because it’s like 200 kilos target and we’re six tons, and it’s black Shahed in the black night. But from my aerobatics, I brought formation flying. You have to be professional, you have to be confident, practice a lot, anticipate a lot, and trust completely each other. There’s no other way. So these skills help enormously, and with this aircraft, we can stay in the air up to 4.5 hours. It’s my devotion, not just to my country, but to aviation. That’s the truth.
As you can see in this video from the NY Times, planes like these shoot the drones down using low-fi techniques: with machine guns mounted in the planes’ doorways.
One of the drone-hunting pilots, who are civilian volunteers: “Standing aside and doing nothing is impossible. For our team, it’s impossible.”
And from a different perspective, here’s a WSJ video profile of a Ukrainian drone pilot:
Here’s a straightforward description of Trump’s “ambush” of Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Heather Cox Richardson:
Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office — his attendance at such an event was unusual — in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.
In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.
Unlike many media outlets reporting on this, Richardson ties this into a previous attempt by Trump to negotiate with Zelenskyy, which ended in Trump’s first impeachment:
Zelensky came across Trump’s radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden’s father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion.
Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump’s phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff led the House’s impeachment team.
Talking Points Memo similarly did not mince words: Trump And Vance Ambush Zelensky In Prelude To Betrayal.
President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance moved to betray a key U.S. ally that has lost hundreds of thousands of people in fending off a Russian invasion on Friday, taunting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at an Oval Office meeting after spending weeks trying to undermine the bilateral relationship.
The Oval Office blowup, in which Trump and Vance berated Zelensky as ungrateful while dismissing the prospect that Russian President Vladimir Putin might renege on a potential ceasefire agreement, is a culmination in a weeks-long campaign to choreograph an end to U.S. support for Ukraine.
It occurs to me after reading about the meeting that Trump’s actions here are partially motivated by a desire for personal retribution against Zelenskyy for not helping him smear Biden in 2019. Zelenskyy told Trump no and Trump wants revenge — and he’s gonna turn his back on Ukraine and Europe to get it.
Trump just kicked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House after berating him for being “disrespectful” in the Oval Office.
The astonishing turn of events could scramble international affairs in Europe and around the globe. During his visit with Trump, Zelenskyy had planned to sign the deal allowing the U.S. greater access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, then hold a joint news conference.
Instead, Ukraine’s leader left the White House shortly after Trump shouted at him, showing open disdain. Untouched salad plates and other lunch items were being packed up outside the Cabinet room, where the lunch between Trump and Zelenskyy and their delegations was supposed to have taken place.
The White House said the Ukraine delegation was told to leave.
“You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have,” Trump told Zelenskky.
My god, Trump and Vance are just total fucking assholes. The US is openly aligning themselves with Russia against Ukraine and Europe, a major shift in international relations that dates back to the 1940s. I am so embarrassed to be an American right now.
Update: The NY Times has some key excerpts from the meeting in the White House.
Vance: And do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
Zelensky: A lot of questions. Let’s start from the beginning.
Vance: Sure.
Zelensky: First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future.
Trump: You don’t know that.
Zelensky: God bless, you will not have a war.
Trump: Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.
Zelensky: I’m not telling you.
Trump: Because you’re in no position to dictate that. Remember this: You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel. We’re going to feel very good.
Zelenskyy’s English is obviously not super strong but Trump sounds like a 4-year-old in full “you’re not the boss of me” mode here. So glad he has control of America’s armed forces and nuclear arsenal!
Writing from Ukraine on his way to the front in the country’s war with Russia, Timothy Snyder muses about the differences in life & freedom on the Ukrainian & Russian sides of the war’s front line.
Yet, on this, the Ukrainian side of the line, people lead completely different lives than under Russian occupation or in Russia. Ukrainians say what they want, including about the war and about politics. Journalists cover the war and write about politics. There is fear, although less than you might think; but it is fear of bombs and missiles and violence from Russia, not of denunciations or oppression or of one’s own government. I have the strange feeling, this week in Kyiv, that Ukrainians are living freer lives now than Americans. At a book store where I was talking to a Ukrainian philosopher about freedom, a young woman put her hand on my arm and said “sorry about the U.S.”
Snyder then goes on to wonder if the United States is now headed towards a similar line:
I have in mind something deeper: the transformation of our public and private lives. As in Russia, we have let local newspapers and local media die. As in Russia, their place was taken by a few commercial operations. As in Russia, the media are owned by oligarchs, who then become close to government or submit to it (not all of the media in America, of course, are submitting, but far too many are). As in Russia, our daily lives are flooded by such a rushing river of contradictory lies that we have trouble knowing where we are, let alone what we should do. As in Russia, a president supported by oligarchs and their media power is trying to humiliate the other branches of government. The executive is seeking to marginalize the legislature — forever — by ruling without passing laws. The executive is seeking to marginalize the judiciary — forever — by ignoring court rulings. Those things, of course, have already happened in Russia.
This passage made my stomach drop:
As I close my tablet and go to sleep, I am safer than every single one of you reading this in the United States, and indeed safer than I would be in the United States. My train will stop in five hours. But America will keep hurtling.
It’s a great, provocative piece; read the whole thing.
In a piece called The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump, Russian exile M. Gessen outlines the five different types of arguments used by people & institutions when they engage in “anticipatory obedience” (aka, obeying in advance). For example:
The second argument is the higher-purpose argument, which is a close cousin of collective hostage-taking. In 2012, during the winter when more than 150,000 Russians protested against rigged elections and Putin’s intention to assume the presidency for a third term, a popular actress, Chulpan Khamatova, broke ranks with the liberal intelligentsia and came out in support of Putin. Khamatova had co-founded an organization that helped children with cancer. She faced some criticism but said, “If it meant that another hospital was built, I would do the same thing again.” Her dignity was, after all, a small price to pay for saving children’s lives.
I suspect that some American hospital administrators who are discontinuing trans care for young people are using similar logic: To serve their patients, they must protect their federal funding — even if this means that they stop serving another group of patients.
The New Yorker has some excerpts of Alexei Navalny’s diary from the last 2 years of his life, taken from his forthcoming memoir, Patriot.
2022, January 17th.
Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.
I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.
The hero of one of my favorite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.
There are a lot of honest people in Russia-tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.
The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.
There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.
In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?
The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.
Two years later, Navalny was dead, murdered by Russia’s leader, dictator Vladimir Putin. I do not think it is hyperbole to read Navalny’s words as a warning, a harbinger of what happens to a country and its people when they come under undemocratic leadership.
Queendom is a documentary film by Agniia Galdanova about queer Russian activist and performance artist Jenna Marvin and her unusual form of protest against the war in Ukraine and Russia’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people. From a short review in the Guardian:
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, some brave souls took to the streets of Moscow to voice their horror at the war, and were met with batons and police brutality. Radical queer performance artist Gena Marvin took a different approach. Wearing platform boots, body paint and wrapped in barbed wire, she walked the streets of Moscow in a stark, silent statement against the war. To call Gena a drag artist fails to capture just how subversive and courageous are her public “performances”. Her otherworldly costumes, created from junk and tape, show the influence of Leigh Bowery; her fearlessness evokes the punk provocation of Pussy Riot.
Marvin’s performances can be intense — check out this video from Paris in 2022. France had just advanced into the semifinals of the World Cup and she went out on the streets dressed in an all-black costume straight out of Alien or Pan’s Labyrinth:
Queendom opens in theaters and will available on streaming on June 14.
In an uncompromising TED Talk from a few days ago, Garry Kasparov warns we must confront “true evil” in the world when we see it, in this case Vladimir Putin and his regime.
Actually, my first article of warning was published in “The Wall Street Journal” on January 4, 2001. I saw evil because I heard evil. Putin was telling us what he was. All we had to do was listen. When Putin said that there was no such thing as a former KGB agent, I knew Russia’s fragile democracy was in danger. When Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, I knew Russia’s newly independent neighbors were at risk. And when Putin talked at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 about a return to spheres of influence, I knew he was ready to launch his plan. It was the language from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939. The language Hitler and Stalin used to divide Europe. And a year later, in 2008, Putin invaded the Republic of Georgia. 2014, Ukraine.
It’s a paradox, isn’t it? Dictators lie about everything they have done, but often they tell us exactly what they’re going to do. Just listen. Anyone who is surprised at Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine must not be aware about his long record, beginning with the Second Chechen War in Grozny more than two decades ago. Vladimir Putin has been a war criminal from the start.
When he was talking about the problem with compromising with authoritarians, I was reminded of a phrase I’ve heard in a couple of different contexts recently: meeting a racist halfway on their views is still racism; meeting a fascist halfway on their views is still fascism. As Rebecca Solnit put it in an article about the 2020 election: “Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?” Meeting a brutal authoritarian halfway, Kasparov is arguing, is still tyranny.
Building on the lessons of World War II, Ukrainians are trying to save their art and other important cultural artifacts from destruction during Russia’s invasion. When an invader repeatedly tries to deny the cultural distinction of a people for decades and even centuries, like Russia has done with Ukraine, saving buildings and statues and paintings can be of great importance.
Because under the 1954 convention, “damage to cultural property means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind”. So attacks on cultural heritage are a considered war crime. But treaties can only do so much. In the years since, conflicts around the world have rendered immeasurable damage to cultural heritage. A lot of it intentional. Like the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan buddhas. And Isis’ attacks on ancient sites all over Syria.
“That cultural heritage is not only impacted, but in many ways it’s implicated and central to armed conflict. These are things that people point to that are unifying factors for their society. They are tangible reflections of their identity.”
And Putin has made it clear that identity is at the ideological center of Russia’s invasion: “I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.”
“He thinks that we don’t really exist and they want to destroy all the signs of our identity.”
BTW, regarding the destruction of the museum that housed works by Maria Prymachenko at the start of the video: according to the Ukrainian Institute, the works were saved from burning by local residents.
In the early 1930s, desiring the bountiful wheat harvests of its farmlands to sell to Europe and wanting to subjugate its people, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin carried out a genocide in Ukraine that killed millions and hid it behind the guise of food shortages. It’s known as the Holodomor.
In Ukraine, it’s become known as “the Holodomor,” meaning “death by starvation.” It was a genocide carried out by a dictator who wanted to keep Ukraine under his control and who would do anything to keep it covered up for decades.
In the 1930s, Soviet leaders under Joseph Stalin engineered a famine that killed millions as they sought to consolidate agricultural power. In Ukraine, they used additional force as they sought to clamp down on a burgeoning Ukrainian national identity. There, at least 4 million died. As hunger spread among residents, Stalin spearheaded a disinformation campaign to hide the truth from other Soviet citizens and the world. So many Ukrainians died that officials had to send people to resettle the area, setting off demographic shifts that last to this day.
The details of the atrocities committed against the people of Bucha, Ukraine by Russian soldiers are more horrifying than language has words for. Luke Mogelson and photographer James Nachtwey are reporting for the New Yorker from Bucha as loved ones and volunteers try to make sense of the destruction. Note: the descriptions and photos in this piece may be disturbing (but IMO, we cannot turn away from this). This is one of the tamer paragraphs:
On the far side of a stretch of railroad tracks, two elderly women had been killed in their house. One lay in the doorway, another in the kitchen. Both were bundled in heavy winter coats. Neighbors said that they had been sisters, both in their seventies. Their small house was filled with hardcover books, and they did not own a television; it was impossible not to imagine their quiet, literary life together before it was annihilated. In the only bedroom, two narrow mattresses were pushed together and covered by a single blanket.
Update: From the NY Times, Bucha’s Month of Terror.
As the Russian advance on Kyiv stalled in the face of fierce resistance, civilians said, the enemy occupation of Bucha slid into a campaign of terror and revenge. When a defeated and demoralized Russian Army finally retreated, it left behind a grim tableau: bodies of dead civilians strewn on streets, in basements or in backyards, many with gunshot wounds to their heads, some with their hands tied behind their backs.
This is really good: Arnold Schwarzenegger recorded a message, subtitled in both English and Russian, directed at the Russian people (and briefly, Vladimir Putin) about the war in Ukraine. It’s a canny piece of media by an exceptional communicator — drawing on his obvious respect for the people of Russia and his father’s experience as a German soldier in World War II, Schwarzenegger tells Russian citizens that they’ve been lied to about the war by their leadership, that most of the world is against their actions, and warns them about the consequences of being economically and socially isolated from the rest of the world.
This is not the war to defend Russia that your grandfather or your great grandfathers fought. This is an illegal war! Your lives, your limbs, your futures are being sacrificed for a senseless war condemned by the entire world.
After Russia invaded the country, Ukraine’s post office (Ukrposhta) decided to hold a contest to design a stamp that illustrated “Ukrainians’ determination to defend their land”. Out of 500 submissions, Ukrposhta chose 20 designs as the finalists.
(Paweł Jońca’s illustration would also have made an amazing stamp.) Many of the finalists, including the winning entry (middle stamp above), reference the Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island who told a Russian warship “Go fuck yourself”. Ukrposhta is now working on getting the winning stamp printed so that people can use it for postage — because, perhaps unbelievably, the post office continues to deliver the mail & packages throughout much of the country. (thx, @jackisnotabird)
The other day I shared a video and article by Oliver Bullough on how the UK enables Russia’s oligarchs to launder their money: Putin’s Oligarchs and the London Laundromat. Writer and researcher Casey Michel, author of American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History, is here to tell us that the US and EU countries are also guilty here. In a piece for The Atlantic, Michel argues that the present sanctions against Russia would be much more effective if the West were willing to address the use of anonymous shell companies and trusts to launder funds.
The Western response has been far broader than most experts anticipated, and threatens to throw the Russian economy into chaos. Yet there’s a catch. Absent significant domestic reforms in the West — reforms that should have been enacted long ago — sanctions targeted at the oligarchic and official figures close to Russian President Vladmir Putin risk inflicting little more than a flesh wound on Russia’s imperial kleptocracy.
Rampant financial anonymity in places like the U.S. makes it relatively easy for powerful rich people to evade sanctions. A Russian oligarch may have multimillion-dollar mansions in Washington, D.C.; or multiple steel plants across the Rust Belt; or a controlling stake in a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut; or an entire fleet of private jets in California; or an array of lawyers setting up purchases at art houses around the country. And all of that wealth can be hidden-perfectly legally-behind anonymous shell companies and trusts that are enormously difficult to penetrate.
If Western policy makers hope to hold Putin’s cronies truly accountable, sanctions will have to be paired with pro-transparency reforms that can disassemble this web of secrecy. Western governments should start by ending anonymity in shell companies and trusts; demanding basic anti-money-laundering checks for lawyers, art gallerists, and auction-house managers; and closing loopholes that allow anonymity in the real-estate, private-equity, and hedge-fund industries. That is, if the sanctions are to retain their bite, the entire counter-kleptocracy playbook needs to be implemented-immediately.
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