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Educational Responses to the events in Ukraine

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Educational Responses to the events in Ukraine

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Teachers working directly with students in Ukraine and in areas in Europe welcoming refugees can benefit from accessible, relevant and conscientious testimony-based resources to help their students process and cope with their realities. The stories of survivors and witnesses are relatable and foster empathetic thinking. This page has been developed to support educators.

https://iwitness.usc.edu/sites/warinukraine

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IWitness | IWitness - Education through Genocide Testimony

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IWitness brings educators and their students together at the intersection of genocide studies, diversity and inclusion education, and the development of critical literacies needed in the 21st century.

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https://twitter.com/ArbiterOfTweets/status/1545651614253555712?t=cahp479mRynlJyU_iDf08g&s=19

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Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine?

So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.

@Lotte_Lambrecht and I found out who's _actually_ in this photo. Follow along!

1/

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Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine?

So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.

@Lotte_Lambrecht and I found out who's _actually_ in this photo. Follow along!

1/ https://t.co/JimbNj1B0A

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Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine?

So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.@Lotte_Lambrecht and I found out who's _actually_ in this photo. Follow along!

1/ pic.twitter.com/JimbNj1B0A
— Rien Emmery (@ArbiterOfTweets) July 9, 2022

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Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine?

So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.

@Lotte_Lambrecht and I found out who's _actually_ in this photo. Follow along!

1/ https://t.co/JimbNj1B0A

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine?

So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.

@Lotte_Lambrecht and I found out who's _actually_ in this photo. Follow along!

1/ https://t.co/JimbNj1B0A

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine?

So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.

@Lotte_Lambrecht and I found out who's _actually_ in this photo. Follow along!

1/

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/28/jockii-druce-ukrainian-rapper-leads-youth-rejection-of-russian-culture?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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‘Standing on your own’: Ukrainian rapper on connecting with his country’s culture

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Jockii Druce, 22, gives voice to young people reflecting on Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and its colonial legacy

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Ukraine/Russia: the ghosts of history podcast (in French)

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Ukraine/Russia: the ghosts of history podcast (in French)

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https://soundcloud.com/user-897145586/sets/ukraine-russie-les-spectres-de

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Ukraine/Russie. Les spectres de l’Histoire

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Le 24 février 2022, la Russie a déclenché une guerre d’invasion de l’Ukraine. Entre saturation médiatique et oblitérations diplomatiques, mémoires douloureuses et commémorations officielles, instrumen

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Snyder argues Habermas is wrong about Ukraine

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Snyder argues Habermas is wrong about Ukraine

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https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/juergen-habermas-and-ukraine-germans-have-been-involved-in-the-war-18131718.html?GEPC=s3

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/02/world/europe/ukraine-nazis-russia-media.html?fbclid=IwAR3Fjdl9WY9G3OjiDfFNt78O6DvyOBtk4L4sBesEkz_5znZy6ijeYos1t_Q

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How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis (Published 2022)

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An analysis of nearly eight million articles about Ukraine from Russian websites shows that references to Nazism have spiked to unprecedented levels during the war.

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Visual sources to use in your classroom - Centropa in Ukraine

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Visual sources to use in your classroom - Centropa in Ukraine

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https://ukrainianstories.centropa.org/

The results of two decades in Ukraine of interviewing 264 Holocaust survivors, digitizing 2,944 of their old family photographs, curating traveling exhibitions, producing multimedia films and holding teachers’ seminars and student competitions.

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Tbonz Foundation

The Klaff Family Foundation

The Kronhill-Pletka Foundation

Maureen Carter, The Holocaust Center for Humanity, Darrell Friedman and Felice Shapiro, Stephen S Ploscow and Wendie S Ploscowe, Brittany Morefield Brown, Tobin Herringshaw, Anetta Migdal, Erica Lehrer, Susan Whitmore, Ashley Serotta, Tina Lanciati, Marla R Osborn, Christian Hermann, Jill Quigley, Amy Lederman, Karen Donsbach, Ilene Packman-Alon, Thomas Cochran, Howard Rieger, Julia Harris-Smith, Larry & SueEllen Kadis, Julia Harris-Smith, Richard Friedman, Wendy Wright, Nomi Morris, Alan Götz, John Fishel, Betsy and Richard Sheerr, Jacquelyn Saber, David Castillo, Debby and Ken Miller, Raquel Flatow Haas and Michael Haas, Margery Simkin, Harry and Carol Saal,

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The results of two decades in Ukraine of interviewing 264 Holocaust survivors, digitizing 2,944 of their old family photographs, curating traveling exhibitions, producing multimedia films and holding teachers' seminars and student competitions.

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/27/ukraine-russia-looting-museums?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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As Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, the director of the Museum of Local History in Melitopol in the south-east of the country, Leila Ibrahimova, arranged for a hoard of gold artefacts from ancient Scythia to be hidden. Just a few weeks later, she was kidnapped and interrogated by Russian troops. They demanded to know where the Scythian gold was; she refused to cooperate. Subsequently the museum's curator Galina Andriivna Kucher was taken at gunpoint to the museum and asked to show a Russian "expert" and agents where the gold was. She also refused to locate the collection. Kucher was later abducted from her home on 30 April and her whereabouts remains unknown.

According to a report on the theft in the New York Times, Russian troops eventually found the gold hoard, which dates back to the fourth century BC, boxed up in the museum's basement. The items were taken to Donetsk, in the Russian-controlled Donbas region, for "safety", with the museum's newly installed puppet director, Evgeny Gorlachev, stating that the gold artefacts were not just for Ukrainians but "of great cultural value for the entire former Soviet Union". His carefully chosen words were designed to erase the collection's Ukrainian heritage and replace it with a Soviet one, one that suggested Ukraine was back within Russia's sphere of influence and control.

A hall in the museum of Arkhip Kuindzhi, a Russian artist, destroyed after shelling by Russian-backed separatists in Mariupol. Photograph: AP

To date, Russian forces have caused the destruction or severe damage of 250 museums and institutions in Ukraine. Twenty-five paintings by Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko were incinerated after the Museum of Local History in Ivankiv was hit by a missile. The Arkhip Kuindzhi museum in the besieged city of Mariupol was badly damaged by an airstrike that left paintings exposed to the elements, hanging on walls amid piles of rubble. The Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab, run by the Virginia Museum of Natural History in association with the Smithsonian, has already logged more than 110 memorials destroyed by Russian weapons. But as well as destroying museums and galleries, Russian troops are accused of having stolen an estimated 2,000 artworks. In addition to the theft of the Scythian gold in Melitopol, in Mariupol a handwritten Torah scroll and a valuable gospel printed in Venice in 1811 were all have been taken.

Putin sees the Scythian gold as central to Ukraine's cultural identity - that is why he wants to claim it for Russia

Autocratic leaders seizing art as a means to rewriting a nation's cultural history and advance their interests is nothing new: in 1937, Hitler confiscated 17,000 works of art from more than 100 German museums in less than a month. Some were shown in his Degenerate Art exhibition but many were destroyed or "lost". Napoleon had cartloads of masterpieces shipped to Paris from all over Europe: the classical sculptures Apollo Belvedere and Laocoön from Italy; Rubens's The Descent from the Cross from Belgium. But these latest thefts are in keeping with Putin's attempts to erase Ukraine's independent history and promote his own expansionist model of a new Russian empire.

It is clear that Putin sees the Scythian gold as particularly central to Ukraine's cultural identity and independence. It is not the first time he has tried to claim it for Russia. In 2014, examples of Scythian gold were on loan to the Allard Pierson museum in Amsterdam. Four of the Ukrainian museums that had issued the loans were in Crimea. As Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, he pressed the Netherlands to send the gold back. A protracted legal battle ensued and only in October 2021 did a judge finally rule that the works categorically belonged to the State Museum Fund of Ukraine and not the Russian-controlled Crimean museums (the works remain in the Dutch museum's stores).

Mariupol's Museum of Local Lore which burned down after a shelling by Russian-backed separatists. Photograph: AP

When the paintings that were forcibly removed from Mariupol are also considered, a clear pattern emerges. These works have been chosen to undermine Ukraine's national identity. Paintings by western European artists have not been targeted, for example. Instead it is the work of Ukrainian-Russian artists that has been stolen. Take 19th-century maritime painter Ivan Aivazovsky. Born in Feodosiya, a Crimean port, he was a leading Romantic artist who painted heavy seas, golden sunsets and storm-tossed ships. The slightly younger Arkhip Kuindzhi, another whose works were taken, was born in Mariupol. His paintings are the calm before Aivazovsky's storm: landscapes of harmonious tranquillity. Both painters worked in regions that are now in modern-day Ukraine and Russia, and both countries claim the artists as their own. Other works stolen are by Tetyana Yablonska (1917-2005), a politically active Ukrainian painter who was born in Smolensk, Russia, and Mykola Hlushchenko (1901-1977), who lived in Donetsk from an early age but was likewise born in Russia. Russia's line of thinking seems to be that if it seizes such paintings by Ukrainian-Russian artists then the contested territory they once called home will follow.

There is hope, however. The resilience Ukraine is showing in the war is mirrored by the country's response to this parallel attack on its culture. At the Venice Biennale, the exhibition This Is Ukraine was crowded with artists, with President Zelenskiy's handwritten slogan "We are defending our freedom" adorning the side of the building. One of the artists involved, Nikita Kadan, created a work from war-damaged metal shards collected from Donbas during the war of 2014 and the current onslaught. He uses his Instagram account to record damage to Ukrainian museums but also to show how the country is protecting its cultural assets, posting photographs of monuments across the country, wrapped in blankets and tape or surrounded by hundreds of sandbags. All Ukrainians are aware that their heritage is under direct attack.

This article was amended on 31 May 2022 to remove a text assertion that a breastplate (pectoral) was the centrepiece of Melitopol's collection. In fact, this item is in the Scythian collection of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, Kyiv, so contrary to a caption was not among objects looted.
Charlotte Mullins is the author of A Little History of Art (Yale, £16.99).

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'Ukraine's heritage under attack': why Russia is looting museums

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2,000 stolen artworks attest to Putin's desire to erase a nation's history - like so many despots before him

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Ukraine removes Russian statues and street names

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Ukraine removes Russian statues and street names

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/28/friends-no-longer-ukraine-removes-russian-statues-and-street-names?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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At 5.36 pm on Tuesday in the historic Kyiv district of Pecherskyi, an imposing Soviet-era bronze monument symbolising the friendship between Russia and Ukraine was accidentally decapitated and then deliberately dismantled to the applause of hundreds of people.

As local officials explained, when one country invades and bombs another, killing its people, their friendship is over.

The 40-year-old statue, depicting a Ukrainian and a Russian worker on a plinth, was pulled down on the order of local authorities in Kyiv. It is one of the first steps of a plan to demolish about 60 monuments and to rename dozens of streets associated with the Soviet Union, Russia and Russian figures, including the writers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, as a result of the war between the two countries.

Serhii Myrhorodskyi, 86, an architect from Kyiv, watched excitedly as the head of the Russian worker accidentally broke off from its body and tumbled to the ground during the removal. He did not appear bothered, despite the fact it was he who had designed the monument, erected in 1982 as a gift from the Soviet regime to the Ukrainian government.

"It is the right thing to do," he told the Guardian. "There is no friendship with Russia and there will not be any friendship for a long time while Putin and his gang are in this world. After they drop dead, maybe in 30 years, something will change.

"The presence of the monument that represents a friendship with Russia is a sin. Removing it is the only right decision. And we could use that bronze of which the monument is made. We could melt it down and sculpt a new monument dedicated to Ukraine the motherland, which would symbolise the unity of all Ukrainian lands."

"As for my emotions," he added, "I am just happy to see that people are glad this whole thing is being taken away."

As the monument began to fall, the crowd chanted: "Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, glory to the nation of Ukraine."

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, who presided over the dismantling, said the removal of Russian symbols from the city was now under way. "You don't kill your brother. You don't rape your sister. You don't destroy your friend's country. That's why, today, we have dismantled this monument, once created as a sign of friendship between Ukraine and Russia," he said.

Other cities in Ukraine have in recent days begun to rename streets associated with Russian figures or to dismantle monuments related to the Soviet Union.

The city of Ternopil, in western Ukraine, has renamed a street dedicated to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and removed a Soviet tank and aircraft. The aircraft is to be replaced with a "heroes of Ukraine" monument.

Fontanka, a village near Odesa, decided to turn a street dedicated to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky into Boris Johnson Street, after the UK promised to send a £100m weapons package to Ukraine.

And the mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov, said streets named after Russian towns would be rededicated to Ukrainian cities and symbols: Abkhazia Street became Irpin, while the street of the 30th Irkutsk Division is now called Ukrainian Soldiers.

Officials in Kyiv are to approve a law to rename 60 streets, meaning Russian writers and Ukrainians who wrote in Russian - or even assumed a Russian identity - are among those who may be written out of public life in the city. A metro station named after Tolstoy is on the list.

"The war changed everything and things have accelerated the times," Alina Mykhailova, one of the two Kyiv city deputies who put forward the law, wrote on Facebook. "Finally, there is an understanding that [our] colonial heritage must be destroyed."

Mykhailova and her colleague Ksenia Semenova campaigned for the removal of the People's Friendship monument that was dismantled on Tuesday. There had been plans to remove the statue under Ukraine's decommunisation laws passed in 2015, but at the time they received pushback from other members of the Kyiv city council, Mykhailova wrote.

The Ukrainian language and Ukrainian national identity were suppressed by tsarist Russia and its Soviet successor. Russian was considered the language of high culture and official business, and many Ukrainians, particularly peasants who moved to the big cities after the second world war, adopted Russian to distance themselves from their rural origins.

Perhaps more controversially, the de-Russification list includes Ukrainian-born writers such as Mikhail - or Mykhailo, in Ukrainian - Bulgakov, who was born in Ukraine, wrote about Kyiv, but had derogatory views about the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian national identity. His statue sits next to his former house on one of Kyiv's most famous streets, which is now the Bulgakov Museum and is popular with tourists.

"Only idiots could do this because Leo Tolstoy is a world-famous writer, not just Russian or Ukrainian," said Ihor Serhiivych, a Kyiv resident, inside Leo Tolstoy Square metro station.

"There are lots of [ethnic] Russians who live in Kyiv and they are probably doing more right now to protect Ukraine than those western Ukrainians who think of themselves as the elite," Serhiivych said. He said there was a gulf in understanding between those Ukrainians who lived for a significant period under Soviet and tsarist rule and those in western Ukraine who did not.

"If it was a Putin statue I would understand, but you have to differentiate between enemies and world-famous literature."

Another person at the station, Valetyna Hryhoryvycha, said: "I think people need to think about it a bit more. I don't see how they relate to what's happening now. It is part of our history."

Ivan Andreiev, who works near Bulgakov Museum, said: "I'm for the removal of the friendship monument because there can't be friendship between enemies. But I think it's a fake that they're planning on taking down Bulgakov's monument. What Russian or Ukrainian would vote for such a thing? It's just history."

While Ukrainian authorities are working hard to disassemble the Russian monuments in their country, Moscow is doing the opposite in Ukrainian territories it has occupied, restoring statues and symbols of the Soviet era.

Two weeks ago in the seaside town of Henichesk, in the Kherson region, which is occupied by the Russian troops, a familiar figure returned to the main square. A statue of the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, sporting his familiar goatee and moustache, was back on his pedestal, erected by Russian soldiers.

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Friends no longer, Ukraine removes Russian statues and street names

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One village now has a Boris Johnson Street, though some say erasing the likes of Tolstoy is going too far

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https://www.zeit.de/2022/19/waffenlieferung-ukraine-offener-brief-olaf-scholz?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2F

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Sehr geehrter Herr Bundeskanzler,

auf der Maikundgebung in Düsseldorf haben Sie gegen Pfiffe und Protestrufe Ihren Willen bekräftigt, die auch mit Waffenlieferungen zu unterstützen, damit sie sich erfolgreich verteidigen kann. Wir möchten Ihnen auf diesem Weg Beifall für diese klaren Worte zollen und Sie ermutigen, die Entschließung des Bundestags für Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine rasch in die Tat umzusetzen.

Angesichts der Konzentration russischer Truppen im Osten und Süden der Ukraine, der fortgesetzten Bombardierung der Zivilbevölkerung, der systematischen Zerstörung der Infrastruktur, der humanitären Notlage mit mehr als zehn Millionen Flüchtlingen und der wirtschaftlichen Zerrüttung der Ukraine infolge des Krieges zählt jeder Tag. Es bedarf keiner besonderen Militärexpertise, um zu erkennen, dass der Unterschied zwischen "defensiven" und "offensiven" Rüstungsgütern keine Frage des Materials ist: In den Händen der Angegriffenen sind auch Panzer und Haubitzen Defensivwaffen, weil sie der Selbstverteidigung dienen.

Wer einen Verhandlungsfrieden will, der nicht auf die Unterwerfung der Ukraine unter die russischen Forderungen hinausläuft, muss ihre Verteidigungsfähigkeit stärken und die Kriegsfähigkeit maximal schwächen. Das erfordert die kontinuierliche Lieferung von Waffen und Munition, um die militärischen Kräfteverhältnisse zugunsten der Ukraine zu wenden. Und es erfordert die Ausweitung ökonomischer Sanktionen auf den russischen Energiesektor als finanzielle Lebensader des Putin-Regimes.

Es liegt im Interesse Deutschlands, einen Erfolg des russischen Angriffskriegs zu verhindern. Wer die europäische Friedensordnung angreift, das Völkerrecht mit Füßen tritt und massive Kriegsverbrechen begeht, darf nicht als Sieger vom Feld gehen. Putins erklärtes Ziel war und ist die Vernichtung der nationalen Eigenständigkeit der Ukraine. Im ersten Anlauf ist dieser Versuch aufgrund des entschlossenen Widerstands und der Opferbereitschaft der ukrainischen Gesellschaft gescheitert. Auch das jetzt ausgerufene Ziel eines erweiterten russischen Machtbereichs von Charkiw bis Odessa kann nicht hingenommen werden.

Die gewaltsame Verschiebung von Grenzen legt die Axt an die europäische Friedensordnung, an deren Grundlegung Ihre Partei großen Anteil hatte. Sie beruht auf Gewaltverzicht, der gleichen Souveränität aller Staaten und der Anerkennung der Menschenrechte als Grundlage für friedliche Koexistenz und Zusammenarbeit in Europa. Es widerspricht deshalb nicht der Ostpolitik Willy Brandts, die Ukraine heute auch mit Waffen zu unterstützen, um diese Prinzipien zu verteidigen.

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Russlands Angriff auf die Ukraine ist zugleich ein Angriff auf die europäische Sicherheit. Die Forderungen des Kremls für eine Neuordnung Europas, die im Vorfeld der Invasion formuliert wurden, sprechen eine klare Sprache. Wenn Putins bewaffneter Revisionismus in der Ukraine Erfolg hat, wächst die Gefahr, dass der nächste Krieg auf dem Territorium der Nato stattfindet. Und wenn eine Atommacht damit durchkommt, ein Land anzugreifen, das seine Atomwaffen gegen internationale Sicherheitsgarantien abgegeben hat, ist das ein schwerer Schlag gegen die Nichtweiterverbreitung von Atomwaffen.

Was die russische Führung fürchtet, ist nicht die fiktive Bedrohung durch die Nato. Vielmehr fürchtet sie den demokratischen Aufbruch in ihrer Nachbarschaft. Deshalb der Schulterschluss mit Lukaschenko, deshalb der wütende Versuch, den Weg der Ukraine Richtung Demokratie und Europa mit aller Gewalt zu unterbinden. Kein anderes Land musste einen höheren Preis bezahlen, um Teil des demokratischen Europas werden zu können. Die Ukraine verdient deshalb eine verbindliche Beitrittsperspektive zur Europäischen Union.

Die Drohung mit dem Atomkrieg ist Teil der psychologischen Kriegführung Russlands. Dennoch nehmen wir sie nicht auf die leichte Schulter. Jeder Krieg birgt das Risiko einer Eskalation zum Äußersten. Die Gefahr eines Nuklearkrieges ist aber nicht durch Konzessionen an den Kreml zu bannen, die ihn zu weiteren militärischen Abenteuern ermutigen. Würde der Westen von der Lieferung konventioneller Waffen an die Ukraine zurückscheuen und sich damit den russischen Drohungen beugen, würde das den Kreml zu weiteren Aggressionen ermutigen. Der Gefahr einer atomaren Eskalation muss durch glaubwürdige Abschreckung begegnet werden. Das erfordert Entschlossenheit und Geschlossenheit Europas und des Westens statt deutscher Sonderwege.

Es gibt gute Gründe, eine direkte militärische Konfrontation mit Russland zu vermeiden. Das kann und darf aber nicht bedeuten, dass die Verteidigung der Unabhängigkeit und Freiheit der Ukraine nicht unsere Sache sei. Sie ist auch ein Prüfstein, wie ernst es uns mit dem deutschen "Nie wieder" ist. Die deutsche Geschichte gebietet alle Anstrengungen, erneute Vertreibungs- und Vernichtungskriege zu verhindern. Das gilt erst recht gegenüber einem Land, in dem Wehrmacht und SS mit aller Brutalität gewütet haben.

Heute kämpft die Ukraine auch für unsere Sicherheit und die Grundwerte des freien Europas. Deshalb dürfen wir, darf Europa die Ukraine nicht fallen lassen.

Wer diesen offenen Brief unterzeichnen möchte, kann das via change.org tun: http://www.change.org/KanzlerfuerUkraine

Unterzeichnet haben bisher

Stephan Anpalagan
Gerhart Baum
Marieluise Beck
Maxim Biller
Marianne Birthler
Wigald Boning
Prof. Tanja Börzel
Hans Christoph Buch
Mathias Döpfner
Prof. Sabine Döring
Thomas Enders
Fritz Felgentreu
Michel Friedman
Ralf Fücks
Marjana Gaponenko
Eren Güvercin
Rebecca Harms
Wolfgang Ischinger
Olga Kaminer
Wladimir Kaminer
Dmitrij Kapitelman
Daniel Kehlmann
Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff
Gerald Knaus
Gerd Koenen
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk
Remko Leemhuis
Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger
Igor Levit
Sascha Lobo
Wolf Lotter
Ahmad Mansour
Marko Martin
Jagoda Marinić
Prof. Carlo Masala
Markus Meckel
Eva Menasse
Herta Müller
Prof. Armin Nassehi
Ronya Othmann
Ruprecht Polenz
Gerd Poppe
Antje Rávik Strubel
Prof. Hedwig Richter
Prof. Thomas Risse
Prof. Gwendolyn Sasse
Prof. Karl Schlögel
Peter Schneider
Linn Selle
Constanze Stelzenmüller
Funda Tekin
Sebastian Turner
Helene von Bismarck
Marie von den Benken
Marina Weisband
Deniz Yücel
Prof. Michael Zürn

ViSdP: Ralf Fücks, Zentrum Liberale Moderne, Reinhardtstr. 15, 10117 Berlin

auf der Maikundgebung in Düsseldorf haben Sie gegen Pfiffe und Protestrufe Ihren Willen bekräftigt, die auch mit Waffenlieferungen zu unterstützen, damit sie sich erfolgreich verteidigen kann. Wir möchten Ihnen auf diesem Weg Beifall für diese klaren Worte zollen und Sie ermutigen, die Entschließung des Bundestags für Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine rasch in die Tat umzusetzen.

Angesichts der Konzentration russischer Truppen im Osten und Süden der Ukraine, der fortgesetzten Bombardierung der Zivilbevölkerung, der systematischen Zerstörung der Infrastruktur, der humanitären Notlage mit mehr als zehn Millionen Flüchtlingen und der wirtschaftlichen Zerrüttung der Ukraine infolge des Krieges zählt jeder Tag. Es bedarf keiner besonderen Militärexpertise, um zu erkennen, dass der Unterschied zwischen "defensiven" und "offensiven" Rüstungsgütern keine Frage des Materials ist: In den Händen der Angegriffenen sind auch Panzer und Haubitzen Defensivwaffen, weil sie der Selbstverteidigung dienen.

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Offener Brief: "Wir dürfen die Ukraine nicht fallen lassen"

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Intellektuelle um Ralf Fücks plädieren für kontinuierliche Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine. Zuvor hatte eine Gruppe um Alice Schwarzer den Kanzler genau davor gewarnt.

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https://theconversation.com/ukraine-invasion-how-history-can-empower-people-to-make-sense-of-russias-war-181999

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered, in the words of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, "the greatest threat to European stability since the Second World War."

Since then, not a single day has passed without powerful stories and shocking images of bombardments and casualties circulating online.

In a recent CBC interview, Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan examined how history has become "an instrument of war" used by President Putin to lay claims on Ukraine through a one-sided interpretation of the past.

According to Putin's distorted view, Russia's future and its place in the world are at stake and these depend on Putin's goal: to " demilitarize and denazify Ukraine."

The disciplinary tools of history are important to help people today understand two critical related things: Stories mobilize people in powerful ways; and the ability to analyze, challenge and judge stories' credibility is at the heart of empowering citizens to participate in and create democratic societies.

The past, in all its complexity

Historians, MacMillan observes, have a central role to play in making sense of war. She notes:

"We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its complexity."

Like MacMillan, we believe that leaders like Putin cannot mobilize for military operations without invoking the past, or some interpretations of it.

In Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, MacMillan writes that historians are highly qualified to interrogate one-sided, even false, histories that politicians use " to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies."

History and the power of knowledge

In the past decades, there has been a push in Canada, England and other nations to implement programs of study aimed at developing historical thinking, historical literacy or powerful knowledge. All these terms refer to approaches that seek to develop a " historical gaze " or a distinctively historical way of seeing past and current issues.

The rationale driving this is a democratic one: all future citizens should have equal access to the knowledge resources necessary to exercise agency in their world.

To learn a discipline is to learn to reason and organize information in specific ways, drawing on discipline-specific concepts and ways of thinking.

History, as a discipline, can provide us with powerful ways to move beyond the acquisition of stories (as content knowledge) to learn about how these stories were created, including their degree of certainty and their purpose. Such a disciplinary way of thinking helps people understand history as a tradition of inquiry and opens up a distinctive way of seeing world conflicts.

Reasoning with source materials

Studying history involves developing a deep knowledge of the human past understood as the histories of power relations. It also means:

developing knowledge of the particular historical contexts of past and current conflicts;

providing education in how knowledge claims can be made, understanding, for example, that claims about the past emerge through questioning and reasoning with source material, not simply by reassembling memories and fragments of the past into a story;

and finally, it involves developing an understanding of historical narration - both how narration can be used to develop new understandings and insights and how it can be abused to sustain fixed political positions.

'Making sense' of war?

How can studying history help young people make sense of the war in Ukraine?

A historical perspective on the current war in Ukraine can enable understandings of both the events unfolding in the present - as understood by different opposing parties - and the ways in which narratives are being used to influence perceptions.

A historical perspective on the causes of the invasion of Ukraine would avoid simplistic explanations.

Instead, history teachers might build a situation model to explain Russia's invasion by putting it in short-, medium- and long-term contexts, looking for both enabling and determining factors in order to explain why the invasion took place.

Read more: Stop telling students to study STEM instead of humanities for the post-coronavirus world

Taking a historical perspective would certainly need to move beyond the Putin-centred explanation and ask questions about Putin's thinking, psychology and intentions.

It would ask questions about the contexts that enable his actions to have deep consequences in the world.

Evaluating competing narratives

To take a historical perspective is also to move beyond explanation, and to start asking questions about multiple stories that different parties offer, to make sense of what has happened and to shape our responses.

This means considering differing historical perspectives on events and analyzing different points of view on the conflict: Russia/Putin, Ukraine, Canada/NATO.

It also means exercising narrative competence and judgment to compare, deconstruct and evaluate the competing narratives that circulate about the events and that are part of the process of mobilizing action and shaping the future.

Read more: Commemoration controversies in classrooms: Canadian history teachers disagree about making ethical judgments

Why, one might ask, has a euphemistic narrative that speaks of " special military operation," not "war," been actively disseminated by the Russian government notably in schools and what ideological function does that serve?

Why, on the other hand, have " Vlad the mad" psychologized narratives arisen in the West? What function do they serve and what do they obscure and reveal? History has things to teach about what responsible and realistic narratives look like and about the kinds of narrative we should question and find incredible.

Learning to detect patterns

Traditional education, focused either on content knowledge or on skills, is inadequate to the task of educating young citizens to navigate complex futures - as the Organization for Economic Co-opration now recognizes.

To get our bearings on world issues, including climate change and war, we need what education researchers Michael Young and Johan Muller call a "Future 3" education, grounded in disciplinary ways of knowing, not simply in bodies of knowledge. For them, "Future 1" education simply reproduces dominant knowledge traditions and fixed stories. "Future 2" education eliminates distinctive forms of knowledge to emphasize general skills that ultimately limit our capacity to understand history - and its uses and abuses.

As Michael Ignatieff sums it up, "to get our bearings, to figure out what to do, we need to understand how we got to this point ... we need to be able to see the pattern in the carpet."

Read more: How analyzing patterns helps students spot deceptive media

To do that, we need not to be taught more stories or facts but, crucially, to be taught how to look and look critically at narratives aiming to shape perceptions of both the past and the future.

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Ukraine Invasion: How history can empower people to make sense of Russia's war

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'Vlad the mad' psychological analyses don't help us understand Russia's war. Historians gain insights by examining the enabling and determining factors behind why conflicts erupt.

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1525755313412001792

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Kalush Orchestra showed a video for the song Stefania, shot in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and Borodyanka, destroyed by the Russian army. They didn't want to publish it before #Eurovision not to get accused of politicizing the contest. The video ends with a call: Stand with #Ukraine!

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Kalush Orchestra showed a video for the song Stefania, shot in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and Borodyanka, destroyed by the Russian army. They didn't want to publish it before #Eurovision not to get accused of politicizing the contest. The video ends with a call: Stand with #Ukraine! https://t.co/W5lm3gmqMD

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Kalush Orchestra showed a video for the song Stefania, shot in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and Borodyanka, destroyed by the Russian army. They didn't want to publish it before #Eurovision not to get accused of politicizing the contest. The video ends with a call: Stand with #Ukraine! pic.twitter.com/W5lm3gmqMD
— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) May 15, 2022

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Kalush Orchestra showed a video for the song Stefania, shot in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and Borodyanka, destroyed by the Russian army. They didn't want to publish it before #Eurovision not to get accused of politicizing the contest. The video ends with a call: Stand with #Ukraine! https://t.co/W5lm3gmqMD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Kalush Orchestra showed a video for the song Stefania, shot in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and Borodyanka, destroyed by the Russian army. They didn't want to publish it before #Eurovision not to get accused of politicizing the contest. The video ends with a call: Stand with #Ukraine! https://t.co/W5lm3gmqMD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Kalush Orchestra showed a video for the song Stefania, shot in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and Borodyanka, destroyed by the Russian army. They didn't want to publish it before #Eurovision not to get accused of politicizing the contest. The video ends with a call: Stand with #Ukraine!

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/23/a-ukrainian-city-under-a-violent-new-regime

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A Ukrainian City Under a Violent New Regime

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How the Russian occupation transformed life in Melitopol.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61480988

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After almost three months of relentless assault, Mariupol has fallen. Ukraine's military says its combat mission in the besieged port is over. More than any other Ukrainian city, Mariupol has come to symbolise the ferocious brutality of Russia's assault and the stubbornness of Ukraine's resistance.

On Wednesday 23 February, Ivan Stanislavsky left his camera bag at the office. He was on his way to see the layout of his new book on Mariupol's Soviet-era murals at a colleague's house, and didn't want to lug the gear around. He could always pick it up the next day.

But on Thursday, as he stood in the street outside his locked and deserted office, he could hear thunderous sounds rolling in from the east. The city was under fire.

As the conflict intensified, and gunfire became audible to the west too, Ivan moved his mattress into the hall. He piled up his large collection of art books - including the Encyclopaedia of Ukrainian Rock Music - against the windows of his flat in the district of Primorsky.

"Let's say it was not a waste of a library," says the 36-year-old photographer, who is also a press officer at Ukrainian premier league football club FC Mariupol.

Across town in the neighbourhood of Kalmiusky, businessman Yevhen was also taking precautions. The 47-year-old had told his family to pack so they could escape the city. But when he returned from the office, he found no packing had been done. His family refused to leave.

In an apartment in the same block, metallurgists from the nearby steelworks, Nataliia, 43, and Andrii, 41, were already slicing the last two loaves they had been able to buy, leaving them to dry out so they could eat them piece by piece over the weeks ahead.

Volodymyr, a 52-year-old paramedic in Kalmiusky, was also in his kitchen, trying to absorb the news. When reports came in of Russians marching through the village of Chonhar - on a strategic road out of Crimea to the west - he choked. This was a coordinated attack, he realised.

The ambulance dispatcher was on the phone. She instructed Volodymyr to ignore routine calls. "Find the wounded", he was told.

Twenty-two-year-old engineering graduate Mariia thought the first explosion she heard was simply a storm. Then she heard a second.

"We didn't know what to do," says Mariia, who like Ivan, lived in Primorsky. "I didn't have time to think about my future, my plans. I had to think about what I'd eat and drink... [And] what to do with the cats."

It suddenly dawned on her why, in the past few days, soldiers had appeared in the paint shop where she worked, asking to buy blue and yellow tape. They needed it to mark their uniforms.

Four days into the war, with the fighting closing in, Ivan and his wife sought shelter in a basement underneath his local supermarket. It offered good protection, and Ivan found that the muffling of sound dulled his sense of mounting anxiety.

Daily life was being stripped down to bare essentials.

"We lived like primitive people," he told the BBC from Lviv, where he has now fled. "We broke trees, made fires, cooked food on fires. I even heard of people eating pigeons."

He watched as order gradually broke down all around him. He kept a vivid diary, later published online.

"The Stone Age has arrived," he says in his 6 March entry.

He writes of watching his fellow Ukrainian citizens raiding abandoned shops, making off with everything from computers and freezers to swimsuits and underwear.

One evening a drunk woman interrupts a session of evening gossip in the basement. "Treat yourself," she says, as a flashlight revealed a bottle of Californian Merlot, taken from Wines of the World on nearby Italiiska Street.

But aware that even medical supplies and cash tills were being taken, Ivan says he felt disgust.

"We are our own worst enemies," he writes.

But is this, he wonders, how the fittest survive? After a while, each day became a "combat mission".

Over a few short weeks, Mariupol fell apart. The Russian military laid siege to the city, attacking power and water supplies. A Russian airstrike hit the maternity hospital on 9 March, and a plane bombed its theatre - clearly marked as a civilian shelter - a week later.

Ivan was stunned at how quickly it all happened.

"The whole city, all its infrastructure, supply system, logistics, energy supply were destroyed in a matter of days," he says.

Sitting underground at night, he sensed people becoming passive.

"You can only wait in the shelter," he writes in his diary. "Some are waiting for spring, some - for the morning to come, some - for the end of the war. And someone is waiting for the bomb to come and kill everyone."

And all this just as Mariupol had seemed destined to turn a corner. Money began to pour in, adding lustre to a city previously associated mainly with heavy industry - and war.

"It was a city aspiring to something," Ivan says. It hadn't always been this way.

Long before this year's invasion, Mariupol had a ringside seat to Ukraine's simmering conflict with Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two regions that make up the neighbouring area known as Donbas.

When fighting first broke out there in 2014, the government briefly lost control of Mariupol after clashes with pro-Russian protesters. In January 2015, a devastating rocket attack by the rebels on the eastern edge of the city killed almost 30 civilians.

Even though the war gradually receded, the sound of artillery booming in the distance was part of Mariupol's daily soundscape.

But the city moved on. The Ukrainian government briefly made Mariupol the administrative capital of the Donetsk Oblast. People migrated from rebel-held areas and the city started attracting investment.

"It started receiving all of the resources and all of the attention," Ivan says.

Public buildings were renovated, cafés opened, and new parks created. In a podcast last October, the city's mayor Vadym Boychenko boasted of creating the best municipal services in the country, opening an IT school, and promoting contemporary art and sports.

Plans were afoot, he said, for the largest water park in Ukraine and a version of Disneyland "which will probably be called Mariland". In fact, Mariupol was declared Ukraine's "Big Capital of Culture" in 2021.

But while Mariupol flourished, rebel-held Donetsk mouldered. When the rebels returned to Mariupol, Volodymyr, the paramedic, believed they were driven by revenge to destroy the city.

"'If we live in shit, then you will live in shit as well,'" Volodymyr says they told him at a checkpoint as he finally escaped the city. "They just looked at us and envied how we lived."

Yevhen, the businessman, describes life in Mariupol in the past five years as "a fairytale". "The city was being reconstructed," he says, "all roads were renovated, public transport was improved."

His buildings restoration firm was responsible, among other projects, for the reconstruction of Mariupol's iconic water tower in time for the city's 240th birthday.

"This is a city of hard workers... It was hard for me to explain that my workers should finish at 6pm - they wanted to work longer."

Like many others, weekends would be spent with family in the city's revived parks or on the seafront.

"For me, this is a [key] question - if you want to capture the city, why destroy it? [The Russians] don't need thinking people, they need territory," he says.

And, he adds, he is now getting calls from the Russians to return to Mariupol to help rebuild it.

"But if Mariupol is occupied by Russia, there will be no future there... there will be nothing to live for. To live in unrecognised territory is to bury your children's future."

About 150,000 people remain in the city, from a population of almost half a million. Most of those left there, he says, are also trying to escape.

"I left Mariupol but my soul is there," he says, tears in his eyes.

Nataliia and her husband Andrii worked at the Illich plant, one of two iron and steel works which tower over the city's skyline and loom large in Ivan Stanilavsky's photographs.

They spent long days at work, and leisure time was precious.

"The city authorities laid out marble tiles, made piers [so that] it was possible to sit on a bench right in the sea," Andrii says.

"It was a wonderful warm city with parks, concerts, fountains," his wife says. "A European city."

This recent blossoming was captured by Ivan, but as a photographer with a passion for his city's past, his pet project was documenting Mariupol's remarkable collection of Soviet murals, one of the most extensive in Ukraine.

The cultural importance of preserving such remarkable works seems undeniable, but in Mariupol nostalgia for the Soviet Union jostled uneasily with Ukraine's modern, increasingly European identity, Ivan says.

"Politics was already preventing this cultural heritage from being integrated into Ukraine's artistic context," he says.

So inevitably, when the war came, culture found itself fought over too.

On 28 April, Mariupol's city council denounced the alleged theft by Russia of more than 2,000 exhibits from the city's museums, including ancient icons, a handwritten Torah scroll and more than 200 medals.

The director of Mariupol's Local History Museum, Natalia Kapustnikova, later told Russian newspaper Izvestia that she had personally handed over paintings to the Russians by Ivan Aivazovsky and Arkhip Kuindzhi, and claimed that Ukrainian "nationalists" had burned 95% of the museum's exhibits.

She wasn't the only local official harbouring pro-Russian sentiments. On 9 April, Ukraine's prosecutor general charged a member of Mariupol's city council, Kostyantyn Ivashchenko, with treason after he was declared mayor by pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk.

Ivashchenko's pro-Russian party had been well supported in the city's last elections, coming second, while President Volodymyr Zelensky's party came a distant fifth place.

In a poll conducted just before the elections by the Kyiv-based Centre for Social Indicators, almost half the city's population identified themselves as "Russian", though 80% also described themselves as "Ukrainian".

More tellingly, perhaps, fewer than 20% self-identified as "European", while more than 50% said they were "Soviet".

Nataliia, whose father is Russian, says she asked her husband for forgiveness when the bombing started. "I was ashamed that I was Russian."

Mariia, the engineer, says that before the war her first language was Russian, but when the bombing began "I started to hate all things Russian - language, movies, objects".

Mariupol's complex identity is hardly unique in today's Ukraine, a country which formed an integral part of the Soviet Union until the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s. And it's doubtful that any of those who described themselves as "Russian" or "Soviet" wanted to see their city destroyed in a violent effort to pull it back into Moscow's orbit.

Ironically, when the moment arrived to defend the city from Russian invaders, it was another part of Mariupol's Soviet-era legacy that came to play an almost iconic role.

This legacy, buried deep underground, is the maze of bunkers beneath Mariupol's other steel works, Azovstal, built by the Soviet authorities during the Cold War.

The 36 bomb shelters provided room for more than 12,000 people. After independence in 1991, no-one thought that much about them. But then the fighting in 2014 began.

"We started thinking about what we would do if fighting spread further into the city," Enver Tskitishvili, Azovstal's director general, says.

Training on the use of the bunkers and their connecting tunnels went on every day for years.

In early February, as the fear of renewed conflict loomed larger, preparations swung into high gear. Food and water were brought in the week before Russia's invasion.

Officials at the plant knew the bomb shelters would soon be occupied, but had little idea that Azovstal, surrounded by water on three sides, would become the scene of Mariupol's last stand.

As the days went by, the war got closer and closer to Ivan Stanislavsky's apartment. Excursions in search of food, even to the nearby Dzerkalnyy store, just 400m up the road, were increasingly perilous. Sometimes, a Ukrainian mortar team would arrive by truck, fire off a few rounds, and leave before the inevitable Russian reply.

There was little communication between civilians and soldiers.

One day, a tank from the Azov Regiment arrived near Dzerkalnyy, sending locals running, fearful of an impending battle. The regiment emerged in 2014 as a highly effective volunteer militia with far right and, in some cases, neo-Nazi affiliations, before being folded into Ukraine's National Guard.

Vladimir Putin has made extensive use of the Azov's controversial origins, in an effort to bolster his argument that he is trying to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities say the regiment's origins are a thing of the past and points out that far-right parties have had very little electoral success.

In his diary Ivan describes the members he knows as a motley assortment of Mariupol natives - bikers, lawyers, football hooligans, and an amateur actor - driven not by ideology, but by a fierce hatred of those who were trying to ruin their lives.

"Together they formed a 'Nazi' battalion and intimidated the entire Russian army," he writes.

Intimidating and effective, but not enough, eventually, to stem the Russian tide.

While the city's defenders fought their losing battle, Ivan heard voices in his basement starting to curse President Zelensky for leaving Mariupol to its own devices.

For all the praise heaped on the city's defenders, it was clear from the start that Mariupol was not the government's main priority. Faced with Russian threats on a number of fronts, the Zelensky government chose to secure the capital, thwarting what was arguably Vladimir Putin's top priority.

Ultimately, that meant letting Russian forces achieve another of their pre-war goals: the establishment of a land corridor between Crimea - annexed by Moscow in 2014 - and the separatists in the Donbas.

But for those trapped in the city, fighting or just trying to survive, it was a bitter pill.

"Some say Mariupol was given the status of a hero city," Ivan wrote in his diary on 13 March.

"It looks like the award will be posthumous."

By now, Ivan couldn't stand any more. Outside Dzerkalnyy supermarket, he saw corpses neatly stacked under a wall. People who once queued for food were now in "the queue of the dead", waiting to be buried.

So on 15 March Ivan bundled four family members and his cat into his miraculously unscathed Skoda Fabia and joined a convoy for the tortuous journey north-west to government-held Zaporizhzhia.

At an observation point on Markelova St looking towards the port and the beach, Ivan allowed himself a brief moment of reflection.

"In my head I'm saying goodbye to this place," he writes in his diary. "I have a feeling we will never return here."

A day later, Mariia and five relatives also left by car, carrying just personal belongings and the family's dog. As they made their way out of Mariupol, their convoy came under attack and the cars had to accelerate out of danger, headed first to Zaporizhzhia, then to Dnipro.

The following day, Nataliia and Andreii left, after a neighbour offered them a space in his car. The couple eventually reached the city of Khmelnytskyi where they have been selling the family's coin collection in order to survive.

In that same convoy, Yevhen travelled with his wife and two other relatives. He's now in Dnipro, helping other residents who escaped Mariupol, and trying to reach those who remain.

Volodymyr, the paramedic, stayed in Mariupol as long as he could, to look after his elderly mother. But deprived of food and special medicine, she died. He then left the city on 21 April, and is volunteering at a hospital in Dnipro.

"There are thousands and thousands of families like mine," he says. "How many people have died? How many families have been lost?"

Two months after escaping, Ivan is still watching the death throes of Mariupol from the relative safety of Lviv.

In his diary's poignant epilogue, he writes of flashbacks, text messages about deaths or lucky escapes, and phone calls that go unanswered.

"The subscriber is out of range."

With additional reporting by Kateryna Khinkulova and Illia Tolstov

War in Ukraine: More coverage

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Mariupol: The 80 days that left a flourishing city in ruins

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The Ukrainian port which has seen some of the most intense fighting is now under Russian control.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html?smid=tw-share

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Opinion | We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist. (Published 2022)

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If Vladimir Putin prevails in Ukraine, fascists around the world will take comfort.

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A twitter thread on the colonisation of the Donbas

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A twitter thread on the colonisation of the Donbas

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https://twitter.com/YMonastyrskyi/status/1527670597777514496?s=20&t=ZrQRuloymBvpNPrNE5vu5g

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Promised 🧵 on the colonization of Donbas.
"Donbas" comes from the mid-19th century industrial revolution. It is a type of "rust belt" economic region with a local identity tied to heavy industry. 
However, this does not imply that the region was lifeless in pre-modern times.
1/

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Promised 🧵 on the colonization of Donbas.
"Donbas" comes from the mid-19th century industrial revolution. It is a type of "rust belt" economic region with a local identity tied to heavy industry. 
However, this does not imply that the region was lifeless in pre-modern times.
1/ https://t.co/yxMpycsmZU

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Promised 🧵 on the colonization of Donbas.
"Donbas" comes from the mid-19th century industrial revolution. It is a type of "rust belt" economic region with a local identity tied to heavy industry.
However, this does not imply that the region was lifeless in pre-modern times.
1/ pic.twitter.com/yxMpycsmZU
— Yevhenii Monastyrskyi (@YMonastyrskyi) May 20, 2022

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Promised 🧵 on the colonization of Donbas.
"Donbas" comes from the mid-19th century industrial revolution. It is a type of "rust belt" economic region with a local identity tied to heavy industry. 
However, this does not imply that the region was lifeless in pre-modern times.
1/ https://t.co/yxMpycsmZU

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Promised 🧵 on the colonization of Donbas.
"Donbas" comes from the mid-19th century industrial revolution. It is a type of "rust belt" economic region with a local identity tied to heavy industry. 
However, this does not imply that the region was lifeless in pre-modern times.
1/ https://t.co/yxMpycsmZU

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Promised 🧵 on the colonization of Donbas.
"Donbas" comes from the mid-19th century industrial revolution. It is a type of "rust belt" economic region with a local identity tied to heavy industry. 
However, this does not imply that the region was lifeless in pre-modern times.
1/

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/23/kyiv-museums-exhibit-russian-artefacts-with-pride-and-a-warning?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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A young woman takes a selfie in front of the burned-out carcass of a Russian armoured personnel carrier. A child eating an ice cream peers at the remains of a tank turret. A curious pensioner photographs the label on some mangled plane fuselage, which explains it belonged to a Russian Su-25, shot down by the Ukrainian military on 2 March.

Vladimir Putin doubtless envisioned a scenario in which Russian military hardware would stand on Kyiv's central streets this spring, but he probably did not imagine it would look like this.

Here on Kriposnyi Lane, just a few minutes' walk from the compound where Volodymyr Zelenskiy has spent the last three months evading reported Russian plans to kill him, Ukraine's military history museum has opened a street exhibition of captured Russian hardware.

Russian passports, military records, ID cards, dog tag, credit cards on display. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Inside the museum, there is a temporary display of souvenirs, trophies and evidence of the Russian occupation of the towns and villages around Kyiv.

"Many soldiers had been here on excursions before, so they knew where to bring things they had found," said Oleksandr Shemelyak, a senior researcher at the museum. "All the time we are getting new items to put on display."

Across Kyiv, at the museum of the second world war, an even larger exhibition has opened, which is named Crucified Ukraine, and also features both captured hardware outside and a vast array of items chronicling the Russian occupation around Kyiv.

The Russian army began its push towards Kyiv from the north, west and east in the first days of the war, and spent more than a month occupying areas around the capital before a chaotic withdrawal at the beginning of April, effectively an admission of failure.

"Three days after the liberation, the museum staff set off on missions to collect artefacts, accompanied by the Ukrainian military," said Dmytro Hainetdinov, head of the museum's education department.

Footwear of Russian military servicemen in the Crucified Ukraine exhibition at the museum of the second world war. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Some of the exhibits look almost like artworks: more than a hundred pairs of Russian army boots, of different shapes and sizes, are arranged inside a red star. A charred church cupola hangs in the air among various other artefacts recovered from three different churches that were destroyed during the fighting. An icon with a hole in it made by shrapnel forms the centre of the display.

Other items on display include the passports, bank cards and other personal effects of Russian soldiers. There is a map of the left bank of Kyiv, with police stations and other strategic points carefully marked using coloured coding; it was allegedly seized from a Russian diversionary group operating inside the city during the first days of the war.

Re-creation of a Ukrainian shelter in Hostomel. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

In the basement, the staff have recreated a shelter used by residents of the town of Hostomel, who spent more than a month below ground during the occupation. All the contents are original, from the blankets, teabags, salami and makeshift memorial plaque for a woman who died during the occupation.

The museum believes the artefacts are important to preserve for posterity, but also wants those Ukrainians who did not experience occupation to be able to see the horror for themselves. "Many people left for safer places, and are now returning, and happily, they did not have to experience these things first hand," said Hainetdinov.

Upstairs, a television screen shows footage of Russian politicians, television hosts and ordinary citizens making derogatory statements about Ukrainians, in an attempt to show how such rhetoric can lay the groundwork for what has happened in recent months.

"This is a project that shows what happens when the lessons of history are not learned," said Hainetdinov.

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Kyiv museums exhibit Russian artefacts with pride and a warning

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Relics of the failed siege of the Ukrainian capital 'show what happens when lessons of history are not learned'

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https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-other-like-minded-intellectuals-on-the-russia-ukraine-war/

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coauthored with Bohdan Kukharskyy at City University of New York, Anastassia Fedyk at UC Berkeley and Ilona Sologoub at VoxUkraine

Dear Professor Chomsky,

We are a group of Ukrainian academic economists who were grieved by a series of your recent interviews and commentaries on the Russian war on Ukraine. We believe that your public opinion on this matter is counter-productive to bringing an end to the unjustified Russian invasion of Ukraine and all the deaths and suffering it has brought into our home country.

Having familiarized ourselves with the body of your interviews on this matter, we noticed several recurring fallacies in your line of argument. In what follows, we wish to point out these patterns to you, alongside with our brief response:

Pattern #1: Denying Ukraines sovereign integrity

In your interview to Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept from April 14, 2022 you claimed: The fact of the matter is Crimea is off the table. We may not like it. Crimeans apparently do like it. We wish to bring to your attention several historical facts:

First, Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014 has violated the Budapest memorandum (in which it promised to respect and protect Ukrainian borders, including Crimea), the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation (which it signed with Ukraine in 1997 with the same promises), and, according to the order of the UN International Court of Justice, it violated the international law.

Second, Crimeans is not an ethnicity or a cohesive group of people but Crimean Tatars are. These are the indigenous people of Crimea, who were deported by Stalin in 1944 (and were able to come back home only after the USSR fell apart), and were forced to flee again in 2014 when Russia occupied Crimea. Of those who stayed, dozens have been persecuted, jailed on false charges and missing, probably dead.

Third, if by liking you refer to the outcome of the Crimean referendum on March 16, 2014, please note that this referendum was held at gunpoint and declared invalid by the General Assembly of the United Nations. At the same time, the majority of voters in Crimea supported Ukraines independence in 1991.

Pattern #2: Treating Ukraine as an American pawn on a geo-political chessboard

Whether willingly or unwillingly, your interviews insinuate that Ukrainians are fighting with Russians because the U.S. instigated them to do so, that Euromaidan happened because the U.S. tried to detach Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence, etc. Such an attitude denies the agency of Ukraine and is a slap in the face to millions of Ukrainians who are risking their lives for the desire to live in a free country. Simply put, have you considered the possibility that Ukrainians would like to detach from the Russian sphere of influence due to a history of genocide, cultural oppression, and constant denial of the right to self-determination?

Pattern #3. Suggesting that Russia was threatened by NATO

In your interviews, you are eager to bring up the alleged promise by [US Secretary of State] James Baker and President George H.W. Bush to Gorbachev that, if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin NATO, the U.S. would ensure that NATO would move not one inch eastward. First, please note that the historicity of this promise is highly contested among scholars, although Russia has been active in promoting it. The premise is that NATOs eastward expansion left Putin with no other choice but to attack. But the reality is different. Eastern European states joined, and Ukraine and Georgia aspired to join NATO, in order to defend themselves from Russian imperialism. They were right in their aspirations, given that Russia did attack Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Moreover, current requests by Finland and Sweden to join NATO came in direct response to Russias invasion of Ukraine, consistent with NATO expansion being a consequence of Russian imperialism, and not vice versa.

In addition, we disagree with the notion that sovereign nations shouldnt be making alliances based on the will of their people because of disputed verbal promises made by James Baker and George H.W. Bush to Gorbachev.

Pattern #4. Stating that the U.S. isnt any better than Russia

While you admittedly call the Russian invasion of Ukraine a war crime, it appears to us that you cannot do so without naming in the same breath all of the past atrocities committed by the U.S. abroad (e.g., in Iraq or Afghanistan) and, ultimately, spending most of your time discussing the latter. As economists, we are not in a position to correct your historical metaphors and, needless to say, we condemn the unjustified killings of civilians by any power in the past. However, not bringing Putin up on war crime charges at the International Criminal Court in the Hague just because some past leader did not receive similar treatment would be the wrong conclusion to draw from any historical analogy. In contrast, we argue that prosecuting Putin for the war crimes that are being deliberately committed in Ukraine would set an international precedent for the world leaders attempting to do the same in the future.

Pattern #5. Whitewashing Putins goals for invading Ukraine

In your interviews, you go to great lengths to rationalize Putins goals of demilitarization and neutralization of Ukraine. Please note that, in his TV address from February 24, 2022, marking the beginning of the war, the verbatim goal declared by Putin for this military operation is to denazify Ukraine. This concept builds on his long pseudo-historical article from July 2021, denying Ukraines existence and claiming that Ukrainians were not a nation. As elaborated in the denazification manual published by the Russian official press agency RIA Novosti, a Nazi is simply a human being who self-identifies as Ukrainian, the establishment of a Ukrainian state thirty years ago was the Nazification of Ukraine, and any attempt to build such a state has to be a Nazi act. According to this genocide handbook, denazification implies a military defeat, purging, and population-level re-education. Demilitarization and neutralization imply the same goal without weapons Ukraine will not be able to defend itself, and Russia will reach its long-term goal of destroying Ukraine.

Pattern #6. Assuming that Putin is interested in a diplomatic solution

All of us very much hoped for a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement, which could have saved many human lives. Yet, we find it preposterous how you repeatedly assign the blame for not reaching this settlement to Ukraine (for not offering Putin some escape hatch) or the U.S. (for supposedly insisting on the military rather than diplomatic solution) instead of the actual aggressor, who has repeatedly and intentionally bombed civilians, maternity wards, hospitals, and humanitarian corridors during those very negotiations. Given the escalatory rhetoric (cited above) of the Russian state media, Russias goal is erasure and subjugation of Ukraine, not a diplomatic solution.

Pattern #7. Advocating that yielding to Russian demands is the way to avert the nuclear war

Since the Russian invasion, Ukraine lives in a constant nuclear threat, not just due to being a prime target for Russian nuclear missiles but also due to the Russian occupation of Ukrainian nuclear power plants.

But what are the alternatives to fighting for freedom? Unconditional surrender and then elimination of Ukrainians off the face of the Earth (see above)? Have you ever wondered why President Zelenskyy, with the overwhelming support of the Ukrainian people, is pleading with Western leaders to provide heavy weapons despite the potential threat of nuclear escalation? The answer to this question is not Because of Uncle Sam, but rather due to the fact that Russian war crimes in Bucha and many other Ukrainian cities and villages have shown that living under Russian occupation is a tangible hell on earth happening right now, requiring immediate action.

Arguably, any concessions to Russia will not reduce the probability of a nuclear war but lead to escalation. If Ukraine falls, Russia may attack other countries (Moldova, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland or Sweden) and can also use its nuclear blackmail to push the rest of Europe into submission. And Russia is not the only nuclear power in the world. Other countries, such as China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are watching. Just imagine what will happen if they learn that nuclear powers can get whatever they want using nuclear blackmail.

Professor Chomsky, we hope you will consider the facts and re-evaluate your conclusions. If you truly value Ukrainian lives as you claim to, we would like to kindly ask you to refrain from adding further fuel to the Russian war machine by spreading views very much akin to Russian propaganda.

Should you wish to engage further on any of the above-mentioned points, we are always open to discussion.

Kind regards,

Bohdan Kukharskyy, City University of New York

Anastassia Fedyk, University of California, Berkeley

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, University of California, Berkeley

Ilona Sologoub, VoxUkraine NGO

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Open Letter to Noam Chomsky (and other like-minded intellectuals) on the Russia-Ukraine war

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Dear Professor Chomsky, we are a group of Ukrainian academic economists who were grieved by a series of your recent interviews and commentaries on the Russian war on Ukraine. We believe that your public opinion on this matter is counter-productive to bringing an end to the unjustified Russian invasion of Ukraine and all the deaths and suffering it has brought into our home country.

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Free course for teachers in this field from Hive mind

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Free course for teachers in this field from Hive mind

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https://en.hive-mind.community/learning

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We believe that learning should be on topics that matter today and tomorrow and that it should always be rooted in a context. If we live in the Information Age, then our ability to synthesize and use information will determine our individual well-being and prosperity in the years to come.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/23/putin-ignited-new-anti-colonial-struggle-this-time-moscow-target?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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History is teetering on an edge. No one knows which way it will go. Maybe the Russian empire, the last and most terrible of the European empires, will fall. Or maybe it will absorb the hit and survive as it has survived and expanded since the 17th century. You'd be a fool to bet against it. The graveyards of Eurasia are full of those who did.

And yet the breathtaking heroism of the Ukrainian resistance and the insane self-delusion of the Putinist regime are allowing Russia's opponents from Syria to Central Asia, and from Georgia to Moldova, to ask that most revolutionary of questions: "What if?"

What if the empire falls? What if structures that have endured and enslaved for centuries can be blown apart like the creaking trucks in a Russian munitions convoy?

Talking to the men and women engaged in what is - if only the global left could see it - the great anticolonial struggle of our times, you hear them moving through the stages of revolutionary commitment. From peaceful protest to jail sentences to the realisation that civil disobedience will never be enough.

Non-violent tactics work only against regimes that are not so oppressive that they cannot be persuaded to change

Lives are transformed as the stakes are raised. The story of Timur Mitskievich echoes the anticolonial protests of the 20th century. In 2020, he was a teenager in Minsk when the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, rigged the presidential election as he had crushed every challenge to his rule since he came to power in 1994. Supporters of the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya took to the streets in the largest popular demonstrations in Belarus's history.

The paradox of civil disobedience is that non-violent tactics work only against regimes that, however oppressive the protesters think them, are not so oppressive they cannot be persuaded to change. For all their crimes and prejudices, the British imperial authorities in India in the 1940s and the US government of the 1960s had to listen to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Lukashenko did not listen to his opponents. He terrorised them. He didn't have to worry about bad publicity when he controlled the media. Nor need he concern himself with the reaction of the "international community" after Vladimir Putin said he would maintain the dictator in power if he gave up what little remained of Belarusian independence. His country became a Russian colony again, which it had been almost continuously since the Russian empire seized control in 1795.

The 17-year old Mitskievich joined the protests. The police beat him so badly doctors put him into a medically induced coma. While he was out, his mother died, leaving nine orphaned children.

Peaceful disobedience works only against regimes with a capacity for feeling shame and the Belarusian and Russian regimes have no shame.

Belarus, like Ukraine before 2014, is a country parochial westerners barely thought about. If its name registers today, it is as Russia's base for its failed assault on Kyiv. In the glib 1990s, liberal democracy's triumph was assumed to be so inevitable we called Belarus "Europe's last dictatorship". Look at its weirdness, we said. It still clung on to Soviet-style rule, an error that history would surely correct as the ideals of free markets and free societies marched on.

The Ukrainian war has made clear how Russian nationalists view Slavs with the impertinence to reject them

Instead of being an anachronism, Belarus was a model for the future. While it became a Russian client state, Russia became a supersize Belarus, as Putin removed the limited freedoms he had allowed Russian citizens in the 2000s and aped Lukashenko's dictatorship.

To Belarus's exiled opposition, Ukraine's war is their war and a Ukrainian victory would open up the prospect of radical change across territories Russia intimidates and controls. The Ukrainian war has made clear, if clarity were needed, how Russian nationalists view eastern Slavs with the impertinence to reject them. Russian official media explained that Ukrainians (and by extension) Belarusians were really Russians. If they rejected Russian identity and said they had their own cultures and histories that existed before the Russian empire, they proved only that they were "Nazis". No form of human life could be lower. The Russian state had a duty to kill them or send them to labour camps; to take their children from them and crush their country and their culture.

When I spoke last week to Tsikhanouskaya's senior adviser Franak Viačorka, in exile in Poland, he said revolution was the only viable option now. He spoke the language of an officer in an underground war rather than a politician trying to negotiate a settlement. The Lukashenko regime was the "collaborationist state". The activists who sabotaged Belarusian railway lines, to stop Russian troops and armour reaching Ukraine, were "resistance cells".

Even in Soviet times Moscow "recognised the existence of Belarus and Ukrainian nations", Viačorka said. Putin was bringing a "new form of fascism" that denied their very being. The Belarusian opposition was fighting it with covert action. It was attempting to drive the army away from its subservience to Lukashenko and Putin. In Belarus, as in so many other countries, hope depended on a Ukrainian victory offering the "chance to get out of Russian sphere of influence".

Well, we've learned better than to be optimists in the years since the fin de siècle's silly season. We expect brute power to prevail now. The Russian armed forces are undoubtedly corrupt and inept. But you can see the empire winning, as it has always won, by throwing recruits into battle without a thought for their lives and terrorising civilians. For its part, western intelligence is not predicting a swift Ukrainian victory but a hard, grinding war whose outcome is uncertain.

For all that, there is in the air, if not optimism, then a plausible question. What if the partial collapse of the Russian empire in the 1990s is followed by decisive defeat in the 2020s? What if the whole rotten structure falls?

The doctors released Mitskievich from hospital. He is now fighting in Ukraine in the Belarusian version of the International Brigades of the Spanish civil war. He is one of thousands of Belarusians who volunteered to join the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Battalion, named after the leader of an uprising against the Russian empire in 1863. The battalion has seen action in the battles around Irpin. One day, its members will return to Belarus with highly portable military skills. They will have questions of their own.

Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

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Putin has ignited a new anti-colonial struggle. This time, Moscow is the target | Nick Cohen

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Belarusian exiles watch events in Ukraine with fear but also hope. Could they too fight back?

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Mapping the destruction of European culture

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Mapping the destruction of European culture

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/24/crimes-against-history-mapping-the-destruction-of-ukraines-culture?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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Satellite scrutiny of Ukraine is not just focused on military hardware. Thousands of miles away from the fighting, an international group of archaeologists, historians and technicians are quietly coordinating another high-stakes monitoring effort: the tracking of the mounting losses to Ukraine's cultural landscape.

Now an impact summary, released this month from their lab at a museum in the US state of Virginia, has revealed the bleak truth.

So far, signs of damage to 191 cultural landmarks and venues have been detected. Most of the destruction - believed to have been carried out by invading Russian troops - has concentrated on Ukrainian memorials and places of worship. Fifty-eight churches, mosques, temples and cathedrals have now been listed, along with 111 memorial sites and nine public monuments. The war has also seen two arts venues attacked - including the theatre at Mariupol, images of which went around the world - and one archaeological site. Violence directed at monuments and buildings might seem insignificant compared to the growing toll of injury and death inflicted on Ukrainian families, but for a country in the shadow of a threatening neighbour, culture and heritage can play a crucial role. The deliberate targeting of religious and cultural sites is also prohibited by the 1954 Hague Convention, although individual perpetrators have rarely been punished.

The destroyed Drama Theatre in Mariupol. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA

The Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab, at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, is the hub for coordinating worldwide attempts to register and protect landmarks at risk. The network was set up last year in partnership with the acclaimed Smithsonian Institution Cultural Rescue Initiative, founded in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which works to train museum curators around the world to react to conflict.

News of any affected site goes back to Ukraine immediately in case the damage to artefacts can be limited, or at least documented on the ground. Inside Ukraine's museums, many cabinets containing Byzantine icons and Scythian gold have been moved. Valuable artwork has been hidden in basements or moved secretly to supportive foreign museums. Other national collections are guarded by wardens who are now armed and ready to repel looters.

The operation in Virginia draws on the expertise of curators from America and Europe and is led by archaeologist Hayden Bassett. "It's a 24/7 operation," he recently told the Washington Post. "Even though we might not be staring at a screen at 3am, our satellites are imaging at 3am."

Brian Daniels, an anthropologist working with the team in Virginia, said the rate of attacks had increased dramatically since the report's publication. He told the Observer: "The violence is now concentrating on civilian infrastructure and this means museums and cultural heritage are targeted in this scorched-earth policy."

Bassett has seen significant cultural damage to the more densely populated areas, including the complete destruction of a museum in Ivankiv two months ago.

The 26,000 cultural sites checked by the lab this month via a combination of remote sensing, open-source research and satellite imagery, include Ukraine's seven world heritage sites. The best known of these is Kyiv's golden-domed Cathedral of St Sophia, which remains intact. Ukraine's ministry of culture has also urged witnesses to send photographs to its cultural crimes website, culturecrimes.mkip.gov.ua, so that verified evidence can be sent to the International Criminal Court.

The lab's new impact report defined cultural heritage broadly, covering venues and historical sites and monuments, but not libraries and archives. A detected "potential impact" means a sign of possible damage based upon remote sensing methods. Other, smaller impacts may not be visible to geospatial technology.

The Russian-controlled territories of Donbas and Crimea were an early concern, according to Damian Koropeckyj, a senior analyst , who has found evidence that destroyed monuments there are being replaced by new ones supporting a Russian version of the areas' heritage.

"We're a remote project. But it's certainly very real to me. Believing we can make a difference here is important," Koropeckyj said.

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Crimes against history: mapping the destruction of Ukraine's culture

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US-based lab documents destruction of churches and theatres

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/23/lessons-in-patriotism-used-to-justify-ukraine-invasion-to-russias-children?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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When Pavel Tkachev heard about the special lessons on the war in Ukraine that took place at his son's high school in the Primorksy district of St Petersburg earlier this month, he was livid.

"I called them and said this is ridiculous," he told the Observer. "We're the parents and it is we who should tell the kids about patriotism and the 'special operation', not the schools."

Similar lectures were delivered to students in schools across the country, decrying "fascists" in Ukraine and suggesting that Russia was acting in "self-defence". Tkachev said he was particularly angry over comparisons to the second world war, which he called "unforgivable".

School officials "shrugged their shoulders and said these are the instructions", he said. "I was disgusted."

Russia's plans to overhaul education have gone hand-in-hand with its war in Ukraine. Officials are writing curricula to justify the invasion, and have suggested schools will hold flag-raisings and sing the national anthem each morning from September. A major Russian textbook publisher is reportedly using autochecking software to edit out positive references to Ukraine in its schoolbooks.

According to Russia's education ministry, history will become a compulsory subject from the first grade. "We will never allow it [to be written] that we somehow treated other nations - our fraternal nations of Ukraine and Belarus - poorly," said education minister Sergey Kravtsov, who announced the new initiative at the opening of an exhibition called "Everyday Nazism". "We will do everything in our power so that historical memory is preserved."

There is a clear degree of political opportunism in using schoolchildren to deliver propaganda. As Russia declared a disputed victory in Mariupol last week, Andrei Turchak, head of the ruling United Russia party, made a beeline for a local school in the city.

While there, he told the students: "Victory will be ours. The enemy will be defeated, and peaceful life on this earth will finally come ... we will liberate this territory and clean it from the fascist demons."

But there is also a new level of pressure on teachers, sometimes to organise pro-war photo-ops with children, or in other cases to hide their anti-war feeling from their students. "I know a lot of teachers who have hidden their online profiles, they're very careful speaking about politics in school," said Maria, a teacher at a middle school in Voronezh.

Lyubov Zhiltsova, a maths teacher and politician from Pskov, faced a police inquest last week for an image on social media of her holding a sign that said "No to war".

Graffiti saying 'No war' in Moscow. Photograph: Getty Images

"The whole world has turned upside down for me. I prepare events for 9 May [Victory Day] every year, I write a script, I rehearse ... And now how can I talk about it with children?" she told Radio Svoboda. "I couldn't keep silent, I was burning."

One of the first Russians to be targeted under a new law banning "fakes" about the Russian military was a schoolteacher who now faces 10 years in prison. "I hoped to break through the propaganda that is being fed to this country. But look where it got me," Irina Gen, a 55-year-old English and German language teacher said this month. She was reported by her own students.

Educational officials have promised further changes to Russia's curriculum and new patriotic initiatives clearly inspired by the war. Some, such as the flag and anthem, seem inspired by similar rightwing efforts in the United States.

Others are specific to Russia's war in Ukraine. Kravtsov told Putin last week that they had already begun developing lessons about the "goals of the special operation - to help our people, denazification, the demilitarisation of Donbas".

The goal was to fight the "squall of disinformation ... fakes about Russia".

The lessons have "conditionally been called 'Conversations about important topics'".

"And from 1 September, in addition, there will be the raising of the national flag at the beginning of the school week, the performance of the national anthem," he said.

Leaked manuals for this year's special lectures have shown that Russian teachers are being told to tell students that Russia has not invaded Ukraine, but is instead practising "self-defence against the threats created to us and from an even greater calamity than what is happening today".

In a separate lesson on "anti-Russian sanctions", teachers are told to ask students whether the sanctions are fair, whether they'll actually strengthen the Russian economy, and whom will they harm (everyone).

"The teacher, together with the students, concludes that economic policy in recent years has been aimed at increasing the protection of domestic producers, ensuring its sustainability in the face of external crises," the documents read.

The lessons manuals, or metodichki, are so far not compulsory, noted Denis Lanshchikov, a history teacher at a private school in Moscow. But many teachers and administrators at state schools appeared to have leaned into them of their own volition, either because they supported the war or because they thought "big brother is watching".

"It seems to me that it isn't yet a top-down attempt to make schools totalitarian," he said. "But then every person ... creates this totalitarianism himself."

Even grade-school students are facing some level of indoctrination. "In all the schools they held these special events dedicated to the topic that Russia is fighting with fascists," said Marina Litvinovich, an opposition politician in Moscow. In her son's fourth-grade class, the children were given a "light version". "They don't quite get it. So they went through the [second world war] Leningrad blockade - and during the lesson they also said that 'look, this is how Russia is continuing to fight against fascism'."

"The kids are kind of cool toward it," she said of her son. She compared it to the indoctrination that she went through as a student in the late Soviet period, saying: "When the Soviet Union fell, all this indoctrination flew away ... so I'm not extremely worried about it, it will fly away when they meet reality. It's bad but not a catastrophe."

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Lessons in patriotism used to justify Ukraine invasion to Russia's children

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A modified curriculum in schools will include state-approved textbooks that edit out positive references to its neighbour

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/60867414

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TikTok has emerged as one of the leading platforms for snappy false videos about the war in Ukraine which are reaching millions.

With a user base of more than one billion people - more than half of whom are under 30 - TikTok is where many young people have been getting updates about the conflict, as the platform struggles to stem the flow of misleading information.

And you don't need to look that hard to find dubious content. According to an investigation by NewsGuard, a website that monitors online misinformation, new users could be recommended false content about Ukraine within 40 minutes of joining the network.

While platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have been labelling false or misleading viral videos about the war, TikTok seems to be playing catch-up.

The company insists it has stepped up its efforts to combat misinformation.

Here are some of the most common categories of misleading content the BBC has identified on the platform.

Fake livestreams

From the early days of the war, fake livestreams have drawn some of the highest numbers of views on TikTok.

The recipe is simple: a user finds a dramatic video of an old conflict or some military drill, dubs fake audio of a huge explosion or an intense shootout, starts a livestream, and once a sizeable audience tunes in, asks for donations to their channel.

One such account had drawn nearly 30 million views by mid-March. All but three of the account's livestreams up to that point were short clips taken from a YouTube video of old Ukrainian military training, dating from 2017.

At one point, a fake audio track of gunshots became so popular that it appeared in more than 13,000 videos.

Users can react to livestreams by sending the accounts points that can be converted into cash.

"It seems like a lot of the looped scary livestreams were likely created with the hopes of earning money via TikTok's gifting system," says Abbie Richards, an independent researcher who creates videos with a focus on the dangers of misinformation.

Most of the fake livestreams can be easily found under popular hashtags such as #Ukraine or #UkraineWar.

"The content is intended to blend in with all the other information available on the topic," says Ms Richards.

More on this story

Video games

Dramatic footage of military video games or computer-generated imagery (CGI) has been regularly used as a substitute for real war videos.

Scenes from video games such as Arma 3 and Call of Duty have flooded TikTok. Fake aerial battles, including footage appearing to show fighter jets being shot down, have proved particularly popular.

Some accounts try to make the action more realistic and use clips from war films, TV series or real-life games.

One video, which was viewed 24 million times, shows a man appearing to drop an explosive item on a tank. It was taken from a video of an Airsoft match - a team combat game similar to paintball - and uploaded to YouTube in January.

A separate fake livestream, viewed by 2.3 million users, is made up of CGI footage of missile strikes and has been circulating on the internet since last year.

Ms Richards says she has seen instances of users warning in the comments section of such videos that they are taken from video games or are made up. But the people behind the accounts can disable comments - and the warnings disappear.

Old videos

Videos of old conflicts are typically used when a new one is under way. The BBC has seen videos from wars in Libya, Syria and Chechnya being used as though they show the current conflict.

A video purporting to show intense fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces outside a block of flats has racked up 7.7 million views.

But the footage was in fact recorded in 2014 in the Chechen capital, Grozny, during a deadly attack by an armed jihadist group. Fake breaking news and live captions were overlaid on the original footage to hide the real source.

Some have posted videos from the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2014, which could easily be mistaken for the current one, or footage of military exercises or parades in either country.

A video of a column of Ukrainian tanks in central Kyiv was presented as if they were on their way to defend the capital against a Russian offensive. It received nine million views. But it was filmed during an independence-day military parade several years ago.

And a video of a tank with a Ukrainian flag, speeding down a residential street - viewed four million times - also dated back to the Russia-Ukraine conflict of 2014.

Ms Richards says TikTok could address the problem of viral old videos by taking simple measures, such as making the date a video was posted clearer.

War in Ukraine: More coverage

Limited transparency

Like Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, TikTok collaborates with independent fact-checkers, albeit on a smaller scale. But while Facebook and Instagram have been labelling false and misleading content about Ukraine on their platforms, such labels are rare on TikTok.

Unlike some of its rivals, TikTok does not provide transparency or analytics tools to academics, researchers and journalists, which Ms Richards says misinformation experts like her have been "desperately" demanding for some time.

What that means for independent fact-checkers is a time-consuming process of manually researching a huge volume of content on a regular basis.

Another issue, according to Ms Richards, is the absence of a community of TikTok users willing to debunk falsehoods on the platform.

"When TikTok fails to ensure the accuracy of information receiving millions of views on its platform, that burden is falling on outside researchers and everyday TikTok users."

A TikTok spokesperson told the BBC: "We continue to respond to the devastating war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation.

"To support our efforts to help keep TikTok a safe and authentic place, we've added more resources to our moderation and fact-checking for content in Russian and Ukrainian, including local language experts and partnerships with independent fact-checking organisations."

Have you been affected by what is happening in Ukraine? Or do you have any questions about the conflict? Email us at: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.

Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:

If you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.

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Ukraine war: False TikTok videos draw millions of views

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Misleading videos have been viewed by millions as it struggles to deal with so much false material.

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Ukraine and the words that lead to mass murder

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Ukraine and the words that lead to mass murder

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/ukraine-mass-murder-hate-speech-soviet/629629/

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First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing.

In the terrible winter of 1932-33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They led away farm animals and confiscated tomato seedlings. After they left, Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.

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At the time, the activists felt no guilt. Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies-rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised. The kulaks should be swept away, crushed like parasites or flies. Their food should be given to the workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did. Years later, the Ukrainian-born Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko wrote about what it was like to be part of one of those brigades. "To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes-and your mind," he explained. "You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria."

He also described how political jargon and euphemisms helped camouflage the reality of what they were doing. His team spoke of the "peasant front" and the "kulak menace," "village socialism" and "class resistance," to avoid giving humanity to the people whose food they were stealing. Lev Kopelev, another Soviet writer who as a young man had served in an activist brigade in the countryside (later he spent years in the Gulag), had very similar reflections. He too had found that clichés and ideological language helped him hide what he was doing, even from himself:

I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn't give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five-year plan.

There was no need to feel sympathy for the peasants. They did not deserve to exist. Their rural riches would soon be the property of all.

But the kulaks were not rich; they were starving. The countryside was not wealthy; it was a wasteland. This is how Kravchenko described it in his memoirs, written many years later:

Large quantities of implements and machinery, which had once been cared for like so many jewels by their private owners, now lay scattered under the open skies, dirty, rusting and out of repair. Emaciated cows and horses, crusted with manure, wandered through the yard. Chickens, geese and ducks were digging in flocks in the unthreshed grain.

That reality, a reality he had seen with his own eyes, was strong enough to remain in his memory. But at the time he experienced it, he was able to convince himself of the opposite. Vasily Grossman, another Soviet writer, gives these words to a character in his novel Everything Flows:

I'm no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn't think of them as human beings. "They're not human beings, they're kulak trash"-that's what I heard again and again, that's what everyone kept repeating.

Nine decades have passed since those events took place. The Soviet Union no longer exists. The works of Kopelev, Kravchenko, and Grossman have long been available to Russian readers who want them.

In the late 1980s, during the period of glasnost, their books and other accounts of the Stalinist regime and the Gulag camps were best sellers in Russia. Once, we assumed that the mere telling of these stories would make it impossible for anyone to repeat them. But although the same books are theoretically still available, few people buy them. Memorial, the most important historical society in Russia, has been forced to close. Official museums and monuments to the victims remain small and obscure. Instead of declining, the Russian state's ability to disguise reality from its citizens and to dehumanize its enemies has grown stronger and more powerful than ever.
All of this-the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance about mass murder-is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history.
Nowadays, less violence is required to misinform the public: There have been no mass arrests in Putin's Russia on the scale used in Stalin's Russia. Perhaps there don't need to be, because Russian state-run television, the primary source of information for most Russians, is more entertaining, more sophisticated, more stylish than programs on the crackly radios of Stalin's era. Social media is far more addictive and absorbing than the badly printed newspapers of that era, too. Professional trolls and influencers can shape online conversation in ways that are helpful to the Kremlin, and with far less effort than in the past.

The modern Russian state has also set the bar lower. Instead of offering its citizens a vision of utopia, it wants them to be cynical and passive; whether they actually believe what the state tells them is irrelevant. Although Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They got angry when anyone accused them of lying, and they produced fake "evidence" or counterarguments. In Putin's Russia, politicians and television personalities play a different game, one that we in America know from the political campaigns of Donald Trump. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But if you accuse them of lying, they don't bother to offer counterarguments. When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: The Ukrainian army was responsible, or the CIA was, or it was a nefarious plot in which 298 dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This constant stream of falsehoods produces not outrage, but apathy. Given so many explanations, how can you know whether anything is ever true? What if nothing is ever true?
Read: Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
Instead of promoting a Communist paradise, modern Russian propaganda has for the past decade focused on enemies. Russians are told very little about what happens in their own towns or cities. As a result, they aren't forced, as Soviet citizens once were, to confront the gap between reality and fiction. Instead, they are told constantly about places they don't know and have mostly never seen: America, France and Britain, Sweden and Poland-places filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and "Russophobia." A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state-controlled, an average of 18 times a day. Some of the stories were invented ( the German government is forcibly taking children away from straight families and giving them to gay couples), but even true stories were picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, Europeans are weak and immoral, the European Union is aggressive and interventionist.

If anything, the portrayal of America has been worse. U.S. citizens who rarely think about Russia would be stunned to learn how much time Russian state television devotes to the American people, American politics, even American culture wars. In March, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, displayed an alarmingly intimate acquaintance with Twitter arguments about J. K. Rowling and her views on transgender rights at a press conference. It's hard to imagine any American politician, or indeed almost any American, talking about a popular Russian political controversy with the same fluency. But that's because no American politician lives and breathes the ups and downs of Russian partisan arguments in the same way that the Russian president lives and breathes the battles that take place on American cable networks and on social media-battles in which his professional trolls and proxies compete and take sides, promoting whatever they think will be divisive and polarizing.

Within the ever-changing drama of anger and fear that unfolds every night on the Russian evening news, Ukraine has long played a special role. In Russian propaganda, Ukraine is a fake country, one without history or legitimacy, a place that is, in the words of Putin himself, nothing more than the "southwest" of Russia, an inalienable part of Russia's "history, culture and spiritual space." Worse, Putin says, this fake state has been weaponized by the degenerate, dying Western powers into a hostile "anti-Russia." The Russian president has described Ukraine as "fully controlled from the outside" and as "a colony with a puppet regime." He invaded Ukraine, he has said, in order to defend Russia " from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and our people. "

In truth, Putin invaded Ukraine in order to turn it into a colony with a puppet regime himself, because he cannot conceive of it ever being anything else. His KGB-influenced imagination does not allow for the possibility of authentic politics, grassroots movements, even public opinion. In Putin's language, and in the language of most Russian television commentators, the Ukrainians have no agency. They can't make choices for themselves. They can't elect a government for themselves. They aren't even human-they are " Nazis." And so, like the kulaks before them, they can be eliminated with no remorse.

The relationship between genocidal language and genocidal behavior is not automatic or even predictable. Human beings can insult one another, demean one another, and verbally abuse one another without trying to kill one another. But while not every use of genocidal hate speech leads to genocide, all genocides have been preceded by genocidal hate speech. The modern Russian propaganda state turned out to be the ideal vehicle both for carrying out mass murder and for hiding it from the public. The gray apparatchiks, FSB operatives, and well-coiffed anchorwomen who organize and conduct the national conversation had for years been preparing their compatriots to feel no pity for Ukraine.

They succeeded. From the first days of the war, it was evident that the Russian military had planned in advance for many civilians, perhaps millions, to be killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes in Ukraine. Other assaults on cities throughout history-Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima, Nagasaki-took place only after years of terrible conflict. By contrast, systematic bombardment of civilians in Ukraine began only days into an unprovoked invasion. In the first week of the war, Russian missiles and artillery targeted apartment blocks, hospitals, and schools. As Russians occupied Ukrainian cities and towns, they kidnapped or murdered mayors, local councilors, even a museum director from Melitopol, spraying bullets and terror randomly on everyone else. When the Ukrainian army recaptured Bucha, to the north of Kyiv, it found corpses with their arms tied behind their backs, lying in the road. When I was there in mid-April, I saw others that had been dumped into a mass grave. In the first three weeks of the war alone, Human Rights Watch documented cases of summary execution, rape, and the mass looting of civilian property.

Mariupol, a mostly Russian-speaking city the size of Miami, was subjected to almost total devastation. In a powerful interview in late March, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, noted that in previous European conflicts, occupiers hadn't destroyed everything, because they themselves needed somewhere to cook, eat, wash; during the Nazi occupation, he said, "movie theaters were operating in France." But Mariupol was different: "Everything is burned out." Ninety percent of the buildings were destroyed within just a few weeks. A massive steelworks that many assumed the conquering army wanted to control was totally flattened. At the height of the fighting, civilians were still trapped inside the city, with no access to food, water, power, heat, or medicine. Men, women, and children died of starvation and dehydration. Those who tried to escape were fired upon. Outsiders who tried to bring in supplies were fired upon as well. The bodies of the dead, both Ukrainian civilians and Russian soldiers, lay in the street, unburied, for many days.

Yet even as these crimes were carried out, in full view of the world, the Russian state successfully hid this tragedy from its own people. As in the past, the use of jargon helped. This was not an invasion; it was a "special military operation." This was not a mass murder of Ukrainians; it was "protection" for the inhabitants of the eastern-Ukrainian territories. This was not genocide; it was defense against "genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime." The dehumanization of the Ukrainians was completed in early April, when RIA Novosti, a state-run website, published an article arguing that the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine would require the "liquidation" of the Ukrainian leadership, and even the erasure of the very name of Ukraine, because to be Ukrainian was to be a Nazi: "Ukrainianism is an artificial anti-Russian construct, which does not have any civilizational content of its own, and is a subordinate element of a foreign and alien civilization." The existential threat was made clear on the eve of the war, when Putin reprised a decade's worth of propaganda about the perfidious West, using language familiar to Russians: "They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature."
From the May 2022 issue: Anne Applebaum on how there is no liberal world order
For anyone who might have accidentally seen photographs of Mariupol, explanations were provided. On March 23, Russian television did broadcast film of the city's ruins-drone footage, possibly stolen from CNN. But rather than take responsibility, they blamed the Ukrainians. One television anchorwoman, sounding sad, described the scene as " a horrifying picture. [Ukrainian] nationalists, as they retreat, are trying to leave no stone unturned." The Russian Defense Ministry actually accused the Azov battalion, a famously radical Ukrainian fighting force, of blowing up the Mariupol theater, where hundreds of families with children had been sheltering. Why would über-patriotic Ukrainian forces deliberately kill Ukrainian children? That wasn't explained-but then, nothing is ever explained. And if nothing can be known for certain, then no one can be blamed. Maybe Ukrainian "nationalists" destroyed Mariupol. Maybe not. No clear conclusions can be drawn, and no one can be held accountable.

Few feel remorse. Published recordings of telephone calls between Russian soldiers and their families-they are using ordinary SIM cards, so it's easy to listen to them-are full of contempt for Ukrainians. "I shot the car," one soldier tells a woman, perhaps his wife or sister, in one of the calls. "Shoot the motherfuckers," she responds, "as long as it's not you. Fuck them. Fucking drug addicts and Nazis." They talk about stealing television sets, drinking cognac, and shooting people in forests. They show no concern about casualties, not even their own. Radio communications between the Russian soldiers attacking civilians in Bucha were just as cold-blooded. Zelensky himself was horrified by the nonchalance with which the Russians proposed to send some trash bags for the Ukrainians to wrap the corpses of their soldiers: "Even when a dog or a cat dies, people don't do this," he told journalists.

All of this-the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance about mass murder, even the disdain for the lives of Russian soldiers-is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history (or German history, for that matter). But Russian citizens and Russian soldiers either don't know that history or don't care about it. President Zelensky told me in April that, like "alcoholics [who] don't admit that they are alcoholic," these Russians "are afraid to admit guilt." There was no reckoning after the Ukrainian famine, or the Gulag, or the Great Terror of 1937-38, no moment when the perpetrators expressed formal, institutional regret. Now we have the result. Aside from the Kravchenkos and Kopelevs, the liberal minority, most Russians have accepted the explanations the state handed them about the past and moved on. They're not human beings; they're kulak trash, they told themselves then. They're not human beings; they're Ukrainian Nazis, they tell themselves today.
This article appears in the June 2022 print edition with the headline "'They're Not Human Beings.'"

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Ukraine and the Words That Lead to Mass Murder

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First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing.

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https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/the-fundamental-reasons-why-russias-war-against-ukraine-will-continue-to-fail

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Two months on from the start of the war, Russia seems no closer to achieving its original aims. Even if taken at face value, the recent announcement that the goal is now the capture of Donbas and southern Ukrainian territory, creating a land bridge from Crimea, is a dramatic climbdown from the original goals of conquering the whole country, effecting regime change, and forcing Nato to retreat to the force posture of the mid-1990s.

Revising goals downward so early in a war of choice is, of course, a sign that the Kremlin thinks things are going badly. And there is every reason to think that things are going to get significantly worse for Putin.

From the start of the war, western analysis has highlighted the Russian army's apparent problems with logistics, communication, equipment, training and morale. All of these are issues that could in theory be fixed, greatly improving Russia's capacity to fight the war. But there are two immediate problems with this. The first is the impact of sanctions, which will continue to put pressure on Russian finances, ultimately limiting the Kremlin's capacity to spend its way out of the difficulty. Sanctions also pose a challenge to attempts to resupply and repair-let alone upgrade-equipment, because they cover military and technology sales.

The second problem is time. Russian personnel and equipment losses have been enormous. Repairing and building new vehicles, planes and helicopters is a slow process, and it takes many years to replace lost warships. It also takes time to adequately train soldiers to replace the many thousands killed and wounded. Russia appears to be losing men and weapons more quickly than it can replace them; unless this changes, it spells defeat.

But even if the Kremlin were able to overcome these problems, there are two further, fundamental challenges concerning the conduct of the war and its aims that are entirely outside its control. These mean Russia's war against Ukraine will continue to fail.

The first is that the west seems committed to supplying Ukraine with military assistance for the foreseeable future. The scale of this aid is staggering. The United States alone has provided or pledged $3.4bn in military assistance since the start of the war, including $1.6bn in the last two weeks alone; the top ten countries providing military aid have collectively pledged nearly $6bn. It is impossible for Russia to compete with this.

Beyond the headline figures, the specifics of western aid should also be deeply worrying for the Kremlin. The most obvious problem for Putin is that aid is seemingly being tailored to address the changing character of the war. The UK government, for example, has announced that it will "backfill" Polish tank capacity, supplying Poland with tanks that will enable the country to supply its own tanks to Ukraine. Like the recent announcement that the US will provide armoured personnel carriers and howitzers, this seems designed to help Ukraine in the fight for its eastern territory.

Early in the war, concerns about the risk of escalation appeared to be limiting the types of western aid provided to Ukraine. The Kremlin attempted to increase this anxiety, and so choke off the aid supply, by announcing that western supply convoys would be regarded as legitimate targets and by making ominous, if vague, noises about nuclear weapons. The latest round of pledges from western donors suggests that these threats may be causing less concern than previously, or that that they carry less weight because the will to support Ukraine has strengthened. Either is very bad news for Putin, since this was almost the only lever that he could pull to try to slow or stop aid to Ukraine.

The public acknowledgement by western leaders that the war could last for years is an important signal that they are not shaping policy in expectation of a quick resolution; they are preparing their populations for a long-term commitment to Ukraine. Any hopes that Putin may have pinned on nervousness about this would seem to be misplaced.

This means that Russia, with its capacity to wage war significantly degraded by the first two months of fighting and with limited (and declining) scope to reverse its losses, will have to deal with an opponent benefitting from a seemingly open-ended supply of billions of dollars' worth of weapons. That is not sustainable.

There is a second fundamental issue that Putin is unable to control. In aiming to weaken the west and turn the European strategic clock back, he has triggered the opposite outcome. Although differences inevitably remain, western states look much more united than they have at any point this century, and much more focused on strengthening military capacity in the face of Russian threats. It now looks possible that despite their long histories of neutrality, Finland and Sweden will join Nato. This would be a strategic disaster and a profound humiliation for Russia. Threats intended to prevent their accession seem to be having the reverse effect. Whatever short-term gains the Russian army may make by reducing cities like Mariupol to ruins, the medium- and long-term prospects look disastrous for Putin, and he appears powerless to do anything about it.

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The fundamental reasons why Russia's war against Ukraine will continue to fail

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Putin is powerless in the face of factors out of his control

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https://www.thelocal.se/20220425/sweden-and-finland-agree-on-joint-nato-application-next-month-reports/

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https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/interview-with-german-chancellor-olaf-scholz-there-cannot-be-a-nuclear-war-a-d9705006-23c9-4ecc-9268-ded40edf90f9

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Martin Knobbe, Melanie Amann, DER SPIEGEL

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Interview with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “There Cannot Be a Nuclear War”

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In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz discusses arms deliveries to Ukraine and growing calls for Berlin to supply heavy weapons. He also talks about why he has been hesitant to act in this crisis and addresses critical questions about his party’s policies toward Russia in t…

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https://twitter.com/mdmitri91/status/1517248387145469952?s=20&t=m-MiOUbLJUwXW9Q9DZZ-VQ

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I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f). 

Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f). 

Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f).

Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.
— Dmitri (@wartranslated) April 21, 2022

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f). 

Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f). 

Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f). 

Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.

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Russian teacher's rejection of Kremlin propaganda

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Russian teacher's rejection of Kremlin propaganda

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https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-teacher-rejected-kremlin-propaganda-then-paid-price-2022-04-18/

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ReutersApril 18, 20227:47 AM UTCUpdated 2 years ago

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Insight: Russian teacher rejected Kremlin propaganda, then paid the price

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Days after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Andrei Shestakov opened a set of files in a WhatsApp group chat for history teachers like himself in his town in east Russia.

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Online posts and war crimes documentation

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Online posts and war crimes documentation

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-61011855?at_custom3=%40BBCWalesNews&at_medium=custom7&at_campaign=64&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_custom2=twitter&at_custom4=9AE8C30A-BE2F-11EC-97D0-28443A982C1E

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A law professor said the use of bomb footage from Yemen during a mock war crimes trial showed how images shared online had "transformed" the documentation of atrocities.

One online investigator said there was "so much" useful and verifiable information in warzone footage.

But experts also said eyewitness accounts must not be overshadowed.

Cases against individuals who have committed war crimes in Ukraine could depend on social media posts about unlawful killings, wartime sexual violence and torture, said Prof Yvonne McDermott Rees, who runs the Open Source Research for Human Rights project at Swansea University.

She said material, known as open-source information, had "completely transformed our way of knowing about human rights violations".

"We're seeing increasingly the UN commissions of inquiry, fact-finding missions, even the International Criminal Court in the Hague, using this kind of evidence," she explained.

Prof McDermott Rees said open-source information had also been used in Swedish and Dutch courts to prosecute members of the so-called Islamic State returning from Syria.

Open-source information is information that is freely available online.

"A video of a beheading that's recorded or shared on YouTube or Facebook... is evidence," she said, adding that similar material was recently tested for use in a UK court.

In 2018, unverified footage of the aftermath of a deadly airstrike on the office of the presidency in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, was posted on Twitter.

The open-source investigative website, Bellingcat, used geolocation, satellite imagery and comparisons of hundreds of images to document the attack.

Their evidence was then presented in the mock trial of a fictitious Saudi pilot accused of war crimes.

"We wanted to see if one of these videos would be accepted as evidence in a common-law court in England and Wales," said Nick Waters, the justice accountability lead at Bellingcat.

He said the result was a methodology "we're now using to collect and verify incidents in Ukraine".

The problem, said Prof McDermott Rees, is that in the midst of war, bystanders are rarely thinking about a criminal trial.

"They're sharing it with the intention of showing the world what they've witnessed," she explained.

Bystanders are being encouraged to film landmarks and known buildings in their footage of war crimes and to use a mobile phone app developed by the International Bar Association, called eyeWitness.

"It does things like capturing the metadata, the time, the date, the place where this piece of content was recorded," she said.

"If you are recording this, as well as showing the injuries suffered, the weapon, see if you can include landmarks or buildings in the background."

She said Witness, a charity that uses videos to document human rights abuses, has published guidelines on how bystanders can gather images that will be acceptable for use in courts.

War crimes investigators are also fighting against the widely held view that online images cannot be trusted.

"That misses out on the fact that there is so much useful and verifiable information being posted on the Internet," Mr Waters said, adding that it is difficult to fake incidents online because real events come with a pattern of tweets from multiple sources.

"With the advent of social media, of smartphones, you effectively have an incredibly powerful information network where people are able to take pictures and take videos of the events," Mr Waters added.

Solicitor Dearbhla Minogue works with the human rights charity, Global Legal Action Network and Bellingcat,

She said viewing a video of something happening is a lot more compelling than hearing somebody talk about it.

"Think about... the death of George Floyd," said Ms Minogue.

"People actually saw that happening in real-time, including the jury, by watching what was filmed by a passer-by.

"That impacted the outcome of that trial because it was no longer one person's word against another person's."

The University of California has developed rules for the use of digital open-source material, called the Berkeley Protocol.

War in Ukraine: More coverage

The question facing war crimes prosecutors, Ms Minogue said, is how to reassure a judge that the video is not faked or manipulated for political reasons.

"With a video that just appears online purporting to be the aftermath of an airstrike, how do we know that it is what it says it is?" she said.

"That it's not staged or faked or these issues that are being raised by Russia in the context of these Bucha videos."

Ms Minogue said the normal way in domestic courts is to call the person who filmed it to give evidence in court.

"But in the cast of open-source information, where you don't have the creator, you can't ask them how they created it, whether they manipulated it [or] whether someone else could manipulate it.

"Using the information in the video and comparing it with other satellite imagery or other videos showing the same event, they can piece together all these bits of content and assess whether they think it real or fake."

Prof McDermott Rees warned that while open-source material can help, "it's important not to lose the human side in all of this".

She said: "In Yemen, this kind of evidence wasn't seen on its own, it was in close collaboration with accounts that were gathered by NGOs on the ground."

In Ukraine, she said evidence of rape had been documented in the testimony of survivors, "so it's really important that we don't underplay the importance of those human accounts".

"It's about showing that when international crimes are committed, they're not committed with impunity," Prof McDermott Rees said.

"So this work in documenting and gathering information... we have to make sure that's going to stand up in court and that we'll see justice.

"All of us are seeing this really disturbing content coming out of Bucha, other areas in Ukraine and I think universally we want to see justice done."

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Ukraine: Online posts 'transform' war crimes documentation

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Open-source evidence is increasingly used by the UN and war crimes investigators, says law professor.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/16/ukraine-invasion-teachers-schools?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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Yulia Kuryliuk, a teacher in a village near Lviv, woke on 24 February to find her country at war and gathered her sixth-grade class on Zoom. Two children tearfully asked when the fighting would end. She didn't have an answer, but she led her students through breathing exercises to manage anxiety and encouraged them to hug a relative, pet, or stuffed animal for comfort.

With Ukraine's education system upended by the war, teachers are helping provide stability for their students, along with other forms of emergency support such as evacuation and humanitarian aid. While the ministry of education and science declared a two-week break after Russia's full-scale invasion began, lessons have now resumed where possible, though they are frequently interrupted by the wail of air raid sirens.

According to Ukraine's education minister, Serhiy Shkarlet, as of 7 April, about 12,000 schools were holding classes online and 3.5 million students had returned to some form of learning.

Experts agree that education can play a positive role for children affected by war and "alleviate the psychological impact of armed conflict by offering routine and stability", according to the intergovernmental Safe Schools Declaration.

A few times a week, Kuryliuk meets her studentsin person at the school library, where they play board games. "It's a safe place to be with each other and to communicate," she said, particularly for kids who are cooped up inside with their parents. She has also been reading to her sixth-graders over Zoom in the evenings. Some log in from Poland, Italy and Greece, where they've sought refuge, to connect with familiar faces from back home.

As Russian forces advanced, Anastasiia Luzhetska fled the small community near Kyiv where she was teaching artto stay with her family in the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil. She's since marshaled a team of volunteers to organize games, arts and crafts, parties and other distractions for the many internally displaced children arriving in the area, creating spaces "where kids can feel like kids". When it's time to go, she said, the children and their parents "don't want me or my volunteers to leave".

A video posted on Facebook shows Luzhetska on a recent visit to a shelter for internally displaced people in Ternopil, where she scoots across the room on her knees, flapping her arms like wings. A group of children seated on the floor lean forward, shouting guesses at what kind of bird she is mimicking. "Swan!" a boy cries, and she walks over to give him a high five.

Still, the war is never far away. "One boy, Yegor, drew a house and after that, he said, 'Oh, I think I don't have a house any more, because they bombed it,'" Luzhetska said. "It's hard to hear."

Older students also feel a deep sense of uncertainty. Before 24 February, Vova, a 17-year-old from Borodyanka, a community of 13,000 north-west of Kyiv, was planning his high school graduation party and dreamed of studying journalism at university. Now, with his home and school in ruins after over a month of Russian occupation, he has no idea what his future holds.

When the attacks began, Vova, who was raised by his grandmother, sheltered with her in their basement, where they remained for a week with no electricity. He heard constant explosions as Russian soldiers fired rockets and columns of military vehicles rolled through his neighborhood, shooting at houses. Amid the chaos, he texted with his biology teacher, Viktoria Tymoshenko, who was determined to help him evacuate and arranged a way out.

Tymoshenko "rescued me from this hell", Vova said, speaking through an interpreter. They fled under shelling to a nearby village before moving further west, but they weren't able to get his elderly grandmother out of the Kyiv region. In March, she was killed by a Russian missile that hit the house where she was staying.

Tymoshenko is now living in a village with Vova and another student she helped evacuate. Though it's safer there, she is haunted by memories of their escape and worries about those who stayed behind. She messages students who have internet access to check in, but there are some she cannot reach, along with several of her colleagues.

Ukrainian forces liberated Borodyanka on 1 April, but authorities fear there may be hundreds of residents buried under bombed-out apartment buildings. Russian occupiers destroyed part of their school and then set up a base there, Tymoshenko said, ransacking the classrooms and covering the walls and chalkboards with graffiti: "Russia, our beloved country!!!"

Tymoshenko and her students go on walks in the village to try to take their minds off the war, but there is "a tension you always feel and it does not disappear", she said through an interpreter. Vova is grateful to his teachers for providing support, and despite everything he's been through, he is eager to return to class.

Tymoshenko, Luzhetska and Kuryliuk are fellows with Teach for Ukraine, an organization that recruits and trains Ukrainians to teach in underserved schools. It is part of the Teach for All network, which includes Teach for America and Teach First in the United Kingdom. Since Russia's invasion began, Teach for Ukraine has held workshops with psychologists to equip its teachers with techniques to support students during the war. Most are first-time educators and have been in constant contact, supporting and inspiring one another. "We are more than just colleagues, we are a family," said Kuryliuk. "They all remind me every minute that I just don't have the right to give up."

"Even under the shelling they kept thinking about school," Anastasiia Holovatiuk, another Teach for Ukraine fellow who was serving in nearby Makariv, said through an interpreter. The town was also recently liberated from Russian occupation. Her apartment was destroyed by Russian fire, but her students, who have continued to prepare for their university entrance exams, motivate her to keep going: "Watching these kids, you understand that it is necessary to continue and to move on."

Educators stepped up to hold the community together, Holovatiuk said, cooking food for Ukrainian soldiers, helping locate basic necessities for residents and checking in with their students. Still, she said, while Ukraine has become a global symbol of resilience, its citizens have paid a high price. When people think about the war, she wants them to know "20 students from the 11th grade from Makariv lost everything they had".

Holovatiuk's student Masha, 17, is one of them. After fleeing the fighting in Makariv, Masha, her parents and her brother stayed with an acquaintance near Lviv, but the small apartment was soon crammed with multiple internally displaced families and three cats. To free up space, Masha's parents decided she would travel alone to Poland, where they had found a family willing to take her in.

Masha packed a backpack and boarded a train so crowded people were sleeping on the floor; she tried to rest in the space between wagons. "It was like in the movies about the Holodomor," she saidthrough an interpreter, referring to the Stalin-engineered famine that killed four million Ukrainians in the 1930s. She wasn't afraid to go to Poland, but "you just feel as though everything around you is being destroyed", she said. "You go away from your parents, and when other people are with their families, it is not pleasant. You sit as if you were a puppy."

Now Masha attends classes with other Ukrainian teenagers, with a translator available to help. She's learning basic Polish and for the moment, there are no grades and no homework. Her new school is "a nice picture", with a swimming pool, large gym, "cool classrooms" and kind teachers, but these amenities can't eliminate the persistent sense of uncertainty.

Masha worries about her dad, who wants to return to Makariv to fix the electricity lines, and her insulin-dependent grandmother, whom she hasn't been able to reach for weeks. She feels guilty that she is safe in Poland, able to go outside and spend time with new friends while her family is sitting in a basement.
With translation by Alina Opriatova and Anna Doroshenko
Holovatiuk, who arrived in Makariv in August, was just getting to know her students when she had to flee and is furious that the war disrupted her plans to teach there for two years. She is currently staying in western Ukraine with her partner's family but plans to return to Makariv when it's safe and believes the school will play a central role as the community rebuilds.

"Each of us has nothing left but hope," she said. "You keep thinking that you will be back, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow, or in a week, but I will be back."

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The Ukrainians teaching in a war zone: bombed-out schools, evacuations and board games

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Educators have assisted in rescue efforts and sought to ease children's fears by creating spaces 'where kids can feel like kids'

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61118706

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Ukraine war: Germany’s conundrum over its ties with Russia

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Berlin now has some hard decisions to make following years of dialogue and co-operation with Moscow.

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https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/why-indias-refusal-to-condemn-putin-shouldnt-surprise-you-ukraine

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https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/russias-unintended-effect-on-europe

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In his recent book Project Europe, Kiran Klaus Patel describes the architecture of European integration as an edifice that reflects the continent's history, "with round and pointed arches, with some windows bricked up and new ones broken through elsewhere, with extensions and conversions, ruins and follies." Europeans built this edifice over the decades in fits and starts, often reluctantly, to meet different needs and challenges. It may look strange and fragile. But it is much stronger than it looks.

As we wonder how the war in Ukraine will change Europe, it is important to keep this picture in mind. Most probably, the war will not change Europe that much. Of course, as we have seen during previous crises, European policy priorities evolve over time. Right now, the EU is moving quickly to protect itself and its open structures-as well as making them more resilient to geopolitical threats. National defence budgets are rising, and the commitment to a common European defence policy is in fashion. A common energy policy is seriously taking off, industrial and agricultural policies are being adjusted and Ukrainian refugees are getting legal status in record time. But the way politics is done in Europe will not change. The EU's edifice, patched up many times and in many styles since its inception in the 1950s, will probably just end up with a newly fortified garden wall and another turret or two.

For sure, Vladimir Putin's brutal war is shaking Europeans to the core. European postwar integration, a reaction to two devastating world wars, was set in motion to make such conflict impossible on the continent. This was such a success that younger generations became convinced they had reached a level of civilisation "beyond" war. War was for "less civilised peoples" who had not learned to settle their differences amicably. If fighting broke out somewhere, Europe sent peace envoys and humanitarian aid.

During past decades, most European countries steadily reduced their defence budgets. Many applauded the transfer of American troops, stationed in Europe throughout the Cold War, to bases in Asia. Good riddance, they thought.

Some Europeans thought they could do without the EU altogether. That's another illusion shattered by Putin. Suddenly, war is back. Because, yes, most Europeans feel that Ukrainians are fighting their battle: Ukraine moved away from Russia, towards the west, and Putin's invasion was meant to put a stop to that. Suddenly, the essence of the EU-"no more war"-has moved centre stage again. In a way, Putin reminds us that European integration is still about war and peace: it is a deeply political, indeed civilisational project, and economic integration is just a means to that end.

For years, far-right populists have had a soft spot for Putin. Now, we see them scrambling to hide the fact that they had been helping him to undermine the EU. After Russia's invasion, the far-right National Rally (formally the National Front) in France hastily destroyed campaign brochures featuring a picture of its leader Marine Le Pen smiling with Putin in the Kremlin. Italian far-right leader of the League party, Matteo Salvini, who once proudly posed outside the Kremlin in a Putin t-shirt, travelled to the Ukrainian border to show how much he cared about refugees-until one Polish town mayor reminded him, on camera, of his recent sympathies for the Russian president.

European leaders are again ready to do "whatever it takes"

Putin's invasion heralds a change in Europe's geopolitical priorities. During the Cold War, western Europe was protected from Soviet communism by the US. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, an enlarged EU thrived in a highly interconnected world-its openness regulated by multilateral arrangements. This world order is now changing: leaders in Brussels and national capitals, unprepared for war, have been jolted into action.

With unusual speed and resolve-words rarely mentioned in the same sentence as "Europe"-those leaders are acting. They aim to punish Russia with the severest sanctions; to help Ukraine as much as possible without risking a (nuclear) clash between Russia and Nato; to adjust existing agricultural and energy policies to shield citizens from shortages and price hikes; to outlaw Russian propaganda channels Sputnik and RT (a surprisingly uncontroversial move given Europe's pride in its press freedom); to invoke a temporary protection mechanism for Ukrainian refugees that had never been used in the previous 20 years; and to increase work on European defence and security structures, mainly within the framework of Nato. That organisation, after having been declared "brain dead" by France's Emmanuel Macron in 2019, is once again seen as relevant and the protection it offers valuable. The UK is involved in European security decisions as a Nato member, mostly following US policies-not much more than that.

We have also seen a remarkable show of solidarity by ordinary Europeans with Ukrainians. Many are welcoming refugees into their homes, giving them language classes and organising food supply convoys to besieged areas. Before the war, populist parties in Europe were preparing to capitalise on resentment over energy price hikes. Now, citizens are voluntarily turning down the temperature at home, signalling both to Russia and their own governments that they are willing to pay the price to be on the right side of this ugly war. These contributions fit into the larger narrative of the fight by democratic states against a totalitarian system.

In the past two decades, the world has had to stomach several crises in a row-Islamist terrorism, the credit crunch and then the worst pandemic since Spanish flu. For Europe, it is hard to respond fast to challenges of such magnitude: instead of one government, Europe has 27. Those 27, with different political cultures, geographies, histories, taboos and interests, often disagree. That is why the EU was invented in the first place: to get countries to settle their differences at the negotiating table instead of on the battlefield.

Despite repeated predictions that a divided EU would collapse-predictions which, since Brexit, have become commonplace in the UK-the EU has overall performed rather well. During the financial crisis, it established European supervision of banks and other financial institutions-something member states had previously been unwilling to consider. It also set up a huge fund for Eurozone countries in need, accepting for the first time the obvious truth that a common currency requires political solidarity too. During the pandemic, the European Commission bought vaccines for the entire continent, meaning that after a bumpy start, all countries could be jabbed efficiently and for the same cost, nipping jealousies and political friction in the bud. Moreover, member states broke a huge taboo by allowing the Commission to issue common debt- "eurobonds"-to support the countries hit hardest by the virus. This move may be repeated soon, to shield member states against asymmetric shocks resulting from the Ukraine war. The euro is finally taking on a geopolitical dimension.

As the Dutch political philosopher Luuk van Middelaar wrote in his 2021 book Pandemonium, such crises, and the pandemic in particular, have raised awareness among its citizens that Europe is not just a market, but also a res publica. It is during such times of stress that "the Union is experiencing itself more than ever as a body politic, and a new public life is taking shape." The war in Ukraine reinforces that notion. European leaders are once again ready to do "whatever it takes," as the European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi (and now prime minister of Italy) famously said about the 2011 Eurozone crisis.

This does not mean, however, that the EU itself is going to change. The EU is a state-like structure with an executive (the Commission), a parliament representing citizens, a senate representing states (the Council), an independent court of justice and so on. There is, however, one major difference between this structure and that of the US or Germany. In Brussels, member states take most of the decisions. When European heads of state and government meet, as they have several times since Putin's invasion on 24th February, they discuss sanctions against Russia and other measures as national leaders, elected to act not in the interest of Europe but their own nations.

Whether it is hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving from Syria, European banks becoming insolvent or Europe's dependency on Russian oil and gas, the pattern is the same. A monumental problem appears, whereupon member states bring different solutions to the table; then they get stuck, and after several European Council meetings they arrive at the precipice and look down; seeing how deep it is, they return to the negotiating table and hammer out a compromise. What is good about this system is that there are rarely clear winners and losers. Everyone has a degree of input in the result. Every country "owns" the final decision, to some extent. This ownership guarantees that the 27-none of whom is totally satisfied-will support the outcome.

The new faultlines: Europe's dependency on Russian gas will become a point of focus for EU leaders. Image: Dmitry Lovetsky / AP / Shutterstock

The flip side is that the outcome does not always meet Europe's real needs. Often, leaders accept half-baked decisions because some countries refuse to go further. Often, the fire flares up again after a while, more fiercely, forcing member states to reconvene to correct their previous decision. Erik Jones, Daniel Kelemen and Sophie Meunier call this mechanism "failing forward." Looking back on recent crises, they write: "in an initial phase, lowest common denominator intergovernmental bargains led to the creation of incomplete institutions, which in turn sowed the seeds of future crises, which then propelled deeper integration through reformed but still incomplete institutions-thus setting the stage for the process to move integration forward." Any Brussels insider immediately recognises this description.

As the UK has discovered since Brexit, this kind of decisionmaking makes for surprisingly robust European policy: remembering the protracted, sometimes painful, efforts to reach agreement, governments are generally reluctant to re-open negotiations. The downside is that the intergovernmental character of the process smothers the democratic participation and accountability that Europe desperately needs. In federal systems like the EU, where the centre is far away from citizens, this greatly matters. European decisionmaking, practised behind the closed doors of the Council, is incomprehensible for most Europeans and occasionally for the Brussels in-crowd itself. Even the European Parliament is often sidelined.

In short, national leaders are frustrating European democracy by keeping so many things intergovernmental. Some older European policy areas, like trade and agriculture, are more integrated: the executive branch plays its role and the legislative approves the proposals by a majority vote. In both areas, the EU is able to take strong decisions in the common interest. But when it comes to areas like the European budget, or foreign and security policy-where member states want to keep control-the EU is hamstrung, because national governments resist handing power to Brussels. In such cases the EU has to beg member states for money to implement unforeseen decisions at crisis time-nowadays, almost all the time. What's more, a country like Hungary can-and currently often does-block any foreign policy statement the other 26 agree on. Europe can be as weak as its weakest link.

This is why the EU is such a strange political creature: partly vibrantly European, partly owned by member states: it is always in the process of being reviewed, tweaked or extended. Compare it to sausage-making, with some member states and interest groups adding their own ingredients to the mix, and others supplying the packaging or selling the end product on the market. The process is slightly different, depending on circumstances. There will always be sausage-but the taste keeps changing.

The war in Ukraine is a moment where the taste of the sausage changes. More than ever, Europe needs to provide security to its citizens. Europe's leaders, now used to crises, are becoming increasingly flexible and fast. In the early days of European integration, they met four times a year. Now, if need be, they meet four times a week. The other day, an EU official observed that with new sanctions on Russia, "Europe goes faster than the US," citing the standoff in Congress. He added: "who would have thought I'd ever say this?"

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War has prompted the EU to act with unusual speed and resolve. It will emerge stronger than ever

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1514200611843190789

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“Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine.”

Finland’s prime minister says a decision on whether to join Nato will happen “within weeks”, echoing her Swedish counterpart who also said Nato membership was being considered in Sweden in the near future.

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“Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine.”

Finland’s prime minister says a decision on whether to join Nato will happen “within weeks”, echoing her Swedish counterpart who also said Nato membership was being considered in Sweden in the near future. https://t.co/u32voM2fw3

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“Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine.”

Finland’s prime minister says a decision on whether to join Nato will happen “within weeks”, echoing her Swedish counterpart who also said Nato membership was being considered in Sweden in the near future. pic.twitter.com/u32voM2fw3
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) April 13, 2022

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“Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine.”

Finland’s prime minister says a decision on whether to join Nato will happen “within weeks”, echoing her Swedish counterpart who also said Nato membership was being considered in Sweden in the near future. https://t.co/u32voM2fw3

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“Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine.”

Finland’s prime minister says a decision on whether to join Nato will happen “within weeks”, echoing her Swedish counterpart who also said Nato membership was being considered in Sweden in the near future. https://t.co/u32voM2fw3

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“Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine.”

Finland’s prime minister says a decision on whether to join Nato will happen “within weeks”, echoing her Swedish counterpart who also said Nato membership was being considered in Sweden in the near future.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/04/zelensky-kyiv-russia-war-ukrainian-survival-interview/629570/

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In a wide-ranging conversation at his compound in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tells The Atlantic what Ukraine needs to survive-and describes the price it has paid.

Kyiv is halfway normal now. Burnt-out Russian tanks have been removed from the roads leading into the city, traffic lights work, the subway runs, oranges are available for purchase. A cheerful folk orchestra was performing for returning refugees at the main rail station earlier this week, on the day we arrived to meet Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.

The normality is deceiving. Although the Russians botched their opening campaign, they continue to bombard the capital and are now gathering in the east for a renewed attack on Ukraine. Zelensky has to prepare his country, and the world, for battles that could be deadlier than anything seen so far. The general in charge of the defense of Kyiv, Alexander Gruzevich, told us during a tour of the ravaged northwestern suburbs that he expects the Russians to try to return to the capital using intensified "scorched earth" tactics along the way: total destruction by ground artillery and air strikes, followed by the arrival of troops.

When we met Zelensky in Kyiv on Tuesday night, he told us the same thing: The optimism that many Americans and Europeans-and even some Ukrainians-are currently expressing is unjustified. If the Russians are not expelled from Ukraine's eastern provinces, Zelensky said, "they can return to the center of Ukraine and even to Kyiv. It is possible. Now is not yet the time of victory." Ukraine can win-and by "win," he means continue to exist as a sovereign, if permanently besieged, state-only if its allies in Washington and across Europe move with alacrity to sufficiently arm the country. "We have a very small window of opportunity," he said.
Anne Applebaum: Ukraine must win
It was late in the evening when we met Zelensky at his compound. The surrounding streets were barricaded and empty, the building itself almost entirely blacked out. Soldiers with flashlights led us through a maze of sandbagged corridors to a harshly lit, windowless room adorned only with Ukrainian flags. There was no formal protocol, no long wait, and we were not told to sit at the far end of an elongated table. Zelensky, the comedian who has become a global icon of freedom and bravery, entered the room without fanfare.

"Hi!" he said, brightly, and then proceeded to complain about his back. ("I have a back, and that's why I have some problems, but it's okay!") He thanked us for not filming the interview: Even though he's been a professional television performer for all of his adult life, it's a relief to occasionally go unfilmed.

On or off camera, Zelensky conducts himself with a deliberate lack of pretense. In a part of the world where leadership usually implies stiff posture and a pompous manner-and where signaling military authority requires, at a minimum, highly visible epaulets-he instead evokes sympathy and feelings of trust precisely because he sounds, in the words of a Ukrainian acquaintance, "like one of us." He is a kind of anti-Putin: Rather than telegraphing a cold-eyed, murderous superiority, he wants people to understand him as an Everyman, a middle-aged dad with a bad back.

We started the interview by reminding Zelensky, the Jewish president of a mostly Orthodox Christian and Catholic country, that his words were going to appear on Good Friday on the Western calendar and just before the first seder of Passover, a holiday that marks the liberation of an enslaved nation from an evil dictator.

"We have pharaohs in neighboring countries," Zelensky said, smiling. (The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, is, in the minds of many Ukrainians, a sort of deputy pharaoh to Putin.) But although Ukrainians face a formidable enemy, they are not longing for an exodus: "We're not going anywhere." Nor does Zelensky plan to spend 40 years wandering in the desert. "We already have 30 years of our independence. I would not want us to fight for our independence for another 10 years."

Russia's invasion has caused him to doubt whether it is still possible to associate religion with morality. "I do not understand when religious representatives of Russia"-here he meant the pro-Putin patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church-"say they are faithfully empowering soldiers to kill Ukrainians." Worse, "I cannot understand how a Christian country, the Russian Federation, with the largest Orthodox community in the world, will be killing people on these very days." During the Easter season, the Russians are planning "a great battle in Donbas," the Russian-occupied region in Ukraine's far east. "This is not Christian behavior at all, as I understand it. On Easter they will kill, and they will be killed."

As a result, many Ukrainians are going to spend the holy season under siege, hiding in basements. Others will not live to see the holiday at all. Just a few hours ago, early Friday morning, Russian bombs struck Kyiv again."Ukraine is definitely not in the mood for celebration," Zelensky said. "People usually pray for the future of their families and their children. I think that today they will pray for the present, just to save everyone."

Much of Zelensky's time is spent on the telephone, on Zoom, on Skype, answering the questions of presidents and prime ministers-often the same questions, repeated to a maddening degree. "I like new questions," he said. "It's not interesting to answer the questions you already heard." He is frustrated, for instance, by repeated requests for his wish list of weapons systems. "When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It's Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray."

He says he has no choice but to keep trying. "I come and say that I need this particular weapon. You have it and here it is; we know where it is stored. Can you give it to us? We can even fly our own cargo planes and pick it up; we can even send three planes per day. We need armored vehicles, for example. And not one per day. We need 200 to 300 per day. These aren't personal taxis, just for me; our soldiers need transport. Flights are available, the whole thing can be organized, we can do all the logistics."

Later that night, one of Zelensky's advisers texted us with a list of what, exactly, Ukraine needs to repel the invasion from the east:

Artillery, 155 millimeters

Artillery shells, 152 millimeters as many as possible

Multiple Launch Rocket Systems ("Grad", "Smerch", "Tornado" or M142 HIMARS)

Armored vehicles (armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, others)

Tanks (T-72 tanks or similar tanks from the USA or Germany)

Air defense systems (S-300, "BUK" or western equivalents)

Military aircraft-MUST HAVE-to deblock our cities and save millions of Ukrainians as well as millions of Europeans)

It's not that the various presidents and prime ministers who profess sympathy for the Ukrainian cause don't want to help, Zelensky said: "They are not against us. They just live in a different situation. As long as they have not lost their parents and children, they do not feel the way we feel." He makes the comparison to the conversations he has with the extraordinary defenders of Mariupol, the besieged port city where 21,000 civilians may have been killed so far. "For example, they say, 'We need help; we have four hours.' And even in Kyiv we don't understand what four hours are. In Washington for sure they can't understand. However, we are grateful to the U.S., because the planes with weapons are still coming."
David Frum: What Ukraine needs now
Zelensky's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, spoke with us later that evening, and also expressed his confusion about the pace at which the Biden administration moves. Washington is providing new weapons every day, and President Joe Biden just made an additional $800 million commitment to the defense of Ukraine. Yermak told us that he and Zelensky have strong relationships with many key American players-a break from the previous administration, which withdrew its ambassador just before Donald Trump's "perfect phone call" with Zelensky (the call that triggered the first impeachment) and never replaced her. Biden, Yermak said, is "a man who can be trusted, not just a politician." He had compliments for the secretaries of state and defense, and for leaders of Congress. And he praised Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan: "There is not a single minute when we did not speak specifically or in substance," he said.

So everybody is great, but the weapons don't come fast enough?

"Please tell me with whom else I should speak," Yermak said.

Zelensky understands that his task is not merely to issue weapons requests and express urgency, but also to overcome old stereotypes of Ukraine as corrupt and incompetent, as well as the Russian propaganda that denies Ukraine the right to statehood. He wants to present an image of Ukraine as a modern and liberal state, one unified by a civic, as opposed to a purely ethnic, nationalism.

"The U.S., Britain, the EU, and European countries have always been skeptical of our development, of our 'Europeanness,'" he said. But now "many of them have changed their view of Ukraine and see us as equals." He has no time at all for international institutions. When he is asked about the role of the United Nations in defending Ukraine, one of its member states, from Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, he rolls his eyes and grimaces tragicomically. "Good thing we don't have a video," he says. "Just describe with words what you see on my face." Both Zelensky and Yermak have been thinking and talking about what alternative international institutions might look like. Perhaps there should be a list of human-rights violations or war crimes that trigger automatic responses, Yermak suggested to us. Right now, the process of issuing statements, announcing sanctions, providing responses of any kind is too complex, too bureaucratic, and above all too slow.

But if Western leaders can frustrate Zelensky, Russians send him careering toward despair. He has, from time to time since the war began, spoken in Russian and addressed Russian audiences, something he is accustomed to doing: It's what he once did for a living. His film and television production company was one of the biggest in the region, with an office in Moscow and viewers across the former Soviet Union.

His productive relationship with Russia and Russians came to an end in 2014, when people he had known for years stopped talking to him: "I just did not expect that people, a lot of partners, acquaintances-I thought they were friends, but they were not-just stopped picking up the phone." Since then, many people he knows have changed, "become more brutal." As Russia has shut down alternatives to state media-closing independent newspapers, television channels, and radio stations-Zelensky has found that his old acquaintances retreated further. "Even that small share of intelligent people, which was there, began to live in this informational bubble," and he finds it very difficult to break through. "It's the North Korean virus. People are getting absolutely vertical integrated messages. People don't have any other way; they live in it." He is clear about the author of the messages: "Putin has invited people into this information bunker, so to speak, without their knowledge, and they live there. It is, as the Beatles sang, a yellow submarine."

Now, as Russian propaganda grows more baroque, he sometimes has trouble knowing how to process it. Perhaps that's why he often leans on pop-cultural analogies: "The way they say that we're eating people here, that we have killer pigeons, special biological weapons ... They make videos, create content, and show Ukrainian birds supposedly attacking their planes. Putin and Lukashenko-they make it sound like some kind of political Monty Python."

If Ukraine is to have a secure future, he says, the Russian information barrier will have to be broken. Russians don't just need access to facts; they need help understanding their own history, what they have done to their neighbors. At the moment, Zelensky says, "they are afraid to admit guilt." He compares them to "alcoholics [who] don't admit that they are alcoholic." If they want to recover, "they have to learn to accept the truth." Russians need leaders they choose, leaders they trust, "leaders who can then come in and say, 'Yes, we did that.' That's how it worked in Germany."

Throughout the conversation, Zelensky displayed his gifts for spontaneity, irony, and sarcasm. He didn't tell jokes, exactly, but he said that he cannot part with humor altogether. "I think that any normal person cannot survive without it. Without a sense of humor, as surgeons say, they would not be able to perform surgeries-to save lives and to lose people as well. They would simply lose their minds without humor."

The same is true now for Ukrainians: "We can see what a tragedy we have, and it's hard to live with it. But you have to live with it ... You can't be serious about what Russian politicians and Lukashenko say every day. If you take it seriously, you might as well go and hang yourself."

Is Putin afraid of humor?

"Very much so," Zelensky said. Humor, he explained, reveals deeper truths. The famous television series in which Zelensky starred, Servant of the People, mocked the pomposity of Ukrainian politicians, attacked corruption, and presented the little guy as a hero; many of his sketches were clever satires of political leaders and their attitudes. "Jesters were allowed to tell the truth in ancient kingdoms," he said, but Russia "fears the truth." Comedy remains "a powerful weapon" because it is accessible. "Complex mechanisms and political formulations are difficult for humans to grasp. But through humor, it's easy; it's a shortcut."
Read: The uncanny prescience of Servant of the People
Humor in Ukraine is now mainly of the darkest kind. At certain moments, Zelensky appeared stunned by the cruelty of it all. He tried to explain why he cannot feel-why most Ukrainians cannot feel-much sense of satisfaction in their underdog battlefield victories. Yes, they expelled the mighty Russian army from the northern part of the country. Yes, they killed, by their count, more than 19,000 Russian soldiers. Yes, they claim to have captured, destroyed, or damaged more than 600 tanks. Yes, they say they've sunk the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.Yes, they changed the image of their country, and their understanding of themselves. But the price has been colossal.

Too many Ukrainians, Zelensky told us, died not in battle, but "in the act of torture." Children got frostbite hiding in cellars; women were raped; elderly people died of starvation; pedestrians were shot down in the street. "How will these people be able to enjoy the victory?" he asked. "They will not be able to do to the Russian soldiers what [the Russians] did to their children or daughters ... so they do not feel this victory." Real victory, he said, will come only when the perpetrators are tried, convicted, and sentenced.

But when will that be? "How long do we have to wait? It's a long process, these courts, tribunals, international courts."

Abruptly, he made it personal. He has two children, he reminded us. "My daughter is almost 18. I don't want to imagine, but if something had happened to my daughter, I would not have been satisfied if the attack had been repelled and the soldiers had run away," he said. "I would have looked for these people and I would have found them. And then I would feel victory."

What would he have done when he found them?

"I don't know. Everything."

Then, as if remembering the role history has given him, as an avatar of democratic civilization confronting the cruelty of a lawless regime, he became reflective. "You realize that you want to be a member of a civilized society, you have to calm down, because the law decides everything."

But he feels, viscerally, what so many Ukrainians feel. "There will be no complete victory for people who lost their children, relatives, husbands, wives, parents. That's what I mean," he said. "They will not feel the victory, even when our territories are liberated."
Peter Pomerantsev contributed additional reporting.

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In a wide-ranging conversation at his compound in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tells The Atlantic what Ukraine needs to survive-and describes the price it has paid.

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Predictions at the start of the invasion of a quick Russian victory have been upended by the Ukrainians' willingness to fight, but the war is settling into a long struggle that could still endanger the wider world too.

Remember how it was in Kyiv after the Russians invaded: thousands cramming bitterly cold railway platforms, pushing and shoving to get any train heading away from the Russians. At the height of it, in the week that straddled the end of February and the beginning of March, 50,000 people were moving west from Kyiv station every single day. Rusty carriages that looked as if they had spent years pensioned off in some siding were hauled back into service so the railway company could lay on dozens of extra services.

Most of the passengers were women and children. Men stayed. The law stated they could not leave the country as Ukraine needed them to fight. I did not see any press gangs. Mostly, it was a nation of willing volunteers. Kyiv's population of around four million halved. Some of the women who didn't leave put on uniforms to fight. Outside a volunteer centre I met a woman called Katrine hugging Nikita, her 18-month-old son. It was a brief reunion as her unit rotated through Kyiv. Katrine was a sniper, who said she was ready to kill to give her son a future.

As I drove into Kyiv from the south a few days into the invasion, a Russian convoy 40 miles long was heading towards the city from the north and north-west, from Belarus, Russia's ally. Belarus is the sort of neighbour Russia's President Vladimir Putin wants. Its leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is happy to have Putin's patronage and to accept a role as Russia's client state. Even so Lukashenko did not send his troops into Ukraine, which many outsiders had assumed was part of the Kremlin's battle plan. Perhaps even Putin accepted that loyalty has its limits.

Everyone in Kyiv feared the worst. The city centre was mostly empty, except for armed and anxious men at checkpoints who were ready to believe that anyone behaving in a way they didn't like was a Russian saboteur. The rumble of explosions rolled in from the edge of the city. Everyone feared the all-powerful Russians were about to encircle Kyiv and attack.

On my first night I decided not to sleep in the hotel shelter, at the second basement level. It was overcrowded and airless, and the city centre had not been hit. It felt like a gamble. But as I write this, six weeks later, in the same hotel room on the fourth floor, Kyiv's beautiful and historic centre has still not been attacked, even though it is well within range of Russia's missiles and air force.

In six weeks, so much has changed. The long convoy got bogged down and destroyed. The Russians retreated. The war is far from over, but the Ukrainians won the battle of Kyiv. The first battle. There could be another.

Ukrainian willingness to fight and die upended every prediction of a swift Russian victory. At a military funeral of a soldier killed stopping the Russian advance, his mother and sister sobbed, clutching his portrait. Volleys were fired over his coffin, and hundreds of his comrades lined up to sing their national anthem and roar patriotic slogans.

They looked like who they were, volunteers with ages that ran from late teens to late middle age, wearing a range of uniforms and carrying a variety of weapons. Ukraine also has much more professional-looking, highly trained soldiers.

Together with clever leadership, sharp tactics and Nato weapons they have fought so well that the world's perception of their country has changed. At a photo opportunity at the Nato meeting in Brussels this week foreign ministers of some of the world's most powerful democracies were jostling to get close to the guest of honour, their Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba. Differences are emerging in the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Union about how to increase the pressure on Russia, but they all wanted a little Ukrainian stardust.

In war, leadership has always been critical, and in modern war the messages on the media battlefield are more significant than ever. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is winning that part of the war. Instead of heading for safer ground he stayed, swapping suits for khaki t-shirts.

It is ironic that one of Putin's arguments for Ukraine to be in Russia's orbit is that it is not a proper country. His own actions, along with Zelensky's well-judged messages as he leads a remarkable feat of mobilisation, are sharpening the national identity of Ukrainians.

Another factor for Ukrainian success is that humans caught up in wars adapt fast, once the shock wears off. In a trendy part of Kyiv hipster craft makers repurposed their workshop to turn out steel barriers with vicious spikes to rip tyres. In the basement of a volunteer depot young women tore up sheets to make fuses for Molotov cocktails. The air in the unventilated space was heavy with petrol vapour. Checkpoints in Kyiv went from jumpy armed men with barriers made of a few tyres - to well-fortified sandbagged strongpoints.

Ukrainian defiance has also been a key factor. Thousands of volunteers signed up to learn how to handle weapons and fight. Among them were two young men we've followed ever since, university students Dmytro Kisilenko, aged 18, and his friend Maksym Lutsyk, who's 19. When they signed up to fight at the beginning of March the volunteers of their age looked like young guys off to a festival. Now they have seen action on the front line, and like every other Ukrainian have had their view of the world and the lives they will lead in it shaken.

The two young soldiers, Maksym and Dmytro, have been in Kyiv this week buying the new gear they'll need when they're rotated into the battles of the east in a few days. For Maksym, like all Ukrainians, this is the fight of their lives.

"We are not fighting here only for our country's life, we are fighting for the life of the whole civilised world because the biggest goal for us is to defend our freedoms and rights in Europe, in and out of our country. Every one of us understands that there will not be freedom in the whole world while Russia occupies our territories."

Weeks as a frontline soldier have changed Dmytro. "Human life matters, your relatives or friends. Your country matters, first of all... I become more systematic and unfortunately more ruthless because of the latest news and what I have already been through. Ruthless to Russian soldiers, ruthless to all the situations. I've become more like a soldier."

Russia suffered a serious defeat around Kyiv and had to pull back. But it has not lost the war, and is grinding out territorial gains in the east and south. Since they left the Kyiv Oblast the damage they have done is clearer than ever.

The damage to property is extensive. I have seen terrible devastation in the centres of towns like Irpin and Borodyanka. Far more serious, and alarming, is what has been done to civilians and other non-combatants. I have seen dead bodies, some definitely civilians, left where they were killed by the Russians. The evidence that war crimes were perpetrated by Russian troops is becoming overwhelming. Accusations have also been levelled at Ukrainian forces, after a video emerged that appeared to show their soldiers killing wounded Russians who were lying helpless on the ground.

This war is a world crisis not just because the Russians have driven a tank through international law, or for what they have done to civilians, but because it has brought the biggest military powers with nuclear weapons closer to a potential confrontation than at any time since the Cold War that ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, culminating in 1991.

The 21st Century now has its own Cold War, with the same risks attached if it gets hot. The head of defence intelligence in Ukraine, Maj Gen Kyrylo Budanov, told me that the risks of not confronting Putin's Russia are much worse for Nato than risking escalation by standing up to him and sending Ukraine the much more lethal arsenal it wants.

"This is a war of aggression in the heart of Europe that completely destroys existing political and military security systems. If the world swallows Putin's aggression and offers no radical solution, it will be repeated over and over again," he said.

Kyiv is much calmer now than in the icy first days of the invasion. It's very different in the east, where soldiers are gathering, and thousands of civilians are leaving everything they've ever known. The invasion of Ukraine took many by surprise. But the crisis between Russia and the West was brewing for years. Many, not just politicians, refused to recognise the signs.

A collective amnesia settled over the wars of former Yugoslavia of the 1990s. Europe, it was assumed, was too wise, rich and self-interested to still be that old continent where blood could be spilled to change borders and topple governments. Now we know that view was complacent and wrong. Western leaders are having to think very hard and very quickly about how to readjust to this new era's challenges and dangers.

This is going to be a long, attritional struggle. The stakes are high. If it escalates into a fight to the finish between Putin's presidency and Ukraine's independence the wider world will face even worse danger.

War in Ukraine: More coverage

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Ukraine: Six weeks of devastation and defiance as world grapples with the crisis

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The BBC's Jeremy Bowen takes stock of the war and its significance for the world.

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The Servant to the People - President Zelenskyy - meets EU Commission President @vonderleyen

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The Servant to the People - President Zelenskyy - meets EU Commission President @vonderleyen

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The Servant to the People - President Zelenskyy - meets EU Commission President @vonderleyen

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The Servant to the People - President Zelenskyy - meets EU Commission President @vonderleyen

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The Servant to the People - President Zelenskyy - meets EU Commission President @vonderleyen

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The Servant to the People - President Zelenskyy - meets EU Commission President @vonderleyen

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Ukraine is our past and our future - Time

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Ukraine is our past and our future - Time

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As the horrors in Ukraine are revealed to the world, the echoes with the horrors of World War Two are impossible to ignore-but also the history of human rights.

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Fergal Keane on the international community response

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Fergal Keane on the international community response

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Accounts of atrocities committed by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians are emerging daily. There are calls for President Putin and others to be prosecuted for war crimes - but how likely is that to happen? Given its past record, and failure to stop this war which has seen more than 11 million people flee their homes, the BBC's Fergal Keane considers whether the international community will be able to unite.

Even when the spring sunlight fills the little park, it remains an unsettling place. The Jewish world commemorated at Arsenalna Square in central Lviv was destroyed by genocide. The people who worshipped at the Golden Rose synagogue were either exiled or killed. There is no escape from history here. It is present in the memorial stones for the dead and in the void left by a murdered generation.

In western Ukraine's biggest city, the past collides with the present in other ways too. You can hear it in the rattle of today's refugee suitcases being pulled across the same cobblestoned streets where, in the high summer of 1941, the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators chased Jews to their deaths. The photos of those days are some of the most terrible of the Holocaust - women being stripped and beaten before jeering mobs, eyes wide in horror, mouths frozen in mid-scream.

We are not in the middle of a new world war, or a Holocaust, but the lessons for the world of that terrible conflict - and the promises made in its aftermath - have a relevance we cannot ignore today.

It was a reality framed in scathing terms by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he addressed the Security Council of the United Nations this week. He reminded his audience that the UN had been established in 1945 to guarantee peace after the horrors of World War Two.

Listing allegations of war crimes by Russian troops in Ukraine - summary killings, torture, rape - he called for the council to order a war crimes investigation.

"Are you ready to close the UN?" he asked. "Do you think that the time of international law is gone? If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately."

The threat to the peace of Europe is greater now than at any time since the end of the Cold War in 1989. For nearly a month, I watched families flee westward from Lviv in trains, cars and buses as Russia waged war on their homeland. I listened to survivors from the besieged port of Mariupol talk of a hell on earth with bodies lying in the streets and the cityscape they knew, of shops, restaurants, the Hurov Park with its spectacular fountains, reduced to rubble.

Less than a year ago, I walked through the Hurov with Lyubov Vasilievna and Dominic, her two-year-old grandson. I have known Lyubov for eight years, since the day she was wounded and two other grandchildren - Nikita, 10, and Karolina, six - were killed at the war's beginning in 2014 after Russian-backed forces staged a rebellion in eastern Ukraine against the Kyiv government.

The three of them had been out walking when a shell exploded. In hospital, Lyubov told me she blamed herself for their deaths. "I don't know how I am going to survive this. The images of them are always in front of my eyes," she said.

So, it was heartening to meet her again last year, in a time of relative peace, with a new grandchild. "I am smiling because I live for him now," she told me. "I have someone to take care of. He brings me joy."

Now, as Mariupol is being destroyed, I do not know what has happened to Lyubov and Dominic. I have called and called, but her phone no longer rings.

Every day at Lviv railway station I watched for their faces in the crowds of refugees, but there was no sign. Lyubov and Dominic, and the dead Nikita and Karolina, are among many millions failed by history's greatest broken promise. It was made in the aftermath of World War Two and is firmly rooted in the story of Lviv.

In the far western corner of Ukraine, Lviv is a city to remind us of the worst of mankind, but also of what can be done to protect us from the consequences of aggression.

Walk five minutes west from the ruins of the synagogue and you reach a squat two-storey building that was the cradle of the world's most important human rights legislation - the very principles under which President Putin and his armies might yet face judgement.

The law faculty of the University of Lviv was the alma mater of Raphael Lemkin who invented the word genocide to describe the attempt to exterminate "in whole or in part" a national, religious or racial group. Aghast at the Nazi Holocaust Lemkin coined the term in 1944 and, four years later, succeeded in having the UN define genocide as a crime under international law.

His fellow alumnus, Hersch Lauterpacht, was instrumental in bringing about the legal concept of crimes against humanity which was first used to prosecute Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46.

Both men were Jewish and studied in Lviv in the early decades of the 20th Century. Lviv was called Lemberg then and was a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, home to a cosmopolitan mix of Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and other nationalities from across the empire.

World War One destroyed Austria-Hungary and ushered in an age of instability as Poles, Ukrainians, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany fought for control of the city. The majority of the remaining Jewish population was wiped out in the Holocaust, among them the relatives of Lemkin and Lauterpacht.

At the end of World War Two, Lviv came under the rule of the Soviet Union, where it remained until the fall of communism and the creation of an independent Ukraine in 1991.

Although they differed in important respects - Lemkin argued in favour of group protections, Lauterpacht focused on individual rights - their legacies were enshrined in the 1945 UN Charter, which promised to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which, twice in our lifetimes, has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person..."

Now, Lviv finds itself once more at the centre of a great historical trauma.

I think of that phrase - "the dignity and worth of the human person" - after watching people fight to board trains in the early days of the evacuation of Ukraine. I remember it when I see the images of executed civilians in Bucha, and I wonder what has happened to the dream of the lawyers from Lviv?

We are living in an age where millions are displaced by war. I have seen them jumping from smugglers' boats into the shallows on a Greek beach, shouting with joy that "God is Great". In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Yemen, I have heard civilian victims describe cruel military campaigns.

According to the most recent UN statistics - gathered before the Russian invasion of Ukraine - 84 million people are now forcibly displaced worldwide. The figures reflect an international order in crisis with the UN unable to prevent the murder and abuse of civilians in many regions of the world.

To understand how we have come to this point it is necessary to go back a little to one of the most terrible crimes of our modern era.

It all happened in Rwanda - genocide, crimes against humanity and mass rape as a weapon of war. In late spring of 1994, I was sent to the small, central African country that had become a vast open-air cemetery. The dead flowed down rivers. They lay piled up in churches. The smell of decomposing bodies hung over abandoned villages.

In the space of 100 days, up to 800,000 people are estimated to have been murdered in the Rwandan genocide. It also sparked one of the worst refugee crises in living memory.

Rwanda happened because a hate-filled elite decided that the solution to the country's problems was to exterminate the Tutsi ethnic minority.

Two weeks into the genocide, with tens of thousands already slaughtered, the UN Security Council voted to reduce the peacekeeping force from over 2,000 members to 270. This came after 10 Belgian peacekeepers were attacked and killed by the Rwandan army. The great powers abandoned Rwanda to its fate.

Unlike Ukraine now, Rwanda was a country with little geo-political importance. The US and other powers on the Security Council refused until it was too late to use the word coined by the Lviv lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, because describing the slaughter as "genocide" might have created a responsibility to intervene and protect the victims under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention.

I cannot ever forget the sight of Tutsi refugees huddled a few yards from me outside a municipal office in Butare - a city in southern Rwanda - surrounded by extremist militia and soldiers, and wondering if they would live or die. Many were ultimately slaughtered.

In July 1995, one year after the Rwandan genocide ended, Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladic murdered 8,000 Muslim men and boys when they overran the town of Srebrenica. It happened under the eyes of Dutch UN peacekeepers.

The two genocides of the 1990s - in central Africa and the former Yugoslavia - showed what happened when the Security Council was challenged to live up to words of the UN charter. The promise of 1945 was frustrated by lack of political will and division.

But those terrible years of the 1990s would come to have a profound effect on international law. If there was a failure to prevent genocide it could at least be punished. Tribunals were set up to try the accused of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. There were also courts to try those accused of responsibility for mass killings in Cambodia and Sierra Leone.

There were UN military operations to stop the killing of civilians in Sierra Leone and Nato forces intervened to end the expulsion of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Although, the latter provoked an ominous confrontation with Russia, an ally of Serbia and already wary of Nato encroachment to the east.

The world moved to establish a permanent court to try cases of genocide and crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court - the ICC - was set up in 1998 to try the most serious cases of human rights abuses. It is not part of the UN but was created by UN members and works closely with the organisation.

In 2009, in a landmark moment, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, became the first sitting head of state to be indicted for genocide by the ICC, for the killing of civilians in Darfur.

Just as at the end of WW2, the idea was that prosecutions might not only provide accountability but would make future war leaders think twice before abusing the rights of civilians.

But there was a problem from day one, and it is one that shadows the current debate about war crimes in Ukraine.

Neither the US, China or Russia ratified the Rome Statute - the treaty that established the court. This means the three biggest military powers are not subject to ICC jurisdiction.

The only way they could be is if the Security Council votes to refer them. But as each nation has a veto, that is never going to happen. It means the ICC would be powerless if it wanted to indict President Putin and his senior generals for the crime of waging an aggressive war against Ukraine. Aggression was described by the Nuremberg tribunal after WW2 as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole".

It is worth remembering what happened when the court tried to investigate alleged war crimes by all the parties in Afghanistan. The Trump administration went as far as placing sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the ICC to signal its opposition to any judicial pursuit of US forces.

And - in China's autonomous region of Xinjiang - an attempt to investigate Chinese officials for the alleged genocide against the Uyghurs failed because China was not an ICC member.

A lopsided international order - one rule for the weak, one rule for the strong - is ultimately not a sustainable legal order

Philippe Sands QC
International lawyer and author

The war crimes lawyer, Prof Philippe Sands QC, believes the attitude of the superpowers creates "lopsided justice" where the only prosecutions are those involving less powerful nations.

"One rule for the weak, one rule for the strong - is ultimately not a sustainable legal order or even really a legal order," he says.

Prof Sands' grandfather came from Lviv, and his great-grandmother was murdered by the Nazis. He is among those looking at the possibility of setting up a special international tribunal to indict the Russian president and his commanders.

But the legal framework is not the only issue that hangs over the current debate about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even some supporters of prosecuting President Putin acknowledge a charge of double standards against the US and the UK.

Prof Sands points out that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by a US-led coalition polarised world opinion. The then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan would later call the invasion illegal. "You reap what you sow - and what you sow includes your own double standards," he says.

The British and American governments insisted the invasion was legal.

But President Putin used the Iraq example as a rhetorical stick to beat the US and UK when he announced his decision to attack Ukraine, declaring that there was a "special place" for the invasion of Iraq - which had been carried out "without any legal grounds".

In reality, there has never been a golden age of post-war peace guided by international diplomacy. The big powers have not fought an apocalyptic nuclear war but millions have died in wars big and small - in Korea, Algeria, Congo, Cambodia, Vietnam, Algeria, Indonesia, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and many other battlegrounds. Some of those wars have been - at least partly - proxy conflicts between superpowers. More than 4,000 UN peacekeepers have lost their lives in different conflict zones trying to protect civilians and act as a buffer between warring parties.

Rather than being a place where the great powers consistently work for peace, the Security Council, too often, became a forum of superpower rivalry. Ukraine is just the latest dangerous example.

On 26 February, two days after the Russian invasion began, the Security Council met to discuss a resolution calling on Moscow to stop its attack and withdraw all troops. Russia vetoed that move for peace.

In a singularly ominous moment, President Putin implicitly threatened to use nuclear weapons to deter any intervention by Nato. Whether he intends to deploy nukes or not, the simple issuing of such a threat reflects the perilous state of human affairs in the 21st Century.

The current UN Secretary General, António Guterres, sounded almost forlorn when he declared: "We must never give up. We must give peace another chance." But even some of those critical of the Security Council, argue that this can also be a moment of possibility - if, for example, a special tribunal can be set up to investigate a superpower like Russia for its actions.

"I am partly fearful but also partly optimistic," says Prof Sands. "This period could destroy the [legal] order created by the 1945 moment [the defeat of Nazism] or it might develop and strengthen it. I am inclined to the latter view. It's a long game. Two steps forward and one back, then another forward. We just have to stick to a principled approach."

There have also been important signs of change at the UN in recent days. The General Assembly - the body made up of all 193 UN members - condemned the invasion and voted to remove Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. China voted against the move and India abstained - between them they represent a third of the world's population. And while the decision doesn't affect what the Security Council does or does not do, the moral signal from more than two thirds of UN members was clear.

One former UN official with experience of genocide and war crimes told me that it was a mistake to see the present world order solely through the lens of big power politics. Prof Mukesh Kapila of the University of Manchester is a former UN representative in Sudan and was instrumental in the campaign to have the killings in Darfur recognised as genocide.

"In the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, there is a lot of activity. It is not all going on the side of the bad guys," he says. He points to the case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice - a UN court established in 1945 where one state can bring action against another. Myanmar is being pursued by the small west African nation of The Gambia for alleged persecution of the Rohingya Muslims.

Prof Kapila also cites the development in recent years of "universal jurisdiction" - where individual nations can try alleged war criminals from other countries if they arrest them on their soil. The successful German prosecution last January of a Syrian officer for murder, torture and sexual assault is recent example.

If the Security Council is deadlocked, then why not create a mechanism where one member can take it to a bigger jury - the General Assembly

Prof Mukesh Kapila
Former UN representative in Sudan

Calls for reform of the UN Security Council are not new. It has long been criticised for representing the imperial and superpower realities that prevailed at the end of WW2. There is no permanent representation for Africa, the Indian sub-continent or Latin America.

Expanding the UN's top body would not at a stroke remove the potential for great power rivalry. But Prof Kapila suggests one way around the stalemates created by veto powers would be to strengthen the role of the General Assembly - the body that has just acted against Russia.

"If the Security Council is deadlocked, then why not create a mechanism where one member can take it to a bigger jury - the General Assembly. It is more democratic, and it also increases pressure on the Security Council to reach an agreement."

There seems little prospect at the moment of the "Permanent Five" - China, France, Russia, the UK and US - agreeing to dilute their influence. "Turkeys don't vote for Christmas," as Prof Kapila puts it. But he argues that civil society movements have established powerful pressure for progress in recent years - in the area of climate change, for example. "Things which seem improbable now can become real."

At the heart of the promise made in the UN Charter was the idea that countries must work together to avoid war. If armed conflict did break out they would send forces to try to keep the peace and the world would ensure abuses were prosecuted - both for the sake of justice and to deter future crimes.

It is possible - no more than that - that the crisis in Ukraine becomes one of those moments where the high stakes of conflict create a genuine moment of international reflection and generate a momentum for change. Before she stepped down from power, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel wistfully reflected on a world where unilateral action by states threatened peace and stability.

Mrs Merkel, who grew up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the looming shadow of superpower rivalry, warned of the dangers of forgetting - especially as those with lived experience of WW2 died away.

"We have to take care now not to enter a historical phase in which important lessons from history fade away. We have to remind ourselves that the multilateral world order was created as a lesson from the Second World War."

Remember where we have come from, was the message, and act so that we are not dragged backwards.

War in Ukraine: More coverage

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Ukraine, the UN and history's greatest broken promise

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If the past is anything to go by, the world will struggle to unite for Ukraine - says Fergal Keane.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/09/understanding-vladimir-putin-the-man-who-fooled-the-world?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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Vladimir Putin was annoyed - or maybe just bored. The Russian leader had been patiently fielding questions from a small group of international journalists in the restaurant of a modest hotel in Davos. Then one of the queries seemed to irritate him. He stared back at the questioner, an American, and said slowly, through an interpreter: "I'll answer that question in a minute. But first let me ask you about the extraordinary ring you have on your finger."

All heads in the room swivelled. "Why is the stone so large?" Putin continued. A few of the audience began to giggle and the journalist looked uncomfortable. Putin took on a tone of mock sympathy and continued: "You surely don't mind me asking, because you wouldn't be wearing something like that unless you were trying to draw attention to yourself?" There was more laughter. By now, the original question had been forgotten. It was a masterclass in distraction and bullying.

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The year was 2009, and Putin had already been in power for almost a decade. But this was my first encounter with him in the flesh, during his visit to the World Economic Forum. Putin's ability to radiate menace, without raising his voice, was striking. But so was the laughter of his audience. Despite the violence of his Russian government - as demonstrated in Chechnya and Georgia - western opinion-formers were still inclined to treat him as a pantomime villain.

I was reminded of this just before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In a televised meeting at the Kremlin with his closest advisers, Putin toyed with Sergei Naryshkin, the head of his foreign intelligence service - making the feared securocrat look like a stuttering fool. The pleasure he took in humiliating somebody in front of an audience was once again on display. But this time, nobody was laughing. Putin was about to plunge Europe into its biggest land war since 1945. Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion on 24 February. Within a month, more than 10 million Ukrainians had fled their homes, thousands of troops and civilians had been killed and the coastal city of Mariupol had been destroyed.

Even though western intelligence services had warned for months that Russia was poised to attack, many experienced Putin-watchers, both in Russia and the west, refused to believe it. After more than 20 years of his leadership, they felt that they understood Putin. He was ruthless and violent, no doubt, but he was also believed to be rational, calculating and committed to Russia's integration into the world economy. Few believed he was capable of such a reckless gamble.

Looking back, however, it is clear that the outside world has consistently misread him. From the moment he took power, outsiders too often saw what they wanted and played down the darkest sides of Putinism.

'Speak plainly!': Putin has tense exchange with his spy chief - video

In fact, the outside world's indulgence of Putin went much further than simply turning a blind eye to his excesses. For a rising generation of strongman leaders and cultural conservatives outside Russia, Putin became something of a hero and a role model. As his admirers saw it, the Russian leader had inherited a country humiliated by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Through strength and cunning, he had restored its status and global power, and even regained some of the territory lost when the USSR broke up. And he had delighted nationalists and populists the world over by successfully defying self-righteous American liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, was not simply spouting propaganda when he said in 2018: "There's a demand in the world for special, sovereign leaders, for decisive ones ... Putin's Russia was the starting point."

Xi Jinping admires Putin's strongman leadership style

The Putin fanclub has had numerous members in the west over the years. Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's close adviser and lawyer, expressed admiration for Putin's annexation of Crimea, remarking: "He makes a decision and he executes it, quickly. That's what you call a leader." Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip and the Brexit party, and a friend of Donald Trump, once named Putin the world leader he most admired, adding: "The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically." Matteo Salvini, the leader of the populist right Northern League party and a former deputy prime minister of Italy, flaunted his admiration for the Russian leader by being photographed in a Putin T-shirt in Red Square. Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, has said, " My favourite hero is Putin."

Most important of all, Xi Jinping is also a confirmed admirer. A week after being appointed as president of China in early 2013, Xi made his first state visit overseas - choosing to visit Putin in Moscow. On 4 February 2022, just 20 days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin met Xi in Beijing for their 38th summit meeting. Shortly afterwards, Russia and China announced a "no limits" partnership. As the joint Russian-Chinese statement made clear, the two leaders are united in their hostility to American global power and to the pro-democracy " colour revolutions " they accuse Washington of stirring up around the world - from Ukraine to Hong Kong. Putin and Xi are both strongman rulers who have centralised power around themselves and encouraged a cult of personality. They are, as Alexander Gabuev, a Russian academic, puts it, "the tsar and the emperor". Whether this partnership of strongmen will survive the Russian invasion of Ukraine is now one of the most important questions in international politics.

Putin was sworn into office as president of Russia on 31 December 1999. But at first it was not obvious that he would last very long in the job, let alone that he would emerge as the most aggressive challenger to the western liberal order and the pioneer of a new model of authoritarian leadership. As the chaotic Yeltsin era of the 1990s drew to a close, Putin's ascent to the top job was eased by his former colleagues in the KGB. But he also had the approval of Russia's richest and most powerful people, the oligarchs, who saw him as a capable administrator and "safe pair of hands" who would not threaten established interests.

Viewed from the west, Putin looked relatively reassuring. In his first televised speech from the Kremlin, given on New Year's Eve 1999, just a few hours after taking over from Yeltsin, Putin promised to "protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, ownership rights, these fundamental elements of a civilised society". In March 2000, he won his first presidential election and proudly asserted: "We have proved that Russia is becoming a modern democratic state." When Bill Clinton met Putin in the Kremlin for the first time, in June 2000, he declared his Russian counterpart "fully capable of building a prosperous, strong Russia, while preserving freedom and pluralism and the rule of law".

In his first year in office, he moved to assert the authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his personal position

Yet while Putin may initially have found it convenient to use the rhetoric of liberal democracy, his early actions as president told a different story. In his first year in office, he moved immediately to rein in independent sources of power, to assert the central authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his own personal position - all actions that were to become hallmarks of Putinism. The escalation of the war in Chechnya made Putin seem like a nationalist hero, standing up for Russian interests and protecting the ordinary citizen from terrorism. In an early move that alarmed liberals, the new president reinstated the old Soviet national anthem. His promises to protect media freedom turned out to be empty: Russia's few independent television networks were brought under government control.

As Putin established himself in office, the image-makers got to work crafting a strongman persona for him. Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Putin's first spin doctors, later described him as a "quick learner" and a "talented actor". Key images were placed in the Russian media and around the world: Putin on horseback, Putin practising judo, Putin arm-wrestling or strolling bare-chested by a river in Siberia. These photographs attracted mockery from intellectuals and cynics. But the president's handlers were clear-eyed. As Pavlovsky later told the Washington Post, the goal was to ensure that "Putin corresponds ideally to the Hollywood image of a saviour-hero".

In any case, Russians were more than ready for a strongman to ride to their rescue. The collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 had allowed for the emergence of democracy and freedom of speech. But as the economy atrophied and then fell apart, many experienced a severe drop in living standards and personal security. By 1999, life expectancy for Russian men had fallen by three and a half years to below 60. A UN report attributed this to a "rise in self-destructive behaviour", which it linked to "rising poverty rates, unemployment and financial insecurity".Under those circumstances, a decisive leader who promised to turn back the clock had real appeal.

Long before Trump promised to "make America great again", Putin was promising to bring back the stability and pride of the Soviet era to those Russians who had lost out in the 1990s. But his nostalgia was not restricted to the social cohesion of Soviet times. Putin also yearned to restore some of the USSR's lost international clout. In a speech in 2005, Putin labelled the collapse of the Soviet Union " the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century". As the years have passed, he has become increasingly preoccupied by Russian history. In the summer of 2021, he published a long essay entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians - which, even at the time, some saw as a manifesto for invasion. Delving through centuries of history, Putin attempted to prove that Ukraine was an artificial state and that "Russia was robbed, indeed" when Ukraine gained independence in 1991.

Fyodor Lukyanov, an academic who is close to the Russian leader, told me in 2019 that one of Putin's enduring fears was the loss of Russia's status as one of the world's great powers for the first time in centuries. His resentment at what he regarded as American slights and betrayals set Putin on a collision course with the west. A landmark moment came with a speech he gave at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.

The Russian president had put the west on notice that he intended to fight back against the US-led world order

That speech was a direct challenge to the west and an expression of cold fury. He accused the US of an "almost uncontained hyper use of force - military force - in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts". The Putin of 2000, who had expressed pride at Russia's transformation into a modern democracy, had given way to a man who denounced western talk of freedom and democracy as a hypocritical front for power politics.

The Munich speech was not just an angry reflection on the past. It also pointed the way to the future. The Russian president had put the west on notice that he intended to fight back against the US-led world order. It foreshadowed a lot of what was to come: Russia's military intervention in Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014, its dispatch of troops to Syria in 2015, its meddling in the US presidential election of 2016. All of these actions burnished Putin's reputation as a nationalist and a strong leader. They also made him an icon for strongmen throughout the world who rejected western leadership and the "liberal international order".

This indictment of the west goes back to the 1990s. It is argued repeatedly in Moscow that the expansion of Nato to take in countries of the former Soviet empire (including Poland and the Baltic states) was a direct contradiction of promises made after the end of the cold war. Nato's intervention in the Kosovo war of 1998‑9 added to the list of grievances proving, in the Kremlin's eyes, both that Nato is an aggressor and that western talk of respecting sovereignty and state borders was nothing but hypocrisy. Russians were not reassured by the western riposte that Nato was acting in response to ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses by Serbia. As one liberal Russian politician put it to me in 2008, in a moment of frankness: "We know we have committed human rights abuses in Chechnya. If Nato can bomb Belgrade for that, why could they not bomb Moscow?"

Putin's case against Nato also takes in the Iraq war launched by the US and many of its allies in 2003. For him, the massive bloodshed in Iraq was proof that the west's self-proclaimed pursuit of "democracy and freedom" only brings instability and suffering in its wake. If you mention the brutal behaviour of Russian forces in Chechnya or Syria in Moscow, you will always have the Iraq war thrown back in your face.

Crucially, the west's promotion of democracy has posed a direct threat to Putin's own political and personal survival. From 2003 to 2005, pro-democracy "colour revolutions" broke out in many of the states of the former Soviet Union - including Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. If demonstrators in Independence Square in Kyiv could bring down an autocratic government in Ukraine, what was to stop the same happening in Red Square? In Russia, many believed it was a "fairytale" that these were spontaneous uprisings. As a former intelligence operative whose entire professional career had involved running "black operations", Putin was particularly inclined to see the CIA as pulling the strings. The goal, as the Kremlin saw it, was to install pro-western puppet regimes. Russia itself could be next.

The shock of the Iraq war and the colour revolutions were the recent experiences that informed Putin's Munich speech in 2007. And, as the Kremlin saw it, this pattern of western misdeeds continued. Putin points to the western powers' 2011 intervention in Libya that resulted in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi - something he believes they had promised they would not do.

The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi is a particularly sore point for Putin

That episode is a particularly sore spot for Putin, since it took place during the four years from 2008 to 2012 when he was serving in the lesser job of prime minister, having stepped aside as president in favour of his acolyte Dmitry Medvedev. As Putin's supporters see it, a naive Medvedev was duped into supporting a UN resolution that allowed for a limited intervention, only for western powers to exceed their mandate in order to overthrow and kill Gaddafi. They have no time for the response that the Libyan intervention was made on human rights grounds, but that events then took on a life of their own, as the Libyan rebellion gained steam.

Medvedev's alleged naivety in allowing the Libyan intervention proved useful for Putin, however: it established the idea that he was indispensable as Russia's leader. Any substitute, even one chosen by Putin, would leave the country vulnerable to a scheming and ruthless west. In 2011, Putin announced that he intended to return as president, after the potential presidential term had been extended to two consecutive periods of six years. This announcement provoked rare public demonstrations in Moscow and other cities, which again fanned Putin's fears about western schemes to undermine his power. I was in Moscow in January 2012 and witnessed the marches and banners, some of which carried pointed references to Gaddafi's fate. Putin understood the parallels. He commented publicly about how disgusted he had been by the footage of Gaddafi's murder - which perhaps reflected a certain concern about his own potential fate. The fact that Hillary Clinton, then America's Secretary of State, expressed public support for the 2012 demonstrations was deeply resented by Putin and may have justified, in his mind, Russia's efforts to undermine Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016.

Putin secured his re-election, but his sense that the west remained a threat to Russia was further stoked by events in Ukraine in 2013-14. The prospect of that country signing an association agreement with the European Union was seen as a serious threat in the Kremlin, since it would pull Russia's most important neighbour - once an integral part of the USSR - into the west's sphere of influence. Under pressure from Moscow, the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych reversed course. But this provoked another popular uprising in Kyiv, forcing Yanukovych to flee. The loss of a compliant ally in Kyiv was a major geopolitical reverse for the Kremlin.

Putin's response was to dramatically raise the stakes, by crossing the line into the use of military force. In February 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a region that was part of Ukraine but had belonged to Russia until 1954 and was populated largely by Russian-speakers. It was also, by agreement with the Ukrainians, the home of Russia's Black Sea fleet. In the west, the annexation of Crimea, along with Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, was seen as a flagrant violation of international law that many feared could be the prelude to further acts of aggression.

But in Russia, the annexation was widely greeted as a triumph - it represented the nation's fightback. Putin's approval ratings in independent opinion polls soared to over 80%. In the immediate afterglow, he came closer to achieving the ultimate goal of the strongman ruler: the complete identification of the nation with the leader. Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament, exulted: "If there's Putin, there's Russia. If there's no Putin, there's no Russia." Putin himself crowed that Crimea had been taken without a shot being fired.

The west's response was to slap economic sanctions on Russia. But western indignation did not last long. Four years later, Russia hosted a successful World Cup. At the final, Putin sat with the presidents of France and Croatia, two EU nations, in the VIP box in Moscow.

The ease with which Putin annexed Crimea - and the swiftness with which the west seemed prepared to forgive - may have laid the ground for an unjustified confidence that led to the invasion of Ukraine. His overreach is also a reminder of the flaws in the strongman model of leadership. Decades in office can cause a leader to succumb to megalomania or paranoia. The elimination of checks and balances, the centralisation of power and the promotion of a cult of personality make it more likely that a leader will make a disastrous mistake. For all these reasons, strongman rule is an inherently flawed and dangerous model of government.

Tragically, that lesson is being learned all over again - in Russia and Ukraine. An invasion that was meant to secure Russia's place as a great power and Putin's place in history has clearly gone wrong. Putin is now involved in a brutal war of attrition. Western sanctions will see the Russian economy shrink dramatically this year, and the Russian middle-class is witnessing the disappearance of many of the consumer goods and travel opportunities that emerged with the end of the cold war.

The unofficial goal of western policy is clearly to force Putin from power. But the endgame may not come as swiftly as we would like. Deeply entrenched in his decades-long mission, Putin is now even less likely to give up power voluntarily, since his successors might repudiate his policies, or even put him on trial.

The prospects for popular uprising are equally poor, despite the many brave Russians who have indicated their disgust over the war. Any protests are likely to be swiftly crushed with violence and imprisonment, as they were in neighbouring Belarus in 2020 and 2021. A third scenario - the possibility of an enlightened group within the elite seizing power - seems out of reach, too. Organising a palace coup against Putin will be very difficult: all dissenters were purged from the Kremlin long ago. Putin also takes his personal security very seriously: several of his former bodyguards have become rich in their own right. While there will be many within Russia who are dismayed by the course that events have taken, orchestrating that diffuse discontent into a coherent plot looks like a formidable challenge.

The difficult truth is that Putin's strongman style has defined his rule over Russia - and despite his many crimes and misdemeanours, those same strongman tactics may preserve him in power for years to come.

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. His new book, The Age of the Strongman, is published by Vintage (£20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Understanding Vladimir Putin, the man who fooled the world

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The Russian president has always shown us exactly who he is. So why did it take the invasion of Ukraine for us to believe him?

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Twitter thread on the UN Security Council

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Twitter thread on the UN Security Council

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https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1512771184915619842?s=20&t=UihInw__EcbSqf2kIsCAvw

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The UN Security Council has been completely ineffective during the 🇷🇺-🇺🇦 war.

That's not new, nor unexpected,...nor a problem.

[THREAD]

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The UN Security Council has been completely ineffective during the 🇷🇺-🇺🇦 war.

That's not new, nor unexpected,...nor a problem.

[THREAD] https://t.co/JtsVZT0ONB

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The UN Security Council has been completely ineffective during the 🇷🇺-🇺🇦 war.

That's not new, nor unexpected,...nor a problem.

[THREAD] pic.twitter.com/JtsVZT0ONB
— Paul Poast (@ProfPaulPoast) April 9, 2022

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The UN Security Council has been completely ineffective during the 🇷🇺-🇺🇦 war.

That's not new, nor unexpected,...nor a problem.

[THREAD] https://t.co/JtsVZT0ONB

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The UN Security Council has been completely ineffective during the 🇷🇺-🇺🇦 war.

That's not new, nor unexpected,...nor a problem.

[THREAD] https://t.co/JtsVZT0ONB

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
The UN Security Council has been completely ineffective during the 🇷🇺-🇺🇦 war.

That's not new, nor unexpected,...nor a problem.

[THREAD]

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61023869

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Artillery may decide the key battles looming in Donetsk and Luhansk, say military analysts.

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Programme re protecting art and artists in time of war

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Programme re protecting art and artists in time of war

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1nCCeUMxmc

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By Prof Richard Evans: https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2022/04/vladmir-putins-war-of-delusions

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Thousands gather in Whitehall to protest against Russia's attack on the Ukraine, London, 26th February 2022. Photo by Kiki Streitberger / Alamy

Almost as soon as Vladimir Putin's forces invaded Ukraine, political pundits began comparing him to Hitler. Both men had imposed dictatorial rule over their respective countries, both men suppressed dissent and eliminated independent media, both men had no hesitation in murdering people they considered a threat to their rule. Both Hitler and Putin invaded a series of neighbouring countries, both used lies and disinformation to justify their actions, both used a symbol - in Putin's case "Z", in Hitler's the swastika - to advertise support for their aims. Both men had no hesitation in causing death and destruction on a massive scale to further their ends.

Jonathan Katz, Washington-based director of the Democracy Initiatives network, has described Putin as "this century's equivalent to Hitler". Putin's character, he says, "disturbingly mirrors traits of Hitler". The former director of US national intelligence James Clapper has told CNN that Putin is "a 21st-century Hitler", a phrase used by a variety of commentators ranging from the former Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to the Ukrainian minister of defence. The British Liberal Democrat politician Norman Baker has claimed in the Daily Mail that "everything Vladimir Putin does echoes Adolf Hitler". Even the Prince of Wales, speaking to a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Canada in 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea, said that "Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler". Critics of the West's cautious approach to Putin's territorial aggrandisements routinely draw parallels with the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France sought to appease Hitler and avert a general war by forcing Czechoslovakia to give in to the Nazi dictator's demands for a large chunk of its territory.

As Jewish groups have pointed out, Putin has not established extermination camps or gas chambers as Hitler did to carry out the mass murder of European Jews. But Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky has directly called the indiscriminate bombardment of his country's major towns and cities "a genocide". Poland's president Andrzej Duda has said that the Russian invasion bears "the features of a genocide - it aims at eliminating and destroying a nation". The mounting evidence of indiscriminate massacres of civilian men, women and children by the retreating Russian armies in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns is impossible to ignore, or - despite risible Russian efforts to do so - explain away. Genocide it undoubtedly is: these people are being killed because they are Ukrainians, and for no other reason.

The central train station in Trostyanets, Ukraine, which was used as a Russian base before being liberated by Ukrainian forces, 30 March 2022. Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Genocide was at the heart of the Nazi project. This year is the 80th anniversary of the Nazis' "General Plan for the East", a proposal for the mass murder by disease, starvation, neglect and "extermination through labour" of up to 45 million "Slavs", to prepare for German settlement across east-central Europe. In its official version, completed in June 1942, the plan, which first came to light in 1957, exposed the full extent of the most radical genocidal programme ever devised. Over 30 years, assuming a German victory in the war, the Nazis proposed to "liquidate" 50 per cent of Latvians, Estonians and Czechs, 75 per cent of Belarusians, and 85 per cent of Lithuanians and Poles. The Ukrainians were to disappear altogether: 35 per cent of them, deemed racially suitable, were to be "Germanised"; the rest were to be eliminated.

Fortunately, the plan never had a chance to become reality, but the genocidal attitude of the Nazis towards the millions they regarded as Slav "subhumans" found expression in the killing of thousands of Polish intellectuals and the deliberate starvation of more than three-and-a-quarter million Red Army soldiers. The latter were taken prisoner, penned into huge enclosures on the east European plains, and left to die without food, shelter or medication.

Anyone who thinks that Ukrainians are "Nazis", or that Stalin was the principal enemy of the Ukrainians and the other inhabitants of east-central Europe, needs to read this shocking document. Stalin ordered the shooting of some 40,000 Polish officers captured by the Red Army in Eastern Poland, and deported thousands of mainly upper-class Poles to Siberia, but these crimes were committed in the name of class warfare rather than ethnic hatred. For the victims, it made little difference; nevertheless, the almost unimaginable scale of the "General Plan for the East" puts it in a category of its own.

The Nazis' genocidal intentions went far beyond the elimination of those "subhumans" who stood in the way of German settlement. Genocide comes in many varieties and degrees, and the mass murder by the Nazis of nearly six million European Jews was qualitatively different from the extermination programme contained in the General Plan for the East. From the beginning, the Jews were for the Nazis the "world-enemy", dedicated to destroying Germany and the Germans in a global conspiracy aimed at ruling the world. Hitler believed every Jew was predestined by their "racial character" to work towards this end. Nazi wartime cartoons showed the three most powerful enemies of Germany - the British empire, the Soviet Union and the US - being steered from behind by malevolent Jewish conspirators.

It was this belief that led the German invaders of east-central Europe to degrade and humiliate the Jewish inhabitants of the area, forcing Jewish elders to dance in the town squares until they collapsed from exhaustion, making Jewish girls clean latrines with their blouses, and committing other atrocities too revolting to detail. It also caused the Nazis to try to eliminate European Jews in the quickest way possible, in contrast to the longer-term mass extermination planned for the region's Slavs, who were seldom treated with the grotesque and elaborate sadism reserved for the Jews.

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Few things in Vladimir Putin's propaganda, therefore, seem more absurd than his claim that Ukraine is ruled by a clique of "Nazis", not least because the Ukrainian president is himself Jewish. Unlike Hitler, however, Putin does not think of Ukrainians as subhumans, let alone a malignant global threat to the existence of his country. He thinks of them as Russians. In March 2014, celebrating the annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, he declared that Russians and Ukrainians were one people. "Kiev," he went on, harking back to the Middle Ages, "is the mother of Russian cities." In February 2020 he repeated this belief and alleged that Ukrainian national identity was the creation of malign foreign influences. There was no Ukrainian state; it was a fiction. It followed that apart from the tiny minority of "Nazis" who ruled them, Ukrainians would welcome the Russians as they liberated them from foreign occupation.

And so Russian military conscripts were not prepared for the invasion. They were quickly disillusioned as they encountered unexpectedly strong resistance. Since the invasion, they have made only slow progress in some border regions, and none at all in others. In some locations they have been beaten back by Ukrainian forces. Civilians in occupied towns and villages have come out with Ukrainian flags to demonstrate against the invaders. Artillery bombardments and air strikes have inflicted severe damage on the physical fabric of many Ukrainian towns and cities but they do not seem to have weakened the resistance; if anything, they have strengthened it.

Nato and the EU, bystanders when Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and then the eastern borderland provinces of Ukraine, have surprised Putin by taking strong and concerted action to impose sanctions that are already damaging the Russian economy. The expected swift occupation of the entire country, followed by the rapid removal of Zelensky and his replacement by a Russian puppet, has not happened. For Putin and his regime, this is a military and political defeat of humiliating proportions. It now seems that Russian forces are recognising this embarrassing reality and are withdrawing from central Ukraine to consolidate their position in its eastern provinces.

It is here, if anywhere, that the parallel with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union can be found. For Hitler also expected a quick victory as he sent his armies - more than three-and-half-million men, with thousands of tanks, armoured vehicles, combat aircraft and artillery - into Soviet territory on 22 June 1941. So confident was Hitler that the edifice of Soviet society would collapse that he did not bother to equip his troops with winter clothes.

At first, his confidence appeared to be justified. Along a thousand-mile front, the German and allied armies advanced at speed, encircling and capturing or killing hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers. Hitler and his generals were euphoric. "It's really not saying too much," Franz Halder, head of the German army supreme command, noted in his diary on 3 July 1941, "if I claim that the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days."

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (far left), Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch (third left), Adolf Hitler and Colonel General Halder (right) at the map table during a Russian campaign briefing, 1941. SZ Photo / Alamy

But Halder and his master had miscalculated. Ukrainian peasants greeted the invading troops with the traditional offerings of bread and salt, expecting liberation from Stalin's rule, which had included a famine that killed millions during the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s. Instead they were met with further horrors, as the Germans looted and burned their way through the countryside, reduced towns to rubble, and met even minor acts of resistance with mass executions and the torching of entire villages. Soon, heartened by Stalin's abandonment of Bolshevik rhetoric to call on people to fight the Germans in the spirit of Russian patriotism, partisan groups were emerging everywhere, while Stalin's generals mobilised military reserves and brought them to the front. By early August, Halder was confessing in his diary that "we have underestimated the Russian colossus". The Soviets seemed to have limitless reserves of men and equipment. Reinforcements kept on arriving to replace on the battle front the hundreds of thousands captured or killed.

Worse was to come for the Germans. When the autumn rains arrived, their armies became bogged down in oceans of mud. Soon, the Russian winter was beginning to bite, with temperatures plunging to -40˚C. Such was Hitler's overweening confidence, born of his continuing contempt for the "Slavs", that he ignored all these problems. "Never before," he proclaimed on 8 November 1941, "has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia." But his troops were tired after months of continual advance. They were ill equipped for a winter campaign, and their numbers were depleted by continual counter-strikes launched by the Red Army. Disaster loomed.

When the Soviet general Georgy Zhukov launched a counter-attack, the Germans were forced back. In the terrible winter conditions, they began to freeze to death in their summer uniforms. Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels launched a widespread campaign in Germany to get civilians to send winter clothing to the beleaguered army. But it was too late. Under the strain of defeat, one German general after another suffered a heart attack or a collapse in health and resigned, including Halder himself. Hitler, meanwhile, regarded anything other than uncompromising resistance to the advancing Russians as cowardice. Any general who ordered a withdrawal in the interests of preserving the lives of his troops was instantly dismissed.

Furious with his senior officers, Hitler took over as commander-in-chief of the army in December 1941. In the following months the German forces advanced once more in the East, but it was a false dawn: in the winter of 1942-43, the Battle of Stalingrad sealed their fate and inaugurated a period of continuous retreat that ended in 1945 with the Soviets occupying Berlin and Hitler committing suicide.

Both Hitler and Putin were encouraged in their deadly illusions by subordinates who did not utter a word of criticism of their policies. This may well be because of fear of the consequences of disagreeing. The televised meeting of Putin with his leading advisers in late February showed him bullying them until he got the support he wanted. As for Hitler, anyone who disputed his policy of never giving an inch to the enemy was likely to find himself cashiered from the army and deprived of his pension. Both dictators surrounded themselves with true believers, men who had long since surrendered any independence of judgement and simply acted as an echo chamber for their leader's views.

In the cases of both Putin and Hitler, ideology - a nationalist belief in the essentially Russian character of Ukrainians in the first case, a dogmatic conviction of the superiority of the "Aryan" race in the second - created an overconfidence that led to a humiliating military defeat. In both cases, an invasion that was supposed not to encounter any serious resistance turned into a disaster. In both cases a dictator acted on ideologically driven assumptions that quickly turned out to be false. Both Hitler and Putin projected their own murderous beliefs onto those they imagined to be their enemies: Hitler and Goebbels justified the Holocaust by claiming that the Jews were aiming to exterminate the German race, while Putin and his subordinates have justified his assault on Ukraine by claiming that the "Nazis" in the country's leadership were aiming to exterminate the Russians in the eastern Donbas region.

But there the resemblance ends. To judge from his speeches over the past few years, Putin, who regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as a national catastrophe, wants to recreate the Russia of his early years and absorb into it neighbouring states that he believes have no right to their independent status. He is evidently prepared to use any means he considers necessary to achieve his goal. At the moment at least, the conflict seems confined to one part of Europe and the aims of the invasion are limited, even shrinking: Putin apparently has abandoned the idea of regime change in Ukraine and is opting for the division of the country instead.

The body of a civilian in a mass grave at the back of a church in Bucha, Ukraine, 6 April. Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images

As the breadth and depth of Ukrainian national consciousness have become clear, Putin and his troops have decided that the "Nazis" they claim to be fighting are not just a tiny clique but virtually the whole people. Still, the mass murder of civilians seems to be a product of defeat and retreat; it was not planned in advance, unlike the mass murder of Ukrainians and other "Slavs" by the invading Germans in the Second World War.

Hitler's aims, in contrast to Putin's, were not confined to one corner of Europe. He was never interested in merely reversing the territorial settlement achieved by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919; not interested just in establishing German hegemony over the rest of the continent. Addressing his followers on 5 November 1930, after his stunning success in September's national elections, Hitler lamented that in the "scramble for Africa" in the 1880s, Britain and France had taken the lion's share, leaving only the leftovers to the newly minted German empire:

"No people had more right to the concept of ruling the world [Weltherrschaft] than the German people. We would have had this right, and no other nation [stormy applause]. Not England and not Spain, not Holland, no other nation could have had an inborn right on the basis of its energy and competence, and also its numerical strength, to claim the domination of the world... Today, some people claim that we are entering an age of peace, but I have to say to them: Gentlemen, you have a poor understanding of the horoscope of our times, which points as never before not to peace, but to war."

For Hitler, the invasion of the Soviet Union was only a step in the direction of world domination, as its vast resources would form the basis of even further invasions, including ultimately - as he hinted in his unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf - the US. Perpetual war was, he believed, the only way for the Germans - Aryans, to use his terminology - to succeed in the struggle for existence between races for the survival of the fittest.

Putin's aims are far more limited. He is driven by a committed and misdirected nationalism that wants to reverse the territorial settlement of the early 1990s and re-establish Russia in the ranks of the great powers. And they are based on a bizarrely twisted view of history that sees anyone who tries to frustrate them as a "Nazi", to be killed just as Nazis were by the Red Army in the Second World War.

Both Hitler and Putin are consumed by a deeply held ideology rooted in false memories of world war. Hitler believed that the German nation was betrayed by socialists and Jews who stabbed the army in the back during the First World War. He was committed from the outset to reversing that defeat and resuming Germany's "grasp for world power", though on a far larger scale than before; and eliminating the "Jewish world-enemy" was a precondition of success. Putin believes that the Russian nation was betrayed by leaders who abandoned its integrity after 1917 and again after 1989. He too is committed to reversing what he imagines to be historic defeats. Genocide is the result in both cases. The fact that Hitler's was planned, and Putin's is not, does not take anything away from the horror of what is happening in Ukraine today.
Richard J Evans is regius professor emeritus of history at Cambridge University and an expert on Nazi Germany

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The Russian president is a prisoner of his own deadly misconceptions - and the echoes of Hitler are hard to ignore.

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https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/04/11/saved-from-the-ruins-how-a-ceramic-rooster-became-a-symbol-of-resistance-in-ukraine

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The distinctive pottery ornament was somehow left undamaged on a kitchen shelf of a bombed building.

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A ceramic jug in the shape of a rooster has become the unlikely symbol of resistance in Ukraine.

The pottery item is known as a Vasylkiv cockerel, named after the town near Kyiv where it was mass-produced during Soviet times. But it was the remarkable survival of one of these jugs, preserved intact on a kitchen shelf of a badly bombed building, that gave it new meaning for Ukrainians.

Vasylkiv has a long tradition of producing majolica - a style of glazed earthenware pottery - and in its 1960s heyday the town was churning out a million items each year.

One of the factory's most popular pieces was the rooster-shaped jug designed by renowned artist Prokip Bidasyuk which found its way into the kitchens of many Soviet Union homes from the 1950s to the late 1970s.

When journalist Elizaveta Servatyanksa was taking photographs in the ruins of the town of Borodianka, she spotted something on the exposed wall of an apartment building, the rest of which had been destroyed by a Russian bombardment.

Amid the devastation, she recognised the distinctive Vasylkiv rooster still sitting on the cabinet, untouched by the fighting.

Soon after, Ukrainian artist Oleksandr Grekhov produced a web poster featuring the rooster with a message to "Hold On," making it a popular online talisman for many Ukrainians to embody the spirit of resistance.

Even British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskky received roosters as gifts when Johnson's visited Kyiv on Saturday.

In Ukrainian folklore the rooster is full of symbolism; "without a rooster, a house is deaf" so the Ukrainian saying goes.

The bird is associated with fire, belligerence, new beginnings and the dawn after a dark night. Its crowing was once believed to have magic power which caused evil night-time spirits to lose their strength.

In some parts of Ukraine carved wooden roosters are attached to the roof of buildings to protect them, and rooster motifs can be found embroidered on garments and towels.

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How a ceramic rooster became a symbol of resistance in Ukraine

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The distinctive pottery ornament was somehow left undamaged on a kitchen shelf of a bombed building.

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https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-plans-permanent-military-presence-border-says-stoltenberg-telegraph-2022-04-09/

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April 9 (Reuters) - (This April 9 story corrects to remove 'permanent' from headline and first paragraph to match updated Telegraph article after NATO said it asked the newspaper to correct the original version, published on April 9.)

NATO is working on plans for a full-scale military presence on its border in an effort to battle future Russian aggression, The Telegraph reported, citing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

NATO was "in the midst of a very fundamental transformation" that will reflect "the long-term consequences" of Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions, Stoltenberg said in an interview with the newspaper.

"What we see now is a new reality, a new normal for European security. Therefore, we have now asked our military commanders to provide options for what we call a reset, a longer-term adaptation of NATO," it cited Stoltenberg as saying.

Stoltenberg, who recently said he would extend his term as head of the alliance by a year, also said in the interview that decisions on the reset would be made at a NATO summit to be held in Madrid in June.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has triggered Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War Two and led Western nations to rethink their defense policies.

Reporting by Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru; Editing by Daniel Wallis and John Stonestreet

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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NATO plans full-scale military presence at border, says Stoltenberg

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NATO is working on plans for a full-scale military presence on its border in an effort to battle future Russian aggression, The Telegraph reported, citing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60767454

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Vladimir's Putin's invasion of Ukraine has changed the world. We are living in new and more dangerous times - the post-Cold War era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall is over.

It is a rare thing to live through a moment of huge historical consequence and understand in real time that is what it is.

In November 1989, I stood on a snow-flecked Wenceslas Square in Prague, the capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, and watched a new world being born.

The peoples of Communist Eastern Europe had risen in defiance of their dictatorships. The Berlin Wall had been torn down. A divided Europe was being made whole again.

In Prague, the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel addressed a crowd of 400,000 from a second-floor balcony. It was an exhilarating moment, dizzying in its pace. That evening, the Communist regime collapsed and within weeks Havel was president of a new democratic state. I sensed, even at the time, that I had watched the world pivot - that it was one of those rare moments when you know the world is remaking itself before your eyes.

How many such moments had there been in the history of Europe since the French Revolution? Probably, I thought then, about five. This, 1989, was the sixth.

But that world - born in those dramatic popular revolutions - came to an end when Putin ordered Russian forces into Ukraine.

The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called this moment a zeitenwende - a turning point - while UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said it was a "paradigm shift". The age of complacency, she said, was over.

Pivotal moments in Europe's history

1789: French Revolution. Monarchy overthrown, republic founded

1815: Congress of Vienna redraws map of Europe, restores balance of power and ushers in decades of peace after the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars

1848: A wave of liberal and democratic revolutions across Europe

1919: Treaty of Versailles. New independent sovereign nation states replace old multi-national empires

1945: Yalta - great powers agree to partition Europe into Western and Soviet "spheres of influence". Iron Curtain falls across the continent

1989: Democratic revolutions in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe tear down the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union collapses two years later. Vladimir Putin calls this the "greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century"

Quentin Sommerville, one of the BBC's most experienced war reporters walked through the wreckage in Kharkiv recently and said of the Russian bombardment: "If these tactics are unfamiliar to you, then you haven't been paying attention."

He should know, he spent enough time under Russian rockets in Syria to be paying very close attention. But the governments of the democratic world - how much attention have they been paying to the nature of the Putin regime?

The evidence has been building for years.

Two decades have passed since he sent troops into Georgia claiming he was supporting breakaway regions.

Later, he sent spies into British cities armed with nerve agents to murder exiled Russians.

In 2014, he invaded Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

Ukraine war: Quentin Sommerville and cameraman Darren Conway

Despite all this, Germany, and much of the EU, were locking themselves into an unhealthy dependence on Russian gas. A year after the annexation of Crimea, they approved the building of a new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, to boost supplies.

The "complacency" Liz Truss refers to also indicts her own country. London has been a safe haven for Russian money since John Major was prime minister. Russian oligarchs have parked billions here, laundered their money, bought up the most prestigious private homes in the capital, socialised with politicians and donated to their campaign funds. Few questions were asked about where their vast wealth, acquired so suddenly, had come from.

So, no. The Western democracies have not been "paying attention" to the nature of the menace that has been incubating on their eastern frontier.

But Putin, too, has seemed complacent.

First, he believed the West was in chronic decline, weakened by internal division and ideological rancour. The election of Donald Trump and Brexit he saw as proof of this. The rise of right-wing authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary was further evidence of the disintegration of liberal values and institutions. The US's humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan was proof of a waning power withdrawing from the world stage.

Second, he misread what was happening on his borders. He refused to believe that a series of democratic uprisings in former Soviet Republics - Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004-5) and Kyrgyzstan (2005) - could possibly be authentic expressions of the popular will. Because each was aimed at removing corrupt and unpopular pro-Moscow governments, it seemed self-evident to the Kremlin that these were the work of foreign intelligence agencies, the Americans and the British in particular - Western imperialism's forward march into territory that was rightfully and historically Russia's.

Third, he has failed to understand his own armed forces. It is clear now that he expected this "special military operation" to be over in a few days.

Russia's military incompetence has astonished many Western security experts. It brings echoes for me of a smaller, more containable, but nonetheless devastating war, in former Yugoslavia.

In 1992, Serb nationalists launched a war to strangle the newly independent state of Bosnia at birth. They argued that Bosnian identity was bogus, that Bosnian statehood had no historical legitimacy, that it was really part of Serbia. It is exactly Putin's view of Ukraine.

Like Russia today, Serb forces enjoyed overwhelming firepower superiority. But they often stalled wherever local non-Serbs put up resistance. They seemed unable to seize towns or cities - unwilling to fight street-by-street on foot. The Bosnian defenders were initially very poorly equipped - I remember boys in tennis shoes in the trenches of Sarajevo with one AK-47 between three of them. But they defended their capital for nearly four years. There is a similar resolve in the young men volunteering to defend Kyiv.

So instead of taking the cities and towns, the Serbs laid siege to them - surrounding them, bombarding them, cutting off water, gas and electricity. It is already happening in Mariupol. Besiege a city and cut off its water supply, and within 24 hours, every toilet is a public health hazard. Citizens have to go out into the streets to find water standpipes and fill up receptacles just to flush their loos. Cut off the electricity and you freeze in your own home. Soon the food runs out. Is that what the Russians intend for Mariupol, for Kharkiv, for Kyiv? To starve them into submission?

But nearly four years of this cruelty gave Bosnian nationhood a founding narrative of resistance, suffering and heroic struggle. Ukraine's identity, too, will be strengthened further by the way Ukrainians have fought. Ukraine's Russian speakers have not felt "liberated" by the invasion. The evidence is that they, too, believe in Ukraine as a sovereign state. Putin's war, aimed at reunifying what he sees as two parts of the Russian nation, is already having the opposite effect - strengthening the will of most Ukrainians to seek a destiny free from Russian domination.

In 1994, while the war in the Balkans was still raging, the rest of Eastern Europe was looking to the future - each nation eager to take what it saw as its natural place in a Europe of independent sovereign states at peace with each other. But it was still far from certain that any of them would be allowed to join Nato.

There was a debate, back then, about whether a third security block should be formed by the newly-liberated East European nations, to act as a buffer between Nato and Russia. Russia was weak in the 1990s, and the nations that had endured Soviet occupation for 40 years did not trust it to stay weak for long. In the end, they wanted nothing short of Nato membership.

Under President Bill Clinton, the US pressed ahead with Nato expansion. The Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who saw himself as a loyal ally of Clinton's, was said to be furious when he found out - at a press conference - that Nato was planning to admit new members without consulting Moscow.

And the tearing down of the Iron Curtain had raised a new question in geopolitics - how far east does the Western world extend? I was commissioned by the BBC to take a road trip through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine to address the question, "Where is the eastern edge of the Western world now?"

I went to the hunting lodge in Belarus where, in late 1991, the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, had met his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus. Here, they agreed to recognise each other's Soviet Republics as independent nation-states. They then rang the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and informed him that the country of which he was head of state - the Soviet Union - no longer existed.

It was a moment fraught with both danger and opportunity. For Belarus and Ukraine, it was the chance to liberate themselves from Moscow rule - domination by Russian imperialism in both its Tsarist and Soviet forms.

For Yeltsin, it represented the chance to liberate Russia too - from its historic role as an imperial power. The UK and France had both ceased to be imperial powers after World War Two - as Austria had done after WW1. In Turkey, Kemal Ataturk had built a modern European secular republic - a Turkish nation-state - after the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire had been defeated and dismembered in 1918.

Could Boris Yeltsin do the same thing - build a modern Russian nation-state, at peace with its sovereign neighbours, on the ruins of the Soviet Empire? In the early 1990s, he began his Westernising experiment, to try to turn an imperial power into a democratic state.

But the rush - encouraged by the Western democracies eager for investment opportunities - to turn a sclerotic, state-owned command economy into a free-market system was disastrous. It created gangster capitalism. A tiny elite became fabulously rich by plundering the assets of the major industries - especially oil and gas.

The wheels finally came off the experiment in 1998. The economy collapsed, the rouble lost two-thirds of its value in a month and inflation hit 80%.

I stood with a middle-aged couple in a queue at a Moscow bank. They wanted to take their money out in dollars or pounds - anything other than roubles. The queue was long and slow-moving and, every few minutes, a bank employee changed the displayed exchange rate, as the rouble plunged further. People could see their life savings dropping in value by the minute. The couple got close to the head of the queue when suddenly the shutters came down - there was no cash left.

I went to a former coal-mining region near the Ukraine border, where the mines were barely functioning. I met a graduate mining engineer who had lost his job - a man in his 30s with a young family. He took me to his dacha outside the city, which had about an acre of land. "About 80% of what my family eat in the year," he said. "I grow on this patch of land. The rest, like coffee and sugar, I barter for. I haven't used or even seen cash in about 18 months." Nothing spoke more powerfully about Yeltsin's failure to transform Russia than the sight of this highly educated man digging for his own dinner.

"Stalin turned a nation of peasants into an industrial superpower in a generation. Yeltsin is doing the same thing in reverse," he told me.

Ordinary Russians felt robbed. The great westernising experiment had been a con trick that had enriched a criminalised elite and impoverished everyone else. Many of the reports we filed from Russia at that time boiled down to a single question: "What are the political consequences of the profound disenchantment that Russians now feel?"

The answer was that Russia, eventually, would revert to type - a retreat from democracy and a return to authoritarian rule. A retreat from nation-statehood and return to a more assertive imperial attitude to its "near abroad" - the countries that had previously been part of the Soviet Union.

The former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said that Russia could be a democracy or an empire, but it could not be both. The Russian emblem, the double-headed eagle, looks both east and west. History has pulled Russia in opposing directions - democratic nation statehood in one direction, domineering imperial power in the other.

Go to St Petersburg and you will see another aspect of this dual character. It is the country's beautiful bay window on the Gulf of Finland. It is an 18th Century city, facing west. It is the European Enlightenment in architectural form. Under the Tsars it was the imperial capital.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow and power retreated behind the high, crenellated walls of the Kremlin. It is the architecture of defensiveness, of suspicion, even fear. When Russian leaders look west from here, they see flat open countryside rolling away to the south and west for hundreds of miles. There are no natural frontiers.

When I was the BBC's Moscow correspondent in the late 1990s, there was a driver who could remember, as a boy, seeing German troops on the outskirts of Moscow in the 1940s. Every time he took us to Sheremetyevo Airport, we would pass a monument designed to look like metal anti-tank defences - so-called Czech hedgehogs - and he would say: "This is how close they came, the Germans."

Napoleon's army had gone further the previous century. That experience - that chronic sense of an insecure western frontier - informs the way Russian leaders have thought about their "near abroad".

In another conversation about the "near abroad", a friend recited a rhyming couplet to me. In Russian it rhymes nicely, but in English it goes: "A chicken's not really a bird; and Poland's not really abroad." Russia's sense of what it is entitled to in the lands to its west penetrates popular consciousness, too.

I will borrow an anecdote from another friend in Moscow at the time. The same driver picked her up from the airport and asked her where she had been. "I've been for a weekend in Prague," she said. "Oh Prague," came the reply. "That's good. That's ours."

But it wasn't. The Berlin Wall had come down nine years earlier and the nations of Eastern Europe had ceased being "ours".

Except Ukraine. Putin regards it not as a neighbouring country, but as the frontier land of Russia itself - and he wants it brought back into the Russian fold.

What would it take to do that? How can a nation that has put up so unified a resistance be subdued? Almost certainly he has overreached himself. Several factors must now be alarming him.

The first is the state of his own armed forces.

The second is the resilience of the Ukrainian defence. Did Putin really expect the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine to welcome his troops as liberators? Did he really believe that the uprising of 2014 - which replaced the pro-Moscow government with one oriented to the West - was all a Western plot? If he did, then it reveals how little the Kremlin understands about its "near abroad".

But his biggest miscalculation has been to underestimate the resolve of the West. And this is what makes 2022 one of those pivotal years - the zeitenwende, in the words of Chancellor Scholz.

Almost overnight, Germany has transformed its attitude to its role in the world. Traditionally reluctant - for sound historical reasons - to throw its weight around, it had preferred the exercise of soft power to hard. Not now. It has announced a doubling of defence spending, and is sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. Gone, too, is the ostpolitik - the decades-old German policy of seeking peace through engagement, especially trade.

Germany, along with the rest of the democratic world, will now move to end its dependence on Russian gas. The Nord Stream 2 project is suspended - though not yet scrapped. We are seeing a root-and-branch redrawing of the map of global energy distribution, aimed at cutting Russia out of it.

Russia is highly integrated into the global economy. But now it has been expelled from the system the world uses to exchange payment for goods and services. Its industries, including oil and gas, depend on imported goods and components. Soon production will grind to a halt. Employers will have to lay off their workers. Unemployment will rise.

No-one expected the West to sanction the Russian Central Bank. Already, the rouble has collapsed and interest rates have doubled. No other major economy has ever been subjected to a package of sanctions this punitive. It amounts to the expulsion of Russia from the global economy. More workers will be laid off. Major industries will find it hard to carry on. Unemployment will rise further. Soaring inflation will erode life savings.

We will all be affected. Potentially, this is the rolling back of the globalised economy that emerged after the end of the Cold War.

The US and the EU have, in effect, divided the world up. Those states and companies that continue to trade with Russia will find themselves punished - also frozen out of trade with the rich world.

It amounts to a new economic iron curtain separating Russia from the West.

Much will depend on how China negotiates this new landscape. China and Russia are bonded by their shared antipathy to American power, and their conviction that the greatest threat is from a resurgent, more unified democratic world.

China does not want Putin weakened, or the West strengthened. Yet that is exactly what the effect the war in Ukraine has had.

Some China watchers believe Beijing will try to challenge the dominance of the dollar as a reserve currency by carving out a distinct yuan zone as an alternative space in the global economy that can be protected from any future attempt by the US to sanction China. Putin's war, therefore, could redraw the international financial map.

But above all, this is a war that pits the world's democracies against the world's authoritarian regimes.

It is also a war between two conflicting conceptions of the rules by which international relations should function.

The Oxford scholar Timothy Garton Ash says these two world views can be expressed in short form by two words - Helsinki versus Yalta.

At Yalta in 1945, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill carved post-war Europe into "spheres of influence" - most of Eastern Europe to Russia, the West to the trans-Atlantic alliance that would set about rebuilding Europe's democracies.

"Helsinki", by contrast, describes a Europe of independent sovereign states, each of which is free to choose its own alliances. This grew out of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and gradually evolved into the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Ukraine's defenders are fighting for Helsinki. Putin has sent his troops in to impose a modern version of Yalta - which would kill off Ukraine's independence and leave it under Russian domination.

Garton Ash argues that the West has been too half-hearted in defending the values of Helsinki - that it has formally acknowledged Ukraine's right to join Nato at some unspecified date in the future without ever intending to make it happen.

But Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has signalled a readiness to compromise on Helsinki principles, by agreeing to abandon Ukraine's ambition to become a Nato member. With all the risks that entails, it may yet be the price Ukraine pays for the survival of its statehood.

My generation grew up with the existential terror of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The conflict has brought that fear back to public consciousness. Putin has threatened to use Russia's nuclear arsenal.

That makes this the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Then, the Soviet Union shipped nuclear missiles to its ally Cuba. The US assembled a fleet to blockade (or "quarantine") Cuba and was considering an attack on the island by air and/or sea.

What the Americans did not know is that the Soviets didn't only have long-range strategic missiles. They also had smaller, tactical nuclear missiles - so-called battlefield nuclear weapons. And that Soviet military doctrine delegated first-use decision making to commanders on the ground.

Had the threatened invasion gone ahead, it would have triggered a nuclear exchange.

The then American Defence Secretary Robert McNamara only found out about this when the Soviet archives opened in 1991. Only then, did he understand how close the world had come to catastrophe.

In a remarkable film called Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, he explained how the world had avoided destroying itself. Was it skilled diplomacy? Wise leadership? No.

"Luck," he said. "We lucked out."

That experience, now fading from memory, should focus minds.

Correction: This article previously referred to Zbigniew Brzezinski as a former US secretary of state, rather than former national security adviser

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Ukraine war: Putin has redrawn the world - but not the way he wanted

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Because of his miscalculations, there's a new iron curtain at the Russian leader's door - writes Allan Little

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Calls for a Nuremburg style trial for Putin

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Calls for a Nuremburg style trial for Putin

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60803155

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"You have to catch him first," he said. "The tribunal, it's a nice idea when they happen and all the European countries like Great Britain and America we thank you for all your help, but you know, we are at a totally different stage of war now.

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War in Ukraine: Gordon Brown backs Nuremberg-style trial for Putin

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Gordon Brown and Sir John Major join calls for an international tribunal to investigate Russia.

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https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ivan-krastev-on-russia-s-invasion-of-ukraine-putin-lives-in-historic-analogies-and-metaphors-a-1d043090-1111-4829-be90-c20fd5786288

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Ivan Krastev on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: “Putin Lives in Historic Analogies and Metaphors”

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Political scientist Ivan Krastev is an astute observer of Vladimir Putin. In an interview, he speaks of the Russian president’s isolation, his understanding of Russian history and how he has become a prisoner of his own rhetoric.

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1505582573174546438

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Residents of occupied Kherson block the path of a Russian military convoy and force it to turn away. Incredible.

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Residents of occupied Kherson block the path of a Russian military convoy and force it to turn away. Incredible. https://t.co/jvT1jRXnO6

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Residents of occupied Kherson block the path of a Russian military convoy and force it to turn away. Incredible. pic.twitter.com/jvT1jRXnO6
— Oleksiy Sorokin (@mrsorokaa) March 20, 2022

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Residents of occupied Kherson block the path of a Russian military convoy and force it to turn away. Incredible. https://t.co/jvT1jRXnO6

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Residents of occupied Kherson block the path of a Russian military convoy and force it to turn away. Incredible. https://t.co/jvT1jRXnO6

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Residents of occupied Kherson block the path of a Russian military convoy and force it to turn away. Incredible.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/mar/22/horrors-mariupol-new-danger-sarajevo-balkans-eu-serbia?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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The horrors of Mariupol should remind us of a new danger to Sarajevo | Daniel Cohn-Bendit and others

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Peace in the Balkans is again under threat. EU governments must confront the Serb government before it is too late, say Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Timothy Garton Ash, Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski and Claus Leggewie

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Fierce criticism from a former UK diplomat to Russia - part 1

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Fierce criticism from a former UK diplomat to Russia - part 1

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/23/coventry-no-longer-twinned-with-volgograd-protest-ukraine-war?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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Coventry no longer twinned with Volgograd in protest over Ukraine war

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Council suspends 80-year link with Russian city and says it is exploring options for twinning with Mariupol

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https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/ukrainian-soldiers-study-ira-green-book-in-preparation-for-guerrilla-warfare-against-russian-forces-41478437.html

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The Sunday World has revealed that the Provo's infamous code of conduct was translated into Ukrainian in 2018 and given to new recruits to study.

It has been circulated for the past four years in a bid to educate soldiers on the best tactics and strategies to be used in a successful military campaign.

It is believed an army general researching war came across the 'Green Book' online and ordered for it to be translated and republished.

It is being read today by Ukrainian soldiers as they fight Putin's brutal invasion of their homeland.

The translated text also includes images of the famous gable wall in Derry stating 'You Are Now Entering Free Derry.'

The 160 page book was edited by Oleh Feschowetz, a publisher who lives in the besieged city of Lviv that is on our television screens every night since Putin started the war and began killing innocents.

The booklet carries an advertisement warning soldiers to keep their mouths shut when in public in fear of spies and touts.

"In taxis. On the phone. In clubs and bars. At football matches. At home with friends. Anywhere! Whatever you say- say nothing", it warns.

The Ukrainian introduction of the book, Irish Republician Army: Strategy and Tactics,states it is a commented collection of documents of the IRA which came available to the public in various circumstances.

"It was designed for recruiting trainees, they (IRA) reveal its military history and organisational structure, strategy and tactics of struggle, issues of equipment and armament, security as well as moral and psychological training of volunteers.

"It is intended for officers, sergeants and soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Intelligence officers, researchers in the history of an insurgency and counter insurgency. Teachers of military and civilian educational establishments, cadets and students", it explains.

The Green Book was initially a training and induction manual issued by the Irish Republican Army to new volunteers.

It was adopted by the Provisional IRA and includes a statement of military objectives, tactics and conditions for military victory against the British government.

The Green Book has acted as a manual of conduct and induction to the organisation since at least the 1950s.

The Green Book was issued to IRA volunteers as part of their training and is considered a secret document which should not be revealed to, or discussed with non-IRA members.

In order to protect the organisation, disclosure of its training material and any other training documents, including the Green Book, would have carried stiff penalties up to and including Court Martial.

Once issued, each volunteer, like in Ukraine today, is expected to study and learn from his/her copy of the manual, to apply the rules given in it, and to apply lessons learnt from it.

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Ukrainian soldiers study IRA 'Green Book' in preparation for guerrilla warfare against Russian forces

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The IRA's 'Green Book' has been distributed amongst Ukrainian soldiers to help them prepare for guerrilla warfare.

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Zelenskiy's address after one month since the invasion began

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Zelenskiy's address after one month since the invasion began

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1506753765994647556

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Every evening Ukraine's President #Zelenskyy addresses his nation. Tonight for the first time, he did it in English. Calling on people everywhere to show their solidarity "Come out of your offices and homes, show your support to the Ukrainian people" #UkraineRussiaWar

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Every evening Ukraine's President #Zelenskyy addresses his nation. Tonight for the first time, he did it in English. Calling on people everywhere to show their solidarity "Come out of your offices and homes, show your support to the Ukrainian people" #UkraineRussiaWar https://t.co/iJaRQlvWnF

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Every evening Ukraine's President #Zelenskyy addresses his nation. Tonight for the first time, he did it in English. Calling on people everywhere to show their solidarity "Come out of your offices and homes, show your support to the Ukrainian people" #UkraineRussiaWar pic.twitter.com/iJaRQlvWnF
— Yalda Hakim (@SkyYaldaHakim) March 23, 2022

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Every evening Ukraine's President #Zelenskyy addresses his nation. Tonight for the first time, he did it in English. Calling on people everywhere to show their solidarity "Come out of your offices and homes, show your support to the Ukrainian people" #UkraineRussiaWar https://t.co/iJaRQlvWnF

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Every evening Ukraine's President #Zelenskyy addresses his nation. Tonight for the first time, he did it in English. Calling on people everywhere to show their solidarity "Come out of your offices and homes, show your support to the Ukrainian people" #UkraineRussiaWar https://t.co/iJaRQlvWnF

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Every evening Ukraine's President #Zelenskyy addresses his nation. Tonight for the first time, he did it in English. Calling on people everywhere to show their solidarity "Come out of your offices and homes, show your support to the Ukrainian people" #UkraineRussiaWar

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60855280

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‘Shame on you’: How President Zelensky uses speeches to get what he needs

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In 10 parliaments over two weeks Ukraine’s leader has used shame and national trauma to set a global agenda.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/one-month-on-how-a-tragedy-has-unfolded-in-ukraine-russia-war?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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On 24 February, shortly before dawn broke in Moscow, Vladimir Putin made the latest in a series of televised addresses. His previous appearances had contained increasingly ominous tirades about Ukraine. Now here was the culmination: the declaration of what the Russian president euphemistically called a "special military operation".

The goal, said Putin, was the "demilitarisation and denazification" of Ukraine.

Minutes later, missiles were launched towards Kyiv, Kharkiv and many other Ukrainian cities. For the Ukrainians who woke up to sound of the impacts, and then for millions across the world who woke up to the news of Putin's decision, the first reaction was shock.

Even those Ukrainians in government who had spent the past weeks rehearsing what to do in the event of a Russian attack were stunned when the invasion became reality.

"I had 10 minutes of panic when I was running around the house and I had no idea what to do. Then I pulled myself together and went to work," said Natalia Balasynovych, the mayor of Vasylkiv, a town outside Kyiv hosting an airbase that was hit in the first hours of the war.

Before long, makeshift checkpoints were being put up across the country, volunteers flocked to sign up for territorial defence units, and even some pensioners got to work making molotov cocktails. At the same time, millions of people, mostly women and children, fled to the west of Ukraine, or crossed borders into neighbouring countries.

During the first days of the war there was a sense that something terrible and momentous had occurred that would change the contours of global affairs irrevocably, but also confusion about exactly how it might look, and what it meant for the future of Ukraine, Russia, Europe and the world.

As Putin's invasion reaches the month mark on Thursday, some of those questions have been answered but much still hangs in the balance.

Among the international community there are ongoing debates about how firm a line to take with Russia, and where the divide is between a moral obligation to support Ukraine and potentially provoking Moscow into further escalation, as for the first time since the early 1980s Putin has floated the possibility of using nuclear weapons.

The initial Russian plan, it seems, was that its operation would be a kind of slightly bloodier version of its 2014 Crimea annexation, with pockets of resistance mopped up and then a Russian puppet regime taking control. The plan, which could only have been based on shockingly flawed intelligence about the mood in Ukraine and the state of its army, was quickly shown to be hopeless.

A speedy advance on Kyiv faltered and devolved into grim fighting in the western suburbs. Attempts to take Kharkiv and other cities in the east were repelled, with heavy Russian losses.

Even in the few cities where the Russians have established control bloodlessly, in the south of the country, their forces face angry crowds and have had few successes in co-opting local politicians.

"For years they have been lying to themselves that people in Ukraine were supposedly waiting for Russia to come," said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in one of his frequent video addresses. "They did not find collaborators who would hand over the city and the power to the invaders."

The lack of success has led to a grimmer phase of the war. The idea that the tactics Russia used in Syria would be morally and politically unpalatable for Russia's leadership, given the family ties between millions of Russians and Ukrainians, quickly proved naive. Russia showed itself willing to submit Mariupol, Kharkiv and other Russian-speaking cities to ruthless artillery and air bombardment.

For Ukraine, amid the heartache and the bloodshed, there is the feeling of a new sense of national identity being born, even as the threat of the eradication of the state by the Russian military has far from subsided.

A country where many different ideas of what it means to be Ukrainian have lived in sometimes uneasy coexistence has now found a common idea around which to unite.

"I suppose they hoped it would not be like this, when ordinary people come out without weapons to stop tanks and tell them to leave," said Gennady Trukhanov, the Russian-speaking mayor of Odesa, who had once been considered a Russian stooge. He added that only "a bastard, idiot or scumbag" would drop bombs on Odesa.

The horrific stories emerging from those residents of Mariupol who have been able to escape in recent days make Putin's claim a month ago that his attack was meant to defend Russian speakers from Kyiv's "genocide" seem even more twisted than it sounded back then.

In 2014 Mariupol was split between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian elements and saw violent street clashes, but since then it had been renovated and spruced up by Ukrainian authorities. The terror in which its residents have been living as hostages over the past weeks is a tragedy that is likely to be remembered for decades to come.

For Russia's stalled, bloody military campaign, there appears to be no imminent possibility for a dignified retreat or a peace deal that could be sold as victory, but also no clear route to a military victory either, except perhaps through an intensification of aerial bombardment to destroy Ukraine rather than subdue it.

Whether this would be palatable for the elite around Putin is a key question, and one which has had Kremlinologists trying to understand the increasingly opaque world of Putin's inner circle.

What is clear is that Putin's decision has irrevocably changed Russia as well as Ukraine. The Russian president built a large part of his political appeal on providing stability and economic progress, and even recently he liked to compare his rule with that of the turbulent 1990s. Now he has gone some way to recreating that instability in a matter of weeks, as planes stop flying, western brands head for the exit and the rouble tanks.

Unlike in 2014, when part of international public opinion was amenable to Russian narratives on the annexation of Crimea, this time the Russian actions have been so heinous that the Kremlin finds itself with few international defenders. Russian officials have been taken aback by the strength and scope of the western response, as well as by the speed with which the political climate at home has darkened.

It is hard to tell if the Ukraine war marks the beginning of the end for Putin and his system, or simply the beginning of a long period that is much darker than what went before.

Some in the Russian elite - such as the head of Russia Today, Margarita Simonyan, or the foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova - have revelled in the new, darker climate. Zakharova, who just a week before the war was taunting western journalists for reporting US claims that a Russian invasion was possible, has now embraced it. At a flag-waving rally at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow last week, she said Russia was "fighting evil".

Many others in the elite are horrified by Putin's war, and the decision appears to have come as a surprise to all but a very few close confidants. But this unease so far remains muted, while domestic repression increases and increasingly sinister public warmongering fills the airwaves.

For Ukraine's president, too, the past month has seen a transformation of his behaviour and reputation. Zelenskiy, on the eve of the war, often appeared to be a man struggling to play the admittedly awful hand he had been dealt. He spoke in confused and rambling sentences, at once talking up and diminishing the Russian threat, clearly alarmed by the warnings from Washington and London but keen to save the Ukrainian economy in the event Putin did not invade.

Now, while Putin broods in his bunker, Zelenskiy has been speaking with presidents, prime ministers and the pope, addressing parliaments across the world, and releasing a series of snappy, passionate video addresses to his people.

Despite the rather half-hearted attempts by Russian bloggers to claim Zelenskiy has in fact long since fled Ukraine and all the videos are fakes, it is clear that the president and his inner circle have stayed in the capital, ignoring western evacuation offers and suggestions to move the centre of government to Lviv in the west, even as there were credible intelligence reports of hit squads sent to kill him.

In the process, Zelenskiy has gained overwhelming support from many Ukrainians, even those who were previously his political opponents. "Free people of a free nation," he began one of the latest of these addresses on Tuesday. "Each day of this war makes it increasingly clear what their 'denazification' is."

With exhausted eyes but plenty of passion in his voice, Zelenskiy listed the latest civilian casualties of the Russian attack, and the latest Ukrainians to be awarded bravery medals.

"It was a day of difficult events ... but it was another day that brought us all closer to our victory and to peace for our state," said Zelenskiy, ending his address.

Ukraine has suffered terrible losses over the past month, but few expected that in four weeks Russia's campaign against its neighbour would have achieved so few results for Putin on the ground.

There is a long way to go towards any outcome that could be considered a victory for Ukraine, but with each day that passes, more Ukrainians believe Zelenskiy, and that a victory of some sort is possible.

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One month on: how a tragedy has unfolded in Ukraine

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Russia's failure to score a quick victory has led to a grimmer phase of the war, and much still hangs in the balance

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https://twitter.com/polinaivanovva/status/1507400322829930500?s=20&t=Qtfc7fM6LaxRYjVI1JS0Pg

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Russia's military held a big briefing this afternoon, announcing the war was entering a 'second phase'.

Here's a summary of how Russia, at this point in the war, is depicting what it set out to do, why, and where we're at. (relaying their words, pls don't shoot msnger)

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Russia's military held a big briefing this afternoon, announcing the war was entering a 'second phase'.

Here's a summary of how Russia, at this point in the war, is depicting what it set out to do, why, and where we're at. (relaying their words, pls don't shoot msnger) https://t.co/1kS2VRK8iI

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Russia's military held a big briefing this afternoon, announcing the war was entering a 'second phase'.

Here's a summary of how Russia, at this point in the war, is depicting what it set out to do, why, and where we're at. (relaying their words, pls don't shoot msnger) pic.twitter.com/1kS2VRK8iI
— Polina Ivanova (@polinaivanovva) March 25, 2022

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Russia's military held a big briefing this afternoon, announcing the war was entering a 'second phase'.

Here's a summary of how Russia, at this point in the war, is depicting what it set out to do, why, and where we're at. (relaying their words, pls don't shoot msnger) https://t.co/1kS2VRK8iI

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Russia's military held a big briefing this afternoon, announcing the war was entering a 'second phase'.

Here's a summary of how Russia, at this point in the war, is depicting what it set out to do, why, and where we're at. (relaying their words, pls don't shoot msnger) https://t.co/1kS2VRK8iI

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Russia's military held a big briefing this afternoon, announcing the war was entering a 'second phase'.

Here's a summary of how Russia, at this point in the war, is depicting what it set out to do, why, and where we're at. (relaying their words, pls don't shoot msnger)

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/25/churchill-iphone-volodymyr-zelenskiy-ukraine-west?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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Ukraine has so many nightmares to contend with, but here's one more: that Ukraine becomes Bosnia. By Bosnia I don't mean the country itself so much as the war of a quarter-century ago and the way that conflict came to be seen from afar. For much of the 1990s, war in the Balkans was background noise, even to those who were just an hour or two's flight away. Every now and then an especially horrible episode might propel it to the top of the news; otherwise, Bosnia was a permanent fixture on the inside pages and halfway through the TV bulletin. Bridget Jones confessed to her diary that she felt guilty for not talking or thinking about it, but it just slipped out of view. Besides, you knew the war would still be there tomorrow.

That is the danger Volodymyr Zelenskiy faces now: that his struggle against Russian invasion becomes a long, slow war of attrition and so, with time, the world's attention starts to wander. The war would go on; it would still be there on page 14. But newer stories would edge it aside. Soon, yellow and blue would be last season's colours.

Zelenskiy seems aware of this danger, and if anyone can combat it, it's him. He's not merely a politician with a knack for communication. Often missed in descriptions of him as a former entertainer is the fact that he made his fortune as a phenomenally successful producer of television. His core team in the presidential palace is the same group that ran his production company: his speechwriter is a scriptwriter. The Kyiv-born author of This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, says of the Zelenskiy inner circle: "They're all showrunners."

Note the present tense. There is nothing former about Zelenskiy and his colleagues' vocation: they're still producers now. Indeed, there is scarcely a gap between Zelenskiy's two incarnations as politician and performer. His most famous hit show was called Servant of the People; his political party is called Servant of the People.

Zelenskiy is hardly the first to grasp the tight connection between politics and storytelling. In some ways, he is merely succeeding in doing what Donald Trump longed to do: conducting a presidency like a top-rated TV series, with great visuals, shocking plot twists and plenty of action. Except Trump not only lacked Zelenskiy's talent, he had to rely on manufactured drama and imagined enemies. The Ukrainian president is in a bloody war against an enemy who is all too real.

Of course, the primacy of "comms" long predates Trump and Zelenskiy. In David Hare's new play Straight Line Crazy, the urban planner Robert Moses is hailed in the 1920s as "a new kind of man ... the man who believes that the way you're written about is as important as what you do". But Zelenskiy has taken it to a new level, not least because he has adapted everything he learned from conventional TV to the idiom of social media.

He understands that in the new era, the war leader does not stand besuited at a podium, declaiming a speech packed with rhetorical flourish. Instead, Zelenskiy's message is that he is a servant of the people because he is one of the people, no different from any of them. In his trademark short videos, he wears military olive-green, but it's not a formal uniform, still less the ceremonial getup of a head of state. He wears exactly what a civilian volunteer would wear.

The locations are chosen just as deliberately. If he's not at a simple desk in a plain office, he's just outside the presidential palace, with landmarks Ukrainians would recognise visibly in shot. As David Patrikarakos, whose book, War in 140 Characters, was among the first to identify the changing face of battle in the age of Twitter, tells me: "In those videos, Zelenskiy is literally the man in the street." Together with a knack for demotic, unflowery soundbites - "I need ammunition, not a ride" - he has become a master of what Patrikarakos calls "digital statesmanship". He's Churchill with an iPhone.

By comparison Moscow, until recently feared as the master of manipulation by social media, has looked lumbering, slow and old: "There's Zelenskiy," says Patrikarakos, "and then there's this Botoxed Bond villain who won't sit at a table with other people. All that's missing is a trapdoor and a pool of sharks." (As if to show he has not entirely lost his touch for fuelling culture wars in the west, today Vladimir Putin tried to cast himself as defender of JK Rowling against the western malaise of" cancel culture" - which would be convincing but for the fact that Rowling is no ally of his, but is instead spending big money protecting vulnerable children in Ukraine.)

And yet, there are limits to Kyiv's success in the messaging wars. For one thing, while it has made the Ukrainian president a hero in the west, it is not penetrating elsewhere. It was notable that the 35 countries that abstained on this month's UN resolution condemning Moscow's invasion account for half the world's population. Zelenskiy is a hit in Paris and Berlin; in Beijing and Delhi, not so much.

But the other obstacle is the Bosnia problem, the risk that the longer this goes on, the likelier it is that fatigue and boredom set in. Social media in particular crave novelty. Once the initial shock of footage of bombed-out buildings or distraught victims wears off, Ukraine could recede from the public mind.

Perhaps mindful of that danger, Zelenskiy has been careful to offer variety. In his rolling series of video link addresses to the world's parliaments - itself an innovation - he's careful to tailor his message to his audience. Speaking to Westminster, he channelled Churchill. To Capitol Hill, it was America "the leader of the free world". To Budapest on Thursday, he invoked the memory of the fascist massacre on the banks of the Danube. He is intensifying his language too, shaming western allies for not doing enough. "Why can't we get weapons from you?" he asked Israeli lawmakers on Sunday, reminding them they would "have to live with" their decision. Visually, he's mixing things up: this week saw a montage, complete with voiceover in English. It looked and sounded like a trailer for a Hollywood blockbuster.

But canny messaging and sharp production values take you only so far. Pomerantsev says: "Sympathy is not enough. He has to take people on a journey towards something." There has to be a concrete goal, besides day-to-day survival: maybe Ukraine's bid to join the EU. Yana Lyushnevskaya of BBC Monitoring tells me that Zelenskiy's great gift as a comedian was his ability to know what his audience "were scared of": maybe his next move will be to play on global fears of a Russian nuclear, chemical or biological attack. "That would be the most logical thing for him to do."

In truth, this should not all be on Zelenskiy and his extraordinary team of TV maestros. Putin's threat is not just to Ukraine, but to a wider world that has not fully absorbed the menace it now confronts: a dictator ready to obliterate cities in the heart of Europe, his head filled with fantasies of conquest and domination, happy to ward off any challenge by threatening to unleash nuclear havoc. Turning back that danger cannot be left to a small group of creatives in a bunker in Kyiv, no matter how gifted. This is a task for the world.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. To listen to Jonathan's podcast Politics Weekly America, search "Politics Weekly America" on Apple, Spotify, Acast or wherever you get your podcasts

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A key reason Putin's bloody invasion is faltering? He's no match for Zelenskiy's iPhone | Jonathan Freedland

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The leader's messages to his people - and the west - have been central to the heroic fightback. But now more than ever, we must stay engaged, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland

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Central/Eastern European perspective on Russia

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Central/Eastern European perspective on Russia

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https://twitter.com/alexstubb/status/1507991095233462274

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This ten point thread is about RUSSIA 🇷🇺. It should be read in conjunction with the four previous threads - GENERAL, WORLD, EUROPE and FINLAND - on the same subject. The next thread will be on the US or CHINA. 

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This ten point thread is about RUSSIA 🇷🇺. It should be read in conjunction with the four previous threads - GENERAL, WORLD, EUROPE and FINLAND - on the same subject. The next thread will be on the US or CHINA. 

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This ten point thread is about RUSSIA 🇷🇺. It should be read in conjunction with the four previous threads - GENERAL, WORLD, EUROPE and FINLAND - on the same subject. The next thread will be on the US or CHINA.

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— Alexander Stubb (@alexstubb) March 27, 2022

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This ten point thread is about RUSSIA 🇷🇺. It should be read in conjunction with the four previous threads - GENERAL, WORLD, EUROPE and FINLAND - on the same subject. The next thread will be on the US or CHINA. 

1/10

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
This ten point thread is about RUSSIA 🇷🇺. It should be read in conjunction with the four previous threads - GENERAL, WORLD, EUROPE and FINLAND - on the same subject. The next thread will be on the US or CHINA. 

1/10

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
This ten point thread is about RUSSIA 🇷🇺. It should be read in conjunction with the four previous threads - GENERAL, WORLD, EUROPE and FINLAND - on the same subject. The next thread will be on the US or CHINA. 

1/10

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Russian perspective arguing Russians need to de-Putinise themselves

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Russian perspective arguing Russians need to de-Putinise themselves

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/28/nato-ukraine-vladimir-putin-russia-democratic-national-guilt?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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Neither Nato nor Ukraine can de-Putinise Russia. We Russians must do it ourselves | Mikhail Shishkin

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A new, democratic Russia is impossible without a change of national mindset – and an acknowledgment of national guilt, says novelist Mikhail Shishkin

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View from Kyiv Centre for Civil Liberties

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View from Kyiv Centre for Civil Liberties

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https://neweasterneurope.eu/2022/03/25/no-time-for-reflection-emotions-or-crying/

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Zelenskiy interview with Russian independent journalists - end March 22

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Zelenskiy interview with Russian independent journalists - end March 22

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https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1508247464012390401

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Things to note: Z's description of this war as different from WW2 - it's about the physical elimination of Ukrainians, not conquest of territory. His disgust at Russian generals who don't give their soldiers the burial that a pet animal would receive... https://t.co/dSMUKUB7nI

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Things to note: Z's description of this war as different from WW2 - it's about the physical elimination of Ukrainians, not conquest of territory. His disgust at Russian generals who don't give their soldiers the burial that a pet animal would receive... https://t.co/dSMUKUB7nI

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This is the whole Zelensky interview with independent Russian journalists. This version has subtitles.  https://t.co/ccDql091nF

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Владимир Зеленский — о переговорах, аргументах Путина , ситуации в Мариуполе и отношении к россиянам

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Вместе с Иваном Колпаковым, Михаилом Зыгарем и Владимиром Соловьевым мы созвонились по видеосвязи с президентом Украины Владимиром Зеленским и обсудили ситуа...

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Things to note: Z's description of this war as different from WW2 - it's about the physical elimination of Ukrainians, not conquest of territory. His disgust at Russian generals who don't give their soldiers the burial that a pet animal would receive... https://t.co/dSMUKUB7nI
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) March 28, 2022

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Things to note: Z's description of this war as different from WW2 - it's about the physical elimination of Ukrainians, not conquest of territory. His disgust at Russian generals who don't give their soldiers the burial that a pet animal would receive... https://t.co/dSMUKUB7nI

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Zelensky's interview with Russian journalists / Интервью Зеленского (English subs)

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Вместе с Иваном Колпаковым, Михаилом Зыгарем и Владимиром Соловьевым мы созвонились по видеосвязи с президентом Украины Владимиром Зеленским и обсудили ситуа...

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This is the whole Zelensky interview with independent Russian journalists. This version has subtitles.  https://t.co/ccDql091nF

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Things to note: Z's description of this war as different from WW2 - it's about the physical elimination of Ukrainians, not conquest of territory. His disgust at Russian generals who don't give their soldiers the burial that a pet animal would receive... https://t.co/dSMUKUB7nI

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Things to note: Z's description of this war as different from WW2 - it's about the physical elimination of Ukrainians, not conquest of territory. His disgust at Russian generals who don't give their soldiers the burial that a pet animal would receive... https://t.co/dSMUKUB7nI

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Zelensky's interview with Russian journalists / Интервью Зеленского (English subs)

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Вместе с Иваном Колпаковым, Михаилом Зыгарем и Владимиром Соловьевым мы созвонились по видеосвязи с президентом Украины Владимиром Зеленским и обсудили ситуа...

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This is the whole Zelensky interview with independent Russian journalists. This version has subtitles.  https://t.co/ccDql091nF

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1508312142147203073

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Anti-war performance on the steps of the St. Petersburg City Duma building.  In the video, the girl repeats "Heart bleeds". The "dangerous criminal" has already been detained by Russian police.
#StandWithUkraine 
 Video: Fontanka

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Anti-war performance on the steps of the St. Petersburg City Duma building.  In the video, the girl repeats "Heart bleeds". The "dangerous criminal" has already been detained by Russian police.
#StandWithUkraine 
 Video: Fontanka https://t.co/LvpQn1Ftvf

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Anti-war performance on the steps of the St. Petersburg City Duma building. In the video, the girl repeats "Heart bleeds". The "dangerous criminal" has already been detained by Russian police.#StandWithUkraine
Video: Fontanka pic.twitter.com/LvpQn1Ftvf
— Oleksandra Matviichuk (@avalaina) March 28, 2022

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Anti-war performance on the steps of the St. Petersburg City Duma building.  In the video, the girl repeats "Heart bleeds". The "dangerous criminal" has already been detained by Russian police.
#StandWithUkraine 
 Video: Fontanka https://t.co/LvpQn1Ftvf

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Anti-war performance on the steps of the St. Petersburg City Duma building.  In the video, the girl repeats "Heart bleeds". The "dangerous criminal" has already been detained by Russian police.
#StandWithUkraine 
 Video: Fontanka https://t.co/LvpQn1Ftvf

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Anti-war performance on the steps of the St. Petersburg City Duma building.  In the video, the girl repeats "Heart bleeds". The "dangerous criminal" has already been detained by Russian police.
#StandWithUkraine 
 Video: Fontanka

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https://socialeurope.eu/time-to-decamp-from-cold-war-ideas

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Sections of the left which still think of the world in blocs, Sheri Berman writes, are guilty of blocked thinking.

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How Russia’s mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin’s war

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How Russia’s mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin’s war

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The snarled up 65km Russian convoy that was stuck for days outside Kyiv neatly illustrated Moscow's misplaced belief that it could achieve a lightning-fast victory in Ukraine.

Western military analysts say Russia's leadership initially thought its "special military operation" would reach the capital and other big Ukrainian cities in days, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky's government to capitulate and allow a puppet administration to be installed.

"It's clear that Russia was pursuing regime change in Ukraine," said Michael Kofman, Russia studies director at CNA, a US think-tank. "Regime change operations are often derived of hubris and bad assumptions - and they usually go terribly wrong."

Ukrainian artillery has also targeted the Russian tank formations on the capital's outskirts.

"The Ukrainians have done an incredible job of taking a far less numerically and technically superior force, and putting it in positions to highlight their own strengths against the weaknesses of the Russians," said Philip Breedlove, a former Nato commander now based at the Middle East Institute think-tank.

Multiple countries including the US have supplied weapons to Ukraine, including NLAW and Javelin anti-tank missiles. NLAWs are single-use, portable tubes with a range of up to 800 metres.

Javelins are sophisticated, reloadable missile launchers equipped with night-vision cameras that can reach targets up to 4km away.

Key bridges have been destroyed to slow Russia's advance, including two on the outskirts of Kyiv and one near the Belarus border.

For example, Russia appeared to keep adding units to the huge convoy stuck outside Kyiv despite the fact it had not moved for days, stopped by a likely combination of fuel shortages, vehicle breakdowns, Ukrainian attacks and obstacles ahead.

Kofman said he believed it was likely that Putin ordered a certain amount of manpower and material to get to Kyiv in a set timeframe, and that "the only way that could happen is if you literally take all of it and drive it down the shortest road to the capital".

After the Ukrainians counter-attacked and blew up river crossings, it would have been necessary to move bridge-building equipment positioned at the back of the Russian column to the front, said Kofman.

Breedlove added: "This is very much the Russian style: they have a plan . . . and in the absence of orders being changed from above, they're going to execute no matter what."

Secrecy around Russia's intentions leading up to the invasion has been another hindrance to its advance. Interviews released by Ukraine of Russian prisoners of war captured in the first week of the conflict suggest soldiers were not told they were going to invade.

The expectation that Ukrainian resistance would be minimal can be seen in Russia's early moves. Scott Boston, senior defence analyst at Rand Corporation, said an invading army would only rush into a city if it believed surrender was imminent and the priority was confiscating weapons from potential insurgents. "It turns out that getting there really fast is a good way to get shot in the face," he said.

The light-armoured Rosvgardia force, traditionally sent in to hold populations, was in some cases sent out in front. "You have Rosvgardia units getting themselves killed because they thought they were going to go into these cities and take over without any support or co-ordination with the actual Russian military," said Kofman. "Russian units really were operating in the first part of the war as though they were still driving around in their own country."

Hubris was also evident in Russia's attempt at the outset of hostilities to seize Hostomel airfield outside Kyiv with about 200 paratroopers supported by helicopters, said Bullock.

"They [would usually] send in a lot more troops supported by artillery and light armoured vehicles," he said. "For this assault, however, they appeared to think, 'We can just catch these airfields and won't meet much resistance so we don't need to commit'."

Russia's gains can also be explained by a failure of Ukraine's tactics in the southern theatres. "When they were fighting on the outskirts of [the city of] Melitopol, they were trying to do armoured engagements and they did lose a couple of tanks," said Bullock.

A new and potentially more bloody chapter of the war is now under way as Russia changes its battlefield tactics.

"We're definitely in a second phase of the war," said Justin Bronk, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank. "We're increasingly seeing the Russian military starting to fight like they normally fight."

This means it will increasingly resort to methods tried and tested in previous conflicts, an approach that can be seen in its assault on Mariupol. The port has been subject to a ferocious Russian bombardment that has flattened much of the city and killed a large number of civilians.

"They seem to be falling back on the extremely brutal, but unfortunately very successful, pattern in Syria and Grozny [in Chechnya] - besiege them, cut them off," said Bronk. "Shell people until starvation and bombing just compels a surrender."

Kofman added: "Now they realise they're in for a serious fight . . . this war is going to get uglier."

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How Russia's mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin's war

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The snarled up 65km Russian convoy that was stuck for days outside Kyiv neatly illustrated Moscow's misplaced belief that it could achieve a lightning-fast victory in Ukraine. Western military analysts say Russia's leadership initially thought its "special military operation" would reach the capital and other big Ukrainian cities in days, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky's government to capitulate and allow a puppet administration to be installed.

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Ideas & practices to help students getting involved for Ukraine

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Ideas & practices to help students getting involved for Ukraine

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In light of the invasion of Ukraine, many students may feel the urge to help and do something about the situation. What are the ways teachers can help the students channel their energy into positive actions?

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Classrooms and school administrations across the continent have mobilised to express solidarity with Ukraine, and teachers have undertaken to answer pupils' questions. This article highlights some commendable ideas and practices.

Expressing solidarity

European schools have been making donations of money, food, clothes, medicine, and school equipment to Ukraine. In some cases, the funds were raised by sales of baked goods or handmade items (such as jewellery) and accompanied by cards written by the pupils.

For a more targeted approach, some schools have got in touch with their twin town or sister city in Ukraine - or found a partner school in Ukraine - to ask them what they need more concretely.

There have also been many symbolic gestures of solidarity. Pupils and staff have sung Peace on Earth or Imagine, gathered together to form the peace symbol, read anti-war poetry, lit up classrooms in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, or created an anti-war 'corner'.
2nd Primary School of Lavrio, Greece - text reads "No to War"
Embracing Ukrainian pupils

European schools have opened their doors to Ukrainian refugees, like the Footprints preschool in Dublin, Ireland, which has offered free places to children fleeing the ongoing conflict. Many European countries are preparing for Ukrainian refugee children to enter their education system. Poland for example, which is receiving the largest numbers of refugees - including hundreds of thousands of school-age children - is taking special measures to help them acclimate, including setting up preparatory units, and securing intercultural assistants and school psychologists.

Countering stigmatisation

On the other hand, teachers caution that the war might cause pupils of Russian and Belarussian origin to be excluded or stigmatised in school. To counteract this, educators should challenge possible preconceptions as soon as possible. They should also frame the war as something perpetrated specifically by the Russian leadership and military, and make it clear that the Russian people are suffering from it, as well. School psychologists can step in to help, if needed.

Encouraging student activism

Pupils and school staff are participating in anti-war protests in large numbers, often with the support of their school administration and local government. In Germany, for example, Hamburg's approximately 250,000 pupils were given time off by their Minister for Schools to take part in the Fridays for Future protest (article in German).

Talking about war

Before class and during breaks, the school yard is almost certainly abuzz with news about the crisis in Ukraine. Teachers can dedicate some of their lesson time to answering pupils' questions and concerns. Ignoring the subject might only amplify the existing 'noise' as pupils continue to bounce ideas off each other.

Here are some approaches that have proven successful.

Listening and reassuring: Find out what pupils already know, and let them convey their questions, fears and uncertainties. Clarify that it is normal to be worried and to lack some answers, but try to put their imaginary scenarios in perspective.

Sharing good sources: Disinformation is running rampant, especially on platforms popular among young users, like TikTok and Instagram. Teachers can present some reliable alternatives, lay out the facts and reconstruct the context of the conflict. The news can even be used as a springboard for a lesson on media literacy and disinformation. The European Commission has created a page EU solidarity with Ukraine, including its actions on countering disinformation.

Seeking support from colleagues: An email by the school administration encouraging teachers to talk about the topic in classroom can go a long way toward boosting their confidence, and a list of pupils' FAQs with possible replies and resources can lighten their burden. Teachers may also get advice from colleagues or involve the school psychologists in classroom discussions. Some pupils might feel more comfortable talking to their peers: in these cases, the student representatives can intervene.

Seeking support outside school: Other educational stakeholders have offered their support to schools. In Belgium, for example, one school collaborated with the Ukrainian Embassy to receive children's books on Ukraine that were made available in the school's library; and in the Netherlands, schools received a brief from TerInfo of Utrecht University with guidelines on how to explain the situation to pupils ( article in Dutch).
If you are a teacher, we encourage you to create solidarity videos - with or without your pupils - to send to your National Support Organisation. Additional references: https://educateagainsthate.com/blog/posts/help-students-talk-news/ https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-07/ukraine-russia-misinformation-classroom-lessons
https://deutsches-schulportal.de/schulkultur/krieg-in-schule-thematisieren/ (German)

https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/anfeindungen-russischer-kinder-in-schulen-rlp-100.html (German)

https://www.savethechildren.it/blog-notizie/come-parlare-di-guerra-a-scuola-e-articolo-11 (Italian)

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Schools in Europe react to the Russian invasion of Ukraine

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Classrooms and school administrations across the continent have mobilised to express solidarity with Ukraine, and teachers have undertaken to answer pupils' questions. This article highlights some commendable ideas and practices. European schools have been making donations of money, food, clothes, medicine, and school equipment to Ukraine.

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Invasion of Ukraine - IN THE NEWS Resources - Feb 2022

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Resources for Teaching about the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

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Resources for Teaching about the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

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On February 24, 2022, the Russian military invaded Ukraine. The escalating conflict is causing a widespread humanitarian crisis, as civilians are injured, killed, or forced from their homes. This Teaching Idea is designed to help students explore one facet of this devastating war: the mounting refugee crisis. The UNHCR projects that more than 4 million Ukrainian people-10% of the population-will leave the country because of the Russian invasion, and as of March 8, 2022, half of the 2 million Ukrainian refugees who fled to other European countries are children.

European governments and private citizens have mobilized to help Ukrainian refugees. For example, the European Union plans to allow Ukrainian people to live and work in EU countries for up to three years, the Polish government is providing Ukrainians with healthcare and social assistance, and individual volunteers have assembled to provide free rides, food, and supplies. We can and should be inspired by these stories, and they also raise ethical questions about the different treatment migrants and refugees from other parts of the world, including Middle Eastern and African countries, have faced recently in Europe.

This Teaching Idea introduces students to the experiences of Ukrainian people forced to flee the war and highlights the inspiring ways governments and individual volunteers have stepped up to help Ukrainians. It also raises ethical questions about the treatment of refugees and migrants from non-European countries and asks students to consider how we can take care of ourselves and each other during this crisis.

Additional Resources:
What follows are teacher-facing instructions for the activities. Find student-facing instructions in the Google Slides for this Teaching Idea.

1. Introduce the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

To introduce your students to the growing Ukrainian refugee crisis, share the following passage, which you can also find in the Slides for this Teaching Idea. ( Note: The situation involving Ukrainian people fleeing the war is evolving rapidly, and we recommend you consult a recent news story to find the latest information and statistics.)

On February 24, 2022, the Russian military invaded Ukraine, a country in Eastern Europe with a population of about 40 million people. The conflict has continued to escalate, and many civilians have been killed or forced from their homes due to the fighting, creating the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Most of the refugees are entering Poland, with large numbers also crossing into other countries west of Ukraine: Moldova, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia. As of March 8, 2022, half of the refugees fleeing Ukraine were children, and Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been ordered by their government to stay and fight. The UNHCR (the UN agency in charge of refugees) estimates that more than 4 million Ukrainians-10% of the population-will leave the country because of the Russian invasion.

European governments and private citizens have mobilized to help Ukrainian refugees. For example, the European Union plans to allow Ukrainians to live and work in EU countries for up to three years, the Polish government is providing Ukrainians with healthcare and social assistance, and individual volunteers have assembled to provide free rides, food, and supplies.

Show your students a selection of images of Ukrainian people fleeing the war from the Atlantic photo essay Ukrainian Refugees Say Goodbye to Home and Family Members. ( Note: We recognize that your students may have varying degrees of proximity to the events in Ukraine, a lived experience of war, or refugee status. We encourage you to be careful in choosing images to share, balancing a desire to help your student confront and understand the crisis with a desire to meet them where they are.)

Then, ask your students to reflect in their journals on what they learned about the Ukrainian refugee crisis using the Head, Heart, Conscience strategy:

Head: What information did you learn from these sources about Ukrainians who were forced to flee their homes because of the war? What questions do you still have?

Heart: What emotions did these sources raise for you? Were there particular images that stood out to you? If so, why?

Conscience: Who should be responsible for helping Ukrainian refugees? According to the paragraph you read, what are some steps individuals and governments are taking to help Ukrainian refugees? What other ideas do you have about how people and governments can help refugees?

Once students have finished reflecting in their journals, give them an opportunity to share aspects of their reflections with a partner or call on a few volunteers to share with the whole class.

2. Explore the Choices People and Governments Make to Help Refugees

European governments and individual volunteers have been stepping up in inspiring ways to aid Ukrainian people forced to flee their homes because of the war. This generosity should be celebrated. At the same time, it highlights the harsh treatment that refugees and migrants from non-European countries have at times faced in Europe. This activity is designed to help students think about the ways people are standing up to help Ukrainians while also exploring ethical questions around the differences in the reception refugees and migrants from different backgrounds face in Europe.

Ask students to read one or both of the article excerpts in the reading Choices People and Governments Make to Help Refugees. Once students have finished reading, they should discuss the questions below in small groups of 3-4 students. These questions are also located within the reading, below each excerpt.
Excerpt 1 Reflection Questions:

What does Godlewska-Jeneralska plan to do to help Ukrainians fleeing the war? Why did she decide to help?

According to the article, why do many Polish people feel close to Ukrainians? What are some other reasons people feel close to each other?

Why does Godlewska-Jeneralska believe it is "natural" to help Ukrainian refugees? Why might people feel a greater obligation to help those who feel geographically or culturally "close"?

What problems can it create when people prioritize helping those who feel geographically or culturally "close"?

Excerpt 2 Reflection Questions:

What assumptions do the politicians and the journalist quoted in this article make about refugees from non-European countries? What assumptions do they make about Ukrainian refugees? What do these assumptions say about who they think "belongs" in their countries?

The politicians and the journalist mentioned socio-economic class, religion, education, and physical appearance as significant aspects of refugee identity. Why do you think these factors shape the way people respond to refugees? Should they matter?

Finish by asking a few volunteers from different groups to share their responses with the class.

3. Reflect on How People Can Care for Themselves and Others

In times of crisis, it is important that people take care of themselves and others. Place your students into small groups of 3-4 and ask them to choose one or more of the following prompts to discuss together:

Godlewska-Jeneralska is prepared to host Ukrainian people fleeing the war in her own home. Can you think of other examples, perhaps from your own community, of people meeting a crisis with generosity?

Who in your own community might be feeling particularly vulnerable because of the war in Ukraine? What can we do to help those who feel vulnerable?

The news about the war in Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis is upsetting for everyone, and in particular for those who have a personal connection to Ukraine or the region. What steps can you take to care for yourself in the face of this crisis? (Some ideas include talking to someone you trust or limiting the amount of time you spend reading the news.)

Intolerance, fear, and existing stereotypes have shaped the extent to which many societies respond to refugees with empathy and support. What can we do to challenge these harmful attitudes and encourage more equitable responses?

When students have finished discussing, ask them to return to their Head, Heart, Conscience journal reflections and add any additional thoughts or questions these activities raised for them.

Extension 1: Create a Toolbox for Care
You can build on the final reflection by using our Toolbox for Care teaching strategy, which invites students to create a physical toolbox containing "tools" that represent the skills, attitudes, and actions that they need to care for themselves and their communities during difficult times.
Extension 2: Connect to the Concept of the "Universe of Obligation"
The "universe of obligation" is a helpful concept in analyzing the choices both governments and individuals make about what groups of people they are most likely to protect. Our global system assumes that every person will fit into their own nation's universe of obligation. However, that is not always the case, especially for refugees who are forced to flee their own countries. Share Facing History's reading Universe of Obligation with your students. Read it together as a class, and then discuss the following questions with your students:

What factors influence the way a society defines its universe of obligation? In what ways might a nation or community signal who is part of its universe of obligation and who is not?

What factors do you think should influence whether migrants or refugees are included within a country's universe of obligation?

What do you think might be some of the consequences for those, including migrants and refugees, who are not within a society's universe of obligation?

How do we expand our own universes of obligation? What can we do to encourage our communities and nations to feel and act responsibly towards others?

Download the Student Facing Slides

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Teaching about the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

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On February 24, 2022, the Russian military invaded Ukraine. The escalating conflict is causing a widespread humanitarian crisis, as civilians are injured, killed, or forced from their homes. This Teaching Idea is designed to help students explore one facet of this devastating war: the mounting refugee crisis.

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Putin's War in Ukraine - Dr Shane Rourke

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Putin's War in Ukraine - Dr Shane Rourke

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A historian's lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=G8_Umkk6_ho&feature=youtu.be

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The home of news and fun facts for kids. Find out what is going on, with stories, pictures and videos. Try a quiz or one of our free games.

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Odessa Opera - Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves

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Odessa Opera - Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves

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Sung by others before as a symbol of protest and resistance. Lyrics:
"Oh my country so beautiful & lost!
Oh so dear yet unhappy!
Rekindle the memories within our hearts,
tell us about the time that have gone by
Or similar to the fate of Solomon
give a sound of lament
or let the Lord inspire a concert
That may give to endure our suffering"

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An opera choir in Odessa sing ‘Va, pensiero’ (Choir of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, as the city braces for a Russian attack.

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An opera choir in Odessa sing ‘Va, pensiero’ (Choir of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, as the city braces for a Russian attack.

https://t.co/obc1050ARP

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An opera choir in Odessa sing ‘Va, pensiero’ (Choir of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, as the city braces for a Russian attack.pic.twitter.com/obc1050ARP
— Adam Schwarz (@AdamJSchwarz) March 12, 2022

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An opera choir in Odessa sing ‘Va, pensiero’ (Choir of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, as the city braces for a Russian attack.

https://t.co/obc1050ARP

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An opera choir in Odessa sing ‘Va, pensiero’ (Choir of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, as the city braces for a Russian attack.

https://t.co/obc1050ARP

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An opera choir in Odessa sing ‘Va, pensiero’ (Choir of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, as the city braces for a Russian attack.

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ulture has long been a proxy in the assertion of power by one people over another. Recent egregious examples include the Chinese government's attempt to suppress Uyghur religion, literature, music, even food, and Islamic State's destruction of ancient monuments. In war, culture is a second front. At their most extreme, wars are about eradicating a people's cultural memory altogether, wiping them from the slate as if they had never been.

That Vladimir Putin should have prefaced his invasion with a speech falsely framing Ukraine as essentially Russian is on the one hand a spurious justification for invasion, and on the other an attempt to seize, simplify and own a complex historical narrative about the two intertwined but distinct nations.

However, Mr Putin has been outsmarted by his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The former comedian, who had never held office before his 2019 election, has, remarkably, been a persuasive rhetorician and war leader. On the other hand, a career in acting is perhaps exactly what was required for him to step so convincingly into this new role.

He is not the only one to make such a leap. A potent symbol of the ploughshares-to-swords shift of Ukraine is the fact that ballet dancers from Kyiv's national opera house have joined the fight. Elsewhere, symbols of Ukrainian resistance - the sunflower, and the blue and yellow of the national flag - have been deployed internationally to moving effect. And acts of fellowship - making Ukrainian food, for example, as part of the UK-based Cook for Ukraine humanitarian fundraising effort - have their own simple and practical power.

"If we lose our culture, we lose our identity," Lilya Onyshchenko, the head of Lviv's city council heritage protection office, told the Guardian. Ms Onyshchenko went on to emphasise that the city in western Ukraine had always been multicultural. It is not clear what Mr Putin's intentions are, precisely, in relation to Ukraine's assertion of its own identity. But the understandable fear is that Russian expansion seeks to colonise minds as well as places.

In some ways, intentions are less important than effects, amid war's messy reality. A missile strike in Kyiv that reportedly killed five people was seemingly directed at the television tower, but it lies close to Babyn Yar, the site of the massacre of 150,000 people during the second world war, including 30,000 Jews - a great irony given Mr Putin's stated ambition to " denazify" Ukraine. An attack on the town of Ivankiv, 50 miles north-west of Kyiv, set afire the town's Historical and Local History Museum, destroying precious works by the 20th-century folk artist Maria Prymachenko. The artist is an important symbol of Ukrainian art - and Ukrainian hope.

Three decades ago, war in the former Yugoslavia saw sacred and beautiful places such as Dubrovnik or the Mostar bridge and old town targeted, sometimes with the intention of erasing the evidence that people of another religion or ethnicity had once lived there. Whether or not sites like Babyn Yar and Ivankiv's museum have been collateral damage rather than actual targets, the cultural front in war is never trivial. This is a conflict, like so many others, that's not just about controlling territory - but owning narrative.

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The Guardian view on Ukraine's cultural heritage: a second front | Editorial

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ulture has long been a proxy in the assertion of power by one people over another. Recent egregious examples include the Chinese government's attempt to suppress Uyghur religion, literature, music, even food, and Islamic State's destruction of ancient monuments. In war, culture is a second front.

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Film report on help for refugees 10 March 

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Film report on help for refugees 10 March 

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Where are Ukraine’s refugees heading? - BBC Newsnight

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Perspective from a Russian born American commentator

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Perspective from a Russian born American commentator

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or three months everyone argued about whether there would be a war, whether Vladimir Putin was bluffing or serious. Some of the Russia experts who had long told people to take it easy were now telling people to get worried. Others, who had long criticised Putin, said that he was just trying to draw attention to himself, that it was all for show. Among the analysts, there was a debate between the troop watchers and the TV watchers. The troop watchers saw the massive concentration of Russian forces at the border and in Crimea and warned of invasion. The TV watchers said that Russian TV was not ramping up war hysteria, as it usually does before a Russian invasion, and that this meant there would be no war.

The question was settled, for ever, on the night of 24 February, when Russian missiles hit military installations and civilian targets inside Ukraine, and Russian armoured convoys crossed the border. Then everyone began arguing about why. Was Putin crazy? Was he genuinely concerned about Nato expansion? Was he thinking in amoral categories - as longtime Putin scholar Fiona Hill suggested - that were fundamentally historical, along timescales that made no sense to ordinary mortals? Was he trying, bit by bit, to reconstruct the Russian Empire? Was Estonia next?

I had travelled to Moscow in January to see what I could learn. The city looked beautiful. Snow lay on the ground and everyone was very calm. Yes, repressions were ramping up, the space for political expression was narrowing, and many more people had died of Covid-19 than was officially acknowledged. And yes, speaking of Covid, Putin was paranoid about it, forcing anyone who wanted to see him in person to quarantine for one week in advance in a hotel the Kremlin had for that purpose. No one thought things were going in anything like the right direction, but none of the people I spoke to, some of them fairly well connected, thought an invasion was actually going to happen.

They thought Putin was engaged in coercive diplomacy. They thought the American intelligence community had lost its mind. I visited friends, listened to their reflections, gamed out the various scenarios. Even if an invasion did happen - a big if - it would be over quickly, we all agreed. It would be like Crimea: a precision operation, the use of overwhelming technological superiority. Putin had always been so cautious - the sort of person who never started a fight he wasn't sure to win. It would be terrible, but relatively painless. That was wrong. We were all wrong.

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That everyone was wrong did not prevent everyone from immediately claiming that, in fact, they'd been right. Russia experts who had been arguing for years that Putin was a bloody tyrant rushed forth to claim vindication, for he had undoubtedly become what they had claimed he was all along. Russia experts who had been arguing for years that we needed to heed Putin's warnings could also claim vindication (though more quietly) because Putin had finally acted on those warnings. As usual, officials from US presidential administrations of yore were trotted out on TV as talking heads, dispensing their wisdom and accepting no responsibility, as if they had not allcontributed, in one way or another, to the catastrophe.

This war was not inevitable, but we have been moving toward it for years: the west, and Russia, and Ukraine. The war itself is not new - it began, as Ukrainians have frequently reminded us in the past two weeks, with the Russian incursion in 2014. But the roots go back even further. We are still experiencing the death throes of the Soviet empire. We are reaping, too, in the west, the fruits of our failed policies in the region after the Soviet collapse.

This war was the decision of one person and one person only - Vladimir Putin. He made the call in his Covid isolation, failed to mount any sort of campaign to garner public support, and barely spoke to anyone outside the tiniest inner circle about it, which is why just a few weeks before the invasion no one in Moscow thought it was going to happen. Furthermore, he clearly misunderstood the nature of the political situation in Ukraine, and the vehemence of the resistance he would encounter. Nonetheless, to understand the tragedy of the war, and what it means for Ukraine and Russia and the rest of us, it is worth going back beyond the last few weeks and months, and even beyond Vladimir Putin. Things did not have to turn out this way, though where exactly we went wrong is much harder to determine.

1. The breakup: Russia and Ukraine after the fall of the USSR

hirty years ago, as the countries of the former Soviet Union declared their independence, everyone breathed a sigh of relief that the empire disappeared so gently. Aside from a nasty irredentist conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the ethnic Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, there was very little violence. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, conflict began appearing at the edges of the former USSR.

In Moldova, Russian troops supported a small separatist movement of Russian-speakers that eventually formed the tiny breakaway republic of Transnistria. In Georgia, the autonomous region of Abkhazia, also supported by Russian arms, fought a short war with the central government in Tbilisi, as did South Ossetia. Chechnya, a Russian republic that had fiercely resisted the encroachment of the empire throughout the 19th century, and which suffered terribly under Soviet rule, declared its own wish for independence, and was ground down in not one but two brutal wars. Tajikistan endured a civil war, in part a fallout from the civil war raging in Afghanistan, with which it shared a border. And on and on. In 2007, Russia launched a cyber-attack against Estonia, and in 2008, it responded to an attempt by Georgia to retake South Ossetia with a massive counter-offensive. Despite all this, it was still common for people to say that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had been miraculously peaceful. And then came Ukraine.

In the laboratory of nation-building that was the former empire, Ukraine stood out. Some of the Soviet former republics had longstanding political traditions and distinct linguistic, religious and cultural practices; others less so. The Baltic states had each been independent for two decades between the world wars. Most of the other republics had had, at best, a brief experiment with independence in the immediate wake of the collapse of tsarism in 1917. To complicate matters, many of the newfound nations had significant Russian-speaking populations who were either uninterested in or actively hostile toward their new national projects.

Ukraine was unique on all these fronts. Though it, too, had only existed as an independent state in modern times for a few short years, it had a powerful nationalist movement, a vibrant literary canon, and a strong memory of its independent place in the history of Europe before Peter the Great. It was very large - the second-largest country in Europe after Russia. It was industrialised, being a major producer of coal, steel and helicopter engines, as well as grain and sunflower seeds. It had a highly educated populace. And that populace at the time it became independent in 1991 numbered 52 million - second only to Russia among post-Soviet states. It was strategically located on the Black Sea and on the border with numerous eastern European states and future Nato members. It possessed what had once been the most beautiful beaches in the USSR, on the Crimean peninsula, where the Russian tsars had spent their summers, as well as the USSR's largest warm water naval port, in Sevastopol. It had suffered greatly during the German advance into the Soviet Union in 1941 - of the 13 "hero cities" of the USSR, so called because they saw the heaviest fighting and raised the stoutest resistance, four were in Ukraine (Kyiv, Odesa, Kerch and Sevastopol). The economies of Russia and Ukraine were deeply intertwined. Ukrainian factories in Dnipropetrovsk were a vital part of the military-industrial capacity of the USSR, and Russia's largest export gas pipelines ran through Ukraine. Strategically, in the words of historian Dominic Lieven, describing the situation circa the first world war, Ukraine could not have been more vital. "Without Ukraine's population, industry and agriculture, early-20th-century Russia would have ceased to be a great power." The same was true, or seemed to be true, in 1991.

Ukraine was not just geopolitically significant to Russia. It was culturally and historically, too. The Russian and Ukrainian languages had diverged sometime in the 13th century, and Ukraine had a distinct and notable literature, but the two remained close - about as close as Spanish and Portuguese. While most of the country was ethnically Ukrainian, there was, particularly in the east, a large ethnic Russian minority. Perhaps more important, while the official language was Ukrainian, the lingua franca in most of the large cities was Russian. And perhaps even more important than that, most people knew both languages. It was common on television to see a journalist, for example, ask a question in Russian and receive an answer in Ukrainian, or to have a panel of experts for a talent show with two Russian-language judges and two Ukrainian-language judges. It was a genuinely bilingual nation - a rare thing.

From a Russian nationalist perspective, that was a problem. Why speak two languages when you could just speak one? Crimea was a particularly sore spot: the vast majority of the population identified as Russian. And once you started thinking about Crimea, you then started thinking about eastern Ukraine. There were many Russians there. To be sure, there were also Russians in other places - in northern Kazakhstan, for example, and eastern Estonia. There were irredentist claims on these areas as well, and occasionally they flared up. The writer turned political provocateur Eduard Limonov, for example, was arrested in Moscow in 2001 for allegedly plotting to invade northern Kazakhstan and declare it an independent ethnic Russian republic. But no place held such a central part in the Russian historical imagination as Ukraine.

For the first 20 years of independence, Russia kept a very close eye on developments in Ukraine, and interfered in various ways, but that was as far as it went. That was as far as it needed to go. Ukraine's large Russian-language population guaranteed, or seemed to guarantee, that the country would not stray too far from the Russian sphere of influence.

2. 'Where does the motherland begin?' The view from Ukraine

n Ukraine itself, even aside from the Russian presence, there were the birth agonies of a nation. Many of the new post-Soviet countries had their share of problems - corrupt elites, restive ethnic minorities, a border with Russia. Ukraine had all this, and more. Because it was large and industrialised, there was plenty of it to steal. Because it had a major Black Sea port in the city of Odesa, there was an easily accessible seaway through which to steal it. As became clear in 2014, when it became time to use it, much of the equipment of the old Ukrainian army was smuggled out of the country through that port.

On top of this, Ukraine was, if not divided, then certainly not immediately recognisable as a unified whole. Because it had so many times been conquered and partitioned, the country's historical memory itself was fractured. In the words of one historian, "Its different parts had different pasts." To make things worse, one of the most treasured aspects of the political culture of Ukraine, historically - the legacy of the Cossack hetmanate of the 17th century - was anarchism. The original Cossacks were warriors who had escaped serfdom. Their political system was a radical democracy. There was something beautiful about this. But in terms of the construction of a modern state, it had its drawbacks. In a now-infamous CIA analysis written shortly after the creation of independent Ukraine, it was predicted that there was a good chance the country would fall apart.

And yet, for two decades, it didn't. For better and worse, democracy was rooted deep in Ukrainian political culture, and so while in Russia power was never transferred to an opposition, in Ukraine it happened again and again. In 1994, the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, was voted out of office in favour of Leonid Kuchma, who promised better relations with Russia and to give the Russian language equal status in Ukraine. In 2004, his hand-picked successor, Viktor Yanukovych, was, after massive protests against a falsified election, voted out in favour of a more nationalist and pro-European candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. In 2010, Yushchenko proceeded to lose to a resurgent Yanukovych. But Yanukovych was thrown out of office by the Maidan revolution in 2014. A nationalist candidate and chocolate billionaire, Petro Poroshenko, became the next president, but he was replaced by Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a Russian-speaking pro-peace candidate, in 2019.

Ukrainian politics were full of conflict. Fist-fights in the Rada were common and protests were a fact of ordinary life. There were massive protests against Kuchma, for example, in 2000, when a recording surfaced of him apparently ordering the murder of the journalist Georgiy Gongadze, whose headless body had been found in the woods outside Kyiv. (Kuchma insisted the tapes were doctored. He was charged in 2011, but the prosecution was dropped after a court ruled the tapes inadmissible.) Yushchenko, the opposition candidate in 2004, barely survived a dioxin poisoning, which had all the markings of a Russian special operation. The initial round of voting in 2004 was marked by severe irregularities and clear voter fraud such as had not yet appeared in Russia. It took mass protests, known as the Orange Revolution, to win another round of voting, in which Yushchenko won. Yushchenko himself subsequently presided over a fair election in 2010, which he lost. And on and on.

These changes of power were alternately tumultuous and pedestrian, but they reflected genuine differences of opinion among the populace about what Ukraine should be. Some thought Ukraine should integrate further with Europe, others that it should remain friendly and closely connected with Russia. The cultural and historical differences between the different parts of Ukraine would surface in times of crisis.

For Russian speakers and Ukraine's remaining Jewish population, the memory of the second world war, of resistance to Nazi invasion and occupation, remained an important touchstone. Ukrainian nationalists had a different perspective on these events. For some, the occupation of their country began in 1921 (when the Bolsheviks consolidated control of Ukraine) or 1939 (when Stalin took the last part of western Ukraine as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Germany and the USSR to carve up Poland), if not 1654, when the Cossack Hetmanate sought the protection of the Russian tsar. The famous wartime resistance fighters known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who had opposed both Soviet and German occupation in western Ukraine, and who were seen as fascist villains by the Soviets, were, in the nationalist narrative, the George Washingtons of Ukrainian history. For nationalists, the signal tragedy of the 20th century was not the Nazi invasion, but instead the great famine of 1932-33, in which millions of Ukrainians died. It was known as the Holodomor - "murder by hunger" - and was consistently referred to as a deliberate act by Stalin (and by extension Russia) to destroy the Ukrainian nation.

All these arguments took place against a backdrop of economic stagnation. Ukraine's economy was consistently one of the weakest in the former Soviet bloc. Corruption was endemic and living standards were low. Ukraine was dependent on cheap gas from Russia as well as the "transit fees" it charged for Russian gas going to Europe.

To Ukrainians living under these see-sawing politics, going from hope to disappointment and back again, with what seemed like a permanent elite merely trading the presidency back and forth between themselves, it felt like their lives were passing them by. A journalist I met in Kyiv in 2010, who had taken part in the protests that were part of the Orange Revolution and was then let down by Yuschenko's presidency, lamented the missed opportunities. "All this while time is passing," he said. He couldn't believe how little had been done since 2005, and since 1991.

But there was another aspect to time passing. The more time passed, the more Ukraine's fragile nationhood could coalesce. Because what did it mean to belong to a nation? Where, in the words of the famous Soviet song, does the motherland begin? It begins with the pictures in the first book your mother reads you, according to the song. And to your good and true friends from the courtyard next door. The more people who were born in Ukraine, rather than the USSR, the more people grew up thinking of Kyiv as their capital instead of Moscow, and the more they learned the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian history, the stronger Ukraine would become. Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in the TV show that made him famous in Ukraine and eventually catapulted him to the presidency, played a Russian-speaking high school history teacher who suddenly becomes president. In the brief scenes in which we see Zelenskiy's character actually teaching, he is quizzing his students about the great Ukrainian national historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

3. For Russia, Nato is a four-letter word

t was violent Russian opposition to EU membership for Ukraine that in late 2013 precipitated the Maidan revolution, which in turn precipitated the Russian annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine. But after the end of the cold war, it was Nato expansion that had been the greatest irritant to the relationship between Russia and the west, a relationship that found Ukraine trapped in between.

Nato expansion proceeded very slowly, then seemingly all at once. In the immediate wake of the Soviet collapse, it was not a foregone conclusion that Nato would get bigger. In fact, most US policymakers, and the US military, opposed expanding the alliance. There was even talk, for a while, of disbanding Nato. It had served its purpose - to contain the Soviet Union - and now everyone could go their separate ways.

This changed in the early years of the Clinton administration. The motor for the change came from two directions. One was a group of idealistic foreign policy hands inside the Clinton national security council, and the other was the eastern European states.

After 1991, the post-communist countries of eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, found themselves in an uncertain security environment. Nearby Yugoslavia was falling apart, and they had their own potential border disputes. Most of all, though, they had a vivid memory of Russian imperialism. They did not believe Russia would remain weak for ever, and they wanted to align with Nato while they still could. "If you don't let us into Nato, we're getting nuclear weapons," Polish officials told a team of thinktank researchers in 1993. "We don't trust the Russians."

In presenting their case, it did not hurt that the leaders of the eastern European countries had a great deal of moral credibility. It was after a meeting with, among others, Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa in Prague in January 1994 that Bill Clinton announced that "the question is no longer whether Nato will take on new members but when." This formulation - not whether, but when - became official US policy. Five years later, the Czech Republic (having peacefully divorced Slovakia), Hungary and Poland were inducted into Nato. In the years to come, 11 more countries would join, bringing the total number of countries in the alliance to 30.

During the recent crisis, some American pundits and policymakers have claimed that Russia did not object to Nato until quite recently, when it was searching for a pretext to invade Ukraine. The claim is genuinely ludicrous. Russia has been protesting Nato expansion since the very beginning. The Russian deputy foreign minister told Clinton's top Russia hand Strobe Talbott in 1993 that "Nato is a four-letter word". At a joint press conference with Clinton in 1994, Boris Yeltsin, to whom Clinton had been such a loyal ally, reacted with fury when he realised that Nato was actually moving ahead with its plans to include the eastern European states. He predicted that a "cold peace" in Europe would be the result.

Russia was too weak, and still too dependent on western loans, to do anything except complain and watch warily as Nato increased in power. The alliance's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was particularly disturbing to the Russian leadership. It was, first of all, an intervention in a situation that Russia viewed as an internal conflict. Kosovo was, at the time, part of Serbia. After the Nato intervention, it was, in effect, no longer part of Serbia. Meanwhile the Russians had their own Kosovo-like situation in Chechnya, and it suddenly seemed to them that it was not impossible that Nato could intervene in that situation as well. As one American analyst who studied the Russian military told me: "They got scared because they knew what the state of Russian conventional forces was. They saw what the actual state of US conventional forces was. And they saw that while they had a lot of problems in Chechnya with their own Muslim minority, the United States just intervened to basically break Kosovo off of Serbia."

The next year, Russia officially changed its military doctrine to say that it could, if threatened, resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. One of the authors of the doctrine told the Russian military paper Krasnaya Zvezda that Nato's eastward expansion was a threat to Russia and that this was the reason for the lowered threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. That was 22 years ago.

The second post-Soviet round of Nato expansion was the largest. Agreed to in 2002 and made official in 2004, it brought Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia into the alliance. Almost all these states were part of the Soviet bloc, and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - the "Baltics" - were once part of the Soviet Union. Now they had joined the west.

As this was happening, a series of events shook up the Russian periphery. The "colour revolutions" - coming in quick succession in Georgia in 2003 (Rose), Ukraine in 2004 (Orange) and Kyrgyzstan in 2005 (Tulip) - all used mass protests to eject corrupt pro-Russian incumbents. These events were greeted with great enthusiasm in the west as a reawakening of democracy, and with scepticism and trepidation in the Kremlin as an encroachment on Russian space. In the US, policymakers celebrated that freedom was on the march. In Moscow, there was a slightly paranoid concern that the colour revolutions were the work of the western secret services, and that Russia was next.

The Kremlin might not have been right about a long-range western plot, but they weren't wrong to think that the west never saw it as an equal, as a peer. The fact is that at every turn, at every sticking point, in every situation, the west, and the US in particular, did what it wanted to do. It was, at times, exquisitely sensitive to Russian perceptions; at other times, cavalier. But in all cases the US just pressed ahead. Eventually this just became the way things were. Relations between the two sides soured, and positions hardened. In 2006, Dick Cheney gave an aggressive speech in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, in which he celebrated the achievements of the Baltic nations. "The system that has brought such great hope to the shores of the Baltic can bring the same hope to the far shores of the Black Sea, and beyond," he said. "What is true in Vilnius is also true in Tbilisi and Kyiv, and true in Minsk, and true in Moscow." As Samuel Charap and Timothy Colton note in their excellent short history of the 2014 Ukraine conflict, Everyone Loses, "One can only conjecture the reaction to such statements in the Kremlin."

A year later, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, in what is widely considered a key turning point in relations between Russia and the west, Putin delivered his response, assailing the US and its unipolar system for its arrogance, its flouting of international law, and its hypocrisy. "We are constantly being taught about democracy," he said of Russia. "But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves."

The warning was heard, but not heeded. In April 2008, in Bucharest, Nato countries met and delivered a promise that Georgia and Ukraine "will become members of Nato". It was, as many have since noted, the worst of both worlds: a promise of membership without any of the actual benefits, in the form of security guarantees, that membership would bring. A few months later, in what, up to that point, was by far the most significant military action outside its borders, Russia defeated Georgia in a decisive five-day war.

In retrospect, one could argue that if Nato had moved faster and accepted Ukraine and Georgia much earlier, none of what followed would have happened. This argument has the virtue of examples to bolster it: the Baltics entered Nato, and despite being former Soviet republics, have experienced relatively little Russian harassment since. But one could also argue that, in the face of mounting Russian alarm and repeated warnings about "red lines" over Nato, the US States and its allies should have been extra careful. They should have taken into account the specificity of the places they were dealing with, in particular Ukraine. Ukraine was not Russia, in Leonid Kuchma's famous phrase, but it was also not Poland. One of the problems with Ukraine's Nato bid in 2008, for example, pushed forth by the western-friendly Yushchenko administration, was that it was unpopular inside Ukraine - in large part because Ukrainians knew how Russia felt about it, and were rightly worried.

But as Nato and the EU both expanded farther east, their representatives considered it a matter of principle not to make compromises with a regime they viewed as trying to bully them and Ukraine. Again, they may have been right in principle. In practice, Putin has been warning of this invasion, in one form or another, for 15 years. A great many voices are now saying that we should have been much tougher on Putin much earlier - that the sanctions we are now seeing should have been deployed after the war in Georgia in 2008, or after the polonium poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. But there is also a case to be made that we should have thought more deeply about how to create a security arrangement, and an economic one, in which Ukraine would never have been faced with such a fateful choice.

4. What Putin thinks

till, at the centre of this tragedy lies one man: Vladimir Putin. He has embarked on a murderous and criminal war that also appears almost certain to be judged a colossal strategic blunder - uniting Europe, galvanising Nato, destroying his economy and isolating his country. What happened?

There have always been multiple competing views of Putin, falling along different axes as to his competence, his intelligence, his morality. That is, some people who thought he was evil also thought he was smart, and some people who thought he was merely defending Russian interests also thought he was incompetent.

Five years ago in this paper, during the boom in Putinology that followed Donald Trump's election, I made the case that Putin was basically a "normal" politician in the Russian context. That didn't mean he was in any way admirable - the way prosecuted the war in Chechnya, which launched his presidential candidacy, was evidence enough of his bad intentions. Nor did I think he should be hacking Hillary Clinton's emails. Nonetheless I thought that, given Russia's history, its traumatic experience of the post-Soviet transition, the internal dynamics of the Yeltsin regime, and the wider geopolitical context, the person who took over from Yeltsin was almost certain to have been a nationalist authoritarian, whether or not he was named Vladimir Putin. The question seemed to be: would this other nationalist authoritarian, not named Putin, have behaved very differently? Here there was some limited historical evidence, in the persons of Boris Yeltsin (author of the first war in Chechnya) and Dmitry Medvedev (author of the war in Georgia), that he would not.

The moment, at least in my mind, where Putin rendered these questions irrelevant, was the attempted poisoning with a nerve agent of the oppositionist Alexei Navalny, an attempted murder that would almost certainly have had to have Putin's approval. Other political murders in Russia had seemed to me less clearcut. There was good reason to believe that the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the politician Boris Nemtsov, for example, had been killed on the order of the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. And while Kadyrov was Putin's loyal ally, they were not one and the same. Possibly this was a distinction without a difference, and yet it seemed that talk of a dictatorship in Russia obscured the fact that the country still had some room, albeit narrowing by the year, for political life and freedom of thought. We are now seeing what an actual Russian dictatorship looks like: all remnants of an opposition media shuttered, journalists threatened with 15 years of prison, unbridled and unanswerable police aggression. With the invasion of Ukraine, there is no one left who thinks Putin is merely acting like a standard post-Soviet Russian politician.

Is there any explaining Putin's thought process? Here, there were objective and subjective factors. Objectively, he was not wrong to think that Ukraine was integrating further and further into the west. The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that he had so fiercely opposed in 2013 had been signed in 2014 and gone into effect in 2017. Nato, too, was on its way. There were now Nato weapons and Nato personnel in Ukraine. Putin's attempt to exert control over Ukrainian politics by creating the breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk had failed. In fact, it had not only failed, it had backfired. Ukrainians who had been lukewarm toward Nato now supported joining and many who had entertained pro-Russian sentiments had seen what Russian puppets had done in the breakaway republics. Ukraine, an imperfect democracy, scored a 61 on the Freedom House scale in 2021; the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (competing under the umbrella term "Eastern Donbas") scored a 4. No one wanted that for themselves. Putin had won Crimea and some territory in the east, but he had lost Ukraine. In the wake of Joe Biden's election, which signalled a renewed American commitment to Europe and Nato and, inter alia, Ukraine, things were going less and less in Putin's favour.

But he was not entirely out of options. In 2015 he had extracted, through force of arms, the Minsk-2 agreement - an onerous peace deal, never actually implemented by either side, that had obliged Ukraine to reintegrate the Donetsk and Luhansk republics into a federated Ukraine, where they would essentially have veto power over the country's foreign policy; perhaps, in 2022, he could get Minsk-3 as well. And if he had previously left the implementation of the Minsk agreement to a democratically elected Ukrainian government, he could decide not to make that mistake again. He could install a leader in Kyiv whom he could trust. A month before the invasion, the British government declared that it possessed intelligence indicating that Putin planned to do exactly that.

And yet here we get into the subjective factors: why, in retrospect, did Putin think he could pull this manoeuvre on a country the size of Ukraine? Partly, to be sure, he was buoyed up by his string of military victories - in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Crimea, in Syria. He had found great success, often at relatively little cost, by being a kind of international spoiler to the west's designs in various parts of the world.

He must also have been emboldened by what had happened in Ukraine in 2014. Crimea had surrendered to Russia without a shot. A few weeks later, a small group of middle-aged mercenaries had been able to march 100 miles into Ukraine and capture a small city called Slovyansk, igniting the active phase of the war in eastern Ukraine. If a ragtag outfit could do something like that, imagine what an actual army could do.

There was also the important factor that Putin did not believe Ukraine was a real country. This was not specific to Putin - many Russians, unfortunately, don't see why Ukraine should be independent. But with Putin this has become a real obsession, impermeable to contradictory evidence. One type of leader would see that Ukraine refuses to submit to his will and conclude that it was an independent entity. But for Putin this could only mean that it was controlled by someone else. After all, this was already the case in the parts of Ukraine that Putin had conquered - he had installed puppets to run the self-proclaimed people's republics in eastern Ukraine. So perhaps it stood to reason that the west had also installed a puppet - Zelenskiy - who would run at the first sign of trouble.

5. Where does this end?

ust about everyone has been surprised by the ferocity of the Ukrainian resistance: Putin, obviously, but also western military analysts who had accurately predicted the invasion but inaccurately thought the war would be over very quickly, and possibly even the Ukrainians themselves. Before the war, sociologists who studied Ukraine pointed to a fairly high willingness on the part of Ukrainians to fight for their country, but it was one thing to tell a sociologist, and it was another thing to go and fight. But, clearly, the Ukrainians have decided to fight.

Putin clearly did not expect Volodymyr Zelenskiy to turn into Winston Churchill. Zelenskiy had been elected as a peace candidate in 2019. A political novice from the country's industrial south-east, he won an impressive 73% of the vote in a runoff against Petro Poroshenko. The latter's campaign slogan had been "Army! Language! Faith!" Zelenskiy, by contrast, was elected as a breath of fresh air, someone who was going to do things differently, and also someone who indicated a willingness to try to negotiate with Putin to end the war. Poroshenko's campaign warned that Zelenskiy was a Kremlin stooge who would sell out the country. People voted for him anyway.

By the time war rolled around, Zelenskiy was no longer popular in Ukraine. His approval rating was in the 20s. He had failed to find a peaceful solution to the festering conflict in the Donbas region, and he had started persecuting his opponents. Viktor Medvedchuk, a close ally of Putin who was considered his point man in Ukraine, was placed under house arrest, and Poroshenko, still Zelenskiy's main political rival, was charged with treason for some business dealings he had with Medvedchuk and the separatist regions in 2014. And then, when the clouds of war started gathering, Zelenskiy insisted the threat was not real. He criticised the Biden administration for its alarmist rhetoric. The night before the invasion, he told Ukrainians they could sleep soundly that night. But the first Russian missiles hit their targets before dawn.

The day before, in his anguished, last-minute appeal to the Russian people, Zelenskiy had made clear that he did not want war. But it was also the case that he did not have much room for compromise. The only clear path to peace - implementation of the Minsk accords - had become, with the passage of time, even more intolerable to Ukrainiansthan it had been at their signing. At the end of the day, people don't like to feel as if they have been bullied into compromise by their larger and angrier neighbour. And most observers noted that, as terrifying as a Russian invasion was, a compromise by Zelenskiy that ceded too much would probably lead to the overthrow of his government.

If the only way to avoid war was through a craven surrender, then it would have to be war. Ukraine would fight. And fight they have.

Now, as the Russian army regroups and starts bombing and shelling Ukrainian cities, Nato governments are faced with an excruciating choice: either they watch in horror as innocent Ukrainians are killed, or they get further involved and risk an even wider conflict. Where this stops it's impossible to say. As of this writing, with the Russian leadership continuing to put forth maximalist demands, a settlement looks far away. And whether, if the Russian demands moderate, Zelenskiy will be able to accept a Russian Crimea and eastern Ukraine after all the blood his people have spilled - and, indeed, whether the people will accept it - is an open question.

Someday, the war will end, and someday after that, though probably not as soon as one might hope, the regime in Russia will have to change. There will be another opportunity to welcome Russia again into the concert of nations. Our job then will be to do it differently than we did it this time, in the post-Soviet period. But that is work for the future. For now, in agony and sympathy, we watch and wait.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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Was it inevitable? A short history of Russia's war on Ukraine | Keith Gessen

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or three months everyone argued about whether there would be a war, whether Vladimir Putin was bluffing or serious. Some of the Russia experts who had long told people to take it easy were now telling people to get worried.

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In one room of the National Museum of Lviv, an enormous scaffold is bare. In another, brackets hang loosely from the walls. Plinths sit empty along the corridors and wooden pallets and cardboard boxes are strewn on the floors. The staff used whatever they could to pack away the museum's priceless artefacts in a hurry.

As Russian shelling has devastated other parts of Ukraine, the picturesque western city of Lviv has been left untouched, so far. But it is bracing for war. Some preparations you can see in the open - the checkpoints on main roads and the soldiers on the streets - but some are taking place behind closed doors.

In Lviv's galleries, museums and churches, a huge operation is under way to safeguard the city's cultural heritage. Thousands of artworks and artefacts have been carefully removed and taken to secret underground locations, or down to basement storage rooms.

Ihor Kozhan, the director of the National Museum of Lviv - the largest art museum in Ukraine - took the BBC on a tour of its now empty rooms, which looked as though they had been looted. Climate-controlled display cases, usually home to artworks, icons and manuscripts dating as far back as the 14th Century, were bare.

Nearly every one of the 1,500 artefacts on display has now been removed from the museum. The other 97% of the collection - 180,000 pieces in total - was already in storage in some form.

"Everything, everything is gone," Kozhan said.

Despite overseeing the operation, Kozhan was amazed by the speed with which the 17th-century Bohorodchany Iconostasis - a grouping of religions paintings measuring 10m by 8m and one of the museum's most valuable pieces - had been dismantled by his team. It had taken six months to hang, piece by piece, he said, and less than six days to pull down from its scaffold and store away.

Constructed and painted over seven years beginning in 1698, the iconostasis represents the high watermark of the work of the icon painter Yov Kondzelevych. It has been in Lviv since 1924, when the archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church brought it back to Ukraine from Poland.

It was dismantled and hidden from the Nazis in 1939, forbidden from display during the Soviet era, painstakingly restored in 2006, and now dismantled once more.

There was no plan in place for the evacuation of the museum's artefacts before the invasion began two weeks ago, Kozhan said - not even after Russia began months ago to mass troops along Ukraine's borders.

"There was no plan because no one could imagine this would happen," he said. "We had no plan at all - not before the war, not even in December. You must understand, we did not believe it could come to this."

Around Lviv, cultural and religious officials are running complex operations to wrap up statues, seal off stained glass windows and spirit away sacred artefacts.

In the city's main square, fountains with sculptures of Greek gods and goddesses have been wrapped in flame-retardant fabric and covered with scaffolds to protect them from falling masonry.

"At first it was a bit chaotic but it has become more organised," said Liliya Onischenko, the head of Lviv's city council heritage protection office.

"We are photographing everything before we take it away and we are photographing all the pieces in their hidden places," she said

Onischenko said the priority was protecting the stained glass windows in the city's historical old town, a Unesco world heritage site whose architecture was built over centuries by different nationalities - Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Armenians - as the region changed hands.

At the Armenian cathedral, a prized 15th-Century wooden sculpture of Christ on the cross was removed for the first time since World War Two and taken to a secret, safe place.

Other artefacts besides the sculpture have been removed, the deacon, Armen Hakopian said, but he would not elaborate. "What needed to be taken out was taken out," he said, with a smile.

The windows along the side of the 850-year-old Armenian cathedral are plain, because the original stained glass was blown out in the 1940s by German bombing. But above, stained glass remains in the cupola and the high parts of the church.

The institutions of Lviv have had the benefit of time to prepare. And they may yet escape the violence. But there are grave fears for the cultural, religious and architectural treasures in the parts of Ukraine under attack.

There has already been significant damage. The stained glass windows and nave of the assumption cathedral in Kharkiv were damaged by Russian shelling. Russian troops have reportedly destroyed a 19th-century wooden church in the village of Viazivka in Zhytomyr. And a museum in Ivankiv, north of Kyiv, was razed, destroying 25 works by the Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko.

Ihor Kozhan, the national museum director, said he feared that destroying Ukraine's cultural fabric was part of Russia's goal, and he feared greatly for Lviv.

"If the same damage is done here as in Kharkiv, Mariupol, it would be a terrible tragedy," he said.

"This is a place of historical memory. The museums here hold the history of the nation. They give us an understanding of who we were, who we are, and who we will be.

"Russia wants to destroy that."

The job of emptying the national museum was virtually complete by Wednesday - only a few cardboard boxes of manuscripts were left, near the doors, alongside a sculpture lying on the floor - one of several too heavy to move that will be protected in other ways.

The artefacts that have been moved underground are on a clock - too long there without adequate climate control and they would begin to degrade, Kozhan said.

And they would not probably not survive a direct hit, he said, with a long sigh, because the bunkers are not designed to withstand powerful bombs.

"I hope we can bring them up soon," he said. "It is difficult for me to be here in these empty rooms and hallways. We could have walked the whole day here together looking at our history and our art."

Asked to estimate the total value of the museum's works, Kozhan declined.

"Of course there is no number," he said.

"If these things are destroyed they cannot be remade."

Svitlana Libet contributed to this report.

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Under threat of Russian bombs, Lviv hides away its priceless heritage

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In one room of the National Museum of Lviv, an enormous scaffold is bare. In another, brackets hang loosely from the walls. Plinths sit empty along the corridors and wooden pallets and cardboard boxes are strewn on the floors. The staff used whatever they could to pack away the museum's priceless artefacts in a hurry.

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In describing Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, I have often thought of a remark by John Maynard Keynes about Georges Clemenceau, French prime minister during the first world war: that he was an utterly disillusioned individual who "had one illusion - France".

Something similar could be said of Russia's governing elite, and helps to explain the appallingly risky collective gamble they have taken by invading Ukraine. Ruthless, greedy and cynical they may be - but they are not cynical about the idea of Russian greatness.

The western media employ the term "oligarch" to describe super-wealthy Russians in general, including those now wholly or largely resident in the west. The term gained traction in the 1990s, and has long been seriously misused. In the time of President Boris Yeltsin, a small group of wealthy businessmen did indeed dominate the state, which they plundered in collaboration with senior officials. This group was, however, broken by Putin during his first years in power.

Three of the top seven "oligarchs" tried to defy Putin politically. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were driven abroad, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed and then exiled. The others, and their numerous lesser equivalents, were allowed to keep their businesses within Russia in return for unconditional public subservience to Putin. When Putin met (by video link) leading Russian businessmen after launching the invasion of Ukraine, there was no question of who was giving the orders.

The force that broke the oligarchs was the former KGB, reorganised in its various successor services. Putin himself, of course, came from the KGB, and a large majority of the top elite under Putin are from the KGB or associated state backgrounds (though not the armed forces).

This group have remained remarkably stable and homogenous under Putin, and are (or used to be) close to him personally. Under his leadership, they have plundered their country (though unlike the previous oligarchs, they have kept most of their wealth within Russia) and have participated or acquiesced in his crimes, including the greatest of them all, the invasion of Ukraine. They have echoed both Putin's vicious propaganda against Ukraine and his denunciations of western decadence.

As Russia plunges deeper into a military quagmire and economic crisis, a central question is whether - if the war is not ended quickly by a peace settlement - Putin can be removed (or persuaded to step down) by the Russian elites themselves, in order to try to extricate Russia and themselves from the pit he has dug for them. To assess the chances of this requires an understanding of the nature of the contemporary Russian elites, and above all of Putin's inner core.

By way of illustrating the depth of the Russian catastrophe of the 1990s and identifying with all those who suffered from it, Putin has said that at one stage he was reduced - while still a serving lieutenant colonel of the KGB - to moonlighting as a freelance taxi driver in order to supplement his income. This is plausible enough. In 1994, while I was working as a journalist for The Times in Russia and the former USSR, my driver in the North Caucasus was an ex-major in the KGB. "We thought we were the backbone of the Soviet Union," he said to me bitterly. "Now look at us. Real Chekists!"

Despite amassing immense wealth and power, Putin and his inner circle remain intensely resentful of the way the USSR collapsed

"Real Chekist" ( nastoyashchy chekist) was a Soviet propaganda phrase referring to the qualities of ruthless discipline, courage, ideological commitment and honesty supposedly characteristic of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police formed by Lenin and his associates. It became the subject of many Soviet jokes, but there is little doubt that Putin and his top elite continue to see themselves in this light, as the backbone of Russia - though Putin, who is anything but a revolutionary, appears to identify much more strongly with the security elites of imperial Russia.

An interesting illustration of this comes from Union of Salvation ( Soyuz Spaseniya, 2019), a film about the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825, made with the support of the Russian state. To the considerable shock of older Russian friends of mine who were brought up to revere the Decembrists, the heroes of this film are Tsar Nicholas I and the loyal imperial generals and bureaucrats who fought to preserve government and order against the rebels.

Although they have amassed immense power and wealth, Putin and his immediate circle remain intensely resentful of the way in which the Soviet Union, Russia and their own service collapsed in the 1990s - and great power mixed with great resentment is one of the most dangerous mixtures in both domestic and international politics.

As Putin's autocratic tendencies have grown, real power (as opposed to wealth) within the system has come to depend more and more on continual personal access to the president; and the number of those with such access has narrowed - especially since the Covid pandemic led to Putin's drastic physical isolation - to a handful of close associates.

Five of Putin's inner circle

Sergei Lavrov, 71, foreign minister

Sergei Naryshkin, 67, foreign intelligence chief

Nikolai Patrushev, 70, secretary of Russia's security council

Igor Sechin, 61, chief executive of Rosneft

Sergei Shoigu, 66, defence minister

In his first years in power, Putin (who was a relatively junior KGB officer) could be regarded as "first among equals" in a top elite of friends and colleagues. No longer. Increasingly, even the siloviki have been publicly reduced to servants of the autocrat - as was graphically illustrated by Putin's humiliation of his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, at the televised meeting of the National Security Council on the eve of war. Such contemptuous behaviour towards his immediate followers could come back to bite Putin, as it has so many past autocrats.

The inner core includes defence minister Sergei Shoigu (former emergencies minister and not a professional soldier); Nikolai Patrushev, former head of domestic intelligence and now secretary of Russia's National Security Council; Naryshkin; and Igor Sechin, the former deputy prime minister appointed by Putin to run the Rosneft oil company. Insofar as top economic officials with "patriotic liberal" leanings were ever part of this inner core, they have long since been excluded.

These men are known in Russia as the " siloviki" - "men of force", or perhaps even, in the Irish phrase, "hard men". A clear line should be drawn between the siloviki and the wider Russian elites - large and very disparate and disunited congeries of top businessmen, senior officials outside the inner circle, leading media figures, top generals, patriotic intellectuals and the motley crew of local notables, placemen and fixers who make up the leadership of Putin's United Russia party.

Among some of the wider Russian elites, unease at the invasion of Ukraine and its consequences is already apparent. Naturally enough, this has begun with the economic elites, given their deep stakes in business with the west and their understanding of the catastrophic impact of western sanctions on the Russian economy. Roman Abramovich, his discomfort clear enough as he sought buyers for Chelsea Football Club, found the sale halted this week when his UK assets were frozen. Mikhail Fridman, chairman of Alfa Group (already severely hit by western sanctions) and one of the surviving former "oligarchs" from the 1990s, has called for an early end to the war, as has aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska.

If there is no peace agreement and the war drags on into a bloody stalemate, the economy declines precipitously and the Russian people see a steep fall in their living standards, then public unrest, state repression and state attempts to dragoon and exploit business will all inevitably increase radically, and so will the unhappiness of the wider elites.

These, however, lack the collective institutions and, perhaps more importantly, the collective identities that would allow them to combine easily to unseat Putin. The Duma, or lower house of Russia's parliament, was succinctly described to me by a Russian friend as "a compost heap full of assorted rotten vegetables". This is a bit too unkind - the Duma does contain some decent people - but it would be futile to look to it for any kind of political leadership.

The army, which elsewhere in the world would be the usual institution behind a coup, has been determinedly depoliticised, first by the Soviet state and now by Putin's, in return for huge state funding. It is also now committed to military victory in Ukraine, or at least something that can be presented as victory.

On the other hand, Putin's ruthless purging of the upper ranks of the military, along with the apparent incompetence with which the high command has steered the invasion of Ukraine, could lead to considerable future discontent in the army, including lower-rank generals. This means that while the military will not itself move against Putin, it is also very unlikely to move to save him.

Some of the most effective pressure on Putin's elite may come from their own children. The parents almost all grew up and began their careers in the final years of the Soviet Union. Their children, however, have in many cases been educated and lived largely in the west. Many agree, at least in private, with Elizaveta Peskova, daughter of Putin's press spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who protested against the war on Instagram (the post was quickly removed). Dinner conversations in the Peskov family must be interesting affairs these days.

The siloviki, however, are so closely identified with Putin and the war that a change in the Russian regime would have to involve the departure of most from power, possibly in return for a promise that they would not be arrested and would retain their family's wealth (this was the guarantee that Putin made with his predecessor Yeltsin).

I think one reason [the siloviki] steal on such a scale is they see themselves as representatives of the state, and feel that to be poorer than a bunch of businessmen is a humiliation, even an insult to the state

A senior former Soviet official

Yet this change may be a long time coming. The siloviki have been accurately portrayed as deeply corrupt - but their corruption has special features. Patriotism is their ideology and the self-justification for their immense wealth. I once chatted over a cup of tea with a senior former Soviet official who had kept in touch with his old friends in Putin's elite. "You know," he mused, "in Soviet days most of us were really quite happy with a dacha, a colour TV and access to special shops with some western goods, and holidays in Sochi. We were perfectly comfortable, and we only compared ourselves with the rest of the population, not with the western elites.

"Now today, of course, the siloviki like their western luxuries, but I don't know if all this colossal wealth is making them happier or if money itself is the most important thing for them. I think one reason they steal on such a scale is that they see themselves as representatives of the state and they feel that to be any poorer than a bunch of businessmen would be a humiliation, even a sort of insult to the state. It used to be that official rank gave you top status. Now you have to have huge amounts of money too. That is what the 1990s did to Russian society."

The siloviki are naturally attached to the idea of public order, an order that guarantees their own power and property, but which they also believe is essential to prevent Russia falling back into the chaos of the 1990s and the Russian revolution and civil war. The disaster of the 1990s, in their view, embraced not just a catastrophic decline of the state and economy but socially destructive moral anarchy - and their reaction has been not unlike that of conservative American society to the 1960s or conservative German society to the 1920s.

In this, Putin and the siloviki have the sympathy of very large parts of the Russian population, who remain bitterly resentful - both at the way they were betrayed and plundered in the 1990s and what they perceive as the open contempt shown towards ordinary Russians by the liberal cultural elites of Moscow and St Petersburg.

On one memorable occasion in the mid-1990s, I was asked to give an after-dinner talk at a conference held by a leading western bank for western investors and Russia's financial elite. The dinner took place at a famous Moscow nightclub. When I ran out of time, there was no question of a polite note from the chairman; instead, a jazzed-up version of a Soviet patriotic song started blaring, and behind me on the stage appeared someone in a bear costume waving the Russian military ensign and leading a line of dancers clad in very abbreviated versions of Russian national dress.

The siloviki and the Russian official elite in general are utterly, irrevocably committed to the idea of Russia as a great power

Faced with this competition, I didn't even try to carry on with my carefully considered summing-up, but retired bemused to my table. Then, however, I began to get a distinctly cold feeling. I remembered a scene from the 1972 film Cabaret, set in a nightclub in Weimar Berlin not long before the Nazis' rise to power, in which dancers perform a parody of a parade before a giggling audience to the tune of a famous German military march. I wondered whether in Russia, too, there was going to be a terrible bill to pay for all this jollity - and I fear that Ukraine, and Russian soldiers, are now paying it.

One of the worst effects of this war is going to be deep and long-lasting Russian isolation from the west. I believe, however, that Putin and the siloviki (though not many in the wider elites) welcome this isolation. They are becoming impressed with the Chinese model: a tremendously dynamic economy, a disciplined society and a growing military superpower ruled over with iron control by a hereditary elite that combines huge wealth with deep patriotism, promoting the idea of China as a separate and superior civilisation.

They may well want the west to push Russia into the arms of China, despite the risk that this will turn Russia into a dependency of Beijing. And of course they believe the war in Ukraine will consolidate patriotic feeling in Russia behind their rule, as well as permitting them to engage in intensified repression in the name of support for the war effort. This repression has already begun, with the closing of Russia's last remaining independent media and laws punishing as treason any criticism of the war.

Above all, for deep historical, cultural, professional and personal reasons, the siloviki and the Russian official elite in general are utterly, irrevocably committed to the idea of Russia as a great power and one pole of a multipolar world. If you do not believe in that, you are not part of the Russian establishment, just as if you do not believe in US global primacy you are not part of the US foreign and security establishment.

Recommended

Ukraine's place in this doctrine was accurately summed up by former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski: "Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire." The Russian establishment entirely agrees. They have also agreed, for the past 15 years at least, that America's intention is to reduce Russia to a subservient third-rate power. More recently, they have concluded that France and Germany will never oppose the US. "To the west, we have only enemies," as one establishment intellectual told me in 2019.

The Russian establishment sees encouragement of Ukrainian nationalism as a key element in Washington's anti-Russian strategy. Even otherwise calm and reasonable members of the Russian establishment have snarled with fury when I have dared to suggest in conversation that it might be better for Russia itself to let Ukraine go. They seem prepared, if necessary, to fight on ruthlessly for a long time, and at immense cost and risk to their regime, to prevent that happening.
Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of 'Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry' Find out about our latest stories first - follow on Twitter

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Inside Putin's circle - the real Russian elite | Free to read

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In describing Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, I have often thought of a remark by John Maynard Keynes about Georges Clemenceau, French prime minister during the first world war: that he was an utterly disillusioned individual who "had one illusion - France".

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An expert on Stalin discusses Putin, Russia, and the West

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An expert on Stalin discusses Putin, Russia, and the West

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An expert on Stalin discusses Putin, Russia, and the West.

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Tom: [00:00:12] Hello and welcome to Outrage + Optimism! I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.

Christiana: [00:00:15] I'm Christina Figueres

Paul [00:00:17] And I'm Paul Dickinson.

Tom: [00:00:18] This week we discussed the deeply concerning events unfolding in Ukraine as a result of Russian aggression and ask the questions about the interlinkages between defense and climate change. We speak to two former foreign secretaries of the U.K., William Hague and David Miliband. Thanks for being here. So as all listeners will be aware, we are in the midst of an unfolding, deeply concerning series of events that are happening right now in Ukraine, with the remarkable defense of the country that's been mounted by the president and by the people in the face of ongoing Russian aggression. Now, obviously, this is a source of great concern to all of us, and the potential of escalation is something that every human in the world should be concerned about. And in no way are we trying to distract from the immediacy of this issue. But at the same time, many people have made the point that this conflict is deeply connected to climate change, is deeply connected to the fossil fuel industry, and that's what we wanted to explore this week. So I don't know if either of you would like to come in with a comment, and then we'll go to our discussions with our two guests and we will come back afterwards for some analysis. Load More

Christiana: [00:01:35] Well, my only comment to that, Tom, is just to make clear that this is not contrary to other bellicose situations that we've had. This is not a war about fossil fuel infrastructure, but it's very much a war that has been fueled, sorry to use that word, that has been fueled by the income produced by the export of fossil fuels, right? And so, you know, just an interesting twist there on the ever present relationship between fossil fuels and geopolitical safety.

Paul: [00:02:14] Yeah. I mean, just this extraordinary story rolling across our screens, you know, it is very difficult not to watch the news regularly because it's it's so visceral, but I have been completely struck by how extraordinarily many, many different countries in the world have gone to very significant sanctions and then closing air space and this extraordinary, you know, kind of economic action. And you know, we've got to ask ourselves this question: is purchasing fossil fuels from Russia, gas or oil, you know, is that supporting the invasion of Ukraine? You know, suddenly we're talking about fossil fuels in a different way, like energy independence and national security are kind of the same thing. But I'm also just sort of struck by this notion that the democracies haven't really been, we haven't been in favor of anything discernible for, you know, since the Berlin Wall fell almost. And I think the genius of a book like Orwell's 1984 is like when you see something really bad, it can help you recognize the opposite direction towards something good. So even in this crisis, I actually hold a lot of excitement that something good may come from it.

Tom: [00:03:29] Quite right. Absolutely. So we're going to go to our conversations now, and there's two guests, both of them former guests on this podcast, probably well known to all listeners. But first, we're going to hear from Lord William Hague. William Hague, of course, is a former leader of the Conservative Party and subsequently Minister of Foreign Affairs under David Cameron. Since leaving politics a few years ago, he's done a range of things, including currently chairing the Royal Foundation, deeply involved, of course, with the Earthshot Prize that we've reported on extensively last year. And secondly, a former Labour foreign secretary, David Miliband, had a long career in politics. He was environment secretary under Tony Blair and then foreign secretary under Gordon Brown since leaving politics. David has moved to New York, and he's now the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, the world's largest organization focusing on the humanitarian crisis around refugees. So we're going to go first to William, and then after that we will flip over and we'll play you the conversation we have with David. Both these conversations were recorded on Wednesday, the 2nd of March, which is yesterday. If you're listening to the podcast the day it came out, and we will be back at the end with some discussion on what we heard from both of them. So here are the conversations.

Christiana: [00:04:44] Well, Lord Hague, thank you so, so much for joining us on Outrage + Optimism on a honestly and such a crazy moment in our life and the history of the world. I think we're all still struggling even to figure out what is going on. So we would very much appreciate having that kind of a big picture conversation with you for a moment. Basically, we could set out two different scenarios here. We could be sliding toward global catastrophe if Russia decides to hit a button, or we could say, Well, are we actually in the face of a common enemy and having identified the common enemy, are we actually seeing the birth of a new political order with a strength and a conviction that we had never seen before. How will we know which path we're moving down?

William Hague: [00:05:46] Well, that, of course, typically is a very good question, Christiana. And I think, I believe we should move down, of course, I believe that second path that you are talking about and that the the reawakening that we are seeing in much of the world about understanding what is really important when you see what people are struggling for and Ukraine today, it really puts into perspective many of the troubles of our daily lives. And there is a real unity in much of the world. So I hope that is going to lead to seeing many things, and this will be a revelator in a moment of clarity about the world, not only about the dangers of one man having excessive power for a long time and the mistakes that that can lead to, but about what we really have to do to save ourselves and all sorts of ways. Do I actually think, Well, your question is how will we know we are on that path? And I think we will only know if in a few months down the road in this crisis, we're not only handling it well as a world, but we are linking it to other issues and saying, well, it's not just one thing on its own. It is a struggle about how power works in the 21st century that has implications all over the world and a subject dear to all our hearts. It is linked to people being free of the dependence on petro states. That is such a poisonous aspect of world affairs.

Christiana: [00:07:38] Absolutely. So let's go into that also a little bit more because there are huge implications here, obviously, for the oil and gas industry as a whole, assuming, of course, that we don't go the catastrophe route. What do you see as the major implications? And those could obviously go in many different directions. But what scenarios have you been thinking about?

William Hague: [00:08:03] Well, there's an immediate implication in price and an intriguing thing: differential price. Because as we speak today, Russian crude oil costs about $12 less than other people's crude oil because people actually don't want to buy it, even though you know it's the oil that they do need at the moment, they don't want to buy it. Now that is an interesting new phenomenon. It's not the result, so much of sanctions as it is just people en masse companies around the world taking a decision that they are not going to do that. It's their own decision in a way that's encouraging that people can take positive matters into their own hands. I think then, however, there is some negative effect of all of this is a huge distraction from what we really have to do. And as you know, people often when faced by higher energy prices, some people make the argument well, we can't afford then at the moment to invest in cleaner energy. And you hear that argument in the United Kingdom, sometimes, I'm ashamed to say. So there is some negative effect, and Germany confronting its dependence on Russian gas could easily end up burning more coal, which is the worst thing of all to do from as you have often pointed out, from a global point of view. But of course, in the longer term, well, none of this would be happening if Russia was not a country based on a corrupt pyramid of financial and political power based on oil and gas revenues and other countries dependent on its sale of those things. So we can really see that we can free ourselves from some of the causes of conflict in the future if we encourage the energy transition.

Christiana: [00:10:00] It's very much a question of timing, isn't it? Because although we have seen some divestment already, very interestingly, of some of the oil and gas companies divesting out of their Russian assets, which is a very interesting move. But it's all a question of timing whether we're able to manage the short term crisis, on the one hand, while having the long term view the higher lights on our on our vehicle here and to see that what we really need is precisely to, for every country to be as energy independent as possible, but there really is a choice here, whether or is there a choice? Do you think that we can manage both the short term and the long term, the short term crisis and the long term wisdom?

William Hague: [00:10:57] Well, we can, of course, because you know, if you and I were in charge of everything we would, it is possible to do it. It is both intellectually and physically possible to do that. It's extremely difficult to do that in this situation because there isn't global agreement on what to do. And I think the most worrying aspect of this overall is that if the world is going into reverse on cooperating between the biggest powers of the world, well, that is going to make it harder to make agreements on a whole range of issues that includes climate change, arms control, what happens in space in the future? I think that is really for me, that is the biggest negative about what is happening now, just at a moment when humanity needs to be able to come to common agreements,we are actually squabbling. You know, we're in a burning building falling out about how we're arguing who owes the furniture and things like that. So we can do it, but we're not currently on course to do it. And although you and I are born optimists, I actually feel people are going to need yet another shock. You know, some bigger shock in many parts of the world in order to really change behavior and see that the things that we're in this decade, we have to change things very positively and we have to keep going at full tilt on everything we're doing on climate. So I think we're not there yet. We can do it, but the population of the world is not yet there.

Tom: [00:12:43] William, I mean, you've answered part of this already, but I'd love to just ask you. I mean, Putin is now dragging the world into an era of higher defense spending, more military priorities right at this moment in the middle of this decisive decade. Whatever happens next, a large amount of the bandwidth of foreign ministers and defense ministers and energy ministers is going to be directed towards this. What do you think people can do to try to ensure that climate doesn't get lost in that mix? It feels like it's happening far away and there's not much we can really do about it. But what would you say will make the difference? Because now it feels like we need to just push on that right now.

William Hague: [00:13:19] Well, it's just crucial to make the argument in every forum at every level that these things are related. Solving the problems of climate change can't be just ignored while this is going on, it's we don't have to focus on that because we've got this immediate priority. They are actually linked. A world which has more decentralized provision of energy and more renewable, sustainable provision of energy wouldn't be in this situation. And there isn't going to be other answers and it's not like there's going to be a political answer to this. This war could go on in some form for years and for in a future insurgency if Putin manages to conquer Ukraine. So it's unlikely there's going to be a political breakthrough. So what are we going to be doing in the meantime to address the fundamental causes of this? We have to get to some of those root causes, so we have to make that argument in all the democratic nations of the world and the international forums of the world. And we have to take some good examples and hold them up. So if Germany as a result of this, I just mentioned how it's short term, the short term implication might be bad, but if they end up, they are advancing by five years, their target for having their energy supplied arguably. Well, if they can do that, there is a great example that we can hold up to everyone else.

Christiana: [00:14:56] And if they stay the course right, because there will be a temptation to now use that as a reason, to not say excuse, to to get off that course. So staying the course. It's a very interesting test of the resolution of these countries who have put themselves on a path. It's a very interesting task precisely about the short term. On the one hand and the long term and how to calibrate both.

William Hague: [00:15:26] And it's an interesting test for conservatives, you know, as you know, I speak as a former conservative leader. And I think the first time we ever spoke together was when I wrote an article a few years ago saying it's a very conservative thing to care for the environment and to act on climate change, and that British conservatives have got that message on the whole, but that Americans and Australian conservatives and some others hadn't.

Tom: [00:15:56] You can say that quite loudly while you're in New York. Actually, it would be great if you could push that.

William Hague: [00:16:01] I will be saying that very loudly. Well, conservatives also want the West to be strong and part of that strength vis-a-vis somebody like Putin, part of the strength of not being not succumbing to this different view of how power works in the world he has, which is not that it's an interdependent system and what's important is to establish the rules. His view is you get people to be dependent on you and then you can squeeze them with that with the leverage. It's conservatives all over the world, just like people of other political persuasions want to stand up to that. And so all the more in the next few years, the importance of clean energy should be integrated into conservative thinking about the grand strategy of the western world, if we can call it that.

Tom: [00:16:58] William, I know we need to wrap up. Just one more question: the implications of this for China. I mean, do you think that this is going to lead to a road in which China becomes more isolated as well? Or what? What would you say about that?

William Hague: [00:17:11] This is a tricky moment for China. Now let's quickly, if Putin would not be able to do this if China did not have his back to some extent, he will have calculated that whatever the West does, he can still get his semiconductors through China so he can sell more energy to China. And China has been in an awkward abstention at the UN Security Council, despite having for decades supported the territorial integrity of nations around the world. It's in an awkward spot. Now, I hope that China becomes more critical of Russia because you know the danger for China here is that this reawakening of the West that we are seeing changes attitudes to China that people say Now, wait a minute here we have a crisis caused not by the Russian, not by some consensus in Russia, but by one man and a tiny circle of people working with them, imposing his will, getting very out of touch in power for too long with territorial ambitions. And then they're going to say, Oh, wait a minute, there's somebody else in the world who is going to be in power for too long and might get out of touch and has territorial ambitions in Beijing. And so attitudes to China might change. Now we don't want that breakdown of global cooperation that comes from that, but I would strongly recommend that China takes a more critical view than it has of what's happened in Russia, because it's not in China's long term interest to support it.

Christiana: [00:18:47] Yeah. Well, thank you so much. We don't want to take any more of your time. Really appreciate your thoughts on this. And of course, everyone is remaining vigilant for the huge, huge consequences of every step of the way. Every step of decisions of every country are going to be critical over the next few days and weeks. So we remain vigilant and thank you very much for raising your voice, William, to warn us about the interrelationship between this and our fossil fuel dependency. Really appreciate that.

William Hague: [00:19:26] Well, thank you, Christiana. Thanks, Tom. Thank you.

Tom: [00:19:35] That was Lord William Hague. And now we're moving on to the conversation with David Miliband.

Christiana: [00:19:45] David, thank you so much for joining us on Outrage + Optimism today in which we're all grappling with this horrifying reality that we're witnessing. I'm sure this has been on your mind since it started, and we would really love to hear where you are with your thinking. Are we actually sliding toward global catastrophe with the press of a button? Or are we perhaps seeing the birth of a new political order? And if we can't tell the difference between that now, how would we know which direction we're going in?

David Miliband: [00:20:28] Hi, Christina. Very good to be with you. Let's try and chunk that up a bit and you ask questions and interrupt so to try and get what you want out of this. We've been, we the International Rescue Committee, we're a global humanitarian charity. We've had a team in Poland for the last four weeks really scoping out partner organizations in Poland and neighboring states, but also partner organizations, potential partner organizations inside Ukraine. I mean, there are really three fronts to the, and I know you want to talk about the geopolitics, but in a way the humanitarian is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the pain associated with this crisis. And so we will get to the geopolitics. But there are three fronts to the humanitarian crisis. The first is for the civilians caught in the fighting, and the names Aleppo and Grozny speak to Russian tactics in warfare. And what we are hearing and seeing from Kharkiv and elsewhere, potentially Kiev as well, speak to a I can only call it a pulverization campaign, a model of warfare that is about pulverization. And so the most dangerous front for civilians is obviously if you're caught up in the middle of that bombardment, the second front is the internally displaced. There are millions really who are on the move inside Ukraine. There are no good numbers on it, obviously, because they're not crossing checkpoints, at least not yet. And then the third front is obviously the refugees. We're going to hit a million either this afternoon or tomorrow, Thursday for the number of refugees. So what's my perspective? My perspective is what can we do? How can we deploy our expertise, our teams, our money, the money that's coming in as a result of this crisis in an area where, frankly, Ukraine itself $7000 per person per head annual income, Poland, Hungary advanced industrialized countries where the capacity of the state and of civil society to support people in humanitarian distress is much, much greater than in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon than in South Sudan, Uganda, than in Myanmar, Bangladesh than in Afghanistan, Pakistan, where we are also massively stretched. And so my perspective is inevitably more conditioned by that humanitarian imperative. But every humanitarian crisis is in fact a political crisis, and this one is born of a political crisis. It's the capstone, I said in my article in the New York Times, the invasion of Ukraine, the second invasion of Ukraine after 2014, is the capstone of what I call the age of impunity and impunity, as you know, is crimes without punishment, actions without accountability. And the impunity here is the breach of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of a sovereign state of a nation state, but also the abrogation of rights of individuals, of civilians, of citizens who are having their lives turned upside down. And so to answer your question, no one yet knows whether this is a new world order. What we know is that there is a systematic attempt to rewind the clock by 30 years, not to the recreation of the Soviet Union, but to the immediate period after the end of the Soviet Union and the dispensation that emerged after the 1989-90 fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. Now that attempt, I think a week ago, people, commentators would have feared that it had high chances of success. What's happened in the last week is there's been an enormous counter reaction. And the determination of essentially freedom loving people everywhere, including in Russia, to say no has been enormous and the willingness of governments that have often been attacked for their slowness, bureaucracy inability to take big decisions has been outmatched because Germany's got a new defense policy, Europe has a new international policy, Sweden and Finland are contemplating new defense policies themselves and in a long and winding road to the subject that you have led on with such extraordinary capacity, there is now a national security imperative for the world's largest richest single market to get off Russian oil and gas, just as there is a climate imperative to get off oil and gas. So your outrage is the first part of the title of your podcast. There should be so much outrage about the impunity of the Russian attack. Optimism, I can't offer you, but there is a possibility of a strategic reorientation. Sorry for the long winded answer.

Christiana: [00:25:36] No, that was really very thoughtful. I was struck by the European term being used about a violation of human coexistence. How interesting a choice of words there, where they really are looking at this from a human or let me say humanity's perspective. And it's a quite interesting choice of words, because one could say this is a warfare in which some have chosen old style warfare techniques and the others are uniting around a very new kind of warfare: economic pressure at the outermost point more than we have ever seen before. Squeezed in between is the humanitarian pain and the cost that we are already seeing, and that will only escalate. And then also and that is already for sure, we don't even have to wonder if that's going to happen, what we do have to wonder still is whether the squeezing in between these two choices of warfare is that going to lead to more energy independence, which is what everyone here on the podcast would prefer. Or is this going to lead to even more entrenchment in the incumbent industries?

David Miliband: [00:27:04] Well, let me go back to the beginning of the question. The great missing element of discussion of relations with Russia over the last 30 years, I think, has been the denial of agency to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe in all the discussion, on the one hand of quote-on-quote NATO expansionism, I reject that phrase, but that's the the Russian allegation, and it's often parroted in the West by people who want to say it was the quote-on-quote expansion of NATO that has led us to this past. That denies agency, to Poles, to Hungarians, to citizens of the Baltic states, who chose that they wanted to defend themselves by joining the EU, joining NATO. Now we mustn't repeat that denial of agency in our assessment of the situation today. There are pictures. I mean, I almost tear up recalling, I've just seen this, of a line of Ukrainian, I mean, a road in Ukraine blocked by thousands, if not tens of thousands of Ukrainians who are just standing there and saying you shall not pass. I mean, that is an extraordinary effort of people power, but I'm not a romantic who's going to pretend that that can silence the guns in the same way that it's not straightforward that sanctions can't stop tanks. But let's recognize the agency of the people on the ground, which is extraordinary. And there is, I heard Anne Applebaum today talk about a civic nationalism. I'm always I always say patriotism, good nationalism bad. Patriotism can be positive. Some nationalism can be and is zero sum at best, negative sometimes. She was making the point that a Jewish president, a society of Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers are pushing, are developing a civic nationalism that is standing up for the kind of pluralism that was hinted at in the quote that you've given from Josep Borrell. But of course, the coexistence isn't just within nations, it's between nations. And I always remind people in 2008, after the Russians invaded Georgia, I went to Kiev and gave a speech where I reminded people that George Kennan, who famously wrote the long telegram after the Second World War, he said Russia's tragedy is always to look at its neighbors and see either vassals or enemies. And I think that the point about coexistence is that you don't see neighbors as vassals or enemies. You see them as potential partners and people who are living their own lives and you want to coexist with them. So I think that the values at stake and the order at stake could not be more fundamental here. It's interesting that China has been put in a pickle by this decision. It's vacillating on the fence, really, because it can see the danger of a disrupted world order. It's doing quite nicely thank you out of a slightly more ordered world. And I guess my perspective is that your interest in the global climate and the stability of the global climate is a preeminent interest in a preeminent global public good. I like that way of thinking about a stable climate just in the same way that nuclear security is a global public good, just as treatment support for countries hosting refugees is a global public good. And what we're fighting for here is whether or not there is an international order that can tend the global commons in such a way as to sustain the global public goods. Because the alternative to an ordered global system is either three or four systems. A Russian sphere of influence, a Chinese sphere of influence, a Western sphere of influence, or a kind of leaderless world global, a more anarchic situation. So I think that the right way to think about your question is at the level of tactics, where this question of the national security imperative boosting the European climate imperative is important, but also at the level of, if you like, concept, what's the global concept that we've got? And I think that there is one available and it should be a rallying point, and it's that we have to live in this world together. We live with one planet and that needs rules and it needs rules that are about accountability, not impunity.

Tom: [00:32:01] So David, this is so interesting. And I mean, you know, sustaining public goods is hard to do at any time. And and I'd love to just go one level deeper on those tactics because Putin is now dragging the world into a scenario in any scenario that it's more focused on military spending and more focused on defense priorities in the middle of the most decisive decade, as we would claim in human history to determine the future of our climate. What are those tactics that can actually enable us to continue to focus on this bigger picture rather than get drawn into these, you know, heartbreaking details of these specific things that have the very real potential to distract us from our task and mean that as a result of this, we fail in maintaining a stable climate.

David Miliband: [00:32:42] Well, that's a very good question. And what I've learned when living in America is that when people say that's a great question, they say a lot. That generally means that they don't know the answer. So when I say that's a great question, I don't have an easy answer to that because look, the lesson of COVID is that clear and present danger isn't enough to make for international action. I mean, the clear and present danger of mutations of the virus has not helped vaccinate the world. The places that the International Rescue Committee works is, you know, less than five percent vaccination at best. And secondly, there's a real danger that the shift of focus to Ukraine becomes a myopia, which is dangerous. Now I've said about the humanitarian situation, we the world have got to be able to walk, chew gum and play the violin at the same time that we've got to be able to address starvation in Afghanistan, break down in Ethiopia, a tragedy, a crime in Yemen, coups in the Sahel and address the Ukraine crisis. I think that if you want me to just throw one thing into the pot, what could rather than predict the future say, well, what could shape the future? I think the people power point is real. Big change happens when there's government leadership, business and NGO innovation and mass mobilization, but they don't have to happen in that order. Yeah, the lesson of this crisis may be that people can move first or businesses and NGOs can move first, and then governments run and catch up. But then they end up leading because they've got legitimacy and power. And so I don't want to just say, Well, we've got to, you know, redouble our efforts. That feels a bit pathetic, but I do think that this is interesting to hear. The army generals say morals and morale are the most precious commodity in war and that's about people.

Tom: [00:34:38] And so look, David, it just seems like this extraordinarily kind of teachable moment in the world at the moment. I mean, you know, all these sanctions and you know, I can't even believe that the airspace of the USA and you know, the EU is closed to Russian aircraft. I mean, you know, there's this. It's extraordinary what's going on. You know, we've talked about national security and energy independence now being the same thing. You know, maybe I'm being a bit panglossian and a bit over hopeful. But could the world's democracies be in a moment of sort of rediscovering their values?

David Miliband: [00:35:08] Yes. I mean, I think that I said at the beginning that this was an attempt to rewind the clock by 30 years by Putin. What I also say is it may well be the moment when not that the clock is rewound to 1990, but the spirit of 1990 is rediscovered tempered by all of the failings that have happened since 1990. And that would be the ultimate irony, because remember the pictures of people scaling the Berlin Wall? Those were incredibly inspiring because they were people standing up for human values. And that's really important. So could this be a moment that galvanized or has this been a moment that's galvanized the West? It has. There's no question, and it's galvanized Switzerland to move into this space as well. It's moved Ireland to constructively support the deployment of EU military material. So that is significant and we have to build on that with the unity and the humility, but also the clarity about what's at stake now, just to give you a. So what does that mean, Miliband then stop waffling on. Just give me some specifics. Well, it means that we need the same unity about peacemaking in Yemen. We need the same unity about gender based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and we need the same unity over climate. And we also need to learn one other thing, which is that it's unity plus action. Unity doesn't mean waiting for everyone to agree. Sometimes you just have to get on with it. And Coalition of the willing is a very mixed phrase. But those who are willing to act should act, and they shouldn't be held back by the speed of the slowest.

Tom: [00:36:55] Courage speaks to courage, the suffragettes said. Thank you.

Christiana: [00:36:58] Well, what a moment. David, it could be, you know, the worst of times for the best of times, as you've said. And let us let us definitely pray, hope, meditate in the direction of it being the best of times. It could be the ironic awakening that we have from a very deep and painful and hugely costly slumber that we've been in for such a long time. And when I say costly, I don't mean just in terms of financial cost, but human cost. And so is this the moment for awakening?

David Miliband: [00:37:35] Things are going. I'm afraid things are going to get worse before they get better, especially for the people in Ukraine, people of Ukraine. You know, if any of the four or five of us were in Ukraine, if we were men, we'd be conscripted. And if we were women, we'd be either in the metro stations or we'd be fleeing to the borders. So it's as sobering a moment as Afghanistan, as Syria, as Tigray in Ethiopia. And you know, humanity's capacity to get things wrong is huge, but it's never had more resources to get things right, and that's what I always keep coming back to.

Christiana: [00:38:15] Well, on that wonderful, hopeful conclusion, David, thank you. Thank you very much. We will all be obviously staying vigilant all of us, and might come back when we have when the dust settles and the horrific things have begun to slow down might come back for a lessons learned conversation. But thank you so much.

David Miliband: [00:38:38] Thanks a lot.

Tom: [00:38:40] Thank you. So how fantastic at this moment to be able to sit down with two former foreign secretaries who, of course in their lives have done a lot more than just be foreign secretary, although that was a big part of both of their careers. I'd love to hear both of your reflections on what we heard from both of them.

Christiana: [00:39:02] Shall I go first for a change, Paul?

Paul: [00:39:04] Why don't you, Christiana?

Tom: [00:39:06] He always seems to want you to.

Christiana: [00:39:08] Well, I'm struck by a couple of things. First, the outrageous, outrageous war of choice. This is really a war of choice. Yeah, Putin has chosen to wage war against the nation that had no provocation, has not, you know, nothing. This is simply a choice to go to war against a neighboring nation. So that already is just, you know, completely outrageous. And it is already today in the present, provoking a humanitarian crisis that will only rise, which we heard from David. Now, in addition to that, this is a tale of two futures we are really seeing, we can already see evidence, if you will, or at least fear of one or two futures emerging. The panic that many of us are feeling is if future one emerges from this, which would be a catastrophic world should Putin decide to escalate even further, whereby the humanitarian crisis, let alone the environmental, survival crisis of humanity, is beyond anything that we can possibly imagine. Let us hope that that is not the road that we're taking the other future that could be emerging. Although frankly, you really, really, really have to look behind and underneath most of the news that newsreels that we're reading, to still harbor the hope that there is the emergence of a new political order in the face of a common enemy and that everyone except Russia, and China teetering, but India also, by the way, and the UAE, let's put them all three because they were the ones, the ones teetering there and and China not being willing to go either way in the Security Council. But with those exceptions, could there be, as was spoken by both of them, a new political international alliance here? Very interesting that Russian gas prices are falling, that global gas prices are rising and that there is a divestment from many of the companies, many of the oil and gas companies divesting from the oil and gas assets. And that's that's the present right now. But does this actually lead to the wake up call that we were discussing of everyone realizing that we have been fed the untruth, that we are dependent on a few countries for energy provision? And the fact is, in this century, that is just no longer true. We can actually strengthen our energy independence and thereby minimize these kinds of temptations.

Paul: [00:42:18] I mean, look, just one comment from the news at Berenberg Bank's Chief Economist said faster diversification away from Russian oil and gas, more spending on renewables plus nuclear power and on hydrogen for storage and energy are the long term impacts of the Russia Ukraine crisis. And you know, just one story from the charity I work in, CDP, you know, we saw a massive increase in interest in our products, for lack of a better word, directly correlated to COVID. And it was really strange because I think the whole world felt vulnerable and then they thought more about climate change. The world is feeling vulnerable again right now, and I hope and believe it may lead us to change and pay more attention to our economic and security interests. But by recognizing that, you know, we are a we and there are things that we are against and there are things, therefore that we're in favor of.

Paul: [00:43:17] Yeah, I mean, it's exactly as you say, that's the path forward, right? But we have consistently shown that it's hard to take when there's an acute thing that happens. And as a result of that, wisdom sneaks in and we take the deeper path that enables the mitigation of future risk. The situation we're facing right now, and it was, I mean, so fascinating to sit down with two people who are as deeply steeped in geopolitics as anyone on the planet and have sat in those seats. And what I took from both of them was that they're really worried. I mean, they didn't say quite that way or they sort of did. They're really worried that we're going to get distracted by this and we're not going to remain focused on these critical issues. And they both said there's a chance we can and here's what we need to do and the issues are connected and we need to keep making that case. But, probably the general direction of travel, unless we're able to pull off something significant is that this takes the world's attention in the middle of this most decisive decade to something that it should be focused on because it's a humanitarian outreach, but at the same time takes us away from where we need to focus, which is an urgent, urgent focus on transformation of infrastructure and sources of energy. So I don't know. I mean, I agree with you, Christiana, that it's there underneath the news, but you've got to squint pretty hard to see it. And you know, the next, the next little while Will will uncover more. But it's very challenging, you know, these are the sorts of things we have to get right in this decade if we're going to succeed in this difficult task on climate. And this is a big one that's going to potentially stand in our way unless we really manage it well.

Christiana: [00:44:52] I'm pulling from my bookcase a book called The Future We Choose, which I think can guide us at this critical moment. Sorry, Christiana.

Christiana: [00:44:58] No, I mean that that comment Tom takes us back to, you know, sort of a leitmotif that we have had in many of these episodes, which is acute and chronic. The moment that we see those two as being mutually exclusive routes of engagement or motivations, then we're done for and we're totally done for because we know that as humans, we will tend toward the acute because that's, you know, our human evolution has trained us to first tend to the lion that is roaring right in front of us before we tend to everything else.

Paul: [00:45:41] Before we give up smoking, although which kills more.

Christiana: [00:45:43] Yes. And so the question is and you know, here I still hold my trust that that I myself need to fertilize every day because the news does not fertilize it, but hold my trust in human long term wisdom and human capacity to realize that we must do both the acute and the chronic. We must deal with both of those challenges. It's not that we can accept that one is actually going to throw the other one out the window. So, you know, in David's terms, we have to be able to, what do you say, walk chew gum and play violin? Well, exactly. And we've never had more capacity to do that than right now.

Tom: [00:46:35] And also just, you know, I'm very much in awe of David's ability to look at this humanitarian crisis and contextualize it with so many others that are not on our television screens right now. Yeah, no, I agree with you, Christiana. It's just hard, right? It's hard to solve an acute problem with a long term solution, and we see that time and again. And that's where the answer lies. Whether it's, you know, deciding that you're going to improve your health by going running every day or deciding you're going to avoid future conflict by focusing on energy consumption. You know, it's hard for us to do and that's the growing up that we need to do if we're going to solve many of these big problems.

Paul: [00:47:13] And we will. We must, we can, we will. Someone once said to me.

Paul: [00:47:18] OK, anything else to share before we close out this episode?

Christiana: [00:47:20] Just a nod, Tom to, you know, ourselves, the part in ourselves that is beyond sad, right? That is just deeply, deeply concerned. And all of us have a part of that. And there are so many people out there who are just incredible. I don't even know what adjective to use. It's beyond concerned. It's beyond afraid. You know, we can so easily push ourselves into a corner of debilitation of who we are. And so just, you know a call out there to those who are in that situation that we understand, we understand that pain.

Tom: [00:48:07] Yeah, absolutely. And further, I call out to the remarkable citizens of the country of Ukraine. I mean, it has been incredible to watch this spirit that, you know, places like the country where I live hearken back to days decades ago when people feel like that spirit was present, is there live and in full view of the world. And I think whatever comes out of this, and we hope and pray that it is not more loss of life and heartbreak, it has completely changed the world the way the world sees Ukraine and massively increased the estimation and understanding of those people completely.

Paul: [00:48:47] Yeah. And regular listeners will have heard me many times speak of how important TV comedians have been to me helping through the Trump period and all the rest of it. But it turns out they make very turns out they make very good presidents.

Tom: [00:49:02] All right, thanks friends. We're not going to have any music this week. It feels like it's a very acute episode and it kind of didn't really feel appropriate, but we'll be back as ever next week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for focusing on these issues. None of this stuff's easy, but that's why we've got to do it. Thanks, everyone.

Christiana: [00:49:15] Bye.

Clay: [00:49:20] So there you go. Another episode of Outrage + Optimism. Hi, everybody. This is Clay, I'm the producer of the show. Very short credits from us this week. Thank you so much to Lord William Hague and David Miliband for joining us today on the show. Great to have them back on. So I know a lot of us have been busy with the news. I just wanted to inform you if you didn't see that we had another episode we released this week about the latest IPCC report that came out on Monday. We released a podcast the following day on Tuesday with Patrick Verkooijen, a CEO of the Global Center on Adaptation. Be sure if you have not listened to it, go back to that and give it a spin. Last word for me before you move on with the rest of your day, you can find us on , , and under the name @GlobalOptimism. And if you enjoy this podcast, would you consider leaving us a rating and writing us a review on Apple Podcasts? We read every single one, and it really does make a difference getting the word out about our show. Thank you for doing that. Next week, we are continuing in our series on the Future of Food. This episode we've put together for you will take you into the global food system and the effect that climate change is having on farmers, their land. We look at how they can adapt to overcome the impacts of climate change and who needs to come to the table to support them. You'll hear from a coffee farmer in East Uganda, the the director general of Consumers International and, yeah, Wanjira Mathai, among others. So it's a great episode. Can't wait to share with you. That's coming out next Thursday. We've done two episodes previously in this series, The Future of Food, and you can find them in our podcast feed or I've put a link in the show notes directly to those episodes. But the best way to make sure that you don't miss the next episode is to hit, follow, or subscribe. Ok, that's everything. Thanks. We'll see you next Thursday.

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Ukraine, Defense, and Climate Change with William Hague and David Miliband

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Tom: [00:00:12] Hello and welcome to Outrage + Optimism! I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac. Christiana: [00:00:15] I'm Christina Figueres Paul [00:00:17] And I'm Paul Dickinson. Tom: [00:00:18] This week we discussed the deeply concerning events unfolding in Ukraine as a result of Russian aggression and ask the questions about the interlinkages between defense and climate change.

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News report 13 March: https://www.observerbd.com/news.php?id=357131

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Sound on. pic.twitter.com/HQY7YoigOo
— Kevin Baron (@DefenseBaron) March 13, 2022

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A perspective from Poland and Baltic States

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A perspective from Poland and Baltic States

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VILNIUS - For years, Western Europeans have been dismissive of politicians from Poland and the Baltic countries whenever they sounded the alarm over the expansionist threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

They now realize they should have listened to countries with a far deeper knowledge of the Kremlin and a bitter historical memory of the violence that Moscow is willing to unleash to pursue its goals.

Instead, the Westerners followed a path of commercial and political appeasement of Putin, led by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which has now spectacularly backfired with the invasion of Ukraine, the bombardment of its cities and mass emigration.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," said Radosław Sikorski, a former Polish foreign minister. "For years [they] were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The Easterners say they ran into a brick wall when they made pleas for increased NATO deployments, drew attention to cyberattacks and called on Berlin not to let the EU be held hostage by giant pipelines pumping gas straight into Germany. The outspoken, pugnacious Sikorski, then defense minister, triggered outrage in thin-skinned diplomatic circles in 2006 when he dared compare the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream gas pipeline project, which bypassed Poland, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that divided Poland between the Nazis and Soviets.

Polish and Baltic leaders saw Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 as a defining threshold that signaled that Putin needed to be stopped with a genuine show of force from the West, or otherwise he would go on to attack more targets. In fruitless meetings in Brussels, however, Polish and Baltic diplomats found that most of the European Union was reluctant to impose heavy sanctions on Moscow despite its invasion of an EU ally. The furious anti-Putin camp dubbed the Italian-led opposition to sanctions as the "Club Med" grouping.

Their wariness of Moscow has centuries-old roots.

Poland lost its independence in the 18th century to a coalition of attackers led by Russia, fought Russia in two bloody and failed uprisings in the 19th century, and earned a stunning victory against the communist Soviets in 1920. The USSR got its revenge in 1939, seizing a half of Poland and meting out bloody punishment, executing 20,000 prisoners of war and deporting hundreds of thousands of civilians before subjecting post-war Poland to four decades of Communist dictatorship.

The Baltic countries enjoyed two decades of independence between the wars before being annexed by the Soviet Union. Thousands were murdered and many more were deported deep into the USSR. Their countries were colonized by Russian settlers, and they barely survived to regain their independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The most recent cycle of Russian aggression has many of its origins in 2007. That year, Putin made a speech at the Munich Security Conference that provided a bedrock for many of the decisions that followed. In the speech, he lashed out at the U.S. for creating a unipolar world "in which there is one master, one sovereign," criticized NATO's eastward expansion and challenged the post-Cold War order in Europe.

Sikorski, who became Poland's top diplomat the same year, began asking for more NATO forces in his country. After all, Germany had 35,000 American troops stationed there, and a further effort toward the rebalancing of power in the face of Russia's military modernization campaigns seemed to make sense.

Not everyone in NATO thought so at the time.

"When I demanded on numerous occasions that our membership in NATO be fulfilled by physical presence - and I was only asking for two brigades, which is to say 10,000 American troops - this was regarded as outrageous. Germany in particular, but others too, for the first time in history found themselves surrounded by exclusively friendly states. And they didn't feel our pain of being a flank country, of being on the edge of the world of democracy, rule of law and security," Sikorski said.

After Sikorski's time in government, the messaging on Moscow out of Warsaw has been much muddier since the nationalist Law and Justice party took power in 2015. It won thanks to an untrue conspiracy theory that Russia was responsible for a 2010 plane crash that killed Poland's president and many top officials. The Polish government spent its energy painting Germany as an enemy, engaging in warfare with the EU over rule of law, launching attacks on LGBTQ+ people and palling around with right-wing Putin allies like Italy's Matteo Salvini and France's Marine Le Pen.

'You know nothing'

Estonians remember another episode in 2007.

In April, the Baltic country's computer servers were hit by a massive wave of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on public and private websites alike, essentially shutting the whole country down digitally for weeks. Nearly a million "zombie" computers were deployed, according to the then-defense minister, shortly after a plan to relocate a Soviet "Monument to the Liberators of Estonia" out of Tallinn's city center.

While the Russian government repeatedly denied involvement in the cyberattacks, Estonia was unconvinced. But what was even more shocking to officials in Tallinn was yet to follow, when they presented their case to fellow NATO nations.

"We were told by some of our NATO allies in Europe that, 'Oh you don't know what you're talking about, you're just being Russophobic' - and this at a time by people who wouldn't know a computer from a toaster while we were already then part of the most digitally advanced [country] in Europe," said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who was the Estonian president at the time of the cyberattacks. He was born in Sweden after his parents fled the Soviet occupation. Eventually, NATO conducted an internal assessment

For linguistic and historical reasons - as well as pure fear of the danger across the border - the Baltic states often have excellent intelligence and analysis of Russian activity, but could find themselves roundly ignored. Rihard Kols, chair of the Latvian parliament's foreign affairs committee, said Riga was involved in warning NATO about Russian ambitions before its invasion of Georgia in 2008.

But Kols said he regularly found it difficult to convince his counterparts in the West of how dangerous Putin could be.

"In general, the Baltics have been warning our colleagues in the West to be vigilant and not fall into naïveté based on wishful thinking. The constant readiness to restart relations with Russia, regardless of what its breaches have been, is what got us to this day, unfortunately," he said.

The U.S., under Barack Obama's administration, also opted for a "reset" with Russia in 2009. The gesture famously got off to a glitchy start when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov with a big red button, but with the wrong Russian word written on it.

Regardless of the bad Russian, it was a decision that Ilves called "disastrous."

The one European leader who always "surprised" him was Merkel. She had been raised behind the Iron Curtain, but proved enigmatic on whether she really grasped the risk. "Privately," Ilves said, "she seemed to have few illusions, but I guess she saw that publicly, that's something that she needed to do. Or she was telling me things she didn't believe in. I don't know. I can't say."

Now everyone's eyes are opened to Putin's true nature.

"As of February 24, there has been this dramatic revolution and all of this. But it really took an invasion, a brutal invasion of Ukraine to make people sit up. Given their previous behavior, with invasion of Crimea and invasion of Georgia ... but now this, I guess, was so over the top that even they had to react," Ilves went on.

Unity at stake

In August 2014, months after Russia annexed Crimea, EU foreign ministers were in heated debates about how far to go to sanction the Kremlin. The Baltics, as usual, sided with the Poles, the British and Swedes to call for tougher sanctions. The opposing camp came from fellow ex-communist states, Hungary and Slovakia - both governed by pro-Kremlin populists.

"The sanctions policy pursued by the West ... causes more harm to us than to Russia," Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said. "In politics, this is called shooting oneself in the foot."

Then-Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius responded by saying it was better to shoot yourself in the foot than to let yourself be shot in the head. The message was clear: If Putin was allowed to get away with Crimea, he would go on with his wars of expansion.

In an interview in Vilnius, Linkevičius lamented the lack of action from the West over the past 15 years in response to Putin's expansionism. He recalled the 2008 NATO Russia Council meeting in Romania, where Putin was already describing Ukraine as "an artificial creation." The term didn't go unnoticed. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then Danish prime minister before he became NATO secretary-general, replied to Putin by saying this wasn't the way to talk about partners.

"Putin means what he says," Linkevičius said. "And now to pretend that we are surprised that something [went] wrong, that's too much."

When Putin's troops were massed around Ukraine a month ago, French President Emmanuel Macron was one of the Western European leaders flying in to Moscow to try to talk Putin out of the inevitable.

Linkevičius wasn't impressed. "This is like psychotherapy. All these talks were so far an illusion."

He stressed that the West bears no blame for what's happening in Ukraine today, as it is entirely Russia's own doing. Still, he said, if "those who would have had opportunity in time to do something, didn't [do anything], they must share responsibility."

The war now raging in Ukraine, says Ilves, should teach Western Europe a lesson: "Don't do Russia policy without consulting people who know far more about Russia than you do. Don't rely on people who have been trained as diplomats but have no real understanding of patterns of Russian behavior."

Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting

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'We told you so!' How the West didn't listen to the countries that know Russia best

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Press play to listen to this article VILNIUS - For years, Western Europeans have been dismissive of politicians from Poland and the Baltic countries whenever they sounded the alarm over the expansionist threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most severe geopolitical conflict since World War II and will result in far greater global consequences than September 11 attacks. At this critical moment, China needs to accurately analyze and assess the direction of the war and its potential impact on the international landscape. At the same time, in order to strive for a relatively favorable external environment, China needs to respond flexibly and make strategic choices that conform to its long-term interests.

Russia's 'special military operation' against Ukraine has caused great controvsery in China, with its supporters and opponents being divided into two implacably opposing sides. This article does not represent any party and, for the judgment and reference of the highest decision-making level in China, this article conducts an objective analysis on the possible war consequences along with their corresponding countermeasure options.
I. Predicting the Future of the Russo-Ukrainian War
1. Vladimir Putin may be unable to achieve his expected goals, which puts Russia in a tight spot. The purpose of Putin's attack was to completely solve the Ukrainian problem and divert attention from Russia's domestic crisis by defeating Ukraine with a blitzkrieg, replacing its leadership, and cultivating a pro-Russian government. However, the blitzkrieg failed, and Russia is unable to support a protracted war and its associated high costs. Launching a nuclear war would put Russia on the opposite side of the whole world and is therefore unwinnable. The situations both at home and abroad are also increasingly unfavorable. Even if the Russian army were to occupy Ukraine's capital Kyiv and set up a puppet government at a high cost, this would not mean final victory. At this point, Putin's best option is to end the war decently through peace talks, which requires Ukraine to make substantial concessions. However, what is not attainable on the battlefield is also difficult to obtain at the negotiating table. In any case, this military action constitutes an irreversible mistake.

2. The conflict may escalate further, and the West's eventual involvement in the war cannot be ruled out. While the escalation of the war would be costly, there is a high probability that Putin will not give up easily given his character and power. The Russo-Ukrainian war may escalate beyond the scope and region of Ukraine, and may even include the possibility of a nuclear strike. Once this happens, the U.S. and Europe cannot stay aloof from the conflict, thus triggering a world war or even a nuclear war. The result would be a catastrophe for humanity and a showdown between the United States and Russia. This final confrontation, given that Russia's military power is no match for NATO's, would be even worse for Putin.

3. Even if Russia manages to seize Ukraine in a desperate gamble, it is still a political hot potato. Russia would thereafter carry a heavy burden and become overwhelmed. Under such circumstances, no matter whether Volodymyr Zelensky is alive or not, Ukraine will most likely set up a government-in-exile to confront Russia in the long term. Russia will be subject both to Western sanctions and rebellion within the territory of Ukraine. The battle lines will be drawn very long. The domestic economy will be unsustainable and will eventually be dragged down. This period will not exceed a few years.

4. The political situation in Russia may change or be disintegrated at the hands of the West. After Putin's blitzkrieg failed, the hope of Russia's victory is slim and Western sanctions have reached an unprecedented degree. As people's livelihoods are severely affected and as anti-war and anti-Putin forces gather, the possibility of a political mutiny in Russia cannot be ruled out. With Russia's economy on the verge of collapse, it would be difficult for Putin to prop up the perilous situation even without the loss of the Russo-Ukrainian war. If Putin were to be ousted from power due to civil strife, coup d'état, or another reason, Russia would be even less likely to confront the West. It would surely succumb to the West, or even be further dismembered, and Russia's status as a great power would come to an end.
II. Analysis of the Impact of Russo-Ukrainian war On International Landscape
1. The United States would regain leadership in the Western world, and the West would become more united. At present, public opinion believes that the Ukrainian war signifies a complete collapse of U.S. hegemony, but the war would in fact bring France and Germany, both of which wanted to break away from the U.S., back into the NATO defense framework, destroying Europe's dream to achieve independent diplomacy and self-defense. Germany would greatly increase its military budget; Switzerland, Sweden, and other countries would abandon their neutrality. With Nord Stream 2 put on hold indefinitely, Europe's reliance on US natural gas will inevitably increase. The US and Europe would form a closer community of shared future, and American leadership in the Western world will rebound.

2. The "Iron Curtain" would fall again not only from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, but also to the final confrontation between the Western-dominated camp and its competitors. The West will draw the line between democracies and authoritarian states, defining the divide with Russia as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship. The new Iron Curtain will no longer be drawn between the two camps of socialism and capitalism, nor will it be confined to the Cold War. It will be a life-and-death battle between those for and against Western democracy. The unity of the Western world under the Iron Curtain will have a siphon effect on other countries: the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy will be consolidated, and other countries like Japan will stick even closer to the U.S., which will form an unprecedentedly broad democratic united front.

3. The power of the West will grow significantly, NATO will continue to expand, and U.S. influence in the non-Western world will increase. After the Russo-Ukrainian War, no matter how Russia achieves its political transformation, it will greatly weaken the anti-Western forces in the world. The scene after the 1991 Soviet and Eastern upheavals may repeat itself: theories on "the end of ideology" may reappear, the resurgence of the third wave of democratization will lose momentum, and more third world countries will embrace the West. The West will possess more "hegemony" both in terms of military power and in terms of values and institutions, its hard power and soft power will reach new heights.

4. China will become more isolated under the established framework. For the above reasons, if China does not take proactive measures to respond, it will encounter further containment from the US and the West. Once Putin falls, the U.S. will no longer face two strategic competitors but only have to lock China in strategic containment. Europe will further cut itself off from China; Japan will become the anti-China vanguard; South Korea will further fall to the U.S.; Taiwan will join the anti-China chorus, and the rest of the world will have to choose sides under herd mentality. China will not only be militarily encircled by the U.S., NATO, the QUAD, and AUKUS, but also be challenged by Western values and systems.
III. China's Strategic Choice
1. China cannot be tied to Putin and needs to be cut off as soon as possible. In the sense that an escalation of conflict between Russia and the West helps divert U.S. attention from China, China should rejoice with and even support Putin, but only if Russia does not fall. Being in the same boat with Putin will impact China should he lose power. Unless Putin can secure victory with China's backing, a prospect which looks bleak at the moment, China does not have the clout to back Russia. The law of international politics says that there are "no eternal allies nor perpetual enemies," but "our interests are eternal and perpetual." Under current international circumstances, China can only proceed by safeguarding its own best interests, choosing the lesser of two evils, and unloading the burden of Russia as soon as possible. At present, it is estimated that there is still a window period of one or two weeks before China loses its wiggle room. China must act decisively.

2. China should avoid playing both sides in the same boat, give up being neutral, and choose the mainstream position in the world. At present, China has tried not to offend either side and walked a middle ground in its international statements and choices, including abstaining from the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly votes. However, this position does not meet Russia's needs, and it has infuriated Ukraine and its supporters as well as sympathizers, putting China on the wrong side of much of the world. In some cases, apparent neutrality is a sensible choice, but it does not apply to this war, where China has nothing to gain. Given that China has always advocated respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity, it can avoid further isolation only by standing with the majority of the countries in the world. This position is also conducive to the settlement of the Taiwan issue.

3. China should achieve the greatest possible strategic breakthrough and not be further isolated by the West. Cutting off from Putin and giving up neutrality will help build China's international image and ease its relations with the U.S. and the West. Though difficult and requiring great wisdom, it is the best option for the future. The view that a geopolitical tussle in Europe triggered by the war in Ukraine will significantly delay the U.S. strategic shift from Europe to the Indo-Pacific region cannot be treated with excessive optimism. There are already voices in the U.S. that Europe is important, but China is more so, and the primary goal of the U.S. is to contain China from becoming the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific region. Under such circumstances, China's top priority is to make appropriate strategic adjustments accordingly, to change the hostile American attitudes towards China, and to save itself from isolation. The bottom line is to prevent the U.S. and the West from imposing joint sanctions on China.

4. China should prevent the outbreak of world wars and nuclear wars and make irreplaceable contributions to world peace. As Putin has explicitly requested Russia's strategic deterrent forces to enter a state of special combat readiness, the Russo-Ukrainian war may spiral out of control. A just cause attracts much support; an unjust one finds little. If Russia instigates a world war or even a nuclear war, it will surely risk the world's turmoil. To demonstrate China's role as a responsible major power, China not only cannot stand with Putin, but also should take concrete actions to prevent Putin's possible adventures. China is the only country in the world with this capability, and it must give full play to this unique advantage. Putin's departure from China's support will most likely end the war, or at least not dare to escalate the war. As a result, China will surely win widespread international praise for maintaining world peace, which may help China prevent isolation but also find an opportunity to improve its relations with the United States and the West.

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Possible Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War and China's Choice | U.S.-China Perception Monitor

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Hu Wei is the vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor's Office of the State Council, the chairman of Shanghai Public Policy Research Association, the chairman of the Academic Committee of the Chahar Institute, a professor, and a doctoral supervisor.

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Framework & resources to engage students and schools learning through crisis and learning about crisis

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Framework & resources to engage students and schools learning through crisis and learning about crisis

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There are ongoing tragic events that children and schools are experiencing at personal, local, and global levels.

This framework supports the use of the IB mission to engage students and schools learning through crisis and learning about crisis.

The IB places trust in children. Their curiosity is nurtured, they are encouraged to develop their sense of empathy and compassion and they learn to think critically, in safety. They will grow into adults who will act with integrity.

This framework and its resources aim to support students and schools impacted by crisis. It also supports individual and school resilience throughout extended crisis and recovery. This could mean a personal, local, or global situation, such as:

Schools worldwide are directly and indirectly impacted, and students may find themselves learning through crisis or learning about crisis.

Resources have been curated that support: our wellbeing, our learning, our action, and our communities.
Crisis framework infographic (PDF, 388 KB)
During any crisis it is important to be attentive to:

the safe spaces we create

the language we use

the conversations we have

the information we share

and the sensitivities that exist within our learning communities.

We do this recognizing impact of crisis on children and adults is not about proximity to crisis, but their connections to it.
Note: (disclaimer)
This framework is a collection of curated resources, including external resources. The IB has not quality assured these resources and advises educators to use their professional judgement in determining what is appropriate to their needs and context.
Our wellbeing

Learning in crisis and learning about crisis causes concern and fear among adults and children alike:

fear for safety

fear of loss (for example, home, belongings, loved ones)

fear of being lonely and disconnected

fear of the unknown future

Talking with Children about war and violence in the world Ukraine: Resources for international schools and families How to start a conversation with children and young people about mental health Guide for refugee parents How to talk to your children about conflict and war: 8 tips to support and comfort your children Emotional Well-Being and Coping During Crises
While fear is considered a normal reaction to danger, helping us to adapt to the environment, the research has shown that not everyone has the same sensitivity to this type of stimulus. An individual's reaction to a crisis can be highly influenced by past and present trauma(s), the family and social environment, by many forms of media and by the types of measures taken in a particular community. Sustained worry and fear may also lead to a heightened level of stress, resulting in complex negative experiences for some. While acknowledging some people will need additional and more sustained levels of support, further research has shown that many people, and especially children, are naturally resilient and most will adapt.

Click the links for tools and research to help teachers, leaders, and parents and guardians address wellbeing both for students and for themselves.

Our learning

During times of crisis, learning can provide structure, routine, and a voice to young people.

Learning can help students explore possible answers to questions, solutions to challenges, and tools to help them manage difficult situations. A crisis can also provide a context for meaningful exploration of the complex, sometimes frightening, issues facing humanity and the planet.
EuroClio resources to teach about the invasion of Ukraine How to discuss the Ukrainian crisis in class Explore the current situation in Ukraine and its historical origins Learning lesson - the Invasion of Ukraine Theory of Knowledge Lesson: Ukraine Invasion How to approach Ukraine and Russia war in the classroom
The IB aims to equip and empower you to adapt your learning experiences as you see fit, using the learner profile, approaches to teaching and approaches to learning.

Click the links for resources that will help you facilitate these kinds of explorations with your learners, underpinned by these key tenets of an IB education.

Our action

There are two ways to respond to a crisis: when you are experiencing the crisis, and when you are hearing about it.

When experiencing a crisis, it is most common to ask: "What can I do about my situation?"

When hearing of a crisis, it is most common to ask: "What can I do to help?"

To effectively answer these questions and appropriately engage with individuals and communities in crisis, it is necessary to take a step back and to understand and evaluate the situation to take responsible action that helps those in crisis.

Action must be informed and guided by compassion. Being compassionate includes understanding the complex and systemic nature of any crisis. Context matters. What any person or community can and should do in any crisis depends on the context in which they are living.
How to Talk With Students About the Russia-Ukraine War: 5 Tips The How and Why of Trauma-Informed Teaching Teaching for sustainable development through ethical global issues pedagogy: A resource for secondary teachers Creating Safe Environments
Click the links for resources.
Action and international-mindedness - PYP Service as Action in the MYP in different modes of teaching and learning MYP: Meeting requirements in Challenging Circumstances - June 2020 Examples of research-based, indirect or advocacy type service learning for remote or hybrid learning- CP Global engagement: Teaching and learning about conflict Global Engagement Good Practice Guide - civic participation About compassionate systems
External resources

IB resources

Our community

Schools are encouraged to think of the many communities' students navigate, and further consider the different levels of understanding of the crisis and the types of relations and responses in the school and wider communities.

A supportive school community creates safe spaces for meaningful conversations and engages with controversial issues in sensitive and reflexive ways.
Teaching Sensitive Material in the Classroom An Additional Resource to Teaching the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Adverse Childhood Experiences - webinars How to support your child during conflict and crisis situations Resources for Teachers - Conflict Resolution Education Connection How to Talk to Kids About Violence, Crime, and War Responding to Crisis, Death or Trauma Resilience in a time of war: Tips for parents and teachers of elementary school children Resilience in a time of war: Tips for parents and teachers of middle school children
Some of the methods for supporting the school community include trauma-informed education, restorative practices, reconciliation education, conflict resolution, and communication strategies with the wider community. This includes supporting parents and guardians to engage in conversation with their children.

Click the links for resources.

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Supporting students and schools impacted by crisis

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There are ongoing tragic events that children and schools are experiencing at personal, local, and global levels. This framework supports the use of the IB mission to engage students and schools learning through crisis and learning about crisis. The IB places trust in children.

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Talking With Children About War and Violence In the World

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Talking With Children About War and Violence In the World

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Educators for Social Responsibility has prepared this guide for adults who are concerned about how to communicate with young people about difficult issues in the world.

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Talking With Children About War and Violence In the World

by Sheldon Berman, Sam Diener, Larry Dieringer, and Linda Lantieri

1. How much media coverage of tragedies or warfare is healthy for students to watch?
It depends on the age and maturity of the children. Parents may decide that some shows and topics are inappropriate. However, if children are going to watch programs about the war, we recommend that a parent or caregiver watch with them. Afterwards, talking together about reactions to the coverage and feelings about the event in general can help children make sense of what they are hearing and seeing. There is ample research which says that viewing television coverage of violent or tragic events is correlated with increased chances of post-traumatic symptomology later, so it is important to limit the amount of television coverage children watch, regardless of age. It is especially important to limit young children's exposure to graphic images of violence.

2. How can I judge if a child is ready to talk about difficult events?
Most children from age four to five and above would appreciate talking with adults they trust. In the media there is daily discussion of difficult topics, and it is likely that children know about them. However, it is also quite likely that they have some confusion about the facts and the magnitude of the danger they personally face. Younger children often combine facts and connect them to their own experiences in surprising ways that can increase their sense of fear, believing for example, "Planes have bombs on TV, so the planes over my house have bombs too." They often have mistaken information, questions, and some strong feelings. Often children are hesitant to share their questions and fears with adults. For this reason, we recommend that adults create space for children to share their concerns.

3. How do I open up the subject with children?
The key word here is listen. Most experts agree that it is best not to open up a conversation with children by giving them a lecture--even an informal, introductory lecture--on the particular tragedy that is on the news. Don't burden children with information for which they may not be ready. The best approach is to listen carefully to children's spontaneous questions and comments, and then respond to them in an appropriate, supportive way. Let children's concerns, in their own words, guide the direction and depth of the discussion. If they don't bring the subject up, you can invite conversation by asking a question. You might ask younger children, for example, "Have you heard anything about a country called Iraq?"

4. Won't it just scare children more if we talk about it?
No, not if you listen to children and respond in a supportive, sensitive way to what you hear. No matter how frightening some feelings are, it is far more frightening to think that no one is willing to talk about them. If we communicate by our silence that this--or any other subject--is too scary or upsetting to talk about, then the children, who depend on us, may experience the added fear that we are not able to take care of them. Young children especially need to feel secure in the knowledge that the adults in their lives can manage difficult topics and deep feelings and are available to help them do the same.

5. What if children never bring up the subject? Should I just wait or is there something I can do?
Some children may not bring things up because they are genuinely not concerned; others may never bring up the subject even if it's on their minds; some are afraid of upsetting their parents or teachers by bringing it up; while others are too overwhelmed by their feelings to open up a discussion. As adults we can at least try to assess how children are feeling in order to decide whether a discussion is appropriate.

Children who are troubled but have difficulty talking about their concerns may need special attention. It can be helpful if we gently start the conversation ourselves. You might ask opening questions such as, "How do you feel about what's happening in the world?" Later, you might want to ask, "What are you or your friends thinking and talking about in terms of the world situation?" No matter what their response is, we need to listen--carefully and with care--to what our children have to say.

6. It feels so passive just to listen. Is it appropriate to tell children how I feel?
There are several pitfalls in sharing feelings about violent events outright with children. A serious one is that we might burden them with our adult concerns, raising new questions and fears for them, rather than helping them deal with questions and fears they already have. Sometimes, children feel that they need to take care of us and our feelings. Another is that we might cut off the expression of what's on their minds and in their hearts as we get wrapped up in expressing what's on ours, and thus miss hearing what children want to tell us. We might simply find ourselves talking over their heads, answering questions that weren't asked, providing information that isn't useful, satisfying our need to "give" children something rather than satisfying their need to be heard and understood. We wouldn't want to communicate the message that what they have to say is not important.

This is not to say, however, that we need to be passive--good listening is a very active process. After we've listened carefully, it may then be appropriate for us to respond in ways that provide assurance that the adults in their lives care and are trying to promote safety, security, and peace. We may also want to say that we share some of the same feelings and remind children that we'll be together during these difficult times.

7. How can I listen to children in the most effective and helpful way?
As you listen to children, show that you are interested and attentive. Try to understand what they are saying from their point of view. Don't make judgments about what they say, no matter how silly or illogical it may sound to you at first. If you don't understand something, ask them to explain it. Show your respect for them and their ideas.

As parents, teachers, and caregivers know, children are not always able to express what they mean or what they feel, and what they say doesn't always mean the same thing for them as it does for adults. Sometimes it takes a bit of gentle probing to find out what's going on behind the initial words they utter. Comments such as, "That's interesting, can you tell me more about that?" or, "What do you mean by...?" or, "How long have you been feeling...?" are examples of ways to elicit more information from children without judging what they are saying as right or wrong.

If they seem to be struggling to make something clear, it can be particularly useful and reassuring to have you help them summarize and focus their concerns. For example, you might say, "Are you saying you're scared that the Iraqi government might attack us?" Or, "So, you're worried about the children who live in cities being bombed?" Or, "You've heard Saddam Hussein did horrible things to the Iraqi people and you want to know if that's true?" Clarifying questions and statements help children sort out their ideas and feelings and show them they've been heard and respected without interfering with their thinking process.

Good listening also involves paying very careful attention to the things children may not be saying. Be aware of their nonverbal messages--facial expressions, fidgeting, gestures, posture, tone of voice, or others--which indicate that strong emotions may be present.

It is reassuring to children to have adults acknowledge that their feelings are okay. A comment such as, "You seem sad when we talk about this. I feel sad too," tells a child that the feelings are not only normal and understandable, but that you have similar feelings as well and are still able to cope.

8. What if children don't want to talk about these issues?
If you ask good opening questions and the child clearly isn't interested in talking about certain issues, then don't push. Again, it's important for us to communicate to children our respect for how they feel. This extends to respecting their right not to talk about something they don't feel ready to talk about. There are some children who simply aren't concerned about these things and there's no reason to force them into this awareness. For other children, sharing what they feel may be more easily expressed in another medium besides talking, for example through play or drawings.

Some children are reluctant to talk about violent events because their feelings of fear and confusion overwhelm them, or because they don't feel confident that adults will be able to hear their concerns and respond to them in a way that makes sense. Adolescents may be more reluctant to talk if they perceive their parents and/or teachers having different opinions. They may think that the adults in their lives will try to impose their beliefs on them. These young people need to know that the doors to communication are open when they are ready. One way to let them know this might be to say something like, "Are you and your friends talking about what is happening in Iraq? I'd be really interested in hearing about what you think. Let me know if you want to talk."

Be aware of signals young children send out through their play, their drawing and writing, their spontaneous conversation, and other ways they might communicate about their preoccupations. Young children often use their play instead of words to work out what they are hearing, and observing them as they play can give us important clues about their thoughts and feelings. Especially with young children, be aware of other signs that could mean they are stressed, such as: irritability, sleep disturbances, separation problems, and regression in recent developmental accomplishments. Similarly, if you observe children drawing one violent scene after another, overhear conversations where they seem unnaturally concerned with violence and hopelessness, or if your children seem in any way preoccupied with images of destruction, then it is appropriate for you to let them know that you have noticed this and that you wonder if they could tell you more about it. Use your own judgment, and listen attentively to what they have to say.

Once you have really listened to what is on a child's mind and in their heart, you will be in a far better position to respond to them.

9. How do I deal with the different emotions that children may have about these issues?
It is natural and healthy for there to be a wide range of emotions about any particular conflict. Some children will be sad, anxious, and even fearful for their own family's safety; others will be confused about how to make sense of the events; and others will have little reaction. Some will respond with excitement and anticipation, while others will have a mix of emotions--fear, sorrow, and worry, for example. Some will respond with anger at the Iraqi and/or U.S. Governments' actions leading up to or during the war.

Deep feelings are not atypical for children trying to come to terms with death and suffering and the reasons that people resort to violence. It is our role as adults to help them explore these feelings.

The feelings children have will generally be attached to the developmental issues that are most pressing for them. For early elementary school children it will usually be issues of separation and safety. For older elementary and middle school children it will be issues of fairness and care for others. For adolescents it will often involve the ethical dilemmas posed by the situation.

Listening closely and discerning what some underlying issues might be will help your responses be more productive. In some areas, such as concerns for personal safety, we can provide reassurance by making specific plans with children around what we would need to do in the event of an emergency. In other cases, our role should be that of a listener. Listening in and of itself can be reassuring to children.

Some students might be excited by reported military victories, or upset about reported defeats. Caution about eupohoria or dejection in the early stages of battles or wars is warranted, as a cursory glance at the history of surprise reversals in warfare will attest. Helping students to question simplistic win-lose thinking is also important (please see question #25), because reality is often more complicated than that. Older students might want to read President Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, for example, as he tried to reach out, even on the verge of victory, to bind up the wounds of war.

Other students might become fascinated with the technical capabilities of military hardware. It's useful to promote explorations of scientific and engineering principles, while also complicating students' thinking by encouraging students to comprehend the human consequences of violence for all sides.

Bringing closure to discussions of feelings is sometimes difficult. Rather than trying to summarize or falsely reassure children, it is best to simply thank them for sharing so deeply and affirm how much you and they care about others and the world around them. You can express that it is this caring that makes you feel more hopeful and gives you strength.

In order to be there for our children, it can also be useful to find ways to talk in depth with, and receive support from, other adults in our lives. Teachers in some schools after September 11, 2001, for example, formed school-staff discussion groups in order to listen to and support each other.

Students will also have a wide range of opinions about the war.

10. After I have listened to children's concerns, how do I respond? Is it helpful to give them facts?
It is best not to jump in and tell children everything we think or know about the particular situation, even after we have heard what's on their minds. Nevertheless, there are a number of helpful responses we can make. Whatever our response, it is important that we provide reassurance to the children we care about.

First, we can respond to the obvious items of misinformation that they have picked up and help them distinguish fantasy from reality. When we have listened to what they think and feel, we can gently correct their misinformation by making factual statements. For example, in response to the commonly held belief among young students that tall buildings fell down many times in multiple locations on September 11, 2001, we could inform them, "Even though you might have seen the World Trade Center fall down many times as they replay pictures of those same two buildings falling down over and over again on TV, it happened once on that one day in New York City."

We can also answer children's direct questions in simple and straightforward terms. A child who asks, "What are smart bombs?" or, "What is a terrorist?" deserves a factual answer. If you think there is more to the question than is first apparent--underlying confusions or unexpressed anxiety--then ask an open-ended question to determine what may be going on for them and then listen carefully. Keep your responses brief and simple. Give children a chance to respond to each of your comments before saying more. Follow the lead of children's questions and give no more information than is asked for. Going off on one's own tangent is an easy trap for adults to fall into when answering a child's questions.

The answers to some questions that children ask are not always clear and straightforward. Some are much deeper. When children ask such questions as, "How come we have war?" or, "What will happen when the war is over?" we can explain that some people think one way about it and others think another. We might ask, "What do you think?" It is important for children to hear that there are differences of opinion and different ways of seeing the conflict.

Finally, we can give our children the opportunity to continue to explore their questions and to learn from this conflict. Children often use play to further explore and work out what they are hearing in regard to a violent situation. For instance, war play is a common phenomenon, particularly among young boys. Some schools decide that war play is not appropriate on school grounds. If your school does ban war play, it is important to find other avenues where children know it is okay to work out what they hear with the support of adults, for instance through drawings and discussions. If children are engaging in war play, we can utilize it as an opportunity to learn what they're thinking and discuss what the play means to them. Some children get stuck on imitating the same violent actions over and over. For play to meet children's needs, it needs to evolve and become more complicated. Providing open-ended props like clay, rescue equipment, and toy medical supplies, can help young people make this transition.

For older children and adolescents, conflicts such as the war in Iraq, and the events on and after September 11, 2001, raise important issues about the roots of violence, the ways conflicts are best resolved, and how to increase security. For adolescents concerned about their own potential involvement in war, it raises questions about their own options and choices. These are important issues for young people to talk about and think through with adults they trust.

At the same time, young people can derive hope by learning about conflict resolution and developing concrete skills to resolve conflict nonviolently in their own lives. This is an opportunity for them to explore alternative means of resolving conflicts and ways that, even when a conflict becomes violent, people continue to work toward its resolution. In addition, it would be valuable for them to think about how they may pursue a constructive response that promotes peace and security in their schools and neighborhoods.

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Talking With Children About War and Violence In the World

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by Sheldon Berman, Sam Diener, Larry Dieringer, and Linda Lantieri 1. How much media coverage of tragedies or warfare is healthy for students to watch? It depends on the age and maturity of the children. Parents may decide that some shows and topics are inappropriate.

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Objectives

Students will:

Explore the current situation in Ukraine and its historical origins;

Analyze political cartoons that depict the Ukrainian crisis;

Identify the techniques used by cartoonists to express political opinion;

Monitor the Ukrainian crisis and consider international responses.

Handouts

Monitoring the Ukraine Crisis in the News
Evaluating Media Sources
Note: This lesson has three distinct parts-the first provides information about the ongoing Ukraine crisis and its origins; the second is a political cartoon analysis; and the third asks students to monitor the crisis in the news. You may choose to use all three components, or alternatively, just one or two.
Recommended Reading

Though this lesson can be completed as a stand-alone activity, the following curriculum units provide additional context on the history of Russia and U.S.-Russia relations:

Introduction: Setting the Stage

Begin the class by asking students if they have heard about the ongoing Ukraine crisis. If yes, what do students know about these events? Record students' answers on the board. If students are unfamiliar with the situation, share with them that Ukraine is currently facing the threat of an invasion by the Russian military and a war, a crisis that involves the European Union, Ukraine, the United States, and Russia. Tell the class that they will be exploring this crisis through videos, readings, and political cartoons.

Part I: Understanding the Crisis in Ukraine

Distribute a copy of the map to each student. Have students identify Ukraine on the map. Remind students that Ukraine was controlled by Moscow for centuries and was one of fifteen republics of the Soviet Union until its independence in 1991. Tell students that they are going to watch three short videos that give some important historical background on the current crisis. Pause after viewing each to discuss the key points of each video. Give students time to mark their maps and ask questions.

Show students the short video of Professor Robert Legvold answering the question, "What is the 'near abroad'?"

Ask students to describe the "near abroad" in their own words. Have students mark each country of the "near abroad" on their map. What does Legvold say some people believe Russia is trying to do in the "near abroad"?

Show students the short video of Professor Douglas Blum answering the question, "How do Russia's neighbors regard Russia?"

What factors have influenced the policy decisions of Russia's neighbors? What former Soviet republics have joined NATO? Have students mark those countries on the map. Which former Republics have wanted to join NATO, but have not joined? Tell students to find and mark those countries on the map. What happened in the country of Georgia in 2008?

Show students the short video of Professor Patricia Herlihy answering the question, "What is Russia's relationship with Ukraine?"

What view do many Russians have of Ukraine's independence? What are some of the historical origins of disagreement between Russia and Ukraine?

Form groups of three or four students and distribute the handouts "Ukraine Crisis-Background" and "Graphic Organizer-Charting the Crisis." Ask students to follow the instructions on the handouts and to be prepared to share their answers with the class.

Bring students back together. Go over groups' responses to the questions. What prompted the crisis in Ukraine? What stake do members of the international community (Ukraine, Russia, United States, and the European Union) have in the crisis?

Part II: Political Cartoons

Distribute "Political Cartoons" to each student. Review the introduction with the class, emphasizing the techniques cartoonists use to convey an opinion on political issues. Assign each group a cartoon to analyze. Have students discuss the cartoon and then answer the questions provided. Inform students that they will be presenting their work to the class.

Have each group present their political cartoons. Since you might have multiple groups analyzing the same cartoons, you may wish to have them present together or on different questions from the activity.

As a class, discuss how the political cartoons provide perspective on the crisis in Ukraine. Were students able to identify the message of each cartoon? If so, what were the cartoonists trying to express? Which techniques did students think were most effective in getting the message across? Ask students to imagine that they are the editor of a top U.S. newspaper. Which political cartoon would they feature alongside an upcoming, front-page article on the Ukrainian crisis? Why? Does the cartoon they selected provide the best visual representation of the crisis? Or is it the most thought-provoking?

Part III: Monitoring Ukraine in the News

Distribute "Monitoring the Ukraine Crisis in the News." Tell students that over the course of the next month, they will be following the Ukrainian crisis in the news and taking note of how the crisis evolves. (Please see the list of news sources below that students can use for this activity. Teachers might want to take this opportunity to review with students how to assess media sources for reliability. See the handout "Evaluating Media Sources" for eight steps for assessing source reliability. You might choose to have students use these steps as they monitor the news about Ukraine.) Students should consult at least two or three news sources and write a short update about the crisis every week on Part I of the handout. Encourage students to refer to Ukrainian, U.S. or European, and Russian news sources. At the end of the month, students should answer the questions listed in Part II.

After students have completed the activity, bring the class together to debrief. How has the crisis evolved? Have conditions improved or worsened? What steps has the international community taken? Have the positions of Russia, the United States, and the European Union changed at all? If so, how? What challenges do the Ukrainian people face? Do students believe that a resolution to the conflict is within sight? What sources were most useful? Did students find sources that were unreliable or inaccurate? For example, what do students know about press freedom in Russia and government influence over media outlets? Did students find interesting information in any of the sources they thought were unreliable?

Additional Resources

You may find these additional short videos that explore U.S.-Russia relations helpful.

What are some major sources of tension between Russia and the United States?
What are the broader implications of the Ukraine crisis?
What kind of a relationship should the United States strive to have with Russia?

News Coverage of the Crisis
You may find the selected resources below useful for Part III of the lesson. Russian Sources (in English)
The Moscow Times Russian Photo credit: White House photo. Public domain. Government-Controlled Sources This list is not exhaustive. There are traditional media sources, U.S. government sources, and Russian government-controlled media sources (Sputnik and RT). Teachers should use this as an opportunity to help students consider the value and limitations of different media sources.
U.S. Government Sources
U.S. State Department: Ukraine
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Ukraine

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Students will: Explore the current situation in Ukraine and its historical origins; Analyze political cartoons that depict the Ukrainian crisis; Identify the techniques used by cartoonists to express political opinion; Monitor the Ukrainian crisis and consider international responses.

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Information, images and stories verified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. Updated daily.

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Downloadable Lesson Plan/Worksheets - letting students debate different points of view

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Downloadable Lesson Plan/Worksheets - letting students debate different points of view

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What are Russia's motives for acting in this way?
What is the way forward for Europe?

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In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, an independent sovereign nation. The international community overwhelmingly condemned this act of aggression.

What are Russia's motives for acting in this way?

And what is the best way forward to bring lasting peace and stability back to Europe?

This worksheet can be downloaded from Google Docs, edited, amended and developed however the teacher sees appropriate. I will likely be developing these materials as events unfold.

The tasks include:

A timeline of relations between Ukraine and Russia

"Read the first two events in the following timeline, then find an image on the internet relating to one of the people, events or places mentioned. Put this into the right-hand column with a caption. Repeat the process for the remaining batches of events"

Sourcework: Putin's view of Ukraine

Vladimir Putin denies that Ukraine has any right to exist as an independent country. Read the following, which combines extracts from several of his speeches, and answer the question which follows.

The international dimension

"Putin's invasion of Ukraine was motivated not just by his view that historically it 'belongs' to Russia, but also by his view that it poses a security threat to Russia.
Considering whether there is any truth in these arguments is necessary to determine the best way to respond to bring peace back to Europe.
Read through the following two interpretations. Which of them do you agree with?"

Interpretation 1: Putin's invasion of Ukraine is reflective of his aggressive desire to rebuild a new Russian empire

Interpretation 2: The invasion of Ukraine reflects Russia's genuine security concerns about the eastward expansion of NATO

In the words of President Joe Biden, "This was always about naked aggression, about Putin's desire for empire by any means necessary". Germany's Angela Merkel also describes Putin as "irrational".

Putin, like many Russians, was traumatized by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, The USSR disappeared, and Russia found itself much weaker and more vulnerable to rival great powers.

Although NATO was set up to contain the USSR, it argues that its objectives have always been purely defensive and that it has no offensive ambitions against Russia.

The expansion of NATO eastward is seen by Russians as directed against their country. Rockets are already stationed near the Russian border in Romania and Poland.

The states of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, are independent countries which have the right to form any alliances they wish.

In 1997, 50 foreign policy experts signed an open letter to US President Bill Clinton, saying, "We believe that ... to expand NATO ... is a policy error of historic proportions".

Putin's actions in Ukraine prove that NATO was right to expand into Eastern Europe.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine only happened because of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe.

If you take this view, any actions short of defeating the Russians will look like appeasement - the notorious policy of giving way to Hitler in the 1930s which, far from pacifying him, ultimately emboldened him to launch World War Two.

If you take this view, then the door is open to discussion, negotiation, compromise and concessions - just like the West did with the Soviet Union in various Cold War crises to avoid warfare escalating even more widely and catastrophically.

Task: So how should the international community react?

"Here are four possible ways in which the international community could react to the war in Ukraine. Consider the arguments for and against each one. Your teacher will then put you into small groups to debate the best way forward, and then chair a whole-class discussion."

NATO agrees not to accept any new members in return for Russia withdrawing from Ukraine.

NATO continues to impose harsh economic sanctions on Russia.

NATO declares a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine to deter Russian air attacks.

Putin is permitted to annex Ukraine, but only on the understanding that any attempts to expand Russia further will be met with a full NATO military response.

Extension Tasks

Divide the class into groups, with each one allocated a different one of the 16 myths and misconceptions listed on this website. Each group should report its findings back to the class, covering the following five points:

What is the myth?

Who advocates or subscribes to it?

Why is it wrong?

What is its impact on policy?

What would good policy look like?

Consider the eight global implications listed on this website. Choose one to read about further and report your findings back to the class. Produce a labelled infographic of a world map highlighting how the conflict could have different results around the world.

Read through the five scenarios provided on this website. After reflection and discussion with a partner or in small groups, divide 100% between the five scenarios to reflect your view of the most and least likely outcomes. Compare your thoughts with the rest of the class.

Recommended Video Documentary

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Ukraine-Russia War: Lesson Plan / Worksheets | ActiveHistory.co.uk

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"Read the first two events in the following timeline, then find an image on the internet relating to one of the people, events or places mentioned. Put this into the right-hand column with a caption. Repeat the process for the remaining batches of events" Vladimir Putin denies that Ukraine has any right to exist as an independent country.

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Teacher shared resource: Different Perspectives on the Russian-Ukrainian war

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Teacher shared resource: Different Perspectives on the Russian-Ukrainian war

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The War in the Ukraine February-March 2022

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Tons of live streams claiming to be from Ukraine and Russia to attract subscribers then spread misinformation.

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While TikTok has been an important platform to document the Russian invasion in Ukraine, there has also been plenty of false information shared on the video app. The FRANCE 24 Observers team looked into some posts that used out-of-context or doctored videos as a pretext to ask for donations to help the Ukrainian people.

A video filmed in total darkness. You can hear a siren, moaning and gunshots. At first glance it may seem like an authentic, live broadcast from someone amidst the conflict in Ukraine. But if you keep watching, the supposedly "live" video appears to be playing on a loop. And it appeared on TikTok at 4:17pm Ukraine time, when the sun would still be out.

Other accounts had broadcast this same "live" video earlier in the day.

This type of fake livestream is not uncommon on TikTok, with certain common features: videos of unidentifiable buildings, sirens in the background, and the addition of loud noises and crying. Videos like this are often accompanied by messages such as "Pray for Ukraine" or "Donate for help". And they receive comments from people all over the world.

American broadcaster NBC found that one of these accounts had posted another video of the street where this "live" video had taken place. And that it showed UK license plates on the cars parked there.

In addition to attracting countless views, comments, likes and followers, these accounts are also collecting hundreds of donations. TikTok allows users to buy credits and send "virtual gifts" to creators during live broadcasts.

But it's hard to know exactly how much money these videos are bringing in. Some of the virtual gifts cost just a few cents, while others can be worth dozens of euros. The person receiving the gift can then cash them in for actual money - which isn't always equivalent to the amount that was donated. But the more viral the livestream, the more money it will bring in.

Fake live streams using looped videos and dubbed sounds are nothing new on TikTok. Sometimes users post videos of spectacular landscapes or impressive images. One user even managed to scam fans by reposting a live video of singer Billie Eilish. Now, some have seized onto the conflict in Ukraine as a way to raise money.

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'Please help Ukraine': Fake livestreams on TikTok show telltale signs of a scam

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While TikTok has been an important platform to document the Russian invasion in Ukraine, there has also been plenty of false information shared on the video app. The FRANCE 24 Observers team looked into some posts that used out-of-context or doctored videos as a pretext to ask for donations to help the Ukrainian people.

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‘Pure Orwell’: how Russian state media spins invasion as liberation

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‘Pure Orwell’: how Russian state media spins invasion as liberation

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Turn on Russian state television on Friday afternoon and you will see little sign that the country's missiles are pounding the Ukrainian capital.

Instead, the full force of the state propaganda machine has been mobilised to portray Moscow's invasion as a defensive campaign to "liberate" Ukraine, focusing much of its coverage on the alleged protection of the Donbas, supposedly under attack by Kyiv.

"Our situation is very concerning. The enemy is attacking our positions, entering civilian houses," said Leonid Pasechnik, the leader of the self-proclaimed republic in Luhansk, to the Rossiya-24 channel.

A breaking news banner on Channel One said that "Ukraine launched three missiles at the Donetsk People's Republic in the last seven minutes".

The Russian state news mostly follows Vladimir Putin's narrative on the war, which he laid out in his address to the nation early on Thursday morning when he announced a limited "special military operation" to "demilitarise" Ukraine and protect citizens in the Donbas from what he claimed was a Ukrainian "genocide".

Throughout Friday morning, a Russian assault on the Ukrainian capital was often simply denied.

"Kyiv, as a city where civilians live, hasn't been bombed by anyone. There hasn't been any terror there or instructions to cause such terror," said the Channel One pundit Artyom Sheinin on Friday, contradicting the myriad of reports that have shown the opposite.

As it becomes harder for state media to ignore the full-scale invasion into Ukrainian territory, some channels have started to frame Russian soldiers as eagerly anticipated liberators.

"The people in the city Kharkiv only have one issue with the Russian army: 'What took you so long?'" said Olga Skabeyeva, one of the country's most prominent state television hosts.

Coverage of the invasion contrasts steeply with that of other Russian military campaigns. During Russia's 2015 military intervention in Syria, viewers were often treated to flashy videos of fighter jets destroying their targets. The avoidance of such videos this time serves as a sign that Russian authorities are aware of the country's deep unease with the conflict.

Television remains the biggest news source for Russians despite becoming less trusted over the past decade, past polling has found, and 62% of the population say they get their news from television. But polls also show that most people under 40 prefer to get their news online and from social media.

Despite a state crackdown on Russian media, readers can still choose from several independent outlets that have been reporting critically on the country's involvement in the war, including the popular online platform Meduza and the television channel Dozhd - both recently branded as "foreign agents".

Those who can read English are still able to access foreign press, and there are also many popular independent Telegram channels run by journalists turned bloggers.

In contrast to WhatsApp, the widely used encrypted messaging app Telegram allows readers to "follow" users in a similar way to Twitter, which is accessed by only 3% of the population. Alexei Pivovarov, a veteran Russian journalist, runs a channel with almost 500,000 followers, aggregating independent news on the war coming from Russia, Ukraine and the west.

Other channels are more opinionated. Commenting on a recent statement by the Kremlin official Valentina Matviyenko, who defended the invasion by saying it "was is the only option to stop a brotherly war", the Telegram user Stalingulag wrote to his 300,000 followers: "This is pure Orwell, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery."

Signs are emerging that the Kremlin will try to gain a monopoly on the way Russians perceive events in Ukraine by censoring independent outlets reporting on the war.

On Thursday Russia's media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, demanded that Russian media cite only "official information and data" when covering the conflict. The watchdog vowed to immediately block outlets that did not comply with the order.

In a similar move, Russia previously threatened to block at least 10 news outlets unless they deleted their coverage of video investigations by the jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny into high-level corruption. Most outlets gave in to the demands.

Over at the state broadcaster RT - which has parroted many of the themes on the war that were aired on Russian state television - the first signs have emerged that its staff are uncomfortable with the network's war coverage.

At least one English-language RT staff member and one frequent RT contributor in Moscow have quit the network in recent days over the editorial position on the war, the Guardian has learned.

"In light of recent events, earlier today I resigned from RT with immediate effect," the former RT staff news writer in Moscow Jonny Tickle tweeted on Thursday.

The frequent RT contributor who resigned said, on condition of anonymity, that there had "been an exodus of staff already" at the channel.

"Several people already quit - and lots more said to be contemplating."

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'Pure Orwell': how Russian state media spins invasion as liberation

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Turn on Russian state television on Friday afternoon and you will see little sign that the country's missiles are pounding the Ukrainian capital. Instead, the full force of the state propaganda machine has been mobilised to portray Moscow's invasion as a defensive campaign to "liberate" Ukraine, focusing much of its coverage on the alleged protection of the Donbas, supposedly under attack by Kyiv.

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A website that shows how the war with Ukraine is being perceived in Russia. Updates every couple of weeks.

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Хотят ли русские войны

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The War in Ukraine and the Future of the World | Yuval Noah Harari , Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum

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The War in Ukraine and the Future of the World | Yuval Noah Harari , Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum

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The War in Ukraine and the Future of the World | Yuval Noah Harari , Timothy Snyder,  Anne Applebaum