Why #RussiaInvadedUkraine Matters

One of the features of Russia’s war against Ukraine has been the reintroduction of Newspeak into public discourse. The Kremlin has used misinformation, propaganda and outright deceit to frame the debate. Ukraine’s cyberactivists insisted on #RussiaInvadedUkraine to remind Western leaders and journalists who are loath to use such plain terms that our weak words are an unnecessary concession to Mr. Putin.

..  When Russian troops fighting in Ukraine are described on Russian state television as being “on vacation,” the Kremlin is asserting not only that it can send soldiers to Ukraine, but that it can explain their presence with an aggressively transparent excuse that amounts to thuggish mockery.

 

Obama Just Made the Ultimate Commitment to Eastern Europe

Earlier this week, one gas-industry insider told The Financial Times that without access to U.S. technology, Russia’s hopes to develop a liquefied natural-gas industry would be squashed “like a bug.”

.. Obama repudiated the lies Vladimir Putin has told about Ukraine: that the Ukrainians somehow provoked the invasion, that they are Nazis, that their freely elected government is somehow illegal. He rejected Russia’s claim that it has some sphere of influence in Ukraine, some right of veto over Ukrainian constitutional arrangements. And he forcefully assured Estonians—and all NATO’s new allies—that waging war on them meant waging war on the United States. “[T]he defense of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defense of Berlin and Paris and London,” Obama said. “Article 5 is crystal clear. An attack on one is an attack on all. So if, in such a moment, you ever ask again, who’ll come to help, you’ll know the answer: the NATO alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America, right here, present, now.”

This is the ultimate commitment, given by the ultimate authority, in the very place where the commitment would be tested—and would have to be honored. There’s no turning back from that. Today, for the first time perhaps, Eastern Europeans have reason to believe it. And Vladimir Putin? His depredations have brought about the very result he claimed most to fear: a reanimated NATO rededicated to the defense of all its members, new and old, West and East, backed by the ultimate commitment of the United States.

P.R. Firm for Putin’s Russia Now Walking a Fine Line

Public relations experts said there was a long history of American firms working for controversial foreign governments. Guy J. Golan, a professor of public relations and public diplomacy at Syracuse, compared Ketchum’s business relationship with Russia to that of public relations firms who worked for tobacco companies as the dangers of smoking were revealed.

“There are some who would argue that Russia is just as legitimate a client as Philip Morris cigarettes,” Mr. Golan said.

..  The Russian officials, he said, were initially convinced they could pay for better coverage, or intimidate journalists into it. They were eventually persuaded to take reporters to dinner instead. But after the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of the Kremlin who was assassinated in her Moscow apartment block under mysterious circumstances, they stopped engaging with the news media, because they did not want to face questions about her death.

.. In the State Department filings that detail Ketchum’s work, prominent names like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Henry Kissinger appear alongside policy analysts, politicians and United States government officials. In the filings, the company said it worked with Time magazine to have Mr. Putin named the magazine’s Person of the Year in 2007.

Russia’s Slow-Motion Invasion of Ukraine

During the Cold War, the Soviets hatched scenarios for making incursions into Western Europe that in many ways resemble Russia’s behavior in Ukraine—”for example, a fire-engine crew crossing into West Berlin to help with a fire, followed by police, followed by soldiers, who then refuse to go,” Badsey said. “Putin learned all this as basic early in his career, as did all his generals.”