Ukraine Updates

Haven’t done one of these in a while, some items:

• Drone boats now have air defenses!
• The situation in Georgia remains twitchy.
• A Czech perspective on the war.
• What the Biden administration should do with its newfound REPO authority
• The financial war is not static, but rather characterized by ebbs and flows as Moscow and Washington develop new finwar technologies…
• On Russia’s transformation under war:

Putin’s inauguration on Tuesday for a fifth term will not only mark his 25-year-long grip on power but also showcase Russia’s shift into what pro-Kremlin commentators call a “revolutionary power,” set on upending the global order, making its own rules, and demanding that totalitarian autocracy be respected as a legitimate alternative to democracy in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence.

“Russia, Remastered” examines how Vladimir Putin, stoking conflict with the West and risking a new world war, is harnessing his invasion of Ukraine to transform Russia and fulfill his revanchist vision of a restored superpower.

“Russians live in a wholly new reality,” Dmitri Trenin, a pro-Kremlin analyst, wrote in reply to questions about an essay in which he argued that Russia’s anti-Western shift was “more radical and far-reaching” than anything anticipated when Putin invaded Ukraine but also “a relatively minor element of the wider transformation which is going on in Russia’s economy, polity, society, culture, values, and spiritual and intellectual life.”

In “Russia, Remastered,” The Washington Post documents the historic scale of the changes Putin is carrying out and has accelerated with breathtaking speed during two years of brutal war even as tens of thousands of Russians have fled abroad. It is a crusade that gives Putin common cause with China’s Xi Jinping as well as some supporters of former president Donald Trump. And it raises the prospect of an enduring civilizational conflict to subvert Western democracy and — Putin has warned — even threatens a new world war.

Well that’s a set of outcomes normally associated with American progressives!