Tag: history

Shocking: Seven Batsmen Out For Zero, Opposite Won The International T20 Match In Just 2 Balls, Happened For First Time In T20 History – Kashmir News
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Shocking: Seven Batsmen Out For Zero, Opposite Won The International T20 Match In Just 2 Balls, Happened For First Time In T20 History – Kashmir News
Church seating has undergone tremendous transformation over time. Here is a guide to the various stages of the development of church chairs:
There were no seats during the first 1000 years after the church formation. The introduction of seating in church buildings began in the 13^th century through benches. People made the benches from stone, which were positioned against the walls in the nave area.
- 14^th century and 15^th century
During the 14^th century, church pews replaced the stone benches used in the 13^th century. People made the pews with wood and included backs into them. However, it was not until the 15^th century that church pews became a vital part of church design.
In the 16^th century, the pews became more popular. For instance, the Archbishop William Laud of the UK established that all churches should have pews. The pews were more comfortable, lighter, and refined.
During the 20^th century, pews were the main seating arrangement of churches. Also, an ecclesiastical architecture evolution occurred during that period. A team from Like Hughes invented stacking pews. The stacking pews allowed for flexible seating to occur.
In the 21^st century, church seating has revolutionized immensely. Churches are now considering interior design as a crucial part of church decor. They are introducing new church chairs with metal, wooden, and ergonomic frames. In addition, churches have now revolutionized the design of chairs by using inventive materials, such as plastic and molded plywood. They are also sleek and lightweight.

Church seating’s cultural and religious importance throughout history
Over time, church seating has managed to gather both religious and cultural significance. Before the 13^th century, there were no seats in churches. Thus, church seating currently symbolizes the embracing of cultural changes.
After establishing church seats, the church members are ceremoniously able to stand and sit as per the church guidelines. For instance, in Catholic churches, congregants stand while reading the sermon and sit during preaching. The same trend has been present from the 13^th century to now. Other churches also have a specific session where they must sit or stand.
Thus, the introduction of church seating has allowed churches to:
- Create formal procedures for worship, such as standing and seating when necessary;
- Accomplish decoration purposes;
- Provide functional purposes;
In decoration, church seating is now a crucial aspect of the interior décor. As a functional object, the seats allow church members to follow the formal ceremonial procedure of churches.
How has church chair design changed throughout time?
Church seats have changed tremendously throughout time. Currently, most churches focus on combining functionality and design in the chairs they need. However, before the evolution of chairs, there were three-legged stools that were purely functional, crudely made, and primitive.
The introduction of chairs began in the 13^th to 15^th century, when people made the chairs very straight and high-backed. In the 16^th to 17^th centuries, the chairs became more decorative, comfortable, lighter, and refined. The aesthetics of the chairs in the 16^th to 17^th century was equally as vital as the functional aspect.
In the 18^th century, chair design revolutionized further. Floral decorations and curved lines became more popular, especially for the priest and pastor’s chairs. Since the 18^th century to date, church chair design has focused on meeting superior aesthetics and functional purposes. Churches aim to have minimalistic, sleek, light, and comfortable chairs. Apart from wood, church seats now have other inventive materials like chrome and plastic.
A look at churches’ current trend toward more flexible seating
Churches are investing more in flexible seating because of its many advantages. For one, they aim to optimize the amount of seating a crowd can manage daily. Most churches consider the 75%-80% rule ideal and anything more than 80% to be overcrowding.
Also, flexible church seats allow church ushers to remove or add chairs as per demand. The flexible seats allow churches to reconfigure their spaces to accommodate small or large groups. You can easily transform the church space into a banquet or empty hall with flexible seats.
In conclusion
Church chairs have undergone a tremendous transformation from the establishment period of churches. At first, no chairs were available in the church space, and people could worship standing. However, from the first development of stone seats, people have revolutionized the chairs to meet functional and aesthetic purposes.
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
February 27, 2023

Kashmir: First Land Settlement

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Two years after the British “took over” the governance of Jammu and Kashmir and appointed Sir Oliver St John, the first British Resident on September 25, 1885, Andrew Wingate was appointed the land Settlement Officer on January 15, 1887. Of the state’s 28 tehsils he did land settlement in Lal and Phak Parangna’s leaving the gigantic exercise to Walter R Lawrence. In his preliminary report, however, he detailed how the land, crops, markets and people were consumed by the middlemen unleashed on the peasantry

Kashmir December 31 2022 NASA pic — This photograph taken by an astronaut on December 1, 2021, using a Nikon D5 digital camera with having 70-mm focal length, was released by NASA on December 31, 2022. It shows the Kashmir valley in a haze.

“The general result of the last 70 years appears to be that the population is now little more than half of what it used to be. That it is a considerable loss, there can be little doubt. Traces of disused irrigation and of former cultivation, ruins of villages or parts of villages, of bridges, &c, local tradition, all point to a greater prosperity, which by the end of the Sikh rule in AD 1846 had well-nigh disappeared.

Feeding People

To maintain the population, two devices have been resorted to, both I believe of old date. The first, prohibiting export of rice is still in existence. The second, prohibiting any Kashmiri crossing the passes was removed during the last famine. The door of hope was, however, opened too late for of the numerous refugees few succeeded in reaching the open country and consequently few came back. Since then, numbers of Kashmiris visit the Punjab every winter where they find employment and save on their wages, returning in the early spring to cultivate their fields, generally bringing with them some cloth or other trifle for their wives, but getting frequently roughly handled by the customs’ clerks for their pains.

Kashmiri requires more and more frequent nourishment and warmer clothing than his brother of the plains. Not only does the climate necessitate more but the Kashmiri has the body and strength of an elephant. The collectors of shali often pay insufficient attention to this point, and as the aim is to collect for the use of the city all that can be safely taken, they are apt, acting on their experience of what a family consume in the plain, to leave too little to properly support and multiply the agricultural population. (page 16)

I saw mobs struggling and fighting to secure a chance of getting a few seers of the government shali, in a way that I have not witnessed since the great famine of southern India.

Stagnant Prices

I have found it impossible to obtain any record of bazar prices, but I believed I am correct in saying that before AD 1846 the normal price of shali was about eight annas per kharwar, and that it varied with the harvests. For example, during the famine of AD 1861-33, the price rose greatly, and oven after AD 1833, it remained for some time as high as Rs 1.5 per kharwar. Whether the kharwar was reduced to 15 traks instead of 16 traks then I have not ascertained. Shortly after Maharaja Golab Singh assumed control, the present system of collecting shali in large granaries in the city and selling it by retail through government officials appears to have been introduced, and the price of shali, with a brief interval about AD 1879 when it was raised to Rs 1.5 has remained stationary at Rs 1.25 per kharwar of 15 traks = two maunds and one seer of standard weight at 80 tolas per seer.

For over 40 years the system has been sufficiently profitable to support a large body of the pandit population of the city in idleness, and the government has gradually become on the one side a farmer working with coolies under a management closely approximating forced labour, and on the other side, a gigantic bannia’s shop doling out food to the poor in exchange for their coppers, and keeping with every cultivator an account showing what is taken from him whether in the way of grain, oil, wool, ponies, cows, &c, and what is given to him in the shape of seed, plough-cattle, cotton or wool to spin and weave, and a hundred other petty details. (page 17)

When I told your Highness in Darbar the price of shall must rise with the state of the harvest, and must probably be often higher than rupees two chillki, a shiver went round the officials, and your Highness said you would not dare to raise the price so great would be the outcry. I can only say that a country cannot go on feeding a semi-idle host at less than cost price and somebody must be a loser. The cultivators have lost much, even the interest to cultivate, and now the loss is falling on the State. (page 26)

The Booty

Under the Sikhs, the State took a half-share of the kharif crop and in addition four traks per kharwar and on account of the rice straw and the vegetable produce of’ the Sagazar” plots, the whole of which were kept by the Asami and were supposed to be free of assessment, Rs 1-9-0 per cent, was added to the total. The patwari and kanungo got 4 a trak per kharwar between them.

Inferior village servants got something. Nazarana was levied four times a year, and tambol (about two per cent) was taken on occasions of marriages in the ruler’s family. The villagers had also to feed the state watchers of the grain, called Shakdar. Non-resident cultivators paid a little less and Pandits and Pirzadas only paid two extra traks instead of four.

For the rabi and kimiti crops, all classes of cultivators were taxed alike, and in addition to the half-share, three traks per kharwar were taken under the names of extra cesses. The kimiti crops appear to be those that have always had a money value and are tilgogal, sarson, tobacco, cotton, linseed, saffron and the like.

For other crops, whether kharif or rabi, the collection might be in kind, or the villages might be farmed out. But I can find no trace so far of any crop rates. Walnut oil, fruit-trees, and honey have also always been taxed. Under the above, the State share was not less than three-fifth of the gross produce and what the cultivator actually retained was certainly less than two-fifths and probably only about one-third. The abundance of fruits, berries, and nuts, the extensive grazing area, and forest produce, enabled the cultivators to live, but an assessment so heavy as this would extinguish all rights in land, would render land valueless and would reduce a population forcibly confined within the valley to the condition of tenants-at-will. (page 18)

Panchan Pather is a fascinating meadow in Kulgam that was opened for tourists by officials recently. Photo: special arrangement

Since the times of the Sikhs, the pressure has been undoubtedly relaxed but it must still be pretty severe when cultivators, are found ready to sell whole villages for no other equivalent than the protection of a powerful name. Many of the Mukaddams, or heads of the villages, are very intelligent, but when it comes to seeing their children stinted of food, with hearts sickened by deferred hope, they sign away fatuitously day by day such rights as they possess. During Maharaja Golub Singh’s rule (AD 1846 to 1857) the Sikh procedure was followed, but some slight relaxations were made in favour of land newly cultivated, for large areas were lying waste.

His Highness was fond of horses and a number of grass-rakhs were reserved from cultivation.

Under Maharaja Ranbhir Singh, circles of villages were annually farmed out to contractors, called kardars. About 1865 the extra traks per kharwar were reduced for all Pandits and Pirzadas for a time to only one trak.

From about 1869 the practice of contracting with the Mukaddams or with the Zamindars gradually established itself in place of the farming system, and only two extra traks came to be levied instead of four.

In 1873-74, the village contracts seem to have been divided up into asamiwar khewats” or cultivators’ accounts, and either produce or cash was taken from each man.

In 1875 the harvest was a bad one, and the state took two shares of the produce and left one only to the cultivators. Next year fresh contracts were entered into either with Mukaddams, Kardars or cultivators and two traks per kharwar were again added to the assessment, besides an aggregate tax of Rs 9-12-0 per cent, if paid in cash or nine kharwars 12 traks per hundred kharvvars if paid in kind. This tax included a number of items, such as support of the Palace-temple, the abolished kanungo’s share, and so on.

In 1877 the scarcity began and the new contracts broke down and so the State collected in kind only, and this practically continued till 1880 when a new asamiwar khewat was made based upon previous years’ collections as estimated in cash but payable either in produce or cash as the cultivator was able. This khewat or cash settlement is supposed still to be valid, but after the good harvests of Samvat 1937 and 1938 the settlement was thought to have been too easy, and so it was raised by Rs 8-9-0 per cent, the chief item of the increment being Rs 6-13-0 for a pony tax, which might be paid in ponies instead of money, and in place of the Rs 1-9-0 per cent, formerly levied for fodder, the cultivators were required to give five kurus of rice-straw per 100 threshed.

This settlement includes all cesses except the tambol and nazrana. In 1885 the Rs 8-9-0 per cent, tax was remitted, and so now the khewat of S 1937 is supposed to have been reverted to, with the exception of the five kurus of rice-straw which are still taken.

In 1886, one seer per kharwar, formerly payable to the zillalidars, was made payable to the State, who appointed paid chowkidars. If this revenue history is not very correct, it must be remembered that access to the revenue records has been denied me. (page 19-20)

A pre-partion photograph showing the men and women busy in field harrowing. — A pre-partition photograph showing the men and women busy in rice-field harrowing.

Grain Free Market

There are neither grain shops in the bazar nor bannias nor bankers. I do not know whether it is an offence to sell shali but cultivators are afraid to do so, and in tehsils nominally under a cash settlement and with an abundant harvest my establishment have once and again been literally starving and the only way they can get food is by having it sent out, rice, atta, dall from the government storehouses in Srinagar to the tehsildars who thereupon sell to my men for cash. My men still find difficulty in procuring the necessaries of life, and only very urgent representations at headquarters have secured the supplies necessary to stop the angry and to me humiliating clamour of my subordinates to be allowed to buy food for ready money. (page 17)

Coolies, Not Cultivators

I have been told by the highest and most trusted officials in Srinagar that the Kashmiri cannot be trusted with shali because he would eat the whole of it, that he will not plough unless the tehsildar gives him the seed and makes him, and that without this fostering care of government he would become extinct. The truth being, that he has been pressed down to the condition of a coolie cultivating at subsistence allowances the State property.

The Kashmiris are called cowardly because they have lost the rights belonging to the peasantry elsewhere and tamely submit to be driven like sheep before a sepoy. But it is useless to expect that a small population forming an isolated state that looked only to its hills for protection could withstand powerful neighbours, like Afghans or Sikhs, or that so distant and inaccessible a province would not be ruthlessly ground down under the endless succession of Governors that have enriched themselves in this valley. The Kashmiri is strong and hardworking, but his spirit is dormant, and he is grudged the quantity of food the climate makes necessary but which a short-sighted policy considers gluttonous, and consequently, he is being closer pressed every harvest. (page 19)

Last year I found in the cash-settled tehsil the standing crops, reaping, and threshing, as strictly guarded as if there was batai assessment with this serious difference that the cultivator did not know what share of his shali would be left to him. (page 25)

Peasant Loot

It may be easier now to understand why the Kashmiri cares naught for rights in land, why his fields are fallow or full of weeds, and manure and water neglected, why he has, as I can well believe, even to be forced to cultivate? The revenue system is such that whether he works much or little, he is left with barely enough to get along on till next harvest. He is a machine to produce shali for a very large and mostly idle city population. The secret of the cheap shali is because if the price were allowed to rise to its proper level, the whole body of pundits would compel the palace to yield to their demands. (page 26)

Kashmiarns — An early twentieth-century photograph showing a group of extremely beautiful Kashmiri women, disempowered and in poverty. The photograph has been taken in the Kashmir periphery.

The ignorant Mohammadan cultivator has not only no one he can call friend, but everyone, whether Hindu or Mohammadan, of any influence, is against him, for cheap bread by the sweat of the cultivator’s brow is a benefit widely appreciated. The Mohammadan cultivator is compelled to grow shali, and in many years to part with it below the proper market rate, that the city may be content. If the harvest is too little for both, the city must be supplied and is supplied by any force that may be necessary and the cultivator and his children must go without. That is the explanation of the angry discontent that filled the valley during the famine. The cultivator is considered to have rights neither to his land nor to his crops. The pundits and the city population have a right to be well fed, whether there is famine or not, at rupees two chillki per kharwar. I said everybody of influence was against the cultivator. (page 26)

Enforced Weave

The anti-climax is reached when cotton is served out to the villagers to be made into army clothing, and when the villagers can make nothing of the rotten commodity, they are charged for the cotton supplied at Rs 14 chilki per kharwar, with interest at over 14 per cent. (Page 27)

Internal Displacement

It has been described how the revenue system leaves the cultivator, without protection. His one concern is to get enough to eat and when he fails in one tehsil he betakes himself to another. Consequently, hereditary occupants are few and if any proof were wanting of the unsatisfactory condition of agriculture it is the fact that large numbers have only cultivated their present lands for a few years. In a highly fertile valley to find the peasantry roving from village to village is a clear sign that the administration is faulty.

This constant search for a rest never found, leads to two things; first, that much valuable land is annually thrown out of cultivation, and secondly that the people endeavour to shelter themselves behind any influential name. Consequently, since the death of Maharaja Golab Sing, from which date central authority appears to have been weaker, there has been a steady and latterly rapidly increasing transference of land from the cultivating to the non-cultivating classes and a landlord element is intruding itself between the cultivator and the State. (Page 27)

The Modus Operandi

As soon as a man has got any land he proceeds first to oust all the old cultivators so as to destroy any proof of the land having been cultivated when he entered upon it, and second to extend his ownership over every bit of land in the neighbourhood he can lay hands on. An instance will speak for itself. A tehsildar cast his eye upon a fine village within his charge, close to Srinagar. There, were six or seven kharwars fallow and waste, which supplied a pretext for developing the country and improving the revenue by applying for a chak. He had good influence at headquarters and his friend the Diwan, about five years ago, gave him a mukarrari patta for 20 kharwars at the usual rates of Rs 12 for wet and Rs 6 for dry land, but the tehsildar took care to get it inserted that all the land was dry… For some such trifling sum he is in possession of 29 kharwars of fine land of which 20 kharwars are irrigated and chiefly shali, so that even at the nominal rates of the patta, he should be paying about Rs 300. Some of the villagers objected to their land being thus appropriated and specially to the water supply being controlled for the benefit of the land seized, but the tehsildar speedily reduced them to reason by getting their revenue demand raised by between 30 and 40 per cent, and the village is now labouring under heavy outstanding balances. This leads to cultivators disappearing and as they disappear their fields are quickly added to the chak. He is now trying to turn the villagers out of their abadi and to house his own cultivators there instead.

old pic rice mill — One of the major jobs of a Kashmir home was to grind the paddy for rice, the main staple food. In this photograph taken somewhere in the twentieth century, an entire village family is recorded in the process of grinding paddy. The process involved using stone mortar (Kanz) and pestle (Mohul) to pound the dried rice. Both men and women would do it.

Another cultivator dies, his children are young. The neighbouring chakdar immediately takes possession under an agreement to be answerable for the revenue and to restore the land when the children grow up. Another chakdar makes a quarrel about his boundary and works in a few kharwars of land that way. One cannot ride in any direction without hearing complaints of these annual accretions to chaks. (page 30-31)

When I saw the village its fine lands were mostly lying unsown and its houses empty. If it is inquired why the old cultivators do not now return it is because the outstanding balance against the village is enormous, and last year I found the tehsildar trying to secure the entire crops of the miserable few who were left in a vain attempt to reach a sum equal to about one-third of the demand, but with the more likely result of ensuring the complete desertion of the place. As I pointed out villages do not tumble down in this fashion without a cause and the cause is bad administration, and that I fear sometimes with a definite purpose. (page 32)

The son of an influential official took a contract in the old days for two villages. Next year he petitioned the Vazir Wazarat that he was being hindered paying the revenue of the villages which are his property. The Vazir Wazarat submits the case for orders and an endorsement is written across a corner that petitioner is to be allowed to pay the revenue of the villages, and here the writer takes care to repeat the words of the petition, which are his, in milkiyat and zumindari. Now whatever rights cultivators may have it is certain that ownership of villages, unless conferred by the Darbar by sanad, does not exist in Kashmir. Having got so far, the next step was to take an ikcrarnama or agreement from the villagers that he is the proprietor. Armed with these documents, he requests me to record him as proprietor of both villages. On inquiry, of course, it is ascertained he is a mere contractor of revenue and that one-half the villagers deny his claims, and the other half were bought over by a promise that they should be protected from seizure for forced labour. (page 32)

Waletr Lawrence with Agha — A 1900 photograph showing Sir Walter Lawrence in Kashmir. Agha Sayed Hussain as the young Tehsildar is standing behind him (third from right)

It is to be clearly understood that the interests of the Darbar and the interests of the cultivators are identical and that the interests of all middlemen whatsoever, whether revenue farmers, telisildars, or quasi-proprietors, are inimical to both. The cultivators desire more food and the Darbar, more revenue, and the whole pundit class live by stinting both. (page 37)

The Commission Crisis

I cannot conclude without representing that the conditions which environ my department are most unfavourable to good work. Your Highness’s back is no sooner turned than the measurers again suffer from obstruction. Coolies arc seized, not only from villages under survey, contrary to your Highness’s positive command, but even the parties are interrupted, and chain drawers and flag bearers are dragged away. Recently the judge has begun to receive complaints against my subordinates for assault and the like and to issue process against them. Considering they are Punjabis working for your Highness in a country where they cannot even understand the language, and that a dozen Kashmiris can be made to give any evidence an offended chakdar or official instigates, my subordinates are not likely to consent to work absolutely alone in isolated villages with the prospect of appearing in Criminal Courts. My subordinates have a most difficult task and are exposed to every temptation. (page 45)

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( With inputs from : kashmirlife.net )

February 24, 2023

How Vladimir Putin sells his war against ‘the West’

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MOSCOW — Every year, during the anniversary of the battle that turned back the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union, the city of Volgograd is briefly renamed Stalingrad, its Soviet-era name.

During this year’s commemoration, however, authorities went further. They unveiled a bust of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and paraded soldiers dressed as secret police in a bid to emphasize the parallels between Russia’s past and its present.

“It’s unbelievable but true: we are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin, who traveled to Volgograd to deliver a speech on February 2. “Again and again, we have to repel the aggression of the collective West.”

Putin’s statement was full of factual inaccuracies: Russia is fighting not the West but Ukraine, because it invaded the country; the German Leopards being delivered to Kyiv date back only to the 1960s; there’s no plan for them to enter Russian territory.

But the Russian president’s evocation of former victories was telling — it was a distillation of his approach to justifying an invasion that hasn’t gone to plan. These days in Russia, if the present is hard to explain, appeal to the past.

“The language of history has replaced the language of politics,” said Ivan Kurilla, a historian at the European University at St. Petersburg. “It is used to explain what is happening in a simple way that Russians understand.”

Putin has long harkened back to World War II — known in the country as The Great Patriotic War, in which more than 20 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have died.

Invoking the fight against Adolf Hitler simultaneously taps into Russian trauma and frames the country as being on the right side of history. “It has been turned into a master narrative through which [Putin] communicates the basic ideas of what is good and bad; who is friend and who foe,” said Kurilla.

Putin’s announcement of his full-scale assault on Ukraine was no exception. On February 24, 2022, Russians awoke to a televised speech announcing the start of “a special military operation” to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine.

“The official narrative was: ‘there are fascists in Ukraine, and we want to help people there. We are fighting for the sake of a great cause,’” said Tamara Eidelman, an expert in Russian propaganda.

On the streets, however, Russians seemed confused.

Asked in the early days of the war what “denazification” meant by the Russian website 7×7, one man suggested: “Respect for people of different ethnicities, respect for different languages, equality before the law and freedom of the press.”

GettyImages 1246716763 — Russia’s laws punish those seen as discrediting the Russian Armed Forces or spreading fake news by using the word “war” | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

Another interviewee ventured a different definition: “Destroy everyone who is not for a normal, peaceful life.”

The term “special military operation” at least was somewhat clearer. It suggested a speedy, professional, targeted offensive.

“There is a certain mundaneness to it — ‘yes, this is going to be unpleasant, but we’ll take care of it quickly,’” said Eidelman, the propaganda expert.

А week after the invasion, Russia’s laws were amended to punish those seen as discrediting the Russian armed forces or spreading fake news, including by using the word “war.”

Historical parallels

As the special military operation turned into a protracted conflict, and the facts on the ground refused to bend to Putin’s narrative, the Kremlin has gradually been forced to change its story.

Images of a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol or corpses littering the streets of Bucha were dismissed by state propaganda as fake or a provocation — and yet by spring the terms “demilitarization” and “denazification” had practically disappeared from the public sphere.

New justifications for the invasion were inserted into speeches and broadcasts, such as a claim that the United States had been developing biological weapons in Ukraine. In October, Putin declared that one of the main goals of the war had been to provide Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, with a stable water supply.

But the appeal to history has remained central to Putin’s communication effort.

While World War II remains his favorite leitmotif, the Russian president has been expansive in his historical comparisons. In June, he referenced Peter the Great’s campaign to “return what was Russia’s.” And during an October ceremony to lay claim to four regions in Ukraine, it was Catherine the Great who got a mention.

“Every so many months, another story is put forward as if they’re studying the reaction, looking to see what resonates,” said Kurilla.

The search for historical parallels has also bubbled up from below, as even supporters of the war search for justification. “Especially in spring and early summer, there was an attempt to Sovietize the war, with people waving red flags, trying to make sense of it through that lens.”

In the city of Syzran, students were filmed late last year pushing dummy tanks around in a sports hall in a re-enactment of the World War II Battle of Kursk. More recently, law students in St. Petersburg took part in a supposed restaging of the Nuremberg trials, which the region’s governor praised as “timely” in light of Russia’s current struggle against Nazism.

GettyImages 1233484658 — More recent statement by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin himself have made the idea of “war” less taboo | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Throughout, the Kremlin has sought to depict the conflict as a battle against powerful Western interests bent on using Ukraine to undermine Russia — a narrative that has become increasingly important as the Kremlin demands bigger sacrifices from the Russian population, most notably with a mobilization campaign in September.

“Long before February last year, people were already telling us: We are being dragged into a war by the West which we don’t want but there is no retreating from,” said Denis Volkov, director of the independent pollster Levada Center.

The sentiment, he added, has been widespread since the nineties, fed by disappointment over Russia’s diminished standing after the Cold War. “What we observe today is the culmination of that feeling of resentment, of unrealized illusions, especially among those over 50,” he said.

Long haul

With the war approaching the one-year mark, the narrative is once again having to adapt.

Even as hundreds in Russia are being prosecuted under wartime censorship laws, slips of the tongue by top officials such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and even Putin himself in December have made the idea of “war” less taboo.

“We are moving away from a special military operation towards a holy war … against 50 countries united by Satanism,” the veteran propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said on his program in January.

According to Levada, Russians are now expecting the war to last another six months or longer. “The majority keep to the sidelines, and passively support the war, as long as it doesn’t affect them directly,” said Volkov, the pollster.

Meanwhile, reports of Western weapons deliveries have been used to reinforce the argument that Russia is battling the West under the umbrella of NATO — no longer in an ideological sense, but in a literal one.

“A year of war has changed not the words that are said themselves but what they stand for in real life,” said Kurilla, the historian. “What started out as a historic metaphor is being fueled by actual spilled blood.”

In newspaper stands, Russians will find magazines such as “The Historian,” full of detailed spreads arguing that the Soviet Union’s Western allies in World War II were, in fact, Nazi sympathizers all along — another recycled trope from Russian history.

“During the Cold War, you would find caricatures depicting Western leaders such as President Eisenhower in fascist dress and a NATO helmet,” said Eidelman, the expert in Russian propaganda.

“This level of hatred and aggressive nationalism has not been seen since the late Stalin period,” she added.

GettyImages 85274999 — The anti-West sentiment in Russia has been fed by disappointment over the country’s diminished standing after the Cold War | Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

On Tuesday, three days before the one-year anniversary of the invasion, Putin is scheduled to give another speech. He is expected to distract from Russia’s failure to capture any new large settlements in Ukraine by rehearsing old themes such as his gripes with the West and Russia’s past and present heroism.

There may be a limit, however, to how much the Russian president can infuse his subjects with enthusiasm for his country’s past glories.

In Volgograd, proposals to have the city permanently renamed to Stalingrad have been unsuccessful, with polls showing a large majority of the population is against such an initiative.

When it comes to embracing the past, Russians are still one step behind their leaders.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

‘We are all Ukrainian.’ How the yellow-and-blue flag won over Europe

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The yellow-and-blue flag of Ukraine has become a powerful symbol for millions of people across the Western world who want to express their solidarity with the victims of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

Adopted officially in 1992, the year after Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union, the banner represents the country’s pride in its status as Europe’s bread basket — just picture endless wheat fields under blue skies.

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the colors were displayed on some of Europe’s most famous landmarks, from the Eiffel Tower to the Brandenburg Gate.

Over the course of the year since, the flag has spread to all corners of the Continent and beyond, in the hands of protesters, on official government buildings in London and Washington, and in the windows of private homes and cars.

GettyImages 1240566431 scaled — Brandenburg Gate in Berlin | John Mcdougall/AFP via Getty Images

GettyImages 1238735344 — Brandenburg Gate in Berlin | John Mcdougall/AFP via Getty Images

The flag not only came to signify Ukraine’s brave resistance in a war that ended decades of peace in Europe — it quickly became the hallmark of European unity in the face of the biggest state-backed threat to the Continent’s security this century.

On a visit to Kyiv in January, Charles Michel, the European Council’s president, captured the point.

“With the Maidan uprising, 22 years after gaining your independence, you, Ukrainians said: We are European,” Michel said. “So today, I have come to Ukraine to tell you: We are all Ukrainian.”

GettyImages 1242683888 — Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

GettyImages 1451205222 — Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

Beyond political symbols, Putin’s invasion triggered the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

Within weeks, European governments rushed to welcome in millions of Ukrainians, skipping administrative procedures at a speed that caused some to raise eyebrows.

Benedicte Simonart was one of the founders of a Brussels-based NGO BEforUkraine, whose logo features the Belgian and Ukrainian flags side by side. She was “struck” by the solidarity of those early days. “It was unbelievable: People kept coming to us, they were so eager to help,” she said.

“We felt very close to the Ukrainians,” she added. “Ukraine is the door to Europe, it’s almost as if it was our home.”

As the war has dragged on, European resolve has remained stable at a political level and in surveys of public opinion. The question is how long this will last if the conflict continues.

“One year ago, Europe came together very strongly and very supportively,” said Erik Jones, director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.

“I’m very interested to see what this is going to do over the longer term in the way Europeans think about themselves,” Jones added. “As we approach this one-year anniversary, I think it’s really important to ask: Do we have the same power as a community to support Ukraine through what may be a very long conflict?”

For now at least, Europe and Ukraine seem closer than ever. Ukrainians, through the voice of their President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, make no secret of their desire to join the EU — the sooner, the better.

And the powerful symbolism of the flag continues to color European towns and cities, a gesture that’s welcomed by Ukrainians who are now living in Europe.

“The flag is very important: it’s the symbol of Ukraine, and we need to keep displaying it, to talk about it, to remind people,” said Artem Datsii. “Because the war goes on.”

Datsii, 21, is a student at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where he moved before the war. He has not seen his parents, who live in Kyiv, for a year, but they speak regularly over the phone.

“At home, everyone is afraid that something will happen on the 24th,” Datsii said, referring to the invasion’s one-year marker. “The Russians love anniversaries.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

‘Oh my God, it’s really happening’

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Kaja Kallas had been dreading the call.

“I woke at 5 o’clock,” the Estonian prime minister recalled recently. The phone was ringing. Her Lithuanian counterpart was on the line.

“Oh my God, it’s really happening,” came the ominous words, according to Kallas. Another call came in. This time it was the Latvian prime minister.

It was February 24, 2022. War had begun on the European continent.

The night before, Kallas had told her Cabinet members to keep their phones on overnight in anticipation of just this moment: Russia was blitzing Ukraine in an attempt to decapitate the government and seize the country. For those in Estonia and its Baltic neighbors, where memories of Soviet occupation linger, the first images of war tapped into a national terror.

“I went to bed hoping that I was not right,” Kallas said.

Across Europe, similar wakeup calls were rolling in. Russian tanks were barreling into Ukraine and missiles were piercing the early morning sky. In recent weeks, POLITICO spoke with prime ministers, high-ranking EU and NATO officials, foreign ministers and diplomats — nearly 20 in total — to reflect on the war’s early days as it reaches its ruinous one-year mark on Friday. All described a similar foreboding that morning, a sense that the world had irrevocably changed.

Within a year, the Russian invasion would profoundly reshape Europe, upending traditional foreign policy presumptions, cleaving it from Russian energy and reawakening long-dormant arguments about extending the EU eastward.

But for those centrally involved in the war’s buildup, the events of February 24 are still seared in their memories.

In an interview with POLITICO, Charles Michel — head of the European Council, the EU body comprising all 27 national leaders — recalled how he received a call directly from Kyiv as the attacks began.

“I was woken up by Zelenskyy,” Michel recounted. It was around 3 a.m. The Ukrainian president told Michel: “The aggression had started and that it was a full-scale invasion.”

Michel hit the phones, speaking to prime ministers across the EU throughout the night.

GettyImages 1238719313 — Ursula von der Leyen and Josep Borrell speak to the press on February 24, 2022 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

By 5 a.m., EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was in his office. Three hours later, he was standing next to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as the duo made the EU’s first major public statement about the dawning war. Von der Leyen then convened the 27 commissioners overseeing EU policy for an emergency meeting.

Elsewhere in Brussels, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg was on the phone with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who were six hours behind in Washington, D.C. He then raced over to NATO headquarters, where he urgently gathered the military alliance’s decision-making body.

The mood that morning, Stoltenberg recalled in a recent conversation with reporters, was “serious” but “measured and well-organized.”

In Ukraine, missiles had begun raining down in Kyiv, Odesa and Mariupol. Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to social media, confirming in a video that war had begun. He urged Ukrainians to stay calm.

These video updates would soon become a regular feature of Zelenskyy’s wartime leadership. But this first one was especially jarring — a message from a president whose life, whose country, was now at risk.

It would be one of the last times the Ukrainian president, dressed in a dove-gray suit jacket and crisp white shirt, appeared in civilian clothes.

Europe’s 21st-century Munich moment

February 24, 2022 is an indelible memory for those who lived through it. For many, however, it felt inevitable.

Five days before the invasion, Zelenskyy traveled to the Munich Security Conference, an annual powwow of defense and security experts frequented by senior politicians.

It was here that the Ukrainian leader made one final, desperate plea for more weapons and more sanctions, hitting out at Germany for promising helmets and chiding NATO countries for not doing enough.

“What are you waiting for?” he implored in the highly charged atmosphere in the Bayerischer Hof hotel. “We don’t need sanctions after bombardment happens, after we have no borders, no economy. Why would we need those sanctions then?”

GettyImages 1238615997 — Five days before the invasion, Zelenskyy traveled to the Munich Security Conference, where he made one final, desperate plea for more weapons and more sanctions | Pool photo by Ronald Wittek/Getty Images

The symbolism was rife — Munich, a city forever associated with appeasement following Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated attempt to swap land for peace with Adolf Hitler in 1938, was now the setting for Zelenskyy’s last appeal to the West.

Zelenskyy, never missing a moment, seized the historical analogy.

“Has our world completely forgotten the mistakes of the 20th century?” he asked. “Where does appeasement policy usually lead to?”

But his calls for more arms were ignored, even as countries began ordering their citizens to evacuate and airlines began canceling flights in and out of the country.

A few days later, Zelenskyy’s warnings were coming true. On February 22, Vladimir Putin inched closer to war, recognizing the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine. It was a decisive moment for the Russian president, paving the way for his all-out assault less than 48 hours later.

The EU responded the next day — its first major action against Moscow’s activities in Ukraine since the escalation of tensions in 2021. Officials unveiled the first in what would be nine sanction packages against Russia (and counting).

In an equally significant move, a reluctant Germany finally pulled the plug on Nord Stream 2, the yet unopened gas pipeline linking Russia to northern Germany — the decision, made after months of pressure, presaged how the Russian invasion would soon upend the way Europeans powered their lives and heated their homes.

Summit showdown

As it happened, EU leaders were already scheduled to meet in Brussels on February 24, the day the invasion began. Charles Michel had summoned the leaders earlier that week to deal with the escalating crisis, and to sign off on the sanctions.

Throughout the afternoon, Brussels was abuzz — TV cameras from around the world had descended on the European quarter. Helicopters circled above.

Suddenly, the regular European Council meeting of EU leaders, often a forum for technical document drafting as much as political decision-making, had become hugely consequential. With war unfolding, the world was looking at the EU to respond — and lead.

GettyImages 1238740592 — European leaders gathered in Brussels following the invasion | Pool photo by Olivier Hoslet/AFP via Getty Images

The meeting was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. As leaders were gathering, news came that Russia had seized the Chernobyl nuclear plant, Moldova had declared a state of emergency and thousands of people were pouring out of Ukraine. Later that night, Zelenskyy announced a general mobilization: every man between the ages of 18 and 60 was being asked to fight.

Many leaders were wearing facemasks, a reminder that another crisis, which now seemed to pale in comparison, was still ever-present.

Just before joining colleagues at the Europa building in Brussels, Emmanuel Macron phoned Putin — the French president’s latest effort to mediate with the Russian leader. Macron had visited Moscow on February 7 but left empty-handed after five hours of discussions. He later said he made the call at Zelenskyy’s request, to ask Putin to stop the war.

“It did not produce any results,” Macron said of the call. “The Russian president has chosen war.”

Arriving at the summit, Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš captured the gravity of the moment. “Europe is experiencing the biggest military invasion since the Second World War,” he said. “Our response has to be united.”

But inside the room, divisions were on full display. How far, leaders wondered, could Europe go in sanctioning Russia, given the potential economic blowback? Countries dug in along fault lines that would become familiar in the succeeding months.

The realities of war soon pierced the academic debates. Zelenskyy’s team had set up a video link as missile strikes encircled the capital city, wanting to get the president talking to his EU counterparts.

One person present in the room recalled the percolating anxiety as the video feed beamed through — the image out of focus, the camera shaky. Then the picture sharpened and Zelenskyy appeared, dressed in a khaki shirt and looking deathly pale. His surroundings were faceless, an unknown room somewhere in Kyiv.

“Everyone was silent, the atmosphere was completely tense,” said the official who requested anonymity to speak freely.

Zelenskyy, shaken and utterly focused, told leaders that they may not see him again — the Kremlin wanted him dead.

“If you, EU leaders and leaders of the free world, do not really help Ukraine today, tomorrow the war will also knock at your door,” he warned, invoking an argument he would return to again and again: that this wasn’t just Ukraine’s war — it was Europe’s war.

GettyImages 1238719428 — Black smoke rises from a military airport in Chuguyev near Kharkiv on February 24, 2022 | Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images

Within hours, EU leaders had signed off on their second package of pre-prepared sanctions hitting Russia. But a fractious debate had already begun about what should come next.

The Baltic nations and Poland wanted more — more penalties, more economic punishments. Others were holding back. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi aired their reluctance about expelling Russian banks from the global SWIFT payment system. It was needed to pay for Russian gas, after all.

How quickly that would change.

Sanctions were not the only pressing matter. There was a humanitarian crisis unfolding on Europe’s doorstep. The EU had to both get aid into a war zone and prepare for a mass exodus of people fleeing it.

Janez Lenarčič, the EU’s crisis management commissioner, landed in Paris on the day of the invasion, returning from Niger. Officials started making plans to get ambulances, generators and medicine into Ukraine — ultimately comprising 85,000 tons of aid.

“The most complex, biggest and longest-ever operation” of its kind for the EU, he said.

By that weekend, there was also a plan for the refugees escaping Russian bombs. At a rare Sunday meeting, ministers agreed to welcome and distribute the escaping Ukrainians — a feat that has long eluded the EU for other migrants. Days later, they would grant Ukrainians the instant right to live and work in the EU — another first in an extraordinary time. Decisions that normally took years were now flying through in hours.

Looming over everything were Ukraine’s repeated — and increasingly dire — entreaties for more weapons. Europe’s military investments had lapsed in recent decades, and World War II still cast a dark shadow over countries like Germany, where the idea of sending arms to a warzone still felt verboten.

There were also quiet doubts (not to mention intelligence assessments). Would Ukraine even have its own government next week? Why risk war with Russia if it was days away from toppling Kyiv?

“What we didn’t know at that point was that the Ukrainian resistance would be so successful,” a senior NATO diplomat told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. “We were thinking there would be a change of regime [in Kyiv], what do we do?”

That, too, was all about to change.

GettyImages 1238728882 — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz addressed Germany on the night of Russia’s invasion | Pool photo by Hannibal Hanschke/Getty Images

By the weekend, Germany had sloughed off its reluctance, slowly warming to its role as a key military player. The EU, too, dipped its toe into historic waters that weekend, agreeing to help reimburse countries sending weapons to Ukraine — another startling first for a self-proclaimed peace project.

“I remember, saying, ‘OK, now we go for it,’” said Stefano Sannino, secretary-general of the EU’s diplomatic arm.

Ironically, the EU would refund countries using the so-called European Peace Facility — a little-known fund that was suddenly the EU’s main vehicle to support lethal arms going to a warzone.

Over at NATO, the alliance activated its defense plans and sent extra forces to the alliance’s eastern flank. The mission had two tracks, Stoltenberg recounted — “to support Ukraine, but also prevent escalation beyond Ukraine.”

Treading that fine line would become the defining balancing act over the coming year for the Western allies as they blew through one taboo after another.

Who knew what, when

As those dramatic, heady early days fade into history, Europeans are now grappling with what the war means — for their identity, for their sense of security and for the European Union that binds them together.

The invasion has rattled the core tenets underlying the European project, said Ivan Krastev, a prominent political scientist who has long studied Europe’s place in the world.

“For different reasons, many Europeans believed that this is a post-war Continent,” he said.

Post-World War II Europe was built on the assumption that open economic policies, trade between neighbors and mild military power would preserve peace.

“For the Europeans to accept the possibility of the war was basically to accept the limits of our own model,” Krastev argued.

GettyImages 1239190279 — Ukrainian refugees gather and rest upon their arrival at the main railway station in Berlin | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images

The disbelief has bred self-reflection: Has the war permanently changed the EU? Will a generation that had confined memories of World War II and the Cold War to the past view the next conflict differently?

And, perhaps most acutely, did Europe miss the signs?

“The start of that war has changed our lives, that’s for sure,” said Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu. It wasn’t, however, unexpected, he argued. “We are very attentive to what happens in our region,” he said. “The signs were quite clear.”

Aurescu pointed back to April 2021 as the moment he knew: “It was quite clear that Russia was preparing an aggression against Ukraine.”

Not everyone in Europe shared that assessment, though — to the degree that U.S. officials became worried. They started a public and private campaign in 2021 to warn Europe of an imminent invasion as Russia massed its troops on the Ukrainian border.

In November 2021, von der Leyen made her first trip to the White House. She sat down with Joe Biden in the Oval Office, surrounded by a coterie of national security and intelligence officials. Biden had just received a briefing before the gathering on the Russia battalion buildup and wanted to sound the alarm.

“The president was very concerned,” said one European official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. “This was a time when no one in Europe was paying any attention, even the intelligence services.”

But others disputed the narrative that Europe was unprepared as America sounded the alarm.

“It’s a question of perspective. You can see the same information, but come to a different conclusion,” said one senior EU official involved in discussions in the runup to the war, while conceding that the U.S. and U.K. — both members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — did have better information.

Even if those sounding the alarm proved right, said Pierre Vimont, a former secretary-general of the EU’s diplomatic wing and Macron’s Russia envoy until the war broke out, it was hard to know in advance what, exactly, to plan for.

“What type of military operation would it be?” he recalled people debating. A limited operation in the east? A full occupation? A surgical strike on Kyiv?

Here’s where most landed: Russia’s onslaught was horrifying — its brutality staggering. But the signs had been there. Something was going to happen.

“We knew that the invasion is going to happen, and we had shared intelligence,” Stoltenberg stressed. “Of course, until the planes are flying and the battle tanks are rolling, and the soldiers are marching, you can always change your plans. But the more we approached the 24th of February last year, the more obvious it was.”

Then on the day, he recounted, it was a matter of dutifully enacting the plan: “We were prepared, we knew exactly what to do.”

“You may be shocked by this invasion,” he added, “but you cannot be surprised.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

NATO on the precipice

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WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS — The images tell the story.

In the packed meeting rooms and hallways of Munich’s Hotel Bayerischer Hof last weekend, back-slapping allies pushed an agenda with the kind of forward-looking determination NATO had long sought to portray but just as often struggled to achieve. They pledged more aid for Ukraine. They revamped plans for their own collective defense.

Two days later in Moscow, Vladimir Putin stood alone, rigidly ticking through another speech full of resentment and lonely nationalism, pausing only to allow his audience of grim-faced government functionaries to struggle to their feet in a series of mandatory ovations in a cold, cavernous hall.

With the war in Ukraine now one year old, and no clear path to peace at hand, a newly unified NATO is on the verge of making a series of seismic decisions beginning this summer to revolutionize how it defends itself while forcing slower members of the alliance into action.

The decisions in front of NATO will place the alliance — which protects 1 billion people — on a path to one the most sweeping transformations in its 74-year history. Plans set to be solidified at a summit in Lithuania this summer promise to revamp everything from allies’ annual budgets to new troop deployments to integrating defense industries across Europe.

The goal: Build an alliance that Putin wouldn’t dare directly challenge.

Yet the biggest obstacle could be the alliance itself, a lumbering collection of squabbling nations with parochial interests and a bureaucracy that has often promised way more than it has delivered. Now it has to seize the momentum of the past year to cut through red tape and crank up peacetime procurement strategies to meet an unpredictable, and likely increasingly belligerent Russia.

It’s “a massive undertaking,” said Benedetta Berti, head of policy planning at the NATO secretary-general’s office. The group has spent “decades of focusing our attention elsewhere,” she said. Terrorism, immigration — all took priority over Russia.

“It’s really a quite significant historic shift for the alliance,” she said.

For now, individual nations are making the right noises. But the proof will come later this year when they’re asked to open up their wallets, and defense firms are approached with plans to partner with rivals.

To hear alliance leaders and heads of state tell it, they’re ready to do it.

“Ukraine has to win this,” Adm. Rob Bauer, the head of NATO’s military committee, said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “We cannot allow Russia to win, and for a good reason — because the ambitions of Russia are much larger than Ukraine.”

All eyes on Vilnius

The big change will come In July, when NATO allies gather in Vilnius, Lithuania, for their big annual summit.

GettyImages 1246109250 — Gen. Chris Cavoli will reveal how personnel across the alliance will be called to help on short notice | Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images

NATO’s top military leader will lay out a new plan for how the alliance will put more troops and equipment along the eastern front. And Gen. Chris Cavoli, supreme allied commander for Europe, will also reveal how personnel across the alliance will be called to help on short notice.

The changes will amount to a “reengineering” of how Europe is defended, one senior NATO official said.

The plans will be based on geographic regions, with NATO asking countries to take responsibility for different security areas, from space to ground and maritime forces.

“Allies will know even more clearly what their jobs will be in the defense of Europe,” the official said.

NATO leaders have also pledged to reinforce the alliance’s eastern defenses and make 300,000 troops ready to rush to help allies on short notice, should the need arise. Under the current NATO Response Force, the alliance can make available 40,000 troops in less than 15 days. Under the new force model, 100,000 troops could be activated in up to 10 days, with a further 200,000 ready to go in up to 30 days.

But a good plan can only get allies so far.

NATO’s aspirations represent a departure from the alliance’s previous focus on short-term crisis management. Essentially, the alliance is “going in the other direction and focusing more on collective security and deterrence and defense,” said a second NATO official, who like the first, requested anonymity to discuss ongoing planning.

Chief among NATO’s challenges: Getting everyone’s armed forces to cooperate. Countries such as Germany, which has underfunded its military modernization programs for years, will likely struggle to get up to speed. And Sweden and Finland — on the cusp of joining NATO — are working to integrate their forces into the alliance.

Others simply have to expand their ranks for NATO to meet its stated quotas.

“NATO needs the ability to add speed, put large formations in the field — much larger than they used to,” said Bastian Giegerich, director of defense and military analysis and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

East vs. West

An east-west ideological fissure is also simmering within NATO.

Countries on the alliance’s eastern front have long been frustrated, at times publicly, with the slower pace of change many in Western Europe and the United States are advocating — even after Russia’s invasion.

GettyImages 1247396268 — Joe Biden traveled to Warsaw for a major speech last week that helped alleviate some of the tensions and perceived slights | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

“We started to change and for western partners, it’s been kind of a delay,” Polish Armed Forces Gen. Rajmund Andrzejczak said during a visit to Washington this month.

Those concerns on the eastern front are being heard, tentatively.

Last summer, NATO branded Russia as its most direct threat — a significant shift from post-Cold War efforts to build a partnership with Moscow. U.S. President Joe Biden has also conducted his own charm offensive, traveling to Warsaw for a major speech last week that helped alleviate some of the tensions and perceived slights.

Still, NATO’s eastern front, which is within striking distance of Russia, is imploring its western neighbors to move faster to help fill in the gaps along the alliance’s edges and to buttress reinforcement plans.

It is important to “fix the slots — which countries are going to deliver which units,” said Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu, adding that he hopes the U.S. “will take a significant part.”

Officials and experts agree that these changes are needed for the long haul.

“If Ukraine manages to win, then Ukraine and Europe and NATO are going to have a very disgruntled Russia on its doorstep, rearming, mobilizing, ready to go again,” said Sean Monaghan, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“If Ukraine loses and Russia wins,” he noted, the West would have “an emboldened Russia on our doorstep — so either way, NATO has a big Russia problem.”

Wakeup call from Russia

The rush across the Continent to rearm as weapons and equipment flows from long-dormant stockpiles into Ukraine has been as sudden as the invasion itself.

After years of flat defense budgets and Soviet-era equipment lingering in the motor pools across the eastern front, calls for more money and more Western equipment threaten to overwhelm defense firms without the capacity to fill those orders in the near term. That could create a readiness crisis in ammunition, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and anti-armor weapons.

11302373 — A damaged Russian tank near Kyiv on February 14, 2023 | Sergei Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE

NATO actually recognized this problem a decade ago but lacked the ability to do much about it. The first attempt to nudge member states into shaking off the post-Cold War doldrums started slowly in the years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.

After Moscow took Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014, the alliance signed the “Wales pledge” to spend 2 percent of economic output on defense by 2024.

The vast majority of countries politely ignored the vow, giving then-President Donald Trump a major talking point as he demanded Europe step up and stop relying on Washington to provide a security umbrella.

But nothing focuses attention like danger, and the sight of Russian tanks rumbling toward Kyiv as Putin ranted about Western depravity and Russian destiny jolted Europe into action. One year on, the bills from those early promises to do more are coming due.

“We are in this for the long haul” in Ukraine, said Bauer, the head of NATO’s Military Committee, a body comprising allies’ uniformed defense chiefs. But sustaining the pipeline funneling weapons and ammunition to Ukraine will take not only the will of individual governments but also a deep collaboration between the defense industries in Europe and North America. Those commitments are still a work in progress.

Part of that effort, Bauer said, is working to get countries to collaborate on building equipment that partners can use. It’s a job he thinks the European Union countries are well-suited to lead.

That’s a touchy subject for the EU, a self-proclaimed peace project that by definition can’t use its budget to buy weapons. But it can serve as a convener. And it agreed to do just that last week, pledging with NATO and Ukraine to jointly establish a more effective arms procurement system for Kyiv.

Talk, of course, is one thing. Traditionally NATO and the EU have been great at promising change, and forming committees and working groups to make that change, only to watch it get bogged down in domestic politics and big alliance in-fighting. And many countries have long fretted about the EU encroaching on NATO’s military turf.

But this time, there is a sense that things have to move, that western countries can’t let Putin win his big bet — that history would repeat itself, and that Europe and the U.S. would be frozen by an inability to agree.

“People need to be aware that this is a long fight. They also need to be brutally aware that this is a war,” the second NATO official said. “This is not a crisis. This is not some small incident somewhere that can be managed. This is an all-out war. And it’s treated that way now by politicians all across Europe and across the alliance, and that’s absolutely appropriate.”

Paul McLeary and Lili Bayer also contributed reporting from Munich.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

Inside the deal: How Boris Johnson’s departure paved the way for a grand Brexit bargain

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LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.

But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.

Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.

They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.

As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.

Bye-bye Boris

Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.

For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.

In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.

Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.

“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”

Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.

Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.

But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.

“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.

GettyImages 1244099952 — Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images

Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.

But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.

David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.

During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.

“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.

One British official suggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”

Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.

“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same official said. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”

EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.

Global backdrop

As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.

Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.

“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.

A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”

A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.

“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”

The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.

“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said. “Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”

The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.

The King and I

Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.

The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.

One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”

By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.

The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.

Cleverly does it

The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.

His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.

“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.

This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.

GettyImages 1247215337 — British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”

Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. official said, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.

Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.

A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.

By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.

Sorry is the hardest word

Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.

“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”

The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”

Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.

“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”

There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.

Sunak at the wheel

The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.

An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.

The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.

Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.

The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”

Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.

An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”

The ‘unholy trinity’

Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.

Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.

Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.

Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”

But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”

When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.

The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.

Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,” the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”

Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.

Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.

The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.

Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.

Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.

For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.

This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

Liz Truss: UK should have ‘done more earlier’ to counter Vladimir Putin

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LONDON — Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss argued the U.K. should have “done more earlier” to counter Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric before he invaded Ukraine, and said the West depended on Russian oil for too long.

Truss — the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister who resigned amid market turmoil last year — was speaking in a House of Commons debate about Ukraine, her first contribution in the chamber as a backbencher since 2012. She has been increasingly vocal on foreign policy since leaving office.

The former prime minister, who as served foreign secretary for Boris Johnson before succeeding him in the top job, recalled receiving a phone call at 3.30 a.m. on the morning of the invasion, and told MPs: “This was devastating news. But as well as being devastating, it was not unexpected.”

Truss praised the “sheer bravery” of Ukrainians defending their country, as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Cabinet for not fleeing the country in the aftermath. “I remember being on a video conference that evening with the defense secretary and our counterparts, who weren’t in Poland, who weren’t in the United States,” she said of Ukraine’s top team. “They were in Kyiv and they were defending their country,” she added.

But while Truss argued Western sanctions had imposed an economic toll on Putin’s Russia, said urged reflection. “The reason that Putin took the action he took is because he didn’t believe we would follow through,” she argued, and said the West should “hold ourselves to high standards.”

Ukraine, she said, should have been allowed to join NATO.

“We were complacent about freedom and democracy after the Cold War,” she said. “We were told it was the end of history and that freedom and democracy were guaranteed and that we could carry on living our lives not worrying about what else could happen.”

Truss urged the U.K. to do all it could to help Ukraine win the war as soon as possible, including sending fighter jets, an ongoing matter of debate in Western capitals despite Ukrainian pleas.

And the former U.K. prime minister said the West should “never again” be “complacent in the face of Russian money, Russian oil and gas,” tying any future lifting of sanctions “to reform in Russia.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 20, 2023

Tag: history

Church seating’s cultural and religious importance throughout history

How has church chair design changed throughout time?

A look at churches’ current trend toward more flexible seating

In conclusion

Historical parallels

Long haul

Europe’s 21st-century Munich moment

Summit showdown

Who knew what, when

All eyes on Vilnius

East vs. West

Wakeup call from Russia

Bye-bye Boris

Global backdrop

The King and I

Cleverly does it

Sorry is the hardest word

Sunak at the wheel

The ‘unholy trinity’