Jammu, Jan 24: Congress leader and Member Parliament Rahul Gandhi Tuesday said that Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY) has largely succeeded to fight against the narrative of hatred spread across the country and bring the folks together yet again.
“Let me tell you that we have been able to bring the people across the country together yet again through BJY. There were a lot of lessons for us in the Yatra and we have learnt a lot after meeting people of various shades during our journey,” Rahul said addressing a press conference in Jammu, as per news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO).
He said that there is no scope for hatred in the country as Congress believes in spreading the message of love. “Our endeavour is to open the shops of love across J&K that has been made a scapegoat of politics,” Rahul said. “Through BJY we have largely been able to fight the disastrous narrative of hatred spread by the BJP in the country.”
He said that primary focus of Congress is to get Statehood and Assembly restored in J&K. Asked if BJY was apolitical, why he was continuously targeting BJP, Rahul said that since Congress is the grand old political party, there will surely be a bit of politics in his speeches during the Yatra. “When KPs, farmers and unemployed youth would meet me during the Yatra and hope that I will definitely rake up their issues, there would obviously be a problem for me if I don’t talk about them,” the Congress leader said. He said there was not even a tinge of hatred for anybody including PM Narendera Modi. “I am not afraid of anybody so why should I have hatred for anyone,” he asid.
He said J&K youth are suffering from depression and discomfort. “We are here to listen to them and understand their issue,” he said, adding that media too has been suppressed to an extent as if Yatra is not happening at all.
To a query about Lal Singh, Rahul said that Singh supported Yatra and Congress appreciates that. “As far as Ghulam Nabi Azad, 90 per cent of his supporters and party men were on our stage. I would like to tender my apology if we have hurt Azad or Lal Singh,” Rahul said. On there are reports that crores are being spent for his BJY, Rahul said that to tarnish his image, BJP and RSS spent thousands of crores and yet didn’t succeed. “I want to tell BJP that money can’t burry the truth which has a nasty habit of come out. BJP has started to understand this reality gradually,” he said. Pertinently, Rahul led BJY will enter Srinagar on January 30—(KNO)
Fay pointed to Evan McMullin, the former intelligence officer then mounting an independent campaign in Utah against Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican. McMullin’s signature issue was defending democracy against the extreme right; Democrats had made way for his candidacy by declining to field a nominee of their own. Could there not be an Evan McMullin for the cause of planetary survival?
It was a provocative idea, even an outlandish one. Nothing in recent American history suggests a plan like that would have a fair chance of working.
Australian politics tells a different story.
In Fay’s home country, that strategy has already succeeded. In Australia’s elections last May, a slate of independent candidates stepped forward to challenge the ruling conservatives in some of their electoral strongholds. Nicknamed the teals from the color of their campaign materials, these upstarts battered the sitting government for resisting climate action and helped drive Scott Morrison, then the prime minister, from power.
Aiding the teals was a heavily funded environmental group, Climate 200, which spent millions in the election. It is backed by an outspoken investor, Simon Holmes à Court, and Fay is its executive director.
The September gathering helped mark a new phase in climate politics that has arrived with too little notice. For the first time in memory, green forces in different countries have as much to learn from each others’ breakaway successes as they do from studying their noble failures. They are no longer engaged in a long, tired struggle to make voters care about global warming. They have real momentum on multiple continents, manifested in election results from Washington to Warringah.
Their task now is to drive the planet’s clean-energy transition faster and faster. It is a moment that calls for a spirit of experimentation and a willingness to test the assumed boundaries of electoral politics at home.
In some quarters that process is already underway. A political feedback loop has been developing between environmentalists in the United States and Australia, as well as the United Kingdom — a kind of informal distance-learning program for climate campaigners.
Watching Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, leaders of the Australian Labor Party absorbed how Biden talked about climate change not just as an environmental crisis but also as an economic opportunity. In Australia’s next election, Labor leader Anthony Albanese promised to make his country a “clean energy superpower” and accused the right-wing Liberal Party of clinging to old thinking and squandering a prosperous future. The message helped make Albanese prime minister, with the teal independents playing a dramatic supporting role in the campaign.
Last October, weeks after Fay’s meeting in Washington, senior officials of Albanese’s Labor Party, including the national secretary Paul Erickson and Wayne Swan, a former deputy prime minister, visited Liverpool for the British Labour Party’s annual conference. Meeting with advisers to Keir Starmer, Britain’s opposition party leader, the Australians outlined their winning blueprint, including a climate message that put conservatives on defense and blunted the usual claims that progressives wanted to gut Australia’s mining economy to save the trees.
Caroline Spears, the San Francisco-based director of the environmental group Climate Cabinet, said Australia offered lessons for other democracies where right-wing factions reject climate science.
“We share a lot with Australia, in climate denial and the Murdoch media,” she said, referring to the Australian-born, U.S.-naturalized Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire has demonized environmentalism.
What we do not share with Australia is the architecture of our elections. In Australia, voters are required by law to participate in elections, guaranteeing high turnout. A system of ranked-choice balloting ensures that supporters of independent and minor-party candidates have their votes reallocated if their first preference flops. That makes it a more hospitable environment for teal-style campaigns than the United States, where ballots cast for independent candidates are wasted almost by definition.
“It’s a much riskier proposition in the States,” said Ed Coper, an Australian strategist deeply involved in the teal campaigns. He said Australia helped show how to punish politicians for “treating climate as a culture-war issue.” But the independent model might be tough to transplant.
Then there is the matter of campaign finance. Climate 200 spent $13 million in Australia’s elections, to explosive effect. In America that sum would not cover the cost of one pitched Senate race. The social divisions are different, too. Many of the voters who powered Australia’s teal surge were upscale residents of cities and suburbs, left-leaning on cultural and environmental issues but less so on matters of taxes and spending. In the United States, those people are called centrist Democrats.
In September, Fay’s idea earned a skeptical reception from American environmentalists. The 36-year-old Australian left undeterred; he understood why it might sound far-fetched to people hardened in the brutal machinery of American elections. Several of the Americans wondered if he grasped how rigidly partisan our electoral system is. Besides, they had just won a generational triumph in climate policy through their usual method of supporting Democrats. The need for a wily new approach was not immediately apparent.
Yet it might be a bad reflex to shrug off a political innovation in an advanced democracy merely because its institutions do not mirror ours.
When I spoke to Fay recently, he conceded there were enormous structural distinctions between Australian and American politics. Indeed, he joined our Zoom call from a locale that underscored our divergent circumstances: I was at home in America’s frigid capital, while he was under a startling blue sky on the coast of New South Wales. He told me later he went surfing afterward.
Fay insisted the detailed asymmetries of Australian and American politics should not obscure the big, thematic similarities. The core of the teal model, Fay said, is bringing the climate fight to conservative areas showing some signs of political restlessness. It is a way of testing the loyalty of right-leaning constituencies and giving a new option to voters who care about climate but do not identify as progressives.
Of course, he said, Democrats would probably have to abandon these races for an independent to have a shot.
“If you can find two states and 20 House races in which this can work, you change the country,” Fay said. “If I was a Democratic strategist, I would be thinking: Where has potential for us in ten years’ time? And maybe now it could be competitive for an independent.”
It is a question worth engaging. If the most literal version of the teal strategy is ill-matched to American elections, is there a looser adaptation that could leave a mark?
Try this one: What if, rather than fielding a set of independents in affluent suburbs with the teal message — a blend of support for climate action, gender equality and clean government — a climate-minded American billionaire funded rural independents with a common platform of unleashing a clean energy revolution, imposing term limits on federal legislators and ending illegal immigration?
Would unaffiliated candidates with that profile do better or worse than a typical Democrat in a place like Utah or Idaho or Alaska? Who would do more to inflict political pain on an incumbent with reactionary views on climate?
The McMullin campaign last fall furnished a hint of an answer. The Utah independent lost to Lee by ten percentage points. But that was a leaping improvement on the last challenge to Lee in 2016, when the Republican beat his Democratic opponent by 41 points. In the midterms another political independent, Cara Mund, who ran for Congress in North Dakota on a message anchored in support for abortion rights, lost by a wide margin but did 10 points better than the previous Democratic nominee for the seat. There does seem to be some value in shedding a party label and brandishing a cause that confounds entrenched definitions of left and right.
That way of doing politics is alien to the United States. But with a consuming issue like the climate crisis, there is no reason to expect the cleverest political solutions will be made in America.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Taking the job in a newly divided Washington, Zients will inherit a series of trials:
– Fallout from the discovery of mishandled classified documents at Biden’s residence and former office, which has led to the appointment of a Department of Justice special counsel;
– A slim House Republican majority eager to use the power of the subpoena to launch a series of investigations into the president’s policies, conduct and the lives of those closest to him;
– The likelihood that the newly empowered hard right within the GOP will follow through on threats to play politics with the debt ceiling, endangering the nation’s fiscal health;
– Continued concerns that the economy, which has showed remarkable resilience to this point, could slide into a slowdown or recession;
– Fear that the war in Ukraine, which shows no signs of abating, will turn into a years-long conflict that could further strain U.S. resources and alliances.
All of those challenges will come against the backdrop of Biden’s expected announcement in the coming weeks that he will seek a second term, launching a campaign at the age of 80 that could set him up on a collision course, once more, with Donald Trump.
Zients, who was Biden’s first Covid coordinator, is expected within the White House to largely leave the politics to other senior aides. Though outgoing chief of staff Ron Klain had his hands in the legislative outreach as well, Zients will likely defer to top Biden aides Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Steve Ricchetti and others to handle that while he focuses on the West Wing’s operations and processes.
“He may not be the expert on every one of the 10 or 15 things that work its way into the Oval Office. But I guarantee you that, from what I’ve seen, there’s nobody better than Jeff to manage that,” said Anthony Fauci, Biden’s former top medical adviser who worked closely with Zients. “He knows who to call, who to trust, who to get involved with to see that it gets done.”
Zients’ first task will be to respond to GOP investigations into the classified documents and other matters. The slim Republican majority has previewed a robust slate of probes, including into the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal and border policies as well as the business dealings of the president’s son, Hunter.
The White House has expressed a quiet confidence about the tests that lie ahead, comforted by the knowledge, aides said, that they have been there before.
Last week, the West Wing celebrated the president’s second anniversary in office and, in a series of social media posts, reflected on what the White House faced in January 2021. When Klain entered the building as Biden’s first chief of staff, the nation was only two weeks removed from the Jan. 6 insurrection and still at the height of the pandemic.
Biden aides think their strategy of ignoring Beltway chatter and focusing on governing led to a sweeping legislative track record, plaudits for Biden’s leadership in defending Ukraine and a surprisingly strong showing for Democrats in the midterms. The administration entered 2023 with real momentum, aides felt, and they don’t believe the document imbroglio will change that.
Still the task facing Zients won’t be easy, or familiar.
The last two times a president has brought him on board to handle a job it was to solve massive problems: Barack Obama enlisted him to solve the troubled healthcare.gov website and then Biden tapped him to run the pandemic response. This time, Zients has been given the task of keeping the White House out of trouble, not rescuing it from it.
Aides believe the strategy of staying the course will work again, even in the face of steady, potentially damaging revelations about classified documents. The steady drip, drip, drip of information led to the appointment of a special counsel and the matter has already become a political problem if not a legal one.
House Republicans have also begun rattling sabers over what will soon be Zients’ priorities. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in order to obtain enough votes to secure the gavel, has empowered a number of Republicans — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who have demanded that the United States cease or curtail aid to Ukraine, even as Kyiv has been warning about another major Russian offensive.
Moreover, those same extremist forces in the GOP have suggested not voting to raise the debt ceiling if the administration does not enact severe spending cuts. Economists have warned that even approaching a calamity — the debt limit will likely be reached in June — would severely wound the nation’s economy.
Though the House GOP seems certain to be a thorn in Zients’ side, the two years of Democratic control of Washington left Biden with a legislative record that has evoked comparisons to those put forth by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. And White House aides believe that for many voters, the year ahead will be defined not by Republican probes, but by the implementation of Biden’s accomplishments, including the infrastructure bill and the health care and climate change provisions that were part of 2022’s reconciliation package. Polls suggest that while voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the documents, his overall approval rating has changed little.
“President Biden is on the side of working families in standing against House Republicans’ unprecedented middle class tax increase, inflation-worsening tax giveaways for the rich, and legislation to raise gas prices,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates.
Looming over all of the challenges in Zients’ new inbox will be Biden’s announcement about 2024. Though some people close to the president say he has not fully made up his mind to run again, most in the White House expect Biden will announce his candidacy soon, potentially even next month, giving Zients the task of running a White House while coordinating a sprawling re-election campaign.
“Klain faced this unbelievably daunting menu of challenges during the first two years but now comes the hard part,” said Chris Whipple, who wrote the book “The Gatekeepers” about White House chiefs of staff. “Zients has got to manage the current classified documents furor but also put the right time in place and make sure the president is ready for the marathon to come.”
Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Those tensions came to a head earlier this month as Blue Dog members met for a lengthy debate over the reboot that culminated in a secret-ballot vote to reject the new name, according to interviews with nearly a dozen people familiar with the situation, on both sides of the dispute. Shortly after that vote, Reps. Ed Case (D-Hawaii); David Scott (D-Ga.); Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.); Lou Correa (D-Calif.), Spanberger and Sherrill all left the group.
“The Blue Dogs have never prioritized having a large coalition — our members look to have a focused, effective group that can influence the Congress regardless of numbers,” Andy LaVigne, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. “With a narrow majority governing the House, even a smaller group of members focused on getting things done for the American people on these issues can and will play a vital role.”
The group will still have influence in this Congress’ historically small GOP majority, where four Democrats willing to side with Republicans could sway a floor vote. But the Blue Dogs’ shakeup raises glaring questions about their future at a critical time. The centrist coalition sought to increase its sway in recent years, building an increasingly diverse cast of Democrats — several of whom later led the failed push to orient the group away from its socially conservative, geographically limited past.
Returning Blue Dogs insisted that not all the departures were a result of the private tiff over the proposed name change, citing the effect of factors such as departing members’ potential ambitions for statewide office. In addition, the group’s size has historically always shrunk after a tough election, with its ranks often replenished when Democrats seize back power. Blue Dogs began the 2022 cycle with 19 members, only 13 of whom remain in office after the midterms.
Yet that very pattern of shrinking partly fueled the group’s debate over rebranding. With some members seeking to prioritize recruitment as the 118th Congress began, the coalition tapped Democratic polling firm Impact Research to convene one-on-one conversations with fellow party moderates about the group’s direction and image.
The interviews revealed that some felt concerned about the group’s reputation, according to multiple people familiar with the research, which was presented to the Blue Dogs during a meeting earlier this month. Impact found that some lawmakers still held outdated conceptions of the Blue Dogs, whose ranks have included the party’s last lingering opponents of same-sex marriage and abortion rights. It also arose from the vestiges of the so-called Dixiecrats, white southern Democrats who supported segregation.
Many Blue Dogs have routinely dismissed that criticism, citing an uptick in generational, geographical and racial diversity in recent terms. Of the remaining seven members, four are men of color.
“It seems like it’s been a pretty diverse group of people over the last four years. I’m not thinking of 30 years ago. I don’t really entertain that type of critique,” said one Blue Dog Democrat who opposed the name change, speaking on condition of anonymity, as did most others interviewed.
This centrist added that a majority of the remaining members weren’t trying to “change the Blue Dog caucus” by increasing its muscle with more members: “We’re not trying to recruit and become, like, the center of gravity.”
Internal reformers pushed the name Common Sense Coalition. That included Spanberger and Sherrill, the last two women in the group, who were among those advocating for a rebrand.
Those opposed included Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) as well as longer-serving members who had first joined the group in the 1990s, like Reps. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) and Mike Thompson (D-Calif.). At least one member, Gottheimer, took issue with the lack of quantitative data during the closed-door Impact Research presentation, since its work largely involved one-on-one conversations with members.
When the vote failed, members began to depart the group. Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.), who replaced retiring Rep. G.K. Butterfield, was expected to join but declined after the group decided not to rebrand, according to two people familiar with the situation. A website for the Blue Dog PAC, the political arm of the coalition, was quietly updated last week to list eight remaining members: Bishop, Thompson, Gottheimer, Golden, Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Jim Costa (D-Calif.), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and freshman Rep. Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.).
In fact, though Nickel was endorsed by the Blue Dog PAC, he has not decided whether or not he is joining the group, according to two people familiar with his thinking. That leaves seven members to begin the 118th Congress.
Brutal election cycles tend to decimate the Blue Dogs’ roster because the group is typically composed of swing-seat members. Last cycle alone, redistricting felled former Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Ga.), Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). Meanwhile, Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) lost his primary and former coalition Chair Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) retired.
Many Blue Dogs left after the midterms are no longer in swing seats, thanks to redistricting and changing demographics. Schneider’s suburban Chicago district, for example, has gone from a battleground to safe Democratic turf. Sherrill, who flipped a tough swing seat in 2018, received a significantly more Democratic district last cycle under New Jersey’s new lines. And Case, who has represented both of Hawaii’s two districts at different times, is now in the more staunchly Democratic Honolulu-based district.
The Blue Dogs could grow beyond their seven current members if they launch a successful recruitment push in 2023. But its membership is a far cry from its peak of 54 centrist Democrats during the Obama administration — let alone the heyday of 2007, when the group decided to cap its membership to no more than 20 percent of the full Democratic caucus.
The conservative tea party wave of 2010 toppled more than half of the Blue Dogs. But after a previous all-time low from 2015 to 2017, the group regained strength in the 2018 midterms, when it ushered in a historically diverse freshmen class — including Sherrill and Spanberger.
Throughout the group’s history, it hasn’t been unusual for some members to leave for various reasons. Progressive Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) once belonged to the Blue Dogs, for instance, as did former Reps. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), both of them former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chiefs.
Not until this year had their numbers ever dropped below 15 members, according to data maintained by the coalition.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
That’s false. Interpol was formed to disseminate information to aid the search for alleged criminals while preventing the abuse of its systems by member states. But the organization’s highest responsibility isn’t actually to help catch criminals.
Interpol’s own Constitution famously states that it must operate in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines the presumption of innocence and the right to private property. But authoritarian regimes like Russia and China often abuse Interpol in order to harass their critics or to justify their theft of business assets.
Interpol wants to avoid anything that would lead any of its member nations to quit or be suspended, for fear of diluting its global influence. For that reason, it asserts there’s no provision in its Constitution for suspending a member.
That’s technically true; the provision for suspension isn’t in Interpol’s Constitution. It’s in Article 131 of Interpol’s Rules on the Processing of Data, which entitles Interpol to suspend the access rights of any member state for up to three months.
Moreover, if Interpol’s Executive Committee approves, a nation can receive a “long-term suspension.” Unfortunately, that committee is currently dominated by autocracies and Interpol abusers. It’s unlikely that the UAE, China, Egypt and Turkey will vote to suspend one of their comrades in abuse.
Interpol’s defense for its inaction — a defense regularly reiterated by its secretary general, Jürgen Stock — is that Interpol was founded on neutrality and on apolitical cooperation against ordinary law crimes: offenses like murder, rape and robbery.
But practicing neutrality doesn’t mean ignoring systemic abuse. Interpol regularly allows spurious allegations of fraud, or false allegations of ordinary crimes, to be used to attack political or business opponents.
Stock has argued that there isno trade-off between offering “the widest possible mutual assistance” to police and Interpol’s neutrality.
But when the police are the criminals, there is indeed a trade-off. Regimes like Russia and China don’t recognize the distinction between ordinary crimes and political offenses — a distinction on which Interpol is based.
By ignoring that distinction, Interpol winds up “acting as an arm of a criminal regime to go after its enemies,” in the words of Bill Browder, the Putin critic and foremost target of Russia’s Interpol abuse. The Kremlin has repeatedly asked Interpol to arrest Browder, who has called out Russian corruption, though Interpol has rebuffed the requests.
Interpol’s neutrality on Russia’s membership amid the war in Ukraine comes down to refusing to do anything that could be perceived as taking sides. That isn’t neutrality; it’s blindness. True neutrality means enforcing Interpol’s rules against all comers, regardless of the identity or the reaction of the rule-breaker.
Interpol’s blinkered vision of neutrality doesn’t just affect courageous activists like Browder. It threatens the U.S. In 2018, the U.S. requested, and got, an Interpol Red Notice to try to apprehend Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Putin crony and the founder of Russia’s notorious mercenary Wagner Group.
But in 2020, after a complaint was filed by Prigozhin’s attorneys, Interpol withdrew the Notice on the grounds that it “would have significant adverse implications for the neutrality of Interpol” by causing it to be “perceived as siding with one country against another.”
Interpol’s vision of neutrality rests, as Stock states, on the belief that “if there is any state activity, Interpol is not conducting any activity.” But if the state is the one committing the crimes, Interpol’s efforts to remain neutral put it tacitly on the side of criminal states like Russia.
Unfortunately, after taking a strong stand last March in demanding Russia’s suspension, the Biden administration has backtracked. In August, the State Department and the attorney general published a report that found — in defiance of the evidence published by Interpol itself — that there has been no Interpol abuse since 2019.
Incredibly, the U.S., which pays the largest share of Interpol’s bills, is now so afraid of pointing fingers at the abusers and standing up for Interpol’s rules, that it can’t bring itself to cite the State Department’s own Country Reports on Human Rights, which testify to the ongoing reality of Interpol abuse.
Interpol’s critics are not always on target. The organization is right to resist calls, such as a recent one from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, to get involved in areas outside the ordinary crimes to which it is restricted by its Constitution. Interpol isn’t supposed to pursue offenses of a “military character,” even ones as well-documented and massive as Russia’s violations of human rights and commission of war crimes in Ukraine.
The question is not whether Russia is in the wrong in Ukraine. Russia is in the wrong, and Russia should be held to account. But Interpol is not the right tool to use for that purpose.
Interpol has enough trouble preventing abuse of its systems already. If it gets involved at the behest of the combatants in pursing war crimes, it will be faced with rampant politicization. Those who are concerned about Russia’s politicization of Interpol should not respond by urging Interpol to break its own rules.
At the same time, there is a right way to get Interpol involved in this fight. The international community could establish a tribunal to try Russians for offenses related to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The tribunal could then enter into cooperation with Interpol and make requests to locate and detain suspects.
This is the procedure established in 2010 by Interpol’s General Assembly, which is designed to ensure Interpol does not turn into a judge of the rival claims of warring combatants. The European Parliament’s recent designation of Russia as a terrorist state is a significant step in this process.
Until an international tribunal is established, Interpol has plenty of work to do. Above all, it needs to stop telling half-truths about its rules, abandon its biased vision of neutrality, and start living up to its fundamental requirement to enforce its own rules, even if Russia and China perceive that as taking sides.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Needless to say, it didn’t work. While we were holding back, Russia was building up. The Minsk process ended when Russia unleashed a devastating total war of aggression on Ukraine at the end of February 2022.
That’s why the entire international community should carefully study the lessons of “Minsk” in order to restore international peace and security today and avoid falling into new Russian traps.
Here are five lessons we learned from negotiations with Russia.
Lesson #1: It’s a mistake to freeze the war and postpone the solution of territorial problems “for the future.”
The architects of Minsk believed that fixing the status quo and decreasing hostilities would be enough for the conflict to gradually ease. This belief, based on a false premise of Russia’s alleged willingness to compromise, led to a real disaster for Ukraine, the European order and the world.
In fact, from the inception of the Minsk agreements and throughout the Minsk process, Moscow was preparing for a full-scale war on Ukraine. While Russian representatives kept imitating diplomacy, the Kremlin was quietly building up its military forces and planning to destroy the democratic international order with a single devastating blow.
Lesson #2: Russia doesn’t negotiate in good faith.
The world saw Minsk as a platform for dialogue and a path to peace, while Russia saw it as an instrument to steadily pursue its aggressive goals and destroy Ukraine by means of political pressure and without the need to launch a full-scale invasion.
From the very onset, Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to dismantle Ukrainian statehood. If that was achievable by political and diplomatic means, fine, and he tried to use Minsk to erode Ukrainian sovereignty. But if that didn’t succeed, he planned all along to annihilate Ukraine by brute military force.
The Minsk agreements were doomed to fail for only one reason: The Russian regime never sought fair peace and fair play. Even on the eve of the full-scale invasion, Putin continued to lie straight into the faces of world leaders, denying plans to attack.
Deception lies at the core of Russia’s foreign policy and the way it treats international partners — both in Europe, Africa, Asia and other regions. Victims, weaklings, henchmen — this is whom Moscow prefers to see on the other side of the table.
Lesson #3: The de-occupation of Crimea can’t be set aside.
Western strategy to counter the Russian threat should have been based on decisive steps to de-occupy all Ukrainian territories as early as 2014.
Even now, when I say Ukraine aims to fully restore its territorial integrity, journalists sometimes decide to clarify: “Including Crimea?” This question is senseless and only reinforces the Russian narrative that Crimea is special. No, it’s not. Crimea goes without saying. One of the gravest mistakes of Minsk was to allow Russia to believe that the issue of Crimea was off the table.
There is no, and has never been any, difference between Crimea, Donbas, Kherson, Kyiv and other regions. Each of them is significant for the real protection of European and world security. When the West agreed to de facto close its eyes to Crimea’s annexation, it gave the green light to new Russian imperialist encroachments.
Lesson #4: Russia does not reciprocate with constructive language and policy.
How many times have we heard from Russian leaders that they were cheated or outwitted by others? But this is only a projection of their own goals, because for Russia, any victory is someone’s defeat. Putin’s Russia has been inventing complex combinations to deceive others, and not to find a common interest, even the most pragmatic one.
In Putin’s mind, any compromise is a weakness. This is why the only way to speak to him is in the language of strength. Today, Putin has made his final bet by deciding to proceed with a genocidal war of aggression on Ukraine at any cost. This means there is nothing to talk about with him anymore. He made his choice and must be defeated.
Lesson #5: Partners should force Russia, not Ukraine, into concessions.
In 2015, Ukraine still stood on shifting sands. We had just begun rebuilding our army, parts of our territories were occupied and the economy had just begun recovering from the shock of revolution and war. Russia had a powerful army, levers of energy pressure and networks of agents of influence.
Some of our partners thus tried to pressure Ukraine to be “constructive,” because we had more difficulty saying “no.”
Despite all the flaws of the Minsk process, Ukraine adhered to its obligations. Together with France and Germany, we sought a transparent settlement and a just peace. The Russian regime, in its turn, did not fulfill a single point of the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements.
Neither the first, a full cease-fire, nor the second, the withdrawal of all heavy weapons, nor any further points: the permission of OSCE monitoring, the all-for-all exchange of political prisoners and prisoners of war and establishing an international mechanism for the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Since his election in 2019, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has tried to turn the Minsk process around, drive it out of its dead end, despite all its flaws. Under his presidency, Ukraine held 88 rounds of negotiations with Russia. Efforts to find a transparent and honest solution fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin. Russians did not want a settlement, let alone a just peace. And Russia was cynical enough to demand from others that Moscow’s security “concerns” should be heard.
Now that the Kremlin failed to achieve the goals of its full-scale aggression, it’s now trying to outfox Ukraine and the international community. Russia’s latest statements hint at their wish to secure a new “Minsk” agreement, a new trap for the world. But what Russia really wants is a pause, not peace.
Any hypothetical “Minsk-3” can have only one result: an even bloodier war, which will affect not only Ukraine, but draw in the entire Euro-Atlantic space and the world as a whole. Repeating mistakes will not yield better results.
No other nation craves peace more than Ukraine. But we need a just and lasting peace which will prevent any new genocidal war against Ukrainians and other nations. That is why Zelenskyy proposed a Peace Formula with 10 specific steps covering the restoration of nuclear, food and energy security in the interests of the entire international community.
If the entire international community takes a strong, consolidated position, then Russia will have no other option but to stop its killing of Ukrainians and engage in real substantive negotiations. The united will of the world is key to effective diplomacy and achieving sustainable peace for many decades to come.
Furthermore, I believe that the voice of the West is not enough to solve the global security crisis triggered by Russia’s war and guarantee long-term international peace. We have reached a turning point when the position of the states of the Global South can help achieve this result. The fate of the diplomatic resolution of the war depends on the countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America stepping up and using their weight and influence. Every voice and every country is important, because in the U.N. charter there are no “big” and “small” states, influential and non-influential ones, champions or outsiders.
Those who sincerely seek peace should join the consolidated international efforts on implementing the Ukrainian Peace Formula. We designed it in a flexible way allowing states to commit only to those elements of the formula which they fully share and take leadership in certain specific areas of peacebuilding efforts without committing to the other ones.
The flaws of the Minsk process must not be repeated. In fact, they must serve as an example of how not to negotiate with Russia. In diplomatic language, “to minsk, minsking” has become shorthand to describe attempts to negotiate an end to a war which only brings the opposite result and allows an aggressor to launch an even bloodier and tougher aggression.
Therefore, my message today is simple. Don’t minsk Ukraine and the world again!
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
SRINAGAR: Police on Tuesday claimed to have rescued five youth Including Juveniles from joining militancy in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.
Quoting a police handout news agency GNS reported that unearthing a major activity of militants to misguide the youth and entice them to join militan ranks,Baramulla police along with army 29 RR has succeeded in rescuing 5 youths including 2 juveniles (identity protected) from joining militant ranks.
According to police spokesman, as per information received from reliable sources, it was learnt that some youngsters are being inticed by militant handlers from pakistan to join militant organizations. On receiving this input SFs first traced these youth and they were subjected to sustained questioning with the help of their parents. On their disclosure it was learnt that these youth were in touch with militant handlers in pakistan through social media to get recruited in militant outfits. Militant handlers were trying to radicalize the minds of these boys. These boys all in their teenage have now been handed over to parents after proper counselling.
JK Police and Indian Army are firm on their resolve to defeat all nefarious designs of enemy to misguide and radicalize the youth of Kashmir, he said.
Parents are requested to keep vigil on activities of their children and cooperate with Police, reads the statement.
When a major corruption scandal broke in Ukraine last weekend, reporters faced an excruciating dilemma between professional duty and patriotism. The first thought that came to my mind was: “Should I write about this for foreigners? Will it make them stop supporting us?”
There was no doubting the severity of the cases that were erupting into the public sphere. They cut to the heart of the war economy. In one instance, investigators were examining whether the deputy infrastructure minister had profited from a deal to supply electrical generators at an inflated price, while the defense ministry was being probed over an overpriced contract to supply food and catering services to the troops.
Huge stories, but in a sign of our life-or-death times in Ukraine, even my colleague Yuriy Nikolov, who got the scoop on the inflated military contract, admitted he had done everything he could not to publish his investigation. He took his findings to public officials hoping that they might be able to resolve the matter, before he finally felt compelled to run it on the ZN.UA website.
Getting a scoop that shocks your country, forces your government to start investigations and reform military procurement, and triggers the resignation of top officials is ordinarily something that makes other journalists jealous. But I fully understand how Nikolov feels about wanting to hold back when your nation is at war. Russia (and Ukraine’s other critics abroad) are, after all, looking to leap upon any opportunity to undermine trust in our authorities.
A journalist is meant to stay a little distant from the situation he or she covers. It helps to stay impartial and to stick to the facts, not emotions. But what if staying impartial is impossible as you have to cover the invasion of your own country? Naturally, you have to keep holding your government to account, but you are also painfully aware that the enemy is out there looking to exploit any opportunity to erode faith in the leadership and undermine national security.
That is exactly what Ukrainian journalists have to deal with every day. In the first six months of the invasion, Ukrainian journalists and watchdogs decided to put their public criticism of the Ukrainian government on pause and focus on documenting Russian war crimes.
But that has backfired.
“This pause led to a rapid loss of accountability for many Ukrainian officials,” Mykhailo Tkach, one of Ukraine’s top investigative journalists, wrote in a column for Ukrainska Pravda.
His investigations about Ukrainian officials leaving the country during the war for lavish vacations in Europe led to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy imposing a ban on officials traveling abroad during the war for non-work-related issues. It also sparked the dismissal of the powerful deputy prosecutor general.
The Ukrainian government was forced to react to corruption and make a major reshuffle almost immediately. Would that happen if Ukrainian journalists decided to sit on their findings until victory? I doubt it.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended up imposing a ban on officials traveling abroad during the war for non-work-related issues | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
Is it still painful when you have to write about your own government’s officials’ flops when overwhelming enemy forces are trying to erase your nation from the planet, using every opportunity they can get to shake your international partners’ faith? Of course it is.
But in this case, there was definite room for optimism. Things are changing in Ukraine. The government had to react very quickly, under intense pressure from civil society and the independent press. Memes and social media posts immediately appeared, mocking the government’s pledge to buy eggs at massively inflated prices. Ultimately, the deputy infrastructure minister was fired and the deputy defense minister resigned.
This speedy response was praised by the European Commission and showed how far we really are from Russia, where authorities hunt down not the officials accused of corruption, but the journalists who report it.
As Tkach said, many believe that the war with the internal enemy will begin immediately after the victory over the external one.
However, we can’t really wait that long. It is important to understand that the sooner we win the battle with the internal enemy — high-profile corruption — the sooner we win the war against Russia.
“Destruction of corruption means getting additional funds for the defense capability of the country. And it means more military and civilian lives saved,” Tkach said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Public authorities in the Netherlands are being told to steer clear of TikTok amid growing concerns across the EU and U.S. that the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform poses privacy risks.
Dutch ministries and agencies are mostly following a recommendation to shun TikTok accounts and stop government communication and advertising on the platform, two government officials told POLITICO. This is despite the app’s skyrocketing popularity in the Netherlands, where it has around 3.5 million users.
The Dutch pivot away from TikTok follows advice issued by the general affairs ministry to “suspend the use of TikTok for the government until TikTok has adjusted its data protection policy” announced in November. While the recommendation resembles a recent U.S. government decision from December to ban the use of TikTok on government devices, the Dutch guidance is far more limited in scope and enforcement.
It’s the latest example of how TikTok, owned by the Beijing-headquartered ByteDance, is facing headwinds in Europe, adding to its troubles in the U.S. The firm is already under investigation for sending data on European Union users to China. One of the video app’s fiercest European critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users, as well as a source of Russian disinformation.
Dutch officials have sought to strengthen ties with Washington in recent months as the U.S. pushes for more export controls on selling sensitive technology to China, including machines made by Dutch chips printing giant ASML. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte this month met with U.S. President Joe Biden, where they discussed how to “quite frankly, meet the challenges of China,” the U.S. leader told reporters ahead of the meeting.
The Dutch policy on TikTok, which is effectively a pause rather than a ban, is mainly targeted at stopping the use of TikTok for “media” purposes, a spokesperson for the general affairs ministry said, and doesn’t explicitly instruct government officials to delete the app from phones.
The spokesperson said it’s hard to evaluate how strictly government services have abided by the advice since the ministry isn’t monitoring separate services’ use of the app. But the two officials said the advice had triggered a clear shift away from the Chinese-owned app, in line with growing security concerns across the West.
A junior Dutch government coalition party called in November for a full ban on the app “in its current form.” Asked by reporters what he thought of this proposal, Rutte said this was “the opinion of five seats in the Dutch lower chamber.”
TikTok admitted in early November that some of its China-based employees could access European TikTok user data. It also came under intense scrutiny in the U.S. over a report in Forbes magazine in December that employees had accessed data to track the location of journalists covering TikTok.
This month, TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew visited Brussels to assuage concerns in meetings with EU commissioners including Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Vice President for Values Věra Jourová and Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders.
“I count on TikTok to fully execute its commitments to go the extra mile in respecting EU law and regaining [the] trust of European regulator,” Jourová said in a warning shot at the company. There could not be “any doubt that data of users in Europe are safe and not exposed to illegal access from third-country authorities,” she said.
TikTok said in a comment that it’s open to engaging with the Dutch government “to debunk misconceptions and explain how we keep both our community and their data safe and secure.”
UPDATED: This article was updated to add TikTok’s comment.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
It appears it’s only a matter of time before the Kremlin orders another draft to replenish its depleted ranks and make up for the battlefield failings of its command.
This week, Norway’s army chief said Russia has already suffered staggering losses, estimating 180,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since February — a figure much higher than American estimates, as General Mark Milley, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, had suggested in November that the toll was around 100,000.
But whatever the exact tally, few military analysts doubt Russian forces are suffering catastrophic casualties. In a video posted this week, Russian human rights activist Olga Romanova, who heads the Russia Behind Bars charity, said that of the 50,000 conscripts recruited from jails by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitary mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, 40,000 are now dead, missing or deserted.
In some ways, the high Wagner toll isn’t surprising, with increasing reports from both sides of the front lines that Prigozhin has been using his recruits with little regard for their longevity. One American volunteer, who asked to remain unnamed, recently told POLITICO that he was amazed how Wagner commanders were just hurling their men at Ukrainian positions, only to have them gunned down for little gain.
Andrey Medvedev, a Wagner defector who recently fled to Norway, has also told reporters that in the months-long Russian offensive against the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, former prisoners were thrown into battle as cannon fodder, as meat. “In my platoon, only three out of 30 men survived. We were then given more prisoners, and many of those died too,” he said.
Of course, Wagner is at the extreme end when it comes to carelessness with lives — but as Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day missile strike demonstrated, regular Russian armed forces are also knee-deep in blood. Russia says 89 soldiers were killed at Makiivka — the highest single battlefield loss Moscow has acknowledged since the invasion began — while Ukraine estimates the death toll was nearer 400.
Many of those killed there came from Samara, a city located at the confluence of the Volga and Samara rivers, where Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had an underground complex built for Russian leaders in case of a possible evacuation from Moscow. The bunker was built in just as much secrecy as the funerals that have been taking place over the past few weeks for the conscripts killed at Makiivka. “Lists [of the dead] will not be published,” Samara’s military commissar announced earlier this month.
To make up for these losses, Russia’s military bloggers, who have grown increasingly critical, have been urging a bigger partial mobilization, this time of 500,000 reservists to add to the 300,000 already called up in September. President Vladimir Putin has denied this, and Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also dismissed the possibility, saying that the “topic is constantly artificially activated both from abroad and from within the country.”
Yet, last month, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called for Russia’s army to be boosted from its current 1.1 million to 1.5 million, and he announced new commands in regions around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia, on the border with Finland.
Meanwhile, circumstantial evidence that another draft will be called is also accumulating — though whether it will be done openly or by stealth is unclear.
Along these lines, both the Kremlin and Russia’s political-military establishment have been redoubling propaganda efforts, attempting to shape a narrative that this war isn’t one of choice but of necessity, and that it amounts to an existential clash for the country.
General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” | Ruslan Braun/Creative commons via Flickr
In a recent interview, General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” and that course corrections are needed when it comes to mobilization. He talked about threats arising from Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
Similarly, in his Epiphany address this month, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church said, “the desire to defeat Russia today has taken very dangerous forms. We pray to the Lord that he will bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.” And the increasingly unhinged Dmitry Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, has warned that the war in Ukraine isn’t going as planned, so it might be necessary to use nuclear weapons to avoid failure.
As Russia’s leaders strive to sell their war as an existential crisis, they are mining ever deeper for tropes to heighten nationalist fervor too, citing the Great Patriotic War at every turn. At the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, which commemorates the breaking of the German siege of the city in 1944, a new exhibition dedicated to “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned” is due to be unveiled, and it is set to feature captured Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles. “It’s only logical that a museum dedicated to the struggle against Nazism would support the special operation directed against neo-Nazism in Ukraine,” a press release helpfully suggests.
In line with Putin’s insistence that the war is being waged to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists have also been endeavoring to popularize the slogan, “We can do it again.”
At the same time, there are signs that local recruitment centers are gearing up for another surge of draftees as well.
Rumors of a fresh partial mobilization have prompted some dual-citizen Central Asian workers — those holding Russian passports and who would be eligible to be drafted — to leave the country, and some say they’ve been prevented from exiting. A Kyrgyz man told Radio Free Europe he was stopped by Russian border guards when he tried to cross into Kazakhstan en route to Kyrgyzstan. “Russian border guards explained to me quite politely that ‘you are included in a mobilization list, this is the law, and you have no right to go,’” he said.
In order to prevent another surge of refuseniks, Moscow also seems determined to put up further restrictions on crossing Russia’s borders, including possibly making it obligatory for Russians to book a specific time and place in advance, so that they can exit. Amendments to a transport law introduced in the Duma on Monday would require “vehicles belonging to Russian transport companies, foreign transport companies, citizens of the Russian Federation, foreign citizens, stateless persons and other road users” to reserve a date and time “in order to cross the state border of the Russian Federation.”
Transport officials say this would only affect haulers and would help ease congestion near border checkpoints. But if so, then why are “citizens of the Russian Federation” included in the language?
All in all, manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive in the coming months. And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers on the battlefield. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest are necessary for an attacking force.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
