NINGUÉM NA UCRÂNIA ACREDITA QUE A GUERRA VAI TERMINAR EM BREVE - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

NINGUÉM NA UCRÂNIA ACREDITA QUE A GUERRA VAI TERMINAR EM BREVE

Os ucranianos estão confiantes de que podem continuar lutando, mesmo sem o mesmo nível de apoio americano.

Por Anne Applebaum

The Atlantic, 19 de maio de 2025

No sábado, perguntei a Andriy Sadovyi, prefeito de Lviv, no oeste da Ucrânia, se ele esperava que as negociações russo-ucranianas em Istambul levassem a um cessar-fogo. “Não”, ele me respondeu. Mais tarde, perguntei à plateia do Fórum de Mídia de Lviv se alguém esperava um cessar-fogo em breve. Havia cerca de 200 jornalistas e editores na sala. Ninguém levantou a mão. Muitos riram.

Durante vários dias em Lviv, não conheci uma única pessoa que acreditasse que o presidente russo quer encerrar a guerra, ou que ele vá negociar para isso em Istambul. O raciocínio ucraniano é direto: Vladimir Putin nunca disse que quer encerrar a guerra. Os propagandistas da televisão estatal russa nunca disseram que querem encerrar a guerra. A equipe de negociação russa em Istambul não disse que queria encerrar a guerra. Pelo contrário, o chefe da delegação russa, Vladimir Medinsky, disse aos ucranianos: “Lutamos contra a Suécia por 21 anos. Quanto tempo vocês estão dispostos a lutar?” (A Grande Guerra do Norte, à qual Medinsky se referia, terminou em 1721. Além disso, Medinsky é mais conhecido não por feitos heroicos em batalhas, mas por reescrever livros escolares).

Na mesma reunião, os russos exigiram que a Ucrânia se retirasse de terras que controla; ameaçaram anexar mais províncias — algo que tentam e falham em fazer há três anos; e insultaram um membro da delegação ucraniana que perdeu um sobrinho nos combates. “Talvez alguns aqui sentados à mesa percam mais entes queridos”, zombou Medinsky.

Os ucranianos não acham nada disso surpreendente, pois ouvem esse tipo de discurso há três anos. O que os surpreende é a tolerância do presidente americano diante do que lhes parece uma zombaria aberta. O presidente Donald Trump diz que quer uma negociação de paz. O presidente ucraniano Volodymyr Zelensky preparou-se para uma negociação de paz. O presidente russo a transformou em uma farsa — e provavelmente continuará com essa farsa, enrolando Trump o máximo possível, aceitando mais telefonemas e reuniões para evitar novas sanções, desviar a atenção dos crimes de guerra em curso e fazer os EUA parecerem fracos.

Não vou aqui oferecer uma explicação completa sobre por que Trump não entende o jogo que Putin está jogando — um jogo óbvio para todos os demais. Apenas observo que Trump continuamente interpreta mal Putin, superestima sua suposta amizade com ele e frequentemente atribui a Putin motivos que, na verdade, são seus próprios. “Putin está cansado de tudo isso”, disse Trump à Fox News. “Ele não está com boa aparência. E quer parecer bem.” Na realidade, é Trump quem está cansado “de tudo isso”, é Trump quem não está com boa aparência — e é Trump quem quer parecer bem.

Putin, por sua vez, redirecionou toda sua economia para a produção militar, ao estilo da União Soviética ou da Alemanha nazista. Criou um regime tão repressivo que as pessoas têm medo até de usar a palavra “guerra” em público. Sacrifica regularmente centenas ou até milhares de homens para conquistar 100 metros de território. O que os outros pensam disso pouco lhe importa.

Por todas essas razões, os ucranianos acreditam que a guerra vai continuar — e essa perspectiva já não os assusta. Em parte, porque não têm outra escolha. Ao contrário dos russos, que podem abandonar o campo de batalha e voltar para casa a qualquer momento, os ucranianos não podem se retirar. Se o fizerem, perderão sua civilização, sua língua e sua liberdade. Sob ocupação russa, o prefeito de Lviv e os jornalistas do Fórum de Mídia estariam presos ou mortos — assim como seus colegas assassinados ou presos nas regiões ocupadas da Ucrânia.

Mais do que isso, os ucranianos estão confiantes de que podem continuar lutando, mesmo sem o mesmo nível de apoio americano. O exército ucraniano não está reconquistando território, como fez no outono de 2022, nem planeja uma nova grande contraofensiva. Mas também não está perdendo. Os tanques e equipamentos pesados que a Ucrânia precisava de outros países já não importam tanto como há dois anos. Os ucranianos ainda precisam da inteligência americana e das defesas antimísseis para proteger civis nas cidades. Ainda recebem armas e munição da Europa. Mas na linha de frente, o conflito se tornou uma guerra de drones — e a Ucrânia tanto produz drones (mais de 2 milhões no ano passado, provavelmente o dobro neste ano) quanto desenvolve o software e os sistemas para operá-los. Em fevereiro, uma unidade ucraniana implantou o primeiro de uma série de robôs de combate. No mês passado, um drone naval ucraniano derrubou um avião russo. Uma brigada projetou um drone que consegue neutralizar com eficácia um Shahed, os drones iranianos usados para matar civis ucranianos.

Os russos também aumentaram sua produção de drones, e nesse sentido, esta guerra é realmente uma corrida armamentista. Mas, por ora, os ucranianos estão compensando seus recursos mais escassos com maior precisão. Em abril, brigadas de drones ucranianas relataram ter atingido 83 mil alvos russos — veículos, pessoas, artilharia, radares e outros —, o que representa 5% a mais do que em março. O exército agora realiza concursos, premiando as brigadas que atingem mais alvos com maior precisão. Mais recursos vão para os vencedores, criando mais incentivos para inovar.

Os resultados são visíveis no terreno. Lembre-se, se puder, do pânico causado pelas notícias de nove meses atrás: a cidade de Pokrovsk estava prestes a cair, o que muitos acreditavam que poderia provocar o colapso de toda a linha de frente. Mas Pokrovsk não caiu. Os russos continuam a atacar a região: só em 15 de maio, soldados ucranianos na linha de frente de Pokrovsk repeliram 74 ataques e ações ofensivas diferentes. Mas, nos últimos meses, a linha de frente mal se moveu.

Tudo isso ajuda a explicar a naturalidade, até o humor, com que muitos ucranianos agora falam sobre a guerra — bem como sua suposição de que continuarão lutando, aconteça o que acontecer. Enquanto estava em Lviv, visitei também o Superhumans, um dos dois centros de reabilitação para veteranos e vítimas da guerra na cidade. Tal como a linha de frente, este também é um lugar de inovação e ambição. Talvez soe estranho, mas também achei um lugar de otimismo e esperança: uma instalação nova, bem projetada, onde técnicos produzem próteses sob medida, cirurgiões restauram audição e visão, e especialistas em movimento e psicologia ajudam pessoas gravemente feridas a se readaptar.

O restante da sociedade ucraniana também se readaptou. Até os guardas de fronteira se readaptaram. Três anos atrás, na primavera de 2022, a viagem de trem de Varsóvia a Kyiv era longa e estressante. O trem parava e arrancava, fazendo um trajeto em zigue-zague para evitar trilhos bombardeados. Oficiais da alfândega falavam de forma seca e tensa, fazendo perguntas sobre passaportes e propósito. Na volta, voluntários aguardavam para ajudar a processar refugiados ucranianos, alguns entrando nos vagões para distribuir sanduíches.

Na semana passada, cruzei novamente a fronteira polaco-ucraniana duas vezes, desta vez de carro. Na entrada na Ucrânia, esperamos alguns minutos para que os guardas verificassem os passaportes e seus computadores. Eles contaram piadas, sorriram e nos deixaram passar. Ninguém foi seco ou tenso, porque ninguém está ansioso ou com medo. Na volta, não havia refugiados nem voluntários. Ninguém ofereceu sanduíches.

A máquina de propaganda mentirosa das autocracias - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

 Trecho de seu artigo na The Atlantic deste mês, "The Propaganda War":

“In 2013, as Chinese President Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo, known enigmatically as Document No. 9—or, more formally, as the Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere—listed “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party. “Western constitutional democracy” led the list, followed by “universal human rights,” “media independence,” “judicial independence,” and “civic participation.” The document concluded that “Western forces hostile to China,” together with dissidents inside the country, “are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” and instructed party leaders to push back against these ideas wherever they found them, especially online, inside China and around the world.

(…)

This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited—especially in the places where they have historically flourished.“

(...)

The Atlantic, may 8, 2024

The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy - Rogé Karma (The Atlantic)

IDEAS

The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy

Private equity has made one-fifth of the market effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators.

By Rogé Karma 

The Atlantic, November 8, 2023

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/private-equity-publicly-traded-companies/675788/?utm_source=apple_news 

The publicly traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown by nearly $20 trillion. The population has increased by 70 million people. And yet, today, the number of American public companies stands at fewer than 4,000. How can that be?

One answer is that the private-equity industry is devouring them. When a private-equity fund buys a publicly traded company, it takes the company private—hence the name. (If the company has not yet gone public, the acquisition keeps that from happening.) This gives the fund total control, which in theory allows it to find ways to boost profits so that it can sell the company for a big payday a few years later. In practice, going private can have more troubling consequences. The thing about public companies is that they’re, well, public. By law, they have to disclose information about their finances, operations, business risks, and legal liabilities. Taking a company private exempts it from those requirements.

That may not have been such a big deal when private equity was a niche industry. Today, however, it’s anything but. In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole.

Elisabeth de Fontenay, a law professor at Duke University who studies corporate finance, told me that if current trends continue, “we could end up with a completely opaque economy.”

This should alarm you even if you’ve never bought a stock in your life. One-fifth of the market has been made effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators. Information as basic as who actually owns a company, how it makes its money, or whether it is profitable is “disappearing indefinitely into private equity darkness,” as the Harvard Law professor John Coates writes in his book The Problem of Twelve. This is not a recipe for corporate responsibility or economic stability. A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.

(...)

(...)

In the roaring ’20s, the lack of corporate disclosure allowed a massive financial crisis to build up without anyone noticing. A century later, the growth of a new shadow economy could pose similar risks.

The hallmark of a private-equity deal is the so-called leveraged buyout. Funds take on massive amounts of debt to buy companies, with the goal of reselling in a few years at a profit. If all of that debt becomes hard to pay back—because of, say, an economic downturn or rising interest rates—a wave of defaults could ripple through the financial system. In fact, this has happened before: The original leveraged buyout mania of the 1980s helped spark the 1989 stock-market crash. Since then, private equity has grown into a $12 trillion industry and has begun raising much of its money from unregulated, nonbank lenders, many of which are owned by the same private-equity funds taking out loans in the first place.

Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

 

Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy

Leaders shouldn’t give in to Putin’s nuclear rhetoric.

By Anne Applebaum

The Atlantic, November 7, 2022

Most of the time, when heads of state talk about nuclear war, they speak in careful, measured tones, acknowledging the gravity of the nuclear taboo and the consequences of breaking it. The Russian president takes a different approach. Speaking at his annual foreign-policy conference a few years ago, Vladimir Putin reflected, without smiling, on the consequences of a nuclear war. “We will go to heaven as martyrs,” he said, “and they will just drop dead.”

At the same conference last month, a regime insider, Fyodor Lukyanov, asked him about this remark: “You said that we would all go to heaven, but we’re in no hurry to get there, right?” Putin did not answer. The seconds ticked by. Lukyanov said, “You’ve stopped to think. That’s disconcerting.” Putin responded, “I did it on purpose to make you worry a little.”

I did it on purpose to make you worry a little? Why does he want anyone to worry? Because fear is not just a feeling or an ephemeral emotion; it is a physical sensation. It can grip your stomach, freeze your limbs, make your heart beat faster. Fear can distort the way you think and act. Because it can be so paralyzing, human beings have always tried to make other human beings feel fear. If you can make your enemies afraid, they will not oppose you, because they cannot oppose you. You can then win the argument, the battle, or the war without ever having to fight.

Putin is a KGB officer who knows about the manipulation of emotions, fear most of all. For two decades, he has sought to evoke fear inside Russia. Unlike his Soviet predecessors, he doesn’t shoot or arrest millions of people. Instead, he uses targeted violence, specially designed to create fear. When the investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was gunned downin her Moscow stairwell, and when the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sent to prison for a decade, other journalists and other businessmen got the message. When the opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny were murdered and poisoned, respectively, those incidents sent a message too. This isn’t mass terror, but it is just as effective. Fear keeps Putin in power by rendering people too frightened to report news, protest government actions, or conduct independent business or even independent activity of any kind.

Putin also seeks to create fear in the outside world, especially the democratic world. He does this, above all, by bantering about nuclear weapons, at conferences and everywhere else. Indeed, this has been a central subject of his public commentary, and of Russian propaganda more broadly, for many years. Pictures of mushroom clouds appear regularly on the evening news. Threats of nuclear strikes against Ukraine have been made repeatedly, as far back as 2014. Russia’s armed forces practice nuclear strikes as a routine part of military exercises. Back in 2009, they played out a war game that included dropping a nuclear bomb on Poland. This constant, repetitive nuclear signaling, which long predates the current war, has a purpose: to make NATO countries afraid to defend Poland, afraid to defend Ukraine, and afraid to provoke or anger Russia in any way at all.

In the past few weeks, Putin and those who echo Putin have been seeking to pump up fear once again. Russian television journalists now regularly allude to nuclear war in the same half-serious, half-sinister tone, coolly referring to World War III as “realistic” and saying “It is what it is,” because “we’re all going to die someday.” The Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, has called his American, British, and French counterparts to accuse the Ukrainians of preparing a nuclear attack despite the fact that they don’t have nuclear weapons—immediately triggering the suspicion that he is planning one himself. Russian nuclear threats are now habitually echoed and amplified by proxies as disparate as the British politician Jeremy Corbyn and the tech billionaire Elon Musk, growing louder with each Ukrainian military victory. Unsurprisingly, the anxiety created by these repeated threats has already shaped American and European policy toward Ukraine, exactly as it was supposed to do.

Fear certainly explains why we in the West have given Ukraine some weapons but not others. Why no airplanes?  Why no advanced tanks? Because the White House, the German government, and other governments are afraid that one of these weapons would cross an invisible red line and inspire a nuclear retaliation by Russia. Fear also shapes tactics. Why don’t the Ukrainians more often target the military bases or infrastructure on Russian territory that are being used to attack them? Because Ukraine’s Western partners have asked its leaders not to do so, for fear, again, of escalation.

Fear also causes us to treat nonnuclear acts of mass violence and terror as if they are less important, less frightening, less deserving of a response. Right now, Russia is targeting Ukrainian utilities, openly seeking to deprive millions of Ukrainians of electricity and water. This policy could lead to mass evacuations, even mass death, maybe even on the same scale as a tactical nuclear weapon. The Ukrainians have accused the Russians of preparing to dynamite a dam that, if burst, would flood Kherson and other settlements. If a small terrorist or extremist group were even hinting at a similarly devastating blow, people in the West would already be arguing about how to force them to stop. But because this is Russia, and because these are just conventional weapons, we don’t think in terms of retaliation or response. We feel relieved, somehow, that people will die because they have frozen in unheated apartments or drowned in an artificial flood, and not from nuclear fallout.

Yet even as we feel this fear, even as we act on this fear, even as we let this fear shape our perceptions of the war, we still have no idea whether our anxious responses are effective. We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war. We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.

On the contrary, some of these decisions may have had precisely the opposite impact. Our self-imposed limitations may well have encouraged Putin to believe that American support for Ukraine is limited and will soon end. Our insistence that Ukraine not harm Russia or Russians in its own defense might explain why he keeps fighting. Perhaps our nuclear anxiety actually encourages him to carry out nonnuclear mass atrocities; he does so because he believes he will not face any consequences, because we will not escalate.

Given the growing popularity of the word restraint, we must consider how that concept might not only prolong the war but lead to a nuclear catastrophe. What if calls for peace actually reinforce Putin’s deep belief, one he has expressed many times, that the West is weak and degenerate? Before the war, Western shipments of weapons to Ukraine were limited because of similar fears. No one wanted to provoke Russia by offering the Ukrainians anything too sophisticated. In retrospect, this caution was disastrous. It meant that Putin thought the West would not come to Ukraine’s aid; it left Ukraine less prepared than it could have been. Had we armed Ukraine, we might have prevented the many tragedies that have unfolded on occupied territory. Had we helped make Ukraine into a difficult target, the invasion might never have taken place at all.

I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can. We can’t consult a rule book, published military doctrine, or any other document to explain these issues, because Russia has no institutions governing the use of nuclear weapons, indeed no institutions that can check or balance the president. In a one-man dictatorship, the decision whether to use nuclear weapons lies in that one man’s head. Because no one else lives inside that head, no one else knows what would really provoke him or where his red lines really are.

The only guide we have is the past, and given Putin’s behavior in the past, we should at least consider the possibility that by arming Ukraine, by supporting Ukraine, we will also prevent the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Notwithstanding his bravado about martyrdom, if Putin genuinely believes that a Russian nuclear attack will carry “catastrophic consequences,” to use National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s language, then he is much less likely to carry one out. The less fear we show, the more Putin himself will be afraid.

The Ukrainians are already ahead of us. One Ukrainian friend recently told me that she is having the windows on her house changed to make them more airtight—just in case. But she isn’t moving. She has learned not to let fear deform her decisions, and we should learn the same. Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them.

He has to believe that a nuclear strike would be the beginning of the end of his regime. And we have to believe it too.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer of The Atlantic.

Putin’s Newest Annexation Is Dire for Russia Too - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

 O mais poderoso indiciamento do tirano de Moscou por sua contravenção direta à ordem internacional e pelos crimes de guerra, contra a paz e contra a humanidade perpetrados em sua guerra de agressão contra a Ucrânia.

Putin’s Newest Annexation Is Dire for Russia Too

His baldly illegitimate claim to four Ukrainian provinces shows contempt for the global order—and his own subjects.

By Anne Applebaum

The Atlantic, September 30, 2022

Vladimir Putin today announced his annexation of four provinces of Ukraine—four provinces that he does not fully control, that did not vote to join Russia, that have been the site of mass murder and mass deportation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. With this statement, the Russian president is also declaring war. But this is not merely a war on Ukraine.

Putin’s war—Russia’s war—is also a war on a particular idea of world order and international law, an idea upheld not just by Europeans and North Americans, but by most of the rest of the world, indeed by the United Nations itself. One core principle of this world order is that larger countries should not be able to grab parts of smaller countries, that mass slaughter of whole populations is unacceptable, that borders have international significance and cannot be changed through violence or on one dictator’s whim. Putin already challenged this idea in 2014, when he annexed Crimea. At the time he also held a sham referendum, but he convinced many outsiders that it had some validity. Although some sanctions followed, the world largely gave him a pass. Commerce and diplomacy with Russia continued.

This time, Putin is no longer able even to pretend that the farcical votes he has staged in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson have any validity, and no one, anywhere, believes that they do. The simulation was played out: Armed men went house to housecollecting so-called ballots, and some people, left destitute by the war, were bribed in exchange for showing up to vote. But in regions where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have been evacuated, deported, or murdered, where violent conflict continues and where an active resistance is raging, nothing remotely like an actual vote could ever have taken place. Even as Putin was speaking in Moscow, the Ukrainians announced that they were surrounding and cutting off a large group of Russian soldiers in Lyman, a strategically significant city in Donetsk province.

Russia’s actions under these circumstances show contempt not only for international lawyers in European capitals, but also for Chinese politicians who like to talk about sovereignty and African diplomats who have agreed that borders matter, even when they are arbitrary. In the upside-down reality that Putin has created, he will now claim that Ukrainians, by defending their own land and their own people, are somehow attacking Russia. He will even raise the stakes, will try to frighten Ukraine and the West by calling Ukraine’s self-defense an existential threat to Russia that requires an extraordinary response—perhaps even a nuclear response, echoing a threat he has made repeatedly since he began his invasion.

This annexation is also more specifically a declaration of war against the democratic world, a statement of contempt for democracy itself. Putin has been treating democracy as a tool for decades, using fake parties, creating fake opponents, and rigging elections. For a long time, he and his spin doctors promoted a form of “managed democracy,” a system that allowed some space for public opinion, while at the same time ensuring that he always remained in power. With today’s announcement, he no longer pretends or plays games. This deliberate farce mocks the very idea of referenda, of voting, of popular opinion. Nothing about this act has any legitimacy, and that is also part of the point. In his world, there is no such thing as legitimacy. Only brutality matters.

Finally, this annexation marks the culmination of a two-decade war against any Russians whose vision of their country differs from his. Some of those Russians belong to ethnic minority groups—Dagestanis, Buryat, Tuvans, Crimean Tatars, all of whom have been subject to vigorous mobilization drives, as if Putin wants to use his genocidal war against Ukraine to eliminate them as well. Some simply want to live in a country governed by different rules, a country that does not have murderous designs on its neighbors, a country that is not a menace to the world. Although thousands of such people have fled the country over the past decade, the invasion deliberately sparked a new exodus. Putin’s propagandists have celebrated the departure of anti-war Russians as a form of cleansing; Putin himself has said that the nation should “spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.”

Since the war began, the crackdown at home has also accelerated, because the war provides the context in which dissent can be portrayed as treason, and because any criticism of the war is a crime. Newspapers, websites, social-media channels, and civic groups of all kinds have been shut down. More than 16,400 Russians have been detained in prison for protesting. In the past few days, some protesters have received draft notices after being taken to jail. Others are now the focus of special efforts to undermine and destroy them. Alexei Navalny, the Russian politician who came the closest to creating a grassroots, anti-Putin, prodemocracy movement, received a nine-year jail sentence in May and is now locked in a maximum-security prison. He has spent most of the past several weeks in an isolation cell, as punishment for tiny (or invented) infractions of jailhouse rules. Other inmates are forbidden to speak with him and even to look at him. But his anti-corruption foundation continues to function in exile (I am an unpaid member of its advisory board). And when he was allowed to speak in an internal prison court last week, Navalny responded to Putin’s call for the mobilization of military reservists without mincing words: “It is already clear that the criminal war that is going on is getting worse and deeper, and Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in this. He wants to smear hundreds of thousands of people in this blood.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza, another opposition politician who has played an important role in campaigning for individual sanctions, is also in prison, where he remains equally defiant. “It continues to amaze me,” he told an interviewervia smuggled messages, “how many serious Western analysts buy the Kremlin’s propaganda on the ‘overwhelming popularity’ of Putin and of the war. If this were true, the authorities wouldn’t need to rig elections, muzzle the media, or imprison and murder their opponents. The Kremlin knows the real situation—and the only thing it has left in the toolbox to prevent protests in Russia is fear.”

Today’s annexation, along with the mobilization that has been launched to defend these occupied territories, has also been designed to increase that fear. The battle against independent thinkers is now expanding beyond Putin’s opponents and is reaching even Russians who felt too distant, too apathetic, or too afraid to protest in the past. If, once upon a time, the threat of the gulag was used to keep all Soviet citizens in a state of permanent fear, the threat of the war in Ukraine is now being used in exactly the same way against Putin’s subjects. The regime is now treating ordinary citizens exactly as if they were expendable prisoners, throwing untrained, poorly equipped men into the battlefield, where some are rumored to have already died. New draftees are being driven to empty fields with no shelter and no food, just as new prisoners were once abandoned in the 1930s to build their own labor camps. Putin, like Stalin, believes that his sinister, unbalanced idea of collective glory matters more than the prosperity, well-being, happiness, and even physical existence of ordinary Russians.

But nothing lasts forever: “Your time will pass,” Navalny told his jailers last week. Kara-Murza, in a prison interview published this week, said the same thing: “None of us knows exactly how and when the Putin regime will end—but we know that it will.”

And they are right. We don’t know how and when it will end. Nor do we know what kind of regime will follow. But there is nothing predestined about Putinism or his form of kleptocratic autocracy. There is nothing “forever” about the annexation of territories that aren’t even under full Russian control, and none of the people who were at the annexation ceremony today will live forever either. Russia’s sham annexation of Ukrainian land will end, whatever false words are spoken this week.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

Uma vitória ucraniana significa uma derrota de Putin. Mas é cedo ainda para prever sua queda como tirano  de Moscou, o neoczar russo. Não existem forças ou candidatos a essa sucessão, com exceção do líder de oposição Alexis Navalny, que se encontra em prisão.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory

The liberation of Russian-occupied territory might bring down Vladimir Putin.

By Anne Applebaum

A flag waves after the Ukrainian army liberated the town of Balakliya. (Metin Aktas / Anadolu Agency / Getty)

The Atlantic, September 11, 2022

About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/ukraine-victory-russia-putin/671405/

Over the past six days, Ukraine’s armed forces have broken through the Russian lines in the northeastern corner of the country, swept eastward, and liberated town after town in what had been occupied territory. First Balakliya, then Kupyansk, then Izium, a city that sits on major supply routes. These names won’t mean much to a foreign audience, but they are places that have been beyond reach, impossible for Ukrainians to contact for months. Now they have fallen in hours. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are said to be fighting on the outskirts of Donetsk, a city that Russia has occupied since 2014.

Many things about this advance are unexpected, especially the location: For many weeks, the Ukrainians loudly telegraphed their intention to launch a major offensive farther south. The biggest shock is not Ukraine’s tactics but Russia’s response. “What really surprises us,” Lieutenant General Yevhen Moisiuk, the deputy commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, told me in Kyiv yesterday morning, “is that the Russian troops are not fighting back.”

Russian troops are not fighting back. More than that: Offered the choice of fighting or fleeing, many of them appear to be escaping as fast as they can. For several days, soldiers and others have posted photographs of hastily abandoned military vehicles and equipment, as well as videos showing lines of cars, presumably belonging to collaborators, fleeing the occupied territories. A Ukrainian General Staff report said that Russian soldiers were ditching their uniforms, donning civilian clothes, and trying to slip back into Russian territory. The Ukrainian security service has set up a hotline that Russian soldiers can call if they want to surrender, and it has also posted recordings of some of the calls. The fundamental difference between Ukrainian soldiers, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and Russian soldiers, who are fighting for their salary, has finally begun to matter.

That difference might not suffice, of course. Ukrainian soldiers may be better motivated, but the Russians still have far larger stores of weapons and ammunition. They can still inflict misery on civilians, as they did in today’s apparent attack on the electrical grid in Kharkiv and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. Many other cruel options—horrific options—are still open even to a Russia whose soldiers will not fight. The nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia remains inside the battle zone. Russia’s propagandists have been talking about nuclear weapons since the beginning of the war. Although Russian troops are not fighting in the north, they are still resisting the Ukrainian offensive in the south.

But even though the fighting may still take many turns, the events of the past few days should force Ukraine’s allies to stop and think. A new reality has been created: The Ukrainians could win this war. Are we in the West really prepared for a Ukrainian victory? Do we know what other changes it could bring?

Back in March, I wrote that it was time to imagine the possibility of victory, and I defined victory quite narrowly: “It means that Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy, with the right to choose its own leaders and make its own treaties.” Six months later, some adjustments to that basic definition are required. In Kyiv yesterday, I watched Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tell an audience that victory should now include not only a return to the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991—including Crimea, as well as Donbas in eastern Ukraine—but also reparations to pay for the damage and war-crimes tribunals to give victims some sense of justice.

These demands are not in any sense outrageous or extreme. This was never just a war for territory, after all, but rather a campaign fought with genocidal intent. Russian forces in occupied territories have tortured and murdered civilians, arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed theaters, museums, schools, hospitals. Bombing raids on Ukrainian cities far from the front line have slaughtered civilians and cost Ukraine billions in property damage. Returning the land will not, by itself, compensate Ukrainians for this catastrophic invasion.

But even if it is justified, the Ukrainian definition of victory remains extraordinarily ambitious. To put it bluntly: It is hard to imagine how Russia can meet any of these demands—territorial, financial, legal—so long as its current president remains in power. Remember, Vladimir Putin has put the destruction of Ukraine at the very center of his foreign and domestic policies, and at the heart of what he wants his legacy to be. Two days after the launch of the failed invasion of Kyiv, the Russian state-news agency accidentally published, and then retracted, an article prematurely declaring success. “Russia,” it declared, “is restoring its unity.” The dissolution of the U.S.S.R.—the “tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history”—had been overcome. A “new era” had begun.

That original mission has already failed. There will be no such “new era.” The Soviet Union will not be revived. And when Russian elites finally realize that Putin’s imperial project was not just a failure for Putin personally but also a moral, political, and economic disaster for the entire country, themselves included, then his claim to be the legitimate ruler of Russia melts away. When I write that Americans and Europeans need to prepare for a Ukrainian victory, this is what I mean: We must expect that a Ukrainian victory, and certainly a victory in Ukraine’s understanding of the term, also brings about the end of Putin’s regime.

To be clear: This is not a prediction; it’s a warning. Many things about the current Russian political system are strange, and one of the strangest is the total absence of a mechanism for succession. Not only do we have no idea who would or could replace Putin; we have no idea who would or could choose that person. In the Soviet Union there was a Politburo, a group of people that could theoretically make such a decision, and very occasionally did. By contrast, there is no transition mechanism in Russia. There is no dauphin. Putin has refused even to allow Russians to contemplate an alternative to his seedy and corrupt brand of kleptocratic power. Nevertheless, I repeat: It is inconceivable that he can continue to rule if the centerpiece of his claim to legitimacy—his promise to put the Soviet Union back together again—proves not just impossible but laughable.

o prepare for Putin’s exit does not mean that Americans, Europeans, or any outsiders intervene directly in the politics of Moscow. We have no tools that can affect the course of events in the Kremlin, and any effort to meddle would certainly backfire. But that doesn’t mean we should help him stay in power either. As Western heads of state, foreign ministers, and generals think about how to end this war, they should not try to preserve Putin’s view of himself or of the world, his backward-looking definition of Russian greatness. They should not be planning to negotiate on his terms at all, because they might be dealing with someone else altogether.

Anne Applebaum: ‘Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin’

Even if they prove ephemeral, the events of the past few days do change the nature of this war. From the very beginning, everybody—Europeans, Americans, the global business community in particular—has wanted a return to stability. But the path to stability in Ukraine, long-lasting stability, has been hard to see. After all, any cease-fire imposed too early could be treated, by Moscow, as an opportunity to rearm. Any offer to negotiate could be understood, in Moscow, as a sign of weakness. But now is the time to ask about the stability of Russia itself and to factor that question into our plans. Russian soldiers are running away, ditching their equipment, asking to surrender. How long do we have to wait until the men in Putin’s inner circle do the same?

The possibility of instability in Russia, a nuclear power, terrifies many. But it may now be unavoidable. And if that’s what is coming, we should anticipate it, plan for it, think about the possibilities as well as the dangers. “We have learned not to be scared,” Reznikov told his Kyiv audience on Saturday. “Now we ask the rest of you not to be scared too.”

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Why the West’s Diplomacy With Russia Keeps Failing - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

 Putin trouxe a Europa de volta a 1938-39, como Hitler, pois ele pensa que a OTAN vai fazer como Hitler em junho de 1941, e tudo isso porque ele não é um czar normal, mas um autocrata desvairado, como o próprio Hitler e também Stalin. Infelizmente, o "Ocidente" – um conceito dotado de escasso significado no terreno econômico, mas que ainda tem certo peso no terreno político e dos valores – não vai fazer o que sugere Anne Appebaum em seu artigo: confrontar os autocratas russos e expor sua prepotência, suas mentiras, sua lavagem de dinheiro no Ocidente, suas tentações totalitárias. Nem mesmo Bolsonaro vai fazer qualquer coisa a esse respeito: está muito satisfeito de ter sido recebido pelo autocrata, mesmo confinado em seu hotel até o momento. A Rússia é um Terceiro Reich em projeto, mas não vai conseguir, embora tenha recebido agora o respaldo do grande Império do Meio, que ainda vai colonizar a Rússia economicamente.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Ideas

Why the West’s Diplomacy With Russia Keeps Failing

American and European leaders’ profound lack of imagination has brought the world to the brink of war.

By Anne Applebaum

The Atlantic, February 12, 2022

About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

Oh, how I envy Liz Truss her opportunity! Oh, how I regret her utter failure to make use of it! For those who have never heard of her, Truss is the lightweight British foreign secretary who went to Moscow this week to tell her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that his country should not invade Ukraine. This trip was not a success. At a glacial press conference he likened their conversation to “the mute” speaking with “the deaf”; later, he leaked the fact that she had confused some Russian regions with Ukrainian regions, to add a little insult to the general injury.

Lavrov has done this many times before. He was vile to the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, last year. He has been unpleasant at international conferences and rude to journalists. His behavior is not an accident. Lavrov, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, uses aggression and sarcasm as tools to demonstrate his scorn for his interlocutor, to frame negotiations as useless even before they begin, to create dread and apathy. The point is to put other diplomats on the defensive, or else to cause them to give up in disgust.

But the fact that Lavrov is disrespectful and disagreeable is old news. So is the fact that Putin lectures foreign leaders for hours and hours on his personal and political grievances. He did that the first time he met President Barack Obama, more than a decade ago; he did exactly the same thing last week to French President Emmanuel Macron. Truss should have known all of this. Instead of offering empty language about rules and values, she could have started the press conference like this:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the press. I am delighted to join you after meeting my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. This time, we have not bothered to discuss treaties he won’t respect and promises he won’t keep. We have told him, instead, that an invasion of Ukraine will carry very, very high costs—higher than he has ever imagined. We are now planning to cut off Russian gas exports completely—Europe will find its energy supplies somewhere else. We are now preparing to assist the Ukrainian resistance, for a decade if need be. We are quadrupling our support for the Russian opposition, and for Russian media too. We want to make sure that Russians will start hearing the truth about this invasion, and as loudly as possible. And if you want to do regime change in Ukraine, we’ll get to work on regime change in Russia. 

Truss, or Borrell before her, could have added just a touch of personal insult, in the style of Lavrov himself, and wondered out loud just how it is that Lavrov’s official salary pays for the lavish properties that his family makes use of in London. She could have listed the names of the many other Russian public servants who send their children to schools in Paris or Lugano. She could have announced that these children are now, all of them, on their way home, along with their parents: No more American School in Switzerland! No more pied-à-terres in Knightsbridge! No more Mediterranean yachts!

Of course Truss—like Borrell, like Macron, like the German chancellor who is headed for Moscow this week—would never say anything like this, not even in private. Tragically, the Western leaders and diplomats who are right now trying to stave off a Russian invasion of Ukraine still think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite cares about things like its “reputation.” It does not.

Read: The reason Putin would risk war

In fact, when talking to the new breed of autocrats, whether in Russia, China, Venezuela, or Iran, we are now dealing with something very different: people who aren’t interested in treaties and documents, people who only respect hard power. Russia is in violation of the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994, guaranteeing Ukrainian security. Do you ever hear Putin talk about that? Of course not. He isn’t concerned about his untrustworthy reputation either: Lying keeps opponents on their toes. Nor does Lavrov mind if he is hated, because hatred gives him an aura of power.

Their intentions are different from ours too. Putin’s goal is not a flourishing, peaceful, prosperous Russia, but a Russia where he remains in charge. Lavrov’s goal is to maintain his position in the murky world of the Russian elite and, of course, to keep his money. What we mean by “interests” and what they mean by “interests” are not the same. When they listen to our diplomats, they don’t hear anything that really threatens their position, their power, their personal fortunes.

Despite all of our talk, no one has ever seriously tried to end, rather than simply limit, Russian money laundering in the West, or Russian political or financial influence in the West. No one has taken seriously the idea that Germans should now make themselves independent of Russian gas, or that France should ban political parties that accept Russian money, or that the U.K. and the U.S. should stop Russian oligarchs from buying property in London or Miami. No one has suggested that the proper response to Putin’s information war on our political system would be an information war on his.

Read: The U.S. is naive about Russia. Ukraine can’t afford to be.

Now we are on the brink of what could be a catastrophic conflict. American, British, and European embassies in Ukraine are evacuating; citizens have been warned to leave. But this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy; it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination, a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly. We have refused to see the representatives of this state for what they are. We have refused to speak to them in a way that might have mattered. Now it might be too late.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

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About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

Oh, how I envy Liz Truss her opportunity! Oh, how I regret her utter failure to make use of it! For those who have never heard of her, Truss is the lightweight British foreign secretary who went to Moscow this week to tell her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that his country should not invade Ukraine. This trip was not a success. At a glacial press conference he likened their conversation to “the mute” speaking with “the deaf”; later, he leaked the fact that she had confused some Russian regions with Ukrainian regions, to add a little insult to the general injury.

Lavrov has done this many times before. He was vile to the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, last year. He has been unpleasant at international conferences and rude to journalists. His behavior is not an accident. Lavrov, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, uses aggression and sarcasm as tools to demonstrate his scorn for his interlocutor, to frame negotiations as useless even before they begin, to create dread and apathy. The point is to put other diplomats on the defensive, or else to cause them to give up in disgust.

But the fact that Lavrov is disrespectful and disagreeable is old news. So is the fact that Putin lectures foreign leaders for hours and hours on his personal and political grievances. He did that the first time he met President Barack Obama, more than a decade ago; he did exactly the same thing last week to French President Emmanuel Macron. Truss should have known all of this. Instead of offering empty language about rules and values, she could have started the press conference like this:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the press. I am delighted to join you after meeting my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. This time, we have not bothered to discuss treaties he won’t respect and promises he won’t keep. We have told him, instead, that an invasion of Ukraine will carry very, very high costs—higher than he has ever imagined. We are now planning to cut off Russian gas exports completely—Europe will find its energy supplies somewhere else. We are now preparing to assist the Ukrainian resistance, for a decade if need be. We are quadrupling our support for the Russian opposition, and for Russian media too. We want to make sure that Russians will start hearing the truth about this invasion, and as loudly as possible. And if you want to do regime change in Ukraine, we’ll get to work on regime change in Russia. 

Truss, or Borrell before her, could have added just a touch of personal insult, in the style of Lavrov himself, and wondered out loud just how it is that Lavrov’s official salary pays for the lavish properties that his family makes use of in London. She could have listed the names of the many other Russian public servants who send their children to schools in Paris or Lugano. She could have announced that these children are now, all of them, on their way home, along with their parents: No more American School in Switzerland! No more pied-à-terres in Knightsbridge! No more Mediterranean yachts!

Of course Truss—like Borrell, like Macron, like the German chancellor who is headed for Moscow this week—would never say anything like this, not even in private. Tragically, the Western leaders and diplomats who are right now trying to stave off a Russian invasion of Ukraine still think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite cares about things like its “reputation.” It does not.

Read: The reason Putin would risk war

In fact, when talking to the new breed of autocrats, whether in Russia, China, Venezuela, or Iran, we are now dealing with something very different: people who aren’t interested in treaties and documents, people who only respect hard power. Russia is in violation of the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994, guaranteeing Ukrainian security. Do you ever hear Putin talk about that? Of course not. He isn’t concerned about his untrustworthy reputation either: Lying keeps opponents on their toes. Nor does Lavrov mind if he is hated, because hatred gives him an aura of power.

Their intentions are different from ours too. Putin’s goal is not a flourishing, peaceful, prosperous Russia, but a Russia where he remains in charge. Lavrov’s goal is to maintain his position in the murky world of the Russian elite and, of course, to keep his money. What we mean by “interests” and what they mean by “interests” are not the same. When they listen to our diplomats, they don’t hear anything that really threatens their position, their power, their personal fortunes.

Despite all of our talk, no one has ever seriously tried to end, rather than simply limit, Russian money laundering in the West, or Russian political or financial influence in the West. No one has taken seriously the idea that Germans should now make themselves independent of Russian gas, or that France should ban political parties that accept Russian money, or that the U.K. and the U.S. should stop Russian oligarchs from buying property in London or Miami. No one has suggested that the proper response to Putin’s information war on our political system would be an information war on his.

Read: The U.S. is naive about Russia. Ukraine can’t afford to be.

Now we are on the brink of what could be a catastrophic conflict. American, British, and European embassies in Ukraine are evacuating; citizens have been warned to leave. But this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy; it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination, a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly. We have refused to see the representatives of this state for what they are. We have refused to speak to them in a way that might have mattered. Now it might be too late.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.