Os americanos estão sendo humilhados por Putin e arrastando os ucranianos na ilusão: Putin recusará o plano de trégua

 Putin vai humilhar Marco Rubio (que faria melhor renunciando como Secretário de Estado de Trump, cargo no qual é também humilhado), ao recusar terminanente a trégua proposta pelos americanos ingênuos e aceita pelos ucranianos sem esperança de coisa melhor.

PUTIN VAI RECUSAR O PLANO DE TRUMP!
E o que este vai fazer? Ameaçar com "sanções"...
A guerra va continuar...

Do Washington Post (March 12, 2025)
"EXCLUSIVE
Document prepared for Kremlin outlines hard-line negotiating stance
The document, written in February by a Moscow-based think tank close to Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB, lays out Russia’s maximalist demands
WP, March 12, 2025 at 3:02 p.m. EDTYesterday at 3:02 p.m. EDT
By Catherine Belton and Robyn Dixon

Russia should work to weaken the U.S. negotiating position on Ukraine by stoking tensions between the Trump administration and other countries while pushing ahead with Moscow’s efforts to dismantle the Ukrainian state, according to a document prepared for the Kremlin.
The document, written in February by an influential Moscow-based think tank close to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), lays out Russia’s maximalist demands for any end to the conflict in Ukraine. It dismisses President Donald Trump’s preliminary plans for a peace deal within 100 days as “impossible to realize” and says that “a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis cannot happen before 2026.”

Uma coisa incrível: o jornal mais governista dos EUA (WP) só tem matérias CONTRA o governo Trump

Todos os dias recebo os boletins de chamada dos principais jornais do mundo, com uma ampla variedade de matérias, nacionais e internacionais, para todos os gostos. Pois o que me surpreendeu, no boletim do WP, foi a convergência de TODAS as matérias, todas elas refletindo a confusão criada, do nada, pelo governo Trump.

Em apenas uma edição do Washington Post, que se tornou um dos jornais mais governistas dos EUA, depois da rendição de Jeff Bezos a Trump, constatei que TODOS os headlines de matérias indicavam que, acima e à margem das instituições, as políticas setoriais que afetam toda a economia e toda a sociedade americana podem ser afetadas por medidas arbitrárias adotadas por um governo destrambelhado e totalmente submetido à vontade exclusiva de um chefe desequilibrado, ignorante e sobretudo arrogante e sua prepotência mal informada:

1) Trump agrees to one-month tariff reprieve aimed at helping U.S. automakers (depois que ele impôs tarifaço irracional e contrário ao acordo de livre comércio bilateral)
2) Supreme Court says judge can force administration to resume payments of frozen foreign aid
3) NIH reels with fear, uncertainty about future of scientific research
4) Trump administration moves to let Idaho enforce strict abortion ban
5) You’ve never heard that in a presidential address to Congress before
6) U.S. pauses intelligence sharing with Ukraine, squeezing information used to strike inside Russia
7) Trump administration plans 15 prcent cut to VA workforce
8) Small federal agency blocks DOGE employees from entering its building
9) How pausing USS intelligence impacts Ukraine's military operation
10) Draft executive order calls for closing Education Department.

E um único artigo de Opinião:
In just five days, Trump has set the country back nearly 100 years. (Dana Milbank)

Duas insurreições, dois processos bem diferentes, nos EUA e no Brasil - Ishaan Tharoor, Benjamin Soloway (WP)

 Duas insurreições, dois processos bem diferentes, nos EUA e no Brasil

By Ishaan Tharoor with Benjamin Soloway The Washington Post, Jan 7. 2025

After insurrections, the U.S. and Brazil went down different paths Rioters loyal to then-president Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Jose Luis Magana/AP) In one country, a return to power and the promise of pardons. In the other, political marginalization and mounting criminal investigations. Four years after supporters of President-elect Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an insurrection that shocked the world, he is about to start a second term. He was impeached by the House for his alleged role in inciting the riot and to this day remains the only U.S. president not to accept an electoral defeat. But the U.S. system allowed him to run for election again. TheSupreme Court, stacked with a right-wing majority, issued a landmark ruling last year arguing he was immune from prosecution for “official acts” while in office. A string of legal investigations into Trump and his attempts to subvert the 2020 election are petering out. Emboldened, Trump has vowed to issue pardons after he takes office for dozens of Jan. 6 rioters who rampaged through the U.S. Capitol — much to the indignation of his political opponents, constitutional rights groups and the security personnel injured by those who acted in Trump’s name. “We’ve been seeking accountability for years,” a former Capitol Police officer told my colleagues. “It doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.” Demonstrators protest amnesty for Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in São Paulo, Brazil, on Dec. 10. (Felipe Iruata/Reuters) The picture in Brazil is rather different. On Jan. 8, 2023, supporters of defeated right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro stormed through the heart of the federal capital in Brasília in a spasm of rage marked by their refusal to accept his narrow loss to leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, damaging government buildings. Some rioters called for a military coup to keep Bolsonaro in power — a demand he did little to discourage, declining to concede, departing for a strange sojourn in Orlando and skipping his successor’s inauguration. The Brazilian insurrection — a remarkable echo of what happened in the United States two years prior — elicited a more decisive reaction: Authorities swiftly rounded up pro-Bolsonaro rioters and opened legal proceedings that implicated a host of senior politicians and officials in plotting a coup and fomenting violence. ADVERTISEMENT   Six months later, Bolsonaro was barred from seeking public office until 2030 by the country’s top electoral court, even as separate police investigations continued. In November, Brazil’s federal police recommended charges against Bolsonaro, as well as dozens of his associates, for allegedly leading a plot to subvert the will of voters, assassinate political rivals and stay in power by military edict following his 2022 electoral defeat. The police report was submitted to Brazil’s Supreme Court, and the country’s top prosecutorial authorities are weighing what to do next. Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing in this case and numerous others rumbling through Brazil’s legal system, casting himself as a victim of a witch hunt by political opponents and an overzealous Supreme Court. But his political star has fallen, and the hard-right firebrand may sooner find a home in a jail cell than the presidential office. Brazil is arguably as politically polarized as the United States, but both its experience of military dictatorships and its modern constitutional protections against a possible return to authoritarianism gave it “antidotes” — as a senior Brazilian official told me — to overcome a glaring challenge to its democracy. “History explains the difference between the two countries,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter. “Military interventions and political authoritarianism have haunted us throughout the 20th century.” President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the White House on Feb. 10. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) While many Republican politicians backed Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and later offered support for the Jan. 6 participants facing prosecution and sentencing, there was less sympathy in Brazil’s more fragmented multiparty political landscape for the Jan. 8 offenders. “There is a consensus in our country, among the political class, to condemn these acts,” Ciro Nogueira, a prominent lawmaker who served for a stint as Bolsonaro’s chief of staff when he was president, told the New York Times last year. “I think it’s really unfortunate that a portion of American politicians applaud this type of protest.” ADVERTISEMENT   As the Harvard political scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt observed last year, Brazilian civil society, big business groups and even the Catholic Church came out strongly against the possibility of a subversion of the country’s democratic order. New investigations have revealed that top Brazilian military officials balked at Bolsonaro’s alleged coup plot, much to the former president’s chagrin. Andre Pagliarini, a professor of Brazilian history at Louisiana State University, pointed to virtues of Brazil’s “postdictatorial institutional design.” The country’s 1988 constitution empowered the judiciary to take a strong line in defending civic and democratic institutions, especially the integrity of elections. Alexandre de Moraes, a top justice appointed by a right-leaning president in 2017, has been “focused on the Jan. 8 insurrection in Brasília in a way that no single legal actor in the U.S. — [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, lower courts, or the Supreme Court — has been,” Pagliarini told me. For his efforts, Moraes has engendered the fury of Bolsonaro and his allies, and locked horns with tech titan Elon Musk over Brazil’s moves to curb online disinformation on social media criticized as harmful to the country’s democracy. In 2022, with polls pointing to a looming defeat, Bolsonaro spent weeks spreading conspiracy theories about Brazil’s electronic voting machines and warning without meaningful evidence over possible fraud should he lose. Those efforts contributed to the June 2023 decision of Brazil’s top electoral court — another institution that has no parallel in the United States — to bar Bolsonaro from seeking office for the rest of the decade. Bolsonaro and his allies used “freedom of speech” as a “shield for crimes against democracy and a military conspiracy to overthrow it,” the senior Brazilian official told me. “The Supreme Court was empowered and ready to avert it.” The effect of that ruling barring Bolsonaro was “to scramble the Brazilian far right rather than allowing it to regain organizational cohesion as it did in the U.S. in the years after January 6,” Pagliarini said. “With Bolsonaro legally out of the running, the right is in disarray over who to back against Lula in 2026.” To be sure, Lula’s supporters have had their own doubts and fears about Brazil’s judicial system: Lula, who has been president twice, only returned to power in a grand comeback after serving part of a prison sentence for corruption — a ruling that made space for Bolsonaro’s rise, handed down by a judge who would go on to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister, and who an investigation by the Intercept later revealed had colluded with prosecutors to target Lula. With Trump returning, Bolsonaro and his allies could have a path forward. Trump and Bolsonaro sympathizers in his orbit may see in the former Brazilian president’s situation a reflection of their own battles. “We will see public pressure from Trump on Brazil’s Supreme Court, via the threat of sanctions against specific judges, to allow Bolsonaro to run in 2026,” Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, suggested to me. “It will get loud and contentious, and it may backfire against Bolsonaro because I don’t think Brazil will react well to this kind of pressure.” Nevertheless, “Bolsonaro’s supporters remain, and they now have even less faith in the system than before, possibly radicalizing some of them even more,” Winter said. “We’ve seen this in Latin American history before — the most famous case possibly being when Juan Perón and his supporters were banned from politics in Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s, and he took on almost a mystical importance, the popular clamor growing until he was finally allowed to return in 1973. It’s an open question whether these bans backfire or not over time.”

Estamos chegando perto do fim da era nuclear? E do próprio planeta, com uma guerra nuclear? Winslow Myers (WP)

 A hipótese é aterradora, mas plausível, dada a proliferação nos últimos anos e a existência de ditadores malucos. O autor convida os EUA a se desnuclearizarem unilateralmente, com precauções. Não sei se funcionaria, com os generais paranoicos do Pentágono. PRA

The Nuclear Age Is Already Over

BY WINSLOW MYERS

The Washington Post, May 9, 2024

 

Either nuclear weapons kill us or we move beyond them, soon. Via mass death or the building a new security system, the nuclear age is finished. The nuclear deterrence system that the world presently relies upon for its security is rotten, evil, completely unworkable, and obsolete. It is nuclear war waiting to happen, a war no one can or would win. But we remain ostriches with heads deep in sand, waiting passively for an inevitable holocaust apparently too big to prevent.

Somebody somewhere on this small planet has got to begin the process of leading the way out of this morass

• of paradox: the assumption that mutual assured destruction can preserve life forever.

• of hypocrisy: our nuclear weapons are good and necessary but yours are bad and we will not allow you to possess them.

• of illusion: the experts will somehow prevent nuclear war from ever happening.

• of collective insanity: our launch-on-warning policy allows our leaders only minutes to decide our collective fate. And to retaliate against a bolt-from-the-blue attack by North Korea, for example, the U.S. would have to fly its ICBMs over the land mass of Russia, presently our mortal adversary. But even without nuclear weapons, the armed forces of the United States could utterly obliterate North Korea, and Kim Jong Un knows it.

The United States, based in core principles like the value of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, should make a precious gift to the world and sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It would be the first of the nine nuclear powers to sign and the initiative would be welcomed with relief and jubilation by the vast majority of the world’s citizens.

Then what? Rapid and destabilizing American unilateral disarmament? No. Begin instead with well-advertised gestures over time. Have the generals and political leaders admit freely in an international forum like the United Nations that military advantage via nuclear war is impossible, that the nuclear arms race toward ever faster delivery vehicles leads nowhere good, and that resources presently expended on nuclear weapons programs are desperately needed for meeting the global climate emergency.

Pledge no-first-use, and no nuclear retaliation against aggression, on the basis of the potential of nuclear winter as planetary suicide. Bring home five nuclear-armed submarines. Shut down one of our programs of nuclear weapons modernization. Aggressively initiate arms control proposals, which, combined with an ongoing series of gestures, would add credibility to our overall stance.

Then watch for mutual responses from the other nuclear powers. Worst case scenario, there would be none, in which case we can always reverse course, either gradually or rapidly as the situation may demand. What are we so afraid of?

It is an important fact that Putin, a leader as ruthless in his own way as Hitler, has more nuclear weapons at his disposal than any other nation, but so far, and may it continue, he has not used them. Why? Is it because he fears our nuclear weapons? Or is it because in spite of his gross deficit of compassion for Ukraine, he knows that turning swaths of that nation into radioactive desert does not fit any sane conception of military conquest?

Of course “conventional” war itself is equally insane. The October 7^th Hamas attack and what has followed is a tragic case in point. The immense loss of life in the Israeli military’s “conventional” response can only concentrate our minds upon what the massive loss of life in a nuclear war would look like. But if we must carry on with deterrence, think of it as a stage in moving beyond war altogether, and base it instead upon our conventional weapons, which are more than adequate for the job. Especially emphasize defensive weapons like those which protected Israel from Iran’s recent missile and drone attack, making possible the de-escalation which followed.

A world beyond war itself is possible. Viable alternative security systems have been elaborated in great detail. But we can take a sensible step in that ultimate direction quite safely, which is to unilaterally start backing off the nutty, silly, irrational hair-trigger nuclear system presently holding the whole world hostage.

 

Winslow Myers is author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.” He serves on the Advisory Board of the Washington Post.

A destruição da aliança atlântica por Trump - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 

Today's WorldView

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, Feb 13, 2024 The    As Trump spooks Europe, Biden stirs global anger over Gaza war Then-President Donald Trump with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, on July 7, 2017. (Evan Vucci/AP) Former president Donald Trump’s latest rhetorical grenade shook the West’s preeminent military alliance. Over the weekend, he said he would encourage Russia to attack U.S. allies in NATO if they failed to invest enough on their national defense. The remarks, as well as separate comments about ending U.S. aid to foreign countries, “set off fresh tremors across Washington and in European countries already worried about America’s reliability as an ally in a potential second Trump administration,” my colleagues reported. Trump has long grumbled about the United States' outsize role in NATO and casts President Biden’s support for Ukraine’s struggle to resist Russian invasion as a costly drag on the U.S. taxpayer. The sentiment has captured a segment of the Republican Party, which has blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to earmark some $61 billion in fresh funding for Ukraine. To European onlookers, Trump’s stated hostility is a line in the sand. “Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior German lawmaker and former chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the German parliament, wrote on his Facebook page. “We have to manage this because anything else would be surrender and self-abandonment!” Trump, in the eyes of some European critics, is an existential threat to the Western alliance and its political ethos. “The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude towards allies,” Marko Mihkelson, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian Parliament, told my colleagues. “Unfortunately, he is therefore a very convenient tool for Putin’s Russia, which is waging war against the West.” “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. During his term, Biden reinvigorated the transatlantic alliance, assuring European counterparts about U.S. commitments to their security while coordinating a robust, collective effort to support Kyiv. European diplomats in Washington barely disguise their confidence and trust in the Biden administration, and their apprehensions of what may come should Trump defeat him in November. But on the other key battlefront in the global conversation, Biden has unsettled myriad political elites with his perceived complicity in Israel’s relentless war against Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli campaign, which has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians, many of whom were children, took another deadly turn Monday with the expansion of operations in Rafah, a southern city along the territory’s border with Egypt that’s now hosting more than a million cornered Gazan refugees.

O impasse na Ucrânia: poucas armas, poucos avanços nas frentes de batalha: O Ocidente perdeu a vontade? - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, Jan 31, 2024 Email

Ukraine’s hopes for victory over Russia are slipping away A member of a Ukrainian air defense unit in the woods north of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post/FTWP) It’s hard to ignore the sense of desperation in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Nearing two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, authorities in Kyiv maintain their long-standing entreaty to partners in the West: Deliver us more arms, more aid, more political commitments. President Volodymyr Zelensky toured Western capitals at the end of last year, pleading for support amid growing international fatigue with the conflict and paralysis in U.S. Congress over new supplemental funding for Kyiv. Around the same time, his top general, Valery Zaluzhny, bemoaned the “stalemate” that had set into place after the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 failed to make strategic headway against Russia’s deep defensive lines. U.S. officials and their Western counterparts, as my colleagues reported over the weekend, anticipate a lean year ahead, where Ukraine’s increasingly exhausted forces focus more on consolidating their defense than chipping away at Russia’s land-grabs. The Kremlin controls roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s internationally-recognized territory — including Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014, and a broad sweep of Ukraine’s southeast. The U.S. view of the course of the conflict undercuts Zelensky’s stated ambition of driving Russia out by this October. Last week, Pentagon officials came empty-handed to a monthly 50-nation coordinating meeting for Ukraine, with future U.S. money for arms and aid snared by domestic politics. On the front lines, reports indicate stocks of ammunition and artillery shells are running low for many Ukrainian units. “We get asked what’s our plan, but we need to understand what resources we’re going to have,” Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko told my colleagues. “Right now, everything points to the possibility that we will have less than last year, when we tried to do a counteroffensive and it didn’t work out. … If we will have even less, then it’s clear what the plan will be. It will be defense.” Looming far away from the battlefield is the political drama in Washington. House Republicans have already stymied the latest tranche of funding that President Biden is trying to allocate for Kyiv. Analysts believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding out for a potential return to power of former president Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential candidate for the November election. Trump may scale back support for Ukraine and take a friendlier view of the Kremlin’s security concerns in Eastern Europe. As my colleagues reported, the Biden administration and European allies are working on a longer-term, multilateral plan aimed at warding against this scenario and future-proofing support for Ukraine. That includes pledges of economic and security assistance that stretch into the next decade, and may pave the way for Ukraine to get integrated into Western blocs like the European Union and NATO. Biden is set to unveil the U.S. plank of this strategy in the spring. “The policy holds risks, including political ones, if Ukrainians begin to blame their government for stagnant front lines,” my colleagues wrote. “Likewise, in Western capitals, officials are keenly aware that their citizens’ patience with funding Ukraine’s war is not infinite. Amid the planning, Washington also seems to be readying the argument that, even if Ukraine is not going to regain all of its territory in the near term, it needs significant ongoing assistance to be able to defend itself and become an integral part of the West.” But, in the near term, both the shortfalls on Ukraine’s front lines and divisions in Washington may cement the fate of the war. “While the first half of 2024 may bring few changes in control of Ukrainian territory, the materiel, personnel training, and casualties that each side accrues in the next few months will determine the long-term trajectory of the conflict,” wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. “The West in fact faces a crucial choice right now: support Ukraine so that its leaders can defend their territory and prepare for a 2025 offensive or cede an irrecoverable advantage to Russia.” The West may have already squandered its best chance to enable Ukraine to fully liberate its territory. In his new book, “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence,” Wall Street Journal international correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov outlines how Western governments slow-rolled military support to Ukraine out of fear of triggering a possible nuclear-armed escalation with Russia. The United States and its allies have sent Ukraine an unprecedented flow of aid, but critics say the overly careful calibration of that support undermined the Ukrainian war effort. “The United States and its partners held back from supplying Ukraine with Western-made capabilities at a time when they would have had the biggest effect, and prohibited Kyiv from using Western weapons to strike military targets on Russian soil,” Trofimov wrote, in an adapted excerpt from his book published in The Washington Post. “By the time many of these Western systems did arrive, in the second year of the war, Russia had built up defenses, mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and switched its industries to wartime footing. The best window of opportunity for a clear and quick Ukrainian victory had disappeared.” Other experts aren’t so sure, and contend that the Biden administration had a responsibility to avoid a spiraling confrontation with Russia. “More aid, sooner, would have been better — but there’s no guarantee it would have brought a decisive Ukrainian victory,” wrote Bloomberg Opinion columnist Hal Brands. “The best guarantee of that outcome would have been threatening direct military intervention, a strategy that virtually no one wanted to pursue because the risks were so obvious and, potentially, so severe. Indeed, it would have required Biden to more aggressively cross Russia’s red lines at the very moment when uncertainty about Putin’s response was at its peak.” Instead, Ukrainians and their boosters lament what could have been after Ukrainian forces surprised virtually everyone in repulsing Russia’s initial offensive on Kyiv and defiantly standing their ground in the early months of the war. “He opened his mouth like a python and thought that we’re just another bunny,” Zelensky told Trofimov in a 2022 interview, referring to Putin. “But we’re not a bunny and it turned out that he can’t swallow us — and is actually at risk of getting torn apart himself.” Russia, though, has also stood its ground, withstood international sanctions and is preparing for fresh offensives in Ukraine, on top of its incessant, indiscriminate missile barrages into Ukrainian cities. Kyiv knows its ability to resist hinges on foreign backing. “We wouldn’t survive without U.S. support, it’s a real fact,” Zelensky said in a television interview this month.

O exodo armênio, milhares de anos depois do primeiro - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 Ishaan Tharoor (WP), September 26, 2023

An Armenian exodus raises the specter of ‘ethnic cleansing’ Ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh wait to drive to Kornidzor, the town in Syunik region, Armenia, on Monday. (Vasily Krestyaninov/AP) An entire community may be on the verge of abandoning its ancestral homeland. After months of blockade by Azerbaijan, thousands of ethnic Armenians motored out of their highland enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh toward sanctuary in Armenia. They were leaving behind towns and villages that have sat for years within Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory, but which had maintained de facto autonomy in the form of the unrecognized republic of Artsakh, a medieval Armenian name for the contested region. But what existed for centuries may be about to vanish in days. Last week, a lightning-fast Azerbaijani campaignoverwhelmed armed separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh and compelled Artsakh’s authorities to agree to disband their territorial defense forces and enter into negotiations about terms of a de facto surrender. The advances marked the biggest escalation in the conflict since a brief war in 2020 saw the superior Azerbaijani military take back major swaths of land, which had been seized by Armenian forces in earlier rounds of fighting in the 1990s. Now, the autocratic government in Baku may for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union be able to extend full control over the majority-Armenian enclave. That shifting reality sparked an exodus. The victorious Azerbaijanis agreed to open up the lone corridor connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, precipitating a huge flow of refugees fleeing the enclave and a potential future of Azerbaijani rule. Baku insists the region’s some 120,000 ethnic Armenians are welcome to remain as citizens of a reintegrated, pluralist Azerbaijani state. But Karabakh’s residents had endured nine months of blockade that saw grocery stores emptied of food and hospitals bereft of vital medical supplies. This immediate experience of enforced deprivation simply added to the depth of enmities between both sides and a long history of atrocities and violence. “Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan. Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, the president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters. “The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilized world.” No Azerbaijani official has given an order of expulsion. But many residents of the region feel they have little choice. “People right now say everyone is leaving,” Marut Vanyan, a local blogger, told Politico. “In Stepanakert [the region’s capital], there is no second opinion, everyone is trying to find a few liters of petrol and be ready any time, any second, for when we are going.” In neighboring Armenia, the embattled government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan looked on helplessly, offering safe haven for thousands of ethnic Armenians and urging Azerbaijan to guarantee the safety of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population. “If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity,” Pashinyan said Sunday. U.S. and European officials have pressed Baku to assuage growing fears over such “ethnic cleansing.” Samantha Power, chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development, arrived Monday in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, at the head of a U.S. delegation. A letter from President Bidento Pashinyan conveyed support for ongoing efforts to forge regional peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and decried the recent violence, but said little explicitly condemning Azerbaijan’s actions. David McAllister, chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Guardian on Monday that the European Union “should make it clear that any attempt to remove or coerce the Armenian population from the Nagorno-Karabakh region will have serious consequences for our relations with Azerbaijan.” For years, Armenia counted on its close ties with Russia to act as a buffer against Azerbaijan and a safeguard of de facto independence of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. But Russian peacekeepers stood aside earlier this year as Azerbaijan choked off the key highway into Nagorno-Karabakh and did little to thwart last week’s crushing military operation. The Kremlin explicitly dislikes Pashinyan and appears to be stoking anti-government unrest against his rule. “Since Pashinyan’s rise to power in a popular revolution in 2018 against successive authoritarian and massively corrupt regimes, Armenia has moved closer to Washington and refuses to endorse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Al-Monitor explained. “At the same time, Pashinyan is seeking normalization with Turkey in the hopes this would fend off further Azerbaijani aggression, but so far to little effect.”