Venezuela: denunciada pela esquerda e pela direita (WP)

Left and right have denounced Venezuela’s Maduro. Not the authoritarians

After the strongman claimed reelection Sunday, even leftist allies distanced themselves. Russia, China, Iran and Cuba continue to stand by their man.

By Terrence McCoy

WP, August 3, 2024

In Nicolás Maduro, the United States and its allies see a tyrant: an authoritarian socialist who has brought economic ruin to oil-rich Venezuela, persecuted and imprisoned political opponents, grown rich on narcoterrorism, and repeatedly and brazenly stolen elections.

Russia, China, Iran and Cuba see their type of guy.

In return for a strategic foothold in the Western Hemisphere, Maduro’s closest allies have sent him weapons and oil-refining technology, provided his government with billions of dollars in loans and backed him in each of his confrontations with the West — including now.

Washington and its European partners are questioning the strongman’s claim that he won reelection Sunday. Exit polling and, according to the opposition, the government’s records indicate challenger Edmundo González trounced him. Even his leftist allies in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are reserving judgment.

But Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Havana were all quick to congratulate Maduro.

The divided response to Maduro’s election claim has made Venezuela the latest battlefield in an emerging global ideological conflict that’s not between left and right so much as authoritarianism and democracy.

From Ukraine to Taiwan, Yemen to Syria, the authoritarian bloc is upending global norms, working to hinder the advance of democracy and transforming what in other times might have been isolated regional disputes into protracted proxy struggles between the liberal and illiberal worlds.

“It used to be that you could get together a few interested parties and manage a crisis,” said Eric Farnsworth, a senior analyst at the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society. “But Russia, Iran and Cuba complicate everything. Their interests are not to manage the crisis, but disrupt the system, to make the management more difficult.”

Their support of Maduro has undermined the international community’s efforts to force Maduro’s exit through diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions. The strongman, the handpicked successor of Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s socialist state, has ruled Venezuela for more than a decade, despite widespread belief that he stole the 2018 election.

“Maduro is largely immune from Western pressure,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a political analyst at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Brazil. “He doesn’t depend much on friendly relations with them.”

Some of the support is rhetorical. Iran, North Korea and Nicaragua have offered solidarity, forming a de facto support circle among what might otherwise be isolated pariah states. Venezuela and North Korea, Maduro’s Foreign Ministry says, will forge a “new world order.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, hosting Maduro in Tehran in 2022, said the countries were “friends in difficult times” who were “resisting cruel imperialism.” (Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in May.)

Others have offered more than words. Russia, for instance, pledged $5 billion to improveVenezuela’s oil refineries, $1 billion for its gold mining industry — and firepower. Moscow — long one of Venezuela’s biggest arms suppliers — has sold it armored vehicles, tanks, air-defense systems and helicopters, a group of Colombian researchers reported last year in the International Social Science Journal.

At Maduro’s most critical moments, when his grip on power appeared most at risk, Moscow has sent additional military aid. In 2019, when the Trump administration declared him a usurper and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader, the Kremlin dispatched military planescarrying military equipment and roughly 100 “military technicians.” In the lead-up to the presidential election Sunday, Russia twice sent warships into Caribbean waters — once to dock at a Venezuelan port.

Other support has been less public. In 2019, the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary firm then closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, sent hundreds of contractorsinto Venezuela to beef up Maduro’s security forces, Reuters reported at the time.

This week, video spread on social mediasuggesting the group’s return to Venezuela. A man wearing what appears to be a Wagner arm patch is shown among Maduro’s security forces.

“One of the reasons Maduro is surviving is because of Russian support,” said Vladimir Rouvinski, a Russian political scientist at Colombia’s Icesi University. “Russia sees itself as a great constructor of a new world order, and they need Maduro.”

Cuba is also believed to have providedsignificant military support. Chávez, who brought socialism to Venezuela in 1999, enjoyed closed ties with Fidel and Raúl Castro; the communist island remains Venezuela’s closest ideological ally.

In 2019, exiled former Venezuelan general Antonio Rivero told Diálogo Américas, a publication of U.S. Southern Command, that the countries had signed several agreements to promote the “Cubanization” of Venezuela’s armed forces. Maduro’s personal security force is reportedly staffed largely by Cubans. In 2019, when Guaidó led an attempted uprising against Maduro, then-White House national security adviser John Bolton accused Cuba of having dispatched more than 20,000 security agents to Venezuela.

But most crucial to Maduro’s survival has been Chinese patronage.

Beijing has long been Venezuela’s economic benefactor, its principal creditor and largest oil purchaser. Venezuela has been the largest recipient in Latin America of Chinese loans — an estimated $60 billion, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

When U.S.-led sanctions threatened to maim Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy, China evaded the restrictions by trading through third parties.

It’s difficult to know China’s ambitions in Venezuela. It could be that they want to cultivate and bolster a friend who can help undermine Western interests in South America, a continent rich in natural resources sought by both China and the United States. Or they might just want to make sure they can collect on their loans.

“ It’s very difficult to disentangle how much of this is a financial strategy versus geopolitical in nature,” said Stephen Kaplan, a political economist at George Washington University.

Other analysts see clear political motives. Several say Russia, China and others are pursuing a campaign of political reciprocity in Venezuela to retaliate against the United States for its support of their adversaries inUkraine, Taiwan and other countries.

“This needs to be seen through the prism of a superpower conflict between the U.S., Russia and China, and a complete eroding of the world order,” said Ulf Thoene, a political scientist at La Sabana University in Colombia. “What’s happening in Venezuela is a fight between a candidate clearly backed by Russia, China and Iran — and an opposition that is obviously supported by the United States and Europe.”

That dynamic, he said, has fueled violent quagmires around the world, complicating efforts to usher authoritarian leaders to the exits.

Syrian President “Bashar al-Assad is still in power,” he said. “We were promised he would be gone in weeks, but he’s actually stronger now than he was years ago.”

The same, Thoene fears, could happen in Venezuela.

“With every passing day,” he said, “the likelihood grows that Maduro will remain in power.”

By Terrence McCoy

Terrence McCoy is The Washington Post's Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief. He has twice won the George Polk Award and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2023.

I traveled across Ukraine with a U.N. refugee agency - Max Boot (Washington Post)

Opinion 

 

I traveled across Ukraine with a U.N. refugee agency. Here’s what I saw.

By Max Boot

Columnist|

The Washington Post, February 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/27/united-nations-ukraine-refugees/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_popns&utm_campaign=wp_opinions_pm

Public opinion surveys suggest that, while nearly 60 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the United Nations, they are less supportive than the citizens of many other countries. Forty percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the global body compared with 25 percent of Britons and Germans.

Some criticism is definitely warranted. For example, the Biden administration has suspended funding for the United Nations’ Palestinian-aid group, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), after some of its employees were alleged to have participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Council is a sick joke: Its members include notorious human-rights abusers such as Russia, Venezuela and China. And U.N. peacekeeping troops have become notorious for abusing the very people they were supposed to protect.

But the United Nations also does a lot of important work for which it receives scant credit in the United States. I recently spent a week traveling across Moldova and Ukraine with a delegation of American experts assembled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as the U.N. refugee agency is known, and I came away greatly impressed by UNHCR’s efforts to alleviate the refugee crisis created by the Russian invasion. Its work — which is helping Ukraine and its neighbors to weather the onslaught — deserves continuing U.S. support.

The scale of the refugee crisis is mind-boggling: Two years after the Russian invasion, nearly 6.5 million people have fled Ukraine and another 3.7 million are internally displaced. That’s roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population. And, in front-line communities, even many of those who remain in their homes are struggling to survive. In all, some 14.6 million Ukrainians require humanitarian assistance. Those needs are far beyond the capabilities of the Ukrainian government or those of its neighbors to cope with on their own; Kyiv can only fund half its own state budget and requires foreign aid for the rest.

Filling the vacuum have been myriad governmental and private relief agencies, including organizations funded by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. The United Nations is often in the lead. In 2023, UNHCR provided 2.63 million people in Ukraine with assistance of various kinds. That includes repairing damaged houses, sending winter blankets and generators to front-line communities, helping displaced Ukrainians restore legal documents lost in the war, and offering psychological and social services to people traumatized by Vladimir Putin’s incessant bombing.

UNHCR sometimes delivers relief supplies; we saw a warehouse full of food, winter clothes, hygiene kits and kitchen sets in Odessa. But the agency prefers, wherever possible, to provide cash assistance via an ATM card utilizing Ukraine’s existing banks. Those grants went to nearly 900,000 Ukrainians last year. Though the average stipend is only about $120 a month, that pittance helps displaced Ukrainians get whatever they need the most, whether it’s housing, health care, transportation, food or clothing. It also boosts the local economy rather than creating a parallel “aid economy.”

Our group visited a Kyiv apartment building two days after it was hit by a Russian missile to see how quickly and effectively UNHCR and its local and international partners can swing into action. Four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds forced out of their homes. By the time we arrived, laborers were already repairing the damage while, in a nearby school gymnasium, UNHCR and other aid agencies had set up shop to help the affected families. The gym was emptying out because most of the people had already received what they needed, whether food or medicine or a place to sleep. Such rapid response operations occur all the time across Ukraine, and they are helping that country to survive the Russian onslaught.

UNHCR also has been an indispensable lifeline in European countries struggling to cope with a massive refugee influx. We visited Ukraine’s neighbor Moldova (population 2.5 million), which has been inundated by more than 1 million Ukrainians since the start of the war in 2022. Yet there are no tent cities for Ukrainian refugees in Moldova or anywhere else in Europe; all the newcomers either move on or get absorbed by the local population. That’s one of the hidden success stories of the past two years. In part, that speaks to the generosity of European nations in dealing with the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since 1945. But it is also a reflection of the international aid effort spearheaded by UNHCR.

UNHCR is far from perfect; it is subject to some of the same problems as other U.N. agencies. Its Uganda operation was rocked by a corruption scandal in 2018, and in Ukraine it was initially criticized by government officials for being slow to respond to the Russian invasion.

But I was impressed by the UNHCR employees I met in Ukraine, a combination of local and foreign hires who appear intensely committed to the mission and work long hours under grueling and often dangerous conditions. The UNHCR country director, Karolina Lindholm Billing, is a no-nonsense Swede who has been in Ukraine since 2021. She manages 370 staff in 10 different locations, employing a combination of firmness and compassion.

Lindholm Billing had to evacuate her husband and three teenage children from Kyiv when the Russians invaded and sees them only on occasional home visits to Stockholm. “If I didn’t believe that the work my colleagues and I do, often seven days a week and in risky situations, was meaningful to the people we serve, then I would never sacrifice these years with my teenagers,” she told me. “Because we are on the ground where the brutal war hits people every day, we see the positive impact that humanitarian support has on people’s lives.”

I saw it, too, as we visited the refugee-assistance sites that UNHCR operates for grateful Ukrainians who are eager not only for material aid but a sign that the world cares about their plight.

UNHCR spent nearly $1 billion in 2023 responding to the Ukrainian refugee and displacement crisis. The U.S. government was the single biggest donor, giving $200 million, but European nations gave more in aggregate, while also incurring substantial costs in handling millions of refugees in their own countries. This year, UNHCR is asking for a similar contribution from the United States to continue its lifesaving work.

But that money may not be forthcoming. It is part of the $95 billion foreign aid bill — which includes $60 billion for Ukraine — that passed the Senate but is stalled in the House by Republican isolationists. Even some House members who support military aid for Ukraine are talking about removing humanitarian aid and budgetary support for Ukraine.

That would be foolish and heartless. Humanitarian and budgetary aid allows Ukraine to keep functioning in the face of continuing Russian aggression, and makes it possible for refugees to return to their own country — as roughly 2 million Ukrainians have already done. Without that international support, Ukraine could become a failed state no longer able to defend itself and millions more refugees could flee the country, destabilizing its neighbors.

Congress needs to provide both military and budgetary aid to Ukraine as that country battles not only for its own survival but also the security of the entire West. And it needs to keep supporting UNHCR as part of the U.S. response to refugee crises not only in Ukraine but also as far afield as Lebanon, Sudan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The United Nations makes its share of mistakes, but UNHCR is an unheralded success story.

Opinion by Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author of the forthcoming “Reagan: His Life and Legend.  

 Twitte

Lula Can’t Tell Vladimir from Volodymyr - Andreas Kluth (WP)

 Washington Post - 2.2.2023

Lula Can’t Tell Vladimir from Volodymyr

Andreas Kluth

 

With democrats like Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who needs autocrats? Shame on Lula for pretending that Kyiv, NATO and the European Union are as much to blame for Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine as the wannabe tsar in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin. Shame on Lula for not doing anything to help Ukraine.

Lula was sworn in to his old post just a month ago – he was president from 2003 to 2010. This was followed by the four-year term of office of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro – “the trump card of the tropics”. A week after Lula took over, pro-Bolsonaro mobs even looted federal buildings in Brasilia, in a farcical re-enactment of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. When Brazil’s institutions – and Lula – withstood that attack, much of the democratic world breathed a sigh of relief.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz was particularly pleased. He has long been among the “Western” leaders who have struggled hardest to transcend perceptions of “the West and the rest,” instead portraying world politics as a struggle between democratic and autocratic destinies.

“We are all happy that Brazil is back on the world stage,” Scholz beamed at Lula during his visit to Brasilia this week. “You were sorely missed.” Lula spontaneously hugged the Chancellor.

In particular, Scholz wants to expand the alliance in support of Ukraine and against Putin by including as many countries as possible from the “Global South”. For example, last year when he hosted the Group of Seven, a club of liberal democracies with large economies, he also invited India, Indonesia, South Africa and Senegal.

The same goal took him to South America this week. Once again, Scholz was reminded that the further away the countries are from Europe, the less urgent the war in Ukraine is. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric was relatively accommodating. “We will always defend multilateralism, the peaceful resolution of conflicts and, above all, the application of human rights,” he said after meeting Scholz in Santiago. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez was more reticent, refusing to offer military aid to Ukraine and only vaguely wishing for “peace”.

But it was Lula who not only rejected Scholz’s requests in general, but also completely lost the thread. “Brazil has no interest in passing on munitions to be used in war,” Lula said at their joint press conference. “Brazil doesn’t want any involvement, not even indirect.”

To get some insight into Lula’s reasoning, it helps to read his comments in an interview with Time magazine last year. “Putin isn’t the only one to blame,” Lula insisted. “The US and the EU are also guilty” – apparently because they have not categorically ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine (which hasn’t even been discussed since 2008).

But Lula had more to say. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may seem to most people as an inspirational leader braving a brutal invasion. Not Lula. The Brazilian president thinks Zelenskyy is “weird” and is acting like a publicity dog scurrying from one TV camera to the next when he is supposed to be “negotiating” – presumably about Ukraine’s surrender. “This guy is just as responsible for the war as Putin is,” he said.

Come back? It is one thing for politicians to decide, on the basis of realpolitik, that they should stay out of a conflict they consider, rightly or wrongly, irrelevant to their national interests. It is also fair for the nations of the Global South to point out the long history of Western hypocrisy about idealizing and ignoring or even condoning tragedies, where in the world and under what circumstances.

But adopting and spreading Putin’s own propaganda narratives is going too far. It was Putin alone who decided to attack Ukraine and who has since changed his reasons for doing so – apparently he is now fighting Satanism in Ukraine. He is an old-fashioned imperialist and dictator bent on subjugating and colonizing a smaller neighbor while breaking all international norms.

One day the tragic war in Ukraine will indeed end in negotiations. But it is not for Lula, or anyone else, to tell a country struggling to survive that it is time to sit down with the invaders. If Lula can’t grapple with moral geometry in Ukraine, Europe and the world, he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

 

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for the Bloomberg Opinion and reports on European politics. The former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and author of The Economist is the author of “Hannibal and Me”.

Ukraine war at a turning point with rapid escalation of conflict (WP)

 

Ukraine war at a turning point with rapid escalation of conflict

People remove debris from a damaged house after shelling in Sloviansk, Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Monday. (Andriy Andriyenko/AP) The Washington Post, October 10,2022 In little more than a month, the war in Ukraine has turned abruptly from a grueling, largely static artillery battle expected to last into the winter, to a rapidly escalating, multilevel conflict that has challenged the strategies of the United States, Ukraine and Russia. Russia’s launch of massive strikes on civilian infrastructure Monday in nearly a dozen Ukrainian cities far from the front lines brought shock and outrage. The strikes, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken described as “wave after wave of missiles” struck “children’s playgrounds and public parks,” left at least 14 killed and nearly 100 wounded, and cut electricity and water in much of the country. “By launching missile attacks on civilians sleeping in their homes or rushing toward children going to schools, Russia has proven once again that it is a terrorist state that must be deterred in the strongest possible ways,” Ukraine’s United Nations Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya said at the opening of a General Assembly session scheduled before the assault to promote world condemnation of Moscow. The attacks were the latest of many head-spinning events — from Ukrainian victories on the ground to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat of nuclear weapons use — that have changed the nature and tempo of the war in recent weeks, and raised questions about whether the United States and its partners may have to move beyond the concept of helping Ukraine defend itself, and instead more forcefully facilitate a Ukrainian victory. So far, the U.S. supply effort has been deliberative and process-oriented in the kinds of weapons it provides, and the speed at which it provides them, so as not to undercut its highest priority of avoiding a direct clash between Russia and the West. That strategy is likely to be part of the agenda at Tuesday’s emergency meeting of G7 leaders, and a gathering of NATO defense ministers later in the week. U.S. officials continue to express caution about precipitous moves. “Turning points in war are usually points of danger,” said a senior Biden administration official, one of several U.S. and Ukrainian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy deliberations. “You can’t predict what’s around the corner.” Russian leaders have cited their own turning point. Viktor Bondarev, head of the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s upper house of parliament wrote in a Telegram post on Monday that the strikes were the beginning of “a new phase” of what the Kremlin calls its“special military operation” in Ukraine, with more “resolute” action to come. Putin, speaking early Monday to his security council, said the attacks were retaliation for what he called Ukrainian “terrorism,” including the blowing up over the weekend of the strategic Crimean Bridge that is a crucial logistics route for Russian occupying forces in southern Ukraine. The bridge destruction, for which Ukraine has only indirectly claimed responsibility, came after a steady stream of Ukrainian gains that buoyed both Kyiv and its Western supporters. In a surprise counteroffensive begun in early September, Ukrainian forces recaptured more than 1,000 square miles of Russian-occupied territory in the north east, followed by other gains in the south. The Ukrainian victories, along with persistent reports of poorly equipped and low-morale Russian soldiers who fled the onslaught, abandoning equipment and leaving behind their dead, brought public criticism of the conduct of the war from inside Russia, including from some senior Putin advisers. Within days, Putin had called for the military mobilization of up to 300,000 civilians to bolster his failing forces. The humiliation was compounded by a chaotic implementation and the fleeing of hundreds of thousands of military-aged men across neighboring borders. In what was widely interpreted as a reference to nuclear weapons, Putin threatened to use “all means available” to defend Russian-occupied territory, even as he moved to annex four Ukrainian regions. “I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction … and when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all means at our disposal,” he said on Sept. 21. “This is not a bluff.” The mobilization and nuclear threats, the senior administration official said, were “signs of two things: Putin does know how bad he’s doing. … That was a question mark before.” “Two, it’s definitely a sign that he’s doubling down. That we’re not close to the end, and not close to negotiations. Those realities don’t give anyone any great comfort here,” the official said. Rose Gottemoeller, a former senior State Department official for arms control and nonproliferation issues, and former deputy secretary general of NATO, said: “The use of nuclear weapons is a dead end. It shows the final failure of [Putin’s] policy if he’s somehow driven into that corner,” Gottemoeller said. “It’s the final throwing of the dice,” thinking that “somehow … everyone will panic and all of their supporters will force the Ukrainians to sue for peace … I don’t see that happening.” “I think we have to take these threats very, very seriously,” she said. With the Monday strikes inside Ukraine, Putin was clearly trying to reclaim the initiative, but also to bolster the image of a unified strategy and leadership. In his security council remarks, reported by Russian media, he said the missile attack had been fashioned and recommended by his “Defense Ministry, in accordance with the plan of the Russian General Staff.” He made particular reference to the role of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose absence from public view in recent days had led to speculation that he had been fired. For its part, Ukraine has long combined its profuse gratitude for Western weapons aid with demands for stepped up delivery of more, and more sophisticated, supplies. The counteroffensive on the ground brought calls for battle tanks to move into contested territory, which the United States and its allies have been reluctant to send. This week, Kyiv attached new urgency to sophisticated air defense systems. A Ukrainian official, referring to a list provided by the senior military command, said Ukraine’s priority items include the Patriot surface to air missile system, MIM-23 Hawk missiles, attack drones and NASAMS (National Advance Surface-to-Air Missile Systems) as well as Israeli air defense systems. People react outside a partially destroyed office building after several Russian strikes hit the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Oct. 10. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images) Ukraine’s pleas found new resonance in some quarters of Washington after the Monday attacks, with senior Democrats, in particular, demanding that Biden move more quickly to supply Ukraine. “I am horrified by Russia’s depraved and desperate escalation against civilian infrastructure across Ukraine — including in Kyiv,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a statement. “I pledge to use all means at my disposal to accelerate support for the people of Ukraine and to starve Russia’s war machine.” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former senior official at the CIA and the Pentagon, tweeted that the need for air defense “is urgent given the scale of these attacks. Providing these systems is a defensive — not escalatory — step, and our European friends need to step up along with us to get the Ukrainians what they need.” But there was little initial sign that the administration intends to change the relatively lengthy approval process by which it decides what weapons to send to Ukraine, and when. The process includes a U.S. analysis, based on its own reporting of conditions on the battlefield, of what Ukraine needs, a senior U.S. defense official said, and “second, do we have that stuff?” “Third, do they already know how to use it? If not, what’s our plan to train them? Fourth, how are they going to sustain the stuff? Keep it in the field? Maintain it? Repair it? Spare parts? … If we can’t do those things, who among our allies and partners can do it?” the defense official said. Once those questions are answered, the request and recommendation is vetted for comment and concerns from other government departments with equities in the decision before going to the White House, where President Biden makes a final determination. When decision is made, delivery can be made within days for equipment taken from U.S. defense stocks, months if extensive training for use and maintenance is required, or years if particular items need to be manufactured. For example, Biden approved sending the NASAMS air defense system early in the summer, and defense officials have said that two will be shipped this fall, once the systems are ready and training is complete. An additional six NASAMS, announced by the Pentagon at the end of August, will take years to manufacture. Patriot systems are already in short supply within NATO, and usually travel with their own U.S. or NATO operating teams — a commitment the West is unlikely to make. Israel, whose prime minister on Monday for the first time condemned Russia, over the missile attacks, has its own complicated relations with Moscow. “We certainly understand that we are at a potential inflection point here in the war, on many levels,” the senior Biden administration official said. “That thinking is baked into [our] decision-making. … Ukraine has certainly done better and been more aggressive recently, and Putin is feeling the heat on the battlefield, at home, and overseas. There is no question that is a different set of conditions.” “But we believe that these changes on the battlefield and in Russia have only validated even more our decision-making process,” the official said. Shane Harris and Alex Horton contributed to this report.