Category Archives: Putin

But the common denominator between Biden and Trump is the word begging. Is this the future we want? As long as were addicted to oil, we are always going to be begging someone, usually a bad guy, to move the price up or down, because we alone are not masters of our own fate.

This has got to stop. Yes, there needs to be a transition phase, during which we will continue to use oil, gas and coal. We cant go cold turkey. But lets vow to double the pace of that transition not double down on fossil fuels.

Nothing would threaten Putin more than that. After all, it was the collapse in global oil prices between 1988 and 1992, triggered by Saudi overproduction, that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union and hasten its collapse. We can create the same effects today by overproducing renewables and overemphasizing energy efficiency.

The best and fastest way to do that, argues Hal Harvey, the C.E.O. of Energy Innovation, a clean energy consultancy, is by increasing clean power standards for electric utilities. That is, require every U.S. power utility to reduce its carbon emissions by shifting to renewables at a rate of 7 to 10 percent a year i.e., faster than ever.

Utopian? Nope. The C.E.O. of American Electric Power, once utterly coal dependent, has now pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, using mostly natural gas as a backup. Thirty-one states have already set steadily rising clean energy standards for their public utilities. Lets go for all 50 now.

At the same time, lets enact a national law that gives every consumer the ability to join this fight. That would be a law eliminating the regulatory red tape around installing rooftop solar systems while giving every household in America a tax rebate to do so, the way Australia has done a country that is now growing its renewable markets faster per capita than China, Europe, Japan and America.

When cars, trucks, buildings, factories and homes are all electrified and your grid is running mostly on renewables presto! we become increasingly free of fossil fuels, and Putin becomes increasingly dollar poor.

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Opinion | How to Defeat Putin and Save the Planet - The New York Times

While theUnited States did not stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine,the Biden administration seemed to see it coming in extraordinary detail.

In the weeks leading up to the invasion on February 24, as Russia amassed troops and hardware on its neighbour's borders, senior US officials warned an attack was imminent, despite repeated Kremlin denials.

As Russia menaced Ukraine from afar,even the Ukrainian government at times dismissed the build-up as bluster rather than a precursor to war.

Reporters asked US President Joe Biden why he was so convinced that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine.

"We have a significant intelligence capability," he responded simply.

Mr Biden also claimed to know exactly what Mr Putin had in the pipeline down to specific dates.

It was as if US intelligence services had tapped into the mind of a foreign leader notorious for guarding his secrets.

So was the US bluffing or did it really know what Russia had planned?

As a former spy master, Mr Putin knows the importance of intelligence and minimising the ability of your enemies, real or perceived, to know your plans.

He reportedly still relies on tactics he learned as a KGB agent.

To this day he does not trust technology, knowing that the United States maintains extraordinary hacking ability in its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)and National Security Agency (NSA).

"It's said that he very, very rarely uses email and his calls are very selectively used," said Calder Walton, a historian and intelligence expert at the Harvard Kennedy School.

"His worldview is dominated by his previous career as a KGB officer, and synonymous with that is paranoia. So he is a true conspiracy theorist and paranoid."

The widely circulated photos of him sitting at the head of comically long tables to meet with world leaders and his own team is the perfect metaphor for a man trying to keep threats at bay.

Despite those safeguards, however, it appears the United States knew of his invasion plans well in advance and was confident enough to put its assessment on the record.

The US would have been mining a range of sources, according to Mr Walton.

"I'd be confident to say that it is not one single source, but likely a combination: human sources potentially, people close to Putin ...the age-old technique of tradecraft, of espionage, recruiting spies," he said.

But there are other more modern tricks in the current intelligence toolkit, according to Mr Walton.

These include "technical intelligence collection", which often relies on satellite imagery and "open-source intelligence".

The technique draws on the vast amount of data now available from commercial satellites and even social media to establish your enemy's next steps.

There's a long history of espionage between the United States and Russia and its forebear, the Soviet Union.

For much of the Cold War, double agents and undercover spies were operating in both nations.

In 2010, long after the Cold War was declared over, the FBI arrested anetwork of Russian intelligence agents carrying out deep-cover assignments while living seemingly ordinary lives in American suburbs.

But the most recent and impactful example of alleged Russian espionage was the 2016 election.

According to the US intelligence community, Mr Putin ordered an operationtoharmHillary Clinton's campaign, boostDonald Trump's candidacy, and increase social discord in the United States.

The intelligence about Mr Putin's allegedinvolvement wasgiven to the US by a Russian informant,according to Calder Walton.

"The key bit of intelligence saying that it was directly ordered by Putin ... was a human source and that human source was reportedly exfiltrated out of Russia under CIA protection," he said.

Within the FBI, the acronym used to describe the motivation for people to spy for a foreign power is MICE: Money, ideology, coercion and ego.

Trying to seduce people in Moscow could be fraught, Mr Walton said, so it waslikely the US hadtried to access Russian government officials placed in foreign capitals.

But those working for the Kremlin abroad in jobs such as diplomatic postscould also be spying for their motherland.

The US recently expelled a group of Russians working in New York for the United Nations Russian mission.

"There's a longstanding tradition for Russia to use diplomatic cover, particularly at the United Nations, for espionage to recruit foreign agents," Mr Walton said.

"It has to be said that almost certainly Western governments do the same."

While the US knew many details about Russia's plan to start the war, many were surprised by how badly thisinvasion has gone.

Despite heavy investment in its military over a decade,the once feared Russian army's reputation has taken a pummelling.

Instead of the rapid victory many had predicted, it's been stalled by the ferocious resistance of a much smaller country.

That has made intelligence gathering during the war far easier.

Russian units appear to be operating using non-secure communication, allowing Ukrainians to intercept their messages and then pinpoint both units and high-value targets.

Ukraine has managed to target and reportedly kill seven Russian generals in the month-old conflict, a rate of attrition not seen since World War II.

With his troops in trouble, his wealthiest allies sanctioned, and information leaking to his enemies, Vladimir Putin may be getting nervous.

The Russian leader is reportedly conducting an internal purge ofofficersand intelligence personnel, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

"If he fails and looks weak, it's disastrous at home, not just abroad,"Fiona Hill, a former director ofRussian affairs on the US National Security Council, told Meet the Press.

"He's extremely paranoid about this."

Mr Putin, who filled his inner circle with men connected to Russia's intelligence services, may now see them as a potential threat to his leadership.

"There's certainly a history of coups and more importantly, failed coups have always involved Russia's Soviet intelligence services," Mr Walton said.

"The KGB was instrumental in a failed coup in 1991 when they tried to oust Gorbachev, andthe KGB was instrumental in the fall of Khrushchev in the earlier Cold War."

However, Mr Walton said Mr Putin's iron grip on Russia's intelligence services meanta coup against him would be difficult.

"He controls them in a way that even in the Soviet period, Soviet leaders didn't. These are his own personal fiefdoms," he said.

"I'm afraid the history of coups and Russia shows it's unlikely to succeed."

See the rest here:

The US anticipated almost every move Vladimir Putin made in Ukraine. This is how they probably did it - ABC News

LONDON

Russian President Vladimir Putins ambitions and his ruthless style of achieving them in his invasion of Ukraine can be traced at least in part to a handful of conservative Russian thinkers who, like him, came to prominence in a post-Soviet nation struggling to find its identity, and who have helped mold his ideology.

You cannot get inside Putins head at this very moment, said Marlene Laruelle, a historian of Russia and political scientist at George Washington University. But there is a history of advisors, formal and informal, and thinking that has surrounded him over the years that you can look at to understand his perspective.

In justifying the war he launched in late February by blaming a decadent West for attempting to chip away at Russian identity, borders and security, Putin echoed key ideas of Eurasianism, a 20th-century political theory that modern-day followers describe as saying Russia is neither part of Europe nor Asia and is the enemy of the U.S.-led Atlantic world.

Long an imperial people, Russians can lead a world empire, according to writings of one of the most prominent proponents of Eurasianism, Alexander Dugin, 60, whom some refer to as Putins Rasputin.

Dugin, a former professor at Moscow State University, is not known to regularly meet or speak with Putin or his inner circle, though he has given high praise of the Russian leader. Many of his far-right, antisemitic writings are too extreme for even the Kremlin to publicly embrace. But when he failed to make significant formal political inroads after the Soviet Unions fall, Dugin successfully set his eyes on gaining influence among policymakers, the military and Russian intelligence, all of whom have Putins ear.

His ideas, developed over dozens of books and prolific appearances in the Russian and Western media, appear to match Putins current frame of mind as the Russian leader continues his onslaught on neighboring Ukraine, leaving cities in rubble, thousands of civilians dead and millions fleeing, even as his ground forces remain stalled.

Alexander Dugin sits for a TV interview in Moscow in March 2016.

(Francesca Ebel / Associated Press)

The writers 1997 treatise, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, at times reads like an overview of recent Russian history as expressed by Putin today. Ukraine, it says, is a state that has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness. It represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.

Such notions have also been echoed of late by voices of the American far right.

Ukraine is kind of a concept. Its not even a country, said former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon on Feb. 24, the day Putin launched his invasion. He spoke about it on his podcast, Bannons War Room. In 2018, Dugin and Bannon met in Rome, and were reported to have spent several hours together.

Dugin, whose book has become common reading in the Russian military, has advocated a new Russian empire from Dublin to Vladivostok.

He sees technology as promoting a false sense of individualism and he has dismissed many modern-day European governments as extensions of America that encroach on Russia.

Putin struck similar chords in his pre-war speech last month when he said the U.S. was waging a proxy war on Russian freedom that had crossed the red line. The Ukrainian government was illegitimate, stocked with neo-Nazis and was oppressing Russians, Putin said, in the name of an American empire of lies.

Ukrainian police and soldiers stand ready with an artillery unit after Russian bombardment destroyed a building in the Moskovskyi district of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on March 25.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Benjamin Young, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth Universitys Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, describes Dugin as a man whose radical ideas permeate the intellectual ecosystem of Russian conservatism. His predictions have also been frighteningly correct about the posture of post-Cold War Russia.

From Putins militant opposition to globalism to the invasion of Ukraine, his theories align with much of the Kremlins actions.

Like Putin, Young said, Dugin wants a return to a more conservative and religious world order that fuses the Orthodox Church and state. He wants Eastern Europe to return to the Moscow-led Orthodox Church.

Putin has enlisted Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the war effort, with Kirill recently praising the president and calling military service in the war a manifestation of evangelical love for neighbors.

Dugin, who in a 2008 interview with The Times said friendly U.S. relations with former Soviet states were a declaration of psychological, geopolitical, economic and open war, is not the only man whose ideas circulate among Putin and his circle.

Laruelle of George Washington University describes the Russian president as a person without one single ideological source.

There are multiple people all of whom are mediated by the circle around Putin, she said, that united together to support this disastrous invasion.

Putin himself last year named three influences during an address to the Valdai Club, a prominent Moscow think tank, Laruelle noted. They were Nikolai Berdyaev, a well-known Russian religious philosopher; Lev Gumilev, an eccentric Soviet-era ethnologist; and Ivan Ilyin, a 20th-century migr who was a fan of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

Putin has been reported to assign homework to regional governors to read the works of Gumilev and Ilyin. He has been relatively mum on Berdyaev, who like others has lauded Russia as having a unique role in history.

The Russian leader has cited Gumilevs theory of passionarity, which Laruelle described as a living force specific to each people group made up of bio-cosmic energy and inner force. Speaking a little over a year ago, Putin said he believe[s] in passionarity. Russia has not reached its peak. We are on the march, on the march of development. We have an infinite genetic code. It is based on the mixing of blood.

Ilyin has also figured prominently in Putins background. In 2006, Michigan State University, which held Ilyins papers and manuscripts, said it would return them to Russia via one of Putins personal representatives.

Putins speeches are inspired by Ilyins idea of Ukraine construction by opponents of Russia, Laruelle said.

In his writings, Ilyin described Russia as a living organism of nature and the soul that cannot be divided, only dissected. His references to Ukraine were always in quotation marks because it was seen as part of the Russian organism.

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The roots of Putin's ultranationalism and war on Ukraine - Los Angeles Times

You can feel it happening now. People are starting to lose interest. Ukraine slips off the main headlines every so often for the Chancellors Spring Statement, or the Partygate fines. Itll slip off again soon, then more regularly. And eventually, a few months from now, itll be a news-in-brief, a few quick paragraphs detailing the who-where-when of Russias latest atrocity, with a body count tacked on the end.

Were a month in, and journalists are already starting to report that Ukrainian stories are getting less views, that theyre starting to lose reader interest. People are beginning to switch off.

You can see it in how the story is covered, as well as the priority its given. Our standard tribal enmities are slowly seeping back into the debate. That brief moment of shared moral outrage is fading away.

Its not thuggish Vladimir Putin who is losing his marbles but doddery Joe Biden, a recent Daily Mail comment headline read. Bidens great crime was to say: For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power. It jumbled up the White Houses strategic approach, which is to deny a wish for regime change, but it had the immense advantage of being simultaneously obvious and correct. Bidens reward for this most minor of gaffes was to be roasted for 24-hours of the news cycle.

Boris Johnson is playing a similar game using the invasion as just another stick to beat his political opponents with. At the Tory spring conference earlier this month he said. Do we want [Labour] running up the white flag? Do you see them standing up to Putins blackmail? Its clearly an attack line hes been developing for the local elections. Last night he told Tory MPs: It is impossible to imagine a Labour defence minister arming Ukraine in the way this Conservative government has.

This is the reward Keir Starmer gets for offering the Conservatives conditional support for their Ukraine response to have it thrown back at him in the most venal and fictitious way imaginable. But it is also a sign that the old formulations are coming back. Were slumping back from unity to division, from emergency to day-to-day political knockabout.

Putin knows it. Hes been exploiting Western division from the very beginning. He is a master at plugging into our tribal disposition and worsening it.

The most shared Russian disinformation post on US Facebook between 2015 and 2017 was an image of the Bugs Bunny adversary Yosemite Sam, with guns drawn and a confederate flag behind him. The caption read: I was banned from television for being too violent. Like and share if you grew up watching me on television, have a gun, and havent shot or killed anyone.

The most liked Russian disinformation post on Instagram was an image of eight female legs with different skin tones, starting with white and ending with black. All the tones are nude, it said. Get over it. It was hashtagged #blackandproud.

The first post was aimed at conservatives, the second at progressives. But in each case, the desired outcome was the same: worsening tribal division. Focusing debate on cultural wedge issues. Fuelling the culture war fire.

Now hes doing it again. Recently they cancelled the childrens writer [JK] Rowling because she fell out of favour with fans of so-called gender freedoms, Putin said last week. It was a trap so obvious a child could see it, but of course, that did not stop the massed warriors on both sides of the gender wars using it for their online squabbles getting played like puppets by the Russian tyrant. And every second they did that was another second the West fought itself rather than the real threat.

You can feel the pace of anti-Putin sanctions grinding to a halt now. Most of the top five Russian banks are still operating on the Swift messaging system, including Sberbank by distance the countrys largest. Russian energy is still being bought by Europe. British sanctions remain middling and half-effective. And yet there is little talk anymore of how we ratchet up to the next stage of punishment. The momentum is being lost.

Yesterday, Russia announced that it was moving its focus from Kyiv to the eastern Donbas region. Weve no idea if that is true. Nearly everything the Russian state says is a lie. But it is perfectly possible that we are now seeing the early stages of a recalibration away from regime change, which is proving impossible, and towards the maximisation of territory which can be demanded as part of a peace process.

And the truth is, many Western commentators will be perfectly susceptible to that objective. You can already see hints of it now. If Putin claims and retains Luhansk and Donetsk the Donbas and allows Ukraine to get on with its life I could live with that, Rachel Johnson said on LBC this week.

Its of no consequence at all what Western commentators could live with in regards to Ukraine. Our feelings are not relevant. If the Ukrainians can accept something, we should too. If they cannot, we must not.

Their autonomy has been talked over and ignored throughout this episode, by Putin himself and his witless enablers on right and left. Now you can see mainstream commentators starting to do the same, as they grow tired of the story.

Cant Ukrainians just accept the loss of a bit of territory? Wont they just give way a bit, so things can be brought to an end? And once you start thinking that way, it becomes possible to actually become quite frustrated with Ukrainians for their recalcitrance.

This is how it starts: with us getting bored. And as we get bored, we retreat back into our usual division and tribal bickering, to our oh-so-sensible assessments of the concessions Ukraine should make and our sluggish initiatives on sanctions.

This is a moment of profound danger. Our attention exhaustion provides hope to Putin and a grave threat to Ukraine.

Read more:

Ukraine fatigue is setting in, just as Putin hoped it would - iNews

Note: This is Part Two of a two-part Planet Money newsletter series on the Russian oligarchs. You can read Part One here and subscribe to the newsletter here.

In the summer of 2000, 21 of the richest men in Russia exited their bulletproof limousines and entered the Kremlin for a historic meeting. In the previous decade, these men had risen seemingly out of nowhere, amassing spectacular fortunes as the country around them descended into chaos. Through shady deals, outright corruption, and even murder, these rapacious "oligarchs" as Russians had come to derisively call them had seized control of much of Russia's economy, and, increasingly, its fledgling democracy. But now, their nation's newly elected president, Vladimir Putin, wanted to tell them, face to face, who was really in charge.

"I want to draw your attention to the fact that you built this state yourself, to a great degree, through the political or semi-political structures under your control,'' Putin reportedly said in the closed-door meeting. ''So there is no point in blaming the reflection in the mirror. So let us get down to the point and be open and do what is necessary to do to make our relationship in this field civilized and transparent.''

Putin in 2000 ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Putin in 2000

Putin offered the oligarchs a deal: bend to my authority, stay out of my way, and you can keep your mansions, superyachts, private jets, and multibillion-dollar corporations (corporations that, just a few years before, had been owned by the Russian government). In the coming years, the oligarchs who reneged on this deal and undermined Putin would be thrown into a Siberian prison or be forced into exile or die in suspicious circumstances. The loyalists who remained and the new ones who got filthy rich during Putin's long reign became like ATM machines for the president and his allies.

"These individuals have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people," the White House said in a recent statement announcing sanctions against over a dozen oligarchs connected to Putin. "[They] sit atop Russia's largest companies and are responsible for providing the resources necessary to support Putin's invasion of Ukraine."

Putin came to power thanks in no small part to the original class of oligarchs, who got ostentatiously rich through crooked privatization deals during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. These oligarchs created and bankrolled what became Putin's political party, Unity, the predecessor to what is now called United Russia. They engineered President Boris Yeltsin's stunning comeback victory in the 1996 presidential elections. Without this victory, Yeltsin could have never appointed Putin as his prime minister, a position that proved to be Putin's launching pad for his presidential bid. The oligarchs helped fuel Putin's meteoric rise. Two of them, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, deployed their television stations and newspapers to turn Putin from an unknown figure into a household name.

But Putin was a shrewder politician than they initially realized. When Putin's 2000 presidential election campaign heated up, he began paying lip service to Russia's hatred of the oligarchs and the corrupt deals that enriched them. Shortly before election day, Putin was asked by a radio station how he felt about the oligarchs. If by oligarchs, he said, one meant those who "help fusion of power and capital there will be no oligarchs of this kind as a class."

But, once in power, Putin didn't actually eliminate the oligarchy. He only targeted individual oligarchs who threatened his power. He first aimed at Vladimir Gusinsky, the rare oligarch who built most of his wealth from scratch as opposed to merely taking over extractive industries that once belonged to the government. Back in the mid-1980s, Gusinsky was a cab driver with broken dreams of directing plays in Moscow's theater scene. When the Soviet Union began allowing entrepreneurship in the late 1980s, Gusinsky made a small fortune making and selling copper bracelets, which were apparently a big hit with Russian consumers. In the early 1990s, he flipped buildings in Moscow's burgeoning real estate market and started a bank. By 1993, he had enough money to start a newspaper and Russia's first private television station, NTV.

Tolerated under Yeltsin, NTV ran programs including a satirical puppet show critical of the Kremlin. When NTV newscasters and puppets began criticizing and making fun of the newly elected president, Putin slammed down his iron fist. In 2000, armed agents in camouflage and ski masks raided NTV's offices. The government alleged Gusinsky stole $10 million in a privatization deal. Gusinsky was jailed and then fled overseas. A state-controlled energy company, Gazprom, ended up buying NTV in a hostile takeover. Rest assured, Putin doesn't have to worry about puppets making fun of him anymore.

Director Victor Shenderovich poses with a life size puppet of Vladimir Putin in 2000, on the set of a popular satirical NTV television show called "Kukly" (Puppets). Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images hide caption

Director Victor Shenderovich poses with a life size puppet of Vladimir Putin in 2000, on the set of a popular satirical NTV television show called "Kukly" (Puppets).

In the early 2000s, another oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, crossed the line with Putin and also paid a hefty price. Khodorkovsky, a square-jawed magnate built like a retired linebacker, was then the richest man in Russia, estimated to be worth around $15 billion. He made his fortune largely through a corrupt deal with the Yeltsin administration under a scheme known as "Loans For Shares" (read our last newsletter for more details). Khodorkovsky was able to buy a 78 percent stake in the state-controlled oil company Yukos for only $310 million, even though it was then worth an estimated $5 billion.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the CEO of the Russian oil company Yukos, poses for photographs in his private office in 2003. Tatyana Makeyeva/Getty Images hide caption

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the CEO of the Russian oil company Yukos, poses for photographs in his private office in 2003.

Khodorkovsky proved to be a capable oil baron and brought Western-style management and transparency to his empire. As corporations do in the United States, he spent generously on lobbying and campaign contributions to politicians in Russia's legislature. He funded opposition political parties. He even hinted he might run for president. As his empire grew, he became increasingly strongheaded. In February 2003, Khodorkovsky challenged Putin in a televised meeting, alleging corruption at a state-owned oil company. Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky was mulling a merger with the American oil company Exxon Mobil. Putin and his allies hated all of this.

In 2003, masked agents stormed Khodorkovsky's private jet during a refueling stop and arrested him at gunpoint. Authorities charged him with fraud and tax evasion. They imprisoned him in Siberia, where he would languish for the next decade. The government took over his oil empire and handed the keys to one of Putin's longtime associates, Igor Sechin.

Igor Sechin is one of the leading figures in a new breed of oligarchs, who have accrued wealth and power under Putin: the siloviki, which translates roughly to "men of force." Most are military men or former KGB officers, like Putin himself. Sechin, who has a PhD in economics, is rumored to have served as a KGB officer in East Africa during the 1980s.

Whereas the original class of oligarchs arose during the era of "shock therapy" and rapid privatization in the 1990s, the siloviki or silovarchs, as they're also called made their fortunes under Putin, largely through government contracts, Putin's re-nationalization of extractive industries, and good, old-fashioned corruption. Like Putin, most silovarchs revile the reform era of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, when Russia lost its empire and saw a host of liberal and pro-Western intellectuals take the helm of the government and the economy.

Sechin has worked for Putin for decades. In the 1990s, when Putin served as an aide to the mayor of Saint Petersburg, Sechin served as Putin's assistant. Later he served as Putin's deputy prime minister. A 2008 U.S. embassy document leaked by Wikileaks said, "Sechin was so shadowy that it was joked he may not actually exist but rather was a sort of urban myth, a bogeyman, invented by the Kremlin to instill fear." Some in Moscow call him "Darth Vader." Sechin now serves as the chairman and CEO of the state-controlled oil company, Rosneft, which is the largest corporation in Russia, producing around six percent of the world's oil and employing about 300,000 people.

Vladimir Putin speaks with Russian oligarch Igor Sechin (center right) in 2009. AFP/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Vladimir Putin speaks with Russian oligarch Igor Sechin (center right) in 2009.

In his autobiography, First Person, Putin wrote, "I have a lot of friends, but only a few people are really close to me. They have never gone away. They have never betrayed me, and I haven't betrayed them, either. In my view, that's what counts most."

Which brings us to another important subset of oligarchs, who are buddies with Putin but who did not serve in the military, police, or Russian security apparatus. A prime example of this type of oligarch a Putin buddygarch, if you will is Arkady Rotenberg.

In the 1960s, a twelve-year-old Arkady Rotenberg was forced by his parents to go to a martial arts class. They didn't know it was like handing their son a winning lottery ticket. At that judo class, Rotenberg met a young Vladimir Putin. Rotenberg and Putin quickly became friends. For years, they sparred against each other and traveled to judo tournaments around their hometown of Leningrad (aka Saint Petersburg). The two were known as pranksters, getting into trouble doing silly things like popping balloons at parades by throwing wire pellets at them.

In 2000, Arkady and his brother Boris were small-time oil traders. But then something crazy happened: one of Arkady's best friends became the president of Russia. That same year, Putin created a new state liquor monopoly, Rosspirtprom, by merging more than a hundred liquor factories. Rosspirtprom controlled around 30 percent of Russia's vodka market. Putin put Arkady in charge of it.

A year later, Putin installed his own henchman on the board of Gazprom, a large state-run gas company. Arkady and Boris saw an opportunity. They started a new bank, SMP Bank, and began acquiring construction, gas, and pipeline companies that could service Gazprom. Since then, the Rotenbergs have emerged as the greatest beneficiaries of a government with a penchant for awarding no-bid contracts. The government has forked over billions upon billions of dollars to the Rotenbergs to construct things like pipelines, roads, and bridges. Curiously, they are known to significantly overcharge for these projects, but the Kremlin seems to be cool with it. Evidence suggests it might be because someone in the Kremlin is getting a cut.

Stanislav Markus, an economist at the University of South Carolina who studies Russian oligarchs, recently told The Indicator that Putin's buddies kick back some of the extra money they charge the state to the president himself. "That's what makes Vladimir Putin one of the wealthiest people on the planet," Markus said. "Nobody knows exactly how wealthy, but that's one of the key processes."

Much of the money that has flowed to the oligarchs and to Putin whom historian Timothy Snyder calls "the head oligarch" has been stashed in accounts and assets located outside of Russia. "There is as much financial wealth held by rich Russians abroad in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Cyprus, and similar offshore centers than held by the entire Russian population in Russia itself," a 2017 study by economists Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman found.

Although it's been hard to see exactly where all the money ends up and how much of it is actually Putin's it's easy to see that loyal oligarchs are making bank through extra fat government contracts. In 2014, as Putin grew excited about hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi, his government spent lavishly preparing for the Games. The biggest winner of this spending? Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. A 2017 profile of Arkady in The New Yorker found, "In all, companies controlled by Rotenberg received contracts worth seven billion dollars equivalent to the entire cost of the previous Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, in 2010."

Shortly after the Sochi Olympic Games, Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time, annexing the Crimean Peninsula. Naturally, Ukraine sealed off the one land entrance to the area, which is on their southern border. Looking to unite Russia with its new territory, Putin decided to create a 12-mile bridge over the Kerch Strait. Given it was a warzone with lots of logistical and political challenges, many contractors were reluctant to build that bridge. Not Arkady Rotenberg. His company took on the multibillion-dollar project, despite the political headaches it posed, and completed it in 2018. "A miracle has come true," Putin said about the bridge's completion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin decorates oligarch Arkady Rotenberg with the Hero of Labour medal during an awards ceremony for those who led the construction of the Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait, which that links mainland Russia to Moscow-annexed Crimea. ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Russian President Vladimir Putin decorates oligarch Arkady Rotenberg with the Hero of Labour medal during an awards ceremony for those who led the construction of the Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait, which that links mainland Russia to Moscow-annexed Crimea.

The Obama administration sanctioned the Rotenbergs to punish them and Putin for the invasion of Crimea. "Arkady Rotenberg and Boris Rotenberg have provided support to Putin's pet projects by receiving and executing high price contracts for the Sochi Olympic Games and state-controlled Gazprom," said the U.S. Treasury Department. "Both brothers have amassed enormous amounts of wealth during the years of Putin's rule in Russia." European nations also sanctioned them. For example, Italy seized Arkady's multimillion-dollar mansions in Sardinia and Tarquinia.

The sanctions proved to only bring the Rotenbergs and the Kremlin closer together. The Russian legislature even tried to pass a law, called "the Rotenberg law," which sought to compensate citizens who had their assets stripped by foreign governments. It didn't pass. However, the Rotenbergs have been compensated generously in the form of lucrative state contacts that got even bigger after they were targeted by foreign sanctions.

Western authorities are again targeting the Rotenbergs and other Russian oligarchs in response to Putin's second invasion of Ukraine. This script is similar to the prequel, but the sanctions are tougher and more coordinated than they were after Putin's first invasion of Ukraine. Last time, the sanctions proved to be largely ineffective. The people of Ukraine can only hope that this time will be different.

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How Putin Conquered Russia's Oligarchy : Planet Money - NPR

WASHINGTON President Biden on Monday stood by his comment that Vladimir V. Putin should not remain president of Russia, but he said it was an expression of his own horror over the invasion of Ukraine and not a change in American policy aimed at seeking to remove Mr. Putin from office.

I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it, Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House, rejecting criticism from around the globe in the last two days about the potential diplomatic consequences of his words. The president said no one should have interpreted his comments as calling for Mr. Putins ouster.

Its ridiculous, he said of the questions about his speech in Warsaw on Saturday, when he said, For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power. On Monday, Mr. Biden said: Nobody believes I was talking about taking down Putin. Nobody believes that.

The fallout over Mr. Bidens words in Warsaw underscored the dilemma that he and the NATO allies face about how to condemn the war in Ukraine and pressure Russia without shutting down any relationship with Moscow that might help end the invasion.

The West will also have to decide whether Moscow would be allowed back into the global economy, whether to lift sanctions and how to resume diplomatic relations if Russia pulls back its forces.

Mr. Bidens remark drew some praise for its toughness and clarity but also warnings from lawmakers and President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said on Sunday that I wouldnt use this kind of words when asked about Mr. Bidens speech. Mr. Macron said he hoped to obtain a cease-fire and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine through diplomacy.

Some critics said Mr. Bidens declaration could make it more difficult to negotiate an end to the 5-week-old war, which has killed thousands in Ukraine and driven millions from their homes.

Mr. Biden insisted on Monday that was not the case, although Mr. Putin has told Russians for years that he believes the United States and the C.I.A. are conspiring to remove him from power. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlins spokesman, said that Mr. Bidens statement makes us worry and that the Kremlin would continue to closely monitor the presidents remarks.

In his speech in Warsaw, Mr. Biden tried to draw a distinction between Mr. Putins actions and those of the Russian people, who he said were not responsible for the atrocities being committed by the countrys military in Ukraine each day. He suggested that Russian controls on television and the internet had left the countrys citizens unaware of the truth.

Vladimir Putins aggression have cut you, the Russian people, off from the rest of the world, and its taking Russia back to the 19th century, he said.

Moments later, he proclaimed that a dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase a peoples love for liberty before declaring that Mr. Putin should go.

The White House appeared to rapidly understand that Mr. Bidens words could be seen as a reversal of the administrations long-stated position that it was not seeking regime change in Russia. It took just minutes for officials to back away from Mr. Bidens comments on Saturday evening. Reporters had just loaded buses after his speech when administration officials sent an email denying that the president was formally advocating Mr. Putins removal.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told journalists in Jerusalem that we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else, for that matter.

On Monday, his first extended comments on the matter, Mr. Biden insisted his statement had been misinterpreted.

March 29, 2022, 11:43 a.m. ET

The last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia. Thats not part of it, Mr. Biden said. I was expressing my outrage at the behavior of this man. Its outrageous. Its outrageous. Its more an aspiration than anything. He shouldnt be in power.

People like this shouldnt be ruling countries, but they do, he said, adding, But it doesnt mean I cant express my outrage.

Mr. Biden spoke as the violence in Ukraine continued to intensify, with Russian forces appearing determined to cement their territorial gains in the east. In just five weeks, the conflict has killed thousands of civilians, including women and children who have been the victims of intense Russian bombardment. Human rights advocates say more than 3.7 million Ukrainians have fled, creating one of the largest-ever refugee crises across Eastern Europe.

The presidents remark on Saturday was not the first time an apparently off-the-cuff comment upended or overshadowed an otherwise tightly scripted White House message.

During a news conference earlier on the trip, Mr. Biden said Russias use of chemical weapons would trigger a response in kind, seeming to suggest that NATO would respond with chemical weapons, which are banned by international law. Jake Sullivan, the presidents national security adviser, told reporters the next day that was not what the president meant, saying that the United States has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstances.

In January, Mr. Biden created a similar flurry of speculation when he said that the response to a then-potential invasion of Ukraine would depend on whether its a minor incursion. Mr. Biden eventually corrected himself, saying, If any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion.

Mr. Biden is no stranger to the nuances of public diplomacy, in which officials especially heads of state are careful to speak in very particular ways in an effort to avoid offending another leader or sending an unintended message about policy.

American presidents, for example, never refer to Taiwan as an independent nation for fear of provoking anger from the Chinese government. Similar care is taken when talking about the city of Jerusalem, the status of which remains a disputed part of discussions between Israel and the Palestinians.

In 2016, when President Barack Obama delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Shimon Peres, the former Israeli president, a White House stenographer initially indicated that the remarks had been given in Jerusalem, Israel. After that created a minor flap, the remarks were amended to remove the reference to Israel.

Ongoing peace talks. Russia said that it would sharply reduce military activity near Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. The announcement was the first sign of progressto emerge from peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul.

On the ground. Russiasapparent concessions in the north of Ukraine reflected a successful Ukrainian resistancethat has bogged down Russias forces around Kyivs suburbs and retaken territorynear the capital and cities closer to the Russian border.

Bidens comments. During a speech in Warsawon Saturday, President Biden said that President Vladimir V. Putin cannot remain in power, sendingU.S. officials scrambling to walk backthe ad-lib. On Monday, Mr. Biden stood by his remark, but said it was a personal expression of his moral outrage.

President Donald J. Trump repeatedly violated many of the diplomatic rules in what aides said was a deliberate attempt to shake up the way foreign policy was conducted. He called the leader of North Korea Rocket Man, formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and took steps to more formally deal with Taiwan in the final days of his administration.

Since taking office, Mr. Biden has made it a priority to return to a more traditional form of diplomacy in which the United States seeks to work with adversaries like Russia even as the administration challenges actions by Mr. Putin that it finds objectionable.

But Russias invasion of Ukraine has tested that approach. During the past several weeks, Mr. Biden has grown increasingly vocal in his condemnation of Mr. Putin, using more aggressive language as the Russian leader has escalated his attacks on Ukraine.

A week ago, he called Mr. Putin a war criminal before the United States had officially made that determination. Before his speech on Saturday, Mr. Biden visited with refugees from Ukraine at a stadium in Warsaw and called Mr. Putin a butcher because of the deaths caused by shelling in Mariupol, a hard-hit city in the eastern part of the country.

That kind of language has helped Mr. Biden unite American allies behind a coordinated set of responses to Mr. Putins aggression, including some of the most severe sanctions ever levied on a large, developed nation. The presidents condemnations have been echoed over the past several weeks by other world leaders.

But it remains a delicate balance as the administration tries not to provoke Mr. Putin into engaging in a broader conflict with NATO countries. Mr. Biden has said repeatedly that such engagements could lead to World War III.

In his remarks to reporters on Monday, the president said it was his visit with the refugees just hours earlier that led to his comment about Mr. Putin not staying in power.

Half the children in Ukraine, he said, apparently referring to the number of children who are estimated to have become refugees because of the war. I had just come from being with those families.

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Biden Says of Condemning Putin: I Make No Apologies - The New York Times

In 1996, the year that Vladimir Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to take a post inside Boris Yeltsins Kremlin, the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta asked its readers a leading question: Do you agree that weve had enough democracy, havent adapted to it, and now its time to tighten the screws? The paper set up a hotline and offered the equivalent of two thousand dollars to any caller who could come up with a new unifying national idea. The exercise reflected an impoverished country demoralized and adrift.

At around the same time, Yeltsin assembled a committee of scholars and politicians to formulate a new national idea. Perhaps the newspaper contest could feed the process. But the efforts went nowhere. Yeltsin had failed to build any momentum behind democratic ideals, and the political optimism of the period between 1989 and 1991 was, for most Russians, now a bitter memory. The Soviet-era social safety net had been shredded. People were tired of looking through shopwindows at glittering imports while a coterie of oligarchs were permitted to buy up the countrys most valuable state enterprises for kopecks on the ruble. Yeltsin won relection, defeating the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, but only by enlisting those oligarchs who, with self-preservation in mind, bankrolled him and helped cover up his exhaustion and his alcoholism. By the late nineties, democracy, demokratia, was referred to as dermokratia, shit-ocracy. Yeltsins support fell to the low single digits.

The same intellectuals who had dreamed of free speech, the rule of law, and a general movement toward liberal democracy now experienced acute feelings of failure. There is no sense of what this new country, Russia, really is, a prominent cultural historian, Andrei Zorin, said at the time, contrasting the atmosphere with the Enlightenment ferment that attended the birth of the United States and republican France. These last four or five years in Russia have produced little besides pure hysteria.

Putin came to power, in 1999, advertised not as a man of ideology but as a figure of rude health and managerial competence. In truth, he was a man of the K.G.B., trained to view the West, particularly the U.S., as his enemy, and to see conspirators everywhere trying to weaken and humiliate Russia. He did not form any committees to devise a national idea; he set up no hotline. He established, over time, a personalist regime built around his patronage and absolute authority. And the national identity he has helped promulgateilliberal, imperial, resentful of the Westhas played an essential role in his brutal invasion of Ukraine.

To create the trappings of this Russian identity, Putin seized on existing strands of reactionary thought. While most observers paid closer attention to the intellectual and political turn to the West in the late nineteen-eighties and nineties, many Russian thinkers, publications, and institutions drew inspiration from far different sources. Newspapers such as Dyen (The Day) and Zavtra (Tomorrow) published screeds about the pernicious influence of American cultural and political power. Various academics celebrated the virtues of the strong hand, exemplified by such repressive tsars as Alexander III and Nicholas I and foreign autocrats such as Augusto Pinochet. A crackpot philosopher named Aleksandr Dugin published neo-fascist apocalyptic tomes about the eternal battle between the sea power of the West and the land power of Eurasia, and found an audience in Russian political, military, and intelligence circles.

Putin, from his first years in office, was obsessed with the restoration of Russian might in the world and the positioning of the security services as the singular institution of domestic control. NATOs expansion and the bombing of Belgrade, Iraq, and Libya propelled his suspicion of the West and his inward turn. He alsorecognized the importance of symbols and traditional institutions that could unify ordinary people and help define the particularities of a new Russian exceptionalism. He restored the old Soviet anthem with updated lyrics. He told interviewers and visitors that he was an Orthodox believer and did nothing to dispel rumors that he had taken on a dukhovnik, a spiritual guide, named Tikhon Shevkunov. Father Tikhon, who has appeared in films and runs the Web site Pravoslavie.ru., denied that he had notable influence over Putin (Iam no Cardinal Richelieu!), but made it plain that he was a conservative nationalist who believed in the special path of Russia.

In 2004, when Ukraine was in the midst of its Orange Revolution, Putin not only called on his security services to combat Kyivs drift to the West; he turned up the volume on his conception of an imperial ideology. He began to speak approvingly of such conservative migr thinkers as Nikolai Berdyaev and Ivan Ilyin, who believed in the exalted destiny of Russia and the artificiality of Ukraine. In case anyone missed the message, the Kremlin distributed the appropriate reading material to regional governors and bureaucrats.

In 2007, the year that Putin delivered a famous diatribe against the West, in Munich, he visited a writer and thinker who had once been considered the greatest enemy of the Soviet state: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn believed that Russia and Ukraine were inextricably linked, and Putin tried to exploit Solzhenitsyns moral standing to underscore his own disdain for Ukrainian independence. What he conveniently ignored was Solzhenitsyns insistence, in 1991, that if Ukrainians chose to go their own wayas they did by a ninety-per-cent votehe would warmly congratulate them. (We will always be neighbors. Lets be good neighbors.)

By the time Putin returned to the Presidency, in 2012, his attention to distinctly conservative values had deepened. He cracked down on dissenters, vilifying them as traitors, an American-backed fifth column. He occupied Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. His vision of Moscow as a center of anti-liberal ideas and Eurasian power intensified. During the pandemic, he rarely met in person with his advisers, yet, according to the political analyst Mikhail Zygar, he spoke for days at his dacha with Yury Kovalchuk, a media baron and the largest shareholder in Rossiya Bank, who shares his messianic vision and sybaritic life style. In recent years, Putin has even succeeded in exporting his particular brand of illiberalism to, among others, the National Front, in France; the British National Party; the Jobbik movement, in Hungary; Golden Dawn, in Greece; and the right wing of the Republican Party. As Donald Trumps ideologist, Steve Bannon, put it recently, Ukraines not even a country.

The devastation of Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities suggests that there is little mercy or modesty in Putins faith. Early in his reign, according to the journalist Catherine Belton, he went with his confidant, banker, and eventual antagonist Sergei Pugachev to an Orthodox service on Forgiveness Sunday, which is celebrated just before Lent. Pugachev, a believer, told Putin that he should prostrate himself before the priest, as an act of contrition.Why should I? Putin is said to have replied. I am the President of the Russian Federation. Why should I ask for forgiveness?

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What Is Putin Thinking? - The New Yorker

In an interview more than two decades ago, Vladimir V. Putin described his younger self, with a hint of self-congratulation, as a hooligan. When the interviewer asked if he was exaggerating about his tendency to get into brawls as a schoolboy, Putin took offense.

You are trying to insult me, he said. I was a real thug.

Masha Gessen, a Russian American journalist and Moscow native, recounts this exchange in a 2012 biography, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, which was praised as part psychological profile, part conspiracy study in The New York Times Book Review. To Gessen, Putins unabashed description of himself as a thug was key to his self-image: someone who could not be bullied, who would lash out unpredictably if he felt slighted and who relished violence.

Understanding Putin and the forces that shaped him has become an urgent global concern, as leaders around the world try to determine his motivations in launching an unprovoked and disastrous invasion of Ukraine, how to best engage with him and how the conflict might evolve.

So far, the military assault appears to be a catastrophic misstep, one that has resulted in crippling economic sanctions and heavy military losses for Russia, as well as mass civilian casualties and destruction in the very Ukrainian cities Putin claims he wants to liberate.

To all this, Putin has said, repeatedly, in public comments that the war is going according to plan.

As the conflict escalates, the question of what is driving Putin has become an increasingly perplexing one, with no obvious answers, but with enormous consequences: The war will end, some experts say, when the Russian president allows it to end.

Gessen set out to understand the Russian leaders mind-set more than a decade ago, first in an article for Vanity Fair, then in The Man Without a Face. Tracing Putins rise from a petulant and unruly schoolboy to a KGB operative who ascended to the Russian presidency, Gessen examined the post-Soviet political, cultural and economic forces that enabled Putins rise, and the way he vilified the West to solidify his grip on power.

After Russias 2014 annexation of Crimea, Gessen wrote a postscript summarizing Putins increasingly aggressive stance toward Western democracies, and his evolution from a bureaucrat who had accidentally been entrusted with a huge country into a megalomaniacal dictator who believed he was on a civilizational mission.

In a recent phone interview, Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker, discussed several books that offer insights into Putins psychology, as well as titles that illuminate the cultural and geopolitical context that helped shape Putins Russia.

Below are Gessens recommendations, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Kasparov thinks about life as chess. And he looks at this as a series of plays. He doesnt look at Putins psychology so much as he looks at the logic of his actions and says, OK, well, this is how we game it out. And it is not uplifting. I mean, the book is not recent, and he was quite sure then that Putin was at war with the west at that point.

March 29, 2022, 11:43 a.m. ET

Its funny, because one didnt really have to press in to see that, one just had to pay attention and not be beholden to the conventional wisdom that says, but thats not possible, thats crazy, he doesnt really mean it. Were going to look at this period between 2012 and 2022 as a period when theres a lot of that happening, when the war was slowly ramping up in plain view and most of the world was in denial about it.

I found it incredibly illuminating because, if you read it as a document of what this man wants to tell the world about himself, you learn a lot. Its not a very long book and it doesnt have a lot of variety, but he recounts three different fights that he had. One was when he was a kid and he felt mistreated by a teacher, if I remember correctly. One was when he was a student and one was when he was a young officer. And in all three cases, he lashes out. He basically loses his temper and then he goes quiet for a bit, and then he strikes again.

Ongoing peace talks. Russia said that it would sharply reduce military activity near Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. The announcement was the first sign of progressto emerge from peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul.

On the ground. Russiasapparent concessions in the north of Ukraine reflected a successful Ukrainian resistancethat has bogged down Russias forces around Kyivs suburbs and retaken territorynear the capital and cities closer to the Russian border.

Bidens comments. During a speech in Warsawon Saturday, President Biden said that President Vladimir V. Putin cannot remain in power, sendingU.S. officials scrambling to walk backthe ad-lib. On Monday, Mr. Biden stood by his remark, but said it was a personal expression of his moral outrage.

This is what it communicates: that this is somebody who has no desire to control his temper. He thinks of himself as somebody who will lash out, somebody whos vengeful. Somebody who likes to strike out of the blue, but also and this is the thing that Im most worried about now he will go quiet for a bit and then he will strike again. Thats actually an M.O. that is important to his self-conception.

I recommend anything by Alexander Etkind, who is a cultural historian of Russia. His latest book is called Natures Evil and its a cultural history of natural resources. Its not entirely limited to Russia, but I think it actually goes a very long way to explaining how Russia works.

Anything by Balint Magyar. He is a Hungarian social scientist and he has this tome, its this huge book called The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes. Its a little on the technical side, but its so incredibly illuminating. I think my favorite book of his is called The Post-Communist Mafia State, which pretends to be about Hungary, but is the best book for understanding post-Communist Russia and how the regime works.

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Books About Russian President Putin and the Forces that Shaped Him - The New York Times

Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine was, first and foremost, a crime indeed, the war crimes continue as you read this. But it was also a blunder. In less than five weeks Putin has destroyed Russias military reputation, battered his nations economy and strengthened the democratic alliances he hoped to undermine. How could he have made such a catastrophic mistake?

Part of the answer, surely, is strongman syndrome: Putin has surrounded himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. All indications are that he went into this debacle believing his own propaganda about both his armys martial prowess and the eagerness of Ukrainians to submit to Russian rule.

But theres also reason to think Putin, like many of his admirers in the West, thought modern democracies were too decadent to offer effective resistance.

And heres the thing: When I look at the United States, I worry that the West is, in fact, being made weaker by decadence but not the kind that obsesses Putin and those who think like him. Our vulnerability comes not from the decline of traditional family values, but from the decline of traditional democratic values, such as a belief in the rule of law and a willingness to accept the results of elections that dont go your way.

Of course, the idea that loose morals destroy great powers goes back centuries. In the Hollywood version of history, the Roman Empire fell because its elites were too busy with orgies to attend to the business of defeating barbarians. Actually, the timing is all wrong on that story, but Ill get back to that in a minute.

Todays right-wingers seem bothered less by weakness from sexual license than by weakness from gender equality: Tucker Carlson warned that Chinas military was becoming more masculine while ours was becoming more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no longer exist. Senator Ted Cruz retweeted a video comparing a U.S. Army recruiting video with footage of a Russian paratrooper with a shaved head and declared that a woke, emasculated military might not be a good idea.

It would be interesting to know what has happened to that paratrooper since Putin invaded Ukraine. In any case, the heavy casualties suffered by Russias anti-woke military as it failed to overrun vastly inferior Ukrainian forces have confirmed what anyone who has studied history knows: Modern wars arent won with swaggering machismo. Courage and endurance, physical and moral, are as essential as ever; but so are more mundane things like logistics, vehicle maintenance and communications systems that actually work.

By the way, I cant help mentioning that recent events have also confirmed the truism that many, perhaps most men who pose as tough guys arent. Putins response to failure in Ukraine has been extremely Trumpian: insisting that his invasion is all going according to plan, refusing to admit having made any mistakes and whining about cancel culture. Im half expecting him to release battle maps crudely modified with a Sharpie.

But back to the kind of decadence that really matters.

As I said, the Hollywood version of Romes decline and fall doesnt stand up under examination. True, the spoils of empire made it possible for a few people to live in great luxury, possibly including the occasional orgy; the closest modern counterpart to that elite would be Russian oligarchs. But Rome retained its territorial integrity and military effectiveness for centuries after the emergence of that pampered, libertine elite.

So what did go wrong? Historians have many theories, but surely a big factor was the erosion of norms that had helped establish political legitimacy, and the ever-growing willingness of some Romans, especially after around 180 C.E., to use violence against one another.

Obviously whats going on in the U.S. today bears no detailed resemblance to the troubles of the ancient world. Yet these days not a month goes by without further revelations that a large part of Americas body politic, very much including members of the political elite, has contempt for democratic principles and will do whatever it takes to win.

Its incredible how quickly weve normalized the fact that the last president tried to retain power despite losing the election and that a mob he incited stormed the Capitol. Many people took part in the effort to overturn the election among them, we recently learned, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice, who hasnt even recused himself in cases about the attempted coup.

And while Donald Trumps effort to stay in office failed, most of his party has, in effect, retroactively backed that effort.

Why is that relevant to Ukraine? Putin effectively bet that an effete West would stand by as he carried out his conquest. Instead, President Biden very effectively mobilized a democratic alliance that has rushed aid to Ukraine and helped humiliate the aggressor.

But the next time something like this happens, America might not lead an effective alliance of democracies, because we ourselves will have given up on democratic values.

And that, if you ask me, is what real decadence looks like.

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Opinion | Putin and the Myths of Western Decadence - The New York Times

Germany has some advice for Russian President Vladimir Putin: think about the consequences of asking for energy payments in rubles.

Russia's Putin said last week that "unfriendly" nations would be asked to pay for their natural gas in rubles causing a spike in European gas prices.

By asking for payments in the Russian currency rather than in dollars or euros, as is contracted Putin is seeking to prop up the value of rubles, which sank in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. dollar is up almost 13% against the Russian ruble since Feb. 24, when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, after spiking around 85% in early March.

However, Germany's Finance Minister Christian Lindner said he would not be strong-armed by Russian demands.

"We are completely against any kind of blackmailing. These treaties are based on euro and [U.S.] dollar and so we suggest that private sector companies to pay [Russia] in euro or dollar," Lindner told CNBC's Annette Weisbach Monday.

"If Putin is not willing to accept this, it's open to him to think about consequences," he added.

Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz said last week that paying for oil in rubles would be a breach of contract, and Italian officials also said they would not be paying in rubles as doing so would help Russia avoid Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine.

Nonetheless, tensions over future payments could disrupt the ongoing flow of natural gas from Russia to Europe. The region receives about 40% of its gas imports from Russia and this figure is even higher for some European nations, notably Hungary which got 95% of its gas imports in 2020 from Russia.

The region's dependency on Russian energy has prevented the bloc from imposing an oil embargo on Moscow as part of its sanctions regime in contrast the White House, which has banned Russian oil and gas imports.

The European Union has said it will overhaul its approach to Russian energy and reduce its long-standing dependency. A plan put forward earlier this month suggested to cut Russian gas imports by two-thirds before the end of the year.

"We will find solutions. We are working on less dependency on Russian imports and if [Putin] decides to cut his supplies, we would have to be even faster to be independent from Russia," Lindner said.

The region is now scrambling to source its energy from elsewhere. The United States, for instance, announced Friday a new deal with the European Union to supply the bloc with 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas this year.

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Putin should think about the consequences of asking for energy payments in rubles, Germany says - CNBC