Category Archives: Russia

MOSCOW President Vladimir V. Putin has ushered in a crisis for his country in its economy and identity.

The Kremlin is hiding the reality of the countrys attack on Ukraine from its own people, even cracking down on news outlets that call it a war.

But the economic carnage and societal turmoil wrought by Mr. Putins invasion are becoming increasingly difficult to obscure.

Airlines canceled once-ubiquitous flights to Europe. The Central Bank scrambled to deliver ruble bills as the demand for cash spiked 58-fold. Economists warned of more inflation, greater capital flight and slower growth; and the S&P credit rating agency downgraded Russia to junk status.

The emphasis on hiding the wars true extent was a sign that the Kremlin fears that Russians would disapprove of a violent, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a country where many millions of Russians have relatives and friends.

Even so, more public figures with ties to the state spoke out against the war, including a lawmaker in Russias rubber-stamp Parliament. Business owners tried to assess the consequences of an economic crisis that appeared already to be beginning, even before sanctions were fully in place.

Facing the greatest test yet of its reality-distorting prowess, the Kremlins propaganda machine for the moment appeared to be keeping widespread opposition to the war in check. There were no signs that the war could undermine Mr. Putins hold on power, and in the event of a speedy victory, analysts noted, it could end up strengthening it.

But the enormous risks of the war, along with the economic pressure the country was suddenly under, have created a new and more treacherous reality for both the Kremlin and Russias 145 million people.

Russians have been stunned at how quickly the economic impact of the war was being felt. The ruble hit its lowest level ever against the dollar, which traded at about 84 rubles on Saturday compared to 74 a few weeks ago. That sent prices for imports surging, while sanctions on Russias largest banks wreaked havoc in the financial markets and new export restrictions promised to scramble supply chains.

Those who shout that Putin is great and bravo to him are no longer shouting as loud, said Lalya Sadykova, the owner of a chain of beauty salons in St. Petersburg. Theyre in shock from what is happening, from how quickly prices are changing and how suppliers are stopping deliveries.

The chief executive of one of Russias biggest electronics retailers, DNS, said on Thursday that a supply crunch had forced his chain to raise prices some 30 percent. Days earlier, the chief executive, Dmitri Alekseyev, had posted on Facebook: For the life of me I cant understand why Russia needs a war.

I understand that the prices in stores provoke frustration, Mr. Alekseyev wrote. But thats the reality.

S7, Russias second-largest airline, suspended all of its flights to Europe because of airspace closures to Russian companies, an early sign that the cheap and easy travel to the West that middle-class Russians had grown used to could become a thing of the past. Photos of retailers changing or removing their price tags went viral on social media.

Were all waiting for what happens next, said Anastasia Baranova, describing a wave of cancellations on Friday at the hotel she runs in St. Petersburg. Its as though the whole country is on pause.

The Kremlin rushed to maintain its narrative, signaling the start of a new and more brutal phase in its long-running crackdown on dissent. The governments communications regulator slowed down access to Facebook and warned 10 Russian news outlets that their websites could be blocked. The outlets declared offense was publishing articles in which the operation that is being carried out is called an attack, an invasion or a declaration of war.

Even as a vicious battle for Kyiv unfolded on Saturday morning, a Russian Defense Ministry statement about the situation in Ukraine made no mention of the Ukrainian capital or any Russian casualties. The ministry, which typically releases sleek and copious footage daily of the Russian military in action, published no videos of its combat operations in Ukraine.

And Russias state-run news channel on Saturday showed footage of a peaceful day in Kyiv to try to counter the videos of violence spreading on the social network Telegram.

As you can see, the situation in the cities is calm, the anchor said. No explosions, no bombings, unlike what some of the Telegram channels are writing.

March 6, 2022, 7:39 p.m. ET

A hint of the potential opposition came on Saturday when Mikhail Matveyev, a Communist lawmaker who had voted to endorse Mr. Putins recognition of the Russian-backed separatist territories, wrote on Twitter that he had been tricked.

I was voting for peace, and not for war, he wrote, and not for Kyiv to be bombed.

It was a rare crack in the firmament of the Parliament, where dissent over Mr. Putins key foreign policy decisions has been virtually nonexistent in recent years. Tatyana Yumasheva, the daughter of former President Boris N. Yeltsin who helped bring Mr. Putin to power, posted an antiwar message on Facebook.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, a sleek showcase of a Westward-looking Russia founded by the Kremlin-friendly oligarch Roman Abramovich, declared it would cease working on new exhibits until the human and political tragedy ceased in Ukraine.

We cannot keep up the illusion of normality, the museum said. We see ourselves as part of a greater world that is not broken up by war.

Still, it appeared on Saturday that the Kremlins enforced blinders were doing their job, as were the clear dangers of voicing dissent. The spontaneous antiwar rallies that brought several thousand people to the streets in cities across the country on Thursday, with more than 1,500 arrests, were not repeated at that scale on Friday.

While many in Russias intellectual elite voiced horror and the fence across from the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow filled up with flowers, there was little evidence of a broader groundswell of opposition.

Protests in Russia. Amid antiwar rallies across Russia, the police said more than 3,000 people were arrested Sunday, the highest nationwide total in any single day of protest in recent memory. An activist group that tracks arrests reported detentions in 49 different Russian cities.

The propaganda is working very well, said Anastasia Nikolskaya, a Moscow sociologist. Its not that anyone is welcoming the war, but it is being seen as a last-ditch measure that is necessary.

The main determining factor for what comes next, of course, will be what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine the longer the war lasts and the greater the loss of life and destruction, the more difficult it will be for the Kremlin to cast the war as a limited operation not directed against the Ukrainian people.

Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government, said he believed that the Kremlin expected the fighting to last no more than two weeks.

If Russia forced a capitulation of the Ukrainian army within that time, with limited destruction and limited Russian and civilian casualties, Mr. Kortunov said, Mr. Putin should be able to count on continuing domestic support.

But if the war does not go according to plan, Mr. Kortunov cautioned, the country could see serious political consequences and consequences for the popularity of the leadership.

Victory will write off a lot not everything, but a lot, Mr. Kortunov said. If there is no victory, then there may be some complications because of course, many doubt that there were no other policy alternatives.

There were indications that recent days were only the beginning of a new chapter in Mr. Putins conflict with the West and of his crackdown on freedoms at home. Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putins security council, speculated in a social-media post on Saturday that Russia might reintroduce the death penalty or seize foreigners assets in Russia as a response to Western sanctions.

The interesting part is only beginning , he wrote.

Despite the economic pain, sanctions are unlikely to alter Russias course in the near term, analysts say. Russia has the reserves to prop up the ruble, and the Kremlin has worked to insulate the economy from external shocks since it was hit by sanctions over the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The real cost of sanctions will be Russias long-term development, said Yevgeny Nadorshin, chief economist at the PF Capital consulting company in Moscow. Incomes will further stagnate, and the countrys middle class will continue shrinking. Many of the countrys manufacturers that launched the production of modern trains, cars and other products over the past decade will face serious trouble if the West bans technology exports to Russia, he said.

The country will be stable, Mr. Nadorshin said. However, he added, this stability will resemble a swamp where nothing happens and changes even as forests burn around it.

Some reeds will bloom in this swamp, but there will only be scorched land around it, said Mr. Nadorshin. You can get into that swamp, but you will get stuck in it and you may eventually drown.

And beyond the economic impact of the war, many Russians could not yet imagine coming to terms with living in a country that had launched an unprovoked assault on its neighbor. A steady stream of people came to the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow on Friday, bringing flowers. A police officer prevented a woman from also leaving a small sign that said: Yes to peace.

I fear meeting Ukrainians and looking them in the eye, said a designer, Aleksei, 28, declining to give his last name for fear of repercussions from the security services. That is the scariest thing of all.

Alina Lobzina and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow.

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Russia's War With Ukraine Is Already Costing Russian Economy - The New York Times

NAIROBI, Kenya Since the days of Nelson Mandela, South Africas leaders have rejected American criticism of their friendships with autocrats like Fidel Castro of Cuba and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya, whose countries backed them during the most desperate moments of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Now South Africans are defending their loyalty to another autocrat Vladimir V. Putin and sitting out the global outcry over his invasion of Ukraine.

At the United Nations on Wednesday, South Africa was among 24 African countries that declined to join the resounding vote denouncing Russian aggression: 16 African countries abstained, seven didnt vote at all and one Eritrea voted against it, keeping company only with Russia, Belarus, Syria and North Korea.

The striking tally reflected the ambiguous attitude across much of the continent where, with a handful of exceptions, the Ukraine war has been greeted with conspicuous silence a sharp contrast with Western countries that are expanding sanctions, seizing oligarchs yachts, pressing for war crimes investigations, and even openly threatening to collapse the Russian economy.

Russia is our friend through and through, Lindiwe Zulu, South Africas minister of social development, who studied in Moscow during the apartheid years, said in an interview. We are not about to denounce that relationship that we have always had.

Many African countries have a longstanding affinity with Russia stretching back to the Cold War: some political and military leaders studied there, and trade links have grown. And in recent years a growing number of countries have contracted with Russian mercenaries and bought ever-greater quantities of Russian weapons.

A few African countries have condemned Russian aggression as an attack on the international order, notably Kenya and Ghana. Some 25 African nations voted for the U.N. resolution that denounced Mr. Putins actions on Wednesday. But deep divisions in the continents response were apparent from the start.

The deputy leader of Sudan flew into Moscow on the first day of the conflict, exchanging warm handshakes with Russias foreign minister as warplanes bombed Ukrainian cities. Morocco, a longtime American ally, offered a watery statement, annoying American officials who nonetheless kept quiet.

In Ethiopia, Russian flags flew at a ceremony on Wednesday to commemorate a famous 19th century battle against Italian invaders, recalling the involvement of Russian volunteers who sided with Ethiopian fighters.

African sympathies for Ukraine were also diluted by reports of Ukrainian border guards forcing African students to the back of lines as they attempted to leave the country, raising a furor over racism and discrimination. President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, which has 4,000 students in Ukraine, decried the reports.

Mr. Putin has partly sidestepped opprobrium in Africa by calling in chits that date back to the Cold War, when Moscow backed African liberation movements and presented itself as a bulwark against Western neocolonialism. On Sunday, Russias foreign ministry paused its focus on Ukraine to remind South Africa, in a Tweet, of its support for the fight against apartheid.

But Mr. Putin has also divided African opinion thanks to his own efforts to expand Russian influence across the continent through an unusual combination of diplomacy, guns and mercenaries.

In an effort to regain some of the influence that Moscow lost in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Putin hosted a glitzy summit in the southern Russian city of Sochi in 2019 that was attended by 43 African heads of state. A second Russia-Africa summit is scheduled for this fall.

March 6, 2022, 9:33 p.m. ET

But as Russias economy strained under Western sanctions imposed following the annexation of the Crimea in 2014, it could not afford the expensive enticements offered by other powers in Africa, like Chinas cheap loans or Western development aid.

So it has offered no-questions weapons sales and the services of Russian mercenaries, many employed by the Wagner Group, a company linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Mr. Putin who is known as Putins cook.

In recent years, Wagner mercenaries have fought in civil wars in Libya and Mozambique, and are currently guarding the president of the Central African Republic, where they helped repel a rebel assault on the capital last year.

In January, Wagner fighters appeared in Mali, as part of a deal to combat Islamist insurgents that infuriated France, the former colonial power, which last month declared it was pulling its own soldiers out of Mali.

The military junta ruling Mali denies inviting Wagner into the country, but U.S. military officials say as many as 1,000 Russian mercenaries are already operating there.

Russias influence also stems from weapons sales. Russia accounts for nearly half of all arms imports into Africa, according to Russias arms export agency and organizations that monitor weapons transfers.

Protests in Russia. Amid antiwar rallies across Russia, the police said more than 3,000 people were arrested Sunday, the highest nationwide total in any single day of protest in recent memory. An activist group that tracks arrests reported detentions in 49 different Russian cities.

One of Mr. Putins staunchest defenders in the past week was a powerful figure in Uganda, a major customer for Russian weapons. Lt Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of Ugandas President Yoweri Museveni, said in a Tweet:

The majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russias stand in Ukraine.

He added, When the USSR parked nuclear armed missiles in Cuba in 1962, the West was ready to blow up the world over it. Now when NATO does the same they expect Russia to do differently.

That reference highlighted a jarring contradiction in Mr. Putins new embrace of Africa, said Maxim Matusevich, a history professor at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, who studies Russias relationships in Africa.

During the Cold War, the Soviets were trying to sell socialism to African nations while criticizing Western colonialism and imperialism, he said. Now, Russia is engaged in a fresh bid for influence in Africa, but driven by right-wing nationalism.

A similar divide has emerged in Asia, where nations with authoritarian leaders or weak ties to the West have embraced Mr. Putins war or avoided criticism of Russian military aggression.

For Africans, the war could hit hard in the pocket. Last week the Automobile Association of South Africa predicted that rising fuel prices would reach a record high in the coming weeks. Food is getting more expensive too Russia and Ukraine are major sources of wheat and fertilizer in Africa at a time when many African countries are still reeling from the pandemic.

But the war could also have an economic upside for Africa, albeit one that could take years to be felt. As Europe pivots away from Russian gas imports, it could turn to African countries looking to exploit recently-discovered energy reserves.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania, which is seeking a $30 billion investment to tap a huge gas discovery in the Indian Ocean, said the invasion of Ukraine could provide an opportunity.

Whether Africa or Europe or America, we are looking for markets, she told The Africa Report, an online news outlet.

Elsewhere, though, Mr. Putin is still benefiting from his image as a thorn in the Wests side. Many South Africans remember that the United States supported the apartheid regime until the 1980s. South Africans also took a sour view of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Sithembile Mbete, a senior lecturer in political science and international relations at the University of Pretoria.

However, aside from the historical ties with Russia, South Africa is motivated to call for diplomacy rather than fighting because that approach aligns with the countrys stance on international conflicts for the past 30 years, she said.

That is the lesson they took from South Africas own struggle that actually apartheid ended when the two sides sat down at the table, Ms. Mebete said. When it came down to it, the conflict only ended through negotiation and through compromise.

Reporting was contributed by Abdi Latif Dahir in Nairobi, Kenya, Ruth Maclean in Dakar, Senegal, Lynsey Chutel in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Aida Alami in Casablanca, Morocco.

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Shunned by Others, Russia Finds Friends in Africa - The New York Times

LONDON In Switzerland, the Lucerne music festival canceled two symphony concerts featuring a Russian maestro. In Australia, the national swim team said it would boycott a world championship meet in Russia. At the Magic Mountain Ski Area in Vermont, a bartender poured bottles of Stolichnaya vodka down the drain.

From culture to commerce, sports to travel, the world is shunning Russia in myriad ways to protest President Vladimir V. Putins invasion of Ukraine. Not since the frigid days of the Cold War have so many doors closed on Russia and its people a worldwide repudiation driven as much by the impulse to show solidarity with besieged Ukrainians as by any hope that it will force Mr. Putin to pull back his troops.

The boycotts and cancellations are piling up in parallel with the sanctions imposed by the United States, Europe, and other powers. Although these grass-roots gestures inflict less harm on Russias economy than sweeping restrictions on Russian banks or the mothballing of a natural gas pipeline, they carry a potent symbolic punch, leaving millions of ordinary Russians isolated in an interconnected world.

Among the most visible targets of this opprobrium are cultural icons like Valery Gergiev, the conductor and a longtime backer of Mr. Putin. He has been dropped by Lucerne, Carnegie Hall, La Scala in Milan, and faces imminent dismissal by the Munich Philharmonic, where he is chief conductor, unless he disavows the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has been banned from this years Eurovision Song Contest, which it last won in 2008, with Dima Bilan performing his power ballad, Believe. Russias Formula 1 Grand Prix, scheduled for September in Sochi, has been scrapped. St. Petersburg has lost the Champions League soccer final, which was relocated to Paris.

Russias World Cup hopes were dashed on Monday after a dozen countries joined Poland in refusing to play its national soccer team in qualifying rounds. Under intense pressure, soccers two main governing bodies, FIFA and UEFA, ruled that Russia was ineligible to play in their tournaments. In Germany, the soccer club Schalke severed a sponsorship deal with the Russian oil giant Gazprom. The National Hockey League also suspended its business dealings in Russia.

Also on Monday, Greece announced that it would suspend all collaborations with Russian cultural organizations. A French former ballet star, Laurent Hilaire, resigned as the director of the Stanislavksi Theatre Company in Moscow, saying that the context no longer allows me to work with peace of mind.

Canceling all these cultural exchanges and sporting events will be felt by the Russian population, said Angela E. Stent, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book, Putins World. Unfortunately, at the Kremlin level, it will be seen as just another example of the West trying to paint us into a corner.

It will become part of the narrative of victimhood, which weve heard from Putin in spades over the last few weeks, Ms. Stent said. The boycotts affect the people involved in those events, but were talking about Putin and the few people around him. Im not sure its going to make him change his mind.

The last time the countrys leaders provoked such a global backlash was in 1980 when the United States, West Germany, Japan, and Canada boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow to protest the Soviet Unions invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviets retaliated by skipping the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

That was during the depths of the Cold War, when Hollywood released jingoistic films like Red Dawn, about a fictional Soviet invasion of Colorado, and more than 100 million Americans tuned into The Day After, a television movie about a calamitous nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Olympics boycott had a major impact on popular sentiment, according to Russia experts, because the then-Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, had presented them as a simulacrum of Soviet power and influence, much as Mr. Putin has framed the invasion of Ukraine in terms of reclaiming Russian greatness.

The Soviet government had to explain why the United States and other countries werent there, said Michael A. McFaul, a former American ambassador to Russia. It began to affect the way that Soviet citizens saw themselves in the world.

Though Russian villains remained a Hollywood staple, the countrys black-hat image faded after the collapse of the Communist regime. Younger Russians grew up in a relatively open, if rough-and-tumble, society. Those with money had access to a foreign education and European holidays, where the hosts catered to free-spending Russians.

In Jerusalem, Russian-speaking Israelis flocked to the popular Putin Pub, where the name seemed a lark no more problematic than the bars late-night Russian karaoke. On Thursday, the Russian-born owners stripped the golden P-U-T-I-N letters from its facade and announced that they were looking for a new name.

March 6, 2022, 9:33 p.m. ET

It was our initiative, said Yulia Kaplan, one of the three owners, who moved to Israel from St. Petersburg in 1991. Because we are against war.

Israel, in its own way, serves as an example of the limits of these kinds of boycotts. For years, critics of its occupation of the West Bank have tried to pressure the government through the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. While it has had successes, it has antagonized people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide and failed to pressure successive Israeli leaders to change policy toward the Palestinians.

Such boycotts wont change Putins mind, for sure, said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel. But it will boost the morale of the Ukrainians to know that people around the world are on their side. And it will put the oligarchs on the spot in a way that I suspect financial sanctions will not.

Still, the backlash will hit ordinary Russians hard as well. Already, they cannot fly to London and large swaths of the European Union because of bans on Russian flights. Canada closed its airspace to Russian planes on Sunday and announced it was investigating the Russian carrier, Aeroflot, for violating the restrictions.

Middle-class Russians have been going to Turkey to vacation for a decade, Mr. McFaul said. Now they will have to wonder: Will their credit cards work? Will their money be worth anything?

In capitals from Madrid to London, tens of thousands of people marched in solidarity with the Ukrainians and against the Russian invasion. In Ottawa, the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, the backdrop for three weeks of trucker protests in the Canadian capital, was lighted up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

In Rio de Janeiro, where the invasion coincided with the start of the annual Carnival festival, people wore costumes and carried signs related to the conflict. Drop acid, not bombs, one sign said in English.

Protests in Russia. Amid antiwar rallies across Russia, the police said more than 3,000 people were arrested Sunday, the highest nationwide total in any single day of protest in recent memory. An activist group that tracks arrests reported detentions in 49 different Russian cities.

The totality of it the sanctions, the cheering football fans for the Ukrainians, the crowds marching in Berlin and Prague I do think it matters because it makes Russians feel isolated, Mr. McFaul said.

That is likely to deepen the opposition of some Russians to the invasion, he said, particularly among urban, educated elites. These people have access to the internet and are aware of the scornful reaction to Mr. Putins aggression. But among those who live in more provincial areas, where the media is tightly controlled by the government, the backlash against Russia could breed further resentment.

Some cultural institutions have tailored their actions against people who are known for their close ties to Mr. Putin. The Metropolitan Opera, for example, said it would no longer work with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him, Peter Gelb, the Mets general manager, said in a video statement.

That has prompted a show of defiance from some Russian artists. The star soprano Anna Netrebko, who is scheduled to perform at the Met in Puccinis Turandot in April, has tried to distance herself from the Russian invasion. But she also posted on her Instagram account, forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.

Not all cultural exchanges have been sundered. A blockbuster show of French and Russian paintings at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris remains open.

The exhibit showcasing 200 works collected by two 20th-century Russian textile magnates grew out of high-level discussions between President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Putin and the chief executive of LVMH, Bernard Arnault. Both leaders signed contributions to the exhibits catalog, and Mr. Putin signed off on loans for the paintings.

For many, however, the idea of supporting Russia is simply intolerable. Pennsylvania, Utah, Ohio, New Hampshire, and other states, as well as Canada, have pulled Russian-branded vodka off the shelves of liquor stores.

In some cases, the gesture is misplaced: Stolichnaya, though historically a Russian brand, is manufactured in Riga, Latvia. In Brazil, a So Paulo bar has renamed its Moscow Mule a drink that was concocted in the United States and is made with vodka, ginger beer, and lime as a U.N. Mule.

Were not too happy with what Moscow has done, with what Russia has done, said the bars co-owner, Maurcio Meirelles, a well-known comedian and television host in Brazil. And then we thought about changing the name, he added. The U.N. Mule: the drink that isnt attacking anyone.

Reporting was contributed by Jack Nicas in Rio de Janeiro, Andre Spigariol in Braslia, Aurelien Breeden in Paris, Raphael Minder in Madrid, Elisabetta Povoledo in Rome, Carlotta Gall in Istanbul, Niki Kitsantonis in Athens, Vjosa Isai in Ottawa, Livia Albeck-Ripka in California and Isabel Kershner in Jerusalem.

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Invasion Brings Russia Global Repudiation With Cold War Echoes - The New York Times

Former President Donald Trump, in remarks to top Republican National Committee donors Saturday evening, renewed his criticism of NATO, hinted again at another run for the White House and suggested that the role played by the "vote counter is oftentimes more important than the candidate" in elections.

Trump's remarks came about 24 hours after former Vice President Mike Pence took several shots at Trump during his address to the same donor retreat, which is taking place in New Orleans.

Pence told them Friday evening that "there is no room in this party for apologists for Putin" days after Trump had referred to the Russian president as "smart" and "savvy." On Saturday evening, Trump mentioned that "somebody called me a Putin apologist the other day," but didn't bring up Pence, according to a source.

And whereas Pence defended NATO in his remarks, Trump showed he still thinks little of the alliance, dismissing it as a "paper tiger," according to a source.

"Are all of these nations going to stand by and watch perhaps millions of people be slaughtered as the onslaught continues?" Trump said, according to a source. "At what point do countries say, 'No, we can't take this massive crime against humanity?' We can't let it happen. We can't let it continue to happen."

The U.S. and NATO allies have ruled out sending troops to help Ukraine to avoid an escalation of the conflict, but have provided military equipment, funding, humanitarian aid and diplomatic support. The U.S. and European countries have also issued strict sanctions against Russia over the invasion.

Trump joked about the conflict, too, though, telling donors that the U.S. should put the "put the Chinese flag" on F-22 fighter jets and "bomb the s***" out of Russia.

"And then we say, China did it," he said, to laughter in the room, according to the source. "Then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch." The Washington Post first reported Trump's comments about Russia and China.

Trump derided President Biden over his handling of Russia, and hammered him for his openness about what actions the U.S. would and would not take to curtail Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

"We have to have Biden stop saying that and this is for everyone to hear that we will not attack Russia ever because they are a nuclear power, right?" Trump said, according to a source. "You know who is saying this? Okay, whether it's fact or fiction, 'We will not attack Russia. You see, they are a nuclear power.' Oh, thanks for telling us."

Pence, in his address Friday, warned the party's top donors that dwelling on the 2020 election would damage its future prospects, insisting that the Republican Party "cannot win by fighting yesterday's battles, or by relitigating the past." He drew a stark contrast with Trump, who rarely speaks publicly without raising baseless allegations that the election was rigged. He did so again Saturday. The lesson Trump took from 2020 was this:

"The vote counter is oftentimes more important than the candidate and the Republicans are going to have to get a lot tougher," he said, according to a source, shortly after he falsely asserted that he has won "two presidential elections."

Trump is still popular in many circles of the Republican Party. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans said they want Trump to run for president again in 2024, according to a recent CBS News poll. And he has been indulging the idea that he'll run again.

"We will see a Republican president reclaim that magnificent White House in 2024," Trump said, according to a source in the room. "I wonder who that might be."

The comment elicited some "Trump" chants from the crowd, according to a source.

Trump is still annoyed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and has been trying unsuccessfully to find a GOP senator to replace him as the Republican leader. Trump referred to him Saturday as "stupid, corrupt Mitch McConnell" and elicited some applause, according to a source.

And as he has in the past, Trump made light of climate change, dismissing it as a "hoax," and he joked that rising sea levels will lead to "more waterfront property." The donor event in New Orleans was held just weeks after federal officials warned Louisiana's coastal water levels could rise by a foot and a half by 2050.

The former president also weighed in briefly on the North Carolina Senate GOP primary. Trump has endorsed Representative Ted Budd and told donors, according to a source, that Republicans need to get former Representative Mark Walker "out of that race." Walker filed for the Senate run last week, defying Trump's wishes that he run for a fourth term in the House instead.

Pence and Trump's appearances on back-to-back nights could be a preview of what's to come in 2024 if both men decide to run for president. At a private CPAC event last week, in response to a question about a 2024 presidential run, Trump told supporters they would be "very happy" and added that he knew who they "don't want as your VP."

Pence has been airing his disagreements with Trump more openly lately. Last month, he said that "Trump is wrong" for claiming Pence had the authority to overturn the presidential election, and he has said he doesn't know whether he and Trump will "ever see eye-to-eye" about the January 6 attack at the Capitol.

CBS News political reporter.

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Trump renews NATO criticism after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and also says "vote counter" can be more important than candidate - CBS News

The PayPal app shown on an iPhone.

Katja Knupper | DeFodi Images | Getty Images

PayPal said Saturday it was suspending its services in Russia, adding to the number of firms retreating from the country in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

"Under the current circumstances, we are suspending PayPal services in Russia," Dan Schulman, PayPal's CEO, said in a letter addressed to the Ukrainian government.

The letter was posted on Twitter by Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, who has pressured businesses including Apple to Microsoft to cut ties with Russia.

"So now it's official: PayPal shuts down its services in Russia citing Ukraine aggression," Fedorov tweeted Saturday. "Thank you @PayPal for your supporting!"

A PayPal spokesperson confirmed the company was shutting down in Russia. The company will "continue work to process customer withdraws for period of time, ensuring that account balances are dispersed in line with applicable laws and regulations," the spokesperson told CNBC.

The payment processor had already discontinued domestic services in Russia in 2020. This latest action relates to its remaining business in the country, including send and receive functions and the ability to make international transfers via PayPal's Xoom remittances platform.

Russians were prevented from opening new PayPal accounts earlier this week, the company said.

PayPal is the latest payment organization to sever ties with Russia, which now faces a barrage of sanctions from the West over President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine.

Sanctions saw SWIFT, the global interbank messaging network, bar several Russian banks, while Visa and Mastercard this week said they would also block Russian financial institutions from their networks.

"It's now basically impossible to send money to any individual in Russia," said Charles Delingpole, CEO of ComplyAdvantage, a fintech start-up that helps firms with regulatory compliance.

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PayPal suspends its services in Russia over Ukraine war - CNBC

MOSCOW For two decades under President Vladimir V. Putin, Russians reaped the bounties of capitalism and globalization: cheap flights, affordable mortgages, a plethora of imported gadgets and cars.

On Monday, those perks of modern life were abruptly disappearing, replaced by a crush of anxiety as sanctions imposed by the West in retaliation for Moscows invasion of Ukraine rattled the foundations of Russias financial system.

The ruble cratered, losing a quarter of its value, and the central bank shuttered stock trading in Moscow through Tuesday. The public rushed to withdraw cash from A.T.M.s, and Aeroflot, the national airline, canceled all its flights to Europe after countries banned Russian planes from using their air space. Concern about travel was so great that some people rushed to book seats on the few international flights still operating.

Ive become one concentrated ball of fear, said the owner of a small advertising agency in Moscow, Azaliya Idrisova, 33. She said she planned to depart for Argentina in the coming days and was not sure whether her clients would still pay her.

Compounding the pain was the decision by Western countries to restrict the Russian Central Banks access to much of its $643 billion in foreign currency reserves, undoing some of the Kremlins careful efforts to soften the impact of potential sanctions and making it difficult for the bank to prop up the ruble.

Other moves struck at the heart of critical Russian industries. Shell, a company that for years helped Russia profit from its energy riches, said it was exiting all its joint ventures with Gazprom, Russias largest state-owned natural gas company following BPs announcement Sunday it would sell its stake in the Russian state-run oil giant Rosneft. Volvo said it would stop production at its truck factory in Russia, and Mercedes-Benz said it would drop its partnership with a Russian truck maker.

And in a sign of how the sanctions were hitting regular Russians in ways big and small, Apple Pay and Google Pay stopped working at many of Moscows subway turnstiles the ones operated by a bank on the American sanctions list.

For many Russians opposed to the war, those hardships paled in comparison to the moral cost of seeing their country launch an unprovoked invasion. Antiwar protests continued across Russia, with at least 411 people detained in 13 cities, according to OVD Info, a rights group that tallies arrests, for a total of at least 6,435 detentions since last Thursday.

But the financial jolt offered tangible evidence of the Wests outrage, one that is now washing over Russias economy with unpredictable consequences.

The sanctions announced by the European Union and the United States over the weekend, J.P. Morgan analysts wrote to clients on Monday, are more severe and wider than even the more extreme sanctions we had believed were in play just a month ago. By Monday evening, the European Union had added more Russian business tycoons to its sanctions list, including two owners of Alfa Bank, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, who had cut a relatively Western-friendly image.

Some analysts worried that the wide-ranging sanctions, combined with Ukraines ferocious resistance on the battlefield, could lead Mr. Putin to escalate the crisis. The Defense Ministry issued a statement saying that the bombers, submarines and land-based launchers that make up Russias nuclear triad had been put on enhanced combat duty, as Mr. Putin had ordered on Sunday. Rumors circulated that men could be called up if the military got bogged down in Ukraine.

I realized that this government has gone utterly mad, said Ivan Petrov, 28, a Moscow machine learning engineer who flew to the Egyptian resort of Hurghada over the weekend, fearing the war in Ukraine could escalate to the point that he might get drafted. His next goal: Find a job in the West.

March 6, 2022, 9:33 p.m. ET

Earning in rubles seems absolutely pointless, Mr. Petrov said.

On Monday, the sanctions full force hit Russias already stagnant economy.

Russias Central Bank, its reserves largely frozen, more than doubled its key rate to 20 percent to try to stabilize the ruble. A dollar cost more than 110 rubles at kiosks in Moscow on Monday compared with about 80 a week earlier, potentially devaluing peoples savings given the likely increase in the price of imported goods. In trading in London, shares of Sberbank, Russias largest bank, lost three-quarters of their value. The vice president of the countrys real estate agents association declared that Russians could say goodbye to the mortgage.

To stem the flight of capital, Mr. Putin on Monday signed an order rolling back some of the free-market capitalism that had integrated post-Soviet Russia into the world economy. Russian exporters were required to convert 80 percent of their foreign-currency revenues since Jan. 1 into rubles; residents of Russia were banned from depositing money into accounts outside the country.

Mr. Putin called an emergency meeting on the economy with senior officials, in which he repeated his reference last week to the West as an empire of lies.

Our financial system and our economy have collided with a totally non-standard situation, Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank, said afterward.

Protests in Russia. Amid antiwar rallies across Russia, the police said more than 3,000 people were arrested Sunday, the highest nationwide total in any single day of protest in recent memory. An activist group that tracks arrests reported detentions in 49 different Russian cities.

In a stark sign of the fury in the West over Russias attack on Ukraine, even Switzerland a favorite destination and banking hub of Russian oligarchs and senior Kremlin officials ditched its traditional neutrality and joined in European sanctions, including personal ones against Mr. Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov.

There were signs of anger in the elite, though not among the security establishment closest to Mr. Putin. Ms. Nabiullina, who has said in the past that her outfit choices are meant to send messages, wore funereal black. Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, wrote on social media that he wanted to know whos really going to pay for this whole party. Vyacheslav Markhayev, a lawmaker from Siberia, declared that the Kremlin hid plans to start a full-scale war against our closest neighbor.

Countries should spend money on treating people, on research to defeat cancer, and not on war, Oleg Tinkov, the billionaire founder of one of Russias biggest consumer banks, wrote on Instagram.

Stanislav Usaty, owner of a marketing agency in St. Petersburg, said he expected to lose many of his clients because of the higher exchange rate, especially companies selling imports; he said he would probably need to lay off staff. Aleksandra Gridina, the owner of a travel agency in the city, said she would need to raise prices for international tours that her clients had already booked.

Its a catastrophe for our business, she said.

Still, while there was confusion at the subway turnstiles and lines formed at A.T.M.s and banks, there was no full-fledged financial panic among the general public. And it was far from clear whether the sanctions would help turn more Russians against the war or whether they would only increase their resentment of the West, confirming the Kremlin narrative that the United States and Europe were determined to dismantle their country.

Times change, much has happened, but one thing has not changed, a reporter on the state-run news channel Rossiya 24 said on Sunday. When a united Europe tried to destroy Russia, this always ended up bringing about the opposite result.

The backbone of Mr. Putins power is made up of security officials who rarely leave Russia and stand to gain from greater state control over the economy. In the broader public, he draws his core support from pensioners and state employees, who are less sensitive to economic volatility than those in the private sector.

Shopping for groceries in Moscow on Monday, Valentina V. Petrova, 85, who said she used to work on Russias Proton space rockets, said the economic troubles did not faze her.

I think the president did everything right, she said.

Mr. Petrov, the engineer who flew to Egypt, said his parents also supported the war. And older Russians, he noted, had seen their share of ups and downs.

They survived many other Russian crises, he said. Theyre calm about this.

Alina Lobzina and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow, and Jeanna Smialek from Washington.

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Russians Face Sanctions and Anxieties of a Costly War - The New York Times

The world must prepare for "even darker days ahead" over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Boris Johnson has said.

Writing in the New York Times, the prime minister said Western nations have "failed to learn the lessons of Russian behaviour" that led to Vladimir Putin launching his assault last month.

Live updates on Russia's invasion of Ukraine

Key developments: Civilians cower on the ground with shells exploding overhead as they flee Russian assault Zelenskyy urges Russians to protest to 'overcome evil' as Putin demands surrender Fresh attempt to evacuate Mariupol fails as both sides blame each other Conflict could last 'months, if not years', deputy PM Raab warns

PM's six-point plan for resolving crisis

"Have we done enough for Ukraine? The honest answer is no," Mr Johnson wrote in a nearly 1,300-word essay published on Sunday.

The PM, who will host a number of world leaders in Downing Street this coming week, has set out a six-point plan for how he thinks the international community can resolve the crisis.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mark Rutte, PM of the Netherlands, will visit Number 10 on Monday.

On Tuesday, Mr Johnson will host leaders of the V4 group of central European nations - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - which are already experiencing the impact of a humanitarian crisis that has already seen more than 1.5 million people flee Ukraine.

The PM held his latest call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday, telling him that "the British people stand fully behind the Ukrainian people".

According to Number 10's readout of the call, Mr Johnson told his counterpart that "international support and admiration for President Zelensky and the whole of Ukraine grows every day".

Putin trying to 'rewrite the rules' of international order

In his NYT piece, Mr Johnson said "never in my life have I seen an international crisis where the dividing line between right and wrong has been so stark".

He accused Mr Putin of trying to "rewrite the rules" of international order "by military force".

The PM said world leaders "must not allow anyone in the Kremlin to get away with misrepresenting our intentions to find post-facto justification for their war of choice".

In the months leading up to Russia's invasion, Mr Putin expressed fears over the expansion of NATO and cited the potential of Ukraine joining the alliance as a reason for his attack.

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PM claims Putin's actions show 'diplomacy never had a chance'

But Mr Johnson said Ukraine had "no serious prospect of NATO membership in the near future".

"This is not a NATO conflict and it will not become one. No ally has sent combat troops to Ukraine," he said.

"We were ready to respond to Russia's stated security concerns through negotiation. I and many other Western leaders have spoken to President Putin to understand his perspective.

"It was now clear diplomacy never had a chance. But it is precisely because of our respect for Russia that we find the actions of the Putin regime so unconscionable.

"We have no hostility towards the Russian people and we have no desire to impugn a great nation, a world power and a founding member of the United Nations.

"We despair of the decision to send young innocent Russians into a bloody and futile war."

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'No one can say we were not warned'

Mr Johnson urged world leaders to mobilise an "international humanitarian coalition" for Ukraine and back the nation "in its efforts to provide for its own self-defence".

He said economic sanctions on Russia should be taken up a gear and urged fellow leaders to resist the "creeping normalisation" of what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

"We have failed to learn the lessons of Russian behaviour that have led to this point," the PM acknowledged.

"No one can say we were not warned: we saw what Russia did in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 and even on the streets of the British city of Salisbury.

"And I know from speaking to my counterparts on recent visits to Poland and Estonia just how acutely they feel the threat."

Read more: Has World War Three already started? Some security experts believe existential global conflict has begun

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Mr Johnson said a diplomatic route to ending the war should be resolved, but any development had to include the full participation of the "legitimate government of Ukraine".

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer welcomed the PM's six-point strategy, describing the contents as "straightforward measures and points that we all agree with".

But he called for more details, adding: "I think what we now need to do is to stand united and implement this in the UK and across Europe and across our allies."

Sir Keir also said: "The position of the Labour Party could not be clearer in relation to this Russian aggression. We stand with Ukraine and we stand with NATO."

Read more:

Boris Johnson warns of 'even darker days ahead' over Russia's invasion of Ukraine - Sky News

The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Bidens diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory.

In a typical account operating under this framing, Politico described Putin as the steely-eyed strongman who proved immune to traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence and had been playing Biden all along. This telling suggests that the United States exhausted its diplomatic arsenal and that Russias horrifying and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has involved targeting civilian areas and shelling nuclear plants, could never have been prevented.

But according to a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades this narrative is wrong.

Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russias willingness to go to war over Ukraines NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion.

Recognizing this possibility does not excuse Moscows actions, which are heinous. Nor does it mean Russias insistence on regional hegemony is fair or ethical. And ultimately, it is no guarantee that Putin would not have invaded anyway. There are other factors including, but not limited to, Putin's general anger over Kyiv drifting away from Russian influence and domination and his isolation as a decision-maker that may have been sufficient to drive the invasion.

But the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.

Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

The fact that the NATO status question was not put on the table as Putin signaled that he was serious about an invasion so plainly that the U.S. government was spelling it out with day-by-day updates was an error, and potentially a catastrophic one. It may sound cruel to suggest that Ukraine could be barred, either temporarily or permanently, from entering a military alliance it wants to be in. But whats more cruel is that Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

Analysts say its widely known that Ukraine had no prospect of entering NATO for many years, possibly decades, because of its need for major democracy and anti-corruption reforms and because NATO has no interest in going to war with Russia over Ukraines Donbas region, where Russia has meddled and backed armed conflict for years. But by dangling the possibility of Ukraines NATO membership for years but never fulfilling it, NATO created a scenario that emboldened Ukraine to act tough and buck Russia without any intention of directly defending Ukraine with its firepower if Moscow decided Ukraine had gone too far.

But for the West to offer to compromise on Ukraines future entry into NATO would have required admitting the limitations of Western power.

It was the desire of Western governments not to lose face by compromising with Russia, Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry, told me. But it was also the moral cowardice of so many Western commentators and officials and ex-officials who would not come out in public and admit that this was no longer a viable project.

The West didn't want to set limits on NATO's enlargement and influence or lose face. So what it did was gamble.

The choice that we faced in Ukraine and I'm using the past tense there intentionally was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield, said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.

What's happened has happened, and theres no going back. But it still matters.

The U.S. must do everything it can do to end this war which is already brutalizing Ukraine, rattling the global economy, and could quite easily spiral into a nuclear-armed confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, if things get out of hand as swiftly as possible, including negotiating on Ukraine's NATO status and possible neutrality with an open mind. And over the longer term, Americans must realize that in an increasingly multipolar world, reckoning with the limits of their power is critical for achieving a more peaceful and just world.

NATO was originally formed as a military and political alliance between the U.S., Canada and several Western European nations in 1949. It was meant to serve as a collective defense organization to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and its most important provision, Article 5, held that an attack on one member of the alliance was an attack against all of them.

In 1990, the West led the Soviets to believe NATO would not expand further eastward across Europe in exchange for Germany reunification and the agreement that the new Germany would be a NATO member. Most famously, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker once assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the NATO alliance would move not one inch eastward in exchange for this agreement, but as the late Princeton University scholar Stephen Cohen pointed out in 2018, this pledge was in fact made multiple times by several Western countries.

These assurances were not honored, and NATO has expanded eastward over the years to include many more countries, all the way up to Russias borders.

It is the broken promise to Gorbachev that lingers as Americas original sin, Cohen said then.

NATOs expansion was hugely controversial in policy circles in the 1990s. As foreign policy commentator Peter Beinart has noted, around the time the Clinton administration was considering NATO in the '90s to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic a debate that almost caused President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Perry to resign many influential voices dissented:

George Kennan, the living legend who had fathered Americas policy of containment against the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions. Thomas Friedman, Americas most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, We have no idea what were getting into. John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of Americas Cold War historians, noted that, historiansnormally so contentiousare in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.

The major concern was that expansion would backfire that it would, as Kennan put it in 1997, inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion. Indeed, Russia hated it. As Lieven previously told me, for decades the Russian political establishment and commentators have vociferously objected to NATO expansion and warned that if this went as far as taking in Georgia and Ukraine, then there would be confrontation and strong likelihood of war.

Russia is no longer at the helm of a global superpower, but it is still, at the very least, a regional great power, and as such it devotes considerable resources to exerting its influence beyond its borders and using the states around it as buffers. Russia views Ukraine, a large country to which it has long-running cultural and historical ties, as a particularly critical buffer state for protecting its capital.

The issue that Russia saw in NATO was not just an expanding military alliance, but one that had shifted gears to transforming and proactively intervening in global affairs. After the end of the Cold War, NATOs raison dtre no longer existed, but instead of disbanding, its mission shifted to democracy promotion. The carrot of membership in NATO was used to encourage countries to adopt liberalization and good governance and align with U.S. political, economic and military interests.

It is imperative that America develops a clearer understanding of its adversaries and behaves more judiciously in an increasingly multipolar world.

Of particular concern to the Russians have been NATOs operations outside of NATO countries. The Russians were shocked by NATOs bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, where NATO not only intervened in the affairs of a non-NATO country, but took sides against the Serbs, allies of the Russians, and did so without United Nations Security Council approval. NATO has also been involved in regime change and nation-building projects in places like Libya and Afghanistan.

NATO is a defensive organization; I don't think it had any plans on Russia, Thomas Graham, a former special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, said regarding NATOs expansion of territory and widening scope of operations. All that said if you put yourself in the position of people in the Kremlin, you can see why they came to that conclusion.

Things turned up a notch in 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO. It did not specify a timeline, and it was assumed that it was conditional on the countries adopting political reforms, but it infuriated the Russians.

As a way to reassert its dominance in the region, Russia invaded Georgia later that year. In another sign of Russias intolerance of losing out to Western influence in those countries, Putin annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 in the wake of the protest-spurred ouster of Ukraines Russia-friendly president, which the West favored.

John Mearsheimer, an international relations scholar at the University of Chicago, argued that a number of factors, including Ukraines potential integration into the Western European economy, played a role in Russias concerns in 2014, but NATO enlargement was the taproot of the crisis and Russia wanted to make sure that, among other things, a NATO base couldnt be set up in Crimea as Ukraine drifted toward the U.S.

Mearsheimer also warned that this was foreshadowing, and Ukraines pseudo-membership status was going to bait Moscow and result in catastrophe. The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked, he said in a lecture.

Russia has grown concerned again about Ukraine for a number of reasons. Analysts like Lieven and Beebe point out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken a number of sharp measures to eradicate Russian influence in Ukraine recently by doing things like banning the use of Russian language in schools and state institutions, shutting down Kremlin-linked television stations and arresting some of the most prominent Russo-sympathetic leaders in the country all while cooperating on the ground with NATO. Russia read this as a sign that Kyiv was throwing its lot in with the U.S. and the prospect of an agreement ensuring autonomy for the separatist-held Donbas region, crucial to Russias plan to thwart Ukraines NATO entry, might be dead.

All this brings us to the crisis at hand. The takeaway of this very quick survey is not to convince you to agree with Russias assessment that NATO posed an existential threat to it or that it is justified in its great power politicking. As Beebe put it, whether or not Russias perception is accurate or justified is immaterial to whether that perception is genuinely held and to whether they will act on that perception. What matters is that there is clear evidence that Russia sees NATO as destabilizing, pro-democratic and anti-Russian and clear evidence that it was willing to use force to counter NATO's enlargement.

Moreover, Putin sent clear signals that he was serious about pulling the trigger if he didn't get something. Shifting some 150,000 troops along Ukraines border for weeks was a real cost, and it placed pressure on him to not back down without extracting a major concession and risk losing face in front of Russias political elite.

I thought, and continue to think, that we should have made a deal, that there was a deal to be had not a deal that we liked, obviously, but a deal that the realities of the situation that we're facing required, Beebe said.

Graham, the former NSC official, also said the U.S. made a mistake in its approach. Ukraines future NATO membership didnt necessarily have to be permanently taken off the table, but the U.S. had to be prepared to talk about it in a serious way, he said.

Justice is circumscribed by practical matters that require us to contemplate the possibility of making things worse through imprudent action.

Emma Ashford, resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, wrote in an email that it was a pity that NATOs open-door principle was not up for debate. Though she was skeptical about the political ability of the West to promise to close NATOs open door, particularly in a way that would have been credible to Moscow, she said there were potential ways to deal with Moscows concerns, such as a moratorium on NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, conventional arms control agreements limiting the scope of NATO military integration and cooperation with Ukraine, or some form of negotiated Ukrainian neutrality.

The idea behind a moratorium of, say, 20 years is to provide a way for the West to propose to Russia that the issue can be taken up by a future generation of leaders, at a time when Russia's political class has changed and geopolitics may have shifted.

Whether or not opening up on the question of Ukraines NATO status or neutrality in some way wouldve been enough to stop Putin from pursuing war is unknowable, every expert I spoke to stressed. After all, maybe by this point changing Ukraines NATO status would not have allayed Putins concern that Ukraine was irrevocably slipping out of Russias sphere of influence and overcome his conception of Ukraine as Russias lost property. There are also always unprovable and unfalsifiable explanations for his behavior including, but not limited to, a concern with securing his legacy, paranoia and a lack of access to accurate information due to his accumulation of power within the Kremlin.

All we do know is that the NATO element mattered a great deal to Russias political establishment, and theres reason to think it couldve changed the course of negotiations. When things looked dicey, it was worth trying.

It seems unjust that Ukraine might not be let into an alliance it wants to be part of to protect itself from a country like Russia. I would say it is. But alliances choose their own members and must weigh the geopolitical consequences of expanding them the enhanced possibility of war chief among them. As with so many issues in politics, justice is circumscribed by practical matters that require us to contemplate the possibility of making things worse through imprudent action.

As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me, NATOs oft-touted open door policy is supposed to be based on Article 10 of the treaty, but the meaning is often misunderstood.

"In recent decades, the open door has instead come to entail dangling the possibility of membership to other states, never foreclosing that possibility, and sometimes speaking as though states have a right to join NATO if they so choose (when in fact they have a right merely to ask to join)," he wrote.

That dangling is incredibly dangerous, and it's possible that it just caused Ukraine to experience the worst of all worlds: not receiving NATO protection while also enduring one of the most aggressive forms of Russian domination possible.

Many of the experts I spoke to said Ukraine's neutrality or some kind of altered NATO status should be part of the discussion in diplomatic backchannels. Critics will say this constitutes appeasement of Putin. But as Biden has already made clear, the U.S. is not willing to wage war with Russia, and it certainly isn't going to allow Ukraine into NATO when Russia is attacking it, since that would require all of NATO to go to war with Russia. The issue now is to think clearly about how to end a conflict that could spiral into World War III.

It is imperative that America develops a clearer understanding of its adversaries and behaves more judiciously in an increasingly multipolar world. It is not difficult to imagine the U.S. making a miscalculation over what China would be willing to do to secure its domination of the South China Sea. The U.S. may want to be the only great power in the world, free to expand its hegemony with impunity, but it is not. Refusing to see this is dangerous for us all.

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Russia and Putin's Ukraine war may have been preventable - MSNBC