RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gq.com/story/improbable-rise-endless-heroism-volodymyr-zelensky?utm_source=pocket-newtab

As I write this, Volodymyr Zelensky, the most improbable national leader in the world, just might be the world’s most popular. By now everyone knows his life story’s surreal outline: a comedian who rose to fame with a portrayal of a president becomes the real thing, then transcends it.

A huge part of Zelensky’s global resonance is that he seems to fit a type everyone knows the world over, because, thanks to millennia of persecution, the type exists the world over: a Jewish wiseacre. The idea of one of those (of us, I should say), becoming a wartime icon is in itself a perfect Jewish joke. It’s Woody Allen in Bananas, it’s Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, it’s Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder. Except in real life. Risking real death.

The true story of 44-year-old Zelensky’s rise is a tad more complicated, and speaks more to the incredibly messy cultural tangle that exists between Russia and Ukraine than to any easy stereotype. His business and comedy roots lie in KVN, a longtime Russian showbiz phenomenon whose title is an acronym for a musty Sovietism—“The Club for the Jolly and the Resourceful.” KVN is a bizarre but admittedly original concept: Imagine if sketch comedy functioned as a pro sport, with city teams battling one another for a spot in the major league, and the top matches televised.

Zelensky’s troupe, called Quarter 95, repped Kryvyi Rih—a Ukrainian city—but performed in Russian, which was then considered not only normal but expected. He was team captain (under the nickname “Vovan”). Once Quarter 95 hit the big time on Russian TV, Zelensky and two partners, Sergei and Boris Shefir, formed a production company under the same name. Their studio produced dozens of shows and events for both countries’ markets, including the Ukrainian Dancing with the Stars, which Zelensky himself won in 2006 (and yes, that would be like Simon Cowell winning America’s Got Talent).

Around the same time, Zelensky began to produce, co-write, and sometimes star in trashy Russian comedies, most of them directed by a U.S.-educated filmmaker named Marius Vaysberg. The first one is representative: 2009’s Love in the City, about three friends living it up in New York when a curse from a magic fairy (played, in a moment of either inclusivity or homophobia or both, by flamboyant pop star Filipp Kirkorov) leaves them impotent until they find true love.

Even as he turned toward politics, Zelensky didn’t exactly leave his comedy career in the rearview.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/russia-vs-ukraine-round-i-kenneth-r-timmerman/

Public perception of Putin’s war on Ukraine crystallized over the weekend, no thanks to the actions of President-inept Joe Biden.

While Biden was relaxing at home in Delaware, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenski was in the trenches with his troops, sharing grub, talking to reporters, and by all appearances unconcerned by reports that Putin had sent 400 assassins into Kiev to kill him.

“I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelenski told Western journos, who asked him if he was ready to accept Biden’s offer to airlift him out of his country.

It was a Churchillian moment, and it must have galled Putin into realizing that his cakewalk into Ukraine wasn’t happening as planned.

Ukrainian soldiers decimated a Russian armored convoy over the weekend, and the much-awaited assault on Kiev appeared to have stalled. Captured Russian conscripts appeared bewildered in front of cameras, saying they had been told they were embarking on training exercises, not the invasion of a neighboring country. Thousands openly protested Putin’s war in Moscow’s Red Square.

While events in Ukraine remain shrouded in the fog of war, one thing we haven’t seen – and we would have seen it, had it occurred – is a Russian “shock and awe” bombing campaign, such as the US carried out before invading Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/28/the-government-from-hell-n1562382

The trucker convoy has come and gone. The bouncy castles have been put away, the hot tubs dismantled, the 18-wheelers towed, the party atmosphere vanished into air, into thin air. They are such stuff as dreams are made on.

The convoy’s main accomplishment was to force the government to show its autocratic hand to the observant and the doubtful. The invoking of the Emergencies (or War Measures) Act was a groundless abuse of power and its hasty withdrawal a sign of an authoritarian government caught with its pants down. But in the aftermath of the Freedom Convoy’s magnificent display of resolute patriotism and good faith, the federal vaccine mandates it protested remain in place, a finance minister of dubious antecedents bears the fasces, and the administration of a petty and vindictive tyrant is still intact. The partial triumph of the truckers turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory, for it is the truckers who have suffered most.

Our blue-collar benefactors now face the consequences of the scorched-earth policies adopted by the anointed class. Many have lost their rigs. Operating licenses have been revoked. Criminal charges have been laid. Bans on trucker commerce have proliferated. Bankruptcy looms for many. Livelihoods have been demolished. Families have been obliterated. Marriages are bound to collapse. And I suspect that suicides will mount as desperation sees no escape from ruination. In effect, Justin Trudeau declared war on those who kept the goods and services flowing through the ersatz pandemic and who enabled the populace to weather the government-induced travesty. Gratitude is not in the dwindling catalogue of common virtues. The casualties, though hidden by the Soviet-style media, are devastating.

https://www.ft.com/content/0b1a1f5d-147d-4300-8f56-41e16e3dfa2e?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9

Russian forces have launched a heavy bombardment of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, an assault that overshadowed the first direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials since President Vladimir Putin began his invasion five days ago. Residents of the city said they had come under intense artillery and rocket fire from Russian positions. Video footage shared on social media showed high-rise apartment blocks in Kharkiv being hit by heavy shelling that shrouded the sky with plumes of dark smoke. “Dozens of civilians are dying,” said regional governor Oleh Sinegubov. “It’s happening during the day when people go to pharmacies, for food, for drinking water. This is a crime.” Russia’s military operation, unleashed five days ago, has failed to unseat Ukraine’s government or capture any major cities, but has uprooted hundreds of thousands of civilians who have fled to neighbouring countries in search of safety. The war has cranked east-west tensions to new heights, with Putin putting the country’s nuclear deterrent on high alert and the west imposing swingeing sanctions on Moscow that sent the rouble into a tailspin and prompted Russia’s central bank to impose capital controls.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/putin-places-russias-nuclear-forces-high-alert-joseph-klein/

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday placed his military’s nuclear forces on high alert – as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its fourth day.

“Western countries aren’t only taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, but top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country,” the Russian president said in a televised broadcast as he explained his rationale for the nuclear alert order.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden remained at his private residence in Delaware during the weekend. The U.S. president did not comment directly on Putin’s nuclear forces high alert order as of Sunday afternoon. He left it to White House press secretary Jen Psaki and other senior administration officials to respond. Psaki said that Putin was “manufacturing threats that don’t exist in order to justify further aggression — and the global community and the American people should look at it through that prism.”

Russia’s military has stepped up its air bombardments across Ukraine this past weekend. The attacks included missile strikes against a burial point of radioactive waste, an oil depot, and a residential complex. Putin has also reportedly deployed at least two-thirds of the estimated 150,000 Russian troops, who had been assembled near the Ukrainian border, to invade Ukraine from multiple directions. In order to take control of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, Russia is massing more troops to lay siege to the city in preparation for a major assault inside Kyiv. Russia has also reportedly reinforced its military offensive capabilities with heavy weaponry capable of inflicting enormous casualties, including to civilians.

As of Sunday evening, Russia had not yet achieved complete control over Ukraine’s air space. The Ukrainians have continued to repel Russia’s persistent attempts to take over Kyiv, while bracing for a more massive attack, and have managed to hold on to other key cities as well. The longer it takes the Russian military to achieve Putin’s objectives, the more strain is being placed on Russia’s logistics supply lines.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-abbott-putin-west-weak-ukraine-russia-invasion-military-fossil-fuels-nuclear-germany-lng-woke-covid-regulations-china-11645977566?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Mr. Abbott served as prime minister of Australia, 2013-15.

‘The bullying of small nations by big ones, the trampling of justice and decency in the pursuit of national aggrandizement, and reckless indifference to human life, should have no place in our world.”

Those were my words to the Australian Parliament on the morning of July 17, 2014, when a Russian missile battery had shot down flight MH17, killing 38 Australians among the 298 on board, as Russian proxies seized the Donbas. If it wasn’t yet obvious in 2008, when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, it should certainly have been six years later, when he annexed the Crimea, that Mr. Putin was bent on the restoration of greater Russia—and to hell with the freedom and independence of the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

Yet since then, Western democracies have culpably failed to boost their military capability while indulging acts of economic and cultural self-harm.

Take the U.K., the West’s second-strongest military power. The total number of British defense personnel dropped from about 600,000 in the 1950s to 300,000 in the 1960s and about 150,000 now. British forces in Europe declined from 80,000 in the 1950s to 50,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 in 1994 (still including one tank division), before dwindling to zero in Germany by 2020 and 1,000 in Estonia (placed there after 2015 in reaction to Russia’s renewed threat). In response to Russia’s blitzkrieg on Ukraine, the U.K. government has just announced that this force will be boosted to an armored brigade of fewer than 3,000. Given that the U.K. has provided by far the strongest response to the current crisis, it’s little wonder Mr. Putin thinks the West is weak and easily distracted.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/02/how-to-make-russia-pay-over-ukraine-deploy-every-financial-weapon-possible/

How to Make Russia Pay – When asked, after his speech on Thursday, why the United States and its allies weren’t then kicking Russia completely out of SWIFT, the global banking communications system, over its invasion of Ukraine, President Biden said, “[It] is always an option. But right now, that’s not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take.”

Removing Russia from SWIFT – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication – is considered a “financial nuclear weapon,” the most severe sanction that the West could take. Since SWIFT is the “cans and the strings by which banks communicate to settle trades and transfers,” in the words of Marshall Billingslea, a former assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist financing,” removing Russia would cut off its banks from more than 11,000 banks in more than 200 countries.

By late Saturday, the West had partly triggered the SWIFT option; the United States, European Union, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada announced that they would remove “selected” Russian banks from the global system.