Tuesday, March 01, 2022

03/01 Links Pt1: Bernard Henri Levy: Ukraine’s Hero President Z; Russia Promotes ‘Israel Lobby’ Author To Defend Invasion of Ukraine; What If Russia Loses?

From Ian:

Bernard Henri Levy: Ukraine’s Hero President Z.
I don’t know if, by the time this article appears, Volodymyr Zelensky will still be alive.

We do know that he is in Kyiv, surrounded by his generals, in a bunker that the Sukhoi fighter jets seek.

And we have just seen him in a video where he appears helmetless, outside, like a young Churchill walking in the poor neighborhoods of London during the Nazi Blitz of September 1940.

But I also know that he is at the top of the Kremlin’s kill list, according to the English-language press.

His recent farewells come to mind—on Friday, Feb. 25, to his counterparts over Zoom during a special meeting of the European Union: “This is maybe the last time that you will see me alive.”

What is greatness?

True greatness, as taught by European chivalry?

Perhaps it is that.

That heroism, calm and proud.

A touch of Allende the night before the assault of the Moneda by Pinochet’s death squads.

The way he told President Biden, who offered up an exfiltration—“I need weapons, not a taxi”—and Putin, today’s Pinochet: “You can try to kill me, I am ready for it, since I know that the idea lives in me and will survive me.”

The first time I met him was on March 30, 2019, the night before the first round of his stunning election, in a seafood restaurant near the Maidan.

I had just performed, at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Looking for Europe, the theatrical monologue that I was bringing then to the European capitals. My friend Vladislav Davidzon, one of the last American journalists still in Ukraine—reporting for Tablet—had arranged the meeting.

Tablet’s Vladislav Davidzon gained special access to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s enigmatic new leader who once played the president on TV. Here, Davidzon shares his impressions of Zelensky and his predictions for Ukraine’s political future. byVladislav Davidzon

Volodymyr Zelensky was, at the time, a very young man. Looking like a paper boy in jeans, old sneakers, and a black T-shirt with a worn neckline, he had spent the night celebrating the final performance, in an old Kyiv skating rink turned café-theater, of “Servant of the People,” the one-man show that had made him famous.


Israel takes nuanced approach to UN emergency session on Ukraine
“We should take a picture together.”

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan strolled across the General Assembly floor on Monday morning, making a direct line for his counterpart from Ukraine. Six months earlier, Sergiy Kyslytsya had visited Israel as part of a delegation invited by Erdan.

On this morning, Kyslytsya was hoping he would have a country to go back to at all.

Erdan patted the seated Kyslytsya on the back and they shook hands. After days of painful diplomatic neutrality, Jerusalem made a choice. Still sensitive to Russian control of Syrian airspace and Israel’s freedom of movement to attack Iranian and proxy forces to its north, Jerusalem said it would vote yes to a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in an extraordinary emergency session of the General Assembly, not seen in decades.

“Israel was and will be on the right side of history,” Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said in a Monday statement. “We have a moral duty and historical obligation to be part of the effort.” This followed Israel’s silence on a U.N. Security Council resolution late last week demanding a halt to Russia’s hostilities, with Jerusalem, much to the disappointment of the U.S., reportedly reaching a late decision not to co-sponsor the resolution, knowing it would be vetoed by Russia, a permanent Security Council member, anyway.


David Singer: UN should try using its Israel-bashing model on Russia
Reversing Russia’s flagrant violation of the UN Charter justifies the General Assembly adopting its Israel-bashing model to establish the following Ukrainian-dedicated agencies to humiliate and bash Russia into withdrawing from Ukraine: - Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Ukrainian People (CEIRUP):

To institute a programme that will enable the Ukrainian people to exercise their inalienable rights to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty without external interference; to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced.

- Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs' (DPPA) Division for Ukrainian Rights: To serve as the Secretariat of CEIRUP and provide the following core functions:

-Organising the meetings of CEIRUP and its Bureau at UN Headquarters;
-Monitoring political and other relevant developments;
-Organising programmes of international meetings, conferences and CEIRUP delegation visits;
-Implementing a publications programme;
-Developing and maintaining the United Nations Information System on the Question of Ukraine (UNISUKR) and managing CEIRUP’s outreach efforts including via social media;
-Cooperating with civil society organizations active on the Russia-Ukraine issue; -Organising an annual observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Ukrainian People;


Niall Ferguson: Joe Biden Has Only Days to Avoid Becoming Jimmy Carter
To avoid the fate of Carter, I believe Biden needs to go back further in time than 1979 and reflect on how Henry Kissinger played a not dissimilar geopolitical crisis in October 1973, when a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. (If your memory needs refreshing, I recommend Martin Indyk’s excellent new book on the subject.) Recall that Israel, like Ukraine today, was not a NATO member and could expect no support from the UN Security Council, not least because of the Soviet presence as a permanent member of that body.

At the risk of over-simplification, Kissinger’s approach can be summarized as follows. First, he ensured that Israel received U.S. military arms to the extent necessary to avert defeat, but not on such a scale that they could humiliate the Arabs. Second, he seized the diplomatic initiative, ensuring that any peace would be brokered by the U.S., with the Soviets effectively excluded. Third, Kissinger was himself willing to use a heightened nuclear alert to intimidate Moscow.

These are precisely the things the Biden administration is not doing. Although the U.S. has been arming Ukraine, the amounts involved — $60 million in the fall, $200 million in December and now a further $350 million — are not nearly enough to ensure Ukraine survives the Russian onslaught. The amount needs to be at least tripled and the hardware needs to start arriving on Ukrainian soil in U.S. military aircraft, as it arrived in Israel in 1973, tomorrow. If Kyiv falls, the supplies to sustain Ukrainian resistance must continue.

In Operation Cyclone, the Carter and Reagan administrations provided $6.2 billion in military assistance to the mujahideen to help them fight the Soviets. (That’s $24 billion in 2022 dollars.) We need to help on a comparable scale brave Ukrainian partisans who continue the fight against Putin.

Secondly, if the military balance can belatedly be restored and a Russian victory averted, the U.S. needs to initiate the peace negotiations in the role of broker. That means Secretary of State Antony Blinken needs to take a crash course in shuttle diplomacy, ensuring that all the interested parties are brought on board, and that it is America and not Russia that calls the shots. Here, sanctions may provide some leverage. If they do not, there is always Defcon 3. It worked in October 1973.

Contrary to popular belief, another loathsome Russian dictator named Vladimir — Lenin — never said: “There are decades where nothing happens, there are weeks where decades happen.” The real quote is from a letter Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels in 1863. “Only your small-minded German philistine,” declared Marx, “who measures world history by ... what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items,’ could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.”

It does feel as if 20 years have been compressed into the past week. But only by applying history from 50 years ago can Joe Biden now rescue his presidency from terminal malaise.


Noah Rothman: What If Russia Loses?
In one breathtakingly foolish maneuver, Putin has demonstrated the limits of Russian military capabilities and birthed into existence a new European political covenant of the sort that Western hawks have spent decades unsuccessfully advocating. The Kremlin’s actions have left Russia politically isolated, economically devastated, and militarily boxed in. As much as these conditions are of material benefit to the West, they are also extremely dangerous.

How does Putin deescalate the crisis he inaugurated? Such an outcome is hard to envision now. The tactical setbacks Moscow is experiencing in Ukraine and the collapse of Russia’s strategic fortunes in its regional environment will tempt Russian policymakers to escalate the conflict in order to deescalate it. Vladimir Putin’s decision to announce the activation of Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal is a clear signal to the West that it must pare back its support for Ukraine. It’s quite possible that Moscow could label Western nations providing material support to Kyiv co-belligerents in an active war against Russia. It could violently interdict weapons shipments into Ukraine, or conduct cyberattacks on vital elements of Western civilian infrastructure. Already, NATO-aligned naval vessels have found themselves in Russia’s crosshairs. Whether by accident or as a shot across NATO’s bow, it’s not hard to imagine a Russian strike on a Western asset that cannot be ignored.

At the moment, there is precisely no appetite in the West for allowing Russia a face-saving way out of this crisis. Moscow misjudged its adversaries. The West misjudged Russia. And Ukraine couldn’t possibly have imagined the outpouring of support for its efforts to sustain the fight. Everyone’s assumptions about how this conflict would play out proved inaccurate. Those assumptions will need to be replaced with new assumptions. There will, therefore, be a lot more fighting to come until all parties have discovered and reestablished a durable equilibrium in the region. At the moment, Putin has a lot to prove, and the stakes as he views them are quite possibly existential—both for his regime and the greater Russia he has set out to reconstitute. As unappetizing as the prospect is, Western policymakers must consider the circumstances that Russia needs in order to confidently deescalate this situation.

This is an exquisitely delicate moment. Among Ukraine’s Western supporters, the temptation toward triumphalism will be difficult to reject, but cooler heads must prevail. Ukrainian’s national ambitions cannot be sacrificed, or the West will be menaced further by revisionist actors all over the globe. But the Russian regime also needs a soft place to land if it is expected to accept a meaningful peace that doesn’t leave Ukraine a broken nation in a perpetual state of semi-frozen conflict on the borders of NATO. Today, with bullets flying, bombs bursting, and a burgeoning humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in real-time, that’s a hard pill to swallow. But a failure to make those preparations today could produce an infinitely more terrible set of circumstances tomorrow.
Seth Frantzman: Ukraine’s Turkish drones put in spotlight by Russian war
Pro-Ankara media has an interest in talking up the drones because it’s a good way to prove they can survive in contested airspace. Slow-moving armed drones, like the Reaper, can’t perform well in areas where an enemy has air defense. This is because they don’t have a way to avoid radar and they don’t fly fast.

According to the website Defense-Blog.com, the drones continue to carry out strikes.

“According to the chief of Ukraine’s Air Force ,Lt.-Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones have carried out strikes on Russian troops in the Kherson region and near the city of Malyn, about 60 miles northwest of Kyiv,” the website noted.

Video posted on social media shows several such strikes. It is difficult to confirm or locate them. Reports generally place the strikes on the Crimea front line. This means they are not stalking the main Russian thrust at Kyiv, where a 60-km. convoy of Russian vehicles has been seen, but are hitting the soft underbelly of the Russian offensive. Although that doesn’t mean Russia doesn’t have air defense in Crimea, it should have air defense there to protect the Russian fleet.

That the Ukrainian drones are flying sorties from western or southern Ukraine seems apparent. They supposedly have a range of thousands of kilometers but need communications links. The distance from western Ukraine to Crimea is around 800 km., about 500 miles

Ukraine’s Turkish drones are therefore turning out to be an important aspect of the invaded county’s defense against its huge and powerful northeastern neighbor.
Former IDF Soldier Fighting in Kyiv Says Russian Invaders ‘Not Professional at All,’ a ‘Total Mess’
A former Israel Defense Forces soldier currently fighting with the Ukrainian military in the capital city of Kyiv told Israeli news site N12 on Monday that he is shocked by the Russian army’s poor conduct of the war, saying, “they have no motivation and no capabilities.”

The soldier, named only as “Nikolai,” served in Israel’s Givati infantry brigade, and is now fighting in the heart of Kyiv, which the Russian army is still struggling to take in the face of dogged resistance by Ukrainian forces.

“They are not professional at all. What they’re doing looks like a total mess,” Nikolai claimed of the Russian forces. “They have no idea where they’re going, where they’re located, what their mission is — just nothing.”

Despite the heavy fighting in and around Kyiv, he added, “there is no fear. We are a complete team where the majority have already fought the Russians in the past and no one is afraid of them.”

“Right now, we are defending central Kyiv,” Nikolai said. “There was intelligence information that they would try to take over government buildings, but in effect they haven’t gotten close to the outskirts of the city at all.”
There is no nation in the world doing what Israel is doing for its people - opinion
Arina Forys, 12 years old, is a modern-day immigrant. She left Kyiv with her parents and brother - she has no clothes except the ones she is currently wearing, she has left it all behind: Arina has one thing that possibly has saved her life. She is Jewish.

The Forys family has finally reached a hotel in Warsaw during the weekend. They were on the way for close to a week, avoiding shillings, shooting and huge traffic jams outside the Polish border.

Yet the Forys are in a different situation than most of their neighbors in Kyiv: the Jewish people and the Israeli government have their back: They are staying in a prepaid beautiful hotel room, given three meals a day and will be immigrating to Israel on Wednesday. When they arrive in Israel, they’ll be able to stay in a hotel for at least a month - all paid for by the Israeli government. Jewish Agency’s emissary is now helping them with anything they need. He’s an amazing individual that has left the business world and is devoting himself to the Jewish people.

Israel was established almost 74 years ago as a Jewish State, and I couldn't be more proud of my beautiful country and people during the past week.

Even before we knew that Russia’s Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine and begin a terrible war - Jewish organizations around the world and the Israeli government invested hundreds of hours in order to think of all the possible situations that may occur, but also, thought of ways to evacuate and save the lives of tens of thousands of Israelis and Jews.
Russia-Ukraine war: One Israeli killed near Kyiv, one held captive
An Israeli national was killed by Ukrainian forces while trying to escape the country, the Foreign Ministry reported Sunday.

Roman Brodsky, 37, left behind a wife and children in Ukraine and parents in Israel.

Ukrainian soldiers shot at his car, which was in a convoy driving from Kyiv to the border with Moldova. The soldiers thought Brodsky and another Israeli who was in the car with him were Chechen forces, Channel 12 reported.

Ukrainian soldiers stopped their car at a makeshift checkpoint, where they got into an argument, Channel 11 reported.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett sent condolences to Brodsky’s family Monday night.

“In the name of all of Israel’s citizens, I want to send my condolences to his wife, his children, and his family in Israel and in Ukraine,” he said. “We will continue to do all we can to help Israelis come home.”
Russia strikes Kyiv TV tower, killing 5 and damaging Babi Yar Holocaust memorial
An apparent Russian airstrike hit Kyiv’s main television tower in the heart of the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday, knocking out some state broadcasting but leaving the structure intact.

After a blast sounded around the city and smoke was seen rising in the Babi Yar district, the interior ministry said equipment had been damaged and “channels won’t work for a while.”

At least five people died and five were injured in the missile strike, the Ukrainian emergencies service said.

Images from the scene showed charred bodies and cars damaged in the apparent Russian attack, which knocked out some broadcasts.

The attack on the television tower also struck a major Holocaust memorial in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian authorities and the board of the site. A spokesperson for the memorial said a security team was dispatched to the site to assess the damage.

The Babi Yar memorial rests on a mass grave containing 34,000 Jews who were slaughtered there in 1941 when the city was under Nazi occupation. The massacre was carried out by SS troops along with local collaborators.

“To the world: what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar? At least 5 killed. History repeating,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and had family members die in the Holocaust, wrote in a tweet.


Israeli Bedouin Consul Rescues 150 Non-Israeli and Israeli Arab Students from Ukraine
Israel’s Deputy Consul in Istanbul, Yara Shibli, 27, who hails from the Bedouin community of Shibli in northern Israel, was instructed some three weeks ago to fly to Kiev urgently to help the staff of the local Israeli embassy, and then moved with the rest of the diplomatic team to Levov, on the Polish side of the border. Among other things, she assisted in the rescue of 150 Arab students who were evacuated when the fighting broke out, including some residents of eastern Jerusalem.

Ha’aretz reporter/journalist Fadi Amun tweeted last Sunday that a Lebanese citizen who was in Ukraine with a group of Israeli Arabs told him he’s not able to get help to escape. Amun then contacted an Israeli official who said in response: “We have no problem helping Lebanese or any other Arab citizens as well. He can join the Israeli bus.”

Hassan Kaabia, a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, confirmed to Amun that “there are Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian citizens on the Israeli bus, some of them crossed the Ukraine border as refugees. The embassy also helps Israeli residents from eastern Jerusalem.”

Shibli told Ynet on Monday: “We help Israelis as much as we can, trying as much as possible to help. Our people in the field stay out all night, in the cold, to rescue Israelis. We work nights and days and have not slept for almost a week. People can say what they want, but we do our job to the end.”

“People are calling our emergency line and our WhatsApp and I pass the calls to our representatives in the field who are going to locate them at the border crossings and rescue them,” she explained. “We prioritize the inquiries in cases of pregnant women, young children, and the elderly.”


Vladimir Putin, Tyrant
Here is where Putin’s grand geopolitical map for Russia becomes more clear. Dugin argues that Russia’s salvational role in the world must begin with its gradual recovery of its lost Slavic brethren in Ukraine and Moldova. But that is only the beginning. The long-range goal is world war between Russia and the United States, the leader of the “bourgeois” West. Preparing for that war involves Eurasianism making an alliance with radical Islam. For Dugin, the hostility of Islamists to Christianity is outweighed by their loathing for Western materialism and individualism. In Dugin’s view, Russia’s eventual victory over the United States and the capitalist system will also liberate ordinary Americans from their greedy Wall Street overlords. He addressed an open letter to “the American people” stressing Russia’s solidarity with them.

How much of Dugin’s agenda for eventual world conquest does Putin actually embrace or believe he can realize? It is impossible to tell. That said, his thrust into Ukraine, a sovereign state whose territorial integrity was guaranteed by the United States and United Kingdom, displays a riverboat gambler’s recklessness that seems to be a departure from his earlier preference for biting off a chunk of another country and then pausing to digest it while assuring the West that his demands had been satisfied for now.

Putin is therefore a rational actor only to a point, and in a very different way from how that is understood in the West. His aims are for Russia to be honored, feared and powerful. He is no Hitler or Ahmadinejad, willing to pursue his imperial ambitions to the point where he and Russia risk going down in flames in a final Götterdämmerung, like Hitler in his bunker. But Putin is ready to go a very great deal further in pursuing his ambitions than elected democratic leaders are—a fact that he knows, and which he believes gives him a key advantage in his confrontation with the West. He is willing to march up to the very edge of a general war in Europe, or perhaps even cross that line, and he is willing to put the Russian people through extreme material deprivation rather than settle for a slice of the pie as measured out by foreign powers. Honor and national pride come first. That is why we need to remind ourselves over and over again that the ambition to tyrannize and a lust for honor at the expense of material self-interest are unalterable features of human nature.
Ukraine’s Brave Stand Against Putin Upends Germany’s Pro-Russia Policy
One of the most consequential results of the failure of Vladimir Putin’s armies to disintegrate Ukraine, as large sections of the global diplomatic class seem to have wearily expected, may be taking place right now in Germany—a country that less than 10 days ago barred transfers of weapons to Ukraine and nixed calls to kick Putin off SWIFT. Confronted by public evidence of Ukrainian heroism and Russian failure, a sense of delirious regret seems to have gripped Berlin, as Germany’s new Social Democratic government set about shredding every basic assumption that has steered German foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was only two weeks ago, in fact, on Feb. 15—when a Russian invasion force of nearly 200,000 stood on three Ukrainian borders—that Scholz assured Putin that Ukraine would not accede to NATO in the foreseeable future, three current and former German government officials confirmed to Tablet. Until Berlin froze Nord Stream 2 on Feb. 22, it had spent the previous seven years inflexibly defending the Gazprom-operated pipeline—whose sole purpose was to excise Ukraine from the European gas market by doubling direct imports from Russia into Germany. Now, both of those commitments have disappeared into thin air, to be replaced by a sudden spasm of German resolve.

Indeed, the announcements by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz would have seemed like science fiction at any point since the end of the Cold War: A €100 billion investment in new weapons, including the acquisition of U.S. F-35 warplanes and Israeli drones, plus a massive ongoing increase in the country’s overall defense spending target, up to 2% of GDP. Accompanying these sudden commitments to a robust and capable German military were announcements of the creation of a strategic gas reserve, financing for liquefied natural gas terminals, and speculation about bringing nuclear reactors back online to diversify from Russian gas imports. In making these commitments, Germany was upending decades of voluntary dependence on the Kremlin even at the price of the country’s seemingly sacrosanct commitment to its less than successful, anti-nuclear “green” energy policy.

Nor are the changes in Berlin confined to the inner circles of the country’s current government. Reliably pro-Russian German media has spent the last six days running stories of betrayal by Vladimir Putin and wondering about the possible strategic blindness and failure of the otherwise untouchable Angela Merkel. Christoph Heusgen, Merkel’s foreign policy adviser of 12 years, admitted to their shared naivety, while Merkel’s last defense minister blamed herself for failing to face down the Putin sympathizers in the government.

In an about-face with more immediate consequences, the Scholz coalition has agreed to ban Russia from SWIFT, the payments system that finances international trade, as well as to send anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine. For the first time since 1945, Russian soldiers may be killed with German arms.
Russia Promotes ‘Israel Lobby’ Author To Defend Invasion of Ukraine
The Russian Foreign Ministry is promoting an anti-Israel author to justify its invasion of Ukraine.

Moscow's chief propaganda arm on Monday tweeted an article by American author John Mearsheimer, who penned the book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The book accuses pro-Israel advocates in America of manipulating the American foreign policy establishment, a claim that was widely discredited as an anti-Semitic canard.

Russia's foreign ministry promoted a 2014 article by Mearsheimer titled, "Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault." The article argues that Western nations are responsible for creating a Ukraine that opposes Russian influence, and that this is responsible for Moscow's interference in the country. The article attempts to justify Russian war maneuvers in Ukraine, as is currently taking place.

"The U.S. & its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement," the Russian foreign ministry added in a comment on Twitter, referring to its current war on the country.


Russian Invasion of Ukraine Is Warning to Arab States With Ties to ‘Zionist Regime,’ Senior Hezbollah Leader Declares
As western powers have ratcheted up financial, diplomatic and military pressure on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah have been presenting Moscow’s action as a pertinent warning to those moderate Arab states willing to align with Israel and the US.

“The pro-West factions in Lebanon and Arab countries that have normalized ties with the Zionist regime should consider the fate of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and learn lessons from developments in Ukraine,” Sheikh Nabil Qaouk, a member and deputy head of the executive council of Hezbollah, said in remarks on Sunday quoted by official Iranian media outlets.

Pro-western parties in Lebanon, which holds a general election on May 15, would be abandoned by the US just as Ukraine had been, he claimed.

“The United States tends to provoke its allies to engage in a conflict and then leaves them alone to handle the matter,” he said.

Qaouk added: “Our best advice to these elements before the upcoming parliamentary polls is that they should not give in to temptations of the Great Satan [the US]. Our national duty in the forthcoming elections is to choose the liberation of Lebanon from the shackles of American guardianship and Saudi-crafted initiatives as a high priority.”


MEMRI: Assad Regime Expresses Unreserved Support For Russia In Ukraine War; 'Our Enemy Is The Same'
mid the mounting tensions between Russia and the U.S. and NATO over Ukraine, the Syrian regime has aligned itself fully with its ally, Russia, while attacking the U.S. and Europe, which it claims are seeking to undermine Russia's national security. Syrian officials have praised Russia's stance vis-à-vis the West, presenting it as "defending the entire world and the principles of justice and humanity." In addition, senior Syrian journalists wrote articles in the state press proclaiming that Russia's war in Ukraine heralds the end of the unipolar order and the Western hegemony in the world, for the power-balances are shifting in favor of Russia and its allies. Some of the writers called for Russian-Chinese-Iranian-Syrian cooperation against the U.S.

The growing tension between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine has apparently had an impact on the interaction between their forces in Syria. Shortly before the start of the war in Ukraine, both superpowers increased their shows of force in Syria, holding military exercises in the Deir Al-Zor Governorate in the east of the country, where they both have influence zones. Furthermore, Russian jets circled over the Al-Tanf region in southern Syria, near the intersection of the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders, where the U.S. has a major military base.

At the same time, Russia acted to underscore its tight relations with Syria. On February 15, 2022, several days before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu arrived in Syria to oversee largescale Russian naval exercises on the Syrian coast where Russia has two military bases. This move was seen as signaling that Russia regards Syria's security "as a direct continuation of its own national security."[1] Furthermore, on the eve of the war, Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad made an official visit to Moscow. He was thus present in the Russian capital when President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist regions, and Syria was one of the first countries to express support for this move.

This report presents expressions of support for Russia by Syrian regime officials and in the regime press.

Syrian President Assad: Russia Is Correcting The Course Of History And Restoring Balance To The World; It Is Fighting Nazism
In a February 25, 2022, phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad commended Russia on its actions, saying: "What happened today is a historic course-correction and a restoration of the global balance, which was lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Western history seeks to march in place, so as to create a state of chaos that only criminals wish for. Russia is now defending not only itself but the [entire] world and the principles of humanity and justice. The Western countries bear the responsibility for the chaos and the bloodshed, which results from their policy that strives to control nations, because they use their despicable methods to support the terrorists in Syria and the Nazis in Ukraine. Syria supports Russia completely, because it recognizes the justness of its position and because Russia is entitled to confront the expansion of NATO, which poses a danger to the whole world and has become a tool for implementing the irresponsible Western policy of destabilizing the world. The enemy facing the Syrian and Russian armies is one and the same: in Syria it is extremism and in Russia it is Nazism. Russia will teach the whole world that countries do not become superpowers only thanks to their military prowess but also because they respect the law, the noble [values of] morality, and the principles of humanity."[2]
MEMRI: Columnists In Arab Press: Putin Is Behaving Like Hitler While The West Stands Helplessly By
In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, articles in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat compared the conduct of Russian President Vladimir Putin to that of Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. The articles likened Russia's recognition of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the Nazis' invasion of Poland in 1939. The authors of the articles stated that history is repeating itself, for Putin, like Hitler, seeks to establish a new world order and re-establish the Russian empire. But the responsibility for the tragedy currently unfolding in Europe, they said, does not rest solely with Putin, but also with the West, which for over two decades has ignored Putin's dangerous actions – including the assassination of his opponents in the heart of Western capitals, his support of the Syrian regime and his pact with the Iranian regime, and the annexation of Crimea. Today, they added, the West continues to stand helplessly by and does nothing but condemn Putin and try to appease him, just as the leaders of Britain and France tried to appease Hitler before World War II.

The following are translated excerpts from these articles:
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat Columnist: This Is A Black Day For Europe, Like On The Eve Of World War II
In an article titled "Europe's Map Is Being Redrawn in Blood" in the London-based daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Lebanese journalist Elias Harfoush wrote: "History is repeating itself. The world experienced a [similar] dark period 80 years ago. A man comes to power who has delusions of grandeur and dreams of expanding [his rule] beyond the limits of the map, which is no longer large enough to contain his ambitions. Moreover, he wishes to settle historical scores for 'aggression' perpetrated against his country by the victors [in the past]. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in Berlin to avenge [the injustice of] the Treaty of Versailles. Vladimir Putin ascended to the Kremlin to avenge [the injustice of] the agreements between [U.S. president] Ronald Reagan and [Soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev. [These agreements] ended the Soviet era and Moscow's rule over 14 neighboring countries, but opened the gate for [Moscow] to join Europe, and thus to become part of a family [of nations] that is guided by principles of neighborliness and respect for each country's right to manage its affairs according to the will of its citizens.

"[But] Putin is no Gorbachev and no Boris Yeltsin. He belongs to a different school… He does not recognize the right of these countries [of the former Soviet Union] to determine their own fate, for the simple reason that he does not believe they have a right to exist as independent countries. This is his real issue with Ukraine, and with the three Baltic countries, which are in danger of facing the same fate [as Ukraine] if Russia's invasion of Ukraine goes well and Putin manages to establish a [puppet] regime of his choosing in Kyiv. This is a terrible day for Ukraine and a black day for Europe…

"But the responsibility does not lie solely with Putin. The West chose to ignore Putin's real plans for over two decades, during which he repeatedly tested the boundaries of the West's response to his flouting of the norms of foreign relations. Let's leave aside his domestic policy and his revolutionizing of [Russia's] government-turnover laws, which were seen by the West as an internal [Russian] affair. But Putin also poisoned his opponents on the soil of Western capitals, and undermined the Syrian opposition, thus imposing the continued rule of Bashar Al-Assad, amid widespread regional and international criticism of the Syrian regime's crimes against its own people. He [also] used his veto power in the [UN] Security Council more than once to prevent an investigation of these [crimes]; made a pact with the Iranian regime despite the latter's intervention in more than one Arab country; invaded the Crimean Peninsula on the pretext that it is 'Russian soil', and sent his troops to the two separatist regions in Ukraine on the pretext that their inhabitants are Ukrainians of Russian origin – just as Hitler did when he annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland on the grounds that they had a German majority.
CTV Commentator Exploits Crisis In Ukraine To Spread Anti-Israel Propaganda
On Friday, February 25th, the CTV talk show The Social, produced a segment about how social media is being used and abused in the war in Ukraine.

One of the show’s guest commentators, a woman named Ivory described by CTV as a “multi-disciplinary performer, actor and model” exploited the war in Ukraine to justify spreading anti-Israel propaganda.

She commented:
I think it’s a tricky situation because it’s weird to be in a world where everything is happening, to the moment online, but I wonder, why are we all mobilizing so quickly right now with Ukraine, like we should, but where was this kind of solidarity and where was this kind of media reception and social media reception when we had countries that weren’t predominantly white in very similar situations? Like where are these, you know, Facebook profile filters for Palestine? Where is this kind of mobilization and this global attention when everything was happening in Yemen? Right? And my heart is breaking for the Ukranian people right now, and it’s horrific to watch this in real time, but you also have to sort of check your implicit biases and the biases of western culture where we’re all, all of a sudden on high alert because it’s Ukraine, but there’s countries who have been bombed and invaded for years and we’ve given them none of this solidarity.”

Social media's role in the Russia-Ukraine war | The Social

Ivory’s equating Palestinian terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction to Ukrainians who are heroically fighting and repelling an illegal act of war by Russia, one of the world’s largest armies and a nuclear-armed one to boot, is odious.

Ivory drew a false analogy between Israeli defense efforts against Palestinian terrorists with Russian aggression and Houthi terrorist aggression. She insinuated that there was no big hullabaloo when Israel faced war from Hamas because Israel is, in her eyes, a predominantly white country. She also falsely claimed that “Palestine” is a sovereign country.

These comments were allowed to go unchallenged by the host of the segment, CTV Correspondent, Jessica Allen. In fact, Allen validated Ivory’s comments by saying: “That’s necessary to point out. Thanks for pointing this out Ivory.”










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