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Vladimir Putin gave his annual handle to the Russian Federal Assembly at the moment, and it was a farrago of paranoia and lies; in the meantime President Joe Biden humiliated the Kremlin by strolling the streets of Kyiv in broad daylight. The Russian president is aware of he’s dropping.
First, listed here are 4 new tales from The Atlantic:
Out of Options
Every December, Russian President Vladimir Putin provides an handle to the Russian Federal Assembly—a Russian model of the State of the Union. Today, after a delay seemingly associated to Russia’s serial battlefield losses in Ukraine, Putin spent some two hours unloading a barrage of lies, grievances, and weird historic revisions in his try and justify the bloodletting he started a yr in the past. He additionally mentioned Russia would droop participation in an important nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States. What does this all imply?
It means, greater than something, that Putin is determined. He’s dropping in Ukraine, the place, in line with a British estimate final week, roughly 200,000 Russian troopers have been killed or wounded. Even Russia’s tough-guy Wagner mercenaries are getting minimize to items: The National Security Council official John Kirby mentioned in a briefing Friday that the Wagner Group—lots of them convicted criminals—has taken 30,000 casualties, which is about half your complete group’s energy and an enormous quantity even for a contractor power. (Note to Russian jailbirds: Your odds of staying alive are higher in jail.)
Putin could also be a dictator, however even dictators should justify losses. The Russian president began his speech by going full Orwell, claiming that the West began the warfare and that Russia was obliged to take up arms to place a cease to all of it. (He may as properly have mentioned, “Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania,” and he got here shut.) He additionally repeated his accusation that the U.S. and NATO “rapidly deployed their army bases and secret biological laboratories near the borders of our country,” however this part was omitted from the English textual content printed on the official Kremlin web site, maybe as a result of it’s a bonkers cost that has lengthy been debunked. The line, nonetheless, doesn’t appear to have been ad-libbed; it’s within the Russian textual content posted on the Russian president’s official web site.
Putin went on to say that the plot to show Ukraine into “anti-Russia” goes all the best way again to the darkish plans hatched by … the Austro-Hungarian empire. Apparently, the conspiracy theorists are proper: If you look deeply sufficient into any worldwide downside, there’s a Habsburg lurking round someplace. The Russian president then assured his viewers that his warfare was in opposition to the regime in Kyiv, not the folks of Ukraine, whilst his forces proceed to butcher Ukrainian civilians and commit crimes in opposition to humanity.
Putin included his traditional tirade in opposition to sexual perversion within the West, a typical little bit of boilerplate aimed not solely at his personal residents but in addition on the European (and American) right-wingers who adore his supposed stance in opposition to Western ethical decadence. Much of the remainder of Putin’s speech was an analogous rehearsal of Moscow’s basic, old-school Cold War costs in opposition to “the West” basically and the United States particularly. It was, as I wrote a couple of related speech Putin gave a yr in the past when he started the warfare, shot after shot straight from a bottle of Soviet-era moonshine—the 180-proof good things about international confrontations, Nazis, and Washington’s many aggressions. He went on; as they might say in Russian, i tak dalee, “and so on and so forth,” however as we would say extra colloquially in English, yadda yadda yadda.
On a extra substantive notice, Putin introduced Russia would droop additional cooperation underneath the New START Treaty, the nuclear-arms-control settlement signed by the U.S. and Russia in 2011 and prolonged in 2021, which is in impact till 2026. Under New START, the United States and Russia agreed to a restrict of 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, together with on-site verification—the proper of every aspect to go to the opposite’s navy bases—and different technique of exchanging info. The Russians have already suspended on-site verification, and the U.S. State Department almost a month in the past mentioned that Russia was failing to adjust to the treaty.
This is unlucky, as on-site inspections assist construct belief and transparency, nevertheless it’s not a disaster. I labored on these points for years, however I additionally requested Amy Woolf—a specialist in U.S. and Russian arms management, a former adviser to Congress, and probably the most considered consultants on nuclear affairs within the nation—for her tackle Putin’s speech. She instructed me that Putin’s recalcitrance may proceed to erode U.S. confidence in Russian compliance with START, however “it does not mean that Putin plans, at this time or in the near future, to increase its forces beyond the bounds of the treaty limits.” I agree.
Likewise, Putin mentioned that Russia would resume nuclear testing—however provided that the United States performed new exams. Again I agree with Woolf: This was seemingly a “throwaway line,” she instructed me. I’d even say it got here throughout as meaningless; the United States has no quick plans to renew nuclear testing, and so Putin was answering a query nobody was asking.
Putin has put himself and his nation in a determined scenario, and he has run out of choices, together with nuclear threats. This is to not say that the chance of nuclear battle has evaporated; as I famous on the latest episode of the Radio Atlantic podcast, there’s nonetheless loads of room for Putin to do one thing silly and set a horrible chain of occasions in movement. But after a yr, evidently the Russian president’s plan—if it may even be known as that—is to consign extra of his younger males to the Ukrainian abattoir whereas hoping that the West by some means tires of the entire enterprise. As the Atlantic contributing author Eliot Cohen identified yesterday, nonetheless, Biden’s go to to Kyiv and his pledge of “unwavering and unflagging commitment” needed to be a “gut punch” to Putin, dashing any hopes that the Free World will hand over on Ukraine.
The Russian president remains to be relying on Kyiv and its armies to break down, or maybe on an election to take away Biden, or for Europe to lose its nerve, or for China, maybe, to come back to Moscow’s rescue (which might be each a balm and a deep humiliation). But he additionally is aware of that point could also be operating out at house: After a yr of warfare, there are solely so many younger males left to kill and solely so many generals left responsible.
Related:
Today’s News
- The forewoman of a particular grand jury investigating election interference by Donald Trump and his allies in Georgia mentioned that the jury really useful indictments of a number of folks.
- In a Warsaw, Poland, handle, President Biden declared that the U.S. and its allies “will not waver” in supporting Ukraine.
- An enormous winter storm is anticipated to carry substantial snowfall to a lot of the U.S., from the West Coast to New England, later this week.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
Junk Food Is Bad for You. Is It Bad for Raccoons?
By Katherine J. Wu
I used to be in faculty after I noticed my first really chonky raccoon. It was perched on the rim of a trash can, a half-eaten tuna-salad sandwich clutched between its forepaws, its whiskers pinwheeling because it chewed. From throughout the quad, the raccoon fastened me with a beady-eyed stare of reproach, as if daring me to steal its already-filched fish. But I used to be far more within the creature, which seemed twice as huge as any raccoon I’d seen earlier than. It was additionally a wild animal that had chosen a really unwild meal. And I couldn’t assist however marvel if there was a hyperlink between the 2.
As cities have grown and inexperienced areas have shrunk, many wild animals, particularly these within the Western world, have adopted diets that look an terrible lot like ours. Squirrels snarf exhausting taco shells, and abscond with Nutella jars; subway rats chow down on pizza, whereas seagulls have ripped fries and even a KFC wrap straight out of human mouths. For at the least some creatures, the menu adjustments appear to come back with penalties.
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Culture Break
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Watch. Return to Seoul, in choose theaters, is a low-budget character drama with maximalist thrills.
P.S.
Forty years in the past this month, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy premiered in American film theaters. Something between a drama and a black comedy, it starred Robert De Niro as a star stalker named Rupert Pupkin, a 30-something loser who thinks he’s an undiscovered however nice comic. Of course, he’s truly a mediocre doofus and a tad unhinged; he spends his nights in his mom’s basement chatting with life-size cutouts of Liza Minnelli and the favored late-night host he hopes to someday impress, Jerry Langford. (Langford is performed, with excellent contempt and tedium, by Jerry Lewis, proving as soon as once more that comedians are sometimes one of the best dramatic actors.) Finally, he and one other kooky stalker launch a plot to kidnap Langford and thus assure Pupkin a shot on the present.
The King of Comedy was a flop. De Niro captured Pupkin’s earnest however silly narcissism so properly that he’s uncomfortable to look at, which is maybe why it fared so poorly on the field workplace. But it was additionally prophetic: Decades later, we reside in a world of Pupkins, people who find themselves continually looking for rewards in a brand new economic system primarily based not on cash, however on consideration. Narcissism, on the rise for at the least 40 years, now blazes uncontrolled in American society. To watch the film once more is to appreciate that what was as soon as darkish humor about folks on the perimeter is now an nearly unremarkable plot, and the ending that after aggravated me (which I can’t spoil for you) now appears excellent. But it’s deeply unsettling to acknowledge an America that agrees with Pupkin, who says: “I figure it this way: better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.”
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this text.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be a part of The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thursday, February 23—one yr after Russia invaded Ukraine—to debate the warfare’s newest developments and implications for U.S. international coverage. Register for the digital occasion right here.
Do we have to fear concerning the nuclear risk of Putin’s warfare in Europe the best way we fearful throughout the Cold War? Listen to Tom Nichols on Radio Atlantic: