Freedom Struggles

Sir Tom Stoppard, the playwright, has lent his mighty pen to a great cause: the survival of Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of Putin’s political prisoners. He has written a piece for the Telegraph, headed, “Britain can’t let the man Putin hates most die in prison.” He says of Kara-Murza, “His courage is off the scale.” True.

Stoppard goes on to say that Kara-Murza’s courage is “on a continuum with the thousands of Russians who offer themselves for arrest by wearing blue and yellow, or simply holding up a blank placard.” Also true.

He concludes by saying, “We need to make a fuss and to keep on making a fuss.” Dictators want nothing more than that their prisoners be forgotten; the prisoners want nothing more than that they be remembered.

Remember them.

• A headline reads, “Hungary holds up EU sanctions on jailers of Russian dissident.” The dissident in question is Kara-Murza. Orbán’s government typically does this: prevents the EU from acting against the Kremlin.

For the article about Hungary and Kara-Murza, go here.

As you may recall, Viktor Orbán tried to prevent the EU from adopting Magnitsky sanctions in the first place. The Wall Street Journal reported on this in 2020 (here). It was pressure from Senator Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) that forced Orbán to relent.

Yet he can still, of course, wield his veto.

When Putin came to see him in 2017, Orbán said, “We all sense — it’s in the air — that the world is in the process of a substantial realignment.” No question. For his part, Putin hailed Hungary as an “important and reliable partner for Russia in Europe.” That has proven true.

In late 2021, as he was massing troops on the Ukrainian border, Putin personally awarded the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship to the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjártó.

Orbán is a darling of the American Right today — of Heritage, CPAC, Turning Point, etc. Talk about “a substantial realignment.” While Orbán is a darling, Ukraine’s Zelensky is anything but.

This says a great deal. It is well to remember, however, that one realignment can follow another. Life does not stand still (fortunately and unfortunately).

• As democratic governments impose sanctions on individuals, so too does the Kremlin. Here is a highly interesting news story, by Peter Baker of the New York Times. It begins,

Russia has expanded its list of sanctioned Americans in a tit-for-tat retaliation for the latest curbs imposed by the United States. But what is particularly striking is how much President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is adopting perceived enemies of former President Donald J. Trump as his own.

Among the newly sanctioned Americans are Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia — who refused to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election — and the Capitol Hill police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt on January 6, making her a martyr of the general Trump world.

As Baker observes, none of these people “has anything to do with Russia policy and the only reason they would have come to Moscow’s attention is because Mr. Trump has publicly assailed them.”

Today’s alignments in politics are absolutely dizzying, perhaps especially for those of us who knew, and experienced, and participated in, a different day.

• In the Washington Post, Josh Rogin writes,

Those who argue that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be allowed to keep parts of Ukraine should meet the survivors of his atrocities. They know firsthand the horror of life under Russian occupation. Their stories remind us of what Ukraine is fighting for — and what the free world is standing against.

Yes. Oleksandra Matviichuk finds she has to make this point repeatedly. Ukrainians are fighting not merely for territories — physical territories — though those territories are rightfully theirs. They are fighting for the people in those territories — to spare them further brutalization by the occupying forces.

For my interview with Matviichuk last year, go here. She is the executive director of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, which shared the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

• My friend David French, our old colleague here, has been in Ukraine. “At the risk of sounding a bit corny,” he writes, “when I watched the air defenses we helped build intercept Russian hypersonic missiles above Kyiv, I felt proud to be an American.” Yes. I know just how he feels. So do many Americans. Not all, by a long shot, but many.

• This story is related to the above. It is headed, “Russia detains hypersonic missile engineers for treason.” Yes. Very, very Soviet. Putin has indeed re-Sovietized Russia (as I wrote about in some detail last month, here).

• Speaking of re-Sovietization, some interesting information from Steve Rosenberg, the chief BBC correspondent in Russia:

• Here is Mitt Romney:

If you want to be cool in certain circles, say, “Romney speaks conservatism as a foreign language.” I hear it once a week, or every week and a half. But the thing is: Romney often speaks as virtually all of us conservatives spoke, pre-2016 or so.

I’m not sure it is he who is speaking the “foreign language.”

• Here is Professor Eliot A. Cohen, long affiliated with National Review:

A Russia that prevails would be a Russia even further empowered to meddle in Europe and to expand its influence with unlimited violence; a Russia that will have learned that it can commit slaughter and atrocities with impunity; a Russia whose ambitions will grow with success. A Russian victory would, as well, teach the world that the West — including the United States — lacks the resolve, despite its wealth, to follow through on its commitments, offering Beijing an encouraging lesson.

Conversely, Russian defeat would put Beijing — already somewhat nervous about its partner’s incompetence and wild statements — on the defensive, consolidate the Western alliance, and help preserve some of the essential norms of decent behavior in those parts of the world most important to us.

Yes. For that article as a whole, go here.

• Here is a curious story, and one very much of our times. It comes from my home area, southeastern Michigan. In brief, a woman daubed swastikas at synagogues, on baby strollers, etc., for the purpose of blaming the graffiti on Ukrainians.

Again: very today.

• I snapped the below photo on Friday evening. It shows the façade of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The Met is flying, or exhibiting, Ukrainian colors. Many people snort at this. They call it “virtue-signaling” or worse. But to express solidarity with a people under siege, fighting for its life, is outright virtuous. Put it this way: If Russia were invaded and threatened with annihilation, many of us would be flying Russian colors.

It’s a simple matter of right-and-wrong.

• This afternoon, I will attend a concert at Carnegie Hall, given in tribute to Andrei Sakharov. The Sakharov Foundation in Moscow has been banned. So has the Moscow Helsinki Group, which Sakharov started, with many friends and allies, including his wife, Yelena Bonner, of course, and Anatoly Shcharansky, and Yuri Orlov, and Andrei Amalrik . . .

They meant a lot then, they mean a lot now. And they have worthy and great successors, Vladimir Kara-Murza not least. The struggle for freedom continues.