From his prison cell, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian dissident, managed to send a column to the Washington Post via his lawyer. Here is his final paragraph:
As Boris Nemtsov liked to say: “We can do it.” Russia will be free. I’ve never been so sure of it as I am today.
Remarks such as these occasion a great deal of skepticism, of course. But I remember a conversation with Paul Nitze, in the early 1990s. The Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Very few had predicted this. (Bernard Levin, the great British journalist, was one of the few.) Nitze was one of the greatest diplomats in U.S. history. He had particular expertise on the Soviet Union.
I asked him, “Were you surprised by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union?” “Yes,” he said forthrightly. Then he elaborated, in most interesting fashion.
Some years later, I was talking with George Shultz, in an interview. He brought up Nitze. One day, Shultz recalled, the great diplomat was testifying before a Senate committee. One of the Democrats asked him, “How can you serve in an administration whose president calls the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’?” Nitze answered, “Did you ever consider the possibility that it’s true?”
Yes, it was true. And look what Vladimir Putin, that product of the Soviet Union — indeed, of the KGB — is doing today.
• John McCain was a champion of Vladimir Kara-Murza. The senator asked Kara-Murza to be among his pallbearers. McCain had also been a champion of Boris Nemtsov — murdered within sight of the Kremlin in 2015. Is there anyone today — any senator, any other U.S. political leader — who is a champion of Russian democrats, dissidents, and political prisoners? Anyone willing to be loud, for example, about the imprisonment of Kara-Murza?
In whom do the Reaganite juices still flow?
• There have been many articles on the question of genocide, where Russia’s onslaught against the Ukrainians is concerned. Some say yes, this rises (descends?) to genocide; others say no. We have also gone through these discussions where the Syrians, Uyghurs, Rohingyas, and others are concerned.
I suppose my bottom line is this: Call it genocide, call it mass murder, call it terrorization, call it a ham sandwich. I don’t particularly care. Just stop the killing, stop the rape, stop the terror, if you can — and repel the invader.
Most Americans, I gather, are on Ukraine’s side. Many are not. And some are neutral, like J.D. Vance, the Trump-endorsed Senate candidate in Ohio. He said to Steve Bannon, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
Well, one can appreciate the honesty.
• Julia Davis, the creator of the Russian Media Monitor, circulates a video and comments:
More genocidal talk on Russian state TV: pundit agrees that Putin’s goal is to erase the very idea of being a Ukrainian. He finds even the name, “Ukrainians,” to be an insult and sees no reason for that entire nation or nationality to exist outside of “Russian” identity.
Yup. I hear this echoed in the West as well.
• Euan MacDonald, editor-at-large at The New Voice of Ukraine, circulates a photo and describes it as follows: “Hundreds of fresh graves in Irpin, a suburban town near Kyiv that was under occupation for a month by invading Russian forces.”
A reality, like other realities, to be stared in the face.
• “‘Thank You for Not Killing Us.’” That is the headline over a report in the New York Times. It is from Borodianka, Ukraine, and is by Jeffrey Gettleman and Oleksandr Chubko. The subheading is, “An ordeal at a mental health facility in Ukraine illuminated the horrors of the Russian occupation in the areas around Kyiv.”
Yes.
The report begins,
The first sign of trouble was when a squad of Chechen soldiers burst through the gate.
They jumped from their Jeeps, combat boots hitting the pavement hard, and ordered the 500 patients and staff of Borodianka’s special care home into the courtyard, at gunpoint.
“We thought we were going to be executed,” Maryna Hanitska, the home’s director, said in an interview this week.
The soldiers pulled out a camera, Ms. Hanitska said, and then barked at her to make everyone smile. Most of the patients were crying.
“We command you to say to the camera, ‘Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,’’’ the soldiers demanded of Ms. Hanitska.
With several guns in her face, she said, she quickly ran through her options. She would never thank Russia’s president, whom she had called “a liar” and “a killer.”
But she didn’t want the soldiers to hurt anyone. So she managed to utter, “Thank you for not killing us.”
And then she fainted.
• Inna Sovsun, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, has circulated a photo of a young man who volunteered for a gruesome task: exhuming corpses from a mass grave. “To understand the horrors” of the Bucha massacre, Sovsun said, “you need to look at his face.”
• Zinaida Makishaiva lives in the aforementioned Borodianka (alternatively spelled “Borodyanka”), about 15 miles northwest of Bucha. Two reporters from Reuters, Zohra Bensemra and Joseph Campbell, talked with her.
The 82-year-old was not too shaken when Russian tanks first showed up in early March in Borodyanka . . . but then Grad missiles smashed into her home, destroying her chicken coop.
A neighbour next door was killed by shelling. And then Russian troops began to visit every day.
Her daily routines, established since early childhood when she started “rural work”, were soon punctured by shelling and missile attacks.
“Scared doesn’t fully describe how I felt. I felt dead, senseless.”
A bit more:
The Russian troops came in three waves, she said, the first being the most violent. One day several soldiers entered her house, demanding that she stay in the cellar.
“‘Get in the cellar, you old bitch!’ (the Russian troops said). I told them: ‘Kill me, but I won’t go’,” said Makishaiva.
Kill me, but I won’t go — extraordinary.
• For the New York Times, Alex Marshall has written a fascinating report on Russia and ballet. Russia and ballet go together like America and baseball (or maybe I should say, at this point, the Americas and baseball).
Just days after the invasion of Ukraine, Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, posted an emotional statement on Telegram, the messaging app. “I am against war with all the fibers of my soul,” she wrote.
“I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia,” she added, “but now I feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after.”
That’s certainly been true for Ms. Smirnova, 30. As the war got worse, and dissent in Russia was ruthlessly quashed, Ms. Smirnova, who had gone to Dubai to recover from a knee injury, realized that she could no longer return home. “If I were to go back to Russia, I would have to completely change my opinion, the way I felt about the war,” Ms. Smirnova said in a recent interview in Amsterdam, adding that returning would be, “quite frankly, dangerous.”
So she left the Bolshoi, the storied company whose name is synonymous with ballet, with its gilded theaters just blocks from the Kremlin, uprooted her life and moved to Amsterdam, where she joined the Dutch National Ballet.
Some more from Marshall’s report:
“We’re going back to the Cold War,” said Ted Brandsen, the artistic director of Dutch National Ballet and Ms. Smirnova’s new boss, invoking a time notable for the defections of Soviet dance stars including Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova. Mr. Brandsen said Russian dancers were contacting him daily saying, “I can’t be myself as an artist in this country.”
No.
One more excerpt, concerning the great Ratmansky:
Ms. Smirnova is not the only high-profile artist to leave Russia. On the day war began, Alexei Ratmansky, ballet’s pre-eminent choreographer and a former artistic director of the Bolshoi, was in Moscow rehearsing a new work. He immediately got a flight back home to New York, where he is artist in residence at American Ballet Theater, saying he was unlikely to return to Russia “if Putin is still president.”
• Mikhail Khodorkovsky noted some Russian journalists and others who have now been branded “foreign agents” by the Kremlin. Garry Kasparov commented, “As is the natural progression of every paranoid dictatorship, anyone with a functioning brain and free will becomes an enemy of the state.”
Very well put.
• The head of RT, the big Kremlin propaganda outlet, has been interesting in recent weeks. She is Margarita Simonyan, notorious. Here she is, talking about the dangers of a free press.
“No big nation can exist without control over information,” Simonyan says. Russians were once told that political development and economic development went hand in hand. But a free press was disastrous for Russia. (This is Simonyan talking.) Look at China: The Communist Party maintains tight political control — including over the press — while allowing economic development.
Okay, a question for you: How many Westerners have worked for RT? Appeared on RT? Defended RT? Will that continue indefinitely?
• Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg traveled to Kyiv to interview Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. It is a very interesting interview. “There will be no complete victory for people who lost their children, relatives, husbands, wives, parents,” Zelensky says. “They will not feel the victory, even when our territories are liberated.”
I think Zelensky has provided a splendid, inspiring example of leadership. Obviously, many people resent him, throughout the world. He refuses to die. He insists on surviving — even prevailing. It would be more convenient, for many, if he would just die, or give up. Same with Ukraine at large.
A lot of people are invested in Putin: as a great, strong leader; a protector of Christian civilization; a manly man; a bulwark against the “woke” hordes; a scourge of “globalism.” All that. Zelensky and Ukraine are putting up an old-fashioned fight for freedom and independence — for their very right to life.
That doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. Well, too bad.
• I have a friend named Antoine Leboyer. He is a French-born entrepreneur and music critic. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School. He now lives in Munich. Antoine has been engaged in the effort to help Ukrainian refugees. He wrote an account of this effort — one slice of it — here. There are good people in this world, doing what they can. I’m proud to know Antoine Leboyer.