Новости за 02.03.2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t plan on such fierce military resistance to his invasion of Ukraine, and now he’s predictably lashing out. Russian forces have begun indiscriminately bombing civilian targets, including in a missile strike Tuesday in Zhytomyr, 90 miles west of Kyiv, that destroyed the Pavlusenko maternity hospital, according to reporters and Ukraine’s foreign ministry. At least two people died in the bombing.

Most Americans think that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump were president. That news comes via a Harvard Center for American Political Studies-Harris Poll survey released last Friday, which said 62 percent of those polled believed Putin would not have attacked Ukraine if Trump were still in office—numbers that strongly suggest that most Americans still have little understanding about the disastrous ramifications of the Trump-Russia relationship.

As he watched Russian forces move on Kyiv, as part of that nation’s immoral, unjustified, and already hugely costly war on Ukraine, NBC News correspondent Richard Engel had a thought: Why doesn’t the West simply bomb the hell out of the Russians? “Perhaps the biggest risk-calculation/moral dilemma of the war so far,” he tweeted. “A massive Russian convoy is [about] 30 miles from Kyiv. The US/NATO could likely destroy it. But that would be direct involvement against Russia and risk, everything. Читать дальше...

A swath of politicians have taken donations from a Soviet Russia–born billionaire with ties to Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarch allies. Now, as American and global institutions and individuals move to disassociate from Russia as a show of solidarity with Ukraine, the donations from that billionaire are increasingly becoming a yardstick for how far Americans are willing to go to cut ties with Putin.

As attention was mostly focused on Ukraine yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a nearly 3,700-page report arguing in exhaustive detail that the world’s governments could “miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.” Already, its 270 co-authors wrote, nearly half of humanity is “highly vulnerable” to climate change, facing unbearable temperatures and violent storms that will likely soon outpace capacities to adapt to them. Читать дальше...

You probably don’t know this, and I didn’t either, but it turns out that in eighteenth-century Poland there lived a Jewish heretic named Jacob Frank. The origins of this Frank are murky, but at some point he acquired several thousand followers and traveled with those followers through what are now the nations of Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and Turkey. After the Frankists came into conflict with other Jewish sects, they converted to Catholicism, which at first earned them the favor of the Polish... Читать дальше...

In a different world, Joe Biden’s first State of the Union Address might have revolved around economic growth, the historic nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, and the growing sense that normal life is finally resuming as omicron fades and the CDC lifts most of its mask mandates.

The State of the Union address is something of an incantation, offering the president an annual opportunity to argue that his leadership has righted the nation’s course. Even an undertone of national malaise cannot fully forestall the relentless optimism inherent in the event. Though there have been some rare exceptions, the president nearly always testifies that state of the union is strong, regardless of how Americans may actually be feeling.