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Thursday, March 31, 2022
POLITICO NIGHTLY: Why Cawthorn got more GOP blowback than MTG
RSN: FOCUS: Isaac Chotiner | What a Negotiated Solution in Ukraine Might Look Like
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Poor communication and vague pronouncements threaten to prolong the war. I recently spoke by phone with Angela Stent, an expert on U.S.-Russia relations who served in the Office of Policy Planning under multiple Administrations, and also on the National Intelligence Council. Stent is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; her most recent book is “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Biden’s comment will affect Putin’s Ukraine strategy, what a plan for Ukrainian “neutrality” might look like in practice, and the biggest mistake in post-Cold War American policy toward Russia. You’ve written a lot about the ways Russia and the United States interact, or don’t interact. And there’s been a lot of angst about Biden’s comment. Very specifically, what is the problem with the comment? Why is it something that an American President should not say, if in fact you don’t think an American President should say it? Well, first of all, it was obviously from the heart. He’d spent the day partly with refugees, and I’m sure it was a very emotional day for him to be in Poland and see all of that. And he obviously meant what he said. The reason it’s problematic is that world leaders aren’t supposed to say things like that publicly. And I think people have been concerned because there’s a war going on, and the concern is that making a remark like that could make things worse. European leaders, particularly President Macron, of France, have complained and said that they are trying to negotiate with Putin, and that they are trying to end the war, and that comments like this aren’t helpful. All of those who are involved in these ongoing negotiations prefer some ambiguity here. And that’s why there have been concerns about this. But obviously there are people who think that he said what he felt and it was O.K. to say it. Just to nail down on what the concern is: Is the idea that Americans should not say things like this because it’s not our business who the leader of Russia is, or Putin will use it as propaganda, or this would change how Putin personally views the West or change what he’s able to convince his citizens about what the West wants? What do you think the heart of the concern is? Look, Putin has been saying for years that the United States wants regime change in Russia. He said that explicitly, that “they’re trying to defeat us, invade us, cut us up.” So the fact that this was said explicitly is not going to change his view of the United States, which is pretty bad, and he has already convinced himself that we want regime change. It’s not really going to change what the Russian population thinks, because Russia’s state-run media has been telling them for a long time that the United States is the enemy, and that it was going to use Ukraine as a way of invading Russia. I think it’s more that we officially, as the United States, don’t go around saying that we want regime change, and the line is that it’s up to the people of country X to decide who their ruler is. Sometimes we do go around saying that we want regime change and decide that for other countries, but, yes, go on. Yeah. Saddam Hussein, for example. But I think it’s partly because what we’re supposed to say, or what it’s politically correct to say, is that it’s up to the citizens of each country to elect their leader. But I think there is also, possibly, a concern not that Putin’s view of the United States has now changed but that Putin and the people around him can use what President Biden said as a way to justify an even harsher military onslaught in Ukraine, and maybe to prolong the war. I personally don’t really think that saying something like that is going to have an impact on what they actually do, but the concern is that they could use what he said to justify that. Right, but then it seems like everyone is playacting to some degree. Putin is pretending that he’s found something new out, his propaganda will say the same thing, and people in the West will say, “You shouldn’t have said this, because Putin’s going to use it.” Yeah. But I think the other thing is the European allies. Biden has worked very hard, and he’s been very successful in getting everyone on board with his policy. And I guess to say something like that, which is not what the other European leaders are going to say, could also cause some more ripples in trying to keep this coalition together. I was reading your most recent book, and one point you make is that it can be especially important to have communications between the American and Russian Presidents because there aren’t that many lower-level diplomatic communications, or as many cordial relationships between the two countries at many different levels as there are with American allies, and so on. Is that a fair characterization? Yes, and I would say it’s even more so now because of all the expulsions of diplomats and spies in the past few years. We have a skeleton staff at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. We do have the Ambassador, who is a holdover from the Trump Administration. He hasn’t gone, thank goodness. But there’s really very few channels for communication left anymore. And, whereas you do have European leaders who’ve met with Putin physically, or speak to him daily on the phone, apart from a couple of phone calls that President Biden had with Putin in the last month, as far as we know there has been no direct communication between them. Is that problematic? Do you think that the White House should take more of a proactive approach to talking with him? Yeah. I think a number of people have for the past month been saying, “If only there was someone, an American, who could go and have a private channel and talk to Putin.” Henry Kissinger used to meet regularly with Putin as a back channel. And now, again, as far as we know there is no one who is performing that function, and, in a way, it would be good if there could be someone who could meet with him. I don’t know what it would produce, but at least make the gesture of trying to figure out if there’s some other way of getting through to him. It’s very difficult to do that, but I think it would be better. I think the lack of communication at the top is something that has to worry us. There are channels of communication. We know that at lower levels, for instance, there are military channels still going on so that hopefully there won’t be any direct conflict between Russia and any NATO member. But that doesn’t seem to be happening too much at the higher levels. You’ve written extensively about the Russian-German relationship going back to the Cold War. There’s been a lot written in the West about how this has been a transformational moment for Germany in terms of its military, in terms of its energy supplies. But Volodymyr Zelensky has seemed, when he’s talked about it recently, more skeptical that Germany has completely gone in this direction, and moved away from Russia. What is your sense? Well, on the one hand, it is transformational, because in the February 27th speech that Chancellor Scholz made he jettisoned fifty years of Ostpolitik. And the premise of Germany’s Russia policy was that you always have to have good communication with Russia, that you’ve got to engage Russia, and that economic relations and importing Russian energy will have a beneficial effect on political relations. And then obviously the guilt for what happened in the Second World War. And so he threw that over. He said, “We’re going to supply the Ukrainians with lethal defensive weapons,” which Germany refused to do before. He said, “We’re going to spend more than two per cent of our G.D.P. on defense.” He said, “We won’t open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.” And they have now said that they’re going to try and wean themselves off Russian gas. So, on the one hand, that is a major turnaround, but from Zelensky’s point of view it isn’t enough. I guess the Ukrainians are really trying to push the West to stop importing all Russian energy, because they claim, rightly, that as long as people are buying Russian energy it enables Russia to avoid the worst impact of the sanctions, and it fills the Russian state coffers. So he has been very critical of Germany, and of course he even talked about what the Germans did to Ukraine in the Second World War, probably to justify that. There has been a remarkable change in Germany, but I also would note that on Sunday there was a big demonstration in Bonn of solidarity with Russia. They were largely Russian-speaking Germans or Germans who have come from Russia, whose ancestors were living in Russia. So there is still sentiment in Germany on the right, as there is in the United States, that is more supportive of Putin. But I think in general it’s unlikely that the German government is going to move away from importing Russian fossil fuel for some time to come, because there have to be alternatives, and you can’t just flip that on and off. In terms of any possible endgame, Zelensky has made noises that he’s willing to accept certain things, but not other things, and it’s hard to know what’s a negotiating position and what are real red lines for him. But one thing that keeps getting discussed is this idea of Ukrainian “neutrality.” Can you explain what that might mean in practice? Sure. So, until fairly recently, the Ukrainian constitution said that Ukraine will be a neutral country, i.e., that it was not looking to join NATO, and there’s nothing else to join. In 2008, there was a NATO summit, in Bucharest, when the Bush Administration was pushing its allies to grant Ukraine and Georgia membership action plans—in other words, something that would give them a perspective to join NATO. And the allies balked at that. The Germans and French said, “No, we’re not going to do that, because this is going to provoke Russia.” So they came up with an unfortunate compromise, negotiated in all-night-long sessions, and said that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO, without having any sense or commitment to what that meant. And there has never been, since 2008, any program to try and integrate Ukraine with NATO. Ukraine has its own special relationship with NATO. It meets regularly with NATO, but, in other words, nothing was ever done to advance Ukraine’s NATO membership. And then when you had the revolution after 2014 and the new government came in, the constitution was changed to say that actually Ukraine would like to join NATO. And that was obviously a result of Russia annexing Crimea, and starting a war in the Donbas, and they felt much more threatened by Russia. So, today, when Zelensky talks about neutrality he means Ukraine will reluctantly agree that it doesn’t have an aspiration to join NATO, because it knows that’s not happening. But, in return for that, what Zelensky wants—and this is where it gets problematic—are security guarantees. When you say security guarantees, are we saying guarantees from the West, that they will help out, or guarantees from Russia, that Ukraine will not be further attacked? What’s not clear here is exactly what he means by it. I’ll leave the Russian part out of this. What he wants are guarantees from the United States and certain Western countries that, if Ukraine were to be attacked, they would come to Ukraine’s defense. And the issue with that is, that’s exactly what NATO Article Five guarantees are. Ukraine won’t join NATO, but it wants guarantees that, if it is attacked, they’ll come to its assistance. And so that is going to be problematic. How would you negotiate that? And how far would the U.S. and other NATO countries be willing to go in order to guarantee this? Now, people have also thrown out the Austrian State Treaty from 1955 as a model, because, in 1955, the Soviet Union, and then the Western powers, agreed that it would withdraw their troops from Austria, and that it would remain neutral, and that was kind of guaranteed legally. But the point is that the Soviet Union didn’t have any designs on Austria at that point. It was willing to let Austria be neutral because it had the rest of the Eastern Bloc. So we’re really not in an analogous situation today, where Ukraine wants Russia to sign on to say that it guarantees Ukraine’s neutrality. How credible would that be? The fact that Ukraine is willing to give up its aspirations to join NATO does meet one of Russia’s demands. The Russians have demanded no NATO enlargement and no NATO membership for Ukraine. But the details would be difficult. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it means it would be problematic. I don’t know if this would be a good analogy or not, and it may not seem particularly heartening to the Ukrainians right now, but I think some people would say that American policy toward Taiwan in the past few decades has exhibited some of the benefits of fuzziness. Taiwan is obviously not part of NATO, and it’s not exactly clear what America would do if Taiwan were attacked. But there’s enough ambiguity in American-Taiwanese relations that Taiwan feels some sense of security. I think that is a useful analogy. The issue is: Would that be enough for Ukraine? We know that China’s ambition is to reabsorb Taiwan. There’s no question about that. The issue here is Russia’s intentions. I don’t know that there is an endgame; there are going to be a series of things that could happen. You could have a negotiated partial settlement, and there could be a lull in the fighting, and then things could pick up again. So you could have an arrangement where there was some ambiguity. And then you just have to hope that Russia didn’t kind of recoup and decide to go back in again, but that’s a possibility. That’s obviously not what Zelensky would like, but he may have to settle for something less than what he would want. How do the last few months make you reëvaluate the post-Cold War period in America-Russia relations? Do you think that there was anything that could have been done differently or should have been done differently? I do think a mistake was this Bucharest communiqué in 2008, because the fact that it’s in black and white there, that Ukraine will join NATO, even though there was no intention from the part of NATO to do anything about this for a long time, allowed the Russians to seize on this and use it as one of the main excuses for what they did. Having said that, Putin has never accepted that Ukraine is a separate country from Russia, and he probably always had designs on reincorporating Ukraine. It’s just that no one was quite sure what the timing was. And what about in terms of Putin? Has your view of him changed? I think what’s changed my view, or what I might not have predicted, were the risks that he’s taken. So if you look at the war in Georgia, in 2008, the Russians went in there, they defeated the Georgians, but they didn’t take the capital, Tbilisi. And they didn’t depose Mikheil Saakashvili, who was the President, whom they loathed. It was a limited incursion. They recognized these two entities as independent, and then they left. If you look at what they did in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea, there was no bloodshed. They started a war in the Donbas region, but they didn’t continue it. They sort of partially withdrew, even though the fighting continued. So it seems as if this whole-scale invasion of Ukraine and telegraphing it—I mean, we knew what they were doing, and we told them that we knew what they were doing—are not things I think that anyone would have predicted. And I think the other thing that maybe we overestimated was the extent to which Putin had rebuilt the Russian armed forces after the Georgia war, where they won, but they didn’t perform that well. And clearly the Russian military is not performing nearly well enough in Ukraine. And we see just the lack of preparation, the miscalculation about whether they would be welcomed with open arms, the fact that they didn’t even prepare these young soldiers to tell them what they were doing. But Putin has been pretty consistent all along in refusing to accept Ukraine as a separate country, and also in saying that Russia has a right to a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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RSN: FOCUS: Tim Dickinson | Dozens of LA Sheriff Deputies Alleged to Be 'Tattooed Members' of 'Law Enforcement Gangs'
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L.A. County’s inspector general reveals 41 sheriff deputies are under investigation for allegedly belonging to the Banditos or Executioners
A new letter to Sheriff Alex Villanueva from Los Angeles County Inspector General Max Huntsman reveals that Huntsman’s office is investigating at least 41 deputies for their alleged membership in tattooed “law enforcement gangs.” The letter cites a “partial list of deputies whom the Sheriffs Department itself has identified as allegedly being tattooed members,” a list that includes “eleven alleged Banditos and thirty alleged Executioners.”
The alleged deputy gangs within the LASD operate out of the department’s precincts, called “stations” in LASD lingo. The Banditos are linked to the East Los Angeles station, while the Executioners, according to Huntsman’s letter, are “a deputy gang based out of the Sheriff’s Department’s Compton Station.”
Deputy gangs have plagued the LASD for decades — as detailed by a county-commissioned 2021 report by the RAND corporation — and members have been accused of violence, discrimination, harassment, and intimidation, not only against members of the public but fellow members of the department. The county has paid out at least $55 million in settlements to resolve claims linked to alleged deputy gangs.
Not unlike in street gangs, sheriff-deputy gang members receive matching tattoos. The Bandidos emblem is a skeleton with a sombrero and a handlebar mustache holding a smoking revolver. As described by Huntsman, the Executioners’ tattoo features “a skeleton with a Nazi-style military helmet.”
The terminology used to describe these deputy gangs has been controversial. They have also variously been described as “subgroups” and “cliques.” In February, Sheriff Villanueva sent a letter to the county board of supervisors demanding that they “cease and desist from using the derogatory term ‘deputy gangs,'” arguing that the term “serves no purpose other than to fuel hatred … against our people.”
But Huntsman makes clear his office is investigating the deputies under a specific section of the California penal code that prohibits “law enforcement gangs.” And Huntsman is far from alone in denouncing LASD gang activity. Last year, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) called for a federal investigation of the Executioners, whom she described as “a rogue, violent gang of law enforcement officials.” This February, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, similarly called for the Justice Department to launch “a full investigation” into “violent contingents of deputies” who belong to “unauthorized, exclusive, and secretive gangs.”
In his letter, Huntsman blasts Villanueva’s top deputy, undersheriff Timothy Murakami, for failing to turn over documents related to the gang investigation requested in January. “The Sheriffs Department may not refuse to produce the records requested,” Huntsman writes, “by unilaterally declaring that no deputy sheriff is a member of a ‘law enforcement gang.'” The inspector general writes that he’s “required by law to investigate” potential gang activity, and that the law also requires the LASD to cooperate.
Huntsman’s letter also makes clear that the investigation is not limited to the Banditos and the Executioners, but and also seeks documentation of deputies linked to “potential law enforcement gangs” known as the “Gladiators,” “Jump Out Boys,” “The Grim Reapers,” and “The Vikings.”
The Sheriff’s Department reacted to Huntsman in a Facebook post decrying the watchdog’s “unhealthy obsession to attack the department” and a campaign to “undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the Sheriff’s Department.”
The post touts Villanueva’s commitment to “transparency and accountability” and claims that “all legally obtainable information requested by the Office of the Inspector General has been provided.”
Finally, it accuses the Inspector General of playing politics — seeking to tarnish Villanueva in an election year. “The timing of this letter suggests Mr. Huntsman is using his public office and resources,” the post contends, “to campaign against the sheriff leading up to the June primaries.”
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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RSN: Putin Outraged by Zelenskyy Note Delivered by Russian Oligarch Ambramovich: 'Tell Him I Will Thrash Him'
30 March 22
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The Times of London reported Monday that Abramovich, a close ally of Putin acting as Russia’s envoy to Ukrainian negotiators, last week met Putin in Moscow and presented him with a handwritten note from Zelenskyy outlining the conditions he would consider in order to reach a cease-fire agreement.
Though the newspaper did not disclose the exact contents of the alleged note, The Times said Putin’s response was unequivocally clear: "Tell him I will thrash them." Fox News has not verified the report.
Abramovich, who along with two top Ukrainian diplomats reportedly suffered a suspected poisoning in Kyiv earlier this month, was present in person Tuesday in Istanbul, Turkey, where another round of talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations happened for the first time in nearly three weeks.
His exact role in the talks was unclear, as the Kremlin has stressed Abramovich is not an official member of the delegation in Istanbul but has been serving as a go-between for the Russian and Ukrainian sides.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Vadym Prystaiko, was critical of Abramovich’s presence at the talks hosted at the Dolmabahce Palace, commenting to the BBC on Tuesday, "I don't know if he's buying his way out somehow or if he's really useful, that's very difficult to tell."
The Wall Street Journal and Netherlands-based investigative group, Bellingcat, both reported about the suspected poisoning on Monday, saying Abramovich, Ukrainian lawmaker Rustem Umerov and another negotiator had all experienced symptoms that included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands following a March 3 meeting in Kyiv.
The reports said the conditions of the three men have since improved and their lives weren’t in danger.
But contacted by Fox News, a spokesman for Zelenskyy’s office denied reports about the poisoning, as did Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who told Russian media the reports were false and part of an "information war." Umerov tweeted, "I’m fine," Monday, warning not to trust "unverified information."
Still, BBC reported that Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said on Ukrainian TV hours before Tuesday’s talks in Istanbul that he advised colleagues not to eat or drink anything.
The Russian government has previously been accused of poisoning perceived dissenters. The Kremlin has been tied to the 2020 nerve agent attack on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Siberia, the 2018 nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer who defected to the U.K., and his daughter Yulia, and the 2004 poisoning of pro-Western Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was left permanently disfigured following the attack.
Speaking at a press conference in Morocco Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there’s "concern" of reports about the poisoning due to Russia’s "track record" with Navalny and others.
Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, has been sanctioned by the U.K. and the European Union, but the Journal previously reported that Zelenskyy asked the U.S. not to sanction Abramovich due to his role in facilitating talks and his growing interest in humanitarian issues, including potentially organizing civilian evacuations from the besieged Mariupol, so the U.S. Treasury paused plans to do so.
Russian state-run news agency Ria Novosti published a photo Tuesday showing Abramovich speaking with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu at the meeting.
The BBC noted that Abramovich, who also holds Israeli and Portuguese citizenship and owns a minority stake in the steel company Evraz PLC, was seen on Turkish television coverage of the talks listening to a translation through headphones while sitting next to Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin at a separate table from the main delegations on Tuesday.
As talks were underway Tuesday, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin told reporters in Moscow that his country has agreed to "fundamentally cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv" in order to "increase mutual trust for future negotiations to agree and sign a peace deal with Ukraine," according to the Financial Times. The announcement did not signal any relief, however, for the besieged cities of Odesa or Mariupol, which have suffered heavy Russian bombardment.
A sign is pictured outside a Google office near the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California. (photo: Reuters)
Roskomnadzor said Google could be fined up to 8 million roubles ($91,533), or as much as 20% of the company's annual revenue in Russia for repeat offences.
It said YouTube had become one of the key platforms in the "information war" against Russia.
Google did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Russia has restricted access to Twitter and Meta Platforms' flagship Facebook and Instagram services since sending troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, as a simmering dispute with U.S. technology giants has escalated into a battle to control information flows.
YouTube, which has blocked Russian state-funded media globally, is under heavy pressure from Moscow, which earlier this month accused it of spreading what it called threats against Russian citizens.
"The American platform openly enables the spread of false content, containing inaccurate publicly significant information about the course of the special military operation in Ukraine, discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation, as well as information of an extremist nature with calls for violence against Russian servicemen," Roskomnadzor said.
Russia last week said Meta was guilty of "extremist activity", something the company's lawyer denied in a Moscow court.
Russia launched what it calls a special operation in Ukraine to degrade its neighbour's military capabilities and root out people it called dangerous nationalists.
Ukrainian forces have mounted stiff resistance and the West has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in response.
($1 = 87.4000 roubles)
A Ukrainian woman recounts being raped by Russian soldiers who killed her husband: 'Shall we kill her or keep her alive?' (photo: Getty Images)
On Monday, The Times of London published an interview with an anonymous woman the newspaper identified as being at the center of the investigation. It said she was 33 and had lived with her 35-year-old husband and 4-year-old son near the village of Shevchenkove outside the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
The woman told The Times that on March 9 she and her husband approached a group of Russian soldiers outside their home and found that the troops had killed the family's dog. She said the troops later searched the area for gasoline, with one of the soldiers apparently apologizing for the dog's death.
After dark, she said, she and her husband again heard something outside, and her husband walked out.
"I heard a single shot, the sounds of the gate opening, and then the sound of footsteps in the house," the woman told The Times.
She said one of the men from earlier — apparently the group's commander — had returned with one other man, who appeared to be in his 20s.
"I cried out, 'Where is my husband?'" she said. "Then I looked outside and I saw him on the ground by the gate. This younger guy pulled gun to my head and said: 'I shot your husband because he's a Nazi.'"
The woman told The Times she told her 4-year-old son to hide in the boiler room where they had been sheltering. She said the two soldiers then took turns raping her as her son cried in the next room.
"He said 'you'd better shut up or I'll get your child and show him his mother's brains spread around the house,'" she told The Times, adding: "All the time they held the gun by my head and taunted me, saying, 'How do you think she sucks it? Shall we kill her or keep her alive?'"
There have been other reports of sexual violence and rape during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but last week Ukraine's prosecutor general announced the first investigation into one of them. Earlier this month, Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine's parliament, talked to UK officials about the rising reports of rape.
"We have reports of women being gang-raped. These women are usually the ones who are unable to get out. We are talking about senior citizens," The Guardian quoted Vasylenko as saying. "Most of these women have either been executed after the crime of rape or they have taken their own lives."
The woman interviewed by The Times said she and her son ultimately fled, leaving the home her husband built for them and his body behind. She said she hadn't yet told her son that his father died. "We cannot bury him, we can't get to the village, because the village is still occupied," she said.
She said she didn't know whether she'd return even if the area were to be liberated. "Memories are hard," she told The Times. "I don't know how I will live with all of it, but I still understand that my husband built this house for us. I would never be able to bring myself to sell it."
A drone is assembled by the Aerorozvidka unit. (photo: Aerorozvidka)
Special IT force of 30 soldiers on quad bikes is vital part of Ukraine’s defence, but forced to crowdfund for supplies
But the convoy of armoured vehicles and supply trucks ground to a halt within days, and the offensive failed, in significant part because of a series of night ambushes carried out by a team of 30 Ukrainian special forces and drone operators on quad bikes, according to a Ukrainian commander.
The drone operators were drawn from an air reconnaissance unit, Aerorozvidka, which began eight years ago as a group of volunteer IT specialists and hobbyists designing their own machines and has evolved into an essential element in Ukraine’s successful David-and-Goliath resistance.
However, while Ukraine’s western backers have supplied thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other military equipment, Aerorozvidka has been forced to resort to crowdfunding and a network of personal contacts in order to keep going, by getting hold of components such as advanced modems and thermal imaging cameras, in the face of export controls that prohibit them being sent to Ukraine.
The unit’s commander, Lt Col Yaroslav Honchar, gave an account of the ambush near the town of Ivankiv that helped stop the vast, lumbering Russian offensive in its tracks. He said the Ukrainian fighters on quad bikes were able to approach the advancing Russian column at night by riding through the forest on either side of the road leading south towards Kyiv from the direction of Chernobyl.
The Ukrainian soldiers were equipped with night vision goggles, sniper rifles, remotely detonated mines, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras and others capable of dropping small 1.5kg bombs.
“This one little unit in the night destroyed two or three vehicles at the head of this convoy, and after that it was stuck. They stayed there two more nights, and [destroyed] many vehicles,” Honchar said.
The Russians broke the column into smaller units to try to make headway towards the Ukrainian capital, but the same assault team was able to mount an attack on its supply depot, he claimed, crippling the Russians’ capacity to advance.
“The first echelon of the Russian force was stuck without heat, without oil, without bombs and without gas. And it all happened because of the work of 30 people,” Honchar said.
The Aerorozvidka unit also claims to have helped defeat a Russian airborne attack on Hostomel airport, just north-west of Kyiv, in the first day of the war, using drones to locate, target and shell about 200 Russian paratroopers concealed at one end of the airfield.
“That contributed largely to the fact that they could not use this airfield for further development of their attack,” saaid Lt Taras, one of Honchar’s aides.
Not all the details of these claims could be independently verified, but US defence officials have said that Ukrainian attacks contributed to the halting of the armoured column around Ivankiv. The huge amount of aerial combat footage published by the Ukrainians underlines the importance of drones to their resistance.
The unit was started by young university-educated Ukrainians who had been part of the 2014 Maidan uprising and volunteered to use their technical skills in the resistance against the first Russian invasion in Crimea and the Donbas region. Its founder, Volodymyr Kochetkov-Sukach, was an investment banker who was killed in action in 2015 in Donbas – a reminder of the high risks involved. The Russians can latch on to the drone’s electronic signature and quickly strike with mortars, so the Aerorozvidka teams have to launch and run.
Honchar is an ex-soldier turned IT marketing consultant, who returned to the army after the first Russian invasion. Taras, who asked not to use his surname, was a management consultant, who specialised in fundraising for the unit and only joined full-time as a combatant in February.
In its early days, the unit used commercial surveillance drones, but its team of engineers, software designers and drone enthusiasts later developed their own designs.
They built a range of surveillance drones, as well as large 1.5-metre eight-rotor machines capable of dropping bombs and rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades, and created a system called Delta, a network of sensors along the frontlines that fed into a digital map so commanders could see enemy movements as they happened. It now uses the Starlink satellite system, supplied by Elon Musk, to feed live data to Ukrainian artillery units, allowing them to zero in on Russian targets.
The unit was disbanded in 2019 by the then defence minister, but it was hastily revived in October last year as the Russian invasion threat loomed.
The ability to maintain an aerial view of Russian movements has been critical to the success of Ukraine’s guerrilla-style tactics. But Aerorozvidka’s efforts to expand, and to replace lost equipment, have been hindered by a limited supply of drones and components, and efforts to secure them through defence ministry procurement have produced little, partly because they are a recent addition to the armed forces and still considered outsiders.
Furthermore, some of the advanced modems and thermal-imaging cameras made in the US and Canada are subject to export controls, so they have resorted to crowdfunding and asking a global network of friends and supporters to find them on eBay or other websites.
Marina Borozna, who was an economics student at university with Taras, is exploring ways of buying what the unit needs and finding routes to get the supplies across the border.
“I know there are people who want to help them fight, people who want to do a bit more than the humanitarian aid,” Borozna said. “If you want to address the root cause of this human suffering, you’ve got to defeat the Russian invasion. Aerorozvidka makes a huge difference and they need our support.”
Her partner, Klaus Hentrich, a molecular biologist in Cambridge, is also helping the effort, drawing on his experience as a conscript in the German army.
“I was in an artillery reconnaissance unit myself, so I immediately realised the outsized impact that Aerorozvidka has. They effectively give eyes to their artillery,” Hentrich said. “Where we can make a difference is to rally international support, be it financial contributions, help to get harder-to-find technical components or donations of common civilian drones.”
The unit is also looking at ways to overcome Russian jamming, part of the electronic warfare being waged in Ukraine in parallel to the bombs, shells and missiles. At present, Aerorozvidka typically waits for the Russians turn off their jamming equipment to launch their own drones, and then it sends up its machines at the same time. The unit then concentrates its firepower on the electronic warfare vehicles.
Honchar describes these technological battles, and Aerorozvidka’s way of fighting, as the future of warfare, in which swarms of small teams networked together by mutual trust and advanced communications can overwhelm a bigger and more heavily armed adversary.
“We are like a hive of bees,” he said. “One bee is nothing, but if you are faced with a thousand, it can defeat a big force. We are like bees, but we work at night.”
Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife Ginni and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Like wife, like husband.
In January, the Supreme Court permitted the US House committee investigating the January 6 attacks on the Capitol to obtain hundreds of pages of White House records that may shine a light on former President Donald Trump’s efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power to Biden. These records may or may not contain additional evidence linking Ginni Thomas to January 6.
If Clarence Thomas had his way, the House committee and the public would never know. Thomas was the only justice to publicly dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to let the House committee obtain these records — though he offered no explanation for why he dissented.
But here’s the thing: Yes, Thomas’s vote in this case, Trump v. Thompson, may have been an underhanded effort to protect his own wife. But his vote in Trump was entirely consistent with his record in cases where his spouse does not have a personal interest.
In more than three decades on the Supreme Court, Thomas has consistently voted to make it harder for many Americans to have their vote count; to erode institutions, like a free press, that are essential to democracy; and to dismantle nearly a century’s worth of democratically enacted laws on spurious constitutional grounds. Thomas’s opposition to democracy is not rooted in nepotism. It appears to be quite principled.
Among other things, Thomas is the only sitting justice who voted to install a Republican president in Bush v. Gore (2000) — although three other current justices were part of Republican George W. Bush’s legal team in that case. Thomas would allow Republican administrations to deactivate the entire Voting Rights Act so long as they are in power. He would strip journalists of First Amendment rights that allow them to safely provide critical coverage of government officials. And he would invalidate a long list of laws including the federal bans on child labor and on whites-only lunch counters, based on a widely rejected reading of the constitutional provision that grants Congress most of its power over the private sector.
No matter how the scandal with his wife’s texts shakes out, it’s worth remembering how the Court’s longest-serving justice would shape the world. In Clarence Thomas’s America, elections would be skewed so heavily in the Republican Party’s favor that Democrats will struggle to ever gain power. And if Democrats somehow do manage to squeak into office, Thomas would ensure that they cannot govern.
Thomas v. free and fair elections
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, in Justice Elena Kagan’s words, “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act.
It’s an astonishing attack on liberal democracy. The Voting Rights Act was America’s first meaningful attempt since Reconstruction to ensure that Black citizens could participate equally in selecting their own leaders. And, when it was fully in effect, it was a breathtakingly effective law. Just two years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Black voter registration rates in Mississippi skyrocketed from 6.7 percent to nearly 60 percent.
And yet, since its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court has systematically dismantled the Voting Rights Act’s key provisions. It hamstrung the law’s “preclearance” provision, which required federal officials to screen voting laws in states with a history of racist election practices to ensure that those laws do not discriminate. It imposed such a high burden of proof on voting rights plaintiffs alleging intentional discrimination that such cases are now virtually impossible to win. And the Court has fabricated limits on the Voting Rights Act that appear nowhere in the law’s text, such as a presumption that voting restrictions that were common in 1982 are valid.
Justice Thomas supported all of these efforts to weaken the Voting Rights Act, a law that arguably did more than any statute in American history to dismantle Jim Crow, But he’s also consistently urged his Court to go much further. It’s unclear whether the Voting Rights Act retains any real force after its many harrowing encounters with the Roberts Court, but Thomas would all but ensure that the law is meaningless.
In the late 1960s, just a few years after the Voting Rights Act became law, the Supreme Court recognized that the law “was aimed at the subtle, as well as the obvious, state regulations which have the effect of denying citizens their right to vote because of their race.”
Imagine, for example, a city where 60 percent of the population is white, and 40 percent is Black. Now imagine that the city draws gerrymandered districts which ensure that white voters will be a majority in every city council district. In such a place Black voters might nominally possess the right to vote, but any vote cast by a Black person would be meaningless if the white majority hangs together to deny power to the Black minority’s preferred candidates.
To prevent these kinds of subtle attacks on the right to vote, the Supreme Court has, for more than half a century, understood the Voting Rights Act to prohibit “vote dilution” — that is, laws that diminish the power of voters of color without formally stripping them of the right to vote altogether. Concurring in the judgment in Holder v. Hall (1994), however, Thomas argued that the Court should abolish vote dilution claims, and effectively allow states to deny voting rights to certain racial groups so long as the state does it with a degree of subtlety.
In Holder, a majority of the Court concluded that vote dilution claims could not be used to challenge the number of people who sit on a governing body, but only Justice Antonin Scalia joined Thomas’s opinion seeking to shut down vote dilution lawsuits altogether.
“Properly understood,” Thomas claimed, the Voting Rights Act only forbids “practices that affect minority citizens’ access to the ballot.” “Districting systems and electoral mechanisms that may affect the ‘weight’ given to a ballot,” Thomas continued, “are simply beyond the purview of the Act.”
Thus, a state would be free to lock voters of a particular race out of power entirely, just so long as those voters were allowed to perform the meaningless act of submitting a ballot in an election that their preferred candidate cannot possibly win.
More recently, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), Thomas joined an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch which suggested that no private party is allowed to bring a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act — only the US Justice Department could do so.
As the Supreme Court explained in Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969), such an approach would severely hamper the law’s effectiveness, even if the Justice Department is committed to protecting voting rights. “The Attorney General has a limited staff,” the Court noted in Allen, “and often might be unable to uncover quickly” new state policies that target voters of color.
And there’s no guarantee that the Justice Department will be led by people who care about voting rights. One result of the approach Thomas endorsed in Brnovich is that, in a Republican administration, the Voting Rights Act could cease to function altogether.
Thomas was also an early proponent of the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine,” a theory that would allow state lawmakers to ignore their state constitution altogether when writing the laws governing congressional and presidential elections. In its strongest form, this doctrine would allow a state legislature to simply gift a state’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate (or, in theory, to any presidential candidate), regardless of what the people of the state, the state’s governor, or the state’s supreme court has to say about it.
Thomas would dismantle the freedom of the press
Even if states hold nominally free and fair elections where every vote counts equally, elections lose much of their import if voters cannot learn which candidates support their preferred policies or know what choices politicians make once elected. This is why a free press is essential to any democracy, because the right to vote means little if voters can’t determine who to vote for.
And yet, Thomas called for his Court to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the single most important decision enabling journalists to report the news without facing intimidation or sanction from government officials.
In 1960, civil rights activists aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr. ran an advertisement in the New York Times, which alleged that Alabama police used brutal tactics to suppress student protests. The ad, however, contained some minor factual errors. It misidentified the song that protesters sang at a particular demonstration, for example, and it also claimed that police had arrested King seven times, when he’d in fact only been arrested four times.
Pointing to these small errors, a Jim Crow police official won a $500,000 verdict against the Times in an Alabama court — close to $5 million in 2022 dollars. Had this verdict stood, it would have chilled journalism of all kinds, because it would have meant that any newspaper or other outlet that prints even very small factual mistakes could have been hit with a verdict large enough to bankrupt the outlet.
The New York Times decision, however, prevented this outcome by holding that the First Amendment imposes limits on defamation lawsuits. When someone speaks about a public figure and about a matter of public concern, the Court held, they cannot be held liable for making false statements unless that statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Thomas argued in McKee v. Cosby (2019) that New York Times should be overruled. Indeed, Thomas’s opinion suggests that states should be free to define their own defamation law free of constitutional constraints. “The States are perfectly capable of striking an acceptable balance between encouraging robust public discourse and providing a meaningful remedy for reputational harm,” Thomas wrote.
If this approach were to prevail, state officials could once again use malicious defamation lawsuits to target journalists. Suppose, for example, that I mistakenly report that “500 people attended a rally protesting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,” when in fact the rally was attended by only 450 people. If states can set their own defamation laws, free of constitutional constraint, then DeSantis could sue me and Vox Media for millions, endangering our ability to continue reporting on DeSantis — and potentially bankrupting Vox in the process.
Thomas would make the winner of a federal election largely irrelevant
Thomas’s final avenue of attack on American democracy is perhaps even more subtle and insidious.
Under Justice Thomas’s approach, the winner of a federal election is largely irrelevant, because the federal government would be stripped of its authority to do nearly anything that the current majority on the Court disapproves of.
That’s because his views on the balance of power among the three branches of the federal government, and on the balance of power between Congress and the states, would leave the national government little more than an empty husk.
To back up: Numerous federal statutes lay out broad policy objectives — such as power plants should use the best available technology to reduce emissions or health insurers shall cover vaccines that are recommended by medical experts — then delegates the task of implementing these objections to a federal agency. One advantage of this approach is that it allows the government to be dynamic. As new emissions reduction technology emerges, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency can update the relevant regulations to ensure that power plants remain state-of-the-art. Another is that it allows democratically elected lawmakers — with a diverse set of backgrounds — to set policy goals, but also leaves the difficult details of implementing these goals to officials with specialized expertise.
In recent years, however, the Court’s Republican appointees have given themselves a veto power over all of these agency regulations. Relying on vague doctrines that appear nowhere in the Constitution, such as the “major questions” doctrine or “nondelegation,” the Court has claimed the power to strike down regulations that a majority of its members disapprove of.
Thomas, however, would go even further. In a 2015 opinion, Thomas argued that any federal law that permits an agency to exercise “policy discretion” is unconstitutional. Thus, Congress would be forbidden from creating a modern environmental protection regime, or a dynamic regime where medical experts can quickly make new vaccines available to the public, no matter how the American people vote in congressional elections.
Thomas would also strike down huge swaths of federal law governing the workplace and other private businesses.
The Constitution permits Congress to “regulate commerce ... among the several states.” This provision is what allows the federal government to protect the right to unionize, to ban child labor, to set the minimum wage, to prohibit discrimination by private companies, and to regulate health insurers — among many other things.
Concurring in United States v. Lopez (1995), however, Thomas endorsed the legal reasoning the Court used in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), an anti-canonical decision striking down federal child labor laws. And he’s restated this view in at least three other opinions since Lopez.
For those who want a deep dive, I’ve written about the full implications of Thomas’s opinion in Lopez at considerable length. But the short version is that Thomas’s approach endangers much of the New Deal, the Great Society, and decades of other regulations of private businesses which now form a backbone of American society.
Again, under Thomas’s approach, it is highly doubtful that the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters, which the Supreme Court held was a valid exercise of Congress’s power to regulate commerce in Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), could survive.
Thomas, in other words, imagines a world where state lawmakers have broad authority to skew elections in their party’s favor. He would strip journalists of the First Amendment protections they need to do their job safely. And, if a left-of-center government somehow did emerge despite these constraints, Thomas would strip that government of most of its authority to govern.
Ultimate power would rest with the Supreme Court, and its panel of unelected judges who serve for life, not with the American people. And Thomas would wield that power to turn back the clock on American law nearly an entire century.
Authorities investigate a crime scene in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, on Feb. 8, 2022. (photo: Marco Ugarte/AP)
Immigrants sent back to dangerous border towns in Mexico while trying to obtain asylum face gang violence, rape, and kidnapping.
In the email, the official says that Mexican government workers were not able to fill gas tanks as criminal networks were threatening to “burn down any station” caught selling to them.
The email describes how immigrants escorted in the area under the protection of the Mexican National Guard were attracting a lot of attention, which could put them in the crosshairs of criminal networks angry with the government.
Under the US program, known as Remain in Mexico, immigrants are sent back to Mexico where they are forced to remain for the duration of their asylum cases. Those turned back to Nuevo Laredo are offered bus trips to other areas in Mexico with the protection of the Mexican National Guard. The immigrants are later brought back inside the US, also with National Guard protection, for court hearings.
“[In] the event that the criminal networks want to retaliate against [the government of Mexico] … migrants could be caught in the middle,” Stephanie Syptak-Ramnath, a lead official in the US embassy in Mexico City, wrote in the email, which was intended for Blas Nuñez-Neto, the top DHS official running border policies for the Biden administration.
The latest spate of violence in Nuevo Laredo began when Juan Gerardo Treviño, who faced extradition to the US on alleged crimes such as murder, was arrested by the Mexican government, according to Reuters. Afterward, trailers were burned in the city and even the US consulate was struck with gunfire, prompting it to shut down.
As of March 18, US government personnel were under curfews and movement restrictions, according to a security alert on the local consul general’s website. The State Department is also recommending that American travelers not travel to the region, reporting that gun battles, homicides, and kidnapping were common along the border.
“Heavily armed members of criminal groups often patrol areas of the state and operate with impunity, particularly along the border region from Reynosa to Nuevo Laredo. In these areas, local law enforcement has limited capacity to respond to incidents of crime,” the recommendation states.
The email reviewed by BuzzFeed News documents the severe security problems plaguing the Mexican border city, which sits across from Laredo in Texas. But it also highlights the inherent complications surrounding a program that began under the Trump administration. Late last year, President Joe Biden was forced to resume the program, also known as the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), following a federal court order.
A DHS official confirmed that the agency had “temporarily paused the court-ordered reimplementation of MPP in the Laredo sector to ensure the safety of migrants in light of recent violence in Nuevo Laredo.” The email obtained by BuzzFeed News recommends resuming sending immigrants to Nuevo Laredo on March 28 if the security situation has been resolved.
Since the return of Remain in Mexico, hundreds of immigrants have been forced back across the border, with a small portion of them being sent to Nuevo Laredo. Immigrant advocates, along with those within the Biden administration, have long criticized the program as violating the law by blocking immigrants from full access to the US asylum system. Administration officials have also said the program places immigrants in dangerous situations in Mexico where the US is limited in its ability to help.
“Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas has repeatedly stated that MPP has endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and failed to address the root causes of irregular migration. DHS, however, is under a court order to reimplement MPP, which it continues to fight in the courts, including in a challenge before the Supreme Court,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement. “In the interim, the Department is required to abide by the order to re-implement the program in good faith. As it does so, the Department is committed to implementing MPP in the most humane way possible.”
Immigrant advocates have felt that Remain in Mexico had largely avoided the level of outrage it deserved after more than 60,000 asylum-seekers were sent back as part of former president Donald Trump’s plan to deter migration at the southern border. While in Mexico, those immigrants faced rape, kidnappings, and murder, according to groups who documented the problems.
The email to Nuñez-Neto documents how the conditions in parts of the Mexican border continue to remain precarious.
“I think this highlights once again how dangerous this particular city is,” said Stephanie Leutert, a former Biden administration official and the director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the University of Texas. “We know that the entire border can be really dangerous for migrants, but Nuevo Laredo has a unique security environment where people returned there are especially vulnerable for crimes by the criminal group that controls the territory.”
Leutert wrote a report in December that found that there were more than 130 people who had been kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo after being sent there under the Remain in Mexico program. Between 2019 and 2021, more than 11,500 people were sent to the border city, according to the report. Leutert found that the kidnapped immigrants included families and people from Honduras, Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere. She also documented how those forced back under Title 42 — an obscure public health law that was invoked to stop the spread of COVID — had also been kidnapped.
“With each new U.S. policy that sends individuals back to Nuevo Laredo, there is a new migrant population that is at-risk for being kidnapped,” she wrote. “Over the long term, the only way to reduce these kidnappings is for the Mexican government to foster sustainable improvements in the security situation or for the U.S. government to stop returning people to the city. However, in the meantime, migrant kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo are likely to continue.”
The return of the Remain in Mexico policy was something the Biden administration has long opposed publicly.
In August, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered the government to restart the program until it could be rescinded in compliance with the Administrative Procedure Act. His order went into effect shortly afterward.
Earlier in 2021, the Biden administration began to undo MPP by allowing thousands of people caught up in Remain in Mexico to come to the US. And in June, Mayorkas issued a memo officially ending the policy. The case has since moved to the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments later this spring.
The program has also come under heavy criticism within the government. The union representing asylum officers wrote in a statement that the policy’s return will make officers “complicit in violations of U.S. federal law and binding international treaty obligations of non-refoulement that they have sworn to uphold.”
The Biden administration has highlighted many changes with the new version of Remain in Mexico. These include improved access to legal representatives, more information about the program given to immigrants, and a speedier court hearing process. But perhaps most consequential will be the practice of border officials asking questions to figure out if immigrants are fearful of being returned to Mexico, which was not the case under Trump. Immigrants who say yes will have the opportunity to be screened by asylum officers to prove their claim.
Under the new DHS guidance, vulnerable immigrants, such as those with known physical or mental issues or of advanced age, will be exempted from Remain in Mexico. An internal government report obtained by BuzzFeed News found that while those with “known physical/mental health issues” were also prohibited under the Trump version of MPP from being sent back, border officials placed them in the program anyway.
The Trump administration implemented the controversial program in early 2019 amid a surge of families crossing the border and claiming asylum. At the time, the US was seeing upward of 100,000 border crossings a month.
The Dakota Access Pipeline protest flags. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post/Getty Images)
Authors say the study could be pivotal in stopping DAPL.
The report, written by NDN Collective, an Indigenous nonprofit, provides the first comprehensive timeline of the controversial pipeline’s legal and environmental violations. Working with a team of engineers, the report’s authors included new information about oil quality, spills, leakage, and faulty infrastructure that NDN Collective says could be pivotal in the ongoing battle to stop the pipeline.
The report comes as tribes await the Army Corps of Engineers to complete a new, court-mandated Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on a section of pipeline under Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River to which tribes have treaty rights. The EIS is expected to be released in September, after which a public comment period will open. NDN Collective, tribes, and other environmental groups are also calling on the Biden administration to shut down the pipeline. Meanwhile, the pipeline remains operational, carrying 750,000 barrels of oil a day.
“This report shows how the Army Corps of Engineers violated their own processes, and continues to violate our human rights for the benefit of a destructive, violent, and extractive energy company,” said Nick Tilsen, Oglala Lakota and CEO of NDN Collective. “We cannot sit on the sidelines with this information. It’s time for accountability and it’s time to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, once and for all.”
Since 2016, the pipeline has been the focus of an international effort by Indigenous people and environmental activists to stop it. Construction began in 2016 and was completed in 2017.
“If the tribes were equipped with this information back in 2015, we could have won the fight. The fight for DAPL would have been very different,” said Jade Begay, Diné and Tesuque Pueblo of New Mexico, Climate Justice Campaign Director at NDN Collective.
Begay said that the report can complement the work of activists on the ground and serve as a tool to fight the pipeline on a policy level but stresses that the responsibility lies with the company, agencies, and federal government to complete accurate studies and share the information with stakeholders.
“Infrastructure should be done right from the beginning,” she said. “Vulnerable communities that are often Black, brown and Indigenous should not have to bear the burden of doing the work for these entities and agencies.”
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