Putin, Vladimir V

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares171 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Team Leaves Behind an Alliance in Crisis

      by

      European leaders felt certain about one thing after a whirlwind tour by Trump officials — they were entering a new world where it was harder to depend on the United States.Many critical issues were left uncertain — including the fate of Ukraine — at the end of Europe’s first encounter with an angry and impatient Trump administration. But one thing was clear: An epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance.After three years of war that forged a new unity within NATO, the Trump administration has made clear it is planning to focus its attention elsewhere: in Asia, Latin America, the Arctic and anywhere President Trump believes the United States can obtain critical mineral rights.European officials who emerged from a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they now expect that tens of thousands of American troops will be pulled out of Europe — the only question is how many, and how fast.And they fear that in one-on-one negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump is on his way to agreeing to terms that could ultimately put Moscow in a position to own a fifth of Ukraine and to prepare to take the rest in a few years’ time. Mr. Putin’s ultimate goal, they believe, is to break up the NATO alliance.Those fears spilled out on the stage of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday morning, when President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs.” He then called optimistically for the creation of an “army of Europe,” one that includes his now battle-hardened Ukrainian forces. He was advocating, in essence, a military alternative to NATO, a force that would make its own decisions without the influence — or the military control — of the United States.Mr. Zelensky predicted that Mr. Putin would soon seek to manipulate Mr. Trump, speculating that the Russian leader would invite the new American president to the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Putin will try to get the U.S. president standing on Red Square on May 9 this year,” he told a jammed hall of European diplomats and defense and intelligence officials, “not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares171 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Aides to Meet With Russian Officials About Ukraine Next Week

      by

      Three top foreign policy aides in the Trump administration plan to meet with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia next week to discuss a path to ending the war in Ukraine, the first substantial talks between the superpowers on the conflict.The meeting would come less than a week after President Trump spoke on the phone with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Trump told reporters afterward that talks on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine would take place in Saudi Arabia. The plan for meetings next week in Riyadh was described to reporters on Saturday by a person familiar with the schedule who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss national security concerns.The meeting will most likely draw criticism from some top Ukrainian officials. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Thursday that his country must be involved in any talks over its own fate, a statement he made after learning about the Trump-Putin call. Ukrainian officials fear Mr. Trump could try to reach a deal with the Russians that would not have strong security guarantees or viable terms for an enduring peace for Ukraine, which has been trying to repel a full-scale Russian invasion for three years.The top American officials who plan to attend are Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; Mike Waltz, the national security adviser; and Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy who also works on Ukraine-Russia issues, the person familiar with the schedule said.When asked whether any Ukrainian officials would attend, the person did not say — a sign that Ukraine will probably not take part in the talks, despite Mr. Trump saying this week that Ukrainians would participate in discussions in Saudi Arabia.Mr. Rubio and Vice President JD Vance met with Mr. Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on Friday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares183 Views

      in Elections

      Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?

      by

      When I was a teenager, my older brother took me to see “Shane.”I wasn’t that into westerns, and the movie just seemed to be about a little boy running after Alan Ladd in the wilderness of the Tetons, screaming “Sha-a-a-a-ne, come back!”I came across the movie on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and this time I understood why the George Stevens film is considered one of best of all time. (The A.F.I. ranks “Shane, come back!” as one of the 50 top movie lines of all time.)The parable on good and bad involves a fight between cattle ranchers and homesteaders. Ladd’s Shane is on the side of the honest homesteaders — including an alluring married woman, played by Jean Arthur. Arriving in creamy fringed buckskin, he is an enigmatic golden gunslinger who goes to work as a farmhand. Jack Palance plays the malevolent hired gun imported by the brutal cattle ranchers to drive out the homesteaders. Palance is dressed in a black hat and black vest. In case you don’t get the idea, a dog skulks away as Palance enters a saloon.It’s so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, the right thing to do versus the wrong. Law and order wasn’t a cliché or a passé principle that could be kicked aside if it interfered with baser ambitions.The 1953 film is also a meditation on American masculinity in the wake of World War II. A real man doesn’t babble or whine or brag or take advantage. He stands up for the right thing and protects those who can’t protect themselves from bullies.I loved seeing all those sentimental, corny ideals that America was built on, even if those ideals have often been betrayed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      To Obey Trump or Not to Obey

      by

      In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible.Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out.I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will.The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.”Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Nobel Laureate: Remember Political Prisoners

      by

      No mission is more important than preserving the lives of those who have been jailed for their principles.This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.Turning Point: On Aug. 1, 24 people were released in a multicountry prisoner swap — the largest exchange of prisoners between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War.I experienced a moment of happiness earlier this year when Evan Gershkovich returned to his parents and Lilia Chanysheva to her husband, when Vladimir Kara-Murza saw daylight after 11 months in solitary confinement and Ilya Yashin and Sasha Skochilenko regained their freedom. But I fear for those political prisoners who remain in Russian jails. If there are no Americans, Germans or Britons among their ranks, will anyone stand up for them?During World War II, it was necessary to open a second front to defeat fascism. In the present fight against creeping authoritarianism, democratic states so far have put all their efforts into standing up for political principles, but there is an urgent need to open a “second front” to stand up for the value of human life, centered on a call for the rights of political prisoners to be observed.Thanks to YouTube and social media, we were able to keep track of the fate of the prisoners freed earlier this year. From now on, however, we will know little about the suffering of those still behind bars because the Russian government has blocked these channels. Only the remnants of free speech still being exercised inside the country allow us to be aware of the circumstances facing those who are held in terrible conditions in Russia’s prisons.Among those who remain incarcerated is the boiler mechanic Vladimir Rumyantsev, who declared war on censorship and opened his own personal radio station in the northern Russian city of Vologda. In Siberia, Mikhail Afanasyev, the editor of the online magazine Novy Fokus, is serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence for his reporting on 11 military servicemen who refused to go to Ukraine. A court in the city of Akaban convicted him for spreading false information about the “special military operation,” as the war in Ukraine is called in Russia. The director Yevgeniya Berkovich and the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were thrown into jail and accused of condoning terrorism after Berkovich staged Petriychuk’s play “Finist the Brave Falcon,” which tells the story of women who were persuaded to become the wives of militants in Syria.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Merkel Memoir Recalls What It Was Like Dealing With Trump and Putin

      by

      The new book by former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany also aims to justify decisions she made that are still affecting her country and the rest of Europe.Shortly after Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Angela Merkel, who was then Germany’s chancellor, visited Washington. As the world looked on, the two leaders sat in front of an unlit fireplace, awkwardly and silently waiting for the photographers to do their work.After hearing the photographers demand “handshake, handshake,” an urging that Mr. Trump ignored, Ms. Merkel tried herself, she relates in a new memoir. “They want to have a handshake,” she said in a hushed tone audible to the press corps just feet away.“As soon as I said that, I shook my head mentally at myself,” Ms. Merkel wrote, according to excerpts from the memoir released this week in Die Zeit, the German weekly. “How could I forget that Trump knew exactly what effect he wanted to achieve?” she added.Long-anticipated in Germany, the book, “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021,” promises the inside story of the taciturn woman many saw as the defender of a global liberal order. When the world was shocked by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the first election of Mr. Trump and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ms. Merkel exuded a kind of patient, cerebral calm that was widely seen as the bastion of an old, more predictable world order.Since she stepped down in 2021, things have changed drastically. Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Germany to wean itself off cheap Russian gas. Absorbing both the lack of cheap energy and a reduction of the Chinese export market, the German economy has stagnated. The country’s bridges, roads and railways, long neglected, are falling apart. And Ms. Merkel’s welcoming migration policy has led to a surge in the far right.All of which has led to widespread unhappiness and a rethinking of Ms. Merkel’s legacy.Ms. Merkel’s book, which is also being published in an English translation and hits bookstores on Tuesday, is expected to be more than just a fascinating first-person view from the seat of a great European power. It is also a justification for decisions she made that helped lead Germany and the rest of Europe to a perilous place.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Russia Supplies Antiaircraft Missiles to North Korea, the South Says

      by

      Pyongyang has long coveted an advanced air-defense system to guard against missiles and war planes from the United States and South Korea.Russia has supplied North Korea with antiaircraft missiles in return for the deployment of its troops ​to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine, South Korea’s national security adviser said on Friday.​In recent weeks, North Korea has sent an estimated 1​1,000 troops, some of whom have joined Russian forces in their fight to retake territories occupied by Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region, according to South Korean and United States officials. It has also sent close to 20,000 shipping containers of weapons to Russia since the summer of 2023, including artillery guns and shells, short-range ballistic missiles and multiple-rocket launchers, South Korean officials have said.In return, North Korea has been widely expected to seek Russian help in modernizing its conventional armed forces and advancing its nuclear​ weapons program and missiles. One of the ​biggest weaknesses of the North Korean military ​has been its poor​, outdated air defense system, while the United States and its allies in South Korea and Japan run fleets of high-tech war planes, ​including F-35 stealth fighter jets.“We understand that Russia has provided related equipment and anti-air missiles to shore up the poor air defense for Pyongyang,” the North Korean capital, ​South Korea’s national security adviser​, Shin Won-shik, ​said in an interview with SBS-TV on Friday.The cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow came as Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, continued to stoke confrontational rhetoric against the United States and South Korea. In a speech at a military exhibition on Thursday that was reported by state media, Mr. Kim warned that the Korean Peninsula has never faced such risks of nuclear war as now, blaming the tensions on Washington’s “aggressive and hostile” policy.Mr. Shin said Russia was also supplying other military technology to North Korea, including help to improve North Korea’s satellite-launch programs.​ After two failed attempts, North Korea placed its first spy satellite into or​bit last November​, triggering speculation that Russia was behind the success. But in May, a North Korean rocket carrying another military reconnaissance satellite into orbit exploded midair shortly after takeoff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Who Has the ICC Charged With War Crimes?

      by

      Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has joined a short list of sitting leaders charged by the International Criminal Court.The warrant announced against him on Thursday puts Mr. Netanyahu in the same category as Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the deposed president of Sudan, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. As part of their membership in the court, countries are required to arrest people for whom it has issued warrants, though that obligation has not always been observed.Here is a closer look at some of the leaders for whom warrants have been issued by the court since its creation more than two decades ago.Vladimir Putin of RussiaPresident Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, left, with Maria Lvova-Belova, also subject to an I.C.C. arrest warrant, in a photo released by Russian state media.Pool photo by Mikhail MetzelThe court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Putin in March 2023 over crimes committed during Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including for the forcible deportation of children. A warrant was also issued for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.Mr. Putin has since made several international trips, including to China, which is not a member of the court. His first state visit to an I.C.C. member since the warrant was issued was in September, to Mongolia, where he received a red-carpet welcome.Omar Hassan al-Bashir of SudanThe court issued warrants in 2009 and 2010 for Mr. al-Bashir, citing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the western region of Darfur.Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the former president of Sudan, on trial for corruption in Khartoum in 2019.Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/ReutersThe court has also charged several other Sudanese officials, including a former defense minister, Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein, with crimes in Darfur.In 2015, Mr. al-Bashir traveled to an African Union summit in South Africa in defiance of the warrant, but was not arrested.Mr. al-Bashir, 80, was deposed in 2019 after three decades in power, and also faces charges in Sudan related to the 1989 coup that propelled him to power. He could receive the death sentence or life in prison on those charges if convicted.Muammar el-Qaddafi of LibyaCol. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then leader of Libya, was charged by the I.C.C. months before being killed by rebels. He is pictured here in Syria in 2008.Bryan Denton for The New York TimesThe court issued arrest warrants in 2011 for Libya’s then leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with one of his sons and his intelligence chief, accusing them of crimes against humanity during the first two weeks of the uprising in Libya that led to a NATO bombing campaign.Mr. Qaddafi was killed by rebels in Libya months later and never appeared before the court. His son remains at large.William Ruto of KenyaPresident William Ruto of Kenya, center, in Haiti this year. The court brought charges against him in 2011, and dropped them in 2016.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe court dropped a case in 2016 against William Ruto, then Kenya’s deputy president, who had been charged in 2011 with crimes against humanity and other offenses in connection with post-election violence in Kenya in 2007 and 2008. Mr. Ruto was elected president of Kenya in 2022.Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory CoastThe former president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, was also indicted by the court in 2011 over acts committed during violence after the country’s elections in 2010.Mr. Gbagbo and another leader in Ivory Coast, Charles Blé Goudé, were acquitted in 2021.Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Ivory Coast, in Abidjan, the capital, last year.Sia Kambou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More