The darkest day since the end of the Cold War

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The darkest day since the end of the Cold War

February 22, 2022

Stephen Collinson and Shelby Rose

Cold War redux

Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow on Monday.

February 21, 2022, was the day Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to go down a dangerous, chilly road. It may prove to be a long one.

Putin's decrees recognizing two separatist pro-Russian regions in Ukraine as independent effectively snuffed out a desperate diplomatic effort mounted by the West to convince him to back down. Already, Russia is promising to send what it's calling "peacekeeping" troops into the area, a move that will effectively slice off another region of Ukraine following Putin's annexation of Crimea in 2014.

And he's probably not done.

Putin's long televised rant that portrayed Ukraine as an integral part of Russia by culture, by history and by blood sounded a lot like a sign that he could use 190,000 troops on alert around the country to take over all of it. And it had even more troubling implications, suggesting that other ex-Soviet states that had left Moscow's orbit — and are now in NATO — were held hostage by the West. Putin's address, in which he boiled with anger, reflected his view that the US and its allies had threatened and disrespected Russia after the Cold War and effectively made a case that Ukraine does not have the right to be a separate sovereign state.

Already, Putin has changed the geopolitical status quo that had prevailed since the end of the Cold War. He has taken a piece of another country, without giving that state a say in its destiny. This is classic expansionist autocracy using ethnic justifications and false claims that Russians were being persecuted and targeted by genocide — a playbook shockingly familiar from the 1930s. Once again, the Russian leader leaves the United States wondering what he will do next. Washington quickly announced a new set of financing and trading sanctions against the eastern separatist regions that call themselves the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics. The White House promised this was just the start. And President Joe Biden quickly consulted with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The question now is whether Putin's move was the beginning of a new and more dangerous stage of the Ukraine crisis or whether it will give him the kind of face-saving moment he could use to de-escalate the situation. Hardly anyone in Washington thinks the second scenario is likely.

That means that Biden, who came to power realizing he may have to wage a second Cold War-style conflict with China, may now be faced with marshaling the West in a revival of the original one — against a revanchist Russia.

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'They are trying to blackmail us again'

After weeks of being accused of escalating a crisis over Ukraine in an effort to rewrite the accepted geopolitical reality of the last 30 years, Putin complained that it was the West that was trying to lure the former Soviet republic into its orbit.

"They are trying to blackmail us again," Putin said in his speech at the Kremlin.

"They are threatening us again with sanctions, which, by the way, I think they will introduce anyway as Russia's sovereignty strengthens and the power of our armed forces grows. And a pretext for another sanctions attack will always be found or fabricated."

Choose your truth

That noise you hear is George Orwell turning in his grave.

Donald Trump has just launched his own social media platform to make up for the fact that his gusher of lies, propaganda and incitement got him banned from Twitter and suspended from Facebook. And what did the ex-President, who The Washington Post said racked up more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over his four years in office, call his new venture? What else? Truth Social.

This is the logical extension of the former President's warning to followers not to believe news coverage. "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening," he said in 2018.

On the new platform, Trump will presumably be able to dispense his tapestry of falsehoods and false realities without a filter. It's being marketed as an alternative to Twitter. Individual posts will be known as "truths" and the equivalent of retweets are "retruths."

The app debuted in Apple's App Store on Presidents Day on Monday, declaring itself free of "political discrimination" and promising a "Big Tent" approach that would let liberals and conservatives debate freely.
But the site is likely to become a forum for Trump supporters who claim they have been censored and suppressed on traditional social media platforms. And it may become an effective arm for Trump's likely 2024 presidential campaign.

Unfortunately, anyone wanting to find out the "truth" when they signed up for the new platform on Monday will have to wait. Some new subscribers who managed to navigate through a somewhat buggy sign-up process were added to a waiting list, which had hit 181,000 by midafternoon in the US.

"Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist. We love you, and you're not just another number to us," the app told new users.

Thanks for reading.

Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba will hold talks with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday. The US Supreme Court resumes oral arguments after its monthlong break.