News
Latest
Politico, March 18, 2022 – 6:00 pm (ET)
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/18/biden-xi-jinping-disavow-russia-ukraine-invasion-00018427
Politico, Phelim Kine – March 18, 2022
President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday morning to try and enlist China’s support in mitigating the worsening humanitarian crisis sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion.
The call — likely brokered in national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s one-on-one in Rome on Monday with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi — occurs amid intensifying verbal sparring over Beijing’s failure to condemn Russian aggression and parroting of Moscow’s invasion narrative.
Biden and Xi seeded a modicum of goodwill with a virtual meeting in November. But Washington has been angry with Beijing’s neutral position over Ukraine and has threatened punitive economic sanctions if China provides assistance requested by Putin.
Vox, Nicole Narea – March 16, 2022
You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.
Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.
And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.
“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”
But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.
CNN, March 18, 2022 – 2:30 pm (ET)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/business/china-russia-sanctions-friction-intl-hnk/index.html
CNN, Laura He – March 18, 2022
China is quietly distancing itself from Russia’s sanction-hit economy.
CNN, March 21, 2022 – 11:00 am (ET)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/business/china-russia-sanctions-friction-intl-hnk/index.html
Spotlight
Politico, Phelim Kine – March 18, 2022
President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday morning to try and enlist China’s support in mitigating the worsening humanitarian crisis sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion.
The call — likely brokered in national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s one-on-one in Rome on Monday with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi — occurs amid intensifying verbal sparring over Beijing’s failure to condemn Russian aggression and parroting of Moscow’s invasion narrative.
Biden and Xi seeded a modicum of goodwill with a virtual meeting in November. But Washington has been angry with Beijing’s neutral position over Ukraine and has threatened punitive economic sanctions if China provides assistance requested by Putin.
Vox, Nicole Narea – March 16, 2022
You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.
Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.
And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.
“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”
But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.
CNN, March 18, 2022 – 2:30 pm (ET)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/business/china-russia-sanctions-friction-intl-hnk/index.html
CNN, Laura He – March 18, 2022
China is quietly distancing itself from Russia’s sanction-hit economy.
CNN, March 21, 2022 – 11:00 am (ET)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/business/china-russia-sanctions-friction-intl-hnk/index.html
Vox, Jen Kirby,
https://www.vox.com/22982698/india-russia-ukraine-war-putin-modi
Vox, Jen Kirby – March 18, 2022
On March 2, the United Nations General Assembly voted, 141 to 5, on a resolution condemning Russia for invading Ukraine. India, the world’s largest democracy, abstained from the vote.
It wasn’t India’s first abstention. India is also reportedly in talks to buy Russian oil at a discount, and is seeking to find ways to maintain trade relations despite the West’s sanctions against Moscow. For India, these choices are a way to avoid choosing. Take the vote: It wasn’t an outright condemnation of Russia’s actions, but it also wasn’t a declaration of support.
Those choices speak to the delicate geopolitical balancing act India is trying to strike amid this Ukraine war. Maintaining its longstanding friendship with Russia, even as it grows closer to the United States and its partners, always involved a complicated calculus. But it fits with India’s desire, especially as a post-colonial state, to look out for its own strategic interests.
CNN, Ira Helfand et al. – March 18, 2022
The world is shocked by the violence in Ukrainian cities besieged by Russian forces, as they suffer under indiscriminate mortar, bomb and missile attacks. But these horrors could lead to something far worse — escalation to nuclear war. If we are going to avoid this ultimate catastrophe, we need to work urgently for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Livestreams
Politico, March 18, 2022 – 6:00 pm (ET)
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/18/biden-xi-jinping-disavow-russia-ukraine-invasion-00018427
CNN, March 18, 2022 – 2:30 pm (ET)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/business/china-russia-sanctions-friction-intl-hnk/index.html
CNN, March 21, 2022 – 11:00 am (ET)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/business/china-russia-sanctions-friction-intl-hnk/index.html
ABC News, March 18, 2022 – 10:00 am (ET)
March 18, 2022 – 10:00 am (ET)
Articles
Politico, Phelim Kine – March 18, 2022
President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday morning to try and enlist China’s support in mitigating the worsening humanitarian crisis sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion.
The call — likely brokered in national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s one-on-one in Rome on Monday with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi — occurs amid intensifying verbal sparring over Beijing’s failure to condemn Russian aggression and parroting of Moscow’s invasion narrative.
Biden and Xi seeded a modicum of goodwill with a virtual meeting in November. But Washington has been angry with Beijing’s neutral position over Ukraine and has threatened punitive economic sanctions if China provides assistance requested by Putin.
Vox, Nicole Narea – March 16, 2022
You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.
Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.
And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.
“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”
But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.
Commentary
CNN, Laura He – March 18, 2022
China is quietly distancing itself from Russia’s sanction-hit economy.
Vox, Jen Kirby – March 18, 2022
On March 2, the United Nations General Assembly voted, 141 to 5, on a resolution condemning Russia for invading Ukraine. India, the world’s largest democracy, abstained from the vote.
It wasn’t India’s first abstention. India is also reportedly in talks to buy Russian oil at a discount, and is seeking to find ways to maintain trade relations despite the West’s sanctions against Moscow. For India, these choices are a way to avoid choosing. Take the vote: It wasn’t an outright condemnation of Russia’s actions, but it also wasn’t a declaration of support.
Those choices speak to the delicate geopolitical balancing act India is trying to strike amid this Ukraine war. Maintaining its longstanding friendship with Russia, even as it grows closer to the United States and its partners, always involved a complicated calculus. But it fits with India’s desire, especially as a post-colonial state, to look out for its own strategic interests.
CNN, Ira Helfand et al. – March 18, 2022
The world is shocked by the violence in Ukrainian cities besieged by Russian forces, as they suffer under indiscriminate mortar, bomb and missile attacks. But these horrors could lead to something far worse — escalation to nuclear war. If we are going to avoid this ultimate catastrophe, we need to work urgently for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
The New Yorker, David Remnick – March 11, 2022
Stephen Kotkin is one of our most profound and prodigious scholars of Russian history. His masterwork is a biography of Joseph Stalin. So far he has published two volumes—“Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.” A third volume will take the story through the Second World War; Stalin’s death, in 1953; and the totalitarian legacy that shaped the remainder of the Soviet experience. Taking advantage of long-forbidden archives in Moscow and beyond, Kotkin has written a biography of Stalin that surpasses those by Isaac Deutscher, Robert Conquest, Robert C. Tucker, and countless others.
Kotkin has a distinguished reputation in academic circles. He is a professor of history at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. He has myriad sources in various realms of contemporary Russia: government, business, culture. Both principled and pragmatic, he is also more plugged in than any reporter or analyst I know. Ever since we met in Moscow, many years ago—Kotkin was doing research on the Stalinist industrial city of Magnitogorsk—I’ve found his guidance on everything from the structure of the Putin regime to its roots in Russian history to be invaluable.
I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar. But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had nato not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before nato existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.
OnAir
Vox, Jen Kirby,
https://www.vox.com/22982698/india-russia-ukraine-war-putin-modi
Videos
PBS NewsHour – March 18, 2022
The sanctions leveled against Russia by the U.S. and its allies are the harshest ever handed down, and their effects are being felt widely in Russia. Special correspondent Ryan Chilcote reports from Moscow on how the lives of Russians are being impacted.
PBS NewsHour – March 18, 2022
New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including President Biden’s announcement of a new round of military assistance for Ukraine and Republican opposition to his administration’s request for billions in emergency COVID spending.
ABC News – March 17, 2022 (04:46)