the *DON* JONES INDEX…
		GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 2/20/23… 15,044.59 2/20/23… 15,068.43
	6/27/13… 15,000.00
(*THE DOW* JONES INDEX: 2/27/23...32,816.92; 2/20/23...33,869.27; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)**

LESSON for February 27, 2023 – “STOP! START! (Part One: Duelling Speeches)”

President Joe, finishing up his State of the Union speech, made a surprise visit to Kyev over the weekend... and then Bad Vlad, during his State of the Nation (that would be Russia, for now) dropped a surprise of his own upon this fevered world.

He announced that he’d “suspend” the Start Two (New Start) treaties with America as prevented his and the enemy countries from increasing their nuclear weapons stockpiles and/or testing the big birds on either their own territory or... elsewhere. A comedian, Tuesday night, said that it no longer sufficed for Russia to be able to blow up the world ten times over, he had to increase it to eleven... so President Joe would have to up the ante to twelve.

Actually, the hostiles are capable of blowing up the world many times over, while lesser players... China of course, then Iran, Israel, No Ko, the NATO gang (except Germanuy – still, like Japan and, for what it’s worth, Italy, still on the no-fry list) could do their share of damage in overt or covert war.

But the emphasis, and paranoia, still center around the old Cold War combatants – one of whom is captainedby a madman, the other having elected, then deposed and now may again be itching to elevate that same madman to sole arbiter of whether or not the planet (or at least the human species) survives or not. And while the Cold War chilled and heated and chilled again over half a century under fourteen American Presidents and a like number of Russians, most were serious men – seriouw practitioners of the arts of war and diplomacy who, on several occasions, dialed down the furnace and imposed limits (irrelevant limites to be sure, but still gestures of some weight) upon their own and their supporters’ cravings for power and destruction.

Thus, at 4:00 PM (EST) on Tuesday, February 21^st, Russian Dictator Vladimir Putin “suspended” his nation’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement with the U.S. during a nearly two-hour diatribe condemning the West that sharpened tensions over the war in Ukraine while calling into question the intricacies of what he meant by “suspension”... details upon which many American and globalist partisans were eager to define.

START was drafted by George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. The treaty barred its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and a total of 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers.

The treaty expired on 5 December 2009.

On 8 April 2010, the replacement New START Treaty was signed in Prague by US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Following its ratification by the US Senate and the Federal Assembly of Russia, the treaty went into force on 26 January 2011, extending deep reductions of American and Soviet or Russian strategic nuclear weapons through February 2026.

(See details at Wikipedia, Attachments One and Two)

Announcement of the STOP, which came a day after President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine, “shows how the confrontation between Russia, the U.S., and Europe is approaching a perilous crossroads one year after Putin ordered Russian forces to invade.” (Time, Attachment Three)

The New START treaty was signed in 2010 and extended for five years in 2021. It limits the number of long-range nuclear warheads Russia and the U.S. can have, including those that can reach the U.S. in about 30 minutes.

Around 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads belong to Moscow and Washington. New START had limited the U.S. and Russia each to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads—“strategic weapons that can be placed on submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bomber planes,” and had, Time reported, also included “monitoring and on-site inspection elements to help ensure compliance,” which, most observers agreed, were the meat and potatoes of the treaty.

Putin also declared Russia is ready to resume nuclear-weapons tests – theoretically only should the U.S. carry one out first—something that hasn’t been done in more than 30 years.

Olga Oliker, the International Crisis Group’s director for Europe and Central Asia, said Putin’s choice of “suspending” the treaty, rather than “withdrawing” from it, may indicate “that he plans for Russia’s arsenal to stay under treaty limits.” Less optimistic informed and uninformed sources disagreed – calling the dictator’s announcement clear intent that his endgame remains to conquer and enslave the world... or, if he cannot, destroy it.

Previously, Moscow had announced that it was suspending US inspections of its military sites under New START and indefinitely postponed talks under New START that had been due to start on November 29, 2022 in Cairo, accusing the United States of "toxicity and animosity" regarding American obstruction of inspections by Russia, a charge denied by Washington. (France 24, Jan. 31, Attachment Four) When it was extended in 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry had said the treaty guaranteed a “necessary level of predictability and transparency” for the world’s two largest nuclear powers while “strictly maintaining a balance of interests.” (USA Today, Attachment Five)

Apparantly they were lying.

Putin made his speech almost exactly a year after the invasion of Ukraine began, accusing the "elites of the West" of escalating international tensions.

"The elites of the West do not hide their purpose. But they also cannot fail to realize that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield," Putin said. (Fox News, Attachment Six)

But later on Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry (above) threw in a carrot to Mad Vlad’s stick, suggesting that the decision to suspend participation in the treaty was “reversible.” (CNN, Attachment Seven) US SecState Antony Blinken called Putin’s decision “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible” or, AP version below, “really unfortunate and very irresponsible.”

“We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does, we’ll of course make sure that in any event that we are posturing appropriately for the security of our own country and that of our allies,” said the apparently unreliable Blinken.

Putin suspension of Moscow’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United States, came during what the Associated Press called a “bitter speech” in which he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine. (Tuesday, Attachment Eight)

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.

“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said ahead of the war’s first anniversary Friday. “The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”

The speech reiterated a litany of grievances he has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign, while vowing no military letup. Putin has repeatedly depicted NATO’s expansion to include countries close to Russia as an existential threat to his country.

“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it,” he said before his audience of lawmakers, officials and soldiers, and broadcast on all state TV channels.

A Time/AP hybrid dispatch early Tuesday morning (Attachment Nine) highlighted Putin’s “litany of grievances” and denounced “Western elites (who) aren’t trying to conceal their goals, to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ to Russia.”

Before the speech, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian leader would focus on the “special military operation” in Ukraine, as Moscow calls it, and Russia’s economy and social issues. Many observers predicted it would also address Moscow’s fallout with the West — and Putin began with strong words for those countries.

“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it.”

Putin’s rambling near-two hour discourse did, in fact, touch upon non-Ukrainian issues (see his address as Attachment Ten).

On Wednesday, the President spoke at a rally-concert dedicated to Defender of the Fatherland Day... somewhat jumbled in the family ropes and ties... at the Luzhniki Stadium.

“We are having this meeting on the eve of Defender of the Fatherland Day. This phrase, these words have something powerful, enormous, I would even say mystical and sacred in them. (Attachment Eleven)

“No wonder one of the most popular prayers begins with the words “Our Father.” “Father” is a word that conveys something very close to every person. After all, we also say “Motherland.” This is about a family, something huge and powerful and at the same time close to everyone’s heart. It is the Motherland and the family. Ultimately, the Motherland is the family and they mean the same for us in our hearts.”

Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and a grand roster of patriotic heroes came in for praise... doctors, nurses, defense contractors, transport workers and not only the troops but even “...children who write letters to support our soldiers. We are proud of them. Let’s give a triple “hurray” in their honour so that they can hear our greetings.

“Our entire country stands behind them,” the dictator declared, even the convicts and conscripts (whom private contractor Prigozhin denied he was still hiring).

The following day, Putin... via video... again congratulated “generations of defenders of the Fatherland” (Attachment Twelve). Harkening back to the Napoleonic and Second World Wars Bad Vlad celebrated: “The current generation of Russian soldiers and officers preserves and enhances the military traditions of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers... heroically fighting the neo-Nazism that has taken root in Ukraine, protecting our people in our historical lands, and are fighting courageously and heroically.”

As if he’d never denied intent to produce, test and... yes... deploy more nukes, Putin promised to “put our focus on strengthening the nuclear triad. This year, the first Sarmat missile system launchers with the new heavy missile will be put on combat duty. We will continue full production of the Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic systems and begin mass deployment of Tsirkon sea-launched hypersonic missiles,” as well as naval cruisers, nuclear submarines and, for all his ally Xi knows, big, white balloons.

“Once again, happy holiday!”

For America and its NATO allies, the best wishes transpired like... well... lead balloons. Tuesday's speech, reported Germany’s DW.com “was largely expected to set the tone for Russia's presidential elections, scheduled to take place in just over a year. (Attachment Thirteen) “Constitutional changes mean Putin, 70, could remain in power until 2036.”

The Germans also solicited remarks from assorted stripey pants (and pantsuit) diplomats, to wit...

“A world without nuclear arms control is a far more dangerous, unstable one, with potentially catastrophic consequences..." (United Nation spokesperson Stephane Dujarric)

"It is Putin who started this imperial war of conquest. It is Putin who keeps escalating the war." (NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg)

"This was a war of choice. Putin chose to fight it. He could have chosen not to. And he can choose even now to end it, to go home..." (White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan)

"(Putin) is in a completely different reality, where there is no opportunity to conduct a dialogue about justice and international law..." (Mykhailo Podolyak, political adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Reuters)

“Vladimir Putin is famous for mixing facts and fiction..." Roman Goncharenko, analyst for DW's Russian service.

And DW's chief international or, Richard Walker, called Putin's speech "war-time propaganda," saying claims about pedophilia being a norm in the West are "almost laughable."

Walker said such messages were intended to make Russians see the West as a strategic, moral and cultural threat to their country.

"[Putin] said that this [war] is about the very existence of the Russian state. And in the Russian nuclear code, it says that they would only use nuclear weapons if their state's very existence was threatened," Walker said.

Wednesday morning, President Joe merely called the suspension a “big mistake.”

News of the suspension “came as a disturbing surprise to multiple former officials who negotiated the pact and nonproliferation experts committed to ending the expansion of nuclear forces,” NBC News reported. (Attachment Fourteen)

Biden was more loquacious when confronting a sympathetic audience of thousands gathered outside the Royal Castle in Warsaw on Tuesday. “Well, I’ve just come from a visit to Kyiv and I can report, Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud. It stands tall. And most important, it stands free.

“The Ukrainian people are too brave. America, Europe, a coalition of nations from the Atlantic to the Pacific — we were too unified. Democracy was too strong. Instead of an easy victory he perceived and predicted, Putin left with burned-out tanks and Russian forces in disarray.”

And then gaffe-a-minute Joe uncorked another. “When President Putin ordered his tanks to roll into Ukraine, he thought we would roll over,” Biden added. “He was wrong!”

Biden was also wrong in that “we” were not battling the Russian forces, the Ukrainians were. But for a handful of volunteers and mercenaries, the American presence on the killing grounds has been... to be frank... nonexistent. Perhaps Zelesnskyy and his people are grateful for the war materiel and humanitarian concerns exhibited by America and the west, but he’s still waiting on the F-69s and, while the Germans have committed dozens of Leopard tanks, U.S. military sources say it may be months before the first Abrams vehicles roll into the combat zone.

In advance of his meeting with the Bucharest Nine group of former Soviet satellites, President Joe declared “...you know better than anyone what’s at stake in this conflict. Not just for Ukraine, but for the freedom of democracies throughout Europe and around the world.”

Addressing concerns of the NATO members that they could be next, Biden on Tuesday had pledged America’s ironclad commitment to the mutual-defense treaty and Ukraine’s defense.

“Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased,” he said. “They must be opposed.”

The meeting with leaders of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia (but not Hungary, the former Yugoslav republics nor Putin’s presumed next target... Moldova...) saw the nine advocating “for an increased NATO presence and deterrence measures in the region.” Slovakian President Zuzana Caputová said the nations need to ensure there are “no gray zones in our defense.” (USA Today, Attachment Fifteen)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the right-wing populist leader who argued last week that the European Union is partly to blame for prolonging Russia’s war in Ukraine, has balked at sanctions on Moscow and arming Kyiv. Orban was skipping the meeting with Biden, and President Katalin Novák was attending in his stead.

Still, Klaus Iohannis, the president of Romania, insisted to the Huffington Post that “The B9 is stronger than ever.”

"NATO will not be divided, and we will not tire," Biden said during his speech within the Royal Castle.

“But the administration and its allies have also tried to keep the fight against Russia from spilling into a NATO country to avoid triggering the mutual defense pact,” USA Today opined.

Back home, the liberals were groaning, the Putin colluders and ollaborators were twerking and the partisan fowl were squeaking.

Fred Kaplan of the leftist Slate parsed the Putin promises of suspension, not extermination, as meaning, in other words, that the dictator “...pledged (for what it’s worth) that Russia will not exceed the treaty’s limits on the size of the nuclear arsenal or on testing nuclear weapons—only that it will no longer allow U.S. officials to conduct on-site inspections of Russia’s nuclear facilities.”

It was “no big deal,” Slate concluded, because the proliferation of high (surveillance satellite) and low (blimps and drones) tech instruments of detection have rendered the onsite inspections superfluous. However, “since New START required the U.S. and Russia not merely to cap but also to cut the size of their arsenals (the initials stand for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty),” satellite imagery can reveal how many missiles a foreign country has—but not how many warheads might be stored inside a missile’s nosecone. Thus the relevance of inspections. (See Attachment Sixteen)

His value as spy or secret agent may be minimal, but the presence of Philipp Kirkorov, a Russian pop star often described as “Putin’s favourite singer” at the Grammies outraged pro-Uke partisans.

In Kyiv, we know Kirkorov well, foreign correspondent Andriy Yermak complained in the Guardian U.K. (that’s United Kingdon, not Ukraine... Wednesday, Attachment Seventeen). In June 2021 we designated him as “a threat to Ukraine’s national security” and he was banned from entering our country after he spoke in support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Last month, we added him to our list of Russian propagandists who are subject to personal sanctions for their support of Russia’s warmongering. He had reportedly been asking his audiences to stand up and clap for the “heroes”, Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

“Now, here was Kirkorov preening openly at the Grammys, posting selfie videos on social media. A few days earlier he had had dinner with Engelbert Humperdinck in Los Angeles and visited Las Vegas to watch an Adele concert.”

Adele? Engelbert Humperdinck???!!

The horror!

Russian warhawk celebrities have also popped up at the Paris fashion show, and in and around Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear energy provider, which has long been active in EU markets.

“If the sanctions regime has holes,” Yermak contends, “Russia will be sure to wriggle through them.”

Or, as in another GUK entry, blast through them... with the aid and comfort of Yankee collaborators.

“Vladimir Putin’s threat to suspend Russian participation in New Start, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with the US, represents a blatant attempt to divide American opinion over the war on Ukraine by raising the specter of nuclear armageddon,” according to statesiders Ed Pilkington and J. Oliver Conroy.

But the RINOs were revolting!

Putin is “playing to all those people who want Ukraine to surrender and capitulate to avoid a massive nuclear exchange and world war three, a kind of nuclear armageddon,” said. Fiona Hill, Russian specialist at Trump’s White House National Security Council from 2017 to 2019.

Thomas Graham, Russia director within George W Bush’s National Security Council, agreed that part of Putin’s calculation was to provoke “certain circles in the US to wonder whether the risks of supporting Ukraine are worth it”.

Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that given how politicized Washington has become, “there will be elements in the Republican party who will play this up as a way of casting aspersions on Biden’s foreign policy”.

Graham’s prediction appeared to have been fulfilled hours after Putin made his threat. Prominent rightwing Republicans heavily criticized Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv, accusing him of devoting more care to Ukraine than to his own people.

And who might these be?

Ron DeSantis, the Neville Chamberlain of Florida who is eyeing a 2024 presidential run, told Fox News that “an open-ended blank cheque [for Ukraine] is unacceptable”. He compared Biden’s staunch support for Ukraine unfavorably with his approach to immigration at the Mexican border.

The inter-elephant dispute finding Trump, DeSantis and the MAGAmob at odds with a group of Republicans active on defense policy split the partisanship - scolding that Biden had "naively" extended New START but also adding that Russia "cannot be trusted to abide by any international agreement." (France 24, Above)

Those whose policies dated back to the Reagan years of strong defense buildups that... along with Russia’s futile imperialist war in Afghanistan... broke the back of the Soviet Union and generated peace for a (if not our) time, lamented the loss but turned towards an uncertain future.

“We are looking at the final demise of the arms control architecture that was built up starting in the 1960s based largely on bilateral relations between the US and the Soviet Union and then Russia,” stated Graham. “We will have a much more difficult and complex environment to deal with.”

Principally because the sick old men of the 20^th century Soviet Union may have been evil, but were not crazy.

Putin is an environment all to himself with no regards for bilateral nor any other relations that do not involve his gun and his enemy’s head.

So a bipartisan, if not bilateral, Congressional coalition is advocating preparation for the worst.

"We urge President Biden to direct the Department of Defense to prepare for a future where Russia may deploy large numbers of warheads well in excess of New START treaty limits," concluded a statement by Congressional Republicans including Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Tx) and a handful of other GOP lawmakers who’d gone to Kyev said they had a productive meeting about what Zelenskyy needs for winning the war. He provided them with a list of weapons, including longer-range artillery and air-to-surface systems.

The meeting comes as some hard-right Republicans are vowing to block future U.S. aid to Ukraine. “We have seen time and again the majority of Republicans and Democrats support our assistance to Ukraine,” McCaul said in a statement to AP, above. “But the Biden administration needs to lay out their long-term strategy.”

“If we don’t get rid of nuclear weapons, they’re going to be used. And if they’re used, nothing else that we’re doing is going to make any difference,” declared Dr. Ira Helfand, former president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War during an interview with “Democracy Now”.

“(T)he New START treaty, while somewhat useful, is (or was) a very limited document and very inadequate treaty. It still allows the United States and Russia to maintain — and they do — 3,100 strategic nuclear weapons, ranging in size from 100 kilotons to 800 kilotons. That is six to 50 times more powerful than the bombs which destroyed Hiroshima. @Check!

“Now, a study @whose? that was published last August showed that if those weapons still allowed under the New START treaty were used in a war, they would cause 150 million tons of soot to be blasted into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun and dropping temperatures across the planet an average of 18 degrees Fahrenheit. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia, the temperatures would drop 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. In the ensuing famine, something like three-quarters of the human race, between 5 billion and 6 billion people, would die. If that’s not bad enough, the same study showed that even a very small fraction of those arsenals would cause worldwide catastrophe. Only 250 of the smallest weapons in the strategic arsenal, 100 kilotons, would still generate enough soot to trigger a famine that would kill 2.1 billion people and end civilization as we know it.” (February 22^nd, Attachment Nineteen)

Other liberals and institutional Democrats are unanimously supporting Ukraine against what Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct) calls the MAGARepublicans who “are trying to destroy democracy.”

Further left, Jacobin contends that Putin’s war in Ukraine is targeting Germany, as opposed to the United States by deepening existing fault lines within the EU, the most important example being Poland. “Already closely aligned with the United States in foreign policy for years, it has been far ahead of other European states in its support for Ukraine from the start, calling for shipments of fighter jets at a time when others were still struggling with sending artillery, and is arming itself more massively than any other state in Europe.

“Poland plans to increase its military budget to 4 percent of GDP this year — in the long term, the figure is expected to rise to 5 percent. Warsaw wants to have three hundred thousand soldiers in its army by 2035. By comparison, the German armed forces today number around 189,000 soldiers. Some are already speculating about Poland becoming the strongest military power in the EU and thus extending its influence considerably — to the benefit of its close ally, the United States, at the expense of German dominance.”

While Jacobin looks to a Russo-German conflict, the erstwhile right-wing Heritage Foundation contended that “Russia is refusing to comply with New START to punish the U.S. for its support of Ukraine.

“Or perhaps Moscow hopes to gain concessions in exchange for returning to compliance.

“Or, it may be trying to gain an advantage over the United States in future negotiations for a follow-on agreement to New START.” (Attachment Twenty One)

“(A)rms control is not an end in itself, and maintaining strong nuclear deterrence should remain the United States’ number one goal.

“Russia should understand that, as well.”

In his exhortations to the base, Putin also reaffirmed Russia's commitment to developing "modern and efficient" conventional forces, relying on combat experience to "pursue balanced and high-quality development of all components of the armed forces" and "improve the system for training units." (Fox News, Attachment Twenty Two)

Their training, not to mention components... mechanical and human... certainly could use improvements.

A glaring example was the failure to launch of his RS-28 Sarmat missile “known as the "Satan II" in the West”... intended as a period to the anniversary speech, but quickly dissolved into a big, messy question mark. (CBS News, Attachment Twenty Three)

If the last remaining arms treaty between the world’s two largest nuclear powers collapses, there will be no limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces for the first time since the 1970s,” USA Today’s Maureen Groppe lamented. “The risks of a nuclear launch – intentional or otherwise – would rise.” (Attachment Twenty Four)

“A world without nuclear arms control is a far more dangerous and unstable one,” agreed U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

And, Groppe warned, “if China turns its economic and diplomatic support for Russia into full-blown military assistance, it would be a major change in how China has approached foreign policy, supercharging the already high tensions between the U.S. and China and making the world more dangerous.”

“It would also return us to…the kind of things we saw in the Cold War where you have all these major countries interfering in conflicts and proxy wars,” said Brian Hart, who studies the evolving nature of Chinese power at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Without arms control, “the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals could double in size, according to the Federation of American Scientists.”

But Groppe disagrees that it’s time to panic... there being no sign that Putin has the desire (or resources) to suddenly produce new weapons, according to Joe Cirincione, an arms control expert and member of the Council on Foreign Relations who thinks Bad Vlad “is raising the nuclear specter to scare away Ukraine’s allies.”

“Russian president Vladimir Putin has come to rely on nuclear weapons for coercion and bullying and will continue to make nuclear threats,” Heather Williams, and arms control expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a recent analysis. “The West may not be able to stop Putin from threatening to use nuclear weapons, but countries can work to prevent him from following through on those threats.”

The Biden administration has warned of “severe consequences” if China helps Russia replenish its military supplies.

“We’ll not hesitate to target Chinese companies or individuals that violate our sanctions,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price.

A Guardian U.K. forecast for the rest of 2023 polled a gang of seven liberals Friday morning (six face cards and a joker) and here’s how they read the tea leaves...

(T)houghts are turning towards the longer-term prospects of the combatants, shaped by the gradual realisation that this conflict could potentially last years. Unfortunately, divergent interests among the western coalition will become more pronounced. Ukraine – and the eastern European countries closest to Russia’s borders – may (must! – DJI) be willing to sustain the war for several more years... given that 40% of Republicans now say they believe the US is doing too much in the conflict meaning that the war is likely to become “a political football in the early phases of the 2024 US presidential election campaign.” (Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy programme at the Stimson Center, Washington DC, and the author of Oil, the State and War.

Despite numerical disadvantages in men and materiel, a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring, using new brigades equipped and trained in the west, could turn the tide. “If the Ukrainian armed forces manage to push south from the Zaporizhzhia region to the Sea of Azov, they could split the Russian occupying forces in two and potentially threaten Crimea.” But speed is of the essence. If western military and economic support comes too slowly, time will work for Vladimir Putin. (Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.)

“This war is going to last for a very long time – that feeling dawned on Russians at the end of 2022... (i)n 2023, the added feeling will be fear of those who enthusiastically went to war and now are getting back. “Many will be angry and frustrated, and capable of further violence.” The body bags arriving in Russian cities and towns will not add to sympathy for the plight of Ukrainians.

“This combination of depression and alienation was probably close to what was felt by Germans in the second year of the first world war, or Iraqis during a very long, brutal and senseless war with Iran.” (Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Russian investigative journalists and authors of The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad

Ukrainian soldiers have demonstrated that they need no assistance in maintaining their motivation and will to fight. Just as the Russians have shown that even well-equipped troops will be defeated in modern warfare if they lack good morale, leadership and training – qualities they have in short supply.

“But superior equipment and morale will only take you so far. Ukraine has taken fearful casualties in the past year. At least 100,000, including in their best and most experienced units. Training is essential, especially for the kind of combined arms mechanised warfare – soldiers, tanks and artillery working in unison – the Ukrainians need to master if they are to defeat Russia.

“Nato must make training its continuing main effort. This will ensure that Ukraine will be able to unlock the combat potential in its newly equipped brigades, achieve a significant victory this year, and defend itself into the future.” (Frank Ledwidge - barrister and former military officer who has served in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan)

The Ukrainian armed forces and the country’s people have defended our lands with an extraordinary courage, about which historians, when they have time, will write tales of heroism to awe future generations. Russia will have been alarmed at the support provided by our friends. Our western allies saw that this terrible conflict represented a turning point in history.

If Russia prevails, the security of the west and the international rules-based order it supports will be shattered. I can assure you that Russia will not stop if its armed forces succeed in Ukraine. If Russia is allowed to succeed, this conflict will not end within the borders of my country.

The Russian leadership understands only power. The more aggressive and comprehensive the western response, the more quickly this war will end. (Andriy Yermak is head of the Office of the Ukrainian Presidency)

And, inexplicably included, was one Sevim Dağdelen is a Member of the German Bundestag for Die Linke who, in his short prophecy, unleashed a storm of howlers that would even have embarrassed George Santos (otherwise blissfully absent from the news and the Index this week)...

“The war in Ukraine has turned into a proxy war between the US and Nato, on one side, and Russia on the other...” Uh... what about the Ukrainians doing the fighting? Even the normally noncommittal President Joe, recipient of a barrel of peace proposals, declared, upon his return from Warsaw: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine! – DJI

“While Nato and its allies are engaged in economic warfare and the massive delivery of ever heavier weapons to Kiev, the vast majority of countries around the world are not taking sides.” Herr Dağdelen apparently did not hear the news that the UN expressed support for Ukraine and disgust with Putin by a vote of 141 ayes, seven nays and 32 abstentions. The problem was that two of the dissenters... Russia and China... hold veto power over the majority - DJI

The west bears a high degree of responsibility for escalating this war, and there is the ever-present threat of direct involvement. To stop this madness, we need an immediate ceasefire without preconditions... “(m)any western backers would apparently rather not support negotiations at all. Hell NO! – DJI

Is this guy one of the retinue of that so-called “prince” who wants to bring back Bismarck? He can contact MTG through the Congressional Directory and/or Djonald Trump on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago.

Moving thankfully on, we turn to Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, who reported from Beijing, laying down practical issues that President Xi must take into account when deciding whether or not to send his lethal materials to Russia.

“While Beijing wants the conflict in Ukraine to end, it does not want to see a weakened Russia or a weakened Putin,” Yu said, pointing out that China receives several benefits from friendly relations with Moscow and demonstrating that their current interests are economical, not existential.

“It gets stable access to cheap oil and gas, it gets a peaceful northern border, and [it gets] a friend in its corner to counterweigh the US and US allies.” (Attachment Twenty Six)

Up in Canada, the Salt Wire press spoke to anonymous “security analysts” who unanimously agreed that STARTS (old, new or future) “may be beyond repair” – not only prompting the Americans and Russians to enhance and test their arsenals, but “spurring” others like China, India and Pakistan to join in the fun. (Attachment Twenty Seven)

A fly on Putin’s wall blamed the stop on Russian insistence that French and British nuclear weapons were also taken into account - a condition the analysts said was a non-starter, as it was opposed by Washington and would require a complete rewriting of the treaty.

William Alberque, director of strategy, technology and arms control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said Russia had decided it could live without New START but was seeking to put the blame on Washington.

"They've already made the calculation the treaty will die. The effort will be to pin the actual loss on the United States," he said in an telephone interview.

The Russians, via Moscow Times (February 21^st, Attachment Twenty Eight) served a notice to the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy, accusing Washington of supplying weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine as well as sharing information on Russia’s military and civilian infrastructure with Kyiv.

“In this regard, the ambassador has been informed of the counter-productivity of the current aggressive U.S. course,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.

The ministry also demanded the U.S. withdraw "soldiers and equipment" from Ukraine — a reference to Western military assistance to the country.

And, soliciting sympathy for the devil, GUK declared that at least some of the blame must fall on the West for having flaunted their Western ways “during the noughties”... (February 24^th, Attachment Twenty Nine)... despite the near certainty that “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would destroy any hope of rapprochement with the western Europeans, driving them for the foreseeable future into the arms of the US. Simultaneously, such a move would leave Russia diplomatically isolated and dangerously dependent on China.”

Correspondent Anatol Lieven called the election of President Trump a deterrant to Russian aggression, given the man from Mar-a-Lago’s hostility to NATO and to Europeans in general. But his replacement by Biden brought back the old USA-Europe ties, particularly among the hated French and Germans, but also among most of the former Soviet satellites.

“But while Putin and his criminal invasion of Ukraine are chiefly responsible for this, we should also recognise that western and central Europeans also did far too little to try to keep Gorbachev’s dream of a common European home alive.”

China and Russia have aligned their foreign policies to oppose Washington. (AP, above) “Beijing has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion or atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, while strongly criticizing Western economic sanctions on Moscow. Late last year, Russia and China held joint naval drills.”

The deputy head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, Vadym Skibitskyi, told The Associated Press his agency hasn’t seen any signs so far that China is providing weapons to Moscow.

Orban excluded, the EU is not only supporting Ukraine, some… like Poland… want to go further than the United States and provide President Z. with the fighter jets he wants to not only defend the homeland, but to launch attacks into Russia,

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who was in Ukraine on Tuesday, said she wished Putin had taken a different approach.

“What we heard this morning was propaganda that we already know,” Meloni said in English. “He says (Russia) worked on diplomacy to avoid the conflict, but the truth is that there is somebody who is the invader and somebody who is defending itself.”

China’s collusion is on the record but, while not supporting Uke membership in the EU, or presumably NATO, the Japan Times has denounced Putin’s regime as rife with “cronies and criminals” the many oligarchs not stupid enough to leave their wealth where it can be snatched seeing the war as a business opportunity,

When Putin contended Western sanctions hadn’t “achieved anything and will not achieve anything” and blasted Russian tycoons who kept their assets in the West and saw them confiscated or frozen as part of the sanctions.

“Believe me, ordinary people had no sympathy for those who lost their yachts, palaces and other assets abroad,” Putin said of his oligarchical supporters... some of whom may now be itching to turn Glad Vlad into Sad Vlad if they mobilize their supporters and money against the dictator.

Said dictator is playing a dangerous game. If there is to be a threat to his regime, it is unlikely to come from domestic quarters, let alone foreign humanitarian protests; rather, some of the oligarchs, military officials and critics... men of power, resources and influence (Russia’s gender gap is even greater than is North Korea’s)... may believe he is not being brutal enough and a real man needs to take the reins and rein in those uppity Ukes.

A real man’s man like Yevgeny Prigozhin… previously a restaurant magnate – known as “Putin’s chef” due to the president’s patronage of his restaurants and catering firms, now elevated to master and commander of the Wagner Group army of mercenaries, conscripts and convicts - widely believed to be behind many of the crimes against humanity the rest of the world accuses Putin of?

If Putin shows weakness, Prigozhin stands ready to rock, roll, revolt and then rule. The owner of the Russian private military company Wagner has already accused Russia’s defense minister and chief of general staff of “starving his fighters in Ukraine of ammunition, which he said amounts to an attempt to “destroy” the force. (Associated Press... Attachment Thirty) This “can be likened to high treason in the very moment when Wagner is fighting for Bakhmut, losing hundreds of its fighters every day,” Prigozhin said.

This despite what GUK’s Samantha deBendern called “the erosion of the rule of law in Russia,” and shows that the state is willing to tolerate extreme, unaccountable violence as long as it serves its interests. (Attachment Thirty One), Might this ultimately become “a threat to the regime itself?”

Russian law is hazy on the authority and responsibility of private armies. Wagner is the largest, with an estimated 50,000 members operating in Ukraine alone, (and the only one led by an operator who is behaving more and more like someone seeking real political influence) but not the only such gathering. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu’s private army, Patriot, has been operating in Ukraine since 2014, and oligarch Gennady Timchenko’s private army, Redut, originally created to protect his company’s gas field, is also present in Ukrainem not to mention the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s army. On 7 February the gas giant Gazprom announced it was creating its own private military company.

The embattled ministry of defence and Wagner have “openly contradicted each other in claiming responsibility for recent Russian gains in Donbas.”

Prigozhin recently asked the Russian parliament to introduce changes to the law to make criticism of his convict soldiers illegal. The Duma speaker responded by asking the parliamentary security and defence committee to study the question. “If the requested changes are made,” deBendern contends, “this could seriously complicate the prosecution of former convict soldiers for any new crimes. By giving such a free rein to Prigozhin, the Kremlin is creating a state-sanctioned culture of criminal violence.”

I have spoken, off the record deBendern added, to a former KGB officer and a Russian oligarch, who both maintain that Prigozhin is intentionally hyped up as a bogeyman, to be presented to Russian audiences who fantasise about regime change. The warning is clear: if Putin goes, things could be worse – although the dictator now, suggests AP, has started to rein in the wannabe reigner.

On Tuesday, in his long-anticipated state-of-the-nation addresss “suspending” New Start, Putin profusely thanked his military, but he made no mention of Wagner.

What he did mention, repeatedly, was his grievance that Washington wants: “to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities.”

Huh?

Putin’s decision is a distressing signal not just for New START but for global arms control and nonproliferation more broadly. (Vox, Saturday, Attachment Thirty Two). Russia and the United States have the world’s largest nuclear weapons arsenals, and “a pact like New START should serve as a safeguard during moments of tension, rather than a tool (or hostage – DJI) in a geopolitical standoff.”

New START specifically caps the number of long-range missiles each country can deploy to 1,550 and allows for a maximum of 700 long-range missiles and bombers.

It all sounds very technical, but strategic nuclear arms are “the big intercontinental systems that are essentially an existential threat — not only to the United States and to the Russian Federation, but to the global community, to humanity as a whole,” said Rose Gottemoeller, who served as the chief negotiator in the Obama administration for the New START Treaty and is now the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University.

Putin has put the existing New START in jeopardy. The prospects of a follow-on treaty, however, were already “pretty precarious” even before the Ukraine war and Putin’s New START decision. “The pathway that we’re on is no different, but the slope is steeper,” said Amy Woolf, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former specialist on nuclear weapons at the Congressional Research Service.

“We’ve known for 10 years that our lists are very different, and we’ve been unable to reach any agreement on what should be on the table,” said Woolf. “If you think that Ukraine caused the problem, all Ukraine did was highlight the fact that there was already a problem.”

New START is/was “cost-saving,” said Jessica Rogers, impact fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. “You can use those resources for other things, or for other defense purposes.”

“Without that information,” Vox correspondent Jen Kirby contend, “the pressure could grow on both sides to build up the nuclear arsenals.”

Beyond Ukraine, should fortune favor the brutal, most Western experts expressed a belief (or fear) that Russia would invade either former satellites like the Baltics, or press westward on to Poland, then Germany, and force NATO to respond or capitulate.

But the tricky Russians may have another option.

Consider Moldova!

The former Moldavia... principally known as a setting for some “Dynasty” episodes (or was it “Dallas”?) was described by Germany’s DW.com (Attachment Thirty Three) as of Russian interest.

“Wedged between Ukraine and northwestern Romania,” the Germans explained, “the Republic of Moldova has long feared Russian aggression, with military threats from Moscow taking on an increasingly belligerent tone lately.”

Earlier in the week, Russian President Vladimir Putin annulled a 2012 decree in which the Kremlin had guaranteed Moldova's sovereignty. Shortly before that, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had warned that Russia was trying to force out Moldova's pro-European leadership. Moscow responded on February 23 that it was actually Ukraine that was planning a military intervention in Moldova.

Moldova was the first country after the collapse of the Soviet Union in which Russia supported separatists, provoking a bloody war that lasted for several months in 1992. The result was a frozen conflict, with pro-Moscow forces ruling Transnistria, a narrow strip of land in the east of Moldova that is home to many Russian speakers, for more than three decades. About 2,000 Russian soldiers are still stationed there, despite the fact that Moscow guaranteed a withdrawal of its troops from the area in 1999. The largest arms depot in Europe, containing some 20,000 tons of ammunition and military equipment, is also located near the Transnistrian village of Cobasna.

A wagonload of guns is a tasty target – as any followers of the old Western movies understands.

But “weapons expert” Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher specializing in arms control and disarmament with the UN’s Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, says the situation could be worse (Radio Free Europe, Sunday, Attachment Thirty Four) inasmuch as “the Russian senior leadership’s understanding of how the New START system works...is very approximate and profoundly wrong.”

In a back-and-forth with RFE, Podvig refutes some of the NATO contentions... explaining that “(i)nspections and sessions of the commission stopped in the spring of 2020 by mutual agreement because of the pandemic.

“In the summer of 2022, it became clear that inspections could resume, but in this case I think the Americans did not read the situation very well. They decided to resume them on a whim, simply sending a notice saying, ‘We are coming to inspect.’

“Russia expected that first the commission would convene and then it would discuss resumption. Russia was somewhat offended by the sudden request and, I would say, with reason.”

“There are degrees of bad news,” Podvig declared, and, in this situation, “I think the absence of completely awful news can be considered good news.”

The “completely awful news” dropped this morning, when Rad Vlad “bestowed a state decoration on Steven Seagal, the American action-movie actor who also holds Russian citizenship. (AP, Attachment Thirty Five)

Seagal was a vocal supporter of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and was named in 2018 as a Russian Foreign Ministry “humanitarian envoy” to the United States and Japan.

With Joes-in-the-Know cognizant of Putin’s fanboy consumption of chop-socky Seagal epics like @, @ and @, it’s not beyone the realm of reason to ponder the effects of such fare on the deranged dictator.

In December, after all, Putin warned of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war, and this month, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, threatened that Russia losing the war could “provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war.” (CNN, above and Attachment Seven)

“Nuclear powers do not lose major conflicts on which their fate depends,” Medvedev wrote in a Telegram post. “This should be obvious to anyone. Even to a Western politician who has retained at least some trace of intelligence.”

And though a US intelligence assessment in November suggested that Russian military officials discussed under what circumstances Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, the US has not seen any evidence that Putin has decided to take the drastic step of using one, officials told CNN.

Might that change?

We’ll explore the range of options… production, testing and (perhaps) deployment in our next Lesson.

February 20^th – February 26^th, 2023

Monday, February 20, 2023

Dow: Closed for Presidents’ Day

From February 17^th: 33,826.50

It’s President’s Day.

President Joe celebrates with a surprise visit to Kyev; meeting with Zelenskyy and touring the bombed-out cities while Mad Vlad Putin confers with a Chinese envoy about obtaining more “lethal materials” to prosecute the war. Some Republicans express support for Russia and polls show that support for Ukraine is fading in America as Poles (the people) welcome Biden for conferences with EastEuro members of NATO,

Relief workers scurry for cover as a 6.5 aftershock rattles the Turko-Syrian border. Fewer and fewer survivors are being found in the rubble and the death toll tops 47,000 with many more missing. The Norfolk Southern derailment continues to spread toxic clouds of vinyl chloride over Palestine (Ohio) and TranSec Pete Butt accuses the company of supporting “profits over people”. The Bern writes a book, excoriating both Putin and the billionaires, promotes class warfare and supports free healthcare and college education, to be paid for by taxing the robots.

Gator chomps a granny in Florida while a more confused Yankee reptile has to be rescued from a freezing New York City lake as the warm weather stays southwards and cold people across the Midwest (as well as the wet, Western folks) flock to theaters, allowing Avatar Two to finally sink the Titanic’s record for biggest B.O. (box office) record ever.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Dow: 33,129.59

It’s Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras).

Putin announces that Russia will suspend participation in the State and New Start treaties (above) and ramping up its production of nuclear weapons, in addition to buying conventional arms from Iran, North Korea and, potentially, China. Biden, in Poland, says it’s a “big mistake” but denies he wants a “head to head” confrontation with either Beijing or Moscow. Other say he’d better start considering “bullet to head.” MTG complains of “Ukraine fatigue”, then calls for a New Confederacy of disadjoining red states to secede from the blue.

Ordinary worker fatigue said to lessen with a four day workweek.

Another round of blizzards strike the West and the snow in Los Angeles is the worst in thirty years. Climate change worldwide brings a Eurodrought that has the canals of Venice drying up.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Dow: 33,045.09

Onward, it’s Washington’s Birthday.

As the anniversary of the Ukraine invasion draws near, Russia holds massive pro-war rallies, slavering at the prospect of replacing dud-ly domestic, Iranian and NoKo arms with the world standard stuff. (In honor of the occasion, they launch a Satan missile, which flops.)

Israelis kill 11 suspected (Mid-East) Palestinian terrorists while more bureaucrats and politicians follow Pete Butt to Palestine (Ohio) to hobnob with the folks and drink their tap water. Nobody dies (but being carcinogenic, they’ll have to wait 20 years.) Djonald UnDrunk drops by and blames the derailment on Obama, so does the local Mayor. Statisticians declare that there were 447 derailment in 2021 and deaths since 2002 are up 30%. The JAMA releases astonishing findings: rich people live longer than poor people.

Madman (or is he a Mad Man) murders a woman in Orlando, then comes back hours later and kills the journalist at the scene, then breaks into a nearby house and kills a 9 year old girl.

As SCOTUS debates whether to strengthen the Communications Decency Act and ban unpleasant online programming, the (surviving) Beatles and (surviving, sort of ) Rolling Stones announce they will do a joint recording – and maybe tour. Dangerous news... for 1967!

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Dow: 33,153.91

It’s National Chili Day.

A bowl of it in chilly weather would go down well in Los Angeles, where snow blankets the Hollywood sign. A deep freeze settles in from Washington State to New England, but record temperatures hang in below the Mason-Dixon line, but there are complications... like tornadoes.

Omnipartisn scramble to either seek peace or re-armanent in the wake of Putin’s ploy (above). TV Gen. McMasters compares the Russian strategy in Ukraine to World War I – sending waves of troops over the top to be slaughtered by the patriots. What the hell... they’re only convicts and constripts and the Russian moms are too bedazzled by patriotic propaganda to realize they’ve been snookered. Which means... prepare for nuclear war.

Old, cold cases slog on... HarveyWeinstein gets 16 more years for more unwanted touching, R. Kelly convicted, too. Split decision for the Bad Als... Murdaugh makes a fool of himself on the stand, but Baldwin posts bail and returns to the set of “Rust” (which will be the B.O. King of 2024).

And Starbucks starts serving up that which everybody wants to drink... olive oil coffee!

Friday, February 24, 2023

Dow: 32,826.54

It’s the First Anniversary of Mad Vlad Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,

President Joe meets with the Bucharest Group of former Soviet satellites turned NATO true believers and then flies home from Warsaw to hit the domestic airwaves. Interviewed on ABC News, he calls the Chinese peace plan “irrational” and says that “...nothing about Ukraine can be decided without Ukraine.” But he also waffles about letting the Russians keep Crimea and flatly refuses to give (or sell) President Zelenskyy the fighter jets he covets. SecState Blinken warns Xi wants it both ways... playing peacemaker and arms dealer... and adding that the sanctions imposed on Russia can be applied to China if they provide Putin his “lethal assistance” and remains optimistic, saying that the Ukrainians are fighting for their country and their freedom. “The Russians are not.”

A Ukrainian official, dmytro Kuleba, who wants the planes in addition to the usual ammunition, tanks and missiles compares his country to David, fighting Goliath but needing a sling. “This is a war where one side is black and one is white.”

In other news, the winter storms bringing snow to Los Angeles for the first time in thirty years are going to march across the country and snap the warm streak on the East Coast. The NTSB rules that the toxic train derailment in Ohio was “one hundred percent preventable.”

And a still-pregnant Rihanna will follow up her halftime show at the Superbowl with a performance at the Oscars.

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Dow: (Closed)

US, NATO and even parties unrelated shower sanctions and bad words upon the Russians after Bad Vlad Putin’s child-kidnapping ring is exposed... the Ukrainian teens to toddlers taken from their families (if any survive) and shipped into the Fatherland’s “re-education camps.” President Zelenskyy, always seeking more influence with Americans (and some of those nifty fighter jets) agrees to sing a duet with Brad Paisley. Why not? (If you can’t overcome at the UN, maybe you can rock the CMA Awards!)

Epoch cold, flooding and blizzards parked over California wash away homes, turn the trickly Los Angeles River into a torrent and cause postponement of the NAACP Image Awards. Rescheduled with Queen Latifah hosting, tributes are paid to Angela Basset, Ben Crump and… Will Smith! The storms, uncr ed, storm off to the upper Midwest where subzero temperatures and multi-foot snowfalls rock worlds from the Rockies to the Great Lake, then into the Northeast, snapping a skein of record warm days.

Government agents, corporate spokesthings and private and public ecology sorts still descending on East Palestin, OH – many blaming President Joe for not coming out and doing the usual disaster photo ops. Erin Brockovich manifests and makes speeches. State governments move to react/exploit by passing bunny-quick legislation to divert rail shipments of toxic chemicals to neighboring states (until everyone’s onboard and the stuff will presumably just pile up in freightyards).

Hero teacher pulls wheelchair-bound victim from fiery car crash. Villainous cartoonist Scott Adams says racist things and “Dilbert” is cancelled from the comic pages of major metropolitan newspapers.

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Dow: (Closed)

Turkish EQ aftershocks continue as death toll tops 50,000 and “rescue” becomes “recovery”. But Mother Earth continues slapping down her disobedient children with cyclones (Freddy in Madagascar, Gabrille in New Zealand), storm-generated power outages in Michigan and the W.H.O. reports that bird flu is crossing over and synthesizing with dogs and humans. (But, unlike with M-Pox, birds are woke-neutral.) Pfizer, on the other hand, promoting its flu/plague fighting synthesized vaccinations.

Dogs in the house but not positively, a mad mongred tears an old lady to death. Bad bugs swatted... USA and FDA will let Covid emergency expire in May. Bad drugs that people keep wanting will be more strongly regulated re: online sales. The government strikes a blow for justice: murder house in Idaho will be demolished. Bad House!

Good news – spring training and exhibition games begin under strange new rules. Rihanna, still pregnant and growing fast, will follow up her Super Sunday concert with an appearance at the Oscars.

Gloomy, dreary week all over the world... bad weather, bad news and the usual fools up to their usual foolishness (war, inflation, disease, crime, etc. etc.). Worst of all, the stock market kept dropping. Every social index was down except for the awards presentations and the beginning of spring training.

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

See a further explanation of categories here…

ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)

CATEGORY

VALUE

BASE

RESULTS

SCORE

OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS

INCOME

(24%)

6/17/13 & 1/1/22

LAST

CHANGE

NEXT

SOURCE

Wages (hrly. per cap)

1350 points

1/9/23

+0.68%

3/23

1,416.49

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages 28.26 nc

Median Inc. (yearly)

600

2/20/23

+0.03%

3/6/23

600.69

600.87

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 35,732

Unempl. (BLS – in mi)

600

1/2/23

-2.94%

3/23

670.92

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/ 3.4

Official (DC – in mi)

300

2/20/23

-0.23%

3/6/23

275.90

276,55

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 5,553

Unofficl. (DC – in mi)

300

2/20/23

-0.21%

3/6/23

265.92

266.47

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 11,993

Workforce Particip.

Number

Percent

300

2/20/23

+0.42% +0.11%

3/6/23

301.11

301.14

In 160,872 Out 100,266 Total: 261,138

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 61.604

WP % (ycharts)*

150

1/9/23

+0.16%

3/23

150.95

https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.40

OUTGO

15%

Total Inflation

1050

2/20/23

+0.5%

3/23

998.57

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm -0.5

Food

300

2/20/23

+0.5%

3/23

279.90

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.5

Gasoline

300

2/20/23

+2.4%

3/23

245.67

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +2.4

Medical Costs

300

2/20/23

-0.7%

3/23

292.85

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm -0.7

Shelter

300

2/20/23

+0.7%

3/23

283.33

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.7

WEALTH

Dow Jones Index

300

2/20/23

-3.11%

3/6/23

284.93

276.08

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/ 33,869.27 32,816.92

Home (Sales)

(Valuation)

150

1/16/23

-1.71% -1.03%

3/23

126.40

273.56

126.40

273.56

https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics

Sales (M): 4.02 Valuations (K): 366.9

Debt (Personal)

300

2/20/23

+0.27%

3/6/23

280.36

279.60

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 72,796

NATIONAL

(10%)

Revenue (trilns.)

300

2/20/23

+0.016%

3/6/23

384.08

384.14

debtclock.org/ 4,610.2

Expenditures (tr.)

300

2/20/23

+0.033%

3/6/23

341.63

341.52

debtclock.org/ 6,017

National Debt tr.)

450

2/20/23

+0.054%

3/6/23

427.58

427.35

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 31,581

(The debt ceiling was 31.4)

Aggregate Debt (tr.)

450

2/20/23

+0.126%

3/6/23

424.10

423.57

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 94,362

GLOBAL

(5%)

Foreign Debt (tr.)

300

2/20/23

+0.16%

3/6/23

346.50

345.95

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,247

Exports (in billions)

150

2/20/23

-0.674%

3/23

159.29

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 250.2

Imports (bl.)

150

2/20/23

+1.32%

3/23

169.81

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 317.6

Trade Deficit (bl.)

150

2/20/23

+8.75%

3/23

304.78

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 67.4

SOCIAL INDICES (40%)

ACTS of MAN

12%

World Affairs

450

2/20/23

-0.4%

3/6/23

452.19

450.38

Dueling Putin/Biden speeches end with Russia threatening pullout from New Start (above). Elections determine political direction in Nigeria, spark violence in Peru.

Terrorism

300

2/20/23

-0.3%

3/6/23

291.26

290.39

Angry, ignored NoKos fire off more missiles towards Japan. Top cop in Mexico accused of cartel collaboration. Israelis kill eleven (MidEast) Palestinians. Russia cuts off gas to NATO-supporting Poles after Biden visit.

Politics

450

2/20/23

-0.2%

3/6/23

471.04

470.19

Polls show support for Ukraine “slipping” as Republicans turn to Putin before Presidents Joe and Z meet in Kyev and “Bucharest Nine” in Warsaw, (MTG cites Uke “fatigue” – promotes red state secession). Bernie writes a book, proposes a robot tax. Biotwitchy Vivaatek Ramaswamy (who?) becomes third Republican 2024 presidential aspirant (making it Indians 2, Cowboy 1) as First Lady Jill says 82 year old white Joe’s running too, whether he agrees or not. Potential candidate Mike Pence resists One Six riot subpoenas but condemns pro-Putin Republicans.

Economics

450

2/20/23

-0.5%

3/6/23

437.89

435.70

Dow goes Down and Down and Down, e-con-mystics blame it on the higher interest rates and highest inflation since June, 2022. NerdWallet says avg. Jones owes $7,500 (DebtClock above only 7.437). The poorest will lose food stamp bennies on March 1^st, overwhelming food banks and charities.

Crime

150

2/20/23

-0.6%

3/6/23

269.81

269.19

Six shot in pre-Mardi Gras parties, 11 in Memphis Husband of LA bishop’s housekeeper arrested for his murder after he stiffed him for work around house. Disneyland maniac kills woman, then returns to scene, kills newscaster and invades nearby house to kill 9 year old girl. Bozohunt on for NYC subway shooting comedian. New Zealand trucker runs down 13 cyclists – two die. Not-OK Brandon Miller accused of giving a gun to an Alabama teammate who gave it to domestic violence killer but he stays on the team. Mormon Church fined for tax fraud. Pineapples imperiled in Dole ransomeware attack.

ACTS of GOD

(6%)

Environment/Weather

450

2/20/23

-0.3%

3/6/23

427.25

425.97

Record drought drying up canals in Venice (Italy). Record snow and cold for Venice (Cal.), warmth east. MAGAMayor of East Palestine blames Obama and Biden for derailment, President Joe is no show, says he’ll no go. Celebrity Erin Brockovich blames Norfolk Southern. Adjoining states refuse to accept toxic spill waste.

Disasters

450

2/20/23

-0.3%

3/6/23

442.77

441.37

Violent (female) passengers fails in attempt to break into cabin and crash a plane. 6.3 Turkish aftershock, death toll reaches 47K Monday, over 50K yesterday. Dozens more killed in Brazilian floods while cyclones (Pacific hurricanes) strike New Zealand and Madagascar.

LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX

(15%)

Science, Tech, Educ.

600

2/20/23

-0.3%

3/6/23

628.51

626.62

Facebook/Meta will start charging users; the Zuck insists it’s about authenticity, not profits. And then he fires thousands of workers.

Equality (econ/social)

600

2/20/23

-0.2%

3/6/23

613.02

611.79

President Joe’s new border rules please MAGA, displease asylum lobbyists. Comic strip “Dilbert” cancelled for author’s racist rants and ravings.

Health

600

2/20/23

-0.3%

3/6/23

474.41

472.99

JAMA jive: poorer people have lower life expectancies. Really? Pfizer develops RSV vax for pregnane women – it’s “82 percent effective”/ More lawyers and bureaucrats head to Ohio to assure residents that everything is safe. (It isn’t.) 145K cans of bacterial baby formula recalled as are fiery Cosori air fryers.. Mississippi bans health care for transgender minors. War on Drugs revives with telemedication regulations and assertions that marijuana KILLS YOU! More prisons needed!

Freedom and Justice

450

2/20/23

-0.3%

3/6/23

461.31

459.93

SCOTUS to rule on Biden’s college debt forgiveness, social media responsibility for social mediots in the Communications Decency Act and whether to reoke earlier revocation of parolee’s sentence for murder most believe he did not commit. Pinterest insists they want nice content, not billable viewing time. Nipsey Hussle killer gets 60 years. More Proud Boys rat out comrades and Georgia grand jury forefemale leaks details in interminable One Six trials; interminable Bad Al trials creak on: Murtaugh denies that he’s a “family annihilator” and blames the evil drugs; Baldwin denies complicity in crew members’ live shooting videos.

MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX

(7%)

Cultural incidents

450

2/20/23

+0.2%

3/6/23

481.70

482.66

Avatar Two tops Titanic for grossest BO gross with $2.2433 billion globally, enough to overtake “Titanic” ($2.2428 billion) at the worldwide box office. Now, “The Way of Water” trails only “Avatar One” ($2.92 billion) and “Avengers: Endgame” ($2.7 billion) on the all-time charts. Proposed Beatles/Stones union excites the old folks. Paisley duet with President Z excites the country Ukes (rumoured Vlad/Xi cover of “Close to You” fails to materialize). Underdogs win Daytona 500 and NBA slam dunk contest (after which @results). Big awards nights for blacks (NAACP Image Awards hosted by Queen Latifah after weather postponement – honoring... Will Smith? And for Asians... sweep for “Everything Everywhere” actress/directress Michelle Yeoh.

RIP Barbara Bossun (Hill Street Blues), hot centenarian movie produer Walter Mirisch (Some like it Hot, In the Heat of the Night).

Misc. incidents

450

2/20/23

3/6/23

473.08

Georgia Trump grand juror leaks dirt, says that she’s a witch – making the upcoming trial a... you know. Special Counsel issues subpoenas to Jared and Ivanka. Starbucks rolls out olive oil flavored coffee. MLB spring training begins.

The Don Jones Index for the week of February 20^th through February 26^th, 2023 was DOWN 23.84 points

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ATTACHMENT ONE – From Wikipedia @use A

START I

START
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty Договор о сокращении стратегических наступательных вооружений
Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev sign START, 31 July 1991
Type	Strategic nuclear disarmament
Drafted	29 June 1982 – June 1991
Signed	31 July 1991
Location	Moscow, Soviet Union
Effective	5 December 1994
Condition	Ratification of both parties
Expiration	5 December 2009
Signatories	George H. W. Bush Mikhail Gorbachev
Parties	United States Soviet Union
Languages	Russian, English

START I (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) was a bilateral treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the reduction and the limitation of strategic offensive arms. The treaty was signed on 31 July 1991 and entered into force on 5 December 1994.^[1] The treaty barred its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and a total of 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers.

START negotiated the largest and most complex arms control treaty in history, and its final implementation in late 2001 resulted in the removal of about 80% of all strategic nuclear weapons then in existence. Proposed by US President Ronald Reagan, it was renamed START I after negotiations began on START II.

The treaty expired on 5 December 2009.

Proposal

The START proposal was first announced by US President Ronald Reagan in a commencement address at his alma mater, Eureka College, on 9 May 1982,^[4] and presented by Reagan in Geneva on 29 June 1982. He proposed a dramatic reduction in strategic forces in two phases, which he referred to as SALT III.^[5]

The first phase would reduce overall warhead counts on any missile type to 5,000, with an additional limit of 2,500 on ICBMs. Additionally, a total of 850 ICBMs would be allowed, with a limit of 110 "heavy throw" missiles like the SS-18 and additional limitations on the total "throw weight" of the missiles.

The second phase introduced similar limits on heavy bombers and their warheads, as well as other strategic systems.

The US then had a commanding lead in strategic bombers. The aging B-52 force was a credible strategic threat but was equipped with only AGM-86 cruise missiles beginning in 1982 because of Soviet air defense improvements in the early 1980s. The US had begun to introduce the new B-1B Lancer quasi-stealth bomber as well and was secretly developing the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB) project, which would eventually result in the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.

The Soviet force was of little threat to the US, on the other hand, as it was tasked almost entirely with attacking US convoys in the Atlantic and land targets on the Eurasian landmass. Although the Soviets had 1,200 medium and heavy bombers, only 150 of them (Tupolev Tu-95s and Myasishchev M-4s) could reach North America (the latter only by in-flight refueling). They also faced difficulty penetrating US airspace, which was smaller and less defended. Having too few bombers available compared to US bomber numbers was evened out by the US forces being required to penetrate the Soviet airspace, which is much larger and more defended.

That changed in 1984, when new Tu-95MS and Tu-160 bombers appeared and were equipped with the first Soviet AS-15 cruise missiles. By limiting the phasing in, it was proposed that the US would be left with a strategic advantage for a time.

As Time magazine put it, "Under Reagan's ceilings, the US would have to make considerably less of an adjustment in its strategic forces than would the Soviet Union. That feature of the proposal will almost certainly prompt the Soviets to charge that it is unfair and one-sided. No doubt some American arms-control advocates will agree, accusing the Administration of making the Kremlin an offer it cannot possibly accept—a deceptively equal-looking, deliberately nonnegotiable proposal that is part of what some suspect is the hardliners' secret agenda of sabotaging disarmament so that the US can get on with the business of rearmament." However, Time pointed out, "The Soviets' monstrous ICBMs have given them a nearly 3-to-1 advantage over the US in 'throw weight'—the cumulative power to 'throw' megatons of death and destruction at the other nation."

Costs[ ]

Three institutes ran studies in regards to the estimated costs that the US government would have to pay to implement START I: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), and the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). The CBO estimates assumed that the full-implementation cost would consist of a one-time cost of $410 to 1,830 million and that the continuing annual costs would be $100 to 390 million.^[6]

The SFRC had estimates of $200 to 1,000 million for one-time costs and that total inspection costs over the 15 years of the treaty would be $1,250 to 2,050 million.^{[7][page needed]}

Finally, the IDA estimated only the verification costs, which it claimed to be around $760 million.^[8]

In addition to the costs of implementing the treaty, the US also aided the former Soviet republics with the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (Nunn-Lugar Program), which added $591 million to the costs of implementing the START I program in the former Soviet Union, which would almost double the cost of the program for the US.^{[9][page needed]}

After the treaty's implementation, the former Soviet Union's stock of nuclear weapons fell from 12,000 to 3,500. The US would also save money since it would not have to be concerned with the upkeep and innovations of its nuclear forces. The CBO estimated that would amount to a total saving of $46 billion in the first five years of the treaty and around $130 billion until 2010, which would pay for the cost of the implementation of the treaty about twenty times over.^{[7][page needed]}

The other risk associated with START was the failure of compliance on the side of Russia. The US Senate Defence Committee expressed concerns that Russia could covertly produce missiles, produce false numbers regarding the numbers of warheads, and monitor cruise missiles.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff assessment of those situations determined the risk of a significant treaty violation within acceptable limits. Another risk would be the ability of Russia to perform espionage during the inspection of US bases and military facilities. The risk was also determined to be an acceptable factor by the assessment.^{[9][page needed]}

Considering the potential savings from the implementation of START I and its relatively-low risk factor, Reagan and the US government deemed it a reasonable plan of action towards the goal of disarmament.

Negotiations[ ]

Negotiations for START I began in May 1982, but continued negotiation of the START process was delayed several times because US agreement terms were considered nonnegotiable by pre-Gorbachev Soviet rulers. Reagan's introduction of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program in 1983 was viewed as a threat by the Soviets, who withdrew from setting a timetable for further negotiations. In January 1985, however, US Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko discussed a formula for a three-part negotiation strategy that included intermediate-range forces, strategic defense, and missile defense. During the Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in October 1986, negotiations towards the implementation of the START Program were accelerated and turned towards the reduction of strategic weapons after the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed in December 1987.^{[10][page needed]}

However, a dramatic nuclear arms race proceeded in the 1980s. It ended in 1991 with nuclear parity preservation with 10,000 strategic warheads on both sides.

Verification tools[ ]

The verification regimes in arms control treaties contain many tools to hold parties accountable for their actions and violations of their treaty agreements.^[2] The START Treaty verification provisions were the most complicated and demanding of any agreement at the time by providing twelve different types of inspection. Data exchanges and declarations between parties became required and included exact quantities, technical characteristics, locations, movements, and the status of all offensive nuclear threats. The national technical means of verification (NTM) provision protected satellites and other information-gathering systems controlled by the verifying side, as they helped to verify adherence to international treaties. The international technical means of verification provision protected the multilateral technical systems specified in other treaties. Co-operative measures were established to facilitate verification by the NTM and included displaying items in plain sight and not hiding them from detection. The new on-site inspections (OSI) and Perimeter and Portal Continuous Monitoring (PPCM) provisions helped to maintain the treaty's integrity by providing a regulatory system handled by a representative from the verifying side at all times.^[11] In addition, access to telemetry from ballistic missile flight tests was required, including exchanges of tapes and a ban on encryption and encapsulation from both parties.^{[12][page needed]}

Signing[ ]

Negotiations that led to the signing of the treaty began in May 1982. In November 1983, the Soviet Union "discontinued" communication with the US, which had deployed intermediate-range missiles in Europe. In January 1985, US Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko negotiated a three-part plan, including strategic weapons, intermediate missiles, and missile defense. It received a lot of attention at the Reykjavik Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and ultimately led to the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in December 1987.^[2] Talk of a comprehensive strategic arms reduction continued, and the START Treaty was officially signed by US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev on 31 July 1991.^[13]

Implementation[ ]

There were 375 B-52s flown to the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, in Arizona.^[when?] The bombers were stripped of all usable parts and chopped into five pieces by a 13,000-pound steel blade dropped from a crane. The guillotine sliced four times on each plane, which severed the wings and left the fuselage in three pieces. The dissected B-52s remained in place for three months so that Russian satellites could confirm that the bombers had been destroyed, and they were then sold for scrap.^[14]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, treaty obligations were passed to twelve Soviet successor states.^[15] Of those, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan each eliminated its one nuclear-related sites, and on-site inspections were discontinued. Inspections continued in Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine.^[15] Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine became non-nuclear weapons states under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons on 1 July 1968 and are committed to it under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol (Protocol to the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms).^[16][17]

Efficacy[ ]

Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine have disposed of all their nuclear weapons or transferred them to Russia. The US and Russia have reduced the capacity of delivery vehicles to 1,600 each, with no more than 6,000 warheads.^[18]

A report by the US State Department, "Adherence to and Compliance With Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments," was released on 28 July 2010 and stated that Russia was not in full compliance with the treaty when it expired on 5 December 2009. The report did not specifically identify Russia's compliance issues.^[19]

One incident concerning Russia violating the START I Treaty occurred in 1994. It was announced by Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director John Holum in a congressional testimony that Russia had converted its SS-19 ICBM into a space-launch vehicle without notifying the appropriate parties.^[20] Russia justified the incident by claiming it did not have to follow all of START's reporting policies regarding missiles that had been recreated into space-launch vehicles. In addition to the SS-19, Russia reportedly used SS-25 missiles to assemble space-launch vehicles. The issue that the US had was that it did not have accurate numbers and locations of Russian ICBMs with those violations. The dispute was resolved in 1995.^[9]

Expiration and renewal

START I expired on 5 December 2009, but both sides agreed to keep observing the terms of the treaty until a new agreement was reached.^[21] There are proposals to renew and expand the treaty, supported by US President Barack Obama. Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute of the U.S. and Canada, said: "Obama supports sharp reductions in nuclear arsenals, and I believe that Russia and the U.S. may sign in the summer or fall of 2009 a new treaty that would replace START-1." He added that a new deal would happen only if Washington abandoned plans to place elements of a missile shield in Central Europe. He expressed willingness "to make new steps in the sphere of disarmament" but said that he was waiting for the US to abandon attempts to "surround Russia with a missile defense ring" in reference to the placement of ten interceptor missiles in Poland and accompanying radar in the Czech Republic.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said the day after the US elections in his first State of the Nation address that Russia would move to deploy short-range Iskander missile systems in the western exclave of Kaliningrad "to neutralize if necessary the anti-ballistic missile system in Europe." Russia insists that any movement toward New START be a legally binding document and to set lower ceilings on the number of nuclear warheads and their delivery vehicles.^[18]

On 17 March 2009, Medvedev signaled that Russia would begin "large-scale" rearmament and renewal of Russia's nuclear arsenal. He accused NATO of expanding near Russian borders and ordered the rearmament to commence in 2011 with an increased army, naval, and nuclear capabilities. Also, the head of Russia's strategic missile forces, Nikolai Solovtsov, told news agencies that Russia would start deploying its next-generation RS-24 missiles after the 5 December expiry of the START I. Russia hopes to form a new treaty. The increased tensions came despite the warming of relations between the US and Russia in the two years since Obama had taken office.^[22]

On 4 May 2009, the US and Russia began renegotiating START and counting nuclear warheads and their delivery vehicles in making a new agreement. While setting aside problematic issues between the two countries, both sides agreed to make further cuts in the number of warheads deployed to around 1,000 to 1,500 each. The US said that it is open to a Russian proposal to use radar in Azerbaijan rather than Eastern Europe for the proposed missile system. The George W. Bush administration insisted that the Eastern Europe defense system was intended as a deterrent for Iran, but Russia feared that it could be used against itself. The flexibility by both sides to make compromises now will lead to a new phase of arms reduction in the future.^[23]

A "Joint understanding for a follow-on agreement to START-1" was signed by Obama and Medvedev in Moscow on 6 July 2009 to reduce the number of deployed warheads on each side to 1,500–1,675 on 500–1,100 delivery systems. A new treaty was to be signed before START-1 expired in December 2009, with reductions to be achieved within seven years.^[24] After many months of negotiations,^[25][26] Obama and Medvedev signed the successor treaty, Measures to Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, in Prague, Czech Republic, on 8 April 2010.

New START Treaty[ ]

The New START Treaty imposed even more limitations on the United States and Russia by reducing them to significantly-less strategic arms within seven years of its entering full force. Organized into three tiers, the new treaty focuses on the treaty itself, a protocol containing additional rights and obligations regarding the treaty provisions, and technical annexes.^[27]

The limits were based on rigorous analysis conducted by Department of Defense planners in support of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. These aggregate limits consist of 1,550 nuclear warheads, which include warheads on deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), warheads on deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), and even any deployed heavy bomber equipped for nuclear armaments. That is 74% fewer than the limit set in the 1991 Treaty and 30% fewer than the limit of the 2002 Treaty of Moscow. Both parties will also be limited to 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped with nuclear armaments. There is also a separate limit of 700 deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, which is less than half the corresponding strategic nuclear delivery vehicle limit imposed in the previous treaty. Although the new restrictions have been set, the new treaty does not contain any limitations regarding the testing, developing, or deploying current or planned US missile defense programs and low-range conventional strike capabilities.^[27]

The duration of the new treaty is ten years and can be extended for no more than five years at a time. It includes a standard withdrawal clause like most other arms control agreements. Subsequent treaties have superseded the treaty.^[27]

Memorandum of Understanding data

Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sign SALT II treaty, 18 June 1979, in Vienna.

Russian Federation
Date	Deployed ICBMs and Their Associated Launchers, Deployed SLBMs and Their Associated Launchers, and Deployed Heavy Bombers	Warheads Attributed to Deployed ICBMs, Deployed SLBMs, and Deployed Heavy Bombers	Warheads Attributed to Deployed ICBMs and Deployed SLBMs	Throw-weight of Deployed ICBMs and Deployed SLBMs (Mt)
1 July 2009^[28]	809	3,897	3,289	2,297.0
1 January 2009^[29]	814	3,909	3,239	2,301.8
1 January 2008^[30]	952	4,147	3,515	2,373.5
1 September 1990 (USSR)^[31]	2,500	10,271	9,416	6,626.3

United States of America
Date	Deployed ICBMs and Their Associated Launchers, Deployed SLBMs and Their Associated Launchers, and Deployed Heavy Bombers	Warheads Attributed to Deployed ICBMs, Deployed SLBMs, and Deployed Heavy Bombers	Warheads Attributed to Deployed ICBMs and Deployed SLBMs	Throw-weight of Deployed ICBMs and Deployed SLBMs (Mt)
1 July 2009^[28]	1,188	4268	3451	1,857.3
1 January 2009^[29]	1,198	3989	3272	1,717.3
1 January 2008^[30]	1,225	4468	3628	1,826.1
1 September 1990^[31]	2,246	10,563	8,200	2,361.3

See also[ ]

· 2010 NPT Review Conference

· Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I and II)

· Treaty of Moscow (2002)

References[ ]

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87. ^ "Russia Urges Biden to Be 'More Constructive' Over Arms Treaty". The Moscow Times. 20 January 2021. Retrieved 31 January 2021.

88. ^ Hudson, John (21 January 2021). "Biden administration to seek five-year extension on key nuclear arms treaty in first foray with Russia". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 21 January 2021.

89. ^ "Renewed US-Russia nuke pact won't fix emerging arms threats". Associated Press. 27 January 2021. Retrieved 31 January 2021.

90. ^ "Russia welcomes US proposal to extend nuclear treaty". AP NEWS. 22 January 2021. Retrieved 23 January 2021.

91. ^ "Russia ratify extension of the New START nuclear arms control treaty". Reuters. 27 January 2021. Retrieved 27 January 2021.

92. ^ United States extends nuclear treaty with Russia for five years, Washington Post, 3 February 2021.

93. ^ "Moscow: We had no choice but to cancel the "Newstart" talks". Asume Tech. 29 November 2022.

94. ^ "Putin Says Russia to Suspend New START Nuke Pact Participation". Bloomberg.com. 21 February 2023. Retrieved 21 February 2023.

95. ^ Jump up to:^a ^b Putin Suspends Nuclear-Arms Treaty Between Russia, U.S., The Wall Street Journal

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to New START treaty (2010).

· Facing the risk of nuclear war in the 21st Century Video by Carl Robichaud, Centre for Effective Altruism, 21 March 2020.

· New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) from the United States Department of State

· The New START Treaty and Protocol from Whitehouse.gov

· The New START Treaty: Central Limits and Key Provisions Congressional Research Service

· Jonathan Schell Says U.S.-Russia "Nuclear Standoff" Defies "Rational Explanation" – video report by Democracy Now!

· New START, One Year Later, Interview with Christopher A. Ford, Hudson Institute

ATTACHMENT THREE – From USA Today

BIDEN CALLS PUTIN'S NEW START SUSPENSION A 'BIG MISTAKE.’ WHAT IS THE NUCLEAR ARMS TREATY?

By Maureen Groppe

Continuing his diplomatic standoff with Vladimir Putin, President Joe Biden said Russia is making a ''big mistake'' by suspending a key nuclear arms treaty.

Biden made the brief comment to reporters as he entered the presidential palace in Warsaw, Poland, where he is meeting with leaders from nations on the eastern edge of the NATO alliance. It is the latest in a series of verbal jockeying between Russia and the U.S. as Biden wraps up a three-day visit to the region.

Putin announced Tuesday he is suspending Moscow’s participation in New START, a strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms reduction deal between the U.S. and Russia. It limits each side to 1,550 long-range nuclear warheads.

Biden is ending his trip to Ukraine and Poland Wednesday with a final emphasis on the strength of the NATO alliance, which has stood up to Putin.

“You’re the front lines of our collective defense," Biden told the leaders of Poland, Romania, Slovakia and several other eastern flank nations. "And you know better than anyone what’s at stake in this conflict. Not just for Ukraine, but for the freedom of democracies throughout Europe and around the world.”

What is the nuclear arms treaty?

When it was extended in 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry said the treaty guaranteed a “necessary level of predictability and transparency” for the world’s two largest nuclear powers while “strictly maintaining a balance of interests.”

The latest

· Trip overview: After making a surprise visit to war-torn Ukraine Monday, Biden traveled to Poland where he praised the strength of Ukraine and the international coalition backing the resistance.

· Bucharest Nine: Biden met Wednesday with leaders of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The countries are known as the Bucharest Nine, a group of eastern NATO allies formed in 2015 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. @No Bulgaria or Moldovia.

· The agenda: The nations have advocated for an increased NATO presence and deterrence measures in the region. Slovakian President Zuzana Caputová said the nations need to ensure there are “no gray zones in our defense.”

· NATO anniversary: Biden announced Tuesday the U.S. will host a NATO summit next year to mark the 75th anniversary of what he called the "strongest defensive alliance in the history of the world."

Why it matters

Russia has tried to keep NATO from its borders. In the lead-up to its invasion of Ukraine, Putin demanded that Ukraine never be allowed to join the alliance. He also wanted to keep NATO missiles from being in striking distance and stop the alliance from deploying forces in former Soviet bloc countries that joined NATO after 1997.

Instead, the alliance has grown stronger. Finland and Sweden are in the process of joining. NATO has bolstered its troop presence in Europe. And NATO countries have provided military and other support to Ukraine.

"NATO will not be divided, and we will not tire," Biden said during his speech at Warsaw's Royal Castle Tuesday.

But the administration and its allies have also tried to keep the fight against Russia from spilling into a NATO country to avoid triggering the mutual defense pact.

Looking ahead

While praising allies for standing together, Biden is emphasizing that the fight is far from over. There will be "hard and very bitter days, victories and tragedies," he said Tuesday.

Biden also encouraged other nations to look beyond the immediate challenge of the war in Ukraine and also work together in "lifting up the lives of people everywhere."

"The democracies of the world have to deliver it for our people," he said.

How many times has Article 5 been invoked?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 as a system of collective defense against the Soviet Union.

Its basic principle of mutual defense is the Article 5 provision that requires member states to come to the aid of their allies in the event of an attack.

The article has been invoked only once, when the U.S. called on the alliance after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Want to know more? Here's what you missed

'Kyiv stands strong’:Biden declares Putin ‘was wrong,’ marking one year of Russia’s war in Ukraine

Biden's surprise:How President Biden pulled off a secret trip to Ukraine one year into Russia's war

ATTACHMENT FOUR – From France 24

US SAYS RUSSIA NOT COMPLYING WITH LAST REMAINING NUCLEAR TREATY

Issued on: 31/01/2023 - 18:52Modified: 31/01/2023 - 21:39

The United States said Tuesday that Russia was not complying with New START, the last remaining arms control treaty between the world's two main nuclear powers, as tensions soar over the Ukraine war.

Responding to a request from Congress, the State Department faulted Russia for suspending inspections and canceling talks but did not accuse Moscow of expanding nuclear warheads beyond agreed limits.

"Russia is not complying with its obligation under the New START Treaty to facilitate inspection activities on its territory," a State Department spokesperson said, charging that Moscow's refusal "threatens the viability of US-Russian nuclear arms control."

"Russia has a clear path for returning to full compliance. All Russia needs to do is allow inspection activities on its territory, just as it did for years under the New START Treaty, and meet in a session of the Bilateral Consultative Commission," he said, referring to the formal talks set up under the treaty.

"There is nothing preventing Russian inspectors from traveling to the United States and conducting inspections."

Moscow announced in early August that it was suspending US inspections of its military sites under New START. It said it was responding to American obstruction of inspections by Russia, a charge denied by Washington.

Diplomacy between the two powers has ground to a bare minimum over the past year as the United States leads a drive to punish Russia economically for its war against Ukraine and arm Kyiv with billions of dollars in weapons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, reviving Cold War era fears of an apocalyptic war.

Russia indefinitely postponed talks under New START that had been due to start on November 29 in Cairo, accusing the United States of "toxicity and animosity."

'Make the world safer'

President Joe Biden shortly after taking office extended New START by five years until 2026, giving time to negotiate while preserving what the Democratic administration sees as an important existing treaty.

The previous administration of Donald Trump had ripped up previous arms control agreements and had been hesitant to preserve New START in its current form, saying that any nuclear treaty must also include China, whose arsenal is rapidly growing but still significantly below those of Russia and the United States.

The Biden administration indicated that it wanted to preserve New START. The State Department spokesperson said the treaty was meant "to make the world safer."

Republican lawmakers, who took control of the House of Representatives in January, had asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to report by Tuesday whether Russia was in violation.

A group of Republicans active on defense policy responded that Biden had "naively" extended New START and said that Russia "cannot be trusted to abide by any international agreement."

"We urge President Biden to direct the Department of Defense to prepare for a future where Russia may deploy large numbers of warheads, well in excess of New START treaty limits," said a statement by Republicans including Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

New START, signed by then president Barack Obama in 2010 when relations were warmer, restricted Russia and the United States to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads each -- a reduction of nearly 30 percent from the previous limit set in 2002.

It also limits the number of launchers and heavy bombers to 800, still easily enough to destroy Earth.

ATTACHMENT FIVE – From Time

Putin Suspended the Last Remaining Nuclear Pact With the U.S. Here's What Happens Now

BY W.J. HENNIGAN

FEBRUARY 21, 2023 4:00 PM EST

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his nation’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement with the U.S. on Tuesday, condemning the West in a nearly two-hour speech that sharpened tensions over the war in Ukraine.

The announcement, which came a day after President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine, shows how the confrontation between Russia, the U.S., and Europe is approaching a perilous crossroads one year after Putin ordered Russian forces to invade. From the start of of the war, the U.S. and NATO have raised fears about the risks of wider war and sought to avoid escalation even as they provided Ukraine with billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and military aid. The possible collapse of the last arms control pact between the world’s two nuclear superpowers illustrates how the security situation is growing more precarious, not less, as the war enters its second year despite Russia’s struggles to gain ground in Ukraine.

Around 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads belong to Moscow and Washington. To remind the world of the high stakes, Putin has continually chosen to rattle his nuclear saber at the U.S. and NATO as they try to pressure him to abandon his military campaign. During Tuesday’s state-of-the-nation address, Putin announced he’s placed strategic missile forces on “combat duty,” while declaring the suspension of the arms-reduction treaty known as New START.

The 2010 agreement limits the U.S. and Russia each to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads—strategic weapons that can be placed on submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bomber planes. It also includes monitoring and on-site inspection elements to help ensure compliance, which Putin blasted in his speech.

“The United States and NATO are directly saying that their goal is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Are they going to inspect our defense facilities, including the newest ones, as if nothing had happened?” he said. “Do they really think we’re easily going to let them in there just like that?”

In announcing that Russia would suspend its participation in the treaty, Putin is ending bilateral communication, data exchanges, and nuclear site visits that give both the U.S. and Russia detailed insights into the day-to-day operations of one another’s strategic nuclear forces. The U.S. can continue to collect information on Russia’s nukes via “national technical means,” including orbiting spy satellites and other intelligence-gathering measures, but these procedures pale in comparison to New START’s monitoring and verification regime. Putin also declared Russia is ready to resume nuclear-weapons tests should the U.S. carry one out first—something that hasn’t been done in more than 30 years.

Olga Oliker, the International Crisis Group’s director for Europe and Central Asia, says Putin is trying to force the U.S. to choose between supporting Ukraine and maintaining a key nuclear-arms agreement. “Arms control, however, is not a prize for the U.S., but something that is very much in both Russia’s and the U.S.’s interest, and in the interests of the world as a whole,” Oliker says. Putin’s choice of “suspending” the treaty, rather than “withdrawing” from it, may indicate “that he plans for Russia’s arsenal to stay under treaty limits,” she says.

It would take time for Russia to increase its deployed nuclear warheads beyond current limits, and both the U.S. and Russia already have more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, anyway. But Putin’s declaration is a blow to the stability of global security, says Rose Gottemoeller, a retired U.S. diplomat who served as chief negotiator for New START. “If all limits go away, we will be on the cusp of a nuclear arms race,” she says. “Nobody—not the Russians, nor Chinese, nor any other country—should be interested in that outcome.”

New START is the last remaining legacy of international arms-control agreements hammered out during the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union identified certain weapons deemed mutually menacing and worked to eliminate the threat. Before that, the two sides would manipulate each other’s nightmares of nuclear annihilation in order to maneuver for advantage in times of relative peace, amassing tens of thousands of nuclear arms pointed at one another’s major cities.

The treaties helped support an uneasy peace that has gradually unraveled, casting the stability of the global nuclear balance in doubt. Several Cold War-era arms control agreements have been torn up, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. U.S. President Joe Biden and Putin agreed to extend New START for five years just days after Biden took office in 2021, but its future looks bleak.

During a visit to Greece, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the speech “really unfortunate and very irresponsible.” Added Blinken: “We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does.”

Even though Putin officially declared the treaty’s suspension Tuesday, the U.S. believes he’s just publicly declaring a policy that his government has been carrying out in private for more than two years. The State Department said on Jan. 31 that Moscow is in “noncompliance” with the treaty because inspections have been suspended since March 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the U.S. has been unable to get Russia to resume them. Therefore, the U.S. can’t determine whether Russia’s warhead numbers are accurate. The agreement also includes what’s called a Bilateral Consultative Commission, which is designed for the two nations to discuss treaty implementation. Moscow has refused to meet since October 2021.

While Putin’s announcement doesn’t necessarily mark the end of the treaty, arms-control experts agree that it may foreshadow its ultimate demise. It seems unlikely there will be a follow-on agreement when New START expires on Feb. 5, 2026. That would leave the nuclear stockpiles for both the U.S. and Russia unrestrained for the first time since 1972.

“Arms control reflects the status of the relationship,” says Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. “The goal is, in my view, to show that Russia is not planning to seek improvement. I don’t think it will build beyond the limits. It can deploy more warheads, but that will have no practical value… Besides, everyone will suspect it of doing it anyway.”

ATTACHMENT SIX – From Fox

PUTIN ISSUES NUCLEAR WARNING TO US, THREATENS TO RESUME WEAPONS TESTS

Russian President Vladimir Putin says he would be suspending Russia's participation in Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with US

By Timothy H.J. Nerozzi Published February 21, 2023 10:52am EST

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a stark warning Tuesday that he would be suspending his nation's participation in a nuclear arms treaty, threatening to resume testing of nuclear weapons.

Putin made his speech almost exactly a year after the invasion of Ukraine began, accusing the "elites of the West" of escalating international tensions.

"The elites of the West do not hide their purpose. But they also cannot fail to realize that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield," Putin said.

The Russian president went on to announce he would be pulling Russia out of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a bilateral agreement signed by former Presidents Obama and Dmitry Medvedev.

BIDEN ANNOUNCES MILLIONS MORE TAXPAYER DOLLARS TO ASSIST UKRAINE DURING SURPRISE TRIP TO KYIV

President Biden met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday at Mariinsky Palace to announce an additional half-billion dollars in U.S. assistance. The U.S. has already supported Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in financial aid and military equipment.

The new assistance includes shells for howitzers, anti-tank missiles, air surveillance radars and other aid but does not offer new advanced weaponry.

PRESIDENT BIDEN MAKES SURPRISE VISIT TO KYIV. UKRAINE, MEETS WITH PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY

Putin claimed in his Tuesday speech that the West was attempting to achieve a "strategic defeat" over Russia and take control of their nuclear capabilities.

"Of course, we will not do this first. But if the United States conducts tests, then we will," Putin threatened.

He continued, "No one should have dangerous illusions that global strategic parity can be destroyed. A week ago, I signed a decree on putting new ground-based strategic systems on combat duty. Are they going to stick their nose in there too, or what?"

Both the U.S. and Russia are capable of deploying far more than the allotted nuclear warheads as Washington and Moscow have a combined total of more than 13,000 warheads – making up roughly 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, according to data provided by the Arms Control Association.

Fox News' Landon Mion and Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.

ATTACHMENT SEVEN – From CNN

PUTIN PULLS BACK FROM LAST REMAINING NUCLEAR ARMS CONTROL PACT WITH THE US

By Rob Picheta, Anna Chernova, Nathan Hodge, Lauren Kent and Radina Gigova, CNN Updated 3:39 PM EST, Tue February 21, 2023

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is suspending his country’s participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, imperiling the last remaining pact that regulates the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.

Putin made the declaration in his much-delayed annual state of the nation address to Russia’s National Assembly on Tuesday.

Hours after Putin’s speech, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the decision to suspend participation in the treaty was “reversible.”

The treaty puts limits on the number of deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons that both the US and Russia can have. It was last extended in early 2021 for five years, meaning the two sides would soon need to begin negotiating on another arms control agreement.

Under the key nuclear arms control treaty, both the United States and Russia are permitted to conduct inspections of each other’s weapons sites, though inspections had been halted since 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

While Russia is not withdrawing from the pact completely, it appears to be formalizing its current position. For months, US officials have been frustrated over Russia’s lack of co-operation with the agreement.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Putin’s decision “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible.”

Blinken said President Joe Biden’s administration remains ready to talk about the nuclear arms treaty “at any time with Russia, irrespective of anything else going on in the world.”

“We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does, we’ll of course make sure that in any event that we are posturing appropriately for the security of our own country and that of our allies,” said Blinken. “I think it matters that we continue to act responsibly in this area … it’s also something the rest of the world expect of us.”

In a lengthy statement published on its website, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the decision to suspend participation in the treaty is “reversible,” saying that ” Washington must show political will, make conscientious efforts for a general de-escalation and create conditions for the resumption of the full functioning of the Treaty and, accordingly, comprehensively ensuring its viability.”

In December, Putin warned of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war, and this month, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, threatened that Russia losing the war could “provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war.”

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – From the Associated Press

PUTIN RAISES TENSION ON UKRAINE, SUSPENDS START NUCLEAR PACT

By The Associated Press 2/21

Putin rails against West in his annual addres

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United States, announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech in which he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.

Putin emphasized, however, that Russia isn’t withdrawing from the pact yet, and hours after his address the Foreign Ministry said Moscow would respect the treaty’s caps on nuclear weapons. It also said Russia would continue to exchange information about test launches of ballistic missiles per earlier agreements with the United States.

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.

The speech reiterated a litany of grievances he has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign, while vowing no military letup.

Along with limits on the number of nuclear weapons, the 2010 New START envisages broad inspections of nuclear sites. Putin said Russia should stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the U.S. does so, a move that would end a global ban on such tests in place since the Cold War era.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded by calling for Russia and the United States to return to dialogue immediately because “a world without nuclear arms control is a far more dangerous and unstable one.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Moscow’s decision to suspend participation in the treaty as “really unfortunate and very irresponsible.”

“We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does,” he said while visiting Greece.

U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking in Poland a day after his surprise visit to Ukraine, did not mention the START suspension but blasted Putin for the invasion. He pledged continued support for Ukraine despite “hard and bitter days ahead.”

“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow and forever,” Biden said at Warsaw’s landmark Royal Castle before a cheering crowd of Poles and Ukrainian refugees.

Putin’s announcement was the second time in recent days the Ukraine war showed it could spread into perilous new terrain, after Blinken told China over the weekend that it would be a “serious problem” if Beijing provided arms and ammunition to Russia.

China and Russia have aligned their foreign policies to oppose Washington. Beijing has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion or atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, while strongly criticizing Western economic sanctions on Moscow. Late last year, Russia and China held joint naval drills.

The deputy head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, Vadym Skibitskyi, told The Associated Press his agency hasn’t seen any signs so far that China is providing weapons to Moscow.

Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and made a dash toward Kyiv, apparently expecting to overrun the capital quickly. But stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces — supported by Western weapons — turned back Moscow’s troops. While Ukraine has reclaimed many areas initially seized by Russia, the sides have become bogged down elsewhere.

The war has revived the divide between Russia and the West, reinvigorated the NATO alliance, and created the biggest threat to Putin’s rule of more than two decades.

In Tuesday’s speech, Putin again offered his own version of recent history, discounting Ukraine’s arguments that it needed Western help to thwart a Russian military takeover. He has repeatedly depicted NATO’s expansion to include countries close to Russia as an existential threat to his country.

“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it,” he said before an audience of lawmakers, officials and soldiers, and broadcast on all state TV channels.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who was in Ukraine on Tuesday, said she wished Putin had taken a different approach.

Also meeting with Zelenskyy was the newly appointed chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, who led a delegation for the first time since the start of the war and since Republicans won control of the House of Representatives.

Chairman Mike McCaul and a handful of other GOP lawmakers said they had a productive meeting about what Zelenskyy needs for winning the war. He provided them with a list of weapons, including longer-range artillery and air-to-surface systems.

The meeting comes as some hard-right Republicans are vowing to block future U.S. aid to Ukraine. “We have seen time and again the majority of Republicans and Democrats support our assistance to Ukraine,” McCaul said in a statement. “But the Biden administration needs to lay out their long-term strategy.”

Putin denied any wrongdoing in Ukraine, even after Kremlin forces struck civilian targets, including hospitals, and are widely accused of war crimes.

Zelenskyy cited fresh attacks on Ukrainian civilians Tuesday, and downplayed Putin’s speech.

“I have not watched it, because during this time there were missile strikes on Kherson. Twenty-one people were wounded and six were killed,” he said.

Putin also accused the West of taking aim at Russian culture, religion and values. He fired another broadside at Western gender policies that he described as efforts to destroy “traditional” values.

And he said Western sanctions hadn’t “achieved anything and will not achieve anything.” He blasted Russian tycoons who kept their assets in the West and saw them confiscated or frozen as part of the sanctions.

“Believe me, ordinary people had no sympathy for those who lost their yachts, palaces and other assets abroad,” Putin said.

While Russia’s Constitution mandates that the president deliver the state-of-the-nation speech annually, Putin never gave one in 2022. Last year, the Kremlin also canceled two other big annual events — Putin’s news conference and a highly scripted phone-in marathon taking questions from the public.

Reflecting the Kremlin’s clampdown on free speech and press, it barred in-person coverage of the address by media from “unfriendly” countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and those in the European Union.

ATTACHMENT NINE – From Time and the Associated Press

PUTIN RAGES AGAINST THE WEST, DEFENDS UKRAINE INVASION IN ANNUAL STATE OF THE NATION SPEECH

FEBRUARY 21, 2023 5:41 AM EST

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Western countries Tuesday of igniting and sustaining the war in Ukraine, dismissing any blame for Moscow almost a year after the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor that has killed tens of thousands of people.

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast Russia — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said Russia, not Ukraine, was the one fighting for its very existence.

“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in a speech days before the war’s first anniversary on Friday. Ukraine “has become hostage of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”

The speech reiterated a litany of grievances that the Russian leader has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned war and ignored international demands to pull back from occupied areas in Ukraine.

Observers are expected to scour it for signs of how Putin sees the conflict, which has become bogged down, and what tone he might set for the year ahead. The Russian leader vowed no military let-up in Ukrainian territories he has illegally annexed, apparently rejecting any peace overtures in a conflict that has reawakened fears of a new Cold War.

Instead, he offered his personalized version of recent history, which discounted arguments by the Ukrainian government that it needed Western help to thwart a Russian military takeover.

“Western elites aren’t trying to conceal their goals, to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ to Russia,” Putin said in the speech broadcast by all state TV channels. “They intend to transform the local conflict into a global confrontation.”

He added that Russia is prepared to respond to that as “it will be a matter of our country’s existence.”

While the Constitution mandates that the president deliver the speech annually, Putin never gave one in 2022, as his troops rolled into Ukraine and suffered repeated setbacks.

“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it,” Putin said before an audience of lawmakers, state officials and soldiers who have fought in Ukraine.

Putin accused the west of the West of launching “aggressive information attacks” and taking aim at Russian culture, religion and values because it is aware that “it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”

He also accused Western nations of waging an attack on Russia’s economy with sanctions — but declared but they hadn’t “achieved anything and will not achieve anything.”

Underscoring the anticipation ahead of time, some state TV channels put out a countdown for the event starting Monday, and Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti on Tuesday morning said the address may be “historic.”

The Kremlin this year has barred media from “unfriendly” countries, the list of which includes the U.S., the U.K. and those in the EU. Peskov said journalists from those nations will be able to cover the speech by watching the broadcast.

Peskov told reporters that the speech’s delay had to do with Putin’s “work schedule,” but Russian media reports linked it to the multiple setbacks Russian forces have suffered on the battlefield in Ukraine.

The Russian president had postponed the state-of-the-nation address before: In 2017, the speech was rescheduled for early 2018.

Last year the Kremlin has also canceled two other big annual events — Putin’s press conference and a highly scripted phone-in marathon where people ask the president questions.

Analysts expected Putin’s speech would be tough in the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv on Monday. Biden plans to give his own speech later Tuesday in Poland, where he’s expected to highlight the commitment of the central European country and other allies to Ukraine over the past year.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Biden’s address would not be “some kind of head to head” with Putin’s.

“This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else,” said.

ATTACHMENT TEN – From Vladimir Putin

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO FEDERAL ASSEMBLY

Vladimir Putin delivered his Address to the Federal Assembly. The ceremony took place in Gostiny Dvor, Moscow.

February 21, 2023

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon,

Members of the Federation Assembly – senators, State Duma deputies,

Citizens of Russia,

This Presidential Address comes, as we all know, at a difficult, watershed period for our country. This is a time of radical, irreversible change in the entire world, of crucial historical events that will determine the future of our country and our people, a time when every one of us bears a colossal responsibility.

One year ago, to protect the people in our historical lands, to ensure the security of our country and to eliminate the threat coming from the neo-Nazi regime that had taken hold in Ukraine after the 2014 coup, it was decided to begin the special military operation. Step by step, carefully and consistently we will deal with the tasks we have at hand.

Since 2014, Donbass has been fighting for the right to live in their land and to speak their native tongue. It fought and never gave up amid the blockade, constant shelling and the Kiev regime’s overt hatred. It hoped and waited that Russia would come to help.

In the meantime, as you know well, we were doing everything in our power to solve this problem by peaceful means, and patiently conducted talks on a peaceful solution to this devastating conflict.

Behind our backs, a very different plan was being hatched. As we can see now, the promises of Western leaders, their assurances that they were striving for peace in Donbass turned out to be a sham and outright lies. They were simply marking time, engaged in political chicanery, turning a blind eye to the Kiev regime’s political assassinations and reprisals against undesirable people, their mistreatment of believers. They increasingly incited the Ukrainian neo-Nazis to stage terrorist attacks in Donbass. The officers of nationalist battalions trained at Western academies and schools. Weapons were also supplied.

I would like to emphasise that, prior to the special military operation, Kiev held negotiations with the West about the delivery of air-defence systems, warplanes and other heavy equipment to Ukraine. We also recall the Kiev regime’s vain attempts to obtain nuclear weapons; they discussed this issue publicly.

The United States and NATO quickly deployed their army bases and secret biological laboratories near Russian borders. They mastered the future theatre of war during war games, and they prepared the Kiev regime which they controlled and Ukraine which they had enslaved for a large-scale war.

Now they admit this publicly and openly, and they feel no shame about it. They seem to be proud and even to be revelling in their own perfidy, while calling the Minsk Agreements and the Normandy Format a diplomatic show and a bluff. It turns out that all this time, while Donbass was ablaze, while blood was being spilled, and while Russia sincerely made every effort to achieve a peaceful solution (I want to emphasise the word “sincerely”), they gambled on people’s lives, and in effect, were playing with marked cards, as they say in certain circles.

This appalling method of deception has been tried and tested many times before. They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honour, trust, and decency are not for them.

Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN Security Council resolutions on Donbass. Indeed, the Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.

We firmly defend our interests as well as our belief that in today’s world there should be no division into so-called civilised countries and all the rest and that there is a need for an honest partnership that rejects any exclusivity, especially an aggressive one.

We were open and sincerely ready for a constructive dialogue with the West; we said and insisted that both Europe and the whole world needed an indivisible security system equal for all countries, and for many years we suggested that our partners discuss this idea together and work on its implementation. But in response, we received either an indistinct or hypocritical reaction, as far as words were concerned. But there were also actions: NATO’s expansion to our borders, the creation of new deployment areas for missile defence in Europe and Asia – they decided to take cover from us under an ‘umbrella’ – deployment of military contingents, and not just near Russia’s borders.

I would like to stress –in fact, this is well-known – that no other country has so many military bases abroad as the United States. There are hundreds of them – I want to emphasise this – hundreds of bases all over the world; the planet is covered with them, and one look at the map is enough to see this.

The whole world witnessed how they withdrew from fundamental agreements on weapons, including the treaty on intermediate and shorter-range missiles, unilaterally tearing up the fundamental agreements that maintain world peace. For some reason, they did it. They do not do anything without a reason, as we know.

Finally, in December 2021, we officially submitted draft agreements on security guarantees to the USA and NATO. In essence, all key, fundamental points were rejected. After that it finally became clear that the go-ahead for the implementation of aggressive plans had been given and they were not going to stop.

The threat was growing by the day. Judging by the information we received, there was no doubt that everything would be in place by February 2022 for launching yet another bloody punitive operation in Donbass. Let me remind you that back in 2014, the Kiev regime sent its artillery, tanks and warplanes to fight in Donbass.

We all remember the aerial footage of airstrikes targeting Donetsk. Other cities also suffered from airstrikes. In 2015, they tried to mount a frontal assault against Donbass again, while keeping the blockade in place and continuing to shell and terrorise civilians. Let me remind you that all of this was completely at odds with the documents and resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council, but everyone pretended that nothing was happening.

Let me reiterate that they were the ones who started this war, while we used force and are using it to stop the war.

Those who plotted a new attack against Donetsk in the Donbass region, and against Lugansk understood that Crimea and Sevastopol would be the next target. We realised this as well. Even today, Kiev is openly discussing far-reaching plans of this kind. They exposed themselves by making public what we knew already.

We are defending human lives and our common home, while the West seeks unlimited power. It has already spent over $150 billion on helping and arming the Kiev regime. To give you an idea, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the G7 countries earmarked about $60 billion in 2020–2021 to help the world’s poorest countries. Is this clear? They spent $150 billion on the war, while giving $60 billion to the poorest countries, despite pretending to care about them all the time, and also conditioning this support on obedience on behalf of the beneficiary countries. What about all this talk of fighting poverty, sustainable development and protection of the environment? Where did it all go? Has it all vanished? Meanwhile, they keep channelling more money into the war effort. They eagerly invest in sowing unrest and encouraging government coups in other countries around the world.

The recent Munich Conference turned into an endless stream of accusations against Russia. One gets the impression that this was done so that everyone would forget what the so-called West has been doing over the past decades. They were the ones who let the genie out of the bottle, plunging entire regions into chaos.

According to US experts, almost 900,000 people were killed during wars unleashed by the United States after 2001, and over 38 million became refugees. Please note, we did not invent these statistics; it is the Americans who are providing them. They are now simply trying to erase all this from the memory of humankind, and they are pretending that all this never happened. However, no one in the world has forgotten this or will ever forget it.

None of them cares about human casualties and tragedies because many trillions of dollars are at stake, of course. They can also continue to rob everyone under the guise of democracy and freedoms, to impose neoliberal and essentially totalitarian values, to brand entire countries and nations, to publicly insult their leaders, to suppress dissent in their own countries and to divert attention from corruption scandals by creating an enemy image. We continue to see all this on television, which highlights greater domestic economic, social and inter-ethnic problems, contradictions and disagreements.

I would like to recall that, in the 1930s, the West had virtually paved the way to power for the Nazis in Germany. In our time, they started turning Ukraine into an “anti-Russia.” Actually, this project is not new. People who are knowledgeable about history at least to some extent realise that this project dates back to the 19^th century. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland had conceived it for one purpose, that is, to deprive Russia of these historical territories that are now called Ukraine. This is their goal. There is nothing new here; they are repeating everything.

The West exp ed the implementation of this project today by supporting the 2014 coup. That was a bloody, anti-state and unconstitutional coup. They pretended that nothing happened, and that this is how things should be. They even said how much money they had spent on it. Russophobia and extremely aggressive nationalism formed its ideological foundation.

Quite recently, a brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was named Edelweiss after a Nazi division whose personnel were involved in deporting Jews, executing prisoners of war and conducting punitive operations against partisans in Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Greece. We are ashamed to talk about this, but they are not. Personnel serving with the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Guard are particularly fond of chevrons formerly worn by soldiers from Das Reich, Totenkopf (Death’s Head) and Galichina divisions and other SS units. Their hands are also stained with blood. Ukrainian armoured vehicles feature insignia of the Nazi German Wehrmacht.

Neo-Nazis are open about whose heirs they consider themselves to be. Surprisingly, none of the powers that be in the West are seeing it. Why? Because they – pardon my language – could not care less about it. They do not care who they are betting on in their fight against us, against Russia. In fact, anyone will do as long as they fight against us and our country. Indeed, we saw terrorists and neo-Nazis in their ranks. They would let all kinds of ghouls join their ranks, for God’s sake, as long as they act on their will as a weapon against Russia.

In fact, the anti-Russia project is part of the revanchist policy towards our country to create flashpoints of instability and conflicts next to our borders. Back then, in the 1930s, and now the design remains the same and it is to direct aggression to the East, to spark a war in Europe, and to eliminate competitors by using a proxy force.

We are not at war with the people of Ukraine. I have made that clear many times. The people of Ukraine have become hostages of the Kiev regime and its Western handlers, who have in fact occupied that country in the political, military and economic sense and have been destroying Ukrainian industry for decades now as they plundered its natural resources. This led to social degradation and an immeasurable increase in poverty and inequality. Recruiting resources for military operations in these circumstances was easy. Nobody was thinking about people, who were conditioned for slaughter and eventually became expendables. It is a sad and dreadful thing to say, but it is a fact.

Responsibility for inciting and escalating the Ukraine conflict as well as the sheer number of casualties lies entirely with the Western elites and, of course, today’s Kiev regime, for which the Ukrainian people are, in fact, not its own people. The current Ukrainian regime is serving not national interests, but the interests of third countries.

The West is using Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia and as a testing range. I am not going to discuss in detail the West's attempts to turn the war around, or their plans to ramp up military supplies, since everyone is well aware of that. However, there is one circumstance that everyone should be clear about: the longer the range of the Western systems that will be supplied to Ukraine, the further we will have to move the threat away from our borders. This is obvious.

The Western elite make no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, “Russia’s strategic defeat.” What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country.

However, they too realise it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield and are conducting increasingly aggressive information attacks against us targeting primarily the younger generation. They never stop lying and distorting historical facts as they attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religious organizations in our country.

Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages. Bless their hearts, let them do as they please. Here is what I would like to say in this regard. Adult people can do as they please. We in Russia have always seen it that way and always will: no one is going to intrude into other people’s private lives, and we are not going to do it, either.

But here is what I would like to tell them: look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning, just planning, to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Millions of people in the West realise that they are being led to a spiritual disaster. Frankly, the elite appear to have gone crazy, and it looks like there is no cure for that. But like I said, these are their problems, while we must protect our children, which we will do. We will protect our children from degradation and degeneration.

Clearly, the West will try to undermine and divide our society and to bet on the fifth columnists who, throughout history, and I want to emphasise this, have been using the same poison of contempt for their own Fatherland and the desire to make money by selling this poison to anyone who is willing to pay for it. It has always been that way.

Those who have embarked on the road of outright betrayal, committing terrorist and other crimes against the security of our society and the country’s territorial integrity, will be held accountable for this under law. But we will never behave like the Kiev regime and the Western elite, which have been and still are involved in witch hunts. We will not settle scores with those who take a step aside and turn their back on their Motherland. Let this be on their conscience, let them live with this – they will have to live with it. The main point is that our people, the citizens of Russia, have given them a moral assessment.

I am proud, and I think we are all proud that our multi-ethnic nation, the absolute majority of our citizens, have taken a principled stance on the special military operation. They understand the basic idea of what we are doing and support our actions on the defence of Donbass. This support primarily revealed their true patriotism – a feeling that is historically inherent in our nation. It is stunning in its dignity and deep understnding by everyone – I will stress, everyone – of the inseparable link between one’s own destiny and the destiny of the Fatherland.

My dear friends, I would like to thank everyone, all the people of Russia for their courage and resolve. I would like to thank our heroes, soldiers and officers in the Army and the Navy, the Russian Guards, the secret services staff, and all structures of authority, the fighters in Donetsk and Lugansk corps, volunteers and patriots who are now fighting in the ranks of the BARS combat army reserve.

I would like to apologise that I will not be able to mention everyone during today’s speech. You know, when I was drafting this speech, I wrote a very long list of these heroic units but then removed it from my text because, as I said, it is impossible to mention everyone, and I was afraid to offend anyone I might leave out.

My deepest gratitude to the parents, wives and families of our defenders, the doctors and paramedics, combat medics and medical nurses that are saving the wounded; to the railway workers and drivers that are supplying the front; to the builders that are erecting fortifications and restoring housing, roads and civilian facilities; to the workers and engineers at defence companies, who are now working almost around-the-clock, in several shifts; and to rural workers who reliably ensure food security for the country.

I am grateful to the teachers who sincerely care for the young generations of Russia, especially those that are working in very difficult, almost front-line conditions; the cultural figures that are visiting the zone of hostilities and hospitals to support the soldiers and officers; volunteers that are helping the front and civilians; journalists, primarily war correspondents, that are risking their lives to tell the truth to the world; pastors of Russia’s traditional religions and military clergy, whose wise words support and inspire people; government officials and business people – all those who fulfill their professional, civil and simply human duty.

My special words go to the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. You, my friends, determined your future at the referendums and made a clear choice despite the neo-Nazis’ threats and violence, amid the close military actions. But there has been nothing stronger than your intent to be with Russia, with your Motherland.

I want to emphasise that this is the reaction of the audience to the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. Once again, our deepest respect for them all.

We have already begun and will expand a major socioeconomic recovery and development programme for these new regions within the Federation. It includes restoring production facilities, jobs, and the ports on the Sea of Azov, which again became Russia’s landlocked sea, and building new, modern road,s like we did in Crimea, which now has a reliable land transport corridor with all of Russia. We will definitely implement all of these plans together.

Russia’s regions are currently providing direct assistance to the cities, districts and villages in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. They are doing it sincerely, like true brothers and sisters. We are together again, which means that we have become even stronger, and we will do everything in our power to bring back the long-awaited peace to our land and ensure the safety of our people. Our soldiers, our heroes are fighting for this, for their ancestors, for the future of their children and grandchildren, for uniting our people.

Friends, I would like to ask you to pay your respects to our fellow soldiers who were killed in the attacks of neo-Nazis and raiders, who gave up their lives for Russia, for civilians, the elderly, women and children.

(A minute of silence)

Thank you.

We all understand, and I understand also how unbearably hard it is for their wives, sons and daughters, for their parents who raised those dignified defenders of the Fatherland – like the Young Guard members from Krasnodon, young men and women who fought against Nazism and for Donbass during the Great Patriotic War. Everyone in Russia remembers their courage, resilience, enormous strength of spirit and self-sacrifice to this day.

Our duty is to support the families that have lost their loved ones and to help them raise their children and give them an education and a job. The family of each participant in the special military operation must be a priority and treated with care and respect. Their needs must be responded to immediately, without bureaucratic delays.

I suggest establishing a dedicated state fund for bringing targeted, personalised assistance to the families of fallen fighters, as well as veterans of the special military operation. This entity will be tasked with coordinating efforts to offer social, medical support and counselling, and also address matters related to sending them to health resorts and providing rehabilitation services, while also assisting them in education, sports, employment and in acquiring a new profession. This fund will also have an essential mission to ensure long-term home care and high-technology prosthetics for those who need that.

I am asking the Government to work with the State Council Commission on Social Policy and with the regions to resolve the organisational matters as quickly as possible.

The state fund must be transparent in its work, while streamlining assistance and operating as a one-stop-shop, free from red tape or administrative barriers. Every family without exception, and every veteran will have their personal social worker, a coordinator, who will be there for them in person to resolve in real time any issue they might face. Let me emphasise that the fund must open its offices in all regions of the Russian Federation in 2023.

We already have measures in place for supporting Great Patriotic War veterans, combat veterans, as well as participants in local conflicts. I believe these essential elements will be added to the state fund’s mission moving forward. We need to explore this possibility, and I am asking the Government to do so.

Make no mistake: the fact that we are establishing a state fund does not mean that other institutions or officials at other levels of government will be relieved of their responsibility. I expect all federal agencies, regions and municipalities to stay focused on veterans, on service personnel and their families. In this context, I would like to thank the senior regional officials, mayors, and governors who routinely meet with people, including by visiting the line of contact, and support their fellow countrymen.

On a special note, let me say that today, career service personnel, mobilised conscripts, and volunteers all share frontline hardships, including in terms of provisions, supplies and equipment, remuneration, and insurance payments to the wounded, as well as healthcare services. However, there are complaints that make it all the way to my office, as well as to the governors, as they have been telling me, and to the military prosecutor’s office and the Human Rights Commissioner, showing that some of these issues have yet to be resolved. We need to get to the bottom of each complaint on a case-by-case basis.

And one more thing: everyone understands that serving in the special military operation zone causes immense physical and mental stress, since people risk their lives and health every day. For this reason, I believe that the mobilised conscripts, as well as all service personnel, and all those taking part in the special military operation, including volunteers, must benefit from a leave of absence of at least 14 days every six months without counting the time it takes them to travel to their destination. This way, every fighter will be able to meet family and spend time with their loved ones.

Colleagues, as you are aware, a 2021–2025 plan for building and developing the Armed Forces was approved by a Presidential Executive Order and is being implemented and adjusted as necessary. Importantly, our next steps to reinforce the Army and the Navy and to secure the current and future development of the Armed Forces must be based on actual combat experience gained during the special military operation, which is extremely important, I would even say absolutely invaluable to us.

For example, the latest systems account for over 91 percent, 91.3 percent, of Russia's nuclear deterrence forces. To reiterate, based on our newly acquired experience, we must access a similarly high quality level for all other components of the Armed Forces.

Officers and sergeants who act as competent, modern and decisive commanders, and they are many, will be promoted to higher positions as a matter of priority, sent to military universities and academies, and will serve as a powerful personnel reserve for the Armed Forces. Without a doubt, they are a valuable resource in civilian life and at governments at all levels. I just want our colleagues to pay attention to that. It is very important. The people must know that the Motherland appreciates their contribution to the defence of the Fatherland.

We will widely introduce the latest technology to ensure high-quality standards in the Army and Navy. We have corresponding pilot projects and samples of weapons and equipment in each area. Many of them are significantly superior to their foreign counterparts. Our goal is to start mass production. This work is underway and is picking up pace. Importantly, this relies on domestic research and the industrial base and involves small- and medium-sized high-tech businesses in implementation of the state defence order.

Today, our plants, design bureaus and research teams employ experienced specialists and increasing numbers of talented and highly skilled young people who are oriented towards breakthrough achievements while remaining true to the tradition of Russian gunsmiths, which is to spare no effort to ensure victory.

We will certainly strengthen the guarantees for our workforce, in part concerning salaries and social security. I propose launching a special programme for low-cost rental housing for defence industry employees. The rental payments for them will be significantly lower than the going market rate, since a significant portion of it will be covered by the state.

The Government reviewed this issue. I instruct you to work through the details of this programme and start building such rental housing without delay, primarily, in the cities that are major defence, industrial and research centres.

Colleagues,

As I have already said, the West has opened not only military and informational warfare against us, but is also seeking to fight us on the economic front. However, they have not succeeded on any of these fronts, and never will. Moreover, those who initiated the sanctions are punishing themselves: they sent prices soaring in their own countries, destroyed jobs, forced companies to close, and caused an energy crisis, while telling their people that the Russians were to blame for all of this. We hear that.

What means did they use against us in their efforts to attack us with sanctions? They tried disrupting economic ties with Russian companies and depriving the financial system of its communication channels to shutter our economy, isolate us from export markets and thus undermine our revenues. They also stole our foreign exchange reserves, to call a spade a spade, tried to depreciate the ruble and drive inflation to destructive heights.

Let me reiterate that the sanctions against Russia are merely a means, while the aim as declared by the Western leaders, to quote them, is to make us suffer. “Make them suffer” – what a humane attitude. They want to make our people suffer, which is designed to destabilise our society from within.

However, their gamble failed to pay off. The Russian economy, as well as its governance model proved to be much more resilient than the West thought. The Government, parliament, the Bank of Russia, the regions and of course the business community and their employees all worked together to ensure that the economic situation remained stable, offered people protection and preserved jobs, prevented shortages, including of essential goods, and supported the financial system and business owners who invest in their enterprises, which also means investing in national development.

As early as in March 2022, we launched a dedicated assistance package for businesses and the economy worth about a trillion rubles. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this has nothing to do with printing money. Not at all. Everything we do is solidly rooted in market principles.

In 2022, there was a decline in the gross domestic product. Mr Mishustin called me to say, “I would like to ask you to mention this.” I think that these data were released yesterday, right on schedule.

You may remember that some predicted that the economy would shrink by 20 to 25 percent, or maybe 10 percent. Only recently, we spoke about a 2.9 percent decline, and I was the one who announced this figure. Later it came down to 2.5 percent. However, in 2022, the GDP declined by 2.1 percent, according to the latest data. And we must be mindful of the fact that back in February and March of last year some predicted that the economy would be in free fall.

Russian businesses have restructured their logistics and have strengthened their ties with responsible, predictable partners – there are many of them, they are the majority in the world.

I would like to note that the share of the Russian ruble in our international settlements has doubled as compared to December 2021, reaching one third of the total, and including the currencies of the friendly countries, it exceeds half of all transactions.

We will continue working with our partners to create a sustainable, safe system of international settlements, which will be independent of the dollar and other Western reserve currencies that are bound to lose their universal appeal with this policy of the Western elite, the Western rulers. They are doing all this to themselves with their own hands. We are not the ones reducing transactions in dollars or other so-called universal currencies – they are doing everything with their own hands.

You know, there is a maxim, cannons versus butter. Of course, national defence is the top priority, but in resolving strategic tasks in this area, we should not repeat the mistakes of the past and should not destroy our own economy. We have everything we need to both ensure our security and create conditions for confident progress in our country. We are acting in line with this logic and we intend to continue doing this.

Thus, many basic, I will stress, civilian industries in the national economy are far from being in decline, they have increased their production last year by a considerable amount. The scale of housing put into service exceeded 100 million square meters for the first time in our modern history.

As for agricultural production, it recorded two-digit growth rates last year. Thank you very much. We are most grateful to our agricultural producers. Russian agrarians harvested a record amount – over 150 million tonnes of grain, including over 100 million tonnes of wheat. By the end of the agricultural season, that is, June 30, 2023, we will bring our grain exports to 55–60 million tonnes.

Just 10 or 15 years ago, this seemed like a fairy tale, an absolutely unfeasible plan. If you remember, and I am sure some people do remember this – the former Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Agriculture are here – just recently, agrarians took in 60 million tonnes overall in a year, whereas now 55–60 million is their export potential alone. I am convinced we have every opportunity for a similar breakthrough in other areas as well.

We prevented the labour market from collapsing. On the contrary, we were able to reduce unemployment in the current environment. Today, considering the major challenges coming at us from all sides, the labour market is even better than it used to be. You may remember that the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent before the pandemic, and now, I believe, it is 3.7 percent. What is the figure, Mr Mishustin? 3.7 percent? This is an all-time low.

Let me reiterate that the Russian economy has prevailed over the risks it faced – it has prevailed. Of course, it was impossible to anticipate many of them, and we had to respond literally on the fly, dealing with issues as they emerged. Both the state and businesses had to move quickly. I will note that private actors, SMEs, played an essential role in these efforts, and we must remember this. We avoided having to apply excessive regulation or distorting the economy by giving the state a more prominent role.

What else there is to say? The recession was limited to the second quarter of 2022, while the economy grew in the third and fourth quarters. In fact, the Russian economy has embarked on a new growth cycle. Experts believe that it will rely on a fundamentally new model and structure. New, promising global markets, including the Asia-Pacific, are taking precedence, as is the domestic market, with its research, technology and workforce no longer geared toward exporting commodities but manufacturing goods with high added value. This will help Russia unleash its immense potential in all spheres and sectors.

We expect to see a solid increase in domestic demand as early as this year. I am convinced that companies will use this opportunity to expand their manufacturing, make new products that are in high demand, and to take over the market niches vacated or about to be vacated by Western companies as they withdraw.

Today, we clearly see what is going on and understand the structural issues we have to address in logistics, technology, finance, and human resources. Over the past years, we have been talking a lot and at length about the need to restructure our economy. Now these changes are a vital necessity, a game changer, and all for the better. We know what needs to be done to enable Russia to make steady progress and to develop independently regardless of any outside pressure or threats, while guaranteeing our national security and interests.

I would like to point out and to emphasise that the essence of our task is not to adapt to circumstances. Our strategic task is to take the economy to a new horizon. Everything is changing now, and changing extremely fast. This is not only a time of challenges but also a time of opportunities. This is really so today. And our future depends on the way we realise these opportunities. We must put an end – and I want to emphase this – to all interagency conflicts, red tape, grievances, doublespeak, or any other nonsense. Everything we do must contribute to achieving our goals and delivering results. This is what we must strive to achieve.

Enabling Russian companies and small family-run businesses to successfully tap the market is a victory in itself. Building cutting-edge factories and kilometres of new roads is a victory. Every new school, every new kindergarten we build is a victory. Scientific discoveries and new technologies – these are also victories, of course. What matters is that all of us contribute to our shared success.

What areas should we focus the partnership of the state, the regions and domestic business on?

First, we will expand promising foreign economic ties and build new logistics corridors. A decision has already been made to extend the Moscow-Kazan expressway to Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Tyumen, and eventually to Irkutsk and Vladivostok with branches to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. This will, in part, allows us to considerably expand our ties with Southeast Asian markets.

We will develop Black Sea and Sea of Azov ports. We will pay special attention to the North-South international corridor, as those who work on this every day know. Vessels with a draft of up to 4.5 meters will be able to pass through the Volga-Caspian Sea Canal this year. This will open up new routes for business cooperation with India, Iran, Pakistan, and the Middle Eastern countries. We will continue developing this corridor.

Our plans include exp ed modernisation of the eastern railways – the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Railway (BAM) – and building up the potential of the Northern Sea Route. This will create not only additional freight traffic but also a foundation for reaching our national goals on developing Siberia, the Arctic and the Far East.

The infrastructure of the regions and the development of infrastructure, including communications, telecommunications and railways will receive a powerful impetus. Next year, 2024, we will bring to a proper condition at least 85 percent of all roads in the country’s largest metropolises, as well as over half of all regional and municipal roads. I am sure we will achieve this.

We will also continue our free gas distribution programme. We have already made the decision to extend it to social facilities – kindergartens and schools, outpatient clinics and hospitals, as well as primary healthcare centres. This programme will now be permanent for our citizens – they can always request a connection to the gas distribution system.

This year, we will launch a large programme to build and repair housing and utility systems. Over the next ten years, we plan to invest at least 4.5 trillion rubles in this. We know how important this is for our people and how neglected this area has been. It is necessary to improve this situation, and we will do it. It is important to give the programme a powerful start. So, I would like to ask the Government to ensure stable funding for this.

Second, we will need to significantly expand our economy’s production capabilities and to increase domestic industrial capacity.

An industrial mortgage tool has been created, and an easy-term loan can now be taken out not only to purchase production facilities, but also to build or upgrade them. The size of such a loan was discussed many times and there were plans to increase it. It is a decent amount for a first step: up to 500 million rubles. It is available at a rate of 3 or 5 percent for up to seven years. It sounds like a very good programme and should be put to good use.

New terms for industrial clusters took effect this year, including a lower fiscal and administrative burden on resident companies, and long-term state orders and subsidies to support demand for their innovative products, which are just entering the market.

According to estimates, these measures will generate high-demand projects worth over 10 trillion rubles by 2030. Investment is expected to reach about 2 trillion this year alone. Please note that these are not forecasts, but existing benchmarks.

Therefore, I would like the Government to exp e the launch of these projects, give a hand to businesses and come up with systemic support measures, including tax incentives. I am aware that the financial bloc does not like to provide incentives, and I partly share this approach: the taxation system must be consistent and without niches or exemptions, but this particular case calls for a creative approach.

So, starting this year, Russian companies will be able to reduce their revenue taxes if they purchase advanced domestic IT solutions and AI-enhanced products. Moreover, these expenses will be cr ed at one and a half times the actual cost, meaning that every ruble invested in purchasing such products will result in a tax deduction of 1.5 rubles.

I propose extending these deductions to purchases of all kinds of Russian high-tech equipment. I would like the Government to come up with a list of such equipment by specific industry and with the procedure for granting deductions. This is a good solution to reinvigorate the economy.

Third, a crucial issue on our economic development agenda to do with the new sources of funding investment, which we have been talking about a lot.

Thanks to our strong payments balance, Russia does not need to borrow funds abroad, kowtow and beg for money, and then hold long discussions on what, how much and on what conditions we would pay back. Russian banks are working stably and sustainably and have a solid margin for security.

In 2022, the volume of bank loans for the corporate sector increased, I repeat, increased. There was considerable concern about that, but we have reported growth, an increase of 14 percent, or more than we reported in 2021, before the miliary operation. In 2021, the figure was 11.7 percent; last year, it was 14 percent. The mortgage portfolio went up by 20.4 percent. We are growing.

Last year, the banking sector as a whole operated at a profit. It was not as large as in the preceding years, but it was considerable nevertheless: 203 billion rubles. This is another indicator of the stability of the Russian financial sector.

According to our estimates, inflation in Russia will approach the target figure of 4 percent in the second quarter this year. I would like to remind you that the inflation rate has reached 12, 17 and 20 percent in some EU countries. Our figure is 4 or 5 percent; the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry are still discussing the figure, but it will be close to the target. Given these positive dynamics and other macroeconomic parameters, we are creating objective conditions for lowering long-term interest rates in the economy, which means that loans for the real economic sector will become more affordable.

Individual long-term savings are a vital source of investment resources around the world, and we must also stimulate their attraction into the investment sphere. I would like the Government to exp e the submission of draft laws to the State Duma to launch the relevant state programme as soon as this April.

It is important to create additional conditions to encourage people to invest and earn at home, in the country. At the same time, it is necessary to guarantee the safety of people’s investment in voluntary retirement savings. We should create a mechanism here similar to the one used for insuring bank deposits. I would like to remind you that such savings, worth up to 1.4 million rubles, are insured by the state on guarantee deposits. I propose doubling the sum to 2.8 million rubles for voluntary retirement savings. Likewise, we must protect people’s investment in other long-term investment instruments, including against the possible bankruptcy of financial brokers.

Separate decisions must be taken to attract funds to rapidly growing and high-tech businesses. We will approve support for the placement of their shares on the domestic stock market, including tax benefits for both the companies and the buyers of their stock.

Freedom of enterprise is a vital element of economic sovereignty. I will repeat: against the backdrop of external attempts to contain Russia, private businesses have proven their ability to quickly adapt to the changing environment and ensure economic growth in difficult conditions. So, every business initiative aimed at benefiting the country should receive support.

I believe it is necessary to return, in this context, to the revision of a number of norms of criminal law as regards the economic elements of crime. Of course, the state must control what is happening in this area. We should not allow an anything-goes attitude here but we should not go too far, either. It is necessary to move faster towards the decriminalisation I mentioned. I hope the Government will consistently and seriously conduct this work together with Parliament, the law-enforcement bodies and business associations.

At the same time, I would like to ask the Government to suggest, in close cooperation with Parliament, additional measures for speeding up the de-offshorisation of the economy. Businesses, primarily those operating in key sectors and industries should operate in Russian jurisdiction – this is a fundamental principle.

Colleagues, in this context I would like to make a small philosophical digression. This is what I would like to single out.

We remember what problems and imbalances the Soviet economy faced in its later stages. This is why after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its planned system, in the chaos of the 1990s, the country began to create its economy along the lines of market relations and private ownership. Overall, this was the right thing to do. The Western countries were largely an example to follow in this respect. As you know, their advisers were a dime a dozen, and it seemed enough to simply copy their models. True, I remember they still argued with each other – the Europeans argued with the Americans on how the Russian economy should develop.

And what happened as a result? Our national economy was largely oriented to the West and for the most part as a source of raw materials. Naturally, there were different nuances, but overall, we were seen as a source of raw materials. The reasons for this are also clear – naturally, the new Russian businesses that were taking shape were primarily oriented toward generating profit, quick and easy profit in the first place. What could provide this? Of course, the sale of resources – oil, gas, metals and timber.

Few people thought about other alternatives or, probably, they did not have the opportunity to invest long-term. This is the reason other, more complex industries did not make much headway. It took us years – other governments saw this clearly – to break this negative trend. We had to adjust our tax system and make large-scale public investments.

We have achieved real and visible change. Indeed, the results are there, but, again, we should keep in mind the circumstances in which our major businesses developed. Technologies were coming from the West, cheaper sources of financing and lucrative markets were in the West, and capital started flowing to the West as well. Unfortunately, instead of expanding production and buying equipment and technology to create new jobs in Russia, they spent their money on foreign mansions, yachts and luxury real estate.

They began to invest in the economy later, but initially the money flowed rapidly to the West for consumption purposes. And since their money was there, that is where their children were educated, where their life was, their future. It was very difficult and almost impossible for the state to track and prevent these developments, because we lived in a free market paradigm.

Recent events have clearly shown that the image of the West as a safe haven for capital was a mirage. Those who failed to understand this in time, who saw Russia only as a source of income and planned to live mostly abroad, have lost a lot. They just got robbed there and saw even their legitimate money taken away.

At some point I made a joke – many may still remember it – I told Russian businesspeople that they will make themselves sick running from courtroom to courtroom and from office to office in the West trying to save their money. That is exactly how it turned out.

You know, I will say something that is quite simple, but truly important. Trust me, not a single ordinary citizen in our country felt sorry for those who lost their assets in foreign banks, lost their yachts or palaces abroad, and so on. In their conversations around the kitchen table, people have all recalled the privatisation of the 1990s, when enterprises that had been built by our entire nation were sold for next to nothing and the so-called new elites flaunted their lavish lifestyle.

There are other key aspects. During the years that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, the West never stopped trying to set the post-Soviet states on fire and, most importantly, finish off Russia as the largest surviving portion of the historical reaches of our state. They encouraged international terrorists to assault us, provoked regional conflicts along the perimeter of our borders, ignored our interests and tried to contain and suppress our economy.

I am saying this because big business in Russia controls strategic enterprises with thousands of workers that determine the socioeconomic well-being of many regions and, hence, the overall state of affairs. So, whenever leaders or owners of such businesses become dependent on governments that adopt policies that are unfriendly to Russia, this poses a great threat to us, a danger to our country. This is an untenable situation.

Yes, everyone has a choice. Some may choose to live in a seized mansion with a blocked account, trying to find a place for themselves in a seemingly attractive Western capital, a resort or some other comfortable place abroad. Anyone has the right to do that, and we will never infringe on it. But it is time to see that in the West these people have always been and will always remain second class strangers who can be treated any way, and their money, connections and the acquired titles of counts, peers or mayors will not help at all. They must understand that they are second class people there.

There is another option: to stay with your Motherland, to work for your compatriots, not only to open new businesses but also to change life around you in cities, towns and throughout your country. We have quite a few businesspeople like this, real fighters in our business community, and we associate the future of our business with them. Everyone must know that the sources of their prosperity and their future can only be here, in their native country Russia.

If they do, we will create a very strong and self-sufficient economy that will not remain aloof in the world but will make use of all its competitive advantages. Russian capital, the money earned here, must be put to work for the country, for our national development. Today, we see huge potential in the development of infrastructure, the manufacturing sector, in domestic tourism and many other industries.

I would like those who have come up against the predatory mores of the West to hear what I have to say: running around with cap in hand, begging for your own money makes no sense, and most importantly, it accomplishes nothing, especially now that you realise who you are dealing with. Stop clinging to the past, resorting to the courts to get at least something back. Change your lives and your jobs, because you are strong people – I am addressing our businesspeople now, many of whom I have known for years, who know what is what in life.

Launch new projects, earn money, work hard for Russia, invest in enterprises and jobs, and help schools and universities, science and healthcare, culture and sports. In this way, you will increase your wealth and will also win the respect and gratitude of the people for a generation ahead. The state and society will certainly support you.

Let us consider this as a message for your business: get moving in the right direction.

Colleagues,

Russia is an open country and at the same time, a distinct civilisation. There is no claim to exclusivity or superiority in this statement, but this civilisation of ours – that’s what matters. Our ancestors passed it to us and we must preserve it for our descendants and pass it on to them.

We will develop cooperation with friends, with all those who are ready to work with us. We will adopt the best practices but will primarily rely on our own potential, on the creative energy of Russian society, on our traditions and values.

Here I would like to mention the character of our people who have always been distinguished by their generosity, magnanimity, mercy and compassion, and Russia, as a country, fully reflects these traits. We know how to be good friends, how to stand by one’s word. We will never let anyone down and will always support those in a difficult situation without hesitation.

Everyone remembers that during the pandemic we were actually the first to support some European countries, including Italy and other states when they were going through the most difficult weeks of the COVID outbreak, and let’s not forget how we are helping Syria and Turkiye after a devastating earthquake.

It is the people of Russia that are the foundation of our national sovereignty and our source of power. The rights and freedoms of our citizens are immutable – they are guaranteed by the Constitution and we will not depart from this despite the external challenges and threats.

I would like to emphasise in this context that elections to local and regional government bodies next September and the presidential elections in 2024 will take place in strict accordance with the law and observance of all democratic, constitutional provisions.

Elections always reveal different approaches to resolving social and economic goals. That said, the leading political forces are consolidated and united in the main idea – the security and wellbeing of the people; our sovereignty and our national interests override everything else for us.

I would like to thank you for this responsible, firm position and recall the words of Pyotr Stolypin, a patriot and a proponent of a strong Russian state. He said this in the State Duma over a hundred years ago, but it is still consonant with our times. He said: “In the cause of defending Russia, all of us must unite and coordinate our efforts, our commitements and our rights for supporting one historical supreme right – the right of Russia to be strong.”

Volunteers at the frontline include deputies of the State Duma and regional parliaments, representatives from different levels of executive government bodies, municipalities, cities, districts and rural areas. All parliamentary parties and leading public associations are taking part in collecting humanitarian aid to help at the front.

Thank you once again – thank you for such a patriotic stand.

Local governments as a public authority closest to the people play a huge role in strengthening civil society and solving everyday problems. People’s trust in the state as a whole, social welfare of the country’s citizens and their confidence in the successful development of the country depends on how they work.

I would like to ask the Presidential Executive Office and the Government to submit proposals on creating tools of direct support for the best managerial teams and practices in large, medium-sized and small municipalities.

The free development of society means being ready to take responsibility for yourself and your loved ones, for your country. These qualities must be encouraged from a young age in the family. Of course, the system of education and our national culture are extremely important for strengthening our common values and our national identity.

The state will use the resources of the Presidential Grants Foundation, the Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, the Institute for Internet Development and other instruments to support all forms of creative endeavour, such as contemporary and traditional art, realism and avant-garde, classical and innovative works. It is not genres or trends that matter. Culture must serve the good, beauty and harmony, ponder some very complicated and contradictory issues in life, but its main mission is not to tear down society but to nurture the best human qualities.

Cultural development will be a priority of rebuilding peaceful life in Donbass and Novorossiya. We will have to rebuild, repair and provide equipment to hundreds of cultural facilities there, including museum collections and buildings, which help people feel the connection between the past and the present and create a link to the future, to feel their affiliation with the common cultural, historical and educational space of the centuries-old great Russia.

We must work together with our teachers, academics and professionals to seriously improve the quality of school and university textbooks, first of all in the humanities – history, social science, literature and geography – so that our young people learn as much as possible about Russia, its great past, its culture and traditions.

We have brilliant, talented young people who are willing to work for the benefit of our country in areas like scientific research, culture, the social sphere, business and public administration. The Leaders of Russia competition, as well as the Leaders of Revival competition currently taking place in the new constituent entities of the Federation, are opening up new horizons for career growth for these very people.

Notably, a number of winners and finalists in these competitions have voluntarily joined military units. Many of them are now working in the liberated territories helping rebuild economic and social life, and they are acting professionally, decisively and courageously.

Generally speaking, nothing can replace the school of war. People return entirely different, and they are ready to lay down their lives for the Fatherland, wherever they may be working.

Let me stress that it’s precisely those who were born and raised in Donbass and Novorossiya, who have fought for them, they will be and should form the foundation of our joint effort to develop these regions. I want them to hear me: Russia is counting on you.

With the ambitious tasks facing our country in mind, we must seriously revise our approaches to the system of professional education, to our science and technology policy.

At the recent meeting of the Council for Science and Education, we discussed the need to prioritise our efforts, to concentrate resources on obtaining specific and fundamentally meaningful scientific results, primarily in areas where we have done a fair amount of work and which are of critical importance to our country, including transport, energy, housing and utilities, public healthcare, agriculture, and the manufacturing industry.

Innovative technology invariably relies on existing fundamental research. Here, just like in culture – and I want to emphasise this – we must give researchers greater freedom for creativity. We should not have everyone just focused on the results that we will need tomorrow. Fundamental science makes its own rules.

Also, setting and fulfilling ambitious goals is a powerful incentive for young people to choose science as their field and a chance to prove their leadership skills and being the best in the world. Our research teams have much to be proud of.

Last December, I met with some of our young researchers. One of their questions concerned housing. A mundane, but important issue. Housing certificates for young researchers are already available. Last year, an additional one billion rubles was set aside for these purposes. I hereby instruct the Government to identify reserves to expand this programme.

In recent years, the prestige of secondary vocational education has grown significantly. The demand for graduates of technical schools and colleges is just huge, colossal. You see, if our unemployment has fallen to a historic low of 3.7 percent, it means that people are working, new personnel is needed.

I believe that we should significantly expand the Professionalitet project, under which educational and industrial clusters are created, the educational base is updated, and enterprises and employers develop educational programmes based on the needs of the economy in close contact with colleges and technical schools. And of course, it is very important for mentors with experience in real, complex production to join in.

The task is clear: in the next five years we need to train about a million specialists of working professions for the electronics industry, the robotics industry, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and the defence industry, construction, transport, nuclear and other industries that are key to ensuring the security, sovereignty and competitiveness of Russia.

Finally, a very important question is about our higher education. Significant changes are also overdue here, considering the new requirements for specialists in the economy, social sectors, and in all spheres of life in our country. What we need here is a synthesis of all the best that was in the Soviet system of education and the experience of recent decades.

In this regard, the following is proposed.

First, to return to the basic training of specialists with higher education, which is traditional for our country. The term of study can be four to six years. At the same time, programmes can be offered that differ in terms of training, depending on the specific profession, industry and labour market demand even within the same specialty and one university.

Second, if a profession requires additional training or niche specialisation, in this case a young person will be able to continue education by doing a master’s degree or choosing residency training.

Third, postgraduate studies will be made into a separate level of professional education, the task of which is to train personnel for scientific and teaching professions.

I want to emphasise that the transition to the new system should be smooth. The Government, together with parliamentarians, will need to make numerous amendments to legislation on education, on the labour market, and so on. Here you need to think everything through, work out every detail. Young people, our citizens should have new opportunities for quality education, employment and professional growth. I repeat: opportunities, not problems.

And I would like to specifically note that those students who are studying now will be able to continue their education under existing programmes. And also, the level of training and higher education diplomas of citizens who have already completed studies under current undergraduate, specialist or master’s programmes are not subject to revision. They must not lose their rights. I ask the Russian Popular Front to take all issues related to changes in the field of higher education under special control.

This year was declared the Year of the Teacher and Mentor in Russia. Teachers are directly involved in building the country’s future, and it is important to raise the social status of their work. Parents should talk to their children more about gratitude for their teachers, and teachers should instil in children respect and love for their parents. Let’s always remember this.

I will talk about support for children and Russian families in a minute.

I would like to note that the so-called children’s budget, or budget allocations to support families in Russia, has increased manifold rather than by a small percent over the past few years. These expenses are the fastest growing part of the country’s main financial document – the budget, the law on the budget. I would like to thank the parliament members and the Government for their uniform, consolidated understanding of our national priorities.

On February 1, the maternity capital in Russia was again adjusted for inflation. As we promised, it was adjusted by last year’s inflation rate, that is, by 11.9 percent. Russian citizens – residents of the new regions of the Federation – are also entitled to this support now. I suggest granting maternity capital to families in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions where children were born starting from 2007, that is, when this programme was launched throughout Russia. I will recall that at one time we made a similar decision for the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol.

We will continue implementing large-scale programmes aimed at improving the living standards of Russian families.

I would like to emphasise that the Government and the regions of the Federation have been given a practical goal – to ensure noticeable, tangible growth in real wages in Russia.

As we all know, an important indicator, a starting point here is the minimum wage. We raised it twice last year, almost by 20 percent overall.

We will continue raising the minimum wage, doing it at a rate that is higher than the inflation rate and the real wage growth rate. Since the start of this year, the minimum wage was adjusted by 6.3 percent.

I suggest supplementing the planned increase by an additional 10 percent starting January 1, 2024. Thus, the minimum wage will have grown by 18.5 percent to constitute 19,242 rubles.

Now I would like to mention adjustments to the taxation system for the benefit of Russian families. Starting last year, families with two or more children have been relieved of paying tax on the sale of housing if they are purchasing a new, bigger flat or house.

It is necessary to make better use of these instruments – they have proven to be in demand. Families should have more money in their family budgets to be able to resolve their most important and urgent problems.

I suggest increasing the amount of social tax deductions: for children’s education costs – from current 50,000 rubles to 110,000 rubles per year, and for costs on personal education, medical treatment or purchase of medications – from current 120,000 to 150,000 rubles. The state will reimburse the 13 percent income tax paid on these increased amounts.

Naturally we need not only to increase this deduction, but also to make this benefit easily available to people. This deduction should be granted proactively, quickly and online. This process should be easy for applicants.

Next. The well-being, the quality of life of Russian families, and therefore the demographic situation, depend directly on the state of things in the social sphere.

I know that many regions of the Federation are ready to significantly speed up renovation of social infrastructure, cultural and sports facilities, relocation of people from dilapidated housing, and comprehensive development of rural areas. This attitude will certainly be supported.

We will use the following mechanism here: the regions will be able to receive now and use the funds that have been set aside in the 2024 federal budget for national projects, through interest-free treasury loans – they will be automatically repaid in April of 2024. It is a good tool.

We will keep this issue under constant review, and I ask the State Council Commission On Economy and Finance to become involved in this work.

However, we don't need to rush and chase after numbers, especially to the detriment of the quality of the facilities being built. Additional financial resources must be used efficiently to give a high return.

This is particularly vital for the modernisation of primary health care, a large-scale programme that we launched in 2021. I ask the Government and regional leaders not to forget that the benchmark – I have said this many times – is not the numbers in reports, but concrete, visible, tangible progress in the availability and quality of medical care.

I also instruct the Government to adjust the regulatory framework for organising the procurement of ambulances with diagnostic equipment. They allow for medical check-ups and preventive examinations to be carried out directly at enterprises, schools, offices and in remote communities.

We have launched a large-scale school renovation programme. By the end of this year, a total of almost 3,500 school buildings will have been renovated. I would like to point out that most of them are in rural areas and we have done this on purpose. This year such work is also being carried out in the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics, in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. It is meaningful and visible, people really see what is happening. This is very good.

From 2025 onwards, federal funds will be regularly and systematically allocated to the regions for repairing and renovating kindergartens, schools, vocational schools and colleges so as to avoid situations where buildings are in dilapidated condition.

Next, we have set a major goal, to build more than 1,300 new schools between 2019 and 2024. Of these, 850 are now open. Another 400 will open this year. I want the regions to stay on track to meet these objectives. The amount of federal funding for this 2019–2024 programme is almost 490 billion rubles. We will not cut these costs, we will keep this amount intact.

This year, we increased the amount of infrastructure budget loans. We are sending additional funds, not as previously planned, but an additional 250 billion rubles for expanding transport, utility and other infrastructure in the regions.

I hereby instruct the Government to allocate, in addition to these funds, an additional 50 billion rubles – which will be purposefully used to upgrade public transport in the constituent entities of the Federation this year. This upgrade will be used for the latest technology. Please pay special attention to small towns and rural areas.

We have decided to extend the Clean Air project through 2030. The goal is to improve the environment in major industrial centres. I want industrial companies and regional and local authorities to keep in mind that a significant reduction in harmful emissions remains on the agenda.

In addition, we have accomplished much in reforming the waste management industry. We are building up recycling and sorting capacity which will help us build a closed-loop economy. Further elimination of old landfills and hazardous material sites is our top priority. I want the Government, in conjunction with the regions, to draft a list of harmful sites that will be eliminated upon the completion of this programme.

We will continue to restore unique water bodies, including Lake Baikal and the Volga River. In the medium term, we will extend this work to other rivers such as the Don, Kama, Irtysh, Ural, Terek, Volkhov and Neva rivers, and Lake Ilmen. We must not forget about medium and small rivers. I want all levels of government to pay attention to this.

As part of an earlier instruction, a draft law on promoting tourism in specially protected nature areas has been submitted. It was recently discussed at a meeting with the Government. It should clearly define what can be built and where and what cannot, and generally set forth the principles of the ecotourism industry. This is a critically important issue for our country. I ask the State Duma to speed up consideration of this draft law.

Now I will say a few words about what is happening around us.

Colleagues, I will talk about one more issue.

In early February, the North Atlantic alliance made a statement with actual demand to Russia, as they put it, to return to the implementation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, including admission of inspections to our nuclear defence facilities. I don’t even know what to call this. It is a kind of a theatre of the absurd.

We know that the West is directly involved in the Kiev regime’s attempts to strike at our strategic aviation bases. The drones used for this purpose were equipped and updated with the assistance of NATO specialists. And now they also want to inspect our defence facilities? In the current conditions of confrontation, it simply sounds insane.

I would like to draw your attention specifically to the fact that they are not letting us conduct full-scale inspections under this treaty. Our repeated applications to inspect different facilities remain unanswered or are rejected under formal pretexts, and we cannot verify anything on the other side.

I would like to stress that the United States and NATO are openly saying that their goal is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. And what, after such statements they are supposed to tour our defence facilities, including the latest ones, as if nothing happened? A week ago, I signed an executive order putting new land-based strategic systems on combat duty. Are they going to poke their nose there as well? Do they think we will let them go there just because?

Having made this collective statement, NATO actually claimed to be a participant in the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Arms. We agree with this, please go ahead. Moreover, we believe this framing of the issue is long overdue. Let me recall that the US is not the only nuclear power in NATO. Britain and France also have nuclear arsenals. They are developing and upgrading them and these arsenals are also directed against us – they are also directed against Russia. The latest statements by their leaders merely confirm it – listen for yourselves.

We cannot just ignore this and have no right to do so especially now. Nor can we forget that the Soviet Union and the United States initially signed the first Treaty on Strategic Offensive Arms in 1991 in a completely different situation – in conditions of abating tensions and growing mutual trust. Subsequently, our relations reached a level that allowed Russia and the US to say they no longer considered each other enemies. Wonderful, everything was going very well.

The Treaty of 2010 that is in force contains critically important provisions about indivisible security and the direct link between strategic offensive and defensive arms. All of that has long been forgotten. The United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty. It is now a thing of the past. Importantly, our relations have degraded which can be cr ed entirely to the United States.

After the Soviet Union broke up, they began to revise the outcomes of World War II and to build an American-style world ruled by one master. To do this, they began to rudely destroy the foundations of the international order laid down after WWII in order to cross out the legacy of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Step by step, they proceeded to revise the existing international order, to dismantle security and arms control systems, and plotted and carried out a series of wars around the world.

To reiterate, all of that was done for the sole purpose of dismantling the post-WWII architecture of international relations. This is not a figure of speech. This is how it all unfolded in reality. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they sought to perpetuate their global dominance regardless of the interests of modern Russia or other countries for that matter.

Sure enough, the international situation changed after 1945. New centres of growth and influence have been formed and are rapidly expanding. This is a natural and objective process that cannot be ignored. But the United States trying to refashion the international order to suit exclusively its own needs and selfish interests is unacceptable.

Now, they are using NATO to give us signals, which, in fact, is an ultimatum whereby Russia should, no questions asked, implement everything that it agreed to, including the New START Treaty, whereas they will do as they please. As if there is no connection between strategic offensive weapons and, say, the conflict in Ukraine or other hostile Western actions against our country. As if there are no vociferous claims about them seeking to inflict a strategic defeat on us. This is either the height of hypocrisy and cynicism, or the height of stupidity, but they are not idiots. They are not stupid after all. They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us and also to get to our nuclear sites.

In this regard, I am compelled to announce today that Russia is suspending its membership in the New START Treaty. To reiterate, we are not withdrawing from the Treaty, but rather suspending our participation. Before we come back to discussing this issue, we must have a clear idea of what NATO countries such as France or Great Britain have at stake, and how we will account for their strategic arsenals, that is, the Alliance's combined offensive capabilities.

Their statement comes, in fact, as a request to join this process. Well, come onboard, we do not mind. Just try not to lie to everyone this time and present yourselves as champions of peace and detente. We know the truth. We are aware of the fact that certain types of US nuclear weapons are reaching the end of their service life. In this regard, we know for certain that some politicians in Washington are already pondering live nuclear tests, especially since the United States is developing innovative nuclear weapons. There is information to that effect.

Given these circumstances, the Defence Ministry and Rosatom must make everything ready for Russia to conduct nuclear tests. We will not be the first to proceed with these tests, but if the United States goes ahead with them, we will as well. No one should harbour dangerous illusions that global strategic parity can be disrupted.

Colleagues, citizens of Russia,

Today, we are together living through challenging times and overcoming all difficulties together as well. It could not have been otherwise because we have been raised on the example of our great ancestors and must be worthy of their behests that are passed down from generation to generation. We are moving only forward owing to our devotion to our Motherland, our will and our unity.

This cohesion was on display from the first days of the special military operation – hundreds of volunteers, representatives of all ethnicities of our country came to recruitment offices. They decided to stand by the defenders of Donbass, to fight for their native land, for their Fatherland, for the truth and justice. Today, warriors from all regions of our multi-ethnic Motherland are fighting shoulder to shoulder on the frontlines. They pray in different languages, but they all pray for victory, for their fellow soldiers and for the Motherland. (Applause.)

Their difficult military labour, their exploits are finding a powerful response all over Russia. People are supporting our fighters. They don’t want to stay on the sidelines. The front is now passing through the hearts of our people in their millions. They are sending medicine, communication devices, transport, warm clothes and camouflage nets, to name a few – everything that helps protect the lives of our fighters.

I know the comfort letters from children and schoolkids give to our soldiers at the front. They take them into battle as a cherished possession because the sincerity and purity of children’s wishes bring tears to their eyes. They feel more forcefully for whose sake they are fighting and whom they are defending.

Warriors, their families and civilians greatly appreciate the care with which volunteers are surrounding them. They have been acting boldly and decisively from the very start of the special military operation. Under fire and shelling they are leading children, elders and all those in trouble out of basements; they were and still are bringing food, water and clothes to hot spots; they are setting up humanitarian aid centres for refugees and helping doctors in field hospitals and on the combat contact line; they continue to risk their lives to save others.

The Russian Popular Front alone raised over five billion rubles as part of the All for Victory initiative. The flow of donations does not stop. Every contribution is important and this applies to those made by large companies and businesspeople. But especially touching and inspiring are the donations of people with modest incomes, which are contributing part of their savings, salaries and pensions. This coming together to help our warriors, civilians in the zone of hostilities and refugees is worth a lot.

Thank you for this sincere support, cohesion and mutual aid. It is impossible to overstate their importance.

Russia will meet any challenges because we are all one country, a big and united nation. We are confident in ourselves and confident in our strength. The truth is on our side. (Applause.)

Thank you.

The Anthem of the Russian Federation plays.

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – From Vladimir Putin

CONCERT GLORY TO DEFENDERS OF THE FATHERLAND

Ahead of February 23, the President spoke at a rally-concert dedicated to Defender of the Fatherland Day at the Luzhniki Stadium.

February 22, 2023

16:15

Moscow

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, friends,

We are having this meeting on the eve of Defender of the Fatherland Day. This phrase, these words have something powerful, enormous, I would even say mystical and sacred in them.

No wonder one of the most popular prayers begins with the words “Our Father.” “Father” is a word that conveys something very close to every person. After all, we also say “Motherland.” This is about a family, something huge and powerful and at the same time close to everyone’s heart. It is the Motherland and the family. Ultimately, the Motherland is the family and they mean the same for us in our hearts.

There are people – here they are standing next to me, on my left and my right – whose choice in life is to defend the most sacred and dearest thing that we have: family and the Motherland. Today, they are doing this as part of the special military operation.

We have come together here for what is, in fact, a festive event, but I know, I just received a report from the country's top military leaders, that a battle for our people is unfolding on our historical borders right at this moment.

It is being led by courageous servicemen just like the ones who are standing next to us here. They are fighting heroically, courageously and bravely. We are proud of them. Let’s give a triple “hurray” in their honour so that they can hear our greetings.

Our entire country stands behind them, which means that everyone who does it is, to a certain extent, also a defender of the Fatherland. That includes medical workers who help our troops get back on their feet, doctors, nurses and, of course, defence industry employees, transport workers, and everyone else who does this. My friends, this also includes you, the people who came here today to support our soldiers. Thank you. It includes even children who write letters to support our soldiers.

This is very important. In this sense, in our efforts to protect our interests, our people, our culture, our language and all our territories, all our people are defenders of the Fatherland. I bow low to all of you.

Happy upcoming Defender of the Fatherland Day.

The National Anthem of the Russian Federation plays.

United we have no equal.

For the unity of the Russian people! Hurray!

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – From Vladimir Putin

CONGRATULATIONS ON THE OCCASION OF DEFENDER OF THE FATHERLAND DAY

In a video address, Vladimir Putin congratulated veterans, military and civilian personnel of the Armed Forces and all Russian citizens on this holiday.

February 23, 2023

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Comrade officers, veterans,

Please accept my greetings on this holiday, Defender of the Fatherland Day!

This national holiday epitomises the heroic history of our Army and Navy and the unbreakable link connecting all generations of defenders of the Fatherland. It embodies our deep gratitude to the faithful sons and daughters of the Fatherland, to all those who did not spare themselves as they fought the enemy defending their native land and their people, underwent trials with honour and emerged as a victor, and who crushed foreign invasions. So it was at Lake Chudskoye and on Kulikovo Field, near Poltava and Borodino, and in the victorious May of 1945.

On this day, deep respect and the warmest words go to our dear veterans who defeated Nazism and upheld the freedom and independence of the Motherland. Your feats during the Great Patriotic War will forever remain in the historical memory of our people as a vivid example of patriotism and courage and will serve as an inexhaustible source of spiritual strength. The current generation of Russian soldiers and officers preserves and enhances the military traditions of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

I would like to extend my heartfelt greetings on this holiday to our military personnel, volunteers, mobilised citizens, and specialists in various professions who are participating in the special military operation. Our troops are heroically fighting the neo-Nazism that has taken root in Ukraine, protecting our people in our historical lands, and are fighting courageously and heroically.

Comrade officers,

Modern and efficient Army and Navy are a guarantee of the country's security and sovereignty, and a guarantee of its stable development and its future. That is why, as before, we will give priority attention to strengthening our defence capability.

Relying on actual combat experience, we will pursue balanced and high-quality development of all components of the Armed Forces, improve the system for training units. A solid foundation here is the soldiers, sergeants and officers who showed their worth in combat on the frontline.

We will continue to supply advanced equipment to our troops, including new strike systems, reconnaissance and communications equipment, drones and artillery systems. Our industry is quickly increasing the production of the entire range of conventional weapons and preparing for mass production of advanced models of equipment for the Army and Navy, as well as the Aerospace Forces.

As before, we will put our focus on strengthening the nuclear triad. This year, the first Sarmat missile system launchers with the new heavy missile will be put on combat duty. We will continue full production of the Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic systems and begin mass deployment of Tsirkon sea-launched hypersonic missiles.

With the Borei-A nuclear-powered submarine Emperor Alexander III becoming operational in the Navy, the share of modern weapons and equipment in the naval strategic nuclear forces will reach 100 percent. In the coming years, three more cruisers from this project will be delivered to the Navy.

Friends,

Our people believe in you, the defenders of Russia, in your reliability, resolve and devotion to the Fatherland and the oath. Millions of people are following their hearts as they help our frontline soldiers, and this unbreakable unity is the key to our victory.

Once again, happy holiday!

I wish you good health and every success in serving the Motherland, and well-being to your families and friends.

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – From DW.com (Germany)

PUTIN BLAMES WAR ON WEST, SUSPENDS NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT PACT

02/21/2023February 21, 2023

In a major speech in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin claimed that the West was responsible for "fueling the Ukrainian conflict." He also said Moscow would suspend participation in the New START nuclear weapons treaty.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday vowed to press on with his war in Ukraine during a major speech to Russian lawmakers and military commanders.

The annual state of the nation address came just days before the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of its neighbor and on the ninth anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine.

In his two-hour speech, the Russian leader chided the West and announced that Moscow was suspending its participation in the New START nuclear disarmament treaty. He said Russia must stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if Washington does so.

Later on Tuesday, Putin submitted a draft law on the suspension of Moscow's participation in the treaty to the Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said.

Volodin said that the Duma would deliberate on the law on Wednesday and take an immediate decision. He said that the law would then be sent to the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council.

Russia's last major nuclear disarmament treaty with the US had come into force in 2011. After its extension in 2021, it was due to expire in 2026.

What did Putin say about the war?

Putin reiterated the Kremlin's lines on launching what Moscow describes as a "special military operation" in Ukraine, saying that Russia was fighting to "liberate" people and claiming that Ukrainians "are hostages of their [own] regime."

He also promised to continue Moscow's offensive: "step by step, we will carefully and systematically solve the aims that face us."

Putin blamed the West for starting the conflict, saying Western countries, led by the US, were seeking "unlimited power" in world affairs.

Moscow's forces have struggled to gain the upper hand in the conflict since invading on February 24 last year. The war has killed thousands, displaced millions and reduced towns to rubble.

"The responsibility for fueling the Ukrainian conflict, for its escalation, for the number of victims ... lies completely with Western elites," Putin said.

"They want to inflict a 'strategic defeat' on us and try to get to our nuclear facilities at the same time," he said"

The West has long denied Putin's claims and consistently maintained the stance that Russia's war on Ukraine was "unprovoked."

Moscow "did everything possible, genuinely everything possible, in order to solve this problem [in Ukraine] by peaceful means," Putin said. "But a completely different scenario was being prepared behind our backs."

He criticized Western attempts toward peace since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, saying the Normandy format and the Minsk agreements "are not genuine."

01:12

Moscow to respect nuclear weapons caps —Foreign Ministry

Hours after Putin's address, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Moscow would continue to respect caps on nuclear weapons set under the treaty.

It added that Russia would continue to exchange information about test launches of ballistic missiles.

The ministry said that Russia's's decision to suspend participation in the treaty could be reversed, and urgued Washington to de-escalate tensions.

During his speech, Putin insisted that Russia was not withdrawing from the pact, but suspending its participation.

00:43

Meanwhile, United Nation spokesperson Stephane Dujarric urged the US and Russia to resume full implication of the New START treaty.

"A world without nuclear arms control is a far more dangerous, unstable one, with potentially catastrophic consequences," Dujarric said.

"Every effort should be taken to avoid this outcome, including an immediate return to dialogue."

Putin 'chose' to start war

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said: "It is Putin who started this imperial war of conquest. It is Putin who keeps escalating the war."

Stoltenberg also said he regretted Putin's decision to withdraw Moscow from the New START pact. "With today's decision on New START the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled."

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that "nobody is attacking Russia," in response to Putin's claims that Moscow's war on Ukraine was merely defensive.

"This was a war of choice. Putin chose to fight it. He could have chosen not to. And he can choose even now to end it, to go home," Sullivan said.

"Russia stops fighting the war in Ukraine and goes home, the war ends. Ukraine stops fighting and the United States and the coalition stops helping them fight — then Ukraine disappears from the map," he added.

Sullivan spoke hours ahead of US President Joe Biden delivering his own speech in Warsaw.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told Reuters news agency that Putin's remarks showed that he had lost touch with reality.

"He is in a completely different reality, where there is no opportunity to conduct a dialogue about justice and international law," Podolyak said.

Solomiia Bobrovska, a Ukrainian lawmaker, condemned Putin's remarks on the Ukrainian regime, saying that since 2014 "all presidents were elected officially and in a legitimate way according to the elections, which were recognized by the whole world and by the Russian Federation as well."

'War-time propaganda'

Roman Goncharenko, an analyst for DW's Russian service, said, "Vladimir Putin is famous for mixing facts and fiction."

Putin's message in his speech was that the West "started this war" and Russia is only using force to stop it, Goncharenko said, adding: "Which is, of course, a lie."

Putin was seeking to mobilize Russians for "an anti-Western crusade," not only by blaming the West for starting the conflict but also by making allegations such as "pedophilia is normal in the West," Goncharenko added.

DW's chief international or Richard Walker said Putin's speech was largely "war-time propaganda," saying claims about pedophilia being a norm in the West are "almost laughable."

Walker said such messages were intended to make Russians see the West as a strategic, moral and cultural threat to their country.

What else did Putin say?

Putin's address came at a time when Russia's economy is under significant pressure due to sanctions imposed by the EU and its allies, leading to rising prices and gloomy prospects within the nation.

"We have already begun and will continue to build up a large-scale program for the socioeconomic recovery and development of these new subjects of the Federation," Putin said in his address, referring to territory annexed from Ukraine.

"We are talking about reviving enterprises and jobs in the ports of the Sea of Azov, which has again become an inland sea of Russia, and building new modern roads, as we did in Crimea."

02:28

The Russian president urged the country's business elite who were "begging" for money in the West to instead invest at home. "Trying to run around with your hand outstretched, groveling, begging for money, is pointless," he said.

"Launch new projects, make money, invest in Russia," he added. "This is how you will multiply your capital and earn people's recognition and gratitude for generations to come."

This is Putin's 18th such speech to the Federal Assembly, meant to outline the nation's condition and outlook. His last state of the nation address was in April 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine.

He did not address the parliament in 2022, citing "dynamics of events."

Tuesday's speech was largely expected to set the tone for Russia's presidential elections, scheduled to take place in just over a year. Constitutional changes mean Putin, 70, could remain in power until 2036.

ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – From NBC News

BIDEN SAYS PUTIN MADE A 'BIG MISTAKE' ON NEW START TREATY

Putin announced on Tuesday that Moscow was suspending participation in New START, a key nuclear arms control treaty and the last such agreement between the U.S. and Russia

By Caroline Kenny and Summer Concepcion Feb. 22, 2023, 10:41 AM EST

President Joe Biden on Wednesday strongly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to suspend his country’s involvement in the last remaining arms control treaty with the U.S.

Biden was asked about his reaction to Putin pulling out of the New START nuclear treaty upon arriving at the Polish Presidential Palace in Warsaw ahead of a meeting with leaders of the so-called Bucharest Nine group of eastern European nations and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

“I don’t have time,” the president initially said. Pressed again on his reaction, Biden said, “big mistake.”

Putin announced on Tuesday that Moscow was suspending participation in New START, a key nuclear arms control treaty between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Putin’s move came amid tensions between the U.S. and Russia one year into the war in Ukraine. The news came as a disturbing surprise to multiple former officials who negotiated the pact and nonproliferation experts committed to ending the expansion of nuclear forces, NBC News reported Tuesday.

Putin said in his speech Tuesday that Russia would not be the first to use a nuclear weapon, and accused the West of starting Russia’s war with Ukraine. But Russia has previously referred to its nuclear capabilities and threatened Ukraine’s nuclear power plants with bombs and shells.

Biden assailed Putin in a speech he delivered in Warsaw on Tuesday, following his surprise visit to Ukraine, marking a year after the Russian president launched the invasion into the country. Biden said Putin had gravely underestimated Ukraine by assuming that it would swiftly crumble and its democratic allies would disperse as Russian forces advanced. Biden noted that Putin has presided over a series of humiliating defeats since the start of the invasion.

“One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv,” Biden told an audience of thousands gathered outside the Royal Castle in Warsaw on Tuesday. “Well, I’ve just come from a visit to Kyiv and I can report, Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud. It stands tall. And most important, it stands free.”

“When President Putin ordered his tanks to roll into Ukraine, he thought we would roll over,” he added. “He was wrong! The Ukrainian people are too brave. America, Europe, a coalition of nations from the Atlantic to the Pacific — we were too unified. Democracy was too strong. Instead of an easy victory he perceived and predicted, Putin left with burned-out tanks and Russian forces in disarray.”

Biden, however, did not address Putin’s decision to “suspend” the New START treaty in the speech, which was filled with triumphant messaging.

Within his first month in office, Biden reached an agreement with Putin to extend New START for five years. (It had been set to expire in February 2021, after the Trump administration failed to hammer out an agreement.) Just last year, the U.S. and Russia committed to creating a new agreement “to achieve deeper, irreversible, and verifiable reductions in their nuclear arsenals,” according to a joint statement.

ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN – From USA Today

BIDEN CALLS PUTIN'S NEW START SUSPENSION A 'BIG MISTAKE.’ WHAT IS THE NUCLEAR ARMS TREATY?

By Maureen Groppe

Continuing his diplomatic standoff with Vladimir Putin, President Joe Biden said Russia is making a ''big mistake'' by suspending a key nuclear arms treaty.

Biden is ending his trip to Ukraine and Poland Wednesday with a final emphasis on the strength of the NATO alliance, which has stood up to Putin.

What is the nuclear arms treaty?

The latest

· Trip overview: After making a surprise visit to war-torn Ukraine Monday, Biden traveled to Poland where he praised the strength of Ukraine and the international coalition backing the resistance.

· NATO anniversary: Biden announced Tuesday the U.S. will host a NATO summit next year to mark the 75th anniversary of what he called the "strongest defensive alliance in the history of the world."

Why it matters

"NATO will not be divided, and we will not tire," Biden said during his speech at Warsaw's Royal Castle Tuesday.

But the administration and its allies have also tried to keep the fight against Russia from spilling into a NATO country to avoid triggering the mutual defense pact.

Looking ahead

While praising allies for standing together, Biden is emphasizing that the fight is far from over. There will be "hard and very bitter days, victories and tragedies," he said Tuesday.

Biden also encouraged other nations to look beyond the immediate challenge of the war in Ukraine and also work together in "lifting up the lives of people everywhere."

"The democracies of the world have to deliver it for our people," he said.

How many times has Article 5 been invoked?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 as a system of collective defense against the Soviet Union.

Its basic principle of mutual defense is the Article 5 provision that requires member states to come to the aid of their allies in the event of an attack.

The article has been invoked only once, when the U.S. called on the alliance after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Want to know more? Here's what you missed

'Kyiv stands strong’:Biden declares Putin ‘was wrong,’ marking one year of Russia’s war in Ukraine

Biden's surprise:How President Biden pulled off a secret trip to Ukraine one year into Russia's war

ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN – From Slate

PUTIN’S NEWEST PROVOCATION

The Russian president isn’t fully withdrawing from a nuclear treaty with the West—but he is threatening an arms race.

BY FRED KAPLAN FEB 21, 20232:12 PM

Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he is suspending the New START treaty—the last remaining nuclear arms-control accord between the United States and Russia—ratchets up East-West tensions to a new level and could revive a nuclear arms race that has been kept under wraps for several decades.

But things don’t have to hurtle so completely out of control. In his two-hour state-of-the-nation speech on Monday, the Russian president said he is “suspending … participation from New START” but “not withdrawing from the treaty.” In other words, he pledged (for what it’s worth) that Russia will not exceed the treaty’s limits on the size of the nuclear arsenal or on testing nuclear weapons—only that it will no longer allow U.S. officials to conduct on-site inspections of Russia’s nuclear facilities.

On one level, this is not such a big deal. At first because of COVID, then because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, neither side has inspected the other’s weapons sites for the past two years. However, with satellites and signals-intelligence intercepts, the U.S. and Russia have both been able—for many decades—to monitor each other’s nuclear activities and to detect significant violations of any treaty.

On another level, however, the clause allowing on-site inspections was the treaty’s most renowned feature—and it was important, since New START required the U.S. and Russia not merely to cap but also to cut the size of their arsenals. (The initials stand for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.) Both sides had—and still do have—missiles armed with more than one warhead each. To meet the new limits, they had to modify some of those missiles to carry fewer warheads. Satellite imagery can reveal how many missiles a foreign country has—but not how many warheads might be stored inside a missile’s nosecone. Imagery can also detect crew members modifying a missile site—but not how they are modifying the missile. Hence the importance of on-site inspections.

Does any of this matter? For building trust and for providing a forum where experts on both sides can discuss suspicions and ambiguities, yes, very much so. But Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and his stepped-up hostility to the West have destroyed any foundations of trust. (In November, well before his speech on Monday, he had ordered his officials not to attend the most recent routine meeting of the bilateral forum.)

Does the end of inspections have any real impact on the balance of power? If Russia proceeded to load up its missiles with as many warheads as they can carry, would that matter? Not really. Each side has more than enough bombs and warheads to destroy all the targets it might need to destroy in the event of nuclear war. In other words, each side has more than enough to deter the other side from starting a nuclear war in the first place.

Still, arms races are propelled, in large part, by uncertainty and fear. One purpose of arms-control treaties, over the decades, has been to limit that uncertainty and, therefore, suppress the pressures for an arms race. Without the full certainty provided by on-site inspections, senior military officers, conservative intelligence analysts, and arms lobbyists could lay out “worst-case scenarios”—stipulating, for example, that Russia is fully loading its missiles and perhaps covertly deploying additional missiles as well. They could then argue that the U.S. must respond in kind, if just to avoid the “perception” of inferiority. It would be stupid to do this; even if the Russians did enlarge their nuclear arsenal, it wouldn’t mean we need to waste our money, too.

Still, we probably would. Back in the 1970s, the Pentagon declared that, as a matter of policy, the United States had to maintain the “perception” of parity with Moscow in its nuclear arsenal, even if precise equality was objectively unimportant. And this policy has remained in place.

The worst-case scenario syndrome is already beginning to take hold. In response to Russia’s cancellation of the bilateral meeting to discuss future inspections, the State Department declared, in a report last month, that the U.S. “cannot certify the Russian Federation to be in compliance with the terms of the New START Treaty.” In response to that, Rep. Mike Rogers, the new Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, stated that the senior U.S. military leadership “needs to assume Russia has or will be breaching New START caps.”

It is a fair guess that Rogers and some of those U.S. military officers will soon propose that we breach the New START caps as well. In any case, Putin and his generals will assume that we will do so. In the 1950s and ’60s, before the era of nuclear arms-control treaties, both sides engaged in worst-case analysis—and built up their nuclear arsenals accordingly. Unless both leaders exercise some restraint, we could see a return to those dark days.

It is dumbfounding that Putin has unleashed this provocation. He must know that Russia’s economy and its military-industrial complex—barely able to sustain a conventional war on their border—are in no shape to engage in a renewed nuclear arms race. He must also know that the United States would likely match whatever steps he might take in this race. @but it’s for VP’s domestic base Congress recently passed a massive increase in the defense budget by a huge bipartisan majority. The budget includes funds to develop new weapons for all three legs of the “nuclear triad”—land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and bombers—and that was before the State Department’s declaration of Russian noncompliance with New START.

Even in gross numbers, Putin could not hope to race ahead. A detailed analysis by the Federation of American Scientists concludes that, if both sides breached New START limits by fully loading their missiles and bombers, the United States could increase its arsenal of long-range nuclear warheads and bombs from 1,670 to 3,570, while Russia could increase its arsenal from 1,674 to 2,629.

Then again, Putin has made several dumbfounding moves in the past year. It’s not out of the question that he could make another, however self-destructive it might be.

Again, none of this needs to happen. The U.S. and Russia are in a state of implacable mutual hostility. That isn’t likely to change as long as Putin remains in power and Russian troops remain in Ukraine. But the two countries do have a few common interests, one of which is the prevention of a new nuclear arms race. In his otherwise hostile speech, Putin did stress (he even repeated the point) that he was “not withdrawing from the treaty,” adding, “There is no connection between the New START issue and, let’s say, the Ukrainian conflict and other hostile actions of the West against our country.” This was a mendacious way of putting the matter (it’s entirely about Ukraine, and the U.S. has refrained from many hostile actions it might have taken against Russia), but it was also an indication that he’s not ready to go so far as violate the treaty.

On Feb. 3, 2021, just two weeks after Biden’s inauguration, he and Putin renewed New START for another five years without clamor, controversy, or discussion of any other issues. (The treaty was otherwise about to expire.) The accord will remain in effect—unless one side or the other declares it null and void—until February 2026. Between now and then, we can only hope that, on this topic, even if not on any other, both sides refrain from plunging into the depths of paranoia.

ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN – From GUK

WHEN PUTIN’S PROPAGANDISTS ARE PARTYING AT THE GRAMMYS, IT’S TIME FOR TOUGHER SANCTIONS

By Andriy Yermak Wed 22 Feb 2023 07.00 EST

Russian pop stars may not be political titans, but the world must not allow the Kremlin to wriggle through any loopholes

· Andriy Yermak is head of the Office of the Ukrainian Presidency

Earlier this month, media from across the globe were training their cameras on the Grammy awards to catch a glimpse of Beyoncé, Adele and Sam Smith. But for the people of Ukraine, the pleasure of watching the cream of music talent perform the biggest hits of the year was spoiled by the presence of Philipp Kirkorov, a Russian pop star often described as “Putin’s favourite singer”.

In Kyiv, we know Kirkorov well. In June 2021 we designated him as “a threat to Ukraine’s national security” and he was banned from entering our country after he spoke in support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Last month, we added him to our list of Russian propagandists who are subject to personal sanctions for their support of Russia’s warmongering. He had reportedly been asking his audiences to stand up and clap for the “heroes”, Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

Now, here was Kirkorov preening openly at the Grammys, posting selfie videos on social media. A few days earlier he had dinner with Engelbert Humperdinck in Los Angeles and visited Las Vegas to watch an Adele concert. How could such a man be freely wandering the US? How is he able to party at a time when so many Ukrainians are fighting for their lives?

Sadly, Kirkorov is no isolated case. On the first day of Paris fashion week last month, Dior was criticised for inviting Yana Rudkovskaya, a Russian TV presenter and influencer who we also sanctioned over ties to the Kremlin.

We have long believed that a key weapon in the fight against Kremlin aggression is an international sanctions regime that weakens the Russian economy, reduces its military potency and targets the gang of criminals who run their country.

We are grateful to the international community for the sanctions they have already imposed. But sanctions can only be effective if they close loopholes, deny exceptions and block gaps. Russia is desperately looking for ways to escape its isolation. Every success, however minor, is seen by the Kremlin as a victory.

Of course, pop stars and influencers are not political or military titans. But they do represent a broader problem of both constructing and maintaining a sanctions regime that applies lasting pressure on the Kremlin. We have had great success so far in stretching the Russian budget, which is running a huge deficit. But the Kremlin works ceaselessly to dodge our restrictions. It has already found a replacement for western cargo shipping and insurers, is building new supply routes through Asia and Africa, and we believe may even be resorting to mineral and diamond smuggling to raise new funds. If the sanctions regime has holes, Russia will be sure to wriggle through them.

We believe that the current sanctions coalition has proved effective, but we also believe it is capable of more. The anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine falls on 24 February, and we are happy that the EU will mark it with a new sanctions package, which we hope will cover some of the most worrying gaps.

Perhaps the most urgent of those concerns is Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear energy provider, which has long been active in EU markets. We have reason to believe that Rosatom may be supplying components to the Russian arms industry. We believe it has also been party to the Kremlin’s reckless and inexcusable strikes on Ukrainian nuclear facilities. Yet no punitive measures have been applied to Rosatom. Another urgent financial priority should be the banishment of Russian banks from the Swift international payment system.

We would also like to see a tougher approach to the barbarians who cheer on Russian atrocities from comfortable boltholes in Europe and elsewhere. Russian propagandists aid the aggressor. They are complicit in the crimes of the regime.

We note that Russian individuals who have found themselves sanctioned are increasingly trying to challenge those sanctions in court. Those who despise democracy are once again trying to turn its strength into weakness. The fact that they and their loved ones enjoy the benefits of the European rule of law while fanning hatred for its values is the real injustice.

The EU’s visa policy for Russians should be as strict as possible. Kremlin propagandists and families of military personnel fighting in Ukraine should not be allowed to stay in the EU. Their visas should be cancelled, if necessary.

This war is not only for the future of Ukraine. It is a war for civilised values and ideas. The aggressor needs to understand that he can never win. Appropriately, one could take the lyrics of Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning song to sum up Ukraine’s defiant message to Russia “You won’t break my soul, you won’t.”

ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN – From GUK

PUTIN AIMING TO DIVIDE US PUBLIC OPINION WITH NUCLEAR TREATY PULLOUT, EXPERTS SAY

Russian president accused of ‘playing to rifts in the United States’ by raising specter of nuclear war between Moscow and west

Ed Pilkington and J Oliver Conroy in New York Wed 22 Feb 2023 05.00 EST

Vladimir Putin’s threat to suspend Russian participation in New Start, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with the US, represents a blatant attempt to divide American opinion over the war on Ukraine by raising the specter of nuclear armageddon, experts and policymakers warned on Tuesday.

Putin announced his intention to halt participation in the agreement towards the end of a belligerent 100-minute speech in which he charged the US and western powers with trying to inflict “strategic defeat” on Russia. His fiery rhetoric prompted instant reaction across the political spectrum in Washington.

Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was a Russian specialist at the White House National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, told the Guardian that Putin was “playing to the rifts in the United States”. The strategy was to increase political discord in an attempt to embolden calls for an end to US support for Ukraine.

“It’s playing to all those people who want Ukraine to surrender and capitulate to avoid a massive nuclear exchange and world war three, a kind of nuclear armageddon,” she said.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is eyeing a 2024 presidential run, told Fox News that “an open-ended blank cheque [for Ukraine] is unacceptable”. He compared Biden’s staunch support for Ukraine unfavorably with his approach to immigration at the Mexican border.

“I and many Americans are thinking to ourselves, OK, he’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world, [but] he’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home.”

New Start was negotiated under the Obama presidency in 2010 and renewed for five years in February 2021. It was designed to ensure strategic stability between the US and Russia, which hold 90% of the world’s total number of nuclear warheads.

The practical implications of Putin’s threatened suspension are likely to be debated in Washington over the coming weeks. It is unlikely in the short term to change much on the ground, Graham pointed out, given that the treaty had already begun to unravel before the Russian president’s speech.

Last month the state department accused Russia of breaking its monitoring obligations by refusing to allow US inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities.

Graham warned though that it will now be all but impossible to replace New Start once the treaty expires in February 2026. “We are looking at the final demise of the arms control architecture that was built up starting in the 1960s based largely on bilateral relations between the US and the Soviet Union and then Russia. We will have a much more difficult and complex environment to deal with.”

Russia experts expressed relief that the Kremlin had stopped short of withdrawing from the treaty altogether. “This does not signify that Putin is planning to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine anytime soon,” said Suzanne Loftus, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

But Loftus added that the longer-term prospects of nuclear stability were “ominous”. She said: “We’re losing the progress we’ve made on non-proliferation, even during the cold war.”

Putin’s audacious move puts the ball back in Washington’s court. Advocacy groups pressing for nuclear threat reduction urged the Biden administration to show restraint even in the face of the latest provocation.

“The goal here, as we see it, is to get Russia back into New Start, because the treaty serves the national interests of both countries,” said Emma Belcher, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington and San Francisco-based funding organization devoted to reducing nuclear risk.

Belcher praised the way that Biden had so far refused to rise to Putin’s bait. In his speech to mark the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine in Warsaw on Tuesday, the US president pointedly declined to refer to his Russian counterpart’s threat to suspend participation.

Such restraint should continue to be the Biden administration’s response, Belcher said. “What the US should avoid is to use Putin’s statement to justify increasing its own nuclear arsenal – that would merely move the clock back.”

Christopher Chivvis, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gave a more sombre assessment of the impact on US policy. Putin’s move would make it more difficult for the US to monitor Russia’s nuclear forces and how they were deployed, he said, and a growing lack of clarity about Russia’s nuclear actions would in turn darken the mood in Washington.

Chivvis said: “It will very likely drive Washington toward a more conservative, more hawkish, approach to the US’s own nuclear arsenal – just to err on the safe side.”

The result, Chivvis suggested, could be exactly the arms-race dynamics the New Start treaty was intended to prevent. The US and Russia would, he said, likely now increase spending on their nuclear arms, which is not what anyone – Russia included – would logically want.

Such a gloomy prognosis makes Hill’s warning that Putin was attempting to provoke rifts within American opinion all the more disconcerting. “Unity is extraordinarily important at this moment on the domestic front, because it determines our own ability to respond,” Hill said.

“Putin is looking for any cracks. We need to be united as Americans, and resist the temptation to play silly politics over this.”

Trump himself refused to condemn his “genius” comrade’s war crimes and has been releasing videos warning of coming nuclear war.

ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – From Democracy Now

AS PUTIN SUSPENDS NEW START TREATY, IS THERE STILL HOPE FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT?

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

GUESTS

· Ira Helfand

former president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, member of the international steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, as well as the co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

· International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

· International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

· Physicians for Social Responsibility

Russian President Vladmir Putin’s announcement that Moscow would suspend its participation in the New START treaty threatens to end the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. Putin made the pledge during his annual State of the Nation address on Tuesday, when he accused Western nations of provoking the conflict in Ukraine. The treaty limits the U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapon stockpiles and gives each country opportunities to inspect the other’s nuclear sites. Russia says it will continue to respect the caps established by the treaty, but that it will no longer allow inspections. For more on the treaty and the wider challenge of nuclear proliferation, we speak with Dr. Ira Helfand, a longtime advocate for nuclear disarmament, who says the need to end nuclear weapons “transcends” all other issues between the U.S. and Russia. “If we don’t get rid of nuclear weapons, they’re going to be used. And if they’re used, nothing else that we’re doing is going to make any difference,” says Helfand. He is the former president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, a member of the steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, as well as the co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Moscow would suspend its participation in the New START treaty, the last nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. ”START” is shorthand for “Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.” Putin made the pledge during his annual State of the Nation address on Tuesday in Moscow, when he accused Western nations of provoking the conflict in Ukraine. He said Russia is fighting for its very existence.

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] They can’t be stupid people. They want to deliver us a strategic defeat while sneaking into our strategic nuclear objectives. Regarding this, I have to say that Russia suspends its participation in the New START treaty. Let me repeat: Russia does not abandon the treaty but suspends its participation in it. Before resuming the discussion about this treaty, we must first understand: What do such countries of the North Atlantic alliance as France and Great Britain aspire to? And how will we take their strategic nuclear arsenals into account?

AMY GOODMAN: The treaty places a cap on the U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapon stockpiles and gives each nation opportunities to inspect the other’s nuclear sites. Shortly after Putin spoke, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow would continue to respect the caps established by the treaty.

We’re joined now by Dr. Ira Helfand, the immediate past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. He’s also a member of the international steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, as well as the co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Dr. Helfand, thanks so much for joining us. Talk about the significance of Putin saying that he’s — well, they’re suspending involvement in START. What does this mean?

DR. IRA HELFAND: Good morning, Amy.

Well, you know, it [inaudible] dialogue between the United States and Russia on the critically important topic of controlling nuclear weapons. And there’s no way around that. Having said that, I think there are a couple of things that are important to recognize. One is that the New START treaty, while somewhat useful, is a very limited document and very inadequate treaty. It still allows the United States and Russia to maintain — and they do — 3,100 strategic nuclear weapons, ranging in size from 100 kilotons to 800 kilotons. That is six to 50 times more powerful than the bombs which destroyed Hiroshima.

Now, a study that was published last August showed that if those weapons still allowed under the New START treaty were used in a war, they would cause 150 million tons of soot to be blasted into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun and dropping temperatures across the planet an average of 18 degrees Fahrenheit. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia, the temperatures would drop 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. In the ensuing famine, something like three-quarters of the human race, between 5 billion and 6 billion people, would die. If that’s not bad enough, the same study showed that even a very small fraction of those arsenals would cause worldwide catastrophe. Only 250 of the smallest weapons in the strategic arsenal, 100 kilotons, would still generate enough soot to trigger a famine that would kill 2.1 billion people and end civilization as we know it.

That means that this treaty allows both the United States and Russia to maintain arsenals which are capable of destroying modern civilization six times over. So, it’s bad that Russia is suspending its participation, but we need to understand that this treaty itself is deeply flawed, and we need to go far beyond it and establish a treaty like the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which actually bans and eliminates these weapons.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Dr. Helfand, I wanted to ask you in terms of where we’re heading now in terms of arms control, given the fact that first the Bush administration withdrew from one treaty, then the Trump administration withdrew from the Intermediate Forces Treaty, and now Putin’s suspension of Russia’s participation in this treaty. What’s the message that these governments are sending to the people of the world?

DR. IRA HELFAND: Well, they’re sending a message that they’re not serious about their obligations to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. They’re moving in exactly the wrong direction.

And it’s important for us to recognize that in response to the Russian decision to suspend participation, there are options open to the U.S. government. And there’s one in particular which we should be sure not to take, and that is to respond by withdrawing ourselves or, more importantly, by building more nuclear weapons. Now, the Russians have indicated that they do not intend to exceed the cap that was established. But even if they do, there is no reason for the United States to build more nuclear weapons. As I mentioned, we already have the ability to destroy modern civilization six times over. Adding to that the ability to destroy civilization eight times or 10 times or 12 times over does nothing to enhance our security.

We need to establish as U.S. policy that nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to our security. They don’t make us safe. And we need to actively pursue an agreement with the other eight nuclear-armed countries to eliminate all nuclear weapons, as is called for by the Back from the Brink campaign here in the United States.

And many people, I think, feel that this is a difficult time to be talking about progress towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, given what’s going on. And indeed this is an extraordinarily dangerous moment. But we have to remember that at times in the past when we have been close to nuclear conflict, as we are now, in the aftermath of those crises, rapid progress was made to improve the situation. You know, in 1983, the United States was threatening to fight and win a nuclear war in Europe. We placed missiles in West Germany to be able to do that. We almost went to war with the Soviet Union twice in 1983. And yet, less than a year and half later, Reagan and Gorbachev were able to proclaim that nuclear war must never be fought, it can never be won. And it was a complete reversal of the nuclear policy of both the United States and the Soviet Union. The leaders had emerged from the crisis in 1983 sobered, frightened by what they had almost done, and open to a new way of thinking about nuclear weapons. And it is possible — not certain, but possible — that we will see the same kind of reaction to this current extremely dangerous moment. And we citizens need to push our government to seize the potential opportunity and to move forward.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask you — in terms of some of the words of Putin yesterday, the Western media doesn’t really pay much attention to the actual content of his speech — of his speeches. But one part I’d like to quote to you and get your reaction. He said, quote, “In early February, the North Atlantic alliance made a statement with actual demand to Russia, as they put it, to return to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, including admission of inspections to our nuclear defense facilities. I don’t even know what to call this. It is a kind of theater of the absurd,” he said. “We know the West is directly involved in the Kyiv regime’s attempt to strike at our strategic aviation bases. The drones used for this purpose were equipped and updated with the assistance of NATO specialists. And now they want to inspect our defense facilities? In the current conditions of confrontation, it simply sounds insane.” That was Putin talking about the fact that these treaties assume a certain level of cooperation between the different countries, and, obviously, the war in Ukraine does not make that possible.

DR. IRA HELFAND: Well, I think right at the moment it is very difficult to have that degree of cooperation. But still, there’s no reason for Putin to suspend cooperation and the inspections. These inspections are very important in maintaining a level of confidence on both sides — the U.S. and the Russian — that the other side is adhering to this treaty. And anything that undermines this dialogue, which Putin’s decision has done, is a step in the wrong direction.

Look, there are problems with the position of both countries in many issues, but the need to abolish nuclear weapons transcends all of these problems. If we don’t get rid of nuclear weapons, they’re going to be used. And if they’re used, nothing else that we’re doing is going to make any difference.

You know, here in the United States, we have the opportunity to affect what our government does. And we need to hold our government accountable for its nuclear policy. We have the ability to change that policy. Congressman Jim McGovern and Congressman Earl Blumenauer have introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.Res.77, which calls on the United States to embrace the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to make the elimination of nuclear weapons the centerpiece of our national security policy and to begin negotiations now with the other eight nuclear-armed states for a verifiable, enforceable, time-bound agreement to get rid of their nuclear weapons.

That’s what the U.S. should be doing right now. It has to acknowledge what is happening in Ukraine, the war that President Putin has started there, but that should not derail our efforts to save the planet. We should sit down with all of these countries, including the Russians, if they’re willing to do it, and begin these negotiations.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the nuclear power plants in Ukraine — you know, they’ve got Zaporizhzhia, for example, which is the largest nuclear plant in all of Europe — and the risks of being in the middle of a war zone with a nuclear catastrophe.

DR. IRA HELFAND: No, this is a very dangerous situation, Amy. Nuclear power plants are dangerous, inherently, in the best of times. They are certainly not designed to be placed in the middle of a war zone. And should there be an accident at Zaporizhzhia, should the plant come under direct attack again, there is a potential for a catastrophic release of radiation. Much larger inventories of nuclear material are present at Zaporizhzhia than were present at Chernobyl. And this is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

In the short term, a demilitarized zone needs to be created around this power plant. All troops have to be withdrawn. International observers need to be placed there to make sure that the plant is safe. In the long term, I think we need to rethink the entire wisdom of having any nuclear power plants, given this, what are the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities that have been illustrated by this conflict in Ukraine.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Ira Helfand, we want to thank you so much for being with us, immediate past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY – From

@find and include

ATTACHMENT TWENTY ONE – From the Heritage Foundation

RUSSIA’S NEW START BREACH MEANS U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS MODERNIZATION IS A MUST

By Patty-Jane Geller Feb 21, 2023

Patty-Jane is a senior policy analyst for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at The Heritage Foundation.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Moscow once again has shown its total disregard for international security commitments.

If Russia continues to ignore its obligations under New START, the U.S. will need to be prepared to compete in an environment without arms control.

Arms control is not an end in itself, and maintaining strong nuclear deterrence should remain the United States’ number one goal.

Russia is certainly consistent. It violated the INF Treaty. It violated the Open Skies Treaty. And now, the State Department reports, it is in non-compliance with the New START agreement—the very last arms control treaty in place.

When U.S. President Joe Biden took office, he agreed to extend New START through 2026 despite its flaws. While New START limits the total number of warheads the U.S. and Russia can deploy on their strategic launchers, it does not limit Russia’s growing stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons, nor its new and novel capabilities such as nuclear-armed hypersonic weapons and the Poseidon underwater drone.

Even with these advantages, Moscow once again has shown its total disregard for international security commitments. By failing to convene a Bilateral Consultative Commission—a forum to discuss issues related to treaty implementation—and refusing to allow required inspections of its nuclear forces, it leaves the State Department with no confidence that Moscow has remained within the New START limit of no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads throughout 2022.

This is an unacceptable state of affairs, one that puts U.S. national security at risk. If Russia can pick and choose which aspects of a treaty it can follow, it defeats the purpose of having a rules-based agreement.

>>> China Surpasses U.S. in Nuclear Missile Launchers; U.S. Unprepared to Deter Growing Threat

It gets worse. While the State Department assessed that Russia did not go significantly over the treaty warhead limits, Russia’s non-compliance could be the first step toward a serious material violation.

Russian non-compliance highlights the need for the U.S. to double down on its efforts to recapitalize its nuclear forces. The U.S. currently plans to deploy modern nuclear capabilities, like the Sentinel missile and Long Range Standoff weapon, around the end of the decade.

But if Russia continues to ignore its obligations under New START, the U.S. will need to be prepared to compete in an environment without arms control.

In particular, the Biden administration should work with Congress to identify ways to accelerate nuclear modernization timelines. This can include increasing funding for nuclear programs, including the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile.

Last year, Congress appropriated just $45 million to continue research and development for the missile and its accompanying warhead. This year, Congress should provide at least $400 million to move this program into development and field it by the end of the decade.

Moreover, last year Congress required the Pentagon to consider assigning these nuclear programs a DX acquisition rating—designating them as highest-priority. Congress could take this further, mandating the DX rating and taking additional steps to separate nuclear modernization programs from the traditional cumbersome acquisition bureaucracy.

The White House should also work with Congress to identify ways to improve the flexibility and resilience of the U.S. nuclear enterprise in order to better hedge against a nuclear threat environment that—as demonstrated by Russia’s willingness to flout arms control—can rapidly change.

>>> It’s Time To Consider Our Nuclear Forces

It’s possible that Russia is refusing to comply with New START to punish the U.S. for its support of Ukraine. Or perhaps Moscow hopes to gain concessions in exchange for returning to compliance.

Or, it may be trying to gain an advantage over the United States in future negotiations for a follow-on agreement to New START.

Indeed, Russia has expressed its interest in both preserving New START and negotiating a follow-on agreement. But the U.S. should not budge an inch.

Instead, the administration should communicate that Russia’s continued unfaithfulness only makes it an increasingly unattractive partner for any arms control pact.

Arms control can certainly provide an important tool for maintaining nuclear stability, and the U.S. should reserve this option for times when it can contribute to national security. But arms control is not an end in itself, and maintaining strong nuclear deterrence should remain the United States’ number one goal.

Russia should understand that, as well.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY TWO – From Fox News

PUTIN PROMISES TO BUILD UP RUSSIA'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL AFTER BACKING OUT OF NEW START TREATY WITH US

Putin says Russia's Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile system is combat ready

By Chris Pandolfo Published February 23, 2023 3:04pm EST

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that he will strengthen Russia's nuclear forces, announcing that his military is prepared to deploy a new intercontinental ballistic missile system with hypersonic missiles and new nuclear submarines.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches its one-year anniversary, Putin has declared that Russia will pull back from the New START treaty negotiated with the United States, signaling his intention to ramp up the country's nuclear armaments. In a speech commemorating Defender of the Fatherland Day, a Russian holiday that honors the country's armed forces, Putin said Russia will continue to "focus on strengthening the nuclear triad."

He said the new RS-28 Sarmat liquid-fueled missile, also called "Satan 2," is ready for combat deployment after a years-long delay. The "nuclear triad" refers to missiles based on land, sea and in the air.

"This year, the first Sarmat missile system launchers with the new heavy missile will be put on combat duty," Putin announced. "We will continue full production of the Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic systems and begin mass deployment of Tsirkon sea-launched hypersonic missiles."

On Tuesday, Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in the New START treaty, which caps the number of nuclear armaments each country can possess at 1,550 warheads deployed on delivery systems like intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missile or heavy bombers.

He also threatened to resume testing nuclear weapons if Western nations do not cease their aid to Ukraine, which is suffering under a brutal Russian invasion. Putin has characterized the conflict as an attempt by Russia to defend itself from encroaching Western powers and asserted that neo-Nazi forces have "taken root in Ukraine."

Russia's Sarmat missile is 35 meters long (nearly 115 feet), has a range of 18,000 km (about 11,000 miles) and is able to carry at least 10 multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles — each with a nuclear warhead — that can be aimed at different targets, Reuters reported.

Putin also noted the completion of a new nuclear-powered submarine called "Emperor Alexander III," which is now operational in the Russian navy.

"With the Borei-A nuclear-powered submarine Emperor Alexander III becoming operational in the navy, the share of modern weapons and equipment in the naval strategic nuclear forces will reach 100 percent," Putin said. "In the coming years, three more cruisers from this project will be delivered to the navy."

Launched in late December, the Emperor Alexander III is the seventh Borei-A class submarine, which can carry 16 Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Putin also reaffirmed Russia's commitment to developing "modern and efficient" conventional forces, relying on combat experience to "pursue balanced and high-quality development of all components of the armed forces" and "improve the system for training units."

"We will continue to supply advanced equipment to our troops, including new strike systems, reconnaissance and communications equipment, drones and artillery systems," Putin said. "Our industry is quickly increasing the production of the entire range of conventional weapons and preparing for mass production of advanced models of equipment for the army and navy as well as the aerospace forces."

ATTACHMENT TWENTY THREE – From CBS

RUSSIAN TEST LAUNCH OF "SATAN II" MISSILE FAILED, U.S. SAYS, AS PUTIN SUSPENDS ROLE IN NUCLEAR TREATY

FEBRUARY 22, 2023 / 2:27 PM / CBS NEWS

Russia's parliament rushed Wednesday to approve a move announced the previous day by President Vladimir Putin, all but finalizing the end of Russia's participation in the New START arms control treaty — the last pact between the world's biggest nuclear powers regulating their atomic arsenals. Russia's "suspension" of its participation in the treaty came as it emerged that Moscow had tried but apparently failed to conduct a new test launch of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile.

A U.S. official told CBS News that Russia carried out a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile on February 18, which failed. That launch came just two days before Mr. Biden arrived for an unannounced visit in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Moscow notified Washington of the launch in advance, as required under New START, American officials said, adding that the U.S. did not view the test as "a surprise" or as a threat to the United States.

The failed missile launch is believed to have been of the massive RS-28 Sarmat missile, known as the "Satan II" in the West. The Sarmat, one of Russia's next-generation nuclear capable missiles, tips the scales at over 200 tons and can carry multiple warheads, with a total estimated payload of 10 tons.

Putin has referred to it as part of Russia's new "invincible" weapons arsenal, due to a short initial boost phase that would make it difficult for enemy surveillance systems to track.

The Russian leader boasted of a successful Sarmat II test launch in April 2022, several weeks after the invasion of Ukraine began, but made no mention of the latest failed test firing during his Tuesday speech.

"This truly unique weapon will strengthen the combat potential of our armed forces, reliably ensure Russia's security from external threats and make those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country, think twice," Putin said on Russian TV after the April launch.

Putin has made multiple thinly-veiled nuclear threats against Kyiv and the West during recent anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian speeches, sparking concern that he could be contemplating use of smaller-scale tactical nuclear weapons on the eastern Ukrainian battlefield, if not strategic weapons, such as his nuclear-capable ICBMs.

Putin's announcement that Russia was halting participation in the New START pact, which limits the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads Russia and the U.S. can deploy, was the final note in his otherwise long but relatively unnewsworthy state of the nation address Tuesday, which took place a few hours before President Biden took the stage in Warsaw to give a speech reiterating Western support for Ukraine.

Putin blamed Washington for the complete "deterioration" of the U.S.-Russia relationship. The Russian leader said, however, that Russia was not completely pulling out of the New START treaty, but he ordered his subordinates to be prepared to resume conducting nuclear weapons tests "if the U.S. does it first."

Mr. Biden on Wednesday called it a "big mistake" for Russia to suspend its participation in the treaty, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned it as "deeply unfortunate and irresponsible."

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FOUR – From USA Today

NUCLEAR WARFARE? CHINA ARMING RUSSIA? FEARS OF NEW COLD WAR RISE.

By Maureen Groppe

WASHINGTON – Moscow suspending a nuclear arms treaty. The possibility of China arming the Russian military.

Even as the U.S. and its allies celebrated this week that Russia has been thwarted thus far in its attempt to take over Ukraine, certain developments could have repercussions far beyond whether Kyiv stays standing.

If the last remaining arms treaty between the world’s two largest nuclear powers collapses, there will be no limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces for the first time since the 1970s. The risks of a nuclear launch – intentional or otherwise – would rise.

“A world without nuclear arms control is a far more dangerous and unstable one,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

And if China turns its economic and diplomatic support for Russia into full-blown military assistance, it would be a major change in how China has approached foreign policy, supercharging the already high tensions between the U.S. and China and making the world more dangerous.

Here’s what you need to know:

What did Russia do?

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday he is suspending Moscow’s participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms reduction deal between the U.S. and Russia. It limits the number of long-range nuclear warheads Russia and the U.S. can have, including those that can reach the U.S. in about 30 minutes.

What’s the concern?

Without arms control, the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals could double in size, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Each nation could dramatically and quickly increase the number of nuclear weapons ready to launch on short notice, said Hans M. Kristensen, director of the federation’s Nuclear Information Project.

“Such an increase would be extraordinarily destabilizing and dangerous, especially with a full-scale war raging in Europe and Russia buckling under the strain of unprecedented sanctions,” Kristensen wrote last year.

Is it time to panic?

No. Putin hasn’t yet pulled the plug on the treaty.

He’s said Russia won’t participate in the inspections and other mechanisms to enforce the limits on nuclear weapons. But the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow would respect the treaty’s weapons caps. And there’s no sign that Putin will suddenly produce new weapons, according to Joe Cirincione, an arms control expert and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Cirincione thinks Putin is raising the nuclear specter to scare away Ukraine’s allies.

“He understands that he’s losing this war,” Cirincione said on MSNBC. "He has to convince Western publics that they risk nuclear war by continuing to aid Ukraine.”

Hasn’t Putin done this before

Yes. Putin ordered Russian nuclear forces on high combat alert shorty after invading Ukraine last February. In December, he said Russia would continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of nuclear weapons that can be fired from land, air and sea.

Even if Putin’s latest move is a gambit, said Ben Rhodes, who was a top national security adviser to President Barack Obama, “it does just point to the fact that we’re in this kind of period of escalation with Russia where we don’t quite know where it’s going to end.”

What’s going on with China?

Since the invasion, China has helped Russia economically buy buying its oil and gas. China has also sold Russia drones, microchips and other technologies that have both commercial and military applications. But Beijing hasn’t allowed Russia to buy ammunition, artillery, armed drones and other weapons.

That could change. Top Biden administration officials warned this week they have intelligence suggesting China is considering providing lethal support to Russia.

In response, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman accused the U.S. of “chasing shadows and smearing China.”

But while the White House hasn’t made its evidence public, the warnings are reminiscent of the administration’s pre-invasion intelligence of Putin’s plans.

What could make China directly aid Russia?

The war in Ukraine has in many ways been good for China, said Hart of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It’s made Russia more reliant on China and has distracted the U.S. – China’s main rival. But China doesn’t want Russia, its most powerful partner on the global stage, to be severely weekend by the war.

“Overall, Beijing’s alignment with Russia is first and foremost fueled by collective concerns about the United States and competing with the United Sates. The more you have direct competition between Beijing and Washington, the more you’re going to see a willingness for Beijing to strengthen ties with Moscow,” he said. “That’s the triangle that their facing.”

How would the U.S. react?

The Biden administration has warned of “severe consequences” if China helps Russia replenish its military supplies.

“We’ll not hesitate to target Chinese companies or individuals that violate our sanctions,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price.

China’s economy is already struggling. But major sanctions against China – which is a much bigger economic player than Russia – would also have blowback effects on the U.S. and other nations.

What would it mean for the geopolitical order?

China’s direct involvement would mark a huge shift in its approach to foreign policy, one so shocking that China expert Oriana Skylar Mastro said she would “have to rethink everything I know about China.”

China has looked at the U.S.’s foreign military interventions as expensive endeavors that haven’t made the U.S. more powerful. They’ve taken a different approach.

“I would be much less concerned about what it means for Ukraine and much more concerned about what it means for the world if we’re dealing with a China now that engages in intervention and foreign conflicts, which is a key thing that they have argued for decades and decades is the reason for the U.S. decline, is a stupid thing to do, something that they would never do,” she said.

But if China does make that radical shift said Mastro, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Stanford University, it would “absolutely” make the world a more dangerous place.

While China makes it harder for the U.S. to coerce autocrats by not, for example, joining in sanctions, she said, “that’s very different from them actively providing support.”

A new Cold War?

Tensions have been rising with China, which the U.S. considers its biggest strategic and economic competitor. Even before the Biden administration shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina this month, the nations have clashed over Taiwan, technology, human rights, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other issues.

The Biden administration has been trying to stabilize the relationship, building what it’s called “guardrails” as it normalizes interaction. But that may become increasingly difficult.

“We have to make sure that the competition that we're clearly engaged in does not veer into conflict, into a new Cold War,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” when discussing the new threat. “It's not in our interest. I won't speak to theirs, but it's not in ours.”

In a vaguely worded proposal China released Friday calling for peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, it also called for an end to “Cold War mentality” — China’s standard term for what it regards as U.S. hegemony, and maintenance of alliances such as NATO.

Contributing: Associated Press

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FIVE – From Guardian U.K.

HOW WILL THE WAR IN UKRAINE DEVELOP DURING 2023? OUR PANEL LOOK AHEAD

One thing seems certain: the conflict isn’t going to end soon. But how can Ukraine win? And what is the feeling within Russia?

By Emma Ashford, Timothy Garton Ash, Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan, Sevim Dağdelen, Frank Ledwidge and Andriy Yermak Fri 24 Feb 2023 01.00 EST

Emma Ashford: Ukraine has done well, but time and US politics may not be on its side

During the last year, questions of timing – how quickly or efficiently policy initiatives or weapons programmes would work – were often put aside under intense pressure to arm Ukraine as quickly as possible. And most states shared the common goal of enabling Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian onslaught.

Today, however, thoughts are turning towards the longer-term prospects of the combatants, shaped by the gradual realisation that this conflict could potentially last years. Unfortunately, divergent interests among the western coalition will become more pronounced. Ukraine – and the eastern European countries closest to Russia’s borders – may @must! be willing to sustain the war for several more years. Western European states, however, may be wary of extending the conflict and its concentrated economic costs into a second winter if military gains aren’t forthcoming..

Public dissatisfaction in the United States and parts of Europe will grow as the war drags on, even as the provision of advanced weaponry and training to Ukraine will take time to produce effects on the battlefield. Ukraine has successfully protected its sovereignty, reclaimed at least some of its territory, and demonstrated that it will not submit to being a Russian vassal. For the US, however, the growing costs and the risks of escalation posed by continued conflict almost certainly outweigh the benefits from continued incremental territorial gains.

This is the source of growing dissatisfaction reflected in polls of the American public: 40% of Republicans now say they believe the US is doing too much in the conflict. The war is likely to become a political football in the early phases of the 2024 US presidential election campaign, especially for Republican presidential hopefuls. In short, time is probably not on Ukraine’s side, at least when it comes to the mismatch between political time horizons and military gains.

· Emma Ashford is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy programme at the Stimson Center, Washington DC, and the author of Oil, the State and War

Timothy Garton Ash: A Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring could turn the tide of the war

Having just spent a week in Kyiv, it’s very clear to me that this spring and summer will potentially be make-or-break time for Ukrainian victory. At the moment, Russia still has the strategic initiative in the east, while Ukraine is running dangerously low on ammunition for its post-Soviet weaponry.

But a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring, using new brigades equipped and trained in the west, could turn the tide. If the Ukrainian armed forces manage to push south from the Zaporizhzhia region to the Sea of Azov, they could split the Russian occupying forces in two and potentially threaten Crimea. There is obviously a higher risk associated with that course, but also a bigger opportunity for getting to peace. This, and not a long grinding war in the east, is the best chance for Ukraine to put itself in a position to negotiate from strength.

As I heard Ukrainian leaders repeatedly stress, both in Kyiv and at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, speed is of the essence. If western military and economic support comes too slowly, time will work for Vladimir Putin. This is one of the very few things that the British government has got right in recent times. But it needs this sense of urgency, and a genuine commitment to Ukrainian victory, to be shared by both the United States and other major European powers. Here one must have some doubts. Pushing for increased support to enable a swift Ukrainian reconquest of large parts of its territory is not just a moral or emotional argument. It’s a strategic understanding that Ukrainian victories on the battlefield are the precondition for reaching a lasting peace.

· Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His latest book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, is published next week

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan: Russians are preparing for a long war – and switching to survival mode

This war is going to last for a very long time – that feeling dawned on Russians at the end of 2022. Most of those who wanted to leave the country have already left. The rest, the thinking part of the population, will try to adjust to the circumstances in a state where even children are subject to compulsory propaganda in schools.

In 2023, the added feeling will be fear of those who enthusiastically went to war and now are getting back. Many will be angry and frustrated, and capable of further violence.

People will switch to a quiet survival strategy – something familiar to Russians who remember the Soviet Union. There will be an exodus into domestic life, to quiet conversations in kitchens, to a habit of being cautious about what you say publicly and on the phone or on social media. In short, keeping one’s head down.

The body bags arriving in Russian cities and towns will not add to sympathy for the plight of Ukrainians. This country always had trouble being connected to the global world, underlined by the centuries-old national psychosis about where Russia belongs – Asia or Europe. Now, with connections to the west severed for many years to come, the question is partly answered.

This combination of depression and alienation was probably close to what was felt by Germans in the second year of the first world war, or Iraqis during a very long, brutal and senseless war with Iran. But there is a difference: a connection to the global world, and the truth about the war, is still there, thanks to the internet and Russian journalists in exile, who have an audience of millions in the country.

· Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Russian investigative journalists and authors of The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad

Sevim Dağdelen: With the war at a stalemate, we must reopen negotiations for peace

In the year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in violation of international law, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and an estimated 8,000 civilians have been killed. The war in Ukraine has turned into a proxy war between the US and Nato, on one side, and Russia on the other. While Nato and its allies are engaged in economic warfare and the massive delivery of ever heavier weapons to Kiev, the vast majority of countries around the world are not taking sides.

According to the US general and chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, the war is currently at a stalemate. This should be used as an opportunity to freeze the conflict. There now needs to be massive social pressure on western governments to turn away from the logic of military escalation and toward diplomacy. The west bears a high degree of responsibility for escalating this war, and there is the ever-present threat of direct involvement. To stop this madness, we need an immediate ceasefire without preconditions.

The initiatives launched by Brazil’s President Lula, the Vatican and China point in the right direction. And the Black Sea grain initiative and continuing prisoner exchanges show that agreements are possible. The goal of 2023 must be the resumption of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, as they were reportedly close to a deal last April. Many western backers would apparently rather not support negotiations at all.

We must not wait any longer. Negoatiations should begin, and the senseless economic war, which mainly affects the populations in Europe and the global south, must be stopped.

· Sevim Dağdelen is a Member of the German Bundestag for Die Linke

Frank Ledwidge: Ukraine is now armed, but the real military test in 2023 is its training

Over the last year, emphasis has been placed upon the provision of equipment: artillery, missile systems, tanks and now jets. This was and is entirely right. In a war of attrition such as this, Ukraine needs to replace and augment worn out, damaged or destroyed equipment with new and better kit. In addition, Ukraine is forming new brigades with which it intends to achieve significant breakthroughs later this year to retake territory.

But superior equipment and morale will only take you so far. Ukraine has taken fearful casualties in the past year. At least 100,000, including in their best and most experienced units. Training is essential, especially for the kind of combined arms mechanised warfare – soldiers, tanks and artillery working in unison – the Ukrainians need to master if they are to defeat Russia.

Western countries are stepping up, with Britain alone aiming to prepare up to 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers a year for combat. But current efforts are insufficient, with perhaps only 10% of Ukrainian forces trained so far. Nato must make training its continuing main effort. This will ensure that Ukraine will be able to unlock the combat potential in its newly equipped brigades, achieve a significant victory this year, and defend itself into the future.

· Frank Ledwidge is a barrister and former military officer who has served in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan

Andriy Yermak: Ukraine believes this conflict will shape the 21st century

When Russia invaded my country, its leadership was surprised at the unity of Ukraine and its western allies. The Kremlin believed its army could march up to Kyiv in a matter of days. The Kremlin was wrong.

Ukraine and its people stand on the frontline of a conflict that will shape the 21st century, just as the first and second world wars carved out the history of the previous 100 years. Believe me when I say that our fight is your fight. Our lives lost will become your lives lost if Ukraine does not prevail.

The Russian leadership understands only power. The more aggressive and comprehensive the western response, the more quickly this war will end.

· Andriy Yermak is head of the Office of the Ukrainian Presidency

ATTACHMENT TWENTY SIX – From Al Jazeera

NUCLEAR WAR NO CLOSER DESPITE TREATY MOVE, RUSSIAN OFFICIAL SAYS

Despite its decision to suspend participation in the New START arms reduction treaty, Russia says it will keep abiding by its restrictions.

Published On 22 Feb 202322 Feb 2023

Moscow’s decision to suspend its participation in the New START arms reduction treaty with the United States does not increase the risk of a nuclear conflict, Russia’s deputy foreign minister says.

Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday it would be up to Russian President Vladimir Putin to determine whether Moscow could return to the pact, Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

His comments came after Putin announced on Tuesday he is freezing Moscow’s participation in the treaty, raising fears the nearly yearlong conflict in Ukraine could yet escalate into a global nuclear war.

But Ryabkov poured cold water on those concerns.

“I do not believe the decision to suspend the New START Treaty brings us closer to nuclear war,” he said.

The agreement is the last major pillar of post-Cold War nuclear arms control between Russia and the US, and limits their strategic nuclear arsenals.

Russia’s foreign and defence ministries have said Moscow will continue abiding by the restrictions outlined in New START on the number of nuclear warheads it can deploy and the number of nuclear missile carriers.

But Washington lamented Putin’s move nonetheless, with US President Joe Biden on Wednesday calling it a “big mistake” as he headed into a meeting with leaders of NATO’s eastern flank in Warsaw.

Russia, China eye ‘deeper’ ties

The meeting in the Polish capital came as China pledged to deepen cooperation with Russia, highlighting growing geopolitical tensions as the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches.

Making the highest-level visit to Russia by a Chinese official since the countries signed a “no limits” partnership weeks before Moscow launched its attack, top diplomat Wang Li told Putin that Beijing is ready to enhance ties.

Atime of crisis required Russia and China “to continuously deepen our comprehensive strategic partnership“, Wang said during a meeting at the Kremlin.

Putin, for his part, said he was looking forward to a visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming months and a deeper partnership with Beijing.

The meeting between China’s top diplomat Wang Li (left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) came after the US said earlier this week that China is weighing supplying weapons and ammunition to Russia [Sputnik/Anton Novoderezhkin via Reuters]

‘Responsible power’

Xi is expected to make a “peace speech” on Friday – exactly a year since tens of thousands of Russian troops funneled into Ukraine from the north, south and east. Kyiv says there can be no talk of peace while Moscow’s forces remain in the country.

Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, reporting from Beijing, said China is keen to “project itself forward as a mediator and responsible power”.

“It gets stable access to cheap oil and gas, it gets a peaceful northern border, and [it gets] a friend in its corner to counterweigh the US and US allies.”

Meanwhile, European Union countries failed to agree on new sanctions against Russia meant to be in place for the one-year anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on Friday, diplomatic sources in Brussels said.

The proposed package features trade curbs worth more than 10 billion euros ($10.6bn), according to the bloc’s chief executive, and also includes a ban on EU imports of Russian rubber.

Putin hails ‘heroic’ Russian troops

Later on Wednesday, Putin delivered a second combative speech in as many days to a patriotic concert at a Moscow sports arena aimed at rallying public support for Russia’s bloody offensive.

He hailed Russian troops as “heroic” and said they were fighting for the country’s “historic frontiers” and to protect its “interests, people, culture, language and territory”.

“When we are together we have no equal,” Putin shouted to enthusiastic crowds at the Glory to Defenders of the Fatherland event, held on the eve of Russia’s February 23 holiday celebrating those who serve in the armed forces.

Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid, reporting from Moscow, said Putin had been keen to emphasise that Russia stands “united and steadfast” in the face of sweeping Western sanctions and military support for Ukraine.

“This has been the theme [from Putin] in the last 24 hours … that the Western alliance has not been able to break Russia,” he said, citing the Russian president’s lengthy state-of-the-nation address on Tuesday.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY SEVEN – From Salt Wire (Canada)

ANALYSIS-NUCLEAR RISK SEEN RISING AS PUTIN UNPICKS LAST TREATY WITH U.S.

By Mark Trevelyan Feb. 21, 2023, 1:02 p.m. | Updated: Feb. 21, 2023, 1:02 p.m. | 4 Min

LONDON (Reuters) - The last remaining treaty that limits Russian and U.S. nuclear weapons was already in grave peril before President Vladimir Putin announced on Tuesday that Moscow was suspending its participation.

Now it may be beyond repair, raising the risk of a new arms race - in parallel with the war in Ukraine - in which neither side can rely on the stable, predictable framework that successive nuclear accords have provided for more than 50 years.

Security analysts said that could hugely complicate the delicate calculus that underpins mutual deterrence between the two countries, while also spurring other powers such as China, India and Pakistan to build up their nuclear arsenals.

In a major speech almost a year after his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said Russia was not abandoning the New START treaty - the agreement signed in 2010 that limits the number of Russian and U.S. deployed strategic nuclear warheads.

But nuclear experts noted the treaty contains no provision for either side to "suspend" its participation, as he said Moscow was doing - they only have the option to withdraw.

Putin said Russia would only resume discussion once French and British nuclear weapons were also taken into account - a condition the analysts said was a non-starter, as it was opposed by Washington and would require a complete rewriting of the treaty.

"They've already made the calculation the treaty will die. The effort will be to pin the actual loss on the United States," he said in an telephone interview.

The treaty effectively limits the number of warheads per missile that either side can deploy, so its demise could instantly multiply the warhead count several times over, Alberque added.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia has an estimated 5,977 nuclear warheads in total, while the United States has 5,428.

"Both sides could immediately go from 1,550 deployed strategic warheads to 4,000 - that could happen overnight," Alberque said.

That is potentially destabilising because it creates a "use or lose" dilemma in which dense concentrations of the opponent's warheads present more attractive targets, he said.

"HUGE INSTABILITY"

Putin justified the Russian move by saying it was "absurd" for the United States to demand the right to inspect Russian nuclear sites, as the treaty allows, while NATO was helping Ukraine to attack them.

He was apparently referring to what Russia says were Ukrainian strikes in December on its Engels airfield near Saratov, 730 km (450 miles) southeast of Moscow, where Russian strategic bomber planes are based. Putin said, without providing evidence, that NATO specialists had "equipped and modernized" drones to conduct the attacks.

Ukraine has followed a policy of not publicly claiming responsibility for attacks on Russian soil.

James Cameron, a post-doctoral fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project, said that if New START was abandoned, it would mark a return to Cold War-style guesswork about the adversary's capabilities and intentions.

"So you have a huge instability in the relationship where both sides are acting on the worst-case scenario, adding ever more elaborate systems and plans for their use, and that ultimately leads to a much more unstable situation between the two sides and also greater risk of some kind of nuclear use," he said in a telephone interview.

Both analysts said it was concerning that Putin had flagged the possibility that Russia might resume testing of nuclear weapons, even though he said Moscow would not take that step unless Washington did so first.

They said that could pave the way for Putin to accuse Washington of conducting or preparing a test in order to justify one of his own.

If he did, it would be Moscow's first since 1990, the year before the breakup of the USSR. Alberque noted that the United States and the Soviet Union had used nuclear tests during the Cold War "to signal to each other when they were mad".

Cameron said any Russian test would also be seen as a rung on the ladder of escalation in Ukraine and "an attempt to signal greater readiness to use nuclear weapons" in the context of the war. In the 12 months since the invasion, Putin has repeatedly reminded the West that Russia has weapons of mass destruction and has extended its nuclear umbrella to areas of Ukraine that Moscow has seized and now claims as its territory.

In the event that New START collapsed, or the two sides failed to renew it before it expires in February 2026, it would mark the end of more than half a century of arms control pacts between the two sides, and send a signal to other existing and would-be nuclear powers.

"What would that tell the Indians and Pakistanis, what would China do?" Alberque said. "This could be much more dangerous than the Cold War because you could have many more players racing up to higher numbers, and that would be terrible for global security."

ATTACHMENT TWENTY EIGHT – From the Moscow Times

RUSSIA DEMANDS U.S. WITHDRAW ‘SOLDIERS AND EQUIPMENT’ FROM UKRAINE

Feb. 21, 2023

The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador on Tuesday over what it called “Washington’s expanding involvement” in the war in Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reported.

The Foreign Ministry served a notice to the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy, accusing Washington of supplying weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine as well as sharing information on Russia’s military and civilian infrastructure with Kyiv.

“In this regard, the ambassador has been informed of the counter-productivity of the current aggressive U.S. course,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.

The ministry also demanded the U.S. withdraw "soldiers and equipment" from Ukraine — a reference to Western military assistance to the country.

"It was noted in particular that in order to de-escalate the situation, Washington should take steps to ensure the withdrawal of U.S.-NATO soldiers and equipment and also stop its anti-Russian activities," the ministry added.

The move comes just a day after U.S. President Joe Biden made a trip to Kyiv, promising $500 million in fresh arms deliveries to Ukraine ahead of the first anniversary of the Russian invasion.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed on Tuesday to press on with Russia’s military campaign in the country and said that further Western arms deliveries to Ukraine would provoke a Russian response.

"The more long-range Western systems are delivered into Ukraine, the further we'll have to push the threat from our borders," Putin said in an address to both houses of parliament in Moscow.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY NINE – From the Guardian U.K.

FOR YEARS, PUTIN DIDN’T INVADE UKRAINE. WHAT MADE HIM FINALLY SNAP IN 2022?

This war is Russia’s fault. But European nations rebuffing Russia during the noughties did not help

By Anatol Lieven Fri 24 Feb 2023 10.43 EST

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and try to capture Kyiv in February 2022, and not years earlier? Moscow has always wanted to dominate Ukraine, and Putin has given the reasons for this in his speeches and writings. Why then did he not try to take all or most of the country after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, rather than only annexing Crimea, and giving limited, semi-covert help to separatists in the Donbas?

On Friday’s one-year anniversary of Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, it is worth thinking about precisely how we got to this point – and where things might be going.

Indeed, Russian hardliners spent years criticising their leader for not invading sooner. In 2014, the Ukrainian army was hopelessly weak; in Viktor Yanukovych, the Russians had a pro-Russian, democratically elected Ukrainian president; and incidents like the killing of pro-Russian demonstrators in Odesa provided a good pretext for action.

The reason for Putin’s past restraint lies in what was a core part of Russian strategy dating back to the 1990s: trying to wedge more distance between Europe and the United States, and ultimately to create a new security order in Europe with Russia as a full partner and respected power. It was always clear that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would destroy any hope of rapprochement with the western Europeans, driving them for the foreseeable future into the arms of the US. Simultaneously, such a move would leave Russia diplomatically isolated and dangerously dependent on China.

This Russian strategy was correctly seen as an attempt to split the west, and cement a Russian sphere of influence in the states of the former Soviet Union. However, having a European security order with Russia at the table would also have removed the risk of a Russian attack on Nato, the EU, and most likely, Ukraine; and allowed Moscow to exert a looser influence over its neighbours – closer perhaps to the present approach of the US to Central America – rather than gripping them tightly. It was an approach that had roots in Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea – welcomed in the west at the time – of a “common European home”.

At one time, Putin subscribed to this idea. He wrote in 2012 that: “Russia is an inseparable, organic part of Greater Europe, of the wider European civilisation. Our citizens feel themselves to be Europeans.” This vision has now been abandoned in favour of the concept of Russia as a separate “Eurasian civilisation”.

Between 1999, when Putin came to power, and 2020, when Biden was elected president of the US, this Russian strategy experienced severe disappointments, but also enough encouraging signs from Paris and Berlin to keep it alive.

The most systematic Russian attempt to negotiate a new European security order came with the interim presidency of Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012. With Putin’s approval, he proposed a European security treaty that would have frozen Nato enlargement, effectively ensured the neutrality of Ukraine and other states, and institutionalised consultation on equal terms between Russia and leading western countries. But western states barely even pretended to take these proposals seriously.

In 2014, it appears to have been Chancellor Angela Merkel’s warnings of “massive damage” to Russia and German-Russian relations that persuaded Putin to call a halt to the advance of the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. In return, Germany refused to arm Ukraine, and with France, brokered the Minsk 2 agreement, whereby the Donbas would return to Ukraine as an autonomous territory.

In 2016, Russian hopes of a split between western Europe and the United States were revived by the election of Donald Trump – not because of any specific policy, rather because of the strong hostility that he provoked in Europe. But Biden’s election brought the US administration and west European establishments back together again. These years also saw Ukraine refuse to guarantee autonomy for the Donbas, and western failure to put any pressure on Kyiv to do so.

This was accompanied by other developments that made Putin decide to bring matters concerning Ukraine to a head. These included the US-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership of November 2021, which held out the prospect of Ukraine becoming a heavily armed US ally in all but name, while continuing to threaten to retake the Donbas by force.

In recent months, the German and French leaders in 2015, Merkel and François Hollande, have declared that the Minsk 2 agreement on Donbas autonomy was only a manoeuvre on their part to allow the Ukrainians the time to build up their armed forces. This is what Russian hardliners always believed, and by 2022, Putin himself seems to have come to the same conclusion.

Nonetheless, almost until the eve of invasion, Putin continued unsuccessfully to press the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in particular to support a treaty of neutrality for Ukraine and negotiate directly with the separatist leaders in the Donbas. We cannot, of course, say for sure if this would have led Putin to call off the invasion; but since it would have opened up a deep split between Paris and Washington, such a move by Macron might well have revived in Putin’s mind the old and deeply held Russian strategy of trying to divide the west and forge agreement with France and Germany.

Putin now seems to agree fully with Russian hardline nationalists that no western government can be trusted, and that the west as a whole is implacably hostile to Russia. He remains, however, vulnerable to attack from those same hardliners, both because of the deep incompetence with which the invasion was conducted, and because their charge that he was previously naive about the hopes of rapprochement with Europe appears to have been completely vindicated.

It is from this side, not the Russian liberals, that the greatest threat to his rule now comes; and of course this makes it even more difficult for Putin to seek any peace that does not have some appearance, at least, of Russian victory.

Meanwhile, the Russian invasion and its accompanying atrocities have destroyed whatever genuine sympathy for Russia existed in the French and German establishments. A peaceful and consensual security order in Europe looks very far away. But while Putin and his criminal invasion of Ukraine are chiefly responsible for this, we should also recognise that western and central Europeans also did far too little to try to keep Gorbachev’s dream of a common European home alive.

· Anatol Lieven is director of the Eurasia programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

ATTACHMENT THIRTY – From The Associated Press

WAGNER OWNER BLASTS ‘TREASON’ OF RUSSIAN MILITARY CHIEFS

February 21, 2023

The owner of the Russian private military company Wagner accused Russia’s defense minister and chief of general staff on Tuesday of starving his fighters in Ukraine of ammunition, which he said amounts to an attempt to “destroy” the force.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a millionaire with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in an emotional audio statement released through his spokespeople that “direct resistance” from the Russian military “is nothing other than an attempt to destroy Wagner.”

Emotional statements from Prigozhin and his fighters highlighted long-brewing tensions between the Russian military and Wagner, which has unclear legal status because Russian law prohibits private military companies.

Prigozhin said in a raised voice that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov are handing out orders “left and right” not to supply Wagner with ammunition and or air transport. The company has been involved in heavy fighting in the east of Ukraine.

This “can be likened to high treason in the very moment when Wagner is fighting for Bakhmut, losing hundreds of its fighters every day,” Prigozhin said.

His claims could not be independently verified.

In a statement, Russia’s Ministry of Defense denied “excited declarations” that ammunition had been held up for volunteers in “assault detachments” fighting around Bakhmut, and said priority had been given to making sure those groups were well equipped. The ministry did not identify whose declarations it was responding to.

It concluded: “Attempts to create a split in the tightknit machinery of cooperation and support between subdivisions of the Russian forces are counterproductive and only benefit the enemy.”

The millionaire Prigozhin and his fighters have been alleging for weeks that the military doesn’t provide them with enough ammunition. Wagner’s push to take over Bakhmut, a city in Ukraine’s partially occupied eastern Donetsk region, has stalled and turned into a grinding battle.

Prigozhin also has repeatedly accused Russia’s top military brass in recent months of incompetence. He has raised his public profile, issuing daily statements that boast about Wagner’s purported victories and mock his opponents.

His criticism, however, appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Last month, Putin reaffirmed his trust in Gerasimov by putting him in direct charge of Russian forces in Ukraine, a move that some observers also interpreted as an attempt to cut Prigozhin down to size.

On Tuesday, in his long-anticipated state-of-the-nation address, Putin profusely thanked his military, but he made no mention of Wagner.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY ONE – From GUK

PUTIN HAS UNLEASHED PRIVATE ARMIES ON UKRAINE – AND A MAN WHO COULD BECOME A DANGEROUS RIVAL

Is Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the notorious Wagner group, a Kremlin-sanctioned bogeyman or a real threat to the president?

By Samantha de Bendern Mon 13 Feb 2023 01.00 EST

The rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch, Putin confidant and head of the notorious Wagner private military company, is a sign of the erosion of the rule of law in Russia. It shows that the state is willing to tolerate extreme, unaccountable violence as long as it serves its interests. This could ultimately become a threat to the regime itself.

Prigozhin is a private citizen who was previously a restaurant magnate – known as “Putin’s chef” due to the president’s patronage of his restaurants and catering firms. But at some point in 2014, he co-founded the Wagner Group along with former Russian military personnel, and has since become a major player in Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.

In the last few months he has taken on prerogatives normally reserved for senior government officials or the president himself. And yet he has no official legal function either in the government or the military – and the Wagner company itself is technically illegal as private military companies are outlawed in Russia.

When Prigozhin began recruiting for soldiers in Russian prisons in the late summer of 2022, offering them a pardon in exchange for six months’ service in Ukraine, Russian lawmakers were unable to explain on what legal basis he was operating. Under Russian law, only the president can pardon convicted felons, and freeing them before the end of their term requires a drawn-out legal process. However, in late January, after the first batch of Wagner convict soldiers were sent back into society as free men, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that the pardons were completely legal, but that some decrees were kept secret.

Many assume that the Kremlin allows Prigozhin to operate in a legal shadowland so that it can wash its hands of Wagner’s actions should they become too extreme. An unofficial army offers the regular army an opportunity to deny responsibility for excessive losses in men or territory, or in an instance where it faces allegations of war crimes in the field. This implies a parallel army, ready to accept its role as a subordinate or scapegoat.

Prigozhin, however, has shown signs that he won’t accept a purely subordinate role. He openly criticises and challenges state officials, including top generals. And the ministry of defence and Wagner have openly contradicted each other in claiming responsibility for recent Russian gains in Donbas. Prigozhin recently announced he was no longer recruiting in prisons. Although he claims that this is because he now has enough men, it could be a sign that the defence ministry is trying to clip his wings.

Prigozhin recently asked the Russian parliament to introduce changes to the law to make criticism of his convict soldiers illegal. The Duma speaker responded by asking the parliamentary security and defence committee to study the question. If the requested changes are made, this could seriously complicate the prosecution of former convict soldiers for any new crimes. By giving such a free rein to Prigozhin, the Kremlin is creating a state-sanctioned culture of criminal violence.

Even before last year’s invasion of Ukraine, Wagner had a reputation for summary murders, rape and extreme violence. A dire recent example of this was the filmed sledgehammer killing of a Wagner deserter from Ukraine, who had been returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange. Prigozhin praised the killing and Peskov stated that the murder was not government business. When the state openly accepts that it no longer holds the monopoly of the use of force, it is sending one of two messages: state and criminal violence have blurred into one, or else it is no longer in control.

Other private armies are also on the rise. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu’s private army, Patriot, has been operating in Ukraine since 2014, and oligarch Gennady Timchenko’s private army, Redut, originally created to protect his company’s gas field, is also present in Ukraine. Not to mention the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s army. On 7 February the gas giant Gazprom announced it was creating its own private military company.

Wagner is the most prominent, with an estimated 50,000 members operating in Ukraine alone, and the only one led by an operator who is behaving more and more like someone seeking real political influence; Prigozhin, indeed, is sometimes touted as a successor to Putin. In one of his latest video appearances, he addresses the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, from the cockpit of an Su-24 fighter-bomber, challenging him to a duel in the skies in exchange for territory in Ukraine. This suggests that Prigozhin not only considers himself a peer of Zelenskiy, but has scant regard for diplomatic protocol in international relations, under which only another head of state should address his or her counterpart directly.

I have spoken, off the record, to a former KGB officer and a Russian oligarch, who both maintain that Prigozhin is intentionally hyped up as a bogeyman, to be presented to Russian audiences who fantasise about regime change. The warning is clear: if Putin goes, things could be worse.

Whether or not Prigozhin is a puppet whose strings can be cut at Putin’s will is ultimately irrelevant. Criminal violence is now tolerated and is becoming institutionalised in Russia. For now, Putin still seems to be in control. But by delegating the use of force to non-state actors, he is giving them a taste of power that could become unmanageable the day the regime shows signs of weakness. The world needs to be prepared for the chaos that will ensue.

· Samantha de Bendern is an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House and a political commentator on LCI television in France

ATTACHMENT THIRTY TWO – From Vox

THE LAST US-RUSSIA ARMS CONTROL TREATY IS IN BIG TROUBLE

Vladimir Putin is suspending New START amid Ukraine war tensions.

By Jen Kirby Feb 25, 2023, 6:30am EST

The last standing nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States is in deep danger.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week that Russia was “suspending” its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which limits the number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons for each country. Putin made the announcement in a speech marking the first year of his war in Ukraine, and he effectively tied his decision to the conflict, saying Washington wants “to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities.”

Putin’s decision is a distressing signal not just for New START but for global arms control and nonproliferation more broadly. Russia and the United States have the world’s largest nuclear weapons arsenals, and a pact like New START should serve as a safeguard during moments of tension, rather than a tool in a geopolitical standoff.

New START specifically caps the number of long-range missiles each country can deploy to 1,550 and allows for a maximum of 700 long-range missiles and bombers.

Russia has said it is going to continue to follow the limits set out by New START — in other words, according to Moscow, it’s not going to amass more warheads. But beyond the nuke limits, New START has formal mechanisms for data-sharing and verification — including inspections — which gave both the US and Russia transparency into what the other was doing, and brought stability and predictability to the nuclear relationship. The Biden administration renewed the pact with Russia in 2021, but the agreement is set to expire in 2026 unless a new deal can be negotiated. The prospects for a new agreement were already pretty grim, even before the Ukraine war poisoned US-Russia relations even further.

And Russia had been gumming up the pact even before Putin’s announcement this week. Inspections were paused during the pandemic, but Russia has continued to block them, most recently claiming that US sanctions are preventing Russian officials from conducting checks. (The US State Department says that’s not true.) Russia also bailed on technical talks, linking that to the US’s weapons support for Ukraine.

Russia’s so-called suspension isn’t actually a legal possibility under the treaty — but, then again, this isn’t exactly a good faith effort. Instead, Putin is trying to use New START as a bargaining chip in the Ukraine war. It’s another way for him “to impose costs or risks on the United States and the West, basically, saying: ‘We know you value this arms control treaty, but if you continue supporting Ukraine the way you are, you can say goodbye to that treaty’ — or he’s at least kind of hinting at the possibility that that could happen down the road,” said Nicholas Miller, nonproliferation expert and associate professor of government at Dartmouth University.

Putin has also used nuclear threats during the Ukraine war. The suspension of New START follows that playbook — an attempt to raise fears in the West about what Russia might do — in an effort to force the US and its partners to back off their support for Ukraine.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Russia’s decision “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible,” but made it clear that the US wants to engage with Russia on arms control at any time, “irrespective of anything else going on in the world or in our relationship.”

In the past, Washington and Moscow have tried to separate talks on strategic nuclear arms from other issues, even if the rest of the relationship was a mess. That seems much less of a possibility now, which is troubling for the US and Russia — and the entire world.

What happens if New START stops?

New START is the last of the bilateral arms control pacts between Washington and Moscow, as the rest of the architecture built from the Cold War onward unravels. New START was negotiated in the early years of the Obama administration, and officially went into force in February 2011. The treaty was set to expire in February 2021, but President Joe Biden and Putin agreed to extend it for five years, until February 2026, its current termination date.

Putin has put the existing New START in jeopardy. The prospects of a follow-on treaty, however, were already pretty precarious even before the Ukraine war and Putin’s New START decision. “The pathway that we’re on is no different, but the slope is steeper,” said Amy Woolf, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former specialist on nuclear weapons at the Congressional Research Service.

The arms control agenda between Washington and Moscow has been stalled for some time; Russia and the US want different things. Also, any new New START would need to be approved by the US Senate with a two-thirds majority, and good luck with that in the current US political environment.

Both the US and Moscow had been chipping away at the arms control regime in recent years. The Trump administration withdrew from agreements, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and the Open Skies Treaty, which allowed for unarmed reconnaissance flights. The US had valid claims of Russian noncompliance, but both ended and left a vacuum behind. Some experts worry that this is Putin’s current modus operandi around New START: don’t comply, trample on the treaty, and force the US to withdraw, allowing Putin to blame Washington for tearing up the pact.

So far, the United States’ tack has been to say they’re disappointed in Moscow but still open to finding a way out of this jam. Exactly what that means for the treaty going forward is unclear, but the most immediate risk is that both sides get a lot less clarity about what the other is doing with their nuclear arsenal. And we’ll know if that concern materializes pretty soon: The treaty calls for a biannual data exchange, and the next one is due March 1.

But even beyond that, New START provides both sides updates about what the other is doing — for example, if someone’s conducting a test or the US moves a missile out of a silo for repairs, it has to notify Russia about it. “Over time, that gives the Russians a great 24/7 view of the status and US Strategic Force posture,” Gottemoeller said. “That’s important for their security, it’s important for their stability; they understand exactly what’s going on in the US strategic nuclear arsenal.”

The same is true for the United States, of course. Once those updates don’t happen, the US and Russia will likely have to use other means to verify nuke limits. That is time-consuming, probably not as accurate (although New START allows both parties to use “national technical means” — like satellites — to verify information, and neither party is supposed to interfere with those), and also much more expensive. New START is “cost-saving,” said Jessica Rogers, impact fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. “You can use those resources for other things, or for other defense purposes.”

Without that information, the pressure could grow on both sides to build up the nuclear arsenals.

“Confidence in what’s going on in the Russian force will degrade. The voices arguing for an expansion of the US force because of what Russia is doing and what China’s doing will grow louder. And Russia will see what we’re doing and their voices to expand will grow louder,” said Woolf. “It’s a cascading effect over time — it’s not a concern that next week will pop out with an extra 1,000 warheads. That’s not going to happen.”

Experts caution that a buildup by Russia is probably not an immediate threat. That takes time and money, and Russia has a lot going on. Again, at least for now, Putin has said that Russia will not increase its strategic nuclear arsenal beyond the current New START limits.

But even if an arms race isn’t an urgent worry, the potential for an arms free-for-all exists — not just between the US and Russia, but also China and other nuclear powers. Putin’s weakening of New START starts this process, and the treaty expiring might accelerate it.

“If 2026 rolls around and there’s no replacement, then there is a possibility that each country could substantially upload more nuclear weapons,” said Shannon Bugos, senior policy analyst at the Arms Control Association.

A grim moment for global arms control, in a series of tough moments

A renewed and unrestrained arms race is not an inevitable conclusion, but as the arms control regime erodes, the greater the risk becomes over time.

And if that happens now, it is not a reprise of the Cold War, with two superpowers, Russia and the United States, locked in competition. It is a much more multipolar world. Iran is inching closer to enriching weapons-grade uranium (something facilitated by the US throwing out the Iran Nuclear Deal). Even US allies like South Korea are more publicly debating getting nuclear weapons, worried about the threat from North Korea’s program.

But most critically, China, another superpower, is also in the mix. Beijing’s strategic nuclear arsenal is still far below either the US or Russia’s, but it is likely trying to build closer to their levels over the next decades — strategic nuclear arms levels currently fenced in by New START. If Russia and the US throw off the remaining restraints, it removes some of the incentive for China (who has been reluctant to engage bilaterally or multilaterally on arms control), or anyone else, to follow suit.

And once countries start down an arms-race path, it is hard to get off the ride. Trust is broken, and getting any agreement on arms control is much harder if tensions among parties are high. Once you invest in building up a nuclear arsenal, it’s not easy to shift, and it’s not cheap to dismantle nuclear warheads, either. And even if you’re a country that thinks some 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons is enough for your defense, sitting out an arms race with an adversary is a pretty hard sell when it comes to domestic politics.

Again, this is not happening at this moment, but chipping away at pacts like New START make that all the more possible. And often it takes a near-catastrophe — say, a Cuban missile crisis — for countries to acknowledge it’s in their national security interest to do arms control.

If anything, the Ukraine war should prove the need for Russia and the US to sit down on strategic arms, no matter what else. After all, that’s the point of these kinds of arms control treaties: They are supposed to provide guardrails when geopolitics are at a fever pitch because they help maintain a level of mutual trust and transparency that protects against miscalculation. They restrain powers when the impulse would be the opposite.

Which is also what’s so dangerous about Putin’s New START tactics. He is explicitly linking it to the US’s support for Ukraine in the war, which as Rogers pointed out, imperils not just arms control but international law more broadly.

Putin isn’t the only president who’s used treaties as a form of politics, but it adds to an alarming norm. By wielding New START as a cudgel, Putin is trying to escalate the nuclear risk, and get the US and the West to reverse their backing for Ukraine. That ultimately makes the conflict more dangerous, adding uncertainty and even more mistrust — this time around weapons of mass destruction.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY THREE – From DW.com

WHAT DOES MOSCOW WANT WITH MOLDOVA?

Western support for Moldova is growing as the country rejects Russian political meddling. While it may be small, Ukraine’s western neighbor is of strategic importance in the war.

By Keno Verseck

It was a remarkable gesture by Joe Biden. The US president asked his Moldovan counterpart Maia Sandu to attend a meeting with representatives of the nine central and southeastern European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) in Warsaw on February 21, even though her country is not yet even seeking membership.

During a speech, Biden addressed Sandu directly: "I am proud to stand with you and the freedom-loving Moldovan people," he said. "Give her a round of applause."

His actions underscore a serious situation. Wedged between Ukraine and northwestern Romania, the Republic of Moldova has long feared Russian aggression, with military threats from Moscow taking on an increasingly belligerent tone lately.

What is all this saber-rattling about? Why has tiny Moldova, with its population of just 3.5 million, become a topic of increasing interest as the war next door rages on?

Transnistria's strategic importance

Since Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, Transnistria has become more strategically important than ever before. Not only could Russia open a western front in Ukraine from there, but it could also foment domestic chaos in Moldova, creating a crisis on NATO's southeastern external border.

Smuggling routes blocked

The separatist forces in Transnistria would likely have an interest in such a scenario. In recent decades, they have financed themselves, among other things, with massive smuggling operations that also ran through Ukrainian territory. Since the beginning of the war, however, Ukraine has sealed off the border with Transnistria, which now faces economic collapse.

Sandu and her pro-European government took a cautious stance of solidarity with Ukraine after the war began, with an eye toward avoiding confrontation with Moscow. But the EU candidate country has sought closer ties to the West since the fall, when Moscow continued to cut gas supplies to Moldova and supported opposition parties in their attempts to destabilize the domestic political situation.

An end to neutrality?

Moldova has therefore begun sourcing its energy supply from countries other than Russia at a rapid pace. There is now also open discussion about whether to change the its neutrality status, which is enshrined in the constitution. An upgrade to the virtually unarmed Moldovan military, which received its first Piranha armored vehicles from Germany a few weeks ago, is also on the table.

At present, the country could hardly defend itself even against the separatists in Transnistria, who probably have dozens of battle tanks and other heavy military equipment, along with the large stocks of ammunition. Ukraine has therefore offered to provide military assistance if Moscow and the separatists provoke a conflict. But any suggestion that Ukraine is planning a military intervention in Moldova is absurd and at best a pretext for the Kremlin to justify its belligerence. Ukraine can certainly do without committing its military resources to a second front.

One thing that Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved in the region is forcing Moldova to decisively break free of Moscow's stranglehold after three decades of ambivalence. The shift has garnered support beyond symbolic gestures like the one made by Biden in Warsaw: Romania, colloquially known as Moldova's "big brother,” already shares language, culture and a long common history with its small neighbor, and has been offering increasing levels of support in achieving economic independence from Russia.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY FOUR – From Radio Free Europe

'IT COULD BE WORSE': WEAPONS EXPERT COMMENTS ON PUTIN'S SUSPENSION OF NEW START NUCLEAR ARMS TREATY

By Sergei Dobryni February 26, 2023 19:41 GMT

In his address to the nation on February 21, President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining U.S.-Russian arms control pact. Lawmakers approved the decision the following day.

Under the 2010 treaty, each side is limited to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems. The treaty also includes a compliance-monitoring system that comprises on-site inspections.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Moscow’s move “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible.”

RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Sergei Dobrynin spoke with Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher specializing in arms control and disarmament with the UN’s Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, to ask about the role of New START and the significance of Moscow’s decision at a time when tensions between Russia and the West are at historically high levels.

RFE/RL: What restrictions are contained in New START aside from ceilings on the number of delivery systems and warheads?

Pavel Podvig: There is the system of inspections to check compliance with those ceilings. It comprises many components, including a system of data exchanges and a broad system of notifications about changes in the composition of one’s arsenal. When a missile is destroyed or liquidated, the appropriate notification is sent. If I remember correctly, if a missile is redeployed to a new location or if a mobile system leaves its base, notifications are also sent.

I got the impression that the Russian senior leadership’s understanding of how the New START system works...is very approximate and profoundly wrong.

In short, the two sides are constantly exchanging a large volume of information. In addition, of course, there is a system of on-site inspections which enables the sides to verify the accuracy of the notifications that the two sides are exchanging.

And there is one other, very important mechanism -- the bilateral consultative commission, which is convened to settle all issues related to the fulfillment of the agreement, to resolve disagreements, and so on.

Now these mechanisms, apparently, will not be used. No data exchanges, at least on Russia’s part. The work of the bilateral commission will be suspended. On-site inspections will stop. At the same time, according to the Foreign Ministry statement, Russia promised to respect the quantitative limits.

RFE/RL: In explaining the decision to suspend participation in the treaty, Putin said that the Americans are demanding to inspect Russian defense sites but not allowing the Russians to inspect American ones. What did he have in mind?

Podvig: I cannot find the statement that he was citing. Some time ago (January 31, 2023), the United States released a report on compliance with New START and there they wrote that Russia is not fulfilling its obligations regarding the convening of the bilateral commission.

In the treaty, there is a precise timeframe during which the commission must be convened when requested by either side, and Russia did not comply with that. But Putin said something completely different. I got the impression that the Russian senior leadership’s understanding of how the New START system works, how the inspections are set up, and what is subject to inspections is very approximate and profoundly wrong.

RFE/RL: Is it true that Russia refused to allow an inspection last August?

Podvig: It is a complicated story. Inspections and sessions of the commission stopped in the spring of 2020 by mutual agreement because of the pandemic.

In the summer of 2022, it became clear that inspections could resume, but in this case I think the Americans did not read the situation very well. They decided to resume them on a whim, simply sending a notice saying, ‘We are coming to inspect.’

Russia expected that first the commission would convene and then it would discuss resumption. Russia was somewhat offended by the sudden request and, I would say, with reason.

The treaty formally allows sides to exclude sites from inspections in cases such as when there is a flood or some kind of accident. But in this case, Russia declared all of its sites excluded, so the Americans didn’t go.

But at the same time, on the working level, they agreed to convene the commission in Cairo on November 29 and discuss the matter. Russia has already complained about complications getting transit visas, limitations on flights, and so on. But the issues were completely resolvable. Bags were already packed, as far as I know, but then the matter reached the eyes of Russia’s senior political leadership, which concluded what we heard [in Putin’s speech]: Why are we going to talk to the Americans when the situation is like this?

RFE/RL: Does that mean that Putin had already made the decision to suspend the treaty before November 29?

Podvig: Not necessarily. Work continued nonetheless. As I understand it, on the working level, at the level of the Foreign Ministry and the State Department, people were trying to avoid irreversible steps. But things dragged out and when it reached 45 days after the collapse of the Cairo meeting, the Americans announced that Russia was not fulfilling its obligations regarding this particular point of the treaty.

RFE/RL: Is it correct to say that up until that point, both sides knew practically everything about the other’s strategic nuclear arsenals -- the locations of their basing, their maintenance, and production; as well as the number of delivery systems and warheads?

Podvig: Yes, of course. The entire system was created in 1991 and began working in 1994 when the START-1 treaty came into force. All the objects that fall within the scope of the treaty were very well known, and there were no secrets.

RFE/RL: How about the new types of strategic weapons that, if you believe Putin, Russia is developing? Do they also fall within the scope of the treaty?

Podvig: That is a complex question, and these matters have to be discussed within the framework of the consultations mechanism. In the New START accord there is a point that says that, if one side creates any new types of strategic weapons, then the other side has the right to raise the matter at the bilateral commission.

Regarding these new Russian systems, the U.S. raised this issue and a dialogue on them was under way. In the treaty it doesn’t clearly say what comes after such consultations. The Russian position has been that these systems do not fall under the existing treaty, but there was an understanding in principle that if there would be a follow-on treaty, then they might be included.

But it is very important to mention that, even if these weapons were perfected, they would not play a crucial practical role that could affect the strategic balance. What is important here is the willingness of the parties to discuss including them in any new agreement.

RFE/RL: Does the United States have new strategic weapons that the treaty does not cover?

Podvig: To my knowledge, no. When modernizing their forces, they have used a program of one-to-one replacements. That is, land-based ballistic missiles are replaced with land-based ballistic missiles. The only thing that might be considered relevant is a U.S. plan to revive its nuclear-powered, sea-launched cruise-missile program.

At one time the United States had such a system, but they first removed it from submarines and put it into storage and later, around 2014, they destroyed them all.

Now there is the idea that such a system should be recreated in a new form. If I remember correctly, the Biden administration killed this idea, but if they do decide to proceed, it would be outside the scope of New START. But in the overall strategic picture, the role of systems like that is not very significant.

RFE/RL: At present both sides have notably fewer strategic delivery systems than are allowed under the New START treaty. As for warheads, they are closer to the treaty ceilings. If the treaty is renounced, how easy would it be for the two sides to increase their ready arsenals?

Podvig: If we are talking about delivery systems, it would be difficult. I believe the United States could add additional ballistic missiles to its existing submarine fleet. At some point in the past, they reduced them from 24 missiles to 20 and could fairly easily restore the four they took away. Russia does not have any spare delivery capacity. Now there is a program of replacing old missiles with new ones on a one-for-one basis. But there are no extra missiles lying around in storage.

As for warheads, the situation is a bit different, since there are warheads in storage. According to my information, the United States could double the number of its deployed warheads fairly quickly. Its Minuteman missiles are currently deployed with one warhead and could be quickly and easily upgraded to three. The same is true for America’s sea-launched missiles.

We have less information about Russia, but it would seem there are some missiles that are deployed without the maximum number of possible warheads. According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia can increase its number of deployed warheads by 50 percent. But that capability has always existed and was taken into account during the treaty negotiations. And it was determined that it did not present a fundamental danger.

RFE/RL: So are you saying that neither Russia nor the United States was really rushing to deploy as many warheads as possible under the treaty?

Podvig: Exactly. And it isn’t true either that everyone was just sitting around waiting for the treaty to expire. Everyone was reconciled, so to speak, to the idea that each side had 1,500 warheads, and all planning was done on this basis.

There are degrees of bad news, and, in this situation, I think the absence of completely awful news can be considered good news.

That situation could change. The Americans are beginning to look at China and think, ‘We need more.’ I am sure that in America there are already conversations along the lines of, ‘Since we can’t check how many warheads Russia has, we must assume that they are deceiving us and deploying more than is allowed.’

Russia will quickly realize it has lost a tool through which it could show the United States and the whole world that it keeps its promises regarding strategic arms limitations. That tool is now gone and accusations against Russia will undoubtedly come. And when they do, Russia will not be able to respond substantially. In this sense, the decision to suspend the treaty was not properly considered.

RFE/RL: In his speech, Putin practically linked Moscow’s return to New START with the taking into account of the nuclear arsenals of Britain and France. Does that make sense in terms of strategic security or is it a purely political demand?

Podvig: Of course, it would be good if all arsenals were taken into consideration…. But the process of arms control can’t just be reduced to an accounting of who has how many weapons. In the big picture, that doesn’t matter so much. What is important are the agreements and the control mechanisms, and mutual understanding.

The Soviet Union tried to include Britain and France in arms control agreements back in 1968, but everyone understood the political necessity of reaching agreement with the United States. Russia, through the arms control process, was an equal partner with the United States and that was important.

Including other countries into the agreement would be extremely difficult. If Russia insisted on this position, there would be no agreement. The Soviets understood this, and each time was willing to negotiate just with the United States and not pay attention to the others. And that makes sense – the arsenals of Britain and France are not significant.

RFE/RL: Would it be fair to say that suspending New START under the current circumstances is almost the minimal level of escalation possible, and has little practical importance?

Podvig: I would put it this way: It could be worse. I believe arms control and disarmament is a political process that reflects the current state of mutual relations. So there is nothing unexpected in this decision.

On the other hand, Russia stressed that it was suspending the agreement, not withdrawing from it. They said they will not exceed the established ceilings and will continue providing advance notifications of missile launches, which is very important.

Regarding testing, they said they would only resume testing if the United States did so. There are degrees of bad news, and, in this situation, I think the absence of completely awful news can be considered good news.

Translated from Russian by Robert Coalson

Sergei Dobrynin is one of the leading investigative journalists in Russia. He has been instrumental in the production of dozens of in-depth reports, exposing corruption among Russia's political elite and revealing the murky operations behind Kremlin-led secret services. He joined RFE/RL in 2012.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY FIVE – From the Associated Press

PUTIN BESTOWS FRIENDSHIP AWARD ON ACTOR STEVEN SEAGAL

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday bestowed a state decoration on Steven Seagal, the American action-movie actor who also holds Russian citizenship.

The awarding of the Order of Friendship was announced on the Russian government’s internet portal. The order recognizes people who Russia considers to have contributed to bettering international relations.

Seagal was a vocal supporter of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and last year visited the Russian-held Ukrainian town of Olenivka where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were reportedly killed in an attack for which Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other.

Seagal was named in 2018 as a Russian Foreign Ministry humanitarian envoy to the United States and Japan.

Summary of New START limits^[12]
Type	Limit
Deployed missiles and bombers	700
Deployed warheads (RVs and bombers)	1,550
Deployed and non-deployed launchers (missile tubes and bombers)	800

New START treaty strategic arms numbers as of 1 September 2022^[74]
State	Deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers	Warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and nuclear warheads counted for deployed heavy bombers	Deployed and non-deployed launchers of ICBMs and SLBMs, and deployed and non-deployed heavy bombers
Russian Federation	540	1549	759
United States of America	659	1420	800