TTCT – Để hiểu được cuộc xung đột ở Ukraine hiện tại, không thể không nhìn lại một lịch sử rất dài, ít ra là từ những ngày ngay sau cuộc chiến lớn gần nhất ở châu Âu.
Việc mở rộng NATO là một trong những vướng mắc lớn nhất của quan hệ Nga – Mỹ suốt thời gian ông Putin cầm quyền, trải 5 đời tổng thống Mỹ. Ảnh: The New York Times
Ngày 5-3-1946, trong bài phát biểu tại Đại học Westminster, bang Missouri, Mỹ, Thủ tướng Anh Winston Churchill, người kiên định sự nghi kỵ không giới hạn với nhà lãnh đạo Liên Xô Joseph Stalin (ngược lại cũng thế), tuyên bố: “Từ Stettin ở Baltic tới Trieste ở Adriatic, một bức màn sắt đã buông xuống trên khắp lục địa”.
“And yet, just when the climate scientists and governments across the eight Arctic states should be working together to understand and address the climate crisis, Russia’s war on Ukraine has forced the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental group of Arctic states and Arctic Indigenous Peoples, to suspend their joint activities in protest of Russia’s unprovoked aggression.“
The larger reality is that the world has never before been confronted by a genocidal war waged by a man brandishing nuclear weapons.P hotograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty
“We have to call this what it is,” Volodymyr Zelensky said, late last month, a few days after Vladimir Putin had ordered the invasion and conquest of Ukraine. “Russia’s criminal actions against Ukraine show signs of genocide.” President Zelensky, who lost family members during the Holocaust, and who also happens to have a law degree, sounded suitably cautious about invoking genocide, and he called for the International Criminal Court in The Hague to send war-crimes investigators as a first step. But such investigations take years, and rarely result in convictions. (Since the I.C.C. was established in 1998, it has indicted only Africans; and Russia, like the United States, refuses its jurisdiction.) The only court that Zelensky can make his case in for now is the court of global public opinion, where his instincts, drawing on deep wells of courage and conviction, have been unerring. And by the end of the invasion’s second week—with Putin’s indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets intensifying, and the death toll mounting rapidly; with more than two and a half million Ukrainians having fled the country, and millions more under relentless attack in besieged cities and towns; and with no end in sight—Zelensky no longer deferred to outside experts to describe what Ukrainians face in the most absolute terms. “I will appeal directly to the nations of the world if the leaders of the world do not make every effort to stop this war,” he said in a video message on Tuesday. He paused, and looking directly into the camera, added, “This genocide.”
Most of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled abroad in the past weeks have passed through the Lviv train station. Photograph by Andres Gutierrez / Anadolu Agency / Getty
In Lviv, on the western edge of Ukraine, most of the time the war felt very far away. Its shadow appeared, fleetingly, in the beautiful old cavernous Greek Catholic churches throughout the city, where people filled the pews and wept, and the priests, who perform the Byzantine liturgy in Ukrainian, called for God to protect the nation from its enemies; and in the basements and hallways and underground parking garages where people sheltered during the frequent air-raid sirens, most often at night; and in the old city after 8 p.m., when the curfew was approaching and all the many small restaurants and cafés closed; and in the many schools and nonprofits that had been turned into shelters for the people fleeing the bombing in the east of the country; but, still, most of the time, during the fourth week of the war, people in Lviv followed the bloodshed in the same way that everyone else in the world did: on television.
The one place in Lviv where the war was never far away was the train station. Built in the early twentieth century, when Lviv was a cosmopolitan, multiethnic city called Lemberg and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is a grand, attractive building two miles from the old town. It has also been, since the start of the invasion, as the Lviv-based sociologist Alona Liasheva put it to me, “a hell on earth.” It was the westernmost hub of the Ukrainian train system, in a country that still relies primarily on trains; most of the three million people who had fled abroad in the past weeks had passed through it, as did the hundreds of thousands who had fled westward but remained in Ukraine, including in Lviv.
Americans are used to wars against people who don’t so casually speak our language. Zelensky can respond to Russian propaganda by directly addressing the Russian people — in Russian.
Photo illustration by Vanessa Saba
By Keith Gessen
NYtime – Published March 11, 2022Updated March 13, 2022
The thing about the videos from the war in Ukraine in 2014 was that there were very few war videos. It was, at least at first, a small-arms war. Fighting, when it erupted, happened on city streets. As soon as shots were fired, whoever was making the video would put away the phone and run.
The videos that characterized the conflict were not of rifle fire but of protests: riot police beating demonstrators as people shouted, “What are you doing?”; later, young men on the same square, outfitted in motley assortments of helmets and kneepads, counterattacking; videos of people arguing; videos of people being forced, in eastern Ukraine, to get on their knees. After pro-Russian forces took over cities in the east and the Ukrainian Army finally moved to restore its authority, there were videos of pro-Russian protesters trying to prevent tanks from entering their towns. These were the images of a country falling apart.
This week, as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, we revisit this piece by Oliver Bullough from 2018. For decades, politicians have welcomed the super-rich with open arms. Now they’re finally having second thoughts. But is it too late?
Every week, Asia Stream tracks and analyzes the Indo-Pacific with a mix of expert interviews and original reporting by our correspondents from across the globe.
nytime.com – Articles, maps, photos, videos, podcasts and more, as well as suggestions for using them in your classroom.
Residents salvage their belongings from their homes on March 14 after the shelling of a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine. Related ArticleCredit…Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Young people all over are avidly following what some have called “the first TikTok war.” In late February, we created a place on our site for teenagers to react to the invasion, and within a week, over 900 had. This comment from Winn Godier, a high school student in North Carolina, echoes what we have heard from many teenagers:
Ukraine has come under a full-blown invasion by the Russian military since Putin’s 24 February 2022 shock announcement of a “special military operation” in the country’s south-eastern Donbass region. The conflict has already caused market jitters, commodity price hikes, and exacerbated supply chain disruptions. It has also prompted a well-planned and coordinated effort by major US, European, and Asian economies to raise the economic costs for Putin. The key ones being:
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union stood for nearly half a century as one of the two lodes of global power. When it dissolved in 1991, Russia found itself losing relevance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was a young KGB officer during this era, and the events of that time influenced many of the moves he made in the early years of his administration, with the goal of regaining the importance in the world the Soviet Union used to hold—and restoring Russian pride.
People stand in line to withdraw U.S. dollars and euros from an ATM in St. Petersburg on Feb. 25. (Dmitri Lovetsky/AP)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the financial reckoningimposed on Moscow in response are proof that the triumphant globalization campaignthat began more than 30 years ago has reached a dead end.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Russian President Vladirmir Putin during the summit in New Delhi, India on December 6, 2021.Credit: Facebook/ Ministry of External Affairs, India
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 has put India in a particularly difficult spot. Since the conflict between Moscow and the U.S. over Ukraine began escalating late last year, India has avoided taking sides. But with Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, that cautious approach will become increasingly untenable for New Delhi. It could hurt India’s interests in the long-run.
Recent public pushback shows that Vladimir Putin could be meeting his match – not just with Ukrainians, but also his own people who are tiring of constant wars.
FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan leave after their joint news conference following the talks in Moscow, Russia March 5, 2020. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS
ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan urged his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Sunday to declare a ceasefire in Ukraine, open humanitarian corridors and sign a peace agreement, his office said.
NATO member Turkey shares a maritime border with Russia and Ukraine in the Black Sea and has good ties with both. Ankara has called Russia’s invasion unacceptable and offered to host talks, but has opposed sanctions on Moscow.
Lake Baikal, Siberia, Russia (Photo by 
CVD 