“It’s impossible to work for a killer and get paid by him,” Yelena Kovalskaya, director of a state-run Moscow theater, announced as she resigned her post.Threats of severe economic sanctions were not enough to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. On Friday, Formula 1 racing announced it would not hold the Russian Grand Prix, and the European Broadcasting Union announced that Russian performers would be barred from participating in the popular Eurovision Song Contest. And multiple cultural institutions, considered important to Russia’s legitimacy on the world stage, pulled back: On Thursday, Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic announced that it would no longer host conductor Valery Gergiev, a Putin friend, for performances. The Council of Europe, an international human rights organization, adopted a decision to suspend Russia from representation on Friday. Russia was hit with a new round of severe sanctions Thursday, with the threat of further punishments looming. A number of Russian public figures also spoke out against the incursion, while much of the international community moved to isolate Russia politically, economically, and culturally. “And there is no one to stop the war, so together with grief we feel shame.”ĭemonstrations sprung up across Russia to oppose the assault on Ukraine, with authorities arresting more than 1,700 protesters. “Our country, by order of President Putin, started a war with Ukraine,” the Russian journalist and Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov said. All of this - this horror - being done in the name of the Russian public, some of which seems to be as outraged as observers in the west at Putin’s unprovoked attack. “They did not leave us any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today,” he said as he announced what he termed a “special military operation,” warning “those who may be tempted to interfere” that “the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” Then he launched his attack, an aerial assault on cities across Ukraine - not just the eastern regions he unilaterally declared independent earlier in the week - and a subsequent ground invasion, which by Friday had embattled Kyiv, the nation’s capital. Putin, in a defiant televised address, spun a rambling alternate history of Ukraine and Russia, thumbing his nose at his neighbor’s sovereignty and implying it is a threat to his own nation’s security. “I don’t understand the motivations, the goals, or the possible results,” said another. “Everything that we believed turned out to be wrong,” as one foreign policy analyst in Moscow told the New York Times of Putin’s approach. Here we have not a cunning rational actor, but a warped tyrant conducting crimes against humanity in broad daylight. The decision to start a war, the most consequential in Europe in more than seven decades, would surely be a calculated one - not one influenced by “which side of the bed he gets up on.” But his bloody invasion of Ukraine this week - executed on the ludicrous pretense that he must “denazify” his democratic neighbor, and with an implicit threat of nuclear retaliation against any foreign powers who would interfere with his plans - has torpedoed that perception. But he has also generally been seen as a rational one - a shrewd strategist operating in self-interest. Putin, an authoritarian abuser of human rights at home and a malignant presence on the world stage, has long been regarded - rightly - as a bad actor. “And I suspect it matters which side of the bed he gets up on in the morning as to exactly what he’s going to do.” Asked about that assessment earlier this year in a press conference, as Putin amassed troops along Ukraine’s borders, Biden mostly stood by it, but seemed to add a qualifier: “He’s making that decision,” Biden said of a Russian invasion. “It’s not in anybody’s interest,” Biden said at the time. After a summit in Geneva with Vladimir Putin this summer, President Joe Biden said that the “last thing” his Russian counterpart wanted was another Cold War with the West.
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