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Adani’s Energy Deals: Sri Lanka’s Annual Losses Exceed 410 Billion Rupees

Various social movements and political parties in Sri Lanka have voiced concerns over what they perceive as India's increasing influence in the country.

The Indian government’s involvement in various projects in Sri Lanka has sparked controversy and drawn criticism from multiple quarters, with accusations ranging from attempts to gain control over the island nation’s resources to allegations of corruption and exploitation.

Indian Adani's next plot: Eliminating all bird sanctuaries in North for profit. [File Photo]

Various social movements and political parties in Sri Lanka have voiced concerns over what they perceive as India’s increasing influence in the country. They allege that India is attempting to seize control over Sri Lanka’s trade, security, and energy sectors through various means.

A press release issued by the Human & Environmental Resources Development Foundation has shed light on the issue, particularly focusing on foreign ownership of power in Sri Lanka. The foundation has raised alarms about the purported increase in electricity bills and the severe impact on the national economy due to what they term as “corrupt alienation” of Sri Lanka’s energy resources to foreign companies, predominantly Indian.

According to the foundation, more than 410 billion rupees are lost annually due to the alleged mismanagement and corrupt practices concerning energy resources. They claim that recent projects signed with Indian companies, including the Adani Group, have exacerbated the situation, leading to further financial losses for Sri Lanka.

The foundation has lodged complaints with the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka and the Bribery or Corruption Investigation Commission, accusing both Indian and Sri Lankan authorities of violating human rights and engaging in corrupt activities. They lament the lack of action from these institutions despite repeated appeals.

Furthermore, the foundation has accused several governmental institutions, professional associations, non-governmental organizations, and political parties of supporting what they perceive as India’s agenda in Sri Lanka. They assert that these entities have succumbed to the influence of Indian companies, particularly Adani, at the expense of Sri Lanka’s national interests.

In response to the outcry, renewable energy production companies have expressed agitation, with Dr. Lakmal Fernando, Secretary of the Power Council of the National Chamber of Commerce, condemning the alleged destruction caused by the Sri Lankan Electricity Board and other relevant authorities.

The foundation has also criticized the silence of environmental organizations and government bodies, such as the Environment Authority and Wildlife Conservation Department, accusing them of prioritizing financial gains over environmental conservation.

Amidst the allegations, the Sri Lankan government’s decision to cooperate with Adani, whom the foundation describes as “the biggest environmental polluter in Asia,” has drawn sharp criticism. The foundation warns that such collaborations could lead to the exploitation of various sectors, including land, agriculture, and media, further exacerbating the country’s economic crisis.

Despite the challenges, the foundation vows to continue advocating for renewable energy projects in Sri Lanka and calls upon the Sri Lankan populace to unite for the welfare of the nation. They highlight the potential for wind and solar power projects to alleviate the country’s energy woes and urge authorities to prioritize national interests over foreign influence.

Shahbaz: Best Bet for Pakistan Regaining Stability?

The Army is also backing Shahbaz in the economic recovery process.

by Rahul K Bhonsle
 
Mr Shahbaz Sharif as the Prime Minister remains the best bet for Pakistan regaining a degree of stability and emerging from the poly crisis, at least for now but will have to navigate the tricky waters some of which may be within the Sharif family itself.

A few reasons for Shahbaz being the best bet are related to the structure of Pakistan politics, his proven ability for governance, a fruitful first tenure as the Prime Minister in the recent past and ability to win over confidence of key global stakeholders and international institutions.

This photo released by Pakistan's Press Information Department (PID) shows newly-elected Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif (L) meeting with former Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari at the Parliament House in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan on March 3, 2024. (PID/Handout via Xinhua)

Shahbaz firstly has the confidence of the Pakistan Army. For decades he has been a go to man with the Army from the Sharif family and whenever elder brother Mr Nawaz Sharif ran foul with the military Shahbaz was seen as an intermediary to patch up.

The Army has now finally placed the interlocutor in a position of governance if not power, for the support of Mr Nawaz Sharif to Shahbaz is extremely important. But the Army is clear that he will not raise issues with the military particularly on a say in strategic policy and internal promotions of senior generals.

Shahbaz is also far more mature than Imran the mercurial Khan who is the undoubtedly the most popular leader in Pakistan but cannot assume the throne due to his quirkiness amongst other drawbacks.

Shahbaz on the other hand lacks the charisma of his elder brother and thus cannot be a regular vote winner. Realising this the Army brought back the senior Sharif from exile providing multiple judicial reliefs to rally the people in Punjab against Imran Khan and the Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf. After Nawaz pitched the PML N to power though not the largest party in the February 8 elections, his utility for the Army due to his penchant to question the military was low and thus possibly the more obedient younger brother was pitched in.

Shahbaz administrative and governance skills are proven as the Chief Minister of the province of Punjab and the brief tenure as the Prime Minister. These will come in handy for a Pakistan facing multiple crisis from economic to energy, unemployment and feeding the hungry.

While Imran Khan is popular his governance ability have been limited evident from the vision of the so called Medina welfare state without resources compatible with the same. Shahbaz on the other hand is far more rooted.

A key requirement for Pakistan’s recovery ahead would be negotiations with the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. Shahbaz has done it once and could cut a last minute deal speaking to the IMF Director Kristalina Georgieva in June last year to seek release of the tranche and thus preventing debt default in some ways.

Shahbaz has selected Muhammad Aurangzeb as the finance minister with the omnipresent Ishaq Dar who has been a perpetual occupant of the chair during PMLN government in Pakistan given the role of Foreign Minister.

Aurangzeb’s policies are likely to be far more practical than that of his predecessors even though the required structural changes in economy are unlikely to be put into place given the need for political will. The Army is also backing Shahbaz in the economic recovery process.

Acceptability of the United States is another factor which determines how the scales are tipped for another IMF tranche and Shahbaz Sharif will be far more favourably seen in Washington than a leader such as Imran.

On the security front, the challenge of politico diplomatic initiatives to overcome the threat from the Tehreek Taliban Pakistan and Baloch militant groups is likely to be a thorn but the military will take most of the flak of security lapses.

Concerns Ahead

While so far, the path appears to be rosy for Shahbaz given the political uncertainties, there are many concerns ahead.

Delivery on the economic front will remain important for the Army is unlikely to support him beyond a reasonable period if the economy continues to go down under.

This will also lead to disenchantment in the public at large which may also set into motion internal politicking within the PML N with Shahbaz’s detractors getting a long handle to seek his ouster.

For now Maryam Sharif as the Chief Minister of Punjab should be busy proving her governance skills as the political battle between her and Shahbaz son Hamza within the Sharif family may have been settled for now.

The mystery of the return of two sons of Nawaz Sharif – Hussan and Hussain needs some more dwelling into.

Any initiative with India – albeit after a new government is formed in Delhi in June is expected to also see the Army red, thus is best avoided.

In sum it can be said that of all the leaders in Pakistan given the current political outcome post the February 08 polls, Shahbaz remains the best bet for stability in Pakistan, but the window is short and he would have to prove himself in the next two years.

Brigadier (Retired) Rahul K Bhonsle, MSc, MPhil, MBA is an Indian army military veteran with 30 years active field experience in counter militancy and terrorism operations. He is presently Director of Sasia Security-Risks.com, a South Asian security risk and knowledge management consultancy which specializes in future scenarios, military capacity building and conflict trends in South Asia.

Proud Boys in Haiti

Failed states are no longer confined to a few corners of the Global South.

by Slavoj Žižek

The way things are going in Haiti, violent gangs might not only gain an official government role; they might actually become the government. Following the gangs’ seizure of critical infrastructure and the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, Haiti is exhibiting all the familiar features of a failed state. Its people are left with a tragic choice: continued rule by a corrupt “democratic” elite, or direct rule by gangs who present themselves as “progressive.”

A woman carries fruit on her head in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Aug. 24, 2021. (Xinhua/David de la Paz)

With law and order having collapsed, CARICOM, the Caribbean regional intergovernmental organization, has announced an agreement to create a transitional council aimed at representing a wide swath of Haitian political and civil-society groupings. The council would wield some powers that typically belong to the (vacant) office of the president, including the power to name an interim prime minister. The resulting government would be expected eventually to hold elections, thus achieving a complete political reset.

But whom will these new arrangements include? Haiti has been under a state of emergency since armed groups attacked the country’s largest prison earlier this month, killing and injuring police and prison staff, and allowing nearly 4,000 inmates to escape. The gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier – himself a former police officer – took credit for the attack and called for the government to be overthrown. Gangs now control 80% of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, having seized the country’s main airport to block Henry’s return from a diplomatic mission to Kenya, where he was hoping to secure police reinforcements.

The CARICOM agreement bars anyone with prior criminal convictions or sanctions against them, thus disqualifying Chérizier. But Chérizier has long been known to harbor political aspirations. He is not only a gang leader but also a populist politician, telling an interviewer in 2019: “I would never massacre people in the same social class as me.” Earlier this month, he said: “We won’t lie to people, saying we have a peaceful revolution. We do not have a peaceful revolution. We are starting a bloody revolution in the country.”

Chérizier has likened himself to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and even Robin Hood. But he also admires François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the right-wing dictator who ruled Haiti with an iron fist from 1957 to 1971 (and who also terrorized Haitian society with armed paramilitary groups, led by the infamous Tonton Macoutes).

In a warning issued late on the night of March 11, Chérizier announced that the alliance of gangs known as Viv Ansanm would not recognize any government resulting from the CARICOM agreement, arguing that, “It is up to the Haitian people to designate the personalities who will lead the country.” Similarly, an adviser to Guy Philippe, a Haitian rebel leader who recently returned to the country, warns that Port-au-Prince will be burned to the ground if the next government does not include Philippe.

Haiti’s story is a long-running tragedy. For more than 200 years, it has been punished for the successful slave rebellion (beginning in 1791) that allowed it to emerge as the world’s first black republic. Forced to pay reparations to France, its former colonial overlord, the only chance it ever had to prosper was when Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas party took power a couple of decades ago. But Aristide, a thorn in America’s side, was toppled in a coup in February 2004.

Haiti is an extreme case of a broader phenomenon. Violent gangs have also occupied parts of cities in Ecuador and Mexico; and, of course, a gang of outgoing US President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021. Trump now promises that one of his first official acts, if re-elected, will be to pardon all those convicted for their participation in that assault.

The strongest of the gangs that organized the January 6 insurrection are the Proud Boys, an exclusively male neo-fascist organization that openly promotes and engages in political violence. Recall that when asked about his appeal to white supremacist and paramilitary groups at a presidential debate in 2020, Trump infamously responded, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” The group’s leaders have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes against the United States for their attempt to block the constitutionally prescribed transfer of presidential power.

Interestingly, the Proud Boys have an initiation process that includes physical hazing, such as being punched unless you correctly answer pop-culture trivia questions, and members must “abstain from pornography.” Strange as these rituals sound, they are familiar mechanisms. Fraternal rituals play the role of poetry, as described by Ernst Jünger, a reluctant Nazi fellow-traveler who, like the Proud Boys, celebrated the purifying effect of military struggle: “Any power struggle is preceded by a verification of images and iconoclasm. This is why we need poets – they initiate the overthrow, even that of titans.”

Failed states are no longer confined to a few corners of the Global South. If we measure a state’s failure by the cracks in the edifice of its power – that is, by the evidence of brewing ideological civil wars, deadlocked assemblies, and increasingly insecure public spaces – we must recognize that France, the United Kingdom, and the US are clearly on the spectrum. The Norwegian political theorist Jon Elster was correct, in 2020, when he wrote: “We can reverse the common dictum that democracy is under threat, and affirm that democracy is the threat, at least in its short-termist populist form.” Recent experience offers clear signals of what will happen if Trump wins the November presidential election.

One might appropriately paraphrase an old joke from East Germany: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Trump are given an audience with God and allowed one question each. Putin begins: “Tell me what will happen to Russia in the next few decades?” God answers: “Russia will gradually become a colony of China.” Putin turns around and starts to cry. Xi asks the same question about China. God answers: “With the Chinese economic miracle over, you will have to return to a hardline dictatorship to survive, while asking Taiwan for help.” Xi turns around and starts to cry. Finally, Trump asks: “And what will be the fate of the US after I take over again?” God turns around and starts to cry.

Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author, most recently, of Heaven in Disorder (OR Books, 2021) and Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022).

Responsibility of The Muslim World On Israeli Actions In Gaza

Does the Islamic World have any responsibility for the incessant and horrific injustice being committed by Israel towards the Palestinian people?

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

HARRY TRUMAN’S COVER OF ISRAELI AIRSPACE

Does the Islamic World have any responsibility for the incessant and horrific injustice being committed by Israel towards the Palestinian people?  Is it because Harry Truman not only recognized Israel as an independent country and as such gave cover to Israeli air space during the short war with Egypt when Anwar Sadat could have given a death blow to Israel but for the US cover of Israeli air space?

People wait to receive aid supplies in Gaza City, March 17, 2024. (Photo by Mohammed Ali/Xinhua)

HISTORIAN LAWRENCE REES AND ADOLF HITLER                  

Lawrence Rees, historian, and author, in his newest book published in March 2024 titled The Holocaust, wrote that “The fundamental precondition for the Holocaust happening was Adolf Hitler,” he explained that   “Even as far back as 1921, Hitler said that solving the Jewish question was a central question for National Socialism. And you can only solve it by using brute force.” Hitler had no blueprint for the Holocaust at that point, says Rees. But he did have a pathological problem with Jews. “Hitler believed that something needed to be done,” Rees explains, “and that evolved and changed according to circumstances and political opportunism. “An intriguing part of Rees’s book is his determination to figure out when the collective set of initiatives we now call the Final Solution became official Nazi policy. It’s a question that doesn’t come with a straightforward answer, Rees maintained. What is clear, though, is that in the summer of 1940, there was still no concrete plan in place for the extermination of Jews. Furthermore, up until that point, Rees argued, the Nazis were still clinging to the belief that in the long term, the way to solve what they called “the Jewish question” was by expulsion and hard labor. At that point, mass murder was still not the preferred option. By the summer of 1942, however, a sea change had taken place. By that time, the Holocaust was in full swing. Therefore, within the previous two-year period, Rees points out, there were several milestones on the road towards mass extermination. But trying to pinpoint an exact moment where the decision was taken to commit to mass killing is very difficult, says Rees — especially since much of the planning was done in secret without written records. Hitherto, many historians, filmmakers, and writers have pointed to a single meeting where plans for the Holocaust were finally decided upon in the power structures of Nazi officialdom.

WANSEE CONFERENCE AND ABSENCE OF HITLER, HIMMLER AND GOEBBELS

This was known as the Wannsee Conference. It was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in January of 1942 and involved several mid-ranking Nazi officials devising a plot to murder Jews over a shorter timescale and in more efficient ways. But even then, Rees says, no final plans were resolved at the infamous conference. He also points out that key figures from the upper tiers of the Nazi hierarchy — Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler himself — were not present. “I cannot see how there can have been a decision in 1941,” said Rees. ‘By that stage, you can say a decision to implement what we would now call the Holocaust had been The moment of no return for the Holocaust, said the historian, was in the spring and early summer of 1942, when a decision was taken to kill all of the Jews in the General Government in Poland — a German-occupied zone established by Hitler after the joint invasion by the Germans and Soviets in 1939.“By that stage you can say a decision to implement what we would now call the Holocaust had been made,” said Rees. Hungary was beautiful to the Nazis, given the number of Jews that resided there. The Jews were transported to Auschwitz between May and July of 1944, where they were murdered.


AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER HANNAH ARENDT’S BANALITY OF EVIL  AND ADOLPH EICHMAN’S ROLE IN THE EXTERMINATION OF JEWS

This plan for cold-blooded murder was deviously orchestrated by Adolf Eichmann, who at the time was stationed in Budapest.  What did Hannah Arendt mean by the banality of evil? A question asked by American philosopher Hannah Arendt. Lawrence Rees disagreed with Hannah Arendt though she continued to insist that one do evil without being evil. This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realized what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘committed crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he was doing wrong’. Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterward feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’. This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer. ie Eichmann, which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.

CRITICS OF HANNAH ARENDT

The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet had no evil intentions. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension.

CONCLUSION

On October 6 1981 Islamic extremists assassinated Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, as he reviewed troops on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Sadat, who was shot four times, died two hours later. Despite Sadat’s incredible public service record for Egypt (he was instrumental in winning the nation its independence and democratizing it), his controversial peace negotiation with Israel in 1977-78, for which he and Menachem Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize, made him a target of extremists across the Middle East. Sadat had also angered many by allowing the ailing Shah of Iran to die in Egypt rather than be returned to Iran to stand trial for his crimes against the country.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a retired Bangladeshi diplomat. During his tenure, he worked in several countries as the ambassador of Bangladesh including Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Germany

Rebels Hit Russia on Election Day

A message of violent resistance to Vladimir Putin

by Alexander Ziperovich

The Kremlin is rolling out its carefully managed simulacrum of a democratic process, with sham elections in which there is only one conceivable outcome: Vladimir Putin as the unopposed victor, sealed into power for at least another six years, and likely for life. If he completes what will be his sixth term in office, he’ll have been in power longer than Joseph Stalin and Catherine the Great. At the age of 71, Putin is a tsar and a warlord, at the height of his power, and on a bloody mission to resurrect the Russian empire from the dustbin of history. 

File of photo Ukrainian Armed forces, The Freedom of Russian Legion and the Belarussian volunteer division are together in east Ukraine as part of military duties against Putin's regime

But some Russians are refusing to play along, and are instead expressing their political displeasure in a variety of creative and ingenious ways. Some brave Russians are going to the polls and making liberal use of black ink to spoil and destroy ballots, or are deploying a tried-and-true Russian tactic, tossing flaming molotov cocktails to firebomb polling centers. 

Others are heeding the advice of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who recently died under mysterious circumstances in an Arctic penal colony, to show up at noon on Sunday, with massive lines suddenly forming at polling sites today. At least 75 people were detained in connection with the midday protest, but people are clearly willing to risk jail or worse to disrupt what is quite plainly a totalitarian coronation, rather than anything even resembling a genuine election. 

Indeed, there have been dozens of incidents at polling sites across Russia, which ends three days of voting on Sunday. Likewise, people living in occupied Ukraine are also being forced into this parody of democracy, and are literally being made to vote at gunpoint, in what is at least a more honest process. Armed to the teeth, and wearing balaclavas over their faces, Russian soldiers and security personnel are apparently going door to door to compel people to cast a ballot for the dictator who invaded their country.

Democracy this is not. This mock “election” is fooling no one.

However, other Russians are going much further than mere vandalism, executing what the New York Times called “the most sweeping ground attacks into Russia since its military invaded Ukraine two years ago,” or at least since mercenary tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin nearly marched on Moscow, before suddenly halting and turning back. 

For his part, the Wagner chief was liquidated two months to the day after his brazen insurrection fell apart, when his private jet suddenly fell flaming from the sky, perhaps providing something of a lesson to these latest insurgents: once you start, don’t turn back. You can expect no mercy from Vladimir Putin if you fail; politics in Russia is an all-or-nothing affair, with no room for hesitation.

Popular Tyrant

Taken together, it’s a reminder that for all the Kremlin’s efforts at conveying a sense of solidarity and wartime unity to the world, Russia’s political landscape remains deeply fractured, and perhaps far more fragile than it might seem at first glance. 

Still, there’s absolutely no denying Vladimir Putin’s enduring strength, or his apparent political popularity, particularly among older nationalistic Russians fed a heavy diet of Kremlin propaganda, and who are eager to see him recreate the Russian empire over the bones of dead Ukrainians. With the economy damaged by sanctions but still functioning, and major cities well supplied with Western consumer goods, many Russians are keen to ignore a war that seems distant. There have been no new troop mobilizations since 2022, and most Russian soldiers are now being recruited from ethnic minorities in impoverished rural areas, attracted by the high wages offered by the army.

The Levada Center, a rare independent pollster the Kremlin has labeled a “foreign agent,” says Putin’s approval rating is at 86 percent, a staggeringly high number that cannot be dismissed. When asked whether Russia was going in the right direction, 75 percent of the respondents replied yes. That’s the highest number since pollsters began asking that question in Russia, and a signal that Putin’s support remains solid, particularly as the war in Ukraine turns in Moscow’s favor.

While this kind of political polling must be taken with a few large grains of salt, in a country where people lack the freedom to safely dissent, it’s quite clear that many Russians do continue to support Vladimir Putin, and applaud his new Cold War with the West, and his brutal invasion of Ukraine. Like other totalitarian regimes throughout history, Putin’s Russia clearly has a solid base of support, even as vicious repression shores up the rest of society with surveillance, denunciations, violence, and mass arrests.

Free Russia

In a country where freedom of speech is nonexistent, and where even the mildest political protest is illegal, political violence has replaced political discourse for those seeking to resist tyranny in Russia. Three insurgent formations, Free Russia Legion, Siberian Battalion, and Russian Volunteer Corps, assaulted Russian border regions near Belgorod, Kursk, and elsewhere along a 100-mile front with tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopter gunships, and infantry.

These rebel forces are homegrown units, though they’re allied with and largely supplied by Kyiv. The Russian Volunteer Corps, under the leadership of Denis Kapustin, callsign White Rex, has been associated with troubling far-right Neo-Nazi ideology, though that hasn’t prevented them from being accepted into the loose anti-Kremlin coalition opposing Putin.

In any case, these rebels made some of the deepest incursions into Russia since the beginning of the war this weekend, even as Ukrainian forces have resisted publicly entering Russia proper, per the advice of Washington, which remains wary about provoking nuclear escalation from the Kremlin. As these rebel factions assaulted Russia, Ukraine was attacking Russian oil installations and other critical infrastructure with drones and long-range missiles, in a coordinated effort designed to deny Putin the image of stability and security he would like to project on election day.

Still, preliminary results showed Putin receiving 88% of the vote, and handily winning what was always an utterly predetermined result, even as the Belgorod town of Gorkovsky was captured by Russian rebels today. With a catastrophic war increasingly spilling into Russia, and hostile tanks rolling across Russian borders for the first time since World War II, it’s unclear where exactly we go from here. For Putin, the answer was clear. He said Sunday night on television, “We need to carry out the tasks in the context of the special military operation.”

Certainly, the war in Ukraine seems nowhere near a conclusion, and the notion of peace talks seems extremely unlikely at present. Russian troops are slowly advancing within Ukraine itself, even as American support is being strangled by Kremlin-friendly MAGA Republicans in Congress, and as Putin’s ally Donald Trump begins his third bid for the presidency.

Meanwhile, Putin’s bellicose rhetoric and nuclear brinksmanship has, if anything, gotten sharper and more threatening as the war has progressed. 

In response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent refusal to rule out sending Western troops to Ukraine, Putin said in a recent interview, “We are ready to use weapons, including any weapons — including the [nuclear] weapons you mentioned — if it is a question of the existence of the Russian state or damage to our sovereignty and independence.” The White House Press Secretary castigated his rhetoric around nuclear weapons as “reckless and irresponsible throughout this conflict,” though from a purely strategic standpoint, his terrifying threats seem to have succeeded in preventing more robust Western military support for Ukraine.

Recent reporting revealed there was an extraordinarily high level of concern in the White House that Putin was preparing to detonate a nuclear weapon, back in October of 2022, when Russia’s frontlines seemed to be near collapse. Since the war began, Russia has shifted tactical nukes into Belarus, and U.S. intelligence agencies recently detected plans for a new nuclear anti-satellite weapon in space, like something out of the 007 movie “Goldeneye.” Clearly, the war in Ukraine represents the most dangerous standoff between the West and Russia since the end of the Cold War, a reprise of some of history’s darkest moments, when the entire world sat on the brink of nuclear annihilation. 

Putin’s obsession with Ukraine, and his total indifference to anything living, has brought the world back to that precipice. The violence Russia’s new tsar has set in motion will continue to play out on the charred battlefields and in the ruined cities of Ukraine and now Russia itself, at an enormous cost for both Russians and Ukrainians, and perhaps the entire world. Ultimately, Putin’s legacy is death, though just how much death remains uncertain.

Views are personal

Alexander Ziperovich is a Political analyst and Opinion columnist. He writes about politics, justice, foreign affairs, and culture, dissecting the larger historical and social context behind important events.

Putin set to win with 87.32 pct of votes after 95.04 pct of ballots counted: CEC

Russia’s incumbent President Vladimir Putin gained 87.32 percent of votes in the presidential elections with 95.04 percent of ballots counted by Monday morning, said the Central Election Commission.

Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the Federal Assembly, Moscow, February 29, 2024