Kit and morale may prove decisive as Ukraine war enters winter phase

Winter has arrived. Temperatures in the frontline Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, under remorseless attack from the Russians, plunged to -11C (12.2F) this weekend, and at no point got above freezing. Gradually the mud and rain of late autumn will give way to snow and cold of -20C or worse. Yet both sides have their reasons to carry on fighting.The weather is a neutral party to the near-10-month war, but in winter it inevitably acts as a constraint. Simple operations take far longer to conduct in the cold, cover from foliage is reduced or eliminated, white camouflage is required when snow has arrived and more rations are needed because soldiers consume more calories.Shelter and warmth is vital, above all because the armies have to ensure soldiers can dry once they get wet, or they will risk hypothermia or frostbite. A report from Channel 4 News on the Donbas frontline concludes in the kind of well-prepared, deep-dug warm bunker required for winter troops, complete with a kitten to hunt down the inevitable mice.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/05/ukraine-war-winter-phase-russian-troops

 

Venezuela’s dictator is less isolated than he once was

As regional leaders descended on Bogotá for the elaborate inauguration on August 7th of Colombia’s first left-wing president, one man was notable by his absence. The outgoing conservative president, Iván Duque, used his last dregs of power to make sure of that. He barred Nicolás Maduro, the dictator next door in Venezuela, from stepping on Colombian soil until the very moment Gustavo Petro was sworn in. So Mr Maduro stayed home and played television presenter, standing by a large screen in his palace and commenting on events in Bogotá as they unfolded. Missing the ceremony has not dampened Mr Maduro’s enthusiasm for the political change sweeping Colombia, America’s staunchest ally in the region. Like many tyrants, Mr Maduro hails democracy when it works to his liking. “New times are coming,” he tweeted shortly after the victory of Mr Petro, a guerrilla-turned-senator, in June. The leftist Mr Petro has promised a thaw in his country’s frosty relations with Venezuela. To start, he says he will restore diplomatic relations, severed since 2019.

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2022/08/18/venezuelas-dictator-is-less-isolated-than-he-once-was

 

China’s Zero-COVID Protests Are Not Tiananmen

After unrest erupted in parts of China this past weekend, many friends asked, “Will this end in bloodshed, just as the 1989 Tiananmen protests did?” The recent outburst of public dissent attacking the Chinese government’s zero-COVID policy was the most intense and widespread that many Chinese had ever seen. Wednesday then brought another eerie parallel with 1989: The death of former President Jiang Zemin echoed the April 15, 1989, demise of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) head Hu Yaobang, whose popularity drew an estimated 100,000 demonstrators to Tiananmen Square just before his funeral. Would Jiang’s death inflame the protesters of today?

Mourners have already begun leaving wreaths and flowers at Jiang’s former residence in Jiangsu province. Still, 2022 isn’t 1989. Having covered the Tiananmen bloodshed in 1989, I don’t believe history will repeat itself. China’s recent protests are important in their own right, but their long-term significance may not be as clear-cut as some would think. To be sure, it is extremely rare to hear demonstrators openly call for President Xi Jinping to step down, declaring they don’t want an “emperor for life.”

But let’s be clear: The majority of demonstrators seemed to be calling for an end to draconian zero-COVID restrictions. And paradoxically, authorities were already scrambling to liberalize bits of its anti-pandemic playbook when protesters began clashing with police. In fits and starts over recent weeks, local apparatchiks tried to roll out incremental tweaks to the strict pandemic protocols that have been seen as Xi’s personal obsession. At the same time, increasingly angry tenants’ committees were writing up homeowners’ manifestos. One of them read, “If I’m infected, I would quarantine at home and not accept being taken to other places for centralized isolation against my will.” This document, drawn up by residents in the Runfeng Shuishang complex of Beijing, also declared: “I retain my legal rights [and] will make audio and video recordings of all individuals or organizations suspected of violating the law.”

The Power of China’s Blank Sheets of Paper

 

Embargo gegen russisches Öl: Guter Plan mit viel Risiko

Es ist der bisher kühnste Versuch der Europäer, den wirtschaftlichen Druck auf Russland zu erhöhen und dem Land die Kriegsführung in der Ukraine zu erschweren. Seit Montag ist ein Embargo in Kraft: Ölimporte aus Russland in die EU über den Seeweg sind verboten. Pipeline-Öl darf nur für Ungarn und die Slowakei fließen. Europäischen Redereien und Versicherern ist es nicht mehr erlaubt, russisches Öl zu transportieren oder Lieferungen zu versichern, wenn der Rohstoff für mehr als 60 Dollar je Fass verkauft wird.

https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000141526076/embargo-gegen-russisches-oel-guter-plan-mit-viel-risiko

 

The Guardian view on biodiversity collapse: the crisis humanity can no longer ignore

In an essay entitled The Sense of Wonder, the American conservationist Rachel Carson suggested two questions to make us think more deeply about our natural environment. “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

Published in 1955, Carson’s call to mindfulness was influential in the burgeoning postwar environmental movement. But despite campaigners’ best efforts, the sense of jeopardy lurking within her second question is now acute. Wild animal populations are declining annually by about 2.5% as a result of habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, climate change, overfishing and overhunting. Since 1970, overall numbers are down by 69%. Livestock and the human beings who farm them now account for 96% of all the mammals on Earth. The Sumatran tiger, the Bornean orangutan and the hellbender salamander are among the million animal and plant species judged perilously close to extinction.

In Canada this week, conservationists will attempt to persuade the world’s governments to summon up the will to address this crisis. Like the climate emergency, it is the direct consequence of human activity, but has nothing like the same high profile. The Montreal Cop15 summit – which begins on Wednesday – is part of the wider Cop process launched in 1992, when the United Nations established three separate conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. But since then, despite 196 nations signing up for action, the record on biodiversity has been one of lamentable failure. Of 20 targets set at the last major summit in Japan in 2010 – ranging from tackling pollution to protecting coral reefs – none were fully met. In the recent words of Andrew Terry, the director of conservation at the Zoological Society of London, “absolutely no progress has been made” in slowing the rate of species attrition.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/04/the-guardian-view-on-biodiversity-collapse-the-crisis-humanity-can-no-longer-ignore

 

Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state

Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. Its long stand curves upward to a white dome shading a dark bulb. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street. 

Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make residents of Marseille more aware that they are being watched. She is part of a group called Technopolice that has been organizing efforts to map the rise of video surveillance. With some 1,600 cameras in the city, there is plenty to find. Mixed in among them, Nano says, are 50 smart cameras designed to detect and flag up suspicious behavior, though she is unsure where they are or how they are being used.

Across the world, video cameras have become an accepted feature of urban life. Many cities in China now have dense networks of them. London and New Delhi aren’t far behind. 

Now France is playing catch-up. Since 2015, the year of the Bataclan terrorist attacks, the number of cameras in Paris has increased fourfold. The police have used such cameras to enforce pandemic lockdown measures and monitor protests like those of the Gilets Jaunes. And a new nationwide security law, adopted last year, allows for video surveillance by police drones during events like protests and marches.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/13/1053650/marseille-fight-surveillance-state/

 

Are we really prisoners of geography?

Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia was at peace and enmeshed in a complex global economy. Would it really sever trade ties – and threaten nuclear war – just to expand its already vast territory? Despite the many warnings, including from Vladimir Putin himself, the invasion still came as a shock.

But it wasn’t a shock to the journalist Tim Marshall. On the first page of his 2015 blockbuster book, Prisoners of Geography, Marshall invited readers to contemplate Russia’s topography. A ring of mountains and ice surrounds it. Its border with China is protected by mountain ranges, and it is separated from Iran and Turkey by the Caucusus. Between Russia and western Europe stand the Balkans, Carpathians and Alps, which form another wall. Or, they nearly do. To the north of those mountains, a flat corridor – the Great European Plain – connects Russia to its well-armed western neighbours via Ukraine and Poland. On it, you can ride a bicycle from Paris to Moscow.

You can also drive a tank. Marshall noted how this gap in Russia’s natural fortifications has repeatedly exposed it to attacks. “Putin has no choice”, Marshall concluded: “He must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.” When Putin did precisely that, invading a Ukraine he could no longer control by quieter means, Marshall greeted it with wearied understanding, deploring the war yet finding it unsurprising. The map “imprisons” leaders, he had written, “giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think”.

There is a name for Marshall’s line of thinking: geopolitics. Although the term is often used loosely to mean “international relations”, it refers more precisely to the view that geography – mountains, land bridges, water tables – governs world affairs. Ideas, laws and culture are interesting, geopoliticians argue, but to truly understand politics you must look hard at maps. And when you do, the world reveals itself to be a zero-sum contest in which every neighbour is a potential rival, and success depends on controlling territory, as in the boardgame Risk. In its cynical view of human motives, geopolitics resembles Marxism, just with topography replacing class struggle as the engine of history.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/10/are-we-really-prisoners-of-geography-maps-geopolitics

 

Ciudad de México marcha a favor de López Obrador: “Son cuatro años de logros para los mexicanos pobres”

La conmoción se siente desde mucho antes de llegar. El metro vomita gente cargada con banderas y pancartas, las calles aledañas descargan columnas de manifestantes, se oye el redoblar de tambores y el chirriar desafinado de trompetas de plástico. Todo el Paseo de la Reforma es una marea humana que avanza sin prisa pero sin pausa hacia el Zócalo. Apenas se puede caminar por la Alameda, uno avanza con la inercia de la masa, pero es difícil abrirse camino. A media mañana en el Zócalo no cabe ya ni un alma más. Es el resultado del pulso político del presidente mexicano, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, con la oposición: una manifestación de decenas de miles de personas que han acudido al centro de la Ciudad de México a refrendar los cuatro años de mandato del dirigente. Para muchos de sus seguidores este domingo es una fiesta, una excusa para conmemorar a un Gobierno que, al menos retóricamente, ha puesto a los pobres en el centro del discurso. Para otros, es solo una forma del mandatario de sacar pecho, después de que miles de personas marcharan hace dos semanas en su contra, en una protesta convocada por la oposición y en defensa del Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE), amenazado por la reforma electoral que López Obrador quiere ejecutar.

https://elpais.com/mexico/2022-11-27/lopez-obrador-saca-musculo-en-las-calles-con-una-manifestacion-masiva.html

 

The Irish Times view on the war in Ukraine: civilians under fire

During the course of the last week the nature of the Russian war against Ukraine changed qualitatively. This is no longer a conflict in which civilians and civilian infrastructure are, even arguably, incidental or accidental victims in a conventional war, as Russia has sought to claim. It is now a war against civilians. They are the targets, in apparent revenge for battlefield losses the Ukrainian army inflicted on Russia. And, in the case of newly liberated Kherson, subject to a sham annexation by Russia, a war against “its own” citizens.

The purpose of the missiles which rained down and at times left some 80 per cent of the country in the dark and without water, was explicitly to attack civilians and the electricity, power, water and housing that sustains them. Along with hospitals, schools, historical sites, dams and churches, these are ostensibly protected by the rules of war set out in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and endorsed by 196 states of the United Nations.

The shelling of nuclear power stations, requiring disconnections from the power grid as a precaution, is also almost certainly a breach of the first protocol to the conventions. These are acts of wanton irresponsibility which threaten not only Ukraine and its neighbours with catastrophic radioactive pollution, but Russia itself.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorials/2022/11/27/the-irish-times-view-on-the-war-in-ukraine-civilians-under-fire/

 

The Future of the Amazon, and Maybe the Planet, Depends on Brazil’s President-Elect Lula

A few days ago, in a São Paulo hotel suite, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took a pause in a daylong slew of calls with foreign leaders to give his first interview since his narrow October 30th election triumph over Brazil’s far-right incumbent President, Jair Bolsonaro. Foremost on Lula’s mind was his upcoming trip to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend the COP27 climate summit. It will be his first trip abroad as President-elect, and there was a lot to be done beforehand. Lula, who turned seventy-seven in October, looked his age, and also tired and preoccupied. The transition was getting underway, but Bolsonaro, in Trumpian fashion, had not formally conceded, making for a tense atmosphere. As Lula spoke, however, his famous high energy levels returned. Before long, he was sitting forward in his chair and grabbing me excitedly to make his points.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-future-of-the-amazon-and-maybe-the-planet-depends-on-brazils-president-elect-lula