Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. February 26, 2023 |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
One year into Russian President Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine, Fareed says it's unlikely either side will win convincingly.
"Most wars end in negotiations," Fareed says. "This one is unlikely to be different. The task for the West is to ensure that Ukraine has enough success and momentum on the battlefield that it enters those negotiations with a very strong hand."
One can envision a cease-fire in which Russia would return lands it has seized since February 2022, those taken earlier (seized by Russia in 2014 and later) would be subject to international arbitration, and Ukraine would be given security guarantees by NATO, Fareed says. If the war grinds on in its current form for years, Fareed says, "it will be worth asking—are we letting Ukraine get destroyed in order to save it?"
After that: How do top US foreign-policy officials think about this war? And what do Ukrainians want to know from them?
This week, Fareed hosted a live CNN Town Hall: Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, One Year Later. On today's GPS, Fareed revisits some of the key moments from that conversation with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and USAID Administrator Samantha Power—who took questions from Fareed and from Ukrainians, including a soldier serving on the front lines who asked Sullivan when the US might send more ammo.
Then: How can Ukraine rebuild itself after the devastation of Putin's war? Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers tells Fareed Russia should pay and that the West should use Russia's assets abroad to fund the effort.
As Russian casualties mount, is Putin's war becoming less popular, domestically? Fareed talks with New York Times reporter Valerie Hopkins who says the opposite is true: As Russians die on the battlefields of Ukraine, Putin's war seems to be getting more popular in Russia as a result.
Finally: Fareed explores a new measure report card for countries—the Atlas of Impunity, which grades them on government accountability, human rights, conflict and violence, economic equality, and damage to the environment. Notably, democracies don't always score the best.
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Life and Death on the Front |
In a remarkable edited diary from last July and August, a Ukrainian soldier—who had no previous military experience, before Putin's invasion—chronicles in The Economist's 1843 magazine his journey to the front, conditions along the way and once he got there, and scenes of battle as his unit sought to establish and hold positions and came under attack.
"Bang!" the soldier writes. "Mortars hit the road ahead. We fall to the ground and run to the trenches. Then comes a second volley and a deafening third one. I hear someone screaming behind me. A soldier is holding his leg. I jump out of the trench and try to drag him into the pit. Now comes Russian rifle fire. Their assault has begun. We keep our heads down. We can't see the Russians advancing but we hear reports of their movements over the radio." |
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Formerly on the margins of Western geopolitics, Poland has come to occupy a leadership role since Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chels Michta argues in a Politico op-ed. Poland successfully lobbied to send Western tanks to Ukraine and is providing key transportation and logistical lines for Western allies, as they deliver help to Poland's besieged neighbor, Michta writes.
The decision to send tanks to Kyiv was "a political win for Poland," Michta writes, "but the Leopard 2 coalition that Warsaw built stretches beyond Central Europe. … Poland's ability to speak not just on behalf of the Baltic states but Finland and other mainstays of Western consensus also suggests that Europe's strategic center is moving east," away from traditional leaders France and Germany.
In a Project Syndicate op-ed, Soňa Muzikárová writes that this has rehabilitated Poland's image, which had suffered under Warsaw's dispute with the EU over judicial independence and status as an "illiberal fellow-traveler" of neighboring Hungary. |
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| Will a Blockade Start the Next War? |
Peace is looking very fragile in Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic-Armenian enclave in neighboring Azerbaijan that was the object of a war between the two countries in 2020, Susan Barba writes in a New York Review of Books essay. Azerbaijani demonstrators have blocked the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, and as Nagorno-Karabakh is sealed off from the world, Barba warns of a humanitarian crisis and depicts autocratic Azerbaijan as deserving of scorn—rather than military assistance and statements of partnership—from the US and EU. |
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This year, tens of thousands of Israelis have protested something they fear would undo their country's democracy: a set of judicial reforms, proposed by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that would give the Knesset more power in disputes with the Supreme Court. At the Financial Times, columnist Martin Wolf warns that Israel could descend into illiberal democracy.
"The programme of this government is of evident importance for the future of the country," Wolf writes. "But it is also of wider significance. This is partly because of Israel's role in the region. It is also because what is happening raises questions about how a democracy can turn into an autocracy via unbridled majoritarianism."
At the London Review of Books, Tareq Baconi takes issue with the scope of protesters' complaints, arguing Israel and the territories it occupies have always been illiberal and undemocratic for Palestinians. "For many Palestinians," Baconi writes, "the new government is simply a more extreme and even more repressive version of the governments that preceded it. That isn't insignificant: it brings the threat of more violence, death and displacement. It doesn't mean, however, that what came before was democratic. If democracy is what they really want, the protesters in Israeli cities should follow the Palestinians' lead and seek to dismantle the regime of supremacy they're upholding." |
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Is hydrogen the future of clean energy? Some hope so.
In a Der Spiegel feature on Germany's future energy sources, in light of Putin's war, last August seven coauthors noted Dutch plans to import, process and export hydrogen to the continent. At the Atlantic Council, Daniel Helmeci suggests North Africa could become a major hydrogen supplier to Europe. At the Financial Times, June Yoon writes that "the biggest carmakers, Toyota and Hyundai, are still driven by the belief that hydrogen will become a key source of clean energy for the future. That obsession with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles looks more justified now than it has sometimes appeared in the past." In encouraging scientific news, scientists announced in January in a Nature Energy paper that they had produced hydrogen from sea water.
At the center of hydrogen talk, recently, have been European regulations finalized this month, concerning what counts as renewable hydrogen. An abundant element, hydrogen nonetheless must be extracted from water using energy—and the sources of that energy (renewables, nuclear, fossil fuels) have been the subject of debate. The new regulations will allow some nuclear-generated hydrogen to count toward EU renewable-energy goals, as Reuters reports.
In a recent editorial, The Wall Street Journal voiced doubt over Europe's plans and hydrogen's future, warning that renewable-energy capacity would need to increase significantly to make green hydrogen workable, while predicting a future fight over what kinds of hydrogen (depending on the sources of its energy inputs) will qualify for subsidies. |
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