Do not ask Ukraine when the war will end. Ask yourself – why Putin is still able to continue it – speech by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference

17 February 2024 – 12:45

February 24th could have marked the end of the world as we all know it. A world of rules. Rules that are meant to protect life.

Our resistance, with the support of our partners, has put on hold the destruction of this system – a rules-based world order.

2024 must become a time for a full restoration of a rules-based world order.

Ladies and gentlemen!

It is not the rules that define the world’s life that should remain in the past, but rather such Russia that doesn’t respect the rules should remain in the past. And we can ensure this. Not just by doing something. But by doing everything necessary.

The Conference today represents different parts of the world and many nations. Among us, there is no one for whom the ongoing war in Europe does not pose a threat. This war defines more than just the place of Ukraine or entire Europe in the world. This is Russia’s war against any rules at all.

But how long will the world let Russia be like this? This is the main question today.

The longer this Russian aggression against the rules-based world order continues, the greater are the changes it provokes.

Perhaps, people will have to live in a world where local wars will not remain local – any outbreak of a war risks turning into a global catastrophe.

Perhaps, the weaponization of food or migration will break existing regional balances and undermine many political systems – not only in Europe but also in the Middle East. In Africa. In the Americas.

Perhaps, Europe is facing times when the question of invoking Article 5 of the NATO treaty will not be a question for Washington at all but rather for European capitals.

There are hundreds of such “perhaps”. On February 23, 2022 none of them existed. Now they are a part of reality. And what do we lack in this reality? Security. Neither for the largest nor for the smallest state. We must make security a reality again.

Ladies and gentlemen!

Are you ready to leave behind everything you value in life in the world of yesterday? Ukrainians will not do it! This is our response. The year of 2024 demands your response – from everyone in the world.

If we do not act now, Putin will manage to make the next years catastrophic for other nations as well. Intelligence communities are aware of this.

Ukraine has already shattered myths with which Russia tried to cloud reality and which the world, unfortunately, believed. The myth that Russia could capture another country in a few days or weeks whenever it wants. Ukrainians have been holding for 724 days. 724 days!

Would you have believed 725 days ago that this was even possible?

We have demolished another insane Russian myth about Ukraine as supposedly “not a real country.” And it was in Russia that a massive mutiny began, leading to the capture of cities, internal fights, and an armed march on Moscow. This is a typical sign of a not a real state.

We have ruined the myth that Russian weapons supposedly have some advantage over Western ones. In reality, Russia is worse in all respects. That’s why for the first time in Russian history, Putin bowed to Iran and North Korea for help.

There was a myth that Europe is too weak to defend itself. Instead, Europe has become a global force overcoming dependencies on Russia. Europe now demonstrates that our community deserves to be called Euro-Atlantic. There are two coasts. Nearly 80 years of preventing a continental war in Europe relied on the strength of the American coast. Now we see that the European coast can also be the force that prevents chaos. Every defense coalition we have created proves this. Every security agreement we have signed implements it. We already have such an agreement with the UK. And I am grateful for the security agreement with Germany that we signed with Olaf in Berlin a day before. We signed a security agreement between Ukraine and France with Emmanuel in Paris. And this is just the beginning of implementing agreements based on the G7’s security declaration.

We were told for a long time – go to Putin so that he would allow the restoration of cargo movement in the Black Sea. In our Black Sea. But we did it without Putin. More than twenty-three million tons of cargo have been transported through the Black Sea and the Ukrainian export corridor. Since the beginning of this year, there is already normal shipment of goods to China, Spain, Egypt, Türkiye, Italy, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Tunisia, Libya, and others.

Some claimed that there is no effective defense against Russian missiles. We know for sure, all of us, – with “Patriots” and some other Western air defense systems, any Russian missile can be shot down. And if there are enough air defense systems in Ukraine, we will be able to bring home millions of Ukrainians, millions of our people, millions of our refugees. And thank you for your attitude in all your countries to our people. Thank you very much! But I hope they will come back. We will do everything for this. And, of course, our economy will be able to regain independence from external support.

Ukrainians have proven that we can force Russia to retreat and that we are capable of restoring the rules. And with this, we leave absolutely nothing of the key Russian myth – the myth that Ukraine supposedly cannot win this war. We can get our land back. And Putin can lose. And this has already happened more than once on the battlefield. Our actions are limited only by the sufficiency and length of the range of our strength – by what does not depend on us. And Andiivka situation proves this exactly.

Dear friends!

Unfortunately, keeping Ukraine in artificial deficits of weapons, particularly in deficits of artillery and long-range capabilities, allows Putin to adapt to the current intensity of the war. This self-weakening of democracy over time undermines our joint results.

Russia has only one specific military advantage at this time, namely – the complete devaluation of human life. Constant Russian “meat assaults” prove this.

International tolerance of the lack of rule of law in Russia after 1991 and Putin’s policy of controlled poverty have led to the fact that human life is worthless for the Russian state.

In addition to this, Putin’s years of self-isolation and his impunity have led to his complete degradation. Absolutely. He now openly justifies Hitler, absolving him of responsibility for World War II. He has made the genocide of our people just an ordinary part of his policy. Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone else who seems as a target exactly to him. After the murder of Alexei Navalny, it’s absurd to perceive Putin as a supposedly legitimate head of the Russian state. He is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence. Coming to his so-called “inauguration”, shaking his hand, considering him an equal means to disdain the very nature of political power.

One may have different attitudes towards international institutions, but the International Criminal Court’s warrant for Putin’s arrest for kidnapping and forced deportation of children from Ukraine clearly demonstrates where Putin’s so-called “career” should end. He has only two options ahead – to be in the dock in The Hague, or to be killed by one of his accomplices who are now killing for him.

Destroying the source of wars and destabilization is our key task. It is fair.

First. We all must do not something, but everything possible to defeat the aggressor. Please, everyone remember that dictators do not go on vacation. Hatred knows no pause. Enemy artillery does not fall silent due to procedural issues. Warriors standing against the aggressor need sufficient strength.

Second. We should not fear Putin’s defeat. Putin is a threat to all free nations. And yes, for those who still haven’t heard – Putin is the monster who invaded Ukraine and killed thousands and thousands of people and kidnapped and deported at least tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. But that’s not all.

Putin butchered Chechens and Syrians; invaded Georgia; ordered the execution of his opponents both outside the walls of the Kremlin and in the heart of London and Berlin; and yes, just yesterday he tried to send us all a clear message as the Munich Security Conference opened – Putin murdered another opposition leader.

So, please, let’s not fear Putin’s defeat and the destruction of his regime. Let’s instead – work together to destroy what he stands for. It is his fate to lose, not the fate of the rules-based world order to vanish. ​

If we don’t defeat Putin now, it won’t eventually matter who is the president of Russia. Because every new Russian dictator will remember how to maintain power by annexing the lands of other peoples, killing opponents, and destroying the world order. If this happens Europe and Central Asia and the whole world will be a very dark place.

Third. We must close all loopholes in the sanctions against Russia. And there should be no sectors of the Russian economy involved in its aggression that are still free from sanctions. This particularly relates to the nuclear sector. Also, Russian assets that are already frozen should be confiscated. And we need to go further – find, freeze, and securely pacify every dollar accumulated by Putin and his friends.

Fourth. Evil will never prevail if the forces of good are united and act together. History has proven it many times – when empires of evil and tyranny, which seemed eternal, crumbled right in front of our eyes. And this increased the space of freedom in the world. And the bolder and more active America was – along with the others on the right side of history – the more successful freedom was. The world would have long been divided among the dreams of a few dictatorships, if it was not for the American dream, which always left enough space for people’s dreams. Major decisions happening in unity of the whole world including the US.

And finally, fifth. Putin must be deprived of any ability to manipulate anyone in the world to constrain the activity of others.

The world has a document that defines the basic rules of co-existence of nations – the Charter of the UN. Russia disregards it. Ukraine has offered the world a Peace Formula, based on the principles and norms of the UN Charter. We have managed to unite representatives of all parts of the world to work on the Peace Formula and to develop details regarding the organization of the first Global Peace Summit. The summit is planned in Switzerland. And there the world must decide how to restore the full strength of the rule-based world order, almost destroyed by Russia.

Please, do not ask Ukraine when the war will end. Ask yourself – why is Putin still able to continue it?

I thank you very much for the invitation. Thank you for your attention and for every expression of support for our state, our people, our children!

Please – be grateful to our warriors.

And may our world, based on rules, never become the world of yesterday.

Glory to Ukraine!

Here is the joint press conference President Zelenskyy held with Vice President Harris.

Czech President Petr Pavel made a statement about this discovery several weeks ago, which I included in the nightly update when it was first reported. Currently he’s trying to get the funding to acquire this ammunition and transfer it to Ukraine.

Czech Republic has found sources abroad for hundreds of thousands of artillery ammunition that could be delivered to Ukraine in a matter of weeks if it can secure funding. When there's a will, there's a way. pic.twitter.com/n4QQLMI5v1

— Maria Avdeeva (@maria_avdv) February 17, 2024

The key, of course, is coming up with the funding.

Here’s the cost:

In recent hours, Russian troops intensified airstrikes and shelling across multiple directions – Kupiansk, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk. Five guided bombs hit houses in Kupiansk, school in Sloviansk was destroyed, people under rubble in Kramatorsk. This is the cost of delay pic.twitter.com/ksNE4fMRVt

— Maria Avdeeva (@maria_avdv) February 17, 2024

Коли ви побачите у людини в пікселі патч з гербом, на якому козак на чорному коні тримає в руці білий спис, можете бути майже на сто відсотків впевнені, що ця людина бачила пекло на власні очі.

Це символ 110 окремої механізованої бригади, яка тримала Авдіївку майже два роки. І,… pic.twitter.com/2aDk0NUJd1

— Позивний Генріх ✙ 🇺🇦 (@Heinrich_AFofU) February 17, 2024

When you see a person in a picture with a patch with a coat of arms, on which a Cossack on a black horse holds a white spear in his hand, you can be almost one hundred percent sure that this person has seen hell with his own eyes.

This is the symbol of the 110th separate mechanized brigade, which held Avdiivka for almost two years. And, without detracting from the honor of other brigades and battalions, we can definitely say that these men and women have become not heroes – but legends.

Honor, 110 OMBr. Honor and endless gratitude.
@y_gudymenko

 

Russia makes its major first battlefield gain since last May — and Ukraine says holdup of US aid is in part to blame. https://t.co/SuIgKJcBdl

— Paul Sonne (@PaulSonne) February 17, 2024

From The New York Times: (emphasis mine)

Ukraine ordered the complete withdrawal from the decimated city of Avdiivka before dawn on Saturday, surrendering a position that had been a military stronghold for the better part of a decade, in the face of withering Russian assault.

“Based on the operational situation around Avdiivka, in order to avoid encirclement and preserve the lives and health of servicemen, I decided to withdraw our units from the city and move to defense on more favorable lines,” Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander, said in a statement issued overnight.

The fall of Avdiivka, a city that was once home to some 30,000 people but is now a smoking ruin, is the first major gain Russian forces have achieved since May of last year. After rebuffing a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer and fall, Russian forces in recent weeks have been pressing the attack across nearly the entire length of the 600-mile-long front.

The Ukrainian withdrawal on Saturday follows a bloody endgame that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the two-year-old war. Relying on its superiority in personnel and weaponry, Russia pounded the city with aerial bombardments and ground assaults, even as its fighters suffered a staggering amount of casualties.

Outgunned Ukrainian forces had begun withdrawing from positions in the southern part of the city on Wednesday, and since then have been engaged in a desperate battle to avoid encirclement inside the city as Russian forces advanced from multiple directions. As Russian bombers pummeled Avdiivka, Ukraine said its forces had targeted and shot down three Russian warplanes.

Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the head of Ukraine’s forces in the south, said there had been no choice but to withdraw, given the Russian advantage in firepower and the number of soldiers Russia was willing to throw into the battle.

“In a situation where the enemy is advancing on the corpses of their own soldiers with a 10-to-1 shell advantage, under constant bombardment, this is the only correct solution,” he said in a statement.

The commander said that there were losses for the Ukrainians and “at the final stage of the operation, under pressure from the superior forces of the enemy, some Ukrainian servicemen fell into captivity.”

Even if Ukrainian lines stabilize in the rear of Avdiivka, the city’s fall into Russian control will allow Moscow’s military to move its troops and equipment more efficiently as it presses in other directions.

“Avdiivka is a very important strong point in the Ukrainian system of defense,” because it protects Pokrovsk, about 30 miles to the northwest, a logistical hub for the Ukrainian Army, Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine, said in an interview.

“Taking control of Avdiivka might create an opening for Russia,” he said.

He added, however, that Russian forces lacked large reserves of troops and equipment and were unlikely to be able to push further west of Avdiivka quickly and turn this week’s success into a major victory.

Soldiers reached by phone on Friday, who asked not to be identified given the ongoing military action, described a harrowing bid to escape the city. They gave accounts of racing past blasted-out buildings as shells thundered from all around and Russians pressed in from several directions.

“In one of the sectors in the town, fighters from the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade find themselves completely surrounded, but they are attempting to break through, and they succeed,” Maj. Rodion Kudryashov, deputy commander of the assault brigade, said in an interview with Radio Liberty.

As the battle for Avdiivka intensified, Ukrainian commanders fighting in the area were forced to ration ammunition, soldiers said. White House officials have seized on similar accounts to assert that the failure to pass a $60 billion renewed military aid package in Congress was directly undermining the Ukrainians’ fight on the ground.

I have served as the senior civilian advisor to over half a dozen general officers. And I have been a faculty instructor at USAWC for at least half a dozen more, as well as half a dozen allied and partner general officers or senior colonels who would become general officers. I have heard several of my former bosses tell our allies and partners that they have no better friend that the US. I know my former bosses believed this. I know I believed this. I no longer believe this.

If the United States is unable to step up and provide the military aid that Ukraine, as well as our other allies and partners need now and the humanitarian aid the Gazan Palestinians need, then we can mark 2023-2024 as when the United States ceded hegemony to the PRC and Russia not with a bang, but with a pathetic whimper.

We now have greater clarity on Russia’s political warfare against Ukraine, the US, NATO, and the EU.

Internal Kremlin docs "obtained by a European intelligence service" & reviewed by WaPo show how Kremlin instructions led to 1000s of social media posts/100s of fake articles "trying to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the 2 Ukrainian leaders"https://t.co/qX5dkZKv5W

— Sean Lyngaas (@snlyngaas) February 16, 2024

From The Washington Post: (emphasis mine)

When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.

“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration ordered a group of Russian political strategists to use social media and fake news articles to push the theme that Zelensky “is hysterical and weak. … He fears that he will be pushed aside, therefore he is getting rid of the dangerous ones.”

The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”

Ukrainian society, however, has so far remained remarkably united since Russia’s invasion, according to opinion polls, and officials in Moscow, the documents show, sometimes expressed frustration at their inability to undermine Zelensky and foment division. One of them complained in one exchange that the Ukrainian president was like Brad Pitt, a global star with an image that couldn’t be sullied.

But with Gen. Zaluzhny now out, the front lines frozen and further military and financial support from the United States uncertain, some in Kyiv are concerned that Russia’s covert propaganda efforts could begin to erode national cohesion and morale.

“The most difficult times are ahead,” said one senior European security official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Russia survived and they are preparing a new campaign which consists of three main directions: first, pressure on the front line; second, attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure; and thirdly, this destabilization campaign.”

Moscow’s four key objectives

The documents show how in January 2023 the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, tasked a team of officials and political strategists with establishing a presence on Ukrainian social media to distribute disinformation.

The effort built on an earlier project that Kiriyenko, a longtime Putin aide, had been running to subvert Western support for Ukraine, including in France and Germany, previous reporting by The Post shows. The European propaganda group was overseen by one of Kiriyenko’s deputies, Tatyana Matveeva, head of the Kremlin’s department for developing information and communication technologies, the documents show.

By the end of 2022, after Ukraine pushed back Russian forces in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions and officials in Kyiv began to talk of a major spring counteroffensive in the east and south, Kiriyenko put together a second team focused on destabilizing Ukraine itself, the documents show. That effort was headed by one of his closest deputies, Alexander Kharichev, a bureaucrat known in some Moscow circles as the “fixer” or “election handler” because he ensures that domestic elections go the Kremlin’s way.

At a Jan. 16, 2023, meeting, Kiriyenko laid out four key objectives for the Ukraine propaganda team: discrediting Kyiv’s military and political leadership, splitting the Ukrainian elite, demoralizing Ukrainian troops and disorienting the Ukrainian population, the documents show.

The team’s success was to be measured according to key indicators: They were to “lower the ratings of key personnel in Zelensky’s office, the Ukrainian government, and the command of Ukraine’s armed forces,” and increase the belief among the Ukrainian population that the country’s elite was working only for itself. “A growth in the number of government dismissals and public conflicts” would also be a sign of achievement. To increase fear and anxiety, Ukrainian war losses were to be exaggerated, the documents state.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Kharichev and Matveeva did not respond to detailed requests for comment on the contents of the documents.

The documents show that progress was monitored at near-weekly Kremlin meetings, where the strategists gave dashboard presentations showcasing the most widely read posts they’d planted in Ukrainian social media and tallying the overall distribution of their output. They also ran weekly opinion polls on the level of trust in Zelensky and the country’s military leadership.

Among the material they highlighted was a fabricated Facebook post claiming that the family of a fallen soldier had not received any help from the state, which garnered more than 2 million views, according to one of the dashboard presentations. According to another, a top post for the goal of disorienting the population was a fake video on Telegram claiming that the main war aim of authorities in Kyiv was “to fight to the last Ukrainian.”

By early March, dozens of hired trolls were pumping out more than 1,300 texts and 37,000 comments on Ukrainian social media each week, according to one of the dashboard presentations. Records show that employees at troll farms earned 60,000 rubles a month, or $660, for writing 100 comments a day.

Most of the strategists’ reports to their political masters focused on the volume of content produced and total views, but for the first five months, they offered little in the way of evidence that the effort was having any impact on Ukrainians. The Kremlin-conducted polls showed that trust in Zelensky remained consistently high, with 68 to 73.3 percent of Ukrainians trusting the president from February to June.

By August, however, the Kremlin polls showed this measure falling to 65.4 percent. It is impossible to gauge the accuracy of these polls, and it’s unclear how the Russians are conducting them in Ukraine.

A poll by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center in July showed trust in Zelensky at 81 percent. The most recent poll published by the center, on Feb. 8, showed trust in Zelensky had dropped to 69 percent.

The strategists were aware of the difficulty of their task. “At the current moment, we are having to enter Ukraine’s media landscape practically from zero,” one report in April said. “The pro-Russian segment has been completely purged from the mass media and social networks.”

The strategists advised developing “a network of Telegram channels in combination with Twitter and Facebook/Instagram” as the most effective way of penetrating Ukraine’s media space, noting that the Telegram audience in Ukraine had grown 600 percent over the previous year. After the invasion, Zelensky’s government had created a single source of television news, but Ukrainians had drifted away from the programming, saying Ukraine’s military struggles were not sufficiently reported or discussed.

“Telegram became the most important source of news, even more important than mainstream media,” the senior European security official said. “It’s impossible to block it.”

The Moscow strategists emphasized the need to avoid blatant pro-Russian propaganda to build trust with the audience. “It’s clear that we can’t fly with our old resources,” one of the strategists wrote on April 5 after a Kremlin meeting.

One of the strategists’ aims, European security officials said, was to ensure that the themes placed in European social media filtered back into Ukraine, through reposts and amplification,or by being picked up by Ukrainian politicians keen to boost their profiles with provocative posts.

“They look for weak spots. … They use what they create themselves and whatever is lying under their feet,” a secondEuropean security officials said. “Everything is aimed at demoralizing people.”

The strategists also had price lists for planting pro-Russian commentary in prominent Western media and for paying social media “influencers” in the United States and Europe “willing to work with Russian clients.” The documents say the Russians were willing to pay up to $39,000 for the planting of pro-Russian commentary in major media outlets in the West.

“Practically everywhere this will be columnists, leaders of public opinion, former diplomats, officials, professors and so on,” a note attached to the price list states. It is unclear from the documents whether the Kremlin was able to get material into Western publications or whether anyone was paid.

But the Kremlin political strategists were not above lining their own pockets in the process: “I added 20 percent,” one of them wrote to a colleague.

As winter descended on Kyiv, a number of deepfake videos portraying Zaluzhny calling Zelensky an enemy of the people and calling for a coup began to appear. The videos were quickly denounced as fake and did not have any real impact in Ukraine. But the senior European security official said he worried the Kremlin was only testing the ground for future deepfakes.

“It’s very expensive, but it can work,” he said. “In the proper time, it can be used.”

There is much, much more after the link!

Guess what you all get tonight? A second rant with no extra charge. US Psychological Operations doctrine DOES NOT care about success. It DOES NOT define success. It DOES NOT measure success. Rather, it measures performance and effectiveness. I have spent a lot of time arguing with members of that community that this is not just wrong, but dangerously stupid as they are now and have been focused on attempting to assess the wrong outcomes. Which also means you wind up designing your operations around bullshit where your outcomes variables are selected on your explanatory variables and neither your outcome nor your explanatory variables have internal consistency!

So if you’re wondering why Russia has been winning its political warfare campaign and doing incredible damage with its information and psychological warfare lines of effort, it is because we are incredibly bad at this in addition to being in denial that we are at war with Russia.

Moving on…

My take for @theipaper on why Navalny’s death signals yet more crackdowns on what tiny space remains for political life in Russia and why the West needs to understand in funding Ukraine its fighting for Kyiv’s future as well as Moscow’s https://t.co/5kqanWcAEZ

— Maximilian Hess (@zakavkaza) February 16, 2024

From the iPaper: (emphasis mine)

The death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny signals the end of President Vladimir Putin’s tolerance of any domestic opposition – and Putin’s confidence that Western support for the fight against him is waning.

Putin’s political opponents have long been jailed, hounded into exile, or met far darker fates – as Navalny has – but the timing could not be clearer.

Much will remain unknown about Navalny’s death – the Kremlin will never tolerate an independent investigation – but its claim that he died of a stroke at 47 is not credible. Navalny was photographed attending one of the many trials engineered against him just a day ago, with the Kremlin’s pursuit of him continuing three years after he decided to return to Russia in January 2021.

Navalny’s choice to return to Russia was incredibly foolhardy. It came shortly after he survived a poisoning attempt in August 2020, and was forced to seek treatment abroad in Germany.

He even spoke with the agent of Russia’s FSB suspected of carrying out the attack shortly before returning, having tricked him into thinking he was talking to his superior rather than his target.

Navalny knew he was a marked man, he knew he would swiftly be imprisoned as he had been many times before – but returned knowing the exiled opposition was divided, hoping he could inspire Russians to seek alternatives.

That was not to be. Nearly one million more Russians are estimated to have fled into exile following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the Kremlin has been setting the stage for removing what little criticism of Putin still remains.

The Russian presidential election on 17 March will be little more than a coronation. Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has stated Putin will not campaign, or debate his opponents.

Although oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov and socialite Ksenia Sobchak were little more than Kremlin-managed faux opposition candidates in the 2012 and 2018 presidential elections, there will be no such symbolic opposition this time. All the candidates running support Putin, serve in his system, and are in favour of the wanton war against Ukraine.

The Kremlin did allow a trial balloon candidacy of Boris Nadezhdin, best known for serving as a punching bag on state television for opposing the war. His appeals to the Supreme Court to be allowed to stand were rejected a day before Navalny’s death, and the Kremlin may have had an ulterior motive in allowing him to gather signatures for his candidacy.

Nadezhdin has been a close friend of Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s latest “curator” of domestic politics, for more than 25 years. His candidacy was little more than an effort by the Kremlin to sniff out those willing to support such a candidate – the Kremlin simultaneously set about passing legislation allowing the seizure of assets from those who criticise the military or Ukraine war.

It made clear that opposition from even the pro-war nationalist right will not be allowed – firebrand ex-militia leader Igor Girkin, who a Dutch court found guilty for downing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine during Putin’s 2014 invasion, was jailed last month.

Putin’s Kremlin clearly feels emboldened to take such action.

On Twitter/X shortly after Navalny’s death was announced, a “journalist” with Russia’s state propaganda service Sputnik threatened a critic of the Kremlin’s abroad with asset seizures or other action. While many Russians at home have protested Putin’s war, and been detained for it, Kremlin crackdowns and the sentences imposed have grown wider and longer. That trend will accelerate.

Navalny was not the West’s ideal version of a Russian liberal, given his nationalist and populist bent – but that is also why he represented an alternative that might have been able to take root in Russia. That hope has been extinguished.

It is clear Putin bears responsibility for Navalny’s death. But the West should look at how it has enabled Putin not only to continue his war in Ukraine, but to rob Russian people of the freedom they deserve too.

Navalny’s death came hours after Republicans in the US House of Representatives went on holiday rather than vote on aid passed by the Senate to fund Ukraine’s defence. But it is not too late to sustain and even expand Western aid for Ukraine. Defeating Putin’s army is the best hope for Ukrainian freedom and, in light of Navalny’s passing and Putin’s crackdowns, for a Russian alternative to emerge. It is the eulogy Navalny deserves, and which both Moscow and Kyiv need.

+3 russian planes destroyed.

This morning, the Ukrainian Air Force destroyed three enemy aircraft at once: two Su-34 fighter-bombers and one Su-35 fighter in the eastern direction.

Great job, warriors! pic.twitter.com/yr2cyxPy96

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) February 17, 2024

/2. Russian sources claim that one Russian Su-35S was shot down on the eastern front. As they claim, “friendly air defense fire.” According to the Russians, the Su-34s were not lost pic.twitter.com/RX0RRERbZG

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) February 17, 2024

/4. Diakove, Luhansk region. Where one of Russian aircrafts was shot down today. +100km from the front line pic.twitter.com/I45SRNvvJn

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) February 17, 2024

Imagine what the Ukrainians are going to do when they finally get the F-16? Imagine what they would have been able to do if we hadn’t dragged things out, started their training on them in late spring/early summer 2022, and they were flying them no later than spring 2023? An entire year and countless lives wasted because the Biden administration is afraid to upset Putin.

Another day, another bit of evidence of Russian war crimes emerges:

You can watch the investigation with English subtitles here: https://t.co/dbZb6KZRNd

— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) February 17, 2024

From the about below the video:

198,773 views Feb 17, 2024 #war #chernihivshchyna #occupiers

“I found a camera that was stolen by the Russians, maybe you can help find the owners.” This story began with what a Ukrainian prospector wrote to us on social networks. He found a camera in an abandoned IFV belonging to Russians fleeing Ukrainian forces in Chernihiv Oblast. On it were photos of a family from a Ukrainian village that had been held by the Russians for a month, and there were also photos of the Russian military themselves. Yes, yes, you did not mix anything up, the occupiers were taking pictures with the cameras they had stolen from the locals. Next, see the fascinating story of how we returned the loot to its owners, and what we learned from the loot. Spoiler: it’s a story about war criminals again

Here’s what Putin had to spend for the Russian to take Avdiivka:

A list of russian brigades and formations that were thrown at Avdiivka. It took tens of thousands of top fighters and four months to create numerical superiority and break through the Ukrainian defence which lacked ammunition. Many of these russian brigades lost 60%+ of… pic.twitter.com/iPAS6jwgS3

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) February 17, 2024

 

A list of russian brigades and formations that were thrown at Avdiivka. It took tens of thousands of top fighters and four months to create numerical superiority and break through the Ukrainian defence which lacked ammunition. Many of these russian brigades lost 60%+ of personnel.

I would also add Speaker Mike Johnson to this list.

Here’s the screen grab of Dmitri’s translation:

Images from Avdiivka of new Russian war crimes against Ukrainian POWs has begun to circulate. Again: you DO NOT need to go look at them!

Kursk, Russia:

Kursk, russia, last night – an oil depot was set on fire by unidentified UAVs. pic.twitter.com/42sV4ytgdt

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) February 17, 2024

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

You gotta fight for your right tо p⃦a⃦r⃦t⃦y⃦ survive

Song for the Planet. 2024 edition. pic.twitter.com/fvYPGGfHpn

— Patron (@PatronDsns) February 17, 2024

I think party is supposed to be scratched out and the tweet should read like this:

You gotta fight for your right tо p⃦a⃦r⃦t⃦y⃦ survive

Song for the Planet. 2024 edition.

And a new video from Patron’s official TikTok:

@patron__dsns

Погані дні бувають у всіх. Завтра обов’язково буде краще❤️ #песпатрон

♬ Bad Day – Dayton

Here is the machine translation of the caption:

Everyone has bad days. Tomorrow will definitely be better ❤️ #песпатрон

Open thread!