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Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!
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Between the Jan. 6 hearings and the war in Ukraine, I am reminded yet again of how fragile any sense of peace and normalcy can be, as well as how easily a single, powerful person can upend it, especially if they are surrounded by enough sniveling enablers.
In Ukraine, the war grinds on. Russia, advancing bit by bit, has taken almost all of the Luhansk region. In what seems like an eerie reprisal of what we saw at the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, a similar drama is now playing out at the Azot chemical plant in Severodonetsk. As many as 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers are trapped there, as are some 500 Ukrainian civilians—including children—who took shelter in the plant. And once again, as another Ukrainian city burns around them, Kyiv and Moscow haggle over humanitarian corridors.
Ukraine is suffering tremendous casualties. While Kyiv did not publicize any casualty figures before the 100 day mark, Ukrainian officials are now saying that their army is losing some 500 soldiers a day to death and injury. The Zelensky government is also pleading with the West for more artillery, more drones, more everything, arguing that it cannot hold off the Russians much longer without it.
According to some analysts I’ve spoken to, the two are related: Ukraine is playing up the direness of its situation in order to pressure Western governments, particularly Washington, to increase its military aid to Ukraine. It doesn’t seem that the message is really getting through, though. The people who make these decisions in Washington are already following every development and are firmly on Ukraine’s side, while the American public is distracted by inflation, school shootings, and a teetering democracy at home...
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The War Comes to Kalorama |
Philippe Étienne, the French ambassador to the U.S., is probably the most popular, and polished, figure in establishment Washington. And he may know more about Russia than anyone else in this town. |
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Philippe Étienne loves Russia. When I was first introduced to the French ambassador, at an event organized by unofficial D.C. mayor (and recent Semafor hire) Steve Clemons, Étienne began to speak to me in Russian. It was soft and wrapped in a thick, charming French accent, but it was still quite good after 20 years, the time that had passed since Étienne worked as a cultural attaché in the French embassy in Moscow.
Étienne arrived in Moscow when it was still the capital of the Soviet Union, in September 1991, just three months before he watched, along with the rest of the astonished world, the red Soviet flag come down over the Kremlin. With it fell the totalitarian regime that had terrorized and silenced its own people for generations. Overnight, Étienne became the cultural ambassador to Russia, a new country that was finally opening to the West—and to itself. “It was a very special time,” he told me later, when we had lunch in one of the many painfully elegant rooms in the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. “This was an incredible, incredible time.”
He traveled to Nizhny Novgorod, a city once closed to foreigners, and met its young new mayor, Boris Nemtsov. A trained mathematician, Étienne met Russian scientists and researchers who had become impoverished by the transition to capitalism but were nonetheless ebullient at the chance to work with the West and to live and speak freely. He helped develop ties between the Russian space program and those in the West. He met Natalia Solzhenitsyna, wife of the exiled writer Aleksandr. He brought loads of Russian books to the country, books that had once been banned by the Kremlin and had been published abroad, including at presses set up by Russian exiles in cities like Paris. The French embassy helped distribute them to regional libraries, which Étienne saw as a restitution of sorts. Those books, he said, “belong to Russian culture, but also to the Russian soul.” (Decades later, Étienne advised the French government on how to repatriate art stolen from France’s former African colonies.)... |
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FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT |
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S.B.F.’s Media Dreams |
The 30-year-old metal-haired crypto billionaire is becoming media-curious. |
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Elon vs. The Arbs |
The arbitrageurs might be the most vulnerable players in Elon's off-the-rails Twitter takeover. |
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David Boies' Gamble |
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PETER HAMBY |
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