Also on today’s menu:
Cyber Security At Risk
Nuclear Danger
An article in Slate helps to explain why so many people doubted that Russia would actually attack Ukraine: “While the world’s news readers may long have thought of Vladimir Putin as a dictator, most Russia analysts and policymakers saw the Kremlin differently. And for most of Putin’s nearly 23-year journey in power, they were right to do so. What existed was a complicated regime beyond one man where lots of people exerted influence and could check Putin’s impulses.”
Putin was Boris Yeltsin’s chosen successor in 1999, when he operated as a semi-democratic populist. He became an authoritarian with the rigged 2004 Russian elections. Following mass protests against the government, he began to tighten his grip on power in 2012. Still, in 2014, when Putin decided to annex Crimea, he discussed the move with his inner circle in the Kremlin, which is a key reason that foreign policy analysts assumed Putin wasn’t making his decisions alone and would avoid an attack on Ukraine.
Americans tend to see the world in much the same way as President Joe Biden frames it in his speeches, divided neatly between “democracies” and “autocracies.” But the reality is that authoritarian states exist on a political spectrum depending on how much power is exercised by a single individual — and where states land on this spectrum has a big impact on matters of war and peace. At one end, you have civilian-run regimes, like Hu Jintao’s China or Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where political power is checked and shared within a ruling party. At the other, you have personalist dictatorships like that of, say, Saddam Hussein, where rivals are purged, loyalists are rewarded, cults of personality flourish, and all authority runs through the glorious leader.
— Slate
Cyber Security At Risk
There has been some fear that Russian government hackers would unleash havoc in the wake of Putin’s war in Ukraine, and, indeed, hackers there likely have access to key U.S. infrastructure agencies. They may just be waiting for the right moment to launch some kind of attack.
In 2015, Russian hackers breached the Ukrainian power grid; in 2017, Russia deployed the notorious NotPetya malware via Ukrainian accounting software, spreading the virus across the globe, leading to billions of dollars in damage and disruption to businesses.
Military officials within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are debating what degree of cyberattack would invoke the organization’s Article 5, which states that all NATO countries would assist if an ally is the victim of an “armed attack.”
Nuclear Danger
The threat of Putin unleashing nuclear weapons in his war on Ukraine has been another concern, but the March 3 fire that broke out at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, following Russian shelling of the area, raised another possibility: a nuclear meltdown. The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency assured the world that radiation levels and the safety of Zaporizhzhia’s reactors were not affected.
Ukraine already witnessed the devastation possible with nuclear power plants in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the northern part of the country. Zaporizhzhia could pose a worse disaster, being Europe’s largest nuclear facility, with six reactors.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that Russia’s attack could have caused destruction equal to six Chernobyls. “If there is an explosion, it is the end of everything. The end of Europe,” he said.
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I found it very difficult to watch Mr. Biden give that speech. Where is our country going? The Biden/Harris administration so far has created so much destruction because of their policies. Do they live in the same world that the average American lives in?