Mind-boggling.........

‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes

Putin is trying to take down the entire world order, Fiona Hill said in an interview. But there are ways even ordinary Americans can fight back.

By MAURA REYNOLDS

For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.

That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades, worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump.

I wanted to know what she’s been thinking as she’s watched the extraordinary footage of Russian tanks rolling across international borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can offer into his motivations and objectives.

Hill spent many years studying history, and in our conversation, she repeatedly traced how long arcs and trends of European history are converging on Ukraine right now. We are already, she said, in the middle of a third World War, whether we’ve fully grasped it or not.

“Sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again,” Hill told me.

Those old historical patterns include Western businesses who fail to see how they help build a tyrant’s war chest, admirers enamored of an autocrat’s “strength” and politicians’ tendency to point fingers inward for political gain instead of working together for their nation’s security.

But at the same time, Hill says it’s not too late to turn Putin back, and it’s a job not just for the Ukrainians or for NATO — it’s a job that ordinary Westerners and companies can assist in important ways once they grasp what’s at stake.

“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”

There’s lots of danger ahead, she warned. Putin is increasingly operating emotionally and likely to use all the weapons at his disposal, including nuclear ones. It’s important not to have any illusions — but equally important not to lose hope.

“Every time you think, ‘No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would,” Hill said. “And he wants us to know that, of course. It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared…. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.”

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Maura Reynolds: You’ve been a Putin watcher for a long time, and you’ve written one of the best biographies of Putin. When you’ve been watching him over the past week, what have you been seeing that other people might be missing?

Fiona Hill: Putin is usually more cynical and calculated than he came across in his most recent speeches. There’s evident visceral emotion in things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in Ukraine. The pretext is completely flimsy and almost nonsensical for anybody who’s not in the echo chamber or the bubble of propaganda in Russia itself. I mean, demanding to the Ukrainian military that they essentially overthrow their own government or lay down their arms and surrender because they are being commanded by a bunch of drug-addled Nazi fascists? There’s just no sense to that. It beggars the imagination.

Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”

This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin. He spotlighted this during the performance of the National Security Council meeting, where it became very clear that this was his decision. He was in a way taking full responsibility for war, and even the heads of his security and intelligence services looked like they’ve been thrown off guard by how fast things were moving.

Reynolds: So Putin is being driven by emotion right now, not by some kind of logical plan?

Hill: I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.

Back then I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia. And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia.

Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?

Hill: It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one in the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.

I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.

Reynolds: Dominance in what way?

Hill: It doesn’t mean that he’s going to annex all of them and make them part of the Russian Federation like they’ve done with Crimea. You can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security networks. You can see this now across the former Soviet space.

We’ve seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.

But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets. When we look at old maps of Europe — probably the maps he’s been looking at — you find all kinds of strange entities, like the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in the Balkans. I used to think, what the hell is that? These are all little places that have dependency on a bigger power and were created to prevent the formation of larger viable states in contested regions. Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years.

Reynolds: How far into Ukraine do you think Putin is going to go?

Hill: At this juncture, if he can, he’s going to go all the way. Before this last week, he had multiple different options to choose from. He’d given himself the option of being able to go in in full force as he’s doing now, but he could also have focused on retaking the rest of the administrative territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. He could have seized the Sea of Azov, which he’s probably going to do anyway, and then joined up the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with Crimea as well as the lands in between and all the way down to Odessa. In fact, Putin initially tried this in 2014 — to create “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” but that failed when local support for joining Russia didn’t materialize.

Now, if he can, he is going to take the whole country. We have to face up to this fact. Although we haven’t seen the full Russian invasion force deployed yet, he’s certainly got the troops to move into the whole country.

Reynolds: You say he has an adequate number of troops to move in, but does he have enough to occupy the whole country?

Hill: If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.

In 2015, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was at the Munich Security Conference after the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. And he talked about Ukraine not being a country, saying pointedly that there are many minority groups in Ukraine — there are Poles and there are Romanians, there are Hungarians and Russians. And he goes on essentially almost inviting the rest of Europe to divide Ukraine up.

So what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.

Reynolds: So step by step, in ways that we haven’t always appreciated in the West, Putin has brought back a lot of these countries that were independent after the Soviet collapse back under his umbrella. The only country that has so far evaded Putin’s grip has been Ukraine.

Hill: Ukraine, correct. Because it’s bigger and because of its strategic location. That’s what Russia wants to ensure, or Putin wants to ensure, that Ukraine like the other countries, has no other option than subjugation to Russia.

Reynolds: How much of what we’re seeing now is tied to Putin’s own electoral schedule? He seized Crimea in 2014, and that helped to boost his ratings and ensure his future reelection. He’s got another election coming up in 2024. Is any of this tied to that?

Hill: I think it is. In 2020, Putin had the Russian Constitution amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony. Putin has rolled up all the potential opposition and resistance, so one would think it would be a cakewalk for him in 2024. But the way it works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the affirmation of all the population.

Behind the scenes it’s fairly clear that there’s a lot of apathy in the system, that many people support Putin because there’s no one else. People who don’t support him at all will probably not turn out to vote. The last time that his brand got stale, it was before the annexation of Crimea. That put him back on the top of the charts in terms of his ratings.

It may not just be the presidential calendar, the electoral calendar. He’s going to be 70 in October. And 70 you know, in the larger scheme of things, is not that old. We have plenty politicians out there we’re way over 70.

Reynolds: But it’s old for Russians.

Hill: It’s old for Russians. And Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by personal factors.

He may have a sense that time is marching on — it’s 22 years, after all, and the likelihood after that kind of time of a Russian leader leaving voluntarily or through elections is pretty slim. Most leaders leave either like Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko thought that he might leave, as the result of massive protests, or they die in office, like every other previous Soviet leader.

The only other person who has been Russian leader in modern times longer than Putin is Stalin, and Stalin died in office.

Reynolds: Putin came to power after a series of operations that many have seen as a kind of false flag — bombings of buildings around Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less than two years before he needs to stand for election again. Am I wrong to see that pattern?

Hill: No, I don’t think you are. There’s definitely a pattern here. Part of Putin’s persona as president is that he is a ruthless tough guy, the strong man who is the champion and protector of Russia. And that’s why Russia needs him. If all was peaceful and quiet, why would you need Vladimir Putin? If you think of other wartime leaders — Winston Churchill comes to mind — in peacetime, Winston Churchill got voted out of office.

Reynolds: Speaking of Chechnya, have been thinking that this is the largest ground military operation that Russia has fought since Chechnya. What did we learn about the Russian military then that’s relevant now?

Hill: It’s very important, that you bring this point up because people are saying Ukraine is the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. The first largest military action in Europe since World War II was actually in Chechnya, because Chechnya is part of Russia. This was a devastating conflict that dragged on for years, with two rounds of war after a brief truce, and tens of thousands of military and civilian casualties. The regional capital of Grozny was leveled. The casualties were predominantly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. The Chechens fought back, and this became a military debacle on Russia’s own soil. Analysts called it “the nadir of the Russian army.” After NATO’s intervention in the Balkan wars in the same timeframe in the 1990s, Moscow even worried that NATO might intervene.

Reynolds: What have we learned about NATO in the last two months?

Hill: In many respects, not good things, initially. Although now we see a significant rallying of the political and diplomatic forces, serious consultations and a spur to action in response to bolster NATO’s military defenses.

But we also need to think about it this way. We have had a long-term policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions. Think about Swiss Re or AIG or Lloyds of London — when the hazard was massive, like during Hurricane Katrina or the global financial crisis in 2008, those insurance companies got into major trouble. They and their clients found themselves underwater. And this is kind of what NATO members are learning now.

Reynolds: And then there’s the nuclear element. Many people have thought that we’d never see a large ground war in Europe or a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, because it could quickly escalate into a nuclear conflict. How close are we getting to that?

Hill: Well, we’re right there. Basically, what President Putin has said quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve “never had in [their] history.” And he has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear is on the table.

Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you know, Donald, we have these hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would be on the table.

Reynolds: Do you really think he’ll use a nuclear weapon?

Hill: The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.

The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Dawn Sturgis and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.

So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.

It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared. That’s exactly what he wants us to be. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.

Reynolds: So how do we deal with it? Are sanctions enough?

Hill: Well, we can’t just deal with it as the United States on our own. First of all, this has to be an international response.

Reynolds: Larger than NATO?

Hill: It has to be larger than NATO. Now I’m not saying that that means an international military response that’s larger than NATO, but the push back has to be international.

We first have to think about what Vladimir Putin has done and the nature of what we’re facing. People don’t want to talk about Adolf Hitler and World War II, but I’m going to talk about it. Obviously the major element when you talk about World War II, which is overwhelming, is the Holocaust and the absolute decimation of the Jewish population of Europe, as well as the Roma-Sinti people.

But let’s focus here on the territorial expansionism of Germany, what Germany did under Hitler in that period: seizure of the Sudetenland and the Anschluss or annexation of Austria, all on the basis that they were German speakers. The invasion of Poland. The treaty with the Soviet Union, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, that also enabled the Soviet Union to take portions of Poland but then became a prelude to Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Invasions of France and all of the countries surrounding Germany, including Denmark and further afield to Norway. Germany eventually engaged in a burst of massive territorial expansion and occupation. Eventually the Soviet Union fought back. Vladimir Putin’s own family suffered during the siege of Leningrad, and yet here is Vladimir Putin doing exactly the same thing.

Reynolds: So, similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?

Hill: Correct. And he’s blaming others, for why this has happened, and getting us to blame ourselves.

If people look back to the history of World War II, there were an awful lot of people around Europe who became Nazi German sympathizers before the invasion of Poland. In the United Kingdom, there was a whole host of British politicians who admired Hitler’s strength and his power, for doing what doing what Great Powers do, before the horrors of the Blitz and the Holocaust finally penetrated.

Reynolds: And you see this now.

Hill: You totally see it. Unfortunately, we have politicians and public figures in the United States and around Europe who have embraced the idea that Russia was wronged by NATO and that Putin is a strong, powerful man and has the right to do what he’s doing: Because Ukraine is somehow not worthy of independence, because it’s either Russia’s historical lands or Ukrainians are Russians, or the Ukrainian leaders are — this is what Putin says — “drug addled, fascist Nazis” or whatever labels he wants to apply here.

So sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again. The other thing to think about in this larger historic context is how much the German business community helped facilitate the rise of Hitler. Right now, everyone who has been doing business in Russia or buying Russian gas and oil has contributed to Putin’s war chest. Our investments are not just boosting business profits, or Russia’s sovereign wealth funds and its longer-term development. They now are literally the fuel for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Reynolds: I gather you think that sanctions leveled by the government are inadequate to address this much larger threat?

Hill: Absolutely. Sanctions are not going to be enough. You need to have a major international response, where governments decide on their own accord that they can’t do business with Russia for a period of time until this is resolved. We need a temporary suspension of business activity with Russia. Just as we wouldn’t be having a full-blown diplomatic negotiation for anything but a ceasefire and withdrawal while Ukraine is still being actively invaded, so it’s the same thing with business. Right now you’re fueling the invasion of Ukraine. So what we need is a suspension of business activity with Russia until Moscow ceases hostilities and withdraws its troops.

Reynolds: So ordinary companies…

Hill: Ordinary companies should make a decision. This is the epitome of “ESG” that companies are saying is their priority right now — upholding standards of good Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance. Just like people didn’t want their money invested in South Africa during apartheid, do you really want to have your money invested in Russia during Russia’s brutal invasion and subjugation and carving up of Ukraine?

If Western companies, their pension plans or mutual funds, are invested in Russia they should pull out. Any people who are sitting on the boards of major Russian companies should resign immediately. Not every Russian company is tied to the Kremlin, but many major Russian companies absolutely are, and everyone knows it. If we look back to Germany in the runup to the Second World War, it was the major German enterprises that were being used in support of the war. And we’re seeing exactly the same thing now. Russia would not be able to afford this war were it not for the fact that oil and gas prices are ratcheting up. They’ve got enough in the war chest for now. But over the longer term, this will not be sustainable without the investment that comes into Russia and all of the Russian commodities, not just oil and gas, that are being purchased on world markets. And, our international allies, like Saudi Arabia, should be increasing oil production right now as a temporary offset. Right now, they are also indirectly funding war in Ukraine by keeping oil prices high.

This has to be an international response to push Russia to stop its military action. India abstained in the United Nations, and you can see that other countries are feeling discomforted and hoping this might go away. This is not going to go away, and it could be “you next” — because Putin is setting a precedent for countries to return to the type of behavior that sparked the two great wars which were a free-for-all over territory. Putin is saying, “Throughout history borders have changed. Who cares?”

Reynolds: And you do not think he will necessarily stop at Ukraine?

Hill: Of course he won’t. Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done.

Reynolds: He’s blown up the rules-based international order.

Hill: Exactly. What stops a lot of people from pulling out of Russia even temporarily is, they will say, “Well, the Chinese will just step in.” This is what every investor always tells me. “If I get out, someone else will move in.” I’m not sure that Russian businesspeople want to wake up one morning and find out the only investors in the Russian economy are Chinese, because then Russia becomes the periphery of China, the Chinese hinterlands, and not another great power that’s operating in tandem with China.

Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.

Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.

All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.

But this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them, some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time. I’ve been saying this for years.

Reynolds: So just as the world didn’t see Hitler coming, we failed to see Putin coming?

Hill: We shouldn’t have. He’s been around for 22 years now, and he has been coming to this point since 2008. I don’t think that he initially set off to do all of this, by the way, but the attitudes towards Ukraine and the feelings that all Ukraine belongs to Russia, the feelings of loss, they’ve all been there and building up.

What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.

Nazi sympathizers...

McConnell speaks out against Greene and Gosar's appearance at white nationalist event

The two House conservatives attended a weekend conference organized by Nick Fuentes, a far-right fringe figure who asked attendees to give Russia "a round of applause."

By BURGESS EVERETT and OLIVIA BEAVERS

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is condemning fellow Republicans who engage with white nationalist groups, just days after GOP Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at the extremist-backed America First Political Action Conference.

Asked for comment on Greene and Gosar’s participation in the event, where far-fright fringe organizer Nick Fuentes urged the crowd to give “a round of applause for Russia,” the Republican leader said in a statement on Monday afternoon: “There’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism.”

During the weekend conference, as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army attacked Ukraine, a chant of “Putin” was heard in the crowd after Fuentes made his request for support of Moscow. Gosar spoke at the America First conference last year, when Fuentes urged the protection of the “white demographic core.”

Greene (R-Ga.) defended herself in a weekend statement after absorbing a deluge of criticism for her appearance at the America First event, criticizing the “Pharisees in the Republican Party” and arguing she “won’t abandon these young men and women” who attended. Her move nonetheless drew condemnation from several prominent Republicans including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).

And other House conservatives sought distance from Gosar and Greene. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) put it this way: “I do not apologize for other members and what they say or what they do. I do not support white supremacists, like Nick Fuentes, period.”

The Republican National Committee recently censured Cheney and Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for their work with Democrats on investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a punishment that prompted criticism from McConnell and many other Senate Republicans who said the RNC had unfairly singled out the duo. The retiring Kinzinger said in an interview on Monday that his party should be focused on Greene and Gosar — not him — but had little confidence in that playing out.

“What I think we should do is kick them out of the party. What do I think we’re going to do? Nothing. Liz and I can get censured, they’re going to get help up as the future leaders of the party,” he said in an interview.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “needs to do a press conference today denouncing Greene, Gosar, Fuentes, announcing Greene and Gosar are out of the conference, there’s no room for this,” Kinzinger added. “He’s not going to do that.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson

'He loved every minute of this’— How Biden decided on Ketanji Brown Jackson

The president has been contemplating this moment for years. When the time came, he moved with haste.

By LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO

As President Biden considered a handful of Black women for the Supreme Court, two things drew him to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, according to those familiar with his decision making process. Jackson was molded by her predecessor, the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer; and, like Biden, she came with a rounded resume bolstered by her work as a public defender.

Those traits ultimately convinced the president to nominate Jackson on Friday, making her the first Black female Supreme Court nominee in the nation’s history. It could soon result in her taking a seat on that bench. One person close to the White House said that prep for hearings will start this weekend and Hill visits will begin next week. Though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to hold a confirmation vote by Easter, those close to the White House have also noted that it took just 27 days to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Court from the time of her nomination.

Getting to this point was not quite as hasty, according to interviews with more than a dozen Biden confidants, White House officials, advocates and people close to the aspiring court nominees. While Biden’s deliberations began in earnest over the last month, the president and White House officials long ago began laying the groundwork that led them to Jackson. Biden started reviewing resumes for potential Supreme Court picks shortly after entering the Oval Office. After Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement last month, the president quickly began seeking the advice of lawmakers, legal scholars, civil rights leaders and judicial activists.

For Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee who spent much of his career shaping and scrutinizing the judicial system, choosing a Supreme Court nominee is arguably one of the most, if not the most, important duties of his presidency.

“It’s one of the reasons he ran. He had to list a bunch of reasons why he ran and one of them was in order to get the right people on the Supreme Court,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman, (D-Del.), Biden’s longtime Senate chief of staff who ran the president’s transition in 2020. “He’s been dealing with this for like almost 50 years.”

Introducing Jackson on Friday from the White House’s Cross Hall, Biden pointed to her work for Breyer and special relationship with the retiring justice as well as her experience as a public defender — a first for the high court if she’s confirmed.

“It spoke to him in an important way,” retired Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe said of Jackson’s public defender years. “He understood in a way that a president who had not himself been a public defender might not have been able to understand just what that meant and why it gave her a distinctive perspective.”

Throughout his Senate career and during his 2020 presidential run, Biden often boasted of his time as a public defender in Delaware, a brief stint early in his career in the late 1960s. Tribe, a constitutional law expert in close touch with Biden and advisers throughout the selection process, said Biden “thought he learned a great deal” from that time in his life, “about the conditions of life on the street, about the way ordinary people get caught up in criminal activity, and he certainly found it put him in a better position to be compassionate for people on all sides of every issue.”

 Ketanji Brown Jackson makes brief remarks after U.S. President Joe Biden introduced her as his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court during an event.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson makes brief remarks after President Joe Biden introduced her on Friday. | Getty Images

Tribe said he communicated to the White House early in the process that he favored Jackson, whose opinions he studied along with those of the other prospective Supreme Court nominees. He mentioned her “analytical brilliance” as well as her experience on the sentencing commission, district court and, for the last eight months, on the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. Tribe also underscored her empathy, another trait closely associated with Biden himself. “She’s very good at understanding where other people are coming from,” he said.

Biden’s sitdown with Jackson came on Feb. 14. A person familiar with the process said that another finalist — California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger — flew in from California for an interview last week.

Biden informed Jackson on Thursday evening that she was his pick. According to a person familiar with the process, the White House was still asking at least one other contender for information through Tuesday, before going dark. The White House was determined to meet the timeline they’d set to pick a nominee by the end of the month. They also were invested in trying to move more quickly than past Democratic presidents.

But they were hemmed in by other political realities. A 50-50 Senate made a typically precarious process even more dicey; a war in Ukraine drew the president’s attention elsewhere. Ultimately, the president took a few more days (29 total) from Breyer’s retirement to the nomination of a replacement than former President Barack Obama did to put forward Justice Sonia Sotomayor for retired Justice David Souter’s seat.

On Friday morning, Biden spoke with Democratic leaders on the Hill, including Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who was instrumental in reviving Biden’s listless 2020 campaign and who, two years ago, convinced him to make his pledge to naming a Black woman.

Clyburn and South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham had made a repeated and vocal push for Biden to pick Judge J. Michelle Childs, who serves on a federal district court in the Palmetto state. The public lobbying, however, had mixed results. While it elevated Childs as a potential Supreme Court nominee — far more so than she would have been otherwise — it also irked some White House officials and others close to the White House.

With just weeks to go before the end-of-February deadline was hit, there was a sense inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. that if Biden were to select Childs, it would be seen as acting for political reasons — a nod to Clyburn for being an early benefactor in his state, and because Graham held out the prospect of a broader bipartisan vote in the Senate.

Officials were heartened by Clyburn’s comments to the Washington Post last week that he didn’t view his support as an ultimatum, seeing it as an implicit off ramp for the South Carolina Democrat to back Jackson. By last weekend, the reality was setting in further, with several people close to Clyburn indicating they didn’t think Childs would be Biden’s choice.

Despite the public pressure campaign, the White House kept a tight lid on the selection process, with officials telling Jackson she had been chosen before telling Childs and Kruger that they were not the nominee. Biden appeared to relish the announcement on Friday, joking that he’s “presided over more Supreme Court nominations than almost anyone living today.”

“He loved every minute of this because he loves constitutional law and making this choice was exciting for him,” Tribe said of Biden.

As a senator, Biden spent “hundreds of hours” preparing for confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees, he said in a 1991 speech before the Detroit College of Law. In those remarks, he described the justices appointed to the high court as the “most important” people “affecting the lives in ways more significant and long laying than any president or any Congress has or will.”

On Friday, Biden argued he’s found a nominee “worthy of Justice Breyer’s excellence and decency.”

“Not only did she learn about being a judge from Justice Breyer himself, she saw the great rigor through which Justice Breyer approached his work,” Biden said. “She learned from his willingness to work with colleagues with different viewpoints. Now years later, she steps up to fill Justice Breyer’s place in the court with a uniquely accomplished and wide ranging background.”

Prior to making his decision, Biden and his staff engaged a wide audience of outside voices. He and his staff also spoke with Republican senators, cautiously hopeful that they might win a few of their votes for final confirmation.

The sales job continued Friday as Biden highlighted Jackson’s unique resume as he introduced her at the White House. After Justice Breyer, Jackson, if confirmed, would be the only member of the high court to have previously served on the United States Sentencing Commission. Next to Justice Sotomayor, Jackson would be the only other justice on the court with experience as a trial judge. If confirmed, Jackson would become the second judge — after Thurgood Marshall — ever to sit on the court to have criminal defense experience and the first public defender.

“She brings a life experience that we’ve not had in the court often, and someone who does not look through the lens of a prosecutor but through the lens of one whose defended defendants,” said Reverend Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network. “As we deal with trying to have a balanced, fair criminal justice system, her presence is very appealing to me.”

During the deliberation process, Sharpton told Biden that he wasn’t looking for an ideologue but warned Biden that “somebody that’s just Black is not who he needs. He needs someone that’s sensitive [and understands] civil liberties and civil rights.

Biden, Sharpton recalled, told him: “I got it.”

Morons

'Morons': Mitt Romney goes after Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar for attending conference with white nationalist ties

Connor Perrett

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney on Sunday implied that members of his own party were "morons" after they attended a Florida event associated with white nationalists.

"Look, there's no place in either political party for this white nationalism or racism. It's simply wrong," the Republican lawmaker told CNN's Dana Bash during a Sunday appearance on "State of the Union."

GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona attended the third-annual America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, which was held Friday and organized by the far-right figure Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes is known for white nationalist views, including his questioning the existence of the Holocaust, criticizing interracial marriage, and praising Jim Crow-era segregation, Insider previously reported. The Anti-Defamation League has also called Fuentes a "well-known white supremacist pundit and organizer."

Greene on Saturday defended her appearance at the conference, claiming she did not know its organizer or about his views, Insider reported.

"I do not know Nick Fuentes. I've never heard him speak. I've never seen a video. I don't know what his views are, so I'm not aligned with anything that may be controversial," Greene told reporters at CPAC, held at the same time in Orlando.

But during his CNN appearance, Romney called out Greene and Gosar by name.

"And Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, I don't know them, but I'm reminded of that old line from the 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' movie, where one character says: 'Morons. I have got morons on my team.'"

He continued: "And I have to think anybody that would sit down with white nationalists and speak at their conference was certainly missing a few IQ points."

As HuffPost reported, other Republican lawmakers were associated with the event, including Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers and Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, who appeared in a pre-recorded video.

Arizona's Republican Gov. Doug Ducey last week defended Rogers days before she attended the event, saying she was "still better" than the Democratic opponent she defeated in 2020, Insider's John L. Dorman reported.

GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, a pariah among staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump, also chastised her colleagues for attending the evening in a tweet.

"As Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar speak at this white supremacist, anti-Semitic, pro-Putin event, silence by Republican Party leaders is deafening and enabling," she said. "All Americans should renounce this garbage and reject the Putin wing of the GOP now."

Treasonous.

Mitt Romney says its 'almost treasonous' for some GOP figures to back an 'oppressor' and 'dictator' like Putin

Cheryl Teh

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said Sunday that it is "unthinkable" and "almost treasonous" for anyone who loves freedom to also support Russian President Vladimir Putin.

During an interview on CNN's "State of the Union," the Utah senator was asked about the "pro-Putin sentiment" held by some factions of the Republican Party.

"Well, a lot of those people are changing their stripes as they're seeing the response of the world and the political response here in the US," replied Romney. "But how anybody, how anybody in this country, which loves freedom, can side with Vladimir Putin, which is an oppressor, a dictator."

"He imprisons his political opponents. He's been an adversary of America at every chance he's had. It's unthinkable to me. It's almost treasonous," he told CNN's Dana Bash.

Romney speculated that conservative figures praising Putin were likely doing so to get attention.

"And it just makes me ill to see some of these people do that. But of course, they do it because it's shock value and it's going to get them maybe more eyeballs and make a little more money for them and their network," Romney said, without mentioning any network in particular.

"It's disgusting. I'm hopeful you're seeing some of those people recognize just how wrong they were," he added.

Bash pressed Romney further, asking if the senator included former President Donald Trump as being among those who behaved in a "treasonous" fashion by expressing support for Putin.

Romney said in reply: "Well, I said it's nearly treasonous. Standing up for freedom is the right thing to do in America. Anything less than that, in my opinion, is unworthy of American support."

Several conservative figures recently praised Putin even as the Russian invasion of Ukraine loomed.

For instance, Trump on Tuesday lauded Putin's justification for invading Ukraine as "savvy" and "genius."

On the same day, Fox News host Tucker Carlson echoed Putin on his show when he said that the US should not care about Russia invading Ukraine. He later walked back some of his comments after Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine began.

Even Switzerland is saying 'Fuck You!'

Switzerland will forego "Swiss neutrality" and adopt same sanctions as EU against Russia

Kappeler in Berlin and Sharon Braithwaite

Switzerland has announced that it will forego its commitment to “Swiss neutrality” in favor of adopting sanctions against Russia, Swiss Federal President Ignazio Cassis said Monday, adding that Switzerland’s sanctions will be in line with those already adopted by the European Union. 

“The Swiss Federal Council has decided today to fully adopt EU sanctions,” Cassis said during a news briefing. “It is an unparalleled action of Switzerland, who has always stayed neutral before.”

“Russia's attack is an attack on freedom, an attack on democracy, an attack on the civil population, and an attack on the institutions of a free country. This cannot be accepted regarding international law, this cannot be accepted politically, and this cannot be accepted morally,” Cassis added. 

Speaking after an extraordinary meeting of the Swiss Federal Council, Cassis stressed that “in these dark days,” Switzerland stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and hopes that sanctions will encourage the Kremlin to “change its mind.”

“To play into the hands of an aggressor is not neutral. Having signed the Geneva convention of human rights, we are bound to humanitarian order,” Cassis said. “Other democracies shall be able to rely on Switzerland; those standing for international law shall be able to rely on Switzerland; states that uphold human rights shall be able to rely on Switzerland."

Switzerland will freeze the assets of “listed persons” and will also bring into force an entry ban for those highlighted by the EU’s packet of sanctions, according to the Swiss Federal President.

Cassis said that Switzerland was closing its airspace to all flights from Russia, including private jets, with the exception of humanitarian flights, search flights and emergency situations. 

Swiss Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter said entry ban will impact “oligarchs of Russian or Ukrainian nationality who are particularly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

“These are five persons with strong economic connections into Switzerland,” Keller-Sutter highlighted, but said because of privacy reasons, she was not naming those oligarchs.

Financial meltdown

Russia faces financial meltdown as sanctions slam its economy

By Mark Thompson, Anna Chernova and Vasco Cotovio

Russia was scrambling to prevent financial meltdown Monday as its economy was slammed by a broadside of crushing Western sanctions imposed over the weekend in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin was due to hold crisis talks with his top advisers after the ruble crashed to a record low against the US dollar, the Russian central bank more than doubled interest rates to 20%, and the Moscow stock exchange was shuttered for the day.

The European subsidiary of Russia's biggest bank was on the brink of collapse as savers rushed to withdraw their deposits. Economists warned that the Russian economy could shrink by 5%.

The ruble lost about 20% of its value to trade at 100 to the dollar at 6 a.m. ET after earlier plummeting as much as 40%. The start of trading on the Russian stock market was delayed, and then canceled entirely, according to a statement from the country's central bank.

The latest barrage of sanctions came Saturday, when the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada said they would expel some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global financial messaging service, and "paralyze" the assets of Russia's central bank.

"The ratcheting up of Western sanctions over the weekend has left Russian banks on the edge of crisis," wrote Liam Peach, an emerging market economist at Capital Economics, in a note on Monday.

Freezing reserves

Putin's government has spent the past eight years preparing Russia for tough sanctions by building up a war chest of $630 billion in international reserves including currencies and gold, but at least some of that financial firepower is now frozen and his "fortress" economy is under unprecedented assault.

"We will ... ban the transactions of Russia's central bank and freeze all its assets, to prevent it from financing Putin's war," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement Sunday.

The United States also banned US dollar transactions with the Russian central bank in a move designed to prevent it accessing its "rainy day fund," senior US administration officials said.

"Our strategy, to put it simply, is to make sure that the Russian economy goes backward as long as President Putin decides to go forward with his invasion of Ukraine," a senior administration official said.

Peach at Capital Economics estimates that about 40% of Russia's reserves are now off limits to Moscow.

"External conditions for the Russian economy have drastically changed," the Russian central bank said. "This is needed to support financial and price stability and protect the savings of citizens from depreciation," the bank added.

The central bank said it would provide an update on share trading at 9 a.m. local time (1 a.m. ET) on Tuesday.

"Due to the current situation, the Bank of Russia has decided not to open a stock market section, a derivatives market section, or a derivatives market section on the Moscow Exchange today," the statement read.

Russia is a leading exporter of oil and gas but many other sectors of its economy rely on imports. As the value of the ruble falls, they will become much more expensive to buy, pushing up inflation.

The crackdown on its leading banks, and the exclusion of some of them from the SWIFT secure messaging system that connects financial institutions around the world will also make it harder for it to sell exports.

Putin was due to meet his prime minister, finance minister, the head of the Russian central bank and the head of Russia's top lender Sberbank to discuss "economic matters," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"For a long time, Russia has been methodically preparing for the event of possible sanctions, including the most severe sanctions we are currently facing," Peskov said. "So there are response plans, and they are being implemented now as problems arise."

A run on the banks

Analysts warned that the turmoil could lead to a run on Russian banks, as savers try to secure their deposits and hoard cash.

"This weekend's events now mean that no G7 banks will be able to buy Russian rubles, sending the currency into free-fall, with the end result we could see a huge inflationary shock unfold inside Russia," Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK, said in a note.

"A run on Russian banks inside the country appears to be already starting, as ordinary Russians fear that their credit cards might no longer work," he added.

One early casualty was the European subsidiary of Sberbank, Russia's biggest lender that has been sanctioned by Western allies. The European Central Bank said Sberbank Europe, including its Austrian and Croatian branches, was failing, or likely to fail, because of "significant deposit outflows" triggered by the Ukraine crisis.

"This led to a deterioration of its liquidity position. And there are no available measures with a realistic chance of restoring this position," the ECB said in a statement.

Sberbank (SBRCY) shares listed in London fell by nearly 70%. Other Russian companies with foreign listings were also hammered. Gas giant Gazprom (GZPFY) dropped 37% in London trading, while shares in internet service provider Yandex (YNDX) were poised to open down 20% in New York.

The Russian central bank last week intervened in the currency markets to try to prop up the ruble. And on Friday, it said it was increasing the supply of bills to ATMs to meet increased demand for cash. Russian state news agency TASS reported that several banks had seen increased withdrawals since the invasion of Ukraine, notably of foreign currency.

"These are the conditions in which runs on local banks begin," wrote Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics. "The [Russian central bank] has this morning raised interest rates to 20% but other measures (e.g. limits on deposit withdrawals) are possible later today. All of this will accelerate Russia's economic downturn — a fall in GDP of [about] 5% now looks likely."

Volunteers...

Ukraine’s resistance is built on the backs of volunteers

As Russia advances, Ukrainian civilians are picking up weapons and learning to make Molotov cocktails.

By Ellen Ioanes

As Ukraine continues to wage a surprisingly successful resistance against Russia, Ukrainian civilians and volunteers are playing a crucial role in defending their country — one for which they have been preparing for the past eight years, since the last major Russian incursion in 2014.

Many civilians are taking up arms themselves, and the Ukrainian government has begun sharing bomb-making instructions and encouraging civilians to take down street signs “in order to confuse and disorient the enemy.”

In a video posted on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that he and his government were still in Kyiv, with the people of Ukraine, and called for everyone able to take up arms to defend the country — even Ukrainians abroad and foreigners.

It’s all part of a country-wide mobilization built on the back of the volunteer movement that fought against Russian forces in Crimea starting in 2014. Many of those same volunteers — and thousands more like them — are now stepping up to defend against a full-scale Russian invasion.

The readiness of Ukraine’s professional military has significantly improved since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, but “Ukraine is not a rich country,” Andrew D’Anieri, the assistant director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, points out. Civilian support, he said, is necessary for the military’s success.

“[Ukraine has] made great strides around better equipping its military, modernizing, but it’s pretty obvious they still do need this kind of crowdfunded support for things like night-vision goggles for soldiers and other kinds of high-tech equipment,” D’Anieri said. “I think it’s a really unique and kind of impressive aspect of how Ukraine has responded to eight years of war.”

That preparedness is on full display now: Many Ukrainians have volunteered to serve with the armed forces, and the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) — an organized, civilian guard that fights to protect individual cities — are integrating as a formal part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. And while the assistance of Western nations, in terms of providing weapons and training, has been critical, there are also civil society organizations — like Phoenix Wings and Come Back Alive — which were organized in the 2014 conflict and have mobilized into service now, collecting and delivering supplies like thermal imagers, body armor, and first-aid kits to fighters.

Volunteers help support current military infrastructure

The current Ukrainian response only highlights how much the country has changed in eight years, former Ukrainian economy minister Tymofiy Mylovanov told Vox on Thursday.

In 2014, “a lot of people defected [to Russia], the leadership defected, we didn’t have [a] military,” he said. Now, Ukraine has a professionalized military, many of whom previously served in the volunteer forces fighting in eastern Ukraine in 2014. “A lot of people who were volunteers in the front lines then, they’ve become battle commanders by now,” he said. “So they are the institutionalized military now.”

Volunteers are also heading to the TDF, the urban battalions trained to defend Ukrainian cities. The Ukrainian government opted to make the TDF part of the Armed Forces starting this year, and according to Kyiv Independent reporter Illia Ponomarenko, the Ukrainian defense ministry expects 11,000 volunteers to sign up this year.

TDF units are supposed to “ensure security and order behind the front line, assist the Armed Forces in combat operations, guard key infrastructure facilities, and render assistance in combating hostile subversive activities in their local areas,” Ponomarenko reports.

TDF units are made up of military veterans and ordinary civilians — men and women of all ages and backgrounds — who keep their day jobs and train for combat on weekends or otherwise periodically. Leaders, including former television host and now chair of Ukraine’s Reservists Council Anton Goloborodko, have been building up the force and training civilian recruits to support the armed forces. Although there have been several attempts over the years to formalize the forces, that finally happened when Ukraine’s national resistance act took effect earlier this year.

Less formal methods of civilian resistance are spreading, too

Now that the invasion has started in earnest, much less formal methods to stave off Russian forces, particularly in urban areas, have been circulating, too — including instructions for homemade weapons.

On Saturday, the Ukrainian-language Twitter account of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine tweeted instructions for making Molotov cocktails — bombs made of glass bottles, a flammable substance, and a cloth fuse, which is lit before the improvised device is thrown at a target.

In English, the tweet reads, “Cocktail ‘Resistance’ While our partners load planes and cars with weapons for Ukraine, we are preparing our branded ‘brotherly’ gift for the Russian bastard. We are arming ourselves, preparing, destroying the occupiers!”

On Friday, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar also encouraged Ukrainians via Facebook to make the homemade incendiary devices, the Washington Post reports. Following that post, in which Maliar wrote that “it is important that everyone resists,” Google searches for “how to make a Molotov cocktail” jumped in Ukraine, the Post reports.

The Ukrainian government is also handing out weapons of its own, with about 18,000 distributed in Kyiv thus far, according to the Post, and 70,000 AK-47 rifles distributed on Thursday alone. “When I heard the explosions I decided that I am ready” to fight advancing Russian forces, Olena Sokolan, a civilian who received a rifle, told the New York Times. “I am adult woman, I am healthy and it’s my responsibility.”

A thriving civil society, too, in which solidarity, activism, and charity are encouraged, is part of the war effort, and although the bulk of military assistance is coming from outside sources, those organizations are critical to equipping and supporting the military.

“There are all kinds of charitable foundations and funds. So that kind of ecosystem and infrastructure is there,” Mylovanov said.

The Ukrainian military has received training from NATO members, including the US, and for the past few months has also received weapons like Stinger missiles and Javelin anti-tank weaponry from NATO member states — primarily from US-supported transfers by Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.

More weapons and more defense funding have poured in since the start of the invasion on February 24, with even Germany — a holdout both on equipping Ukraine and imposing forceful sanctions on Russia — announcing Saturday that it would send 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles to Ukraine, in addition to authorizing the Netherlands to deliver 400 rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

Also on Saturday, the US announced $350 million in new military aid to Ukraine, including “anti-tank and air defense capabilities.”

In addition to direct aid from Ukraine’s western allies, both Come Back Alive and Phoenix Wings have received crowdfunded donations in the lead-up to the Russian invasion, providing weapons and materiel to those on the front lines.

Despite the buy-in from the Ukrainian public and a volunteer infrastructure providing strong support to the military, it’s important to keep perspective. Russia’s military is far larger and far more technologically advanced than Ukraine’s, which has fewer than 200,000 active-duty members to Russia’s 900,000. (Not all of which are currently deployed — by some estimates, Russia has about 200,000 troops in and around Ukraine, though numbers vary.) Russia has been building its armed forces for decades, and has far superior air and sea power; Ukraine’s professional army, meanwhile, had to be rebuilt since 2014.

Still, Russia has suffered serious setbacks in the invasion and has thus far been unable to take Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, three days after launching an all-out invasion. A majority of the Russian forces that had amassed on the border are currently fighting in the country — about 150,000 troops — but in Kyiv and other cities, Ukrainian forces have been able to hold them off.

As of Saturday, according to Ukraine’s defense ministry, some 3,000 Russian troops had been killed in the fighting, and about 100 Russian tanks destroyed. Those numbers should be treated with caution, as Vox’s Jen Kirby and Jonathan Guyer have pointed out, but would represent a major loss for Russian forces if accurate.

The Russian troops are “increasingly frustrated by their lack of momentum,” one Pentagon official told the New York Times Saturday, stymied by the Ukrainian resistance and other logistical issues.

And with new economic and tactical support from NATO member states — plus the mass mobilization of its people — Ukraine may be able to hold on much longer than Russia could have imagined.

Baffling....

Putin’s baffling war strategy

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t going as he planned. Here’s why.

By Ellen Ioanes 

After four days of fighting in Ukraine, it’s not going especially well for Russian forces. According to Ukraine’s defense ministry, Russia has lost about 4,300 troops and nearly 150 tanks, and both Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, are still under Ukrainian control.

Casualty numbers are unverified and should be treated with some caution, but they’re still a sharp contrast to initial Russian expectations, which assumed the Russian armed forces’ greater numbers and access to more advanced weapons systems would result in a swift, relatively painless invasion. Ukrainian forces, however, have mounted a strikingly successful resistance.

In recent years, much has been made of Russia’s developing hybrid warfare, fusing conventional tactics like ground troops and air campaigns alongside information manipulation and electronic warfare like signal jamming. Nonetheless, on the information front, Russia seems to be losing the war; the sheer volume of video and information coming from Ukraine in real time, plus a young, social media-savvy president and broad, transparent intelligence sharing, have proved to be a powerful antidote to the Kremlin’s disinformation spin.

“It’s been interesting to watch in the last 48 hours, and good to see in many ways, that the Kremlin has lost control of the narrative, internationally, around this war,” Mason Clark, the lead Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a nonpartisan DC-based think tank, told Vox.

The conflict is also markedly different than other recent conflicts, such as those in Syria or Afghanistan. Despite the disparities between Russian and Ukrainian forces, it’s still a war between two formal militaries, as opposed to a decentralized insurgency.

Ukraine’s country-wide mobilization adds an additional element, with many civilians picking up weapons, learning to make Molotov cocktails, or simply confronting tanks in the road.

Clark spoke with Vox on February 26 about his observations of the conflict so far, how it compares with other recent conflicts, and the resources Russia is still holding in reserve.

The conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Ellen Ioanes

Can you walk me through some of the changes and upgrades that the Russian armed forces have been working on in the past decade or two?

Mason Clark

So, the short answer is that actually a lot of their equipment has not changed. A lot of the Russian and Ukrainian forces are still fighting with roughly on-par equipment with each other. There’s some Russian units that have better equipment, newer tanks, that sort of thing. But on the whole, much of it due to just the sheer cost of replacing Russia’s old inventory of equipment and weaponry and munitions, even, means that they’re not that much different materially than they would have been in the beginning of the war in 2014.

The main thing that the Russian military has emphasized as really improving is, strangely enough, capabilities that we haven’t really seen them use in the war so far. One, electronic warfare, which we have not seen employed at scale. And two, a lot of various forms of new weapons, either cruise missiles or new fighters, and strategic bombers that Russian doctrine — what they say they would do in this sort of war — we haven’t actually seen.

And I can delve a little bit [into] why we think that is. It appears Putin has wildly miscalculated and had a, frankly, bad plan going into this of how quickly the Ukrainian military would collapse, and is still trying to avoid using these very damaging weapons of concentrated missiles and airstrikes to destroy Ukrainian defensive positions, to preserve his narrative of this not being a real war and not requiring that sort of use of firepower.

Ellen Ioanes

Right, sort of a diminishing expectation of the enemy that they’re up against.

Mason Clark

Exactly. And, of course, as we’ve now seen in the last 72 hours ... to be clear, it’s not just that the Russians are doing badly, it’s also that the Ukrainian military is doing very well, putting up a very, very stiff defense in several areas. But likely what we’re worried about here at ISW and watching on the team over the next 48 hours is when, and if, the Russians will recalibrate their approach and shift back into deploying additional forces forward, and using these much more damaging approaches as they start fighting through Kyiv or Kharkiv, or as they start to push forward into Zaporizhzhya [a city in southeastern Ukraine] — they’re approaching the outskirts [on Saturday]. As damaging as the strikes on Kyiv and other cities have been so far, we haven’t really seen the full capabilities that the Russian military has and can bring to bear, the way it has, for example, in Syria, or in fighting in Chechnya in the early 2000s.

Ellen Ioanes

Right, so speaking of earlier conflicts, there are a couple of similarities, or possible similarities — such as, what we’ve heard of the bombing of hospitals, and I feel like I have reason to believe that’s true — but will those tactics like we saw in Syria be possible in such a magnified, and very scrutinized, landscape as we’re working with now?

Mason Clark

They’re possible, and unfortunately I don’t think we can rule out that Russian forces will begin to carry out those strikes on a more overt scale, even though, [in the] last 24 hours the Ukrainian military has been reporting that Russian forces have been striking residential areas, just strictly to cause intimidation and terror and, probably, to force a collapse of the Ukrainian military — that hasn’t occurred at all.

But as you raised, even with all of the gaps, the fog of war, and that reporting on exact control of terrain and things like that, there is so much video emerging from the fighting on the ground and documentation of Russian actions, and particular violations against civilians and strikes on civilian targets, that in many ways, it’s been interesting to watch in the last 48 hours, and good to see, in many ways, that the Kremlin has lost control of the narrative internationally around this war.

Ellen Ioanes

So, I think another point to that, in terms of the information and what we’re able to see and document, a part of Russia’s hybrid warfare that I feel like everyone and their mom has been talking about for several years, doesn’t seem to be working here.

Mason Clark

No, and I would agree, and that’s been an interesting aspect of this. They have lost control of the narrative completely, even into Russian domestic audiences. I think Putin is facing more pushback than he anticipated. One of my colleagues, Katya, we ran an update on this last night. It’s interesting, Russian media is simply not portraying the war.

To date, they’re claiming that the only fighting that’s happening is around the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, the proxies that Russia recognized, and they’re not showing fighting across the country, they’re not showing any Russian casualties, and rather than showing Russian footage, they’re trying to take Ukrainian footage out of context and use that to portray the war. And even then, they’re facing large backlash from the population, and the early stirrings of what may cohere into a true anti-war movement, which would be quite the feat considering how built-up the Russian repressive apparatus has been the last few years.

On those wider hybrid methods, it seems that this has been, I would say, not necessarily a break from them, because we assess that this was not Putin’s first choice. This seems to be something he has been forced into after a long period of a buildup and trying to coerce demands out of both Ukraine and NATO, and in particular, I think US intelligence did a very good job, as well as with European allies, of exposing so many of what were more of those hybrid methods that the Kremlin was using throughout December to February.

For example, thinking of the multiple reports of Russian plans for a coup in Kyiv, and the fact that they even picked out the people that they wanted to take over the government, or US intelligence exposing in late January that the Russian military had filmed a fake video of civilians being killed by Ukrainian forces, that sort of thing. I think that there’s a very high likelihood that that’s how the Kremlin wanted this war to begin, with some sort of muddled thing that they were able to doctor and spin in the information space. But because so many of those were exposed, they’ve had to do this very overt, direct invasion of Ukraine.

Ellen Ioanes

Right, it seemed as though there were many attempts at narrative-spinning, from “Oh, Ukraine has always been a part of Russia, we’re the same people,” and then, abruptly, “Ukraine is committing genocide against Russian people,” which you can’t do if you’re the same people — you know, these sort of mixed messages.

Mason Clark

A nuance on that, that’s actually important to capture on how Putin is spinning this war at home is, the Kremlin and the Kremlin-run media is trying to draw a very sharp distinction between the Ukrainian population, which they seem to expect will greet Russia as liberators and Russia has no quarrel with them, and the regime in Kyiv, which they portray as being neo-Nazis and drug users. I do not know where that one came from. And it’s this interesting balance where I think it’s a mix of them trying to pitch to the Russian people that this is not a war against Ukraine, it’s a very targeted intervention to get rid of the regime.

But at the same time, we’re having this growing view that we, frankly, were wrong about how rational the Kremlin was, to be honest, and it seems very much that they seem to have drunk their own Kool-Aid, so to speak. They may have actually believed that all they needed to do was take out the government in Kyiv that they do see as this foreign-imposed fascist government, and the Ukrainian population would be completely okay with that, which is just, quite simply, as everyone is seeing, not the case.

Ellen Ioanes

Is that an indication that Putin is, maybe, cut off from reality a bit, if indeed that is the belief? Because I’m not sure, if we’re operating under the idea that he does believe that Ukrainians will welcome Russians with open arms, I don’t see that as the same sentiment or motivating idea as Chechnya or Georgia, where it was like, we have to bring these back into the fold, we have to conquer these areas. Can you draw that parallel at all?

Mason Clark

It’s a tricky one, because Chechnya was framed as more of a domestic terrorism issue, and Georgia — there are certainly some parallels in some of the broad strokes of defending a separatist enclave in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, of course, and comparing that to the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, but the framing is very much different. Even the 2008 war with Georgia was framed as a purely defensive measure to protect these enclaves. There was no framing at all of it being a war of reconquest or to bring Georgia back into the fold or anything like that, where this Ukraine conflict very much has been.

On your first point, I want to hesitate, because I don’t want to fall into the trap of armchair psychology, of ascribing a reason to it, but in short, yes, it does seem that something has shifted in Putin’s approach. It could be his way of thinking — the popular theory going around is that all of his isolation the last two years during Covid has really gotten to him; he seems to be listening to different people in his government than he used to, and there’s been a number of leaks — that haven’t been fully confirmed — that he’s not listening to proper military advice, and that Russian military officers are also unhappy with this plan and the war as a whole. I don’t think I can assess why, but I would agree, at minimum, that this is not the same Putin that we were watching two years ago.

Ellen Ioanes

Along with the mobilization of Ukrainian volunteers and civil society, there is a strong desire to fight and to work together in solidarity that you see in Ukraine, and people have been training for this for eight years. Of course, Russia has a much larger military, but I don’t know what their training looks like. Can you say how well-trained these troops are?

Mason Clark

That’s actually a very, very interesting question, and one of the strangest quirks of watching this offensive in motion, from a Russian doctrinal aspect, which is what I’ve spent the last few years studying — essentially their training and lessons learned from Syria and other conflicts. The short answer is this doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t follow Russian doctrine and everything that they should be doing, according to their own procedures.

At the lower end of the spectrum, [Russia is] still predominantly a conscript-based military. It has issues, and we’re seeing that now on the front line, with a lot of units surrendering. There’s been several reports of Russian troops being taken prisoner and basically telling Ukrainians, “We found out about this invasion three hours before you did. We thought we were actually on exercises, and then suddenly we were told to cross the border.”

There are good elements of the Russian military — particularly the First Guards Tank Army that’s based around Moscow, and we’ve seen some elements of them around eastern Ukraine, but much more importantly, we’re seeing a wide disparity between the units in the south moving north from Crimea, [which] are just functioning much, much better than those coming from the northeastern Ukrainian border and from Belarus.

And we think the reason behind that — and this is something we observed in the months leading up to this, and frankly thought that Putin was not going to launch this offensive — is that only the troops facing Donbas and Crimea, in the southern military district, were ready and actually exercising at a large scale — entire divisions and regiments were carrying out these exercises. All of the troops that were on the northeastern Ukrainian border and in Belarus were pulled from all across Russia. We’re seeing units that were based on the Pacific coast that have been pulled all the way into Belarus and are now being thrown into northern Ukraine, and they didn’t seem to have time to organize together, and form these cohesive command structures.

So now we’re seeing them run into problems with logistics, running out of fuel, bad maps, all sorts of other things. And that’s having costs for the Russian military. The frankly strange thing about this is that, to be glib about it, they should be smarter than this. Again, we assessed until about five days before this began, that there would be no way they would be launching an offensive from the northeast because they just weren’t postured to do it — but they seem to have gone ahead with those forces anyway, which definitely lends credence to the arguments that this very much has been a Putin decision, he’s not listening to good military advice.

Ellen Ioanes

That has occurred to me as well, in terms of the lack of use of their sea power. We have the story from Snake Island, and Russia has a much more powerful navy, so it’s very strange that that has not been exploited — or it’s strange to me, as an outsider.

Mason Clark

I would agree completely. And we haven’t necessarily seen Russian strikes to take out the Ukrainian Navy — there’s been some very minor skirmishing from patrol boats, really, but there hasn’t been much in terms of actual attacks. Now, the Russian Navy and particularly the Black Sea fleet and some of their vessels pulled in from the Mediterranean and even as far away as the Baltic, are certainly carrying out a blockade of Ukrainian ports and preventing Ukrainian ships from breaking out, but we haven’t seen them used, I think, for two reasons: One, the same point in general [why] the Russians have not used as much air power and airstrikes is, quite simply, trying to downplay this and not get to that level.

The second is, they may not have drawn up the plans and been prepared to. We also have not seen any use of Russian naval infantry, which is their equivalent of Marines, being deployed, which was a big thing that a lot of folks forecasted prior to the offensive. There’s very much been this concentration of this ground breakout from Crimea, over everything else. A middling hypothesis is we think they may just be trying to secure ports with these ground forces before being able to land and move vessels in to provide further fire support, because they don’t want to risk the cost of having a naval landing go wrong.

Amphibious landings are quite difficult in even the best of circumstances, and they probably would take heavy casualties if they tried to do any of the direct landings against Mariupol or Odesa or any of those other major coastal cities. But it has indeed been an interesting gap in the capabilities that they’ve used so far.

Ellen Ioanes

That also leaves room for escalation, then, too.

Mason Clark

Exactly, and I hate to have to end it on this point, but it’s been interesting watching the reporting of how well the Ukrainian military has been doing the last few days — and they have been doing very well, there have been a lot of Russian errors — but I wish I could say, “Therefore I think the Ukrainian military’s going to hold out.”

Sheer weight of numbers, and if the Russians do start using the resources that they have, are going to overwhelm the Ukrainian military at some point, almost no matter how badly [Russia runs] this campaign plan.

And there are so many assets that have not been put into play yet, that what we’re really going to be watching in the next 48 to 72 hours is if the Russians decide to change tack and start using those. Particularly as Russian forces move into Kyiv proper, because we haven’t seen the Russians use armor and heavy artillery against an urban target yet, and they absolutely have the capability to do so, if they decide to abandon the approach they seem to be taking: of not taking the hit in the information space, of destroying large swaths of Ukraine and killing civilians.

Ellen Ioanes

This seems like a war from a time forgotten, a little bit. It seems like a battle from World War II, in a way. It does seem like a very ordinary urban warfare, conventional military campaign.

Mason Clark

Sure, and there’s definitely aspects of that. I do think we’ve seen a number of key differences in, certainly, the pace of some of the fighting and the use of what we have seen in terms of artillery and air support, and some of the key differences of how covered this has been on social media, and the importance of these narratives.

But I do agree, it has been very interesting observing it as, other than [Operation Desert Storm in] 1991 and [the invasion of Iraq in] 2003, this large-scale, conventional warfare and sweeping armored offense — or not so sweeping, because the Russians haven’t been doing well — [we haven’t seen that] for decades and decades.

Just shows the fucking stupid religious dicks love Hitler and being a Nazi....

Marjorie Taylor Greene Gets a Warm Welcome at CPAC After Headlining White Nationalist Conference

“I do not know Nick Fuentes. I’ve never heard him speak…I don’t know what his views are.”

PEMA LEVY

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was warmly welcomed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday, the day after she appeared as a surprise speaker at the white nationalist conference hosted by anti-Semitic, white nationalist activist Nicholas Fuentes. In the past, CPAC has shunned the fringiest, most racist elements of the Republican Party. That’s why Fuentes created the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC). It offers white nationalists who are trying to capture the GOP their own place to gather adjacent to the more mainstream CPAC. But the Trumpist, white nationalist fringe is increasingly welcomed in today’s GOP, and Greene’s easy shift from one conference to another demonstrates that trend.

Times are changing fast. Just three years ago, Republican leadership stripped Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a buddy of Fuentes, of his committee memberships after he voiced support for white nationalism in a New York Times interview. King went on to lose his Republican primary after having held the seat for nine terms. Two years later, the Democratic House majority stripped Greene of her committee assignments over anti-Semitic, conspiracy-laden, and violent comments—though this time most of her Republican colleagues supported her. Fast forward to this weekend, when Greene saw no consequences from the party’s standard-bearers after she embraced Fuentes. Fittingly, as Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer noted, she appeared at CPAC on a panel titled, “They Can’t Shut Us Up!”

Fuentes has a long history of voicing opinions that used to get you ostracized in Washington. Here is a sample, compiled by the Anti-Defamation League:

He has referred to Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh as “shabbos goy race traitor” because he works for Jews (Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, runs the Daily Wire). On a livestream episode, Fuentes “jokingly” denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven. On May 24, 2021, Fuentes participated in a debate on right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones’ InfoWars with Robert Barnes, a man described as a “constitutional lawyer” who has legally defended both Jones and Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. During the debate, Fuentes made numerous anti-Semitic remarks, including, “I don’t see Jews as Europeans and I don’t see them as part of Western civilization, particularly because they are not Christians.”

Fuentes marched at the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. On January 6, he was outside the US Capitol urging the mob to participate in the insurrection inside. In January, he was subpoenaed by the January 6 Commission. As for Greene, her own story includes joining Congress last year as a supporter of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory and describing January 6 as “just a riot…and if you think about what our Declaration of Independence says, it says to overthrow tyrants.” Before the Georgia representative took the stage at AFPAC, Fuentes led the crowd in a round of cheers for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the end of the conference, New York magazine reported, Fuentes offered praise for Adolf Hitler: “And now they’re going on about Russia and ‘Vladimir Putin is Hitler’—they say that’s not a good thing.” 

As Greene left CPAC on Saturday, she denied to reporters that she knew anything about Fuentes, claiming she had spoken at AFPAC to reach Fuentes’ “very large audience.” Greene has a history of espousing racist views, only to later claim ignorance.

But as the popular saying goes: “Tell me who you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are.” That goes for Greene and, increasingly, the entire Republican Party.

The stupid ones always think they are not the stupid ones getting screwed in the ass....

How Congress Made Sure the Rich Retire in Luxury—at Taxpayer Expense

Savings plans pitched as helping the middle-class have turned out to be a gold mine for the wealthy.

MICHAEL MECHANIC

Diane Weiss and Kristen Svihlik live 1,700 miles and a generation apart. Weiss, 60, is twice divorced with a grown daughter, and resides by herself in a one-bedroom apartment in Mesa, Arizona. Svihlik is 38 and lives in a fixer-upper in Akron, Ohio, with her husband, their 6-year-old son, and a newborn daughter. The two women have never met, but they uttered precisely the same words to me on the exact same day: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

That is not an uncommon sentiment in America today, where a relative few have enough money socked away to see them comfortably through the so-called golden years. The Federal Reserve’s latest survey of consumer finances (SCF) shows that among the poorest 50 percent of families, less than a third participated in a tax-subsidized retirement plan in 2019, while 91 percent of families in the wealthiest 10 percent did.

For technical reasons, the federal data excludes traditional company pensions, which have been increasingly replaced by “defined contribution” plans like 401(k)s and 403(b)s, which shift the savings burden from employer to employee. And while that shift may account for some portion of the chasm in savings, the vastness of today’s retirement wealth gap is largely the result of a string of Wall Street–backed tax incentives that have been a mother lode for the rich but of little use to the poor. Based on the SCF results, Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, calculated that the average family in the bottom half of the wealth spectrum held just $6,900 in retirement savings, including individual retirement accounts (IRAs), while the wealthiest 10 percent of families averaged $861,300.

This 125-to-1 disparity is astonishing, considering the vast amount of revenue tax collectors give up in the name of helping families build their nest eggs. Retirement-­related incentives will cost a total of $1.9 trillion from 2020 to 2024, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), making them the US government’s single biggest tax-related expense—more than twice the $1.85 trillion price tag of the 10-year Build Back Better plan that Sen. Joe Manchin rejected in December, and more than the cost of federal tax breaks for dependents, charitable donations, and capital gains combined. “It’s unbelievable the amounts of dollars at stake, and how tilted they are to the high end,” Rosenthal says. “It’s just staggering.”

Politicians on both sides of the aisle tout these annual subsidies—which have ballooned from an inflation-­adjusted $145 million in 1996 to roughly $380 billion today—as tools to help ordinary families save. In reality, a series of bipartisan bills enacted over the past quarter century has exploded the savings gap and made the rich richer. “These retirement reform packages are exceptionally confusing and technical and long and really hard for anyone to sort out,” says Rosenthal, a former JCT attorney. “But embedded in every one are Easter eggs: big giveaways to the retirement industry and to high-net-worth individuals.”

Crafted under the watchful eye of finance lobbyists, some bills have included provisions aimed at giving more low-income workers access to retirement plans. But access is meaningless for people who have no money to spare. Take Weiss, an elementary school registrar who has held low-salary jobs in education for more than 25 years. She worked 15 years for a public school district with a mandatory state-sponsored retirement plan, eventually accumulating more than $65,000. But in 2010, Weiss was laid off—longtime staff went first, she recalls. When she later landed a job with a charter school, she was knocked back down to entry-level pay and had to burn through her savings.

Only this past fall, after her annual pay increased from $35,000 to $44,000, did Weiss finally have enough to cover her bills while making contributions to her new employer’s 401(k). “Rent here is crazy,” she explains. “And then you have a car payment and utilities and, you know, everything! If I’m putting 20 or 30 bucks every paycheck into a retirement account—that’s gas money, that’s some groceries. You’re literally living paycheck to paycheck.” Now, as retirement age approaches, she says, “I’m terrified.”

Svihlik used the word “bleak” to describe her family’s finances. She and her husband, Thomas, work for the same national pharmacy chain. Their taxable income is about $79,000, but with medical and school costs, loan payments, and daily needs, they’ve struggled to make meaningful contributions to their company’s 401(k) plan. Over a combined eight years working for the pharmacy, they’ve only accumulated about $22,000—and have had to take out loans against that balance to make ends meet. “I can’t really think about the future because I don’t see an end,” Svihlik tells me. “I see: ‘I’m 65. Okay, better go clock in.’”

It isn’t too hard, on the other hand, for high-income Americans to afford the maximum retirement contributions the law allows. Some have even found creative ways to game the system. Take Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, who reportedly used pre-IPO stock options valued at a fraction of a penny per share to amass more than $5 billion in a Roth IRA, a type of tax-free retirement account theoretically closed to people who make more than $144,000 a year. As the JCT discovered last year, more than 28,000 Americans had tax-­subsidized IRA balances of more than $5 million—nearly 500 of them, Thiel included, had holdings exceeding $25 million. “IRAs were designed to provide retirement security to middle-class families, not allow the superwealthy to avoid paying taxes,” lamented Oregon’s Ron Wyden, the Democratic chair of the Senate’s finance committee. 

The savings bonanza kicked off in 1996 when two members of Congress, Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), ushered through the first of several big reform packages. Neither “had any particular expertise in retirement policy,” University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran wrote in a January working paper, titled, “The Great American Retirement Fraud.” But the pair “followed the lead of lobbyists representing employers and the financial-­services industry” in pushing through two other related bills over the next decade. The 1996 bill, Doran noted, was “the first major relaxation of federal retirement policy in decades.”

Now both senators, Portman and Cardin introduced their latest bill, the Retirement Security and Savings Act of 2021, last May. It was presented, like the others, as a collection of reforms to benefit families and small businesses. “Americans need to save more so they can retire with the dignity and stability they deserve,” Cardin said in a press release. “It’s an ongoing struggle, especially during the pandemic when millions of Americans were without work for months or longer and small businesses struggled.”

But Doran argues that Portman and Cardin’s efforts, alongside similar initiatives, were never crafted with the little guy in mind. Such bills “promised to improve retirement income security for everyone, but instead they delivered expensive and unnecessary tax subsidies to higher-income families and a windfall to the financial services industry.”

Indeed, when celebrating their legislative record, the senators choose their words carefully. They boast of booming total retirement savings—now an estimated $35 trillion—while neglecting to mention how those numbers are skewed toward well-off Americans. “The lawyers, accountants, and wealth managers to the super-rich have fracked every corner of the tax code, especially tax-advantaged retirement programs, to extract benefits for their wealthy clients,” says Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of 2021’s The Wealth Hoarders.

This “wealth defense industry,” for example, helps small businesses set up cash-balance plans, a newer type of tax-advantaged pension that can help company owners enrich themselves. One finance firm’s promotional materials lay out a scenario wherein four highly compensated owner-partners collect 89 percent of their company’s annual contributions—$212,000 each on average—while 20 lower-tier employees share the scraps. There are IRS rules meant to discourage such discriminatory pensions, but Doran says years of lobbying have rendered the rules “anemic.” As Rosenthal puts it, “Businesses have gotten very sophisticated around end-running that policy.”

I reached out to Portman and Cardin to ask why their bills have helped the affluent so much more than ordinary families. A spokesperson responded with a joint statement noting that the senators’ latest bill—which they intend to revive this year—will “help expand access to retirement savings for low-­income Americans.” It would increase the age at which retirees must begin cashing out their accounts to 75, and raise the cap on IRA “catch-up” contributions for older workers by $3,000 annually—a move the senators said was “designed to help families who couldn’t save enough when raising children.” But expanded age limits only help those who can afford to wait for the money, as their tax-shielded assets grow even more. And workers like Diane Weiss don’t have much extra cash lying around for catch-up contributions as they head into their 60s.

Is there a way out? “Congress will struggle to solve the problem they created,” Rosenthal warns. “But the longer they wait, the harder it will be.” He suggests lawmakers adopt an Obama administration proposal that would ban further contributions once a person’s combined retirement accounts hit an upper limit (about $4 million), and that Congress strengthen the rules against businesses with retirement schemes that excessively favor the owners over their workers.

Instead of further subsidizing well-off Americans, who respond to each new incentive by shifting more taxable income and assets into tax-­deferred or tax-exempt retirement funds, Doran writes, the money could go to any number of things to help people who need it—including beefing up Social Security, a poverty-fighting program that supports 65 million retired, widowed, and disabled Americans and their dependents.

Rosenthal isn’t holding his breath. Last summer, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on the retirement system, where Wyden complained that it “doesn’t do nearly enough to help working people of modest means get ahead.” While Rosenthal and a colleague submitted a written statement for the record, the professionals who actually spoke to the committee, he says, were part of what he calls the retirement-industrial complex: “The benefits community, the practitioners, the retirement service industry—they testified,” he tells me. “Nobody was invited to testify who says the emperor has no clothes.”