“Inside the Issues” host Amrit Singh was joined by Markos Kounalakis, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, to discuss the latest on the war in Ukraine. On Spectrum News 1, December 13, 2023.
Spectrum News' Renee Eng speaks with Markos Kounalakis, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine. Live on Spectrum on November 7, 2023.
Vladimir Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine continues in the nation’s eastern Donbas region, threatening to spread south and west through Moldova into the pro-Russian breakaway state of Transnistria. Moscow’s forces are consolidating their military efforts along the Black Sea, with no credible peace talks on the horizon.
Amid this slog, Kyiv’s friends can do more than supply arms, intelligence, and prayers. America and her allies should open an aggressive diplomatic front on Russia’s isolated flank by recognizing a Belarus government in exile led by the dissident Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
Challenging the legitimacy of Moscow’s client in Minsk will not only undermine the legitimacy of Russian troops occupying Belarus but will also buoy opponents of Putin’s ally, Alexander Lukashenko, who has allowed his nation to be drawn into the war on Ukraine. READ MORE
The Russian dictator has stripped Ukraine bare and stolen a symbol of freedom and hope.
The filmmaker Costa-Gavras immortalized the symbol Z as a protest cry for freedom and against military dictatorship and violence. His 1969 Oscar-winning movie of that name starkly dramatized the 1963 murder of the Greek opposition leader Grigoris Lambrakis by right-wing extremists.
Protests against both Lambrakis’s murder and the sham trial that followed crystallized in the form of a letter: Z. Athenian buildings were spray-painted with Z graffiti; illegal gatherings throughout Greece were punctuated by loud cries of “Z!” When pronounced as zée, the letter in Greek means “He lives.” “Z!” was a raised fist of rebellion, and it also meant “Hope lives.”
No more.
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its perverse up-is-downism, the letter Z has been appropriated to represent ethnonationalist militarism, death, and destruction. READ MORE
Refugees are daily streaming over borders to neighboring countries and adding to what is already the world’s largest refugee crisis. The country they are fleeing is embattled, violent and experiencing extreme shortages of medicine and food.
This is not Ukraine. It is Venezuela.
While Ukraine is undergoing invasion, Venezuela continues to suffer erosion. In both cases, people seeking survival are fleeing these two countries. In Europe, they are escaping armed invaders and rocket attacks; in Latin America, they are rushing from societal collapse. READ MORE
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky came to America a few months back to cajole and plead for support — both military and political. He saw the storm coming. It is now a Putin-driven hailstorm of rockets and bullets raining down on cities and civilians. Urban residents have gone from sheltering-in-place against COVID to picking up arms to fight in the streets. Europe is again embroiled in a war that will not end all wars.
San Francisco feels a million miles away from today’s shooting and mayhem. Yet when Zelensky came to visit President Biden in September, he made a pilgrimage to America’s largest Ukrainian community: California. He gave a critical speech warning of Russia’s intentions at Stanford’s FSI center, the academic home of Mike McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia. READ MORE