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Tag Archives: Opinion
Nation’s Sharpest Opinion: Editors ‘Guilt’ of India Faces The Heat For Alleged Fake News on Manipur – Republic World
- Nation’s Sharpest Opinion: Editors ‘Guilt’ of India Faces The Heat For Alleged Fake News on Manipur Republic World
- Press freedom concerns as India editors’ body charged over Manipur report Al Jazeera English
- Manipur Violence: CM Biren Singh Warns Editors Guild Amid Tensions, Ground Reality Must Be Assessed The Indian Express
- India’s Manipur charges four journalists with misrepresenting violence in the state Reuters India
- Neglected child Manipur crying for help from double-engine govt that laid ‘strong foundation’ ThePrint
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It’s the land of the freebies for NYC’s ‘entitled’ migrants
Say this for the migrants demanding more free stuff from City Hall: they’re fast learners about the new American ethos of endless entitlement.
Schooled and led by far-left activists, they arrive here within days of illegally crossing the southern border and claiming asylum, then start agitating for better accommodations in pricey neighborhoods.
Tents in The Bronx, barracks in Brooklyn or homeless shelters anywhere are not good enough. Only first-class Manhattan hotels, where the city pays upward of $500 a night per room, are acceptable.
The welcome wagon comes with free food, free cellphones, free transit passes, free school and free health care.
Unfortunately, the booty is not free for taxpayers, which brings us to the slow learners in the sad saga.
That would be the gang at City Hall that is hell-bent on proving once again that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The open-ended promises are a prime example of how Eric Adams missed key lessons at mayoral school.
His predecessors learned that if you say come and get it, people will come and get it, especially when it’s free. Adams apparently believed his election had changed human nature.
Mixed messages
Recall that he loudly embraced New York’s status as a sanctuary city and urged the Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, to send 200 migrants a day to Gotham. In one of his many mixed messages, Adams opened that door even as he denounced Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for sending busloads of other migrants.
And he said nothing about the secret nighttime migrant flights to area airports arranged by the Biden White House. Are only migrants sent by Democrats welcome?
It was the exact wrong way to look at the problem. Abbott and other border state leaders, frustrated with being ignored by Biden as more than 5 million people have crossed the border, were legitimately trying to spread the pain in hopes of making Adams and other Dem mayors allies for securing the crossing points.
Nonetheless, by October, some 17,000 migrants had arrived here, with most living in crowded city shelters that already housed nearly 60,000 homeless people. With a clear change in tone, Adams suddenly declared a state of emergency and said the city had no more room at the inn.
“New Yorkers are angry,” he said. “I am angry too. We have not asked for this.”
Actually, he had. But he was also banking on fellow Dems in Albany and Washington delivering financial aid.
First he said the cost would be $1 billion, then he said $2 billion.
No matter — the result was the same: zero. That’s how much help Adams has gotten from his friends even as the number of known migrants approaches 45,000.
Gov. Hochul also snubbed his modest request to scatter 500 around to upstate cities.
Meanwhile, Adams’ supposed allies on the City Council undercut him in a different way. They demanded he take down tent cities, put migrants in hotels and give them permanent housing.
So here we are, and the soaring cost is only part of the problem. There is an immediate impact on the city’s already-declining quality of life.
Take the mess at Midtown hotels, which The Post’s Tuesday front page smartly labeled “Inn-Sane!” The three-star Watson Hotel on West 57th Street would normally be a mecca for big-spending tourists, but instead the scene is chaotic with some migrant refuseniks pitching tents on the sidewalk in a bid to stay at the hotel instead of being shipped to a cruise ship terminal in Red Hook.
Never mind that the city filled the cavernous Brooklyn space with cots, pillows and blankets and provided large communal toilets and showers.
“The cruise ship terminal is not as good as the hotel,” a 42-year-old Venezuelan man told The Post.
There you have it — more entitlement than gratitude. In a heartbeat, that migrant’s mindset has gone from dreaming of freedom in America to demanding luxury accommodations in Manhattan — for free, of course.
The chaos is not limited to the Watson. The Post, acting on information and photos provided by a whistleblower employee, reported three weeks ago about the unfolding disaster at another Midtown hotel leased by the city for migrants, the Row Hotel on Eighth Avenue near Times Square.
“Nearly a ton of taxpayer-provided food gets tossed in the trash every day,” the paper said, because the migrants would “rather secretly cook their own meals on dangerous hot plates.”
The photos showed garbage bags full of unopened sandwiches and a room littered with empty beer cans.
The employee, Felipe Rodriguez, said there was a “dramatic” change when the city took over the hotel in October.
“There are some nice migrants in that hotel looking for that American dream, that second chance to make it in society,” he said. “But there are a lot of migrants there that are causing chaos. We have a lot of fights, a lot of drugs, a lot of sexual harassment abuse.”
He said there was no supervision for migrants who were supposed to be quarantined for COVID, chicken pox and other infectious diseases. An NYPD source confirmed to the paper that cops have responded to numerous incidents at the Row, formerly known as the Milford Plaza.
Obviously, the crime element is not something the city needed to import. It’s got more than enough of the home-grown variety and, while murder and shootings are down, too many streets and neighborhoods remain haunted by menace and violence.
To be clear, the migrants didn’t invent the entitlement approach. They are taught to demand what they want by open-border activists who won’t be satisfied until New York looks and feels like Caracas. Nor do the leaders care that the lack of serious vetting provides an open door for drug smugglers, gangbangers and sex traffickers.
Operating through lawyers and charities, and often with government funding, the activists denounce American society as racist, which is both outrageous and ironic. After all, the supposed racism doesn’t curb the desire of tens of millions of people from around the world to come here.
That’s small comfort for taxpayers, nor is it helping Adams look like the mayor he promised to be. On election night, he vowed to be the new face of his party and show America how to run a city.
If this is what he had in mind, heaven help New York.
RX for ‘docs’
Reader Dick Gardner makes a point about classified documents, writing:
“Classified material is signed out like library books — only stricter, and each document has a serial number. There should be a list of everything that’s missing and both Trump and Biden should have been told years ago to turn them in.”
Stop zinging the ‘blues’
Ruth Cohen is repelled by events in Tennessee: “If they keeping making the police profession miserable, only scoundrels and felons will apply. Then we will all have to seek protection from sadists, as we saw in Memphis.”
These healthy diets were associated with lower risk of death, according to a study of 119,000 people across four decades
Eat healthy, live longer.
That’s the takeaway from a major study published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine. Scientists led by a team from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that people who most closely adhered to at least one of four healthy eating patterns were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, cancer or respiratory disease compared with people who did not adhere as closely to these diets. They were also less likely to die of any cause.
“These findings support the recommendations of Dietary Guidelines for Americans that multiple healthy eating patterns can be adapted to individual food traditions and preferences,” the researchers concluded, adding that the results were consistent across different racial and ethnic groups. The eating habits and mortality rates of more than 75,000 women from 1984 to 2020 over 44,000 men from 1986 to 2020 were included in the study.
The four diets studied were the Healthy Eating Index, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet, the Healthful Plant-Based Diet Index and the Alternate Healthy Eating Index. All four share some components, including whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes. But there are also differences: For instance, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet encourages fish consumption, and the Healthful Plant-Based Diet Index discourages eating meat.
The Alternate Mediterranean Diet is adapted from the original Mediterranean Diet, which includes olive oil (which is rich in omega-3 fatty acids), fruits, nuts, cereals, vegetables, legumes and fish. It allows for moderate consumption of alcohol and dairy products but low consumption of sweets and only the occasional serving of red meat. The alternate version, meanwhile, cuts out dairy entirely, only includes whole grains and uses the same alcohol-intake guideline for men and women, JAMA says.
The world’s ‘best diets’ overlap with study results
The Mediterranean Diet consistently ranks No. 1 in the U.S. News and World Report’s Best Diets ranking, which looks at seven criteria: short-term weight loss, long-term weight loss, effectiveness in preventing cardiovascular disease, effectiveness in preventing diabetes, ease of compliance, nutritional completeness and health risks. The 2023 list ranks the top three diets as the Mediterranean Diet, the DASH Diet and the Flexitarian Diet.
The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet recommends fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, poultry, fish and low-fat dairy products and restricts salt, red meat, sweets and sugar-sweetened beverages. The Flexitarian Diet is similar to the other diets in that it’s mainly vegetarian, but it allows the occasional serving of meat or fish. All three diets are associated with improved metabolic health, lower blood pressure and reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes.
Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the latest study, said it’s critical to examine the associations between the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans and long-term health. “Our findings will be valuable for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which is being formed to evaluate current evidence surrounding different eating patterns and health outcomes,” he said.
Reducing salt intake is a good place to start. In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance for restaurants and food manufacturers to, over a two-and-a-half-year period, voluntarily reduce the amount of sodium in their food to help consumers stay under a limit of 3,000 milligrams per day — still higher than the recommended daily allowance. Americans consume around 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day, on average, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people consume less than 2,300 milligrams each day.
Related: Eating 400 calories a day from these foods could raise your dementia risk by over 20%
Opinion | Drug-resistant bacteria are proliferating. We need new antibiotics.
The relentless pace of antibiotic resistance is well-known. What to do about it is less clear. The inadequate pipeline of potential new drugs has been a subject of concern for years, prompting frequent debate about whether and how the government should help. With recent studies showing that antibiotic-resistant infections are on the rise and more lethal than previously thought, the new Congress should take on the issue, learning from the shortcomings of previous attempts to jump-start antibiotic development.
Antibiotics are used for a short, defined course and they are ideally prescribed sparingly to avoid overuse. The return on investment is often insufficient to cover research costs or satisfy shareholders. By the late 1990s and during the 2000s, the pipeline of new antibiotics under development had shrunk. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and drug-resistant tuberculosis raised alarms; additionally, so-called gram-negative bacteria were proving evermore resistant to antibiotics.
A period of renewed action followed. In 2012, Congress passed the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now Act, which offered antibiotic developers a fast-track regulatory pathway for new antibiotics as well as five years of additional market exclusivity in which to sell their new drugs. Both “push” incentives, such as direct grants for research and development, and “pull” incentives, to reward those who succeed, were offered as well. In 2016 came the launch of CARB-X, a nonprofit public-private partnership at Boston University to help advance development of new antibiotics aimed at the most urgent public health threats. After passage in 2016 of the 21st Century Cures Act, the Food and Drug Administration eased clinical trial requirements for some antibiotics and antifungals. The result of these incentives was modest: There was an uptick in new antibiotics but they were often duplicative of existing ones and few addressed unmet needs.
This has led to a renewed search for policy models that might work. The traditional biotech route — backed by investors — is fraught. Small companies are still striving to create new antibiotics, but the field was shaken by the 2019 bankruptcy of Achaogen, a biotech company that had benefited from incentives and government support, developed an antibiotic drug against resistant pathogens that won FDA approval — and still could not make a sufficient profit to stay afloat.
A major new proposal that followed was the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Upsurging Resistance or Pasteur Act, first introduced by Sens. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) and Todd C. Young (R-Ind.) in 2020. The legislation would create a “subscription model” in which the government would provide developers payments of $750 million to $3 billion each for antibiotics that target unmet needs. The government would pay only once, decoupled from the volume of medicine used, after the antibiotics are developed and approved. The proposal had bipartisan support in both houses but failed to clear the 117th Congress; it will be reintroduced this year.
The Pasteur Act is backed by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the biopharmaceutical lobby, although it has never before supported such a large government purchase contract scheme. Jocelyn Ulrich, deputy vice president of policy and research at PhRMA, explained the reasoning: “Over a decade ago, I think 18 to 20 major pharmaceutical companies were still in this space, and now we’re down to just a handful. The market dynamics are just not there. It’s not viable. Everybody sort of agrees now that we have market failure in this particular area.”
The Pasteur Act might help drug developers get a predictable return on investment, but the $11 billion price tag drew criticism as excessive. Some see a parallel with the approximately $10 billion Operation Warp Speed, the crash coronavirus vaccine effort during the pandemic. But antibiotic resistance is not a one-time “moonshot” problem. Rather, it demands years of commitment to research, ultimately creating a steady pipeline of effective, new antibiotics.
Another interesting model would be to create a nonprofit, which is being tried with tuberculosis and malaria. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer of the Los Angeles County and University of Southern California Medical Center, was one of the most vocal advocates of the incentives approach a decade ago, but now has proposed creating a nonprofit to nurture antibiotic discovery. Dr. Spellberg and others wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019, “A drug with annual sales in the tens of millions of dollars is a catastrophic failure for many for-profit companies but would be a lifeline for nonprofits …” A nonprofit would not have to worry about quarterly results or pesky shareholders, and it could use proceeds from selling its new antibiotics to fuel further research. It might still need to rely on for-profits in later drug development stages to license or sell the products. It also could require some seed money from the government, but that “might be a better long-term investment than perpetually offering multibillion-dollar prizes or other pull incentives for each new antibiotic,” Dr. Spellberg argued.
Congress should explore both approaches, and quickly. The end of the antibiotic era — when a doctor has nothing left to treat an infection — is too horrible to contemplate. Waiting is not a reasonable option.
Owning a Rolls-Royce is not as luxurious as it seems
A luxury roll through time
I am now reading repetitive stories about Rolls-Royce being “on a roll.”
OK, but back when family silverware came largely from the Automat, I actually reported my Day One excitement of owning a Rolls-Royce. By Day 10 — in the Coney Island Times, which was all I could scratch up to write in back then — I reported the total experience.
The car my husband bought? It quick laid down dead. A wheeze, a cough — and straight to Rolls-Royce heaven. Second greatest day? It stopped on a six-lane highway and Fords, Chevrolets, Volkswagens zoomed by yelling “Get a horse.”
Our salesman, so British that next to him King Charles sounds southern, said: “Merely a minor adjustment, Moddom.” One month’s minor adjustment later my husband clambered back in. Ignition off, nobody around and the rear windows moved by themselves. Both directional signals worked simultaneously. And the rear’s right-side makeup mirror light lit up the mahogany desk on the left side.
Also, air conditioning in January blasted from the heating unit. “Minor adjustment, Moddom,” oozed its salesman, whose headquarters probably still has my Coney Island Times review somewhere hidden in their vault.
Car had 99 probs, I wasn’t one
On a country road straightaway, late at night, no other car around, this Silver Shadow triumph got up to 5 miles to the gallon. In city traffic that fell off a little. “One does not purchase a Rolls for economy,” hummed the salesman peering at us as if to say, “If the pound hadn’t devalued, we wouldn’t even be doing business with the likes of you.”
High noon, on 57th and Madison, this white dream car — JA4 license plate — had a crowd around. Photos were taken of it. The hood was up. Smoke billowed from the engine. I got onto the first thing moving — a bus going uptown — and where I was headed was downtown.
Next a brake lining problem and reheating situation. Also the radio stopped, rear license plate holder fell off, the trunk locked — and the car stopped dead. IN TRAFFIC. But so chic that even when it couldn’t move we, the owners, surged with pride leaning against it to summon a cab.
They say the only thing that makes noise in a Rolls is the clock. Yeah. Unless you count the owner crying.
We hadn’t realized ours had possibly been one of the earliest Silver Shadow designs and was maybe even a used store model. Whatever. To tell you the truth, the thrill of owning even an asthmatic Rolls dies hard.
Judy’s jibes
A HIGHLIGHT from Judge Judy’s scathing British press blast in case you missed it:
“Prince Harry writes William ‘recoiled’ from Meghan’s first hug. Biting the hand that fed him, he’s a selfish, spoiled, ungrateful disingenuous grandchild. I’d be furious and hurt if my child or grandchild did the same to me.”
Divorced Me-Me-Meghan dumped her father, castigated her former best friend, fought with everyone else, looked only to make money and get famous, and will eventually expend bodily fluid on Prince Empty as has his entire birthplace.
His name’s everywhere but on toilet paper. So . . . let’s . . . just . . . wait.
Meghan’s piggy bank will soon learn money can’t buy happiness. What it gets you is a richer class of estranged relatives.
Only in the UK, kids, only in the UK.
Opinion | A menacing Russia and China pull Japan out of its past
“This is an inflection point” for Asia, argues Kurt Campbell, who oversees regional policy for Biden’s National Security Council. It moves Japan from reliance on its own soft power and U.S. weapons to a real military partnership. And it redraws the security map, framing a NATO-like alliance of containment in the Indo-Pacific as well as the Atlantic.
Why is Japan taking this step toward remilitarization? One galvanizing moment for Japanese leaders, U.S. officials say, was when China and Russia flew six heavy bombers near Japan in a joint exercise on May 24, as Tokyo was hosting a meeting of the “Quad” partnership of Australia, India, Japan and the United States.
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Japan expressed “serious concerns” about the flights. But China and Russia did it again in late November, sending two Chinese heavy bombers and two Russian planes over the Sea of Japan. This time Tokyo expressed “severe concerns,” again with no apparent response.
Another wake-up call came in August, when China fired five missiles into Japan’s “exclusive economic zone” during a spasm of military exercises after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan. “We have protested strongly through diplomatic channels,” said Nobuo Kishi, Japan’s former defense minister who now serves as a special adviser to the prime minister. The lesson was that “nothing in the Taiwan Strait stays in the Taiwan Strait,” Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, told me in an interview.
Japan has moved from talk to action over the past year. A big reason is shock over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coming less than a month after Russia and China announced a “no limits” partnership. “The world has changed in a dramatic fashion, and the Japanese know it,” Emanuel said.
Kishida, though a new and politically weak prime minister, moved aggressively to support Ukraine. Japan quickly sent military and humanitarian assistance, and in March it successfully lobbied eight of the 10 ASEAN countries to back a U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s invasion.
“Kishida understood early that the Russian attack on Ukraine represented a blending of the Indo-Pacific and European worlds. He saw a fundamental challenge to world order,” says Campbell. So, rather than adopt the usual approach of relying on the United States to fix matters, he explains, Kishida “decided to make common cause with Europe.”
The heart of Japan’s security problem is missiles, and not just from China; North Korea regularly tests ballistic missiles that overfly Japanese territory. A decade ago, Japan invested heavily in antimissile technologies, hoping that this would blunt the threat. But several years ago, Japanese military planners realized that an adversary could overwhelm their missile-defense shield. They needed something more.
The “counterstrike” strategy should offer that. The United States will provide Japan with 400 to 500 Tomahawk missiles that can hit missile sites in China or North Korea. Japan also wants to protect its space-based defense assets, which include satellite-guided bombs and a Japanese version of the U.S. Global Positioning System, from China’s expanding antisatellite arsenal. So, the Biden administration will extend the long-standing U.S. security treaty with Japan to cover attacks in space.
Japan’s new militancy will inevitably trigger a backlash in China, where there’s a deep antipathy to Japanese military power dating back to Japanese occupation in the 1930s and early ’40s. If you doubt it, just visit the museum in Nanjing that documents Japan’s savage assault on the city in 1937. Japan has disdained power projection since its defeat in 1945 partly in deference to such historical memories.
Japan is still a deeply peaceful country. But the weight of the past is easing, and younger Japanese want a stronger military to deal with belligerent neighbors. A poll last summer by Jiji Press showed that 75 percent of respondents between 18 and 29 supported increased defense spending, and over 60 percent of that age group favored Japanese “counterstrike capabilities.”
China is in the early stages of what might be the biggest military buildup in history. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine effectively ended the post-Cold War era. Japan is reacting to those developments rationally. But beware: As the global order frays, the chain of action and reaction is only beginning.
Harry and Meghan ‘officially declared war’ on the Royal Family with Netflix docuseries – YouTube
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- Meghan Markle, Prince Harry ‘will outplay their hand’ as royals are ‘baffled’ by their alleged demands: expert Fox News
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Opinion | he untimely, infuriating death of the deal to save 2 million dreamers
But now the framework that Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) were negotiating appears dead. Democratic leaders have privately informed numerous stakeholders that it isn’t going to happen in the current Congress because of Republican opposition, according to sources familiar with the discussions. At least one GOP leader has declared the same.
A genuine opening to address two major national problems is slipping away. There’s the absurdly unjust legal limbo endured by dreamers brought here as children through no fault of their own. And there’s the fiendish challenge of managing soaring numbers of desperate people seeking refuge in the United States at a time of rising international displacement.
The framework would have granted a path to citizenship for 2 million dreamers while overhauling the way asylum-seeking migrants are processed. Both will now remain intractable problems for years to come: Once Republicans control the House next year, the lower chamber will surely never support solutions that are remotely reasonable or humane.
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What happened? Tillis and Sinema were negotiating over bill text, much of which had been written, as late as Wednesday night. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) informed Sinema and Tillis that he wouldn’t allow it to be attached to the end-of-year spending omnibus bill, effectively killing it, one of the sources tells me.
Some last-minute sticking points also arose. Some of them concerned detention issues, as well as the framework’s effort to retain temporary restrictions that barred most migrants from applying for asylum at all. The latter would have replicated the ban under the Title 42 covid-19 health rule, which a court has halted, creating expectations of a spike in efforts to cross the border.
The framework would have created new processing centers that would detain incoming asylum seekers — with increased legal and health services — until screenings could determine whether they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they were returned home. Those who passed would get a final hearing much faster than under the status quo, due to major investments in legal processing. Those who failed would be expelled promptly.
All this was designed to disincentivize exactly what Republicans rail about: migrants who seek asylum in hopes of disappearing into the interior and not showing up for hearings. The framework would have effectively continued the Title 42 ban on most asylum applications for at least a year, until the new system was operational.
But there was disagreement over whether migrants who enter the country between ports of entry should receive much more draconian treatment, such as longer detention or immediate expulsion, than under the current framework, the sources say.
What’s more, how open-ended the Title 42-type ban should be remained unresolved. For Democrats, that uncertainty raises the risk of the ban continuing indefinitely, or at least for many years, which would largely close down our asylum system and renege on international and human rights commitments.
What’s deeply frustrating about this moment is that the fundamental principles underlying reform were real and workable. Many Republicans recognize the absurdity of banishing the dreamers — who are culturally American and often know little of their countries of origin — to legal shadows where they are constrained from contributing to our country in keeping with their full potential.
And on asylum, these reforms represented a good-faith effort to come up with a solution that both sides could accept. It seeks to discourage the sort of abuses of the system that Republicans constantly decry as a “crisis” and a betrayal of the rule of law, while retaining fealty to our core commitment to provide a fair hearing to all who seek refuge here.
For some Republicans, particularly in the Donald Trump era, the only real “solution” to these problems is to reduce the number of immigrants accepted to as low a number as possible, regardless of the human rights consequences. So they won’t support such a compromise by definition.
Others probably see little political incentive in doing so. Our infrastructure is set to come under more strain once Title 42 is lifted, and contributing to solving the problem would provide less political payoff to Republicans than keeping the “border crisis” issue to wield against President Biden and Democrats in 2024.
On the Democratic side, a few opposed this compromise because it would in some fashion stiffen enforcement in inhumane ways. They were right to raise this objection. Yet the compromise offered a real shot at making life more humane for well over 2 million people. It could have demonstrated that government can manage asylum-seeking effectively while remaining true to our core values, potentially opening political space for widening channels to more legal migration later.
But once again, space for compromise on this issue proved extremely hard to find. Even as a real window of opportunity opened, pundits who purportedly care about these matters sat the debate out, and we all squandered too much attention on some right-wing troll named Elon Musk. Now the moment is gone.
Opinion | Give Ukraine the ability to strike every inch of Russian occupied territory
While these are the deepest attacks inside Russia that Ukraine has yet carried out, they are hardly the first. In early April, there were reports that a Ukrainian Tochka ballistic missile had hit a military depot in the Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukrainian border and that Ukrainian Mi-24 helicopter gunships had sneaked over the border to ignite a fuel depot in Belgorod. U.S. intelligence even leaked word that Ukrainian operatives were responsible for the car bomb in August near Moscow that killed the daughter of Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin.
There have also been a number of spectacular Ukrainian attacks on Russian military installations in Crimea — Ukrainian territory that Vladimir Putin has illegally annexed. In August, explosions at the Saki air base in Crimea destroyed nine Russian warplanes; Ukrainian officials told The Post that their special forces were responsible. The Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea to Russia — one of Putin’s showcase projects — was badly damaged by an explosion on Oct. 8 apparently caused by a truck bomb. And on Oct. 29 Ukraine used sea drones to attack the Russian Black Sea fleet at its anchorage in Sevastopol, apparently damaging at least one warship. (In April, Ukraine sank the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, at sea with anti-ship missiles.)
Some of these strikes are militarily significant, others are merely symbolic. But even symbolism can be important. Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the CNA think tank, compared last week’s strikes on two Russian airfields to the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Although the U.S. bombers caused little damage, they demonstrated that Japan was not immune from attack and rallied U.S. public opinion a few months after Pearl Harbor. Today, Ukrainians shivering in the cold and dark because of Russian attacks on the electrical grid must be heartened to see their military striking back.
The Ukrainian attacks naturally raise concerns in the West about provoking Putin. The Biden administration has made clear that Ukraine is not using U.S. equipment for attacks on Russian soil, and indeed it has refused to provide Ukraine with longer-range weapons for fear that they would be used deep inside Russia. (One administration official told me that if the Ukrainians got F-16s, they could bomb Moscow.)
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“We have neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week. But he did not condemn the attacks. The U.S. position seems to be that if U.S. weapons systems aren’t employed, and the attacks are focused strictly on military targets, it doesn’t object to the attacks.
That’s a reasonable position — but, as I’ve argued before, the Biden administration is too restrictive in the types of weapons it provides Ukraine. The U.S. Air Force wants to send roughly 50 older model Reaper drones – which can fire Hellfire antitank missiles – to Ukraine because it doesn’t need them anymore. But the request has languished for months in the Pentagon bureaucracy.
Likewise, the Biden administration refuses to provide the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) to Ukraine and has even modified HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) launchers so that they cannot fire ATACMS rockets, which would increase their range from 50 miles to as many as 180 miles. U.S. fighter-bombers such as the F-16, which the Ukrainians have been requesting, are also off the table.
I can understand the administration not wanting U.S. weapons to be used for attacks on Russian soil, but the Zelensky government has proven to be a reliable partner that has abided by U.S. restrictions. Moreover, the most valuable targets for longer-range strikes are in Ukraine, not Russia.
The Ukrainian military has enabled successful offensives around both Kharkiv in the east and Kherson in the south by targeting Russian headquarters, supply lines and ammunition depots to wear down enemy forces. Gaining access to longer-range “fires” will enable the Ukrainians to more effectively strike such military targets across the width and breadth of Russian-occupied territory. That includes Crimea, which remains out of HIMARS range. Such strikes, in turn, will enable future offensives that can bring this awful war to a conclusion.
The United States shouldn’t enable attacks against targets in Russia. But it should definitely enable more effective Ukrainian strikes on Russian supply lines and bases all over occupied Ukraine.