Snyder: The U.S. is not just unreliable, it is behaving strangely.
Allies like Romania, Poland, Taiwan and South Korea expect America to save resources for serious moments, not waste munitions, reputation and focus on wars it cannot explain. 1/
Snyder: Trump wants to be Putin but cannot. He wants Putin’s money, Putin’s ability to fight wars, Putin’s power.
But he lacks the patience, attention span and competence and he is afraid of American public opinion. 2/
Snyder: Putin does have a vision for Russia. It is terrible, totalitarian and built on a false past where Russia and Ukraine were supposedly one.
He wants to be remembered as a ruler who brought more territory into Russia. 3/
Fiona Hill: Autocracies see the state as strong and society as irrelevant. Individuals have no real role.
The fundamental difference with democracies is that societies still matter and in Ukraine, society has shown extraordinary resilience. 1/
Hill: In Ukraine, strong society is beating strong state.
The state was weak and messy, but society mobilized, networked, flattened hierarchies and worked with the military. That is the opposite of Russia’s vertical, top-down system. 2/
Hill: Putin is afraid of his own society. Ukraine’s innovation comes from mobilized citizens working with the military.
Russia’s system runs vertically through Putin. That gives Moscow control, but it also makes Putin’s choices narrower and darker. 3/
Applebaum: What binds Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is not religion or ideology.
China is communist, Russia nationalist, Iran theocratic. What binds them is fear of liberal language: rights, rule of law, separation of powers and independent courts. 1/
Applebaum: Ukraine has changed how the war is fought. The front is now a 20-mile transparent zone where Ukrainian drones can see almost everything.
Every Russian truck, car or soldier entering that zone can be identified and hit. 2/
Applebaum: Russian losses of around 1,000 killed and wounded a day, roughly 30,000 a month, come from Moscow still throwing people into a zone Ukraine can see and strike.
Russia kept advancing by mass, but now that movement has stopped. 3/