Russian and Ukraine Foreign ministers to meet tomorrow

From Politico Playbook PM:


Russia touted “very important” upcoming negotiations Thursday, which will mark the first time since the invasion that the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers have met face to face. A top aide to Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY told Bloomberg TV that Ukraine was also open to discussing a declaration of neutrality, but it would need security guarantees, and it wouldn’t give up any territory.

A plea from Ukraine for a CAP:

I've just looked at the TASS website.

I'm not going to do links but I think you can get an idea of what they're thinking by seeing what kind of stories they are printing. I think they are starting to look for a way out.
I could be wrong though.

NYT: Russia's other contest with the he West: Economic endurance

The West’s Challenge
Western countries’ secret weapon, nearly as important as their economic edge, may be their citizens’ sudden desire for concerted and unified action.

In polls, Europeans across the continent express a moral imperative to punish Russia’s invasion, as well as a belief that Russia now poses a direct threat to their countries.

In a seven-country survey taken just before the invasion, a plurality said they were willing to personally bear the economic toll of isolating Russia, which provides much of Europe’s energy. Country-specific polls suggest that share has likely increased.

In Germany — the European Union’s largest economy and often its decider on Russia matters — only 38 percent supported increasing military spending as of September, now it is up to 69 percent.

Will it last?

https://nyti.ms/35Gj0iQ

The Vice President is in Poland today.

A big moment for her. The transfer of the Polish Migs will be discussed. If she can work something out it would be monumental.


From today's politico Playbook:
Schedule highlights: On Thursday, Harris is holding a bilateral meeting with Polish President ANDRZEJ DUDA and PM MATEUSZ MORAWIECKI, and a separate meeting with Canadian PM JUSTIN TRUDEAU, who is also in Warsaw. She’ll also meet with some of the thousands of Ukrainian refugees in the country. In Romania on Friday, Harris will meet with President KLAUS IOHANNIS.

It is rare that a VP steps into the middle of such an important diplomatic negotiation. Ukraine is desperate for air power. The Poles have kicked the decision to the Americans (or tried to). The question of whether a transfer can happen without triggering a dangerous escalation is unanswered. The world will be watching how Harris handles this delicate moment. If she unlocks a U.S.-Poland-Ukraine transfer deal, it would be a monumental foreign policy success for someone who has few to speak of in her time as a senator and VP

Latest UK Ministry of Defense Ukraine update

This Ukraine analysis is being praised by some experts (twitter)

At least to me it sounds a little optimistic. Long thread.


https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1501417143312789508

The Atlantic: The strategy that can defeat Putin.

Reading some optimistic stuff this morning;




MARCH 7, 2022
SHARE
About the author: Eliot A. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State. He is the author most recently of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.

First came the shock: the sight of missiles and artillery shells slamming into apartment buildings, helicopters pirouetting in flames, refugees streaming across the border, an embattled and unshaven president pleading with anguished political leaders abroad for help, burly uniformed men posing by burned-out tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, Russian police spot-checking cellphones on Moscow streets for dissident conversations. Distress and anger and resolution were natural reactions. But the time has come to think strategically, asking what the West—and specifically the United States—should do in this crisis and beyond.


French Marshal Ferdinand Foch once said that the first task is to answer the question De quoi s’agit-il?, or “What is it all about?” The answer with respect to Ukraine, as with most other strategic problems, is less straightforward than one might think. At the most basic level, a Russian autocrat is working to subjugate by the most brutal means possible a free and independent country, whose independence he has never accepted. But there are broader issues here as well. The other wars of the post–Cold War era could be understood or interpreted as the consequence of civil war and secession or tit-for-tat responses to aggression. Not the Russian attack on Ukraine. This assault was unprovoked, unlimited in its objectives, and unconstrained in its means. It is, therefore, an assault not only on that country but on all international norms of decent behavior.

A broader world order is at stake; so too is a narrower European order. Putin has made no secret of his bitter opposition to NATO and to the independence of former Soviet republics, and it should be expected that after reducing Ukraine, he would attempt something of a similar nature (if with less intensity) in the Baltic states. He has brought war in its starkest form back to a continent that has thrived largely in its absence for nearly three generations. And his war is a threat, too, to the integrity and self-confidence of the world’s liberal democracies, battered as they have been by internal disputes and backsliding abroad.


In short, the stakes are enormous, and with them the dangers. And yet there is good news in the remarkable solidarity and decisiveness of the liberal democracies, in Europe and outside it. The roles of Australia and Japan in responding to the Russian invasion are no less significant than those of Britain or France. In that respect, Ukraine 2022 is not Czechoslovakia 1938, not only because it is fighting ferociously but because the democracies are with it in material as well as moral ways. It differs, too, in that this time the aggressor is not Europe’s most advanced economy but one of its least; its military is not the fearsomely effective Wehrmacht but a badly led, semi-competent, if well-armed, horde better suited for and inclined to the massacre of civilians than a fight against its peers. Russia’s failure to command the air, its stalled armored columns, the smoking ruins of its tanks and armored personnel carriers all testify to the Russian army’s weakness. So too does the continuation in office of the long-serving chief of general staff and defense minister who planned and led this operation, a debacle in the face of every advantage of positioning, timing, and material superiority.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/strategy-west-needs-beat-russia/626962/

The last time the Russian stock market was closed temporarily....

Russians can no longer convert rubles!