Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Supporting and arming Ukraine, and accelerating the collapse of the Russian military, is the most realistic way to end the conflict.   image by  Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; source: Getty By Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic ,  February 28, 2023, 11:16 AM ET  Flawed  judgments about military history  helped fuel bad policy in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and through the conflict’s early phases. Bad historical analogies look to do the same now, in the debate over how to bring this war to some kind of durable termination. Eliot A. Cohen: Military history doesn’t say what Ukraine’s critics think One line of argument,  advanced  by some French and German leaders in recent discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to  The Wall Street Journal , is that sooner or later Russia and Ukraine can reconcile like Germany and France after World War II. (A German government spokesperson later  denied  the report, ...

Bernard-Henri Lévy, in his signature unbuttoned white dress shirt, views the war in Ukraine as nothing less than a battle for the future of Europe, global liberalism and Western civilization. Credit... Clement Pascal for The New York Times In a new film, “Slava Ukraini,” the writer and filmmaker Bernard-Henri Lévy warns of a heavy price if the West fails to defeat Putin in Ukraine.   By Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times , Feb. 28, 2023 Updated 2:16 p.m. ET original article contains additional illustrations In his new documentary film   “Slava Ukraini,”   Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most famous public intellectual, dodges Russian sniper fire in Ukraine, nonchalantly wearing a khaki bulletproof vest over a chic bespoke suit. He climbs onto a Ukrainian naval vessel in Odessa that is sweeping the Black Sea for Russian mines, his mane of graying hair blowing gently in the wind. And he surveys blown-out apartment blocks in Kyiv, descends into trenches with Ukrainian soldiers in...

No event has transformed the continent more profoundly since the end of the Cold War, and there is no going back now. image from article, with caption: Russian travelers arriving at the Vaalimaa border crossing between Finland and Russia. Its emptiness speaks of new European division . Credit...Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times Roger Cohen, The New York Times ,  Feb. 26, 2023  HELSINKI — A year ago, the day Russia invaded Ukraine and set in motion a devastating European ground war, President Sauli Niinisto of Finland declared: “Now the masks are off. Only the cold face of war is visible.”  The Finnish head of state, in office for more than a decade, had met with President Vladimir V. Putin many times, in line with a Finnish policy of pragmatic outreach to Russia, a country with which it shares a nearly 835-mile border. Suddenly, however, that policy lay in tatters, and, along with it, Europe’s illusions about business as usual with Mr. Putin.  Those illusi...