Putin turns up the war of nerves a few more notches by demonstratively “putting [nuclear] deterrent forces on high alert”.
In response, NATO went to DEFCON 2, the second-highest level on a scale from DEFCON (active nuclear war) to DEFCON 5 (normal peacetime conditions). According to Wikipedia [caveat lector, as always] DEFCON 2 has only been issued twice before: once during the Cuban missile crisis, another time during Gulf War One.
The MEMRI translation service presents two Russian-language articles by Putin critics: one calling on the Russian elite “to abandon Putin’s Titanic”, the other calling on the international community to offer Putin and his closest associates lifelong immunity of person and property if they agree to step down. “”In general, I think Putin has already begun to guess that he has hit a dead end. In order that he shouldn’t get the urge to take extreme measures in this situation, he must understand that there is, in fact, a way out. Remember what he told about the cornered rat in his first book?”
Meanwhile, Germany, under NATO partner as well as domestic public pressure, has taken some drastic steps:
- reversed its longtime policy not to ship weaponry to an active conflict zone
- Germany itself will more than double its defense budget
This is especially shocking considering that Germany’s SPD (social-democratic party) and Greens are both full of Russia-appeasers (fueled in no small part by historical guilt about Operation Barbarossa) and so-called Putinausleger (“Putin explainers”, sarcastic term for apologists) — and it is now them who are taking these steps, with support from the more hawkish CDU/CSU opposition.
On a broader European level, many European countries have closed their airspace both to Russian airliners and to private planes of Russian ‘oligarchs’.
I had not expected Germany and the EU to do even this much — and definitely not so fast. In Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s speech I am now watching, he refers explicitly to concern this conflict will spread to EU countries themselves, ‘unless a line in the sand is drawn’.
Also, aside from a one-time special defense spending allocation of EUR 100 billion, from now on Germany will now annually have a defense budget of more than 2% of GDP, rather than 1.4% as now. Scholz also stresses the need for R&D and procurement of advanced weaponry. (He actually specifically mentions Israeli UAVs/drones by name.)
Ironically, if the current chancellor proposing this were a Christian Democrat, he’d be accused of “warmongering” by at least some of the SPD and likely all of the Greens. But as always in a parliamentary democracy, it is the left that can increase defense spending, and the right that can make territorial concessions, since in each case the opposition will naturally back its own natural policy. Nixon could go to China, De Gaulle could leave Algeria, and Menachem Begin could make peace with Egypt.
Meanwhile, there are reports that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators will meet at the Ukraine-Belarus border. Developing…
The Daily Telegraph shows Russians queueing up to withdraw money from banks following the EU decision to exclude Russia from the SWIFT international bank transfer system, ‘both natural and legal persons’ as EC chair Ursula von der Leyen put it. (This is European legalese for ‘both individuals and corporations or nonprofits’.)
ADDENDUM: Powerline’s Steven Hayward, quoting mostly Matt Ridley and Daniel Yergin, discusses how Western anti-fracker and anti-fossil fuel groups are not just “useful idiots” of the Putin regime:
>Matt Ridley reported on this at length back in 2019 in “The Plot Against Fracking.” Key part:
[blockquote]
The Russians also lobbied behind the scenes against shale gas, worried about losing their grip on the world’s gas supplies. Unlike most conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in Western politics, this one is out there in plain sight. The head of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the Russians, as part of a sophisticated disinformation operation, “engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas”.
The Centre for European Studies found that the Russian government has invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”. The US Director of National Intelligence stated that “RT runs anti-fracking programming … reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.” Pro-Russian politicians such as Lord Truscott (married to a Russian army colonel’s daughter) made speeches in parliament against fracking.
[/blockquote]
Ridley goes on to trace out how David Cameron’s conservative government a decade ago buckled under the public pressure, and killed a nascent natural gas production industry in Britain. The Russians were also behind successful anti-fracking campaigns in several eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria (I learned about this first hand in two trips to Bulgaria I made several years ago).
UPDATE 2: Condoleeza Rice., former provost of Stanford University and National Security Advisor under George W. Bush, is current the director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. She is an academic Russologist and has met Putin many times. She is convinced something happened to him in recent years, that he has become delusional and out of touch with reality. Also, that he had expected this to be a cakewalk and clearly has bitten off more than he can chew.
UPDATE 3: I forgot to mention that an Ukrainian source here told me the reason the Russian tanks and trucks ran out of fuel was that while still in Belarus, the soldiers had siphoned fuel off and traded it for vodka… It sounds a bit like a ‘just-so story’, but let me remind you of Arbel’s Law: the greatest trouble with fighting stereotypes is that some people are hell-bent on affirming them…
Also, more seriously, AFP reports:
Sweden announces it will break its doctrine of not sending arms to countries in active conflict and send military equipment, including anti-tank launchers, to Ukraine.
The decision to send 135,000 field rations, 5,000 helmets, 5,000 pieces of body armour and 5,000 single use anti-tank launchers is the first time Sweden has sent weapons to a country in armed conflict since the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson tells reporters.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
“…the reason the Russian tanks and trucks ran out of fuel was that while still in Belarus, the soldiers had siphoned fuel off and traded it for vodka…”
From other sources I’ve read over the years I find this wholly believable. In MiG Pilot, Belenko talks about how they would take afternoons off to drink illicit vodka.