The Weekly Leaf
This week, Ukrainian President Zelensky spoke to the U.S. Congress about the crisis unfolding in Ukraine, war devastated the city of Mariupol, and President Biden called President Putin a 'war criminal' while speaking to reporters outside of the White House.
Read more below.
This Week’s Content Highlights
Features from Aspen Strategy Group Members
Chris Brose quoted by Justin Katz in Breaking Defense: “Show, Don’t Tell: Navy Changes Strategy to Sell Unmanned Systems to Skeptical Congress”
Michèle Flournoy profiled by Steven Ehrlich in Forbes: “How a Former Under Secretary of Defense Is Advising Companies to Navigate Ukraine War Disruptions”
Susan Glasser on Frontline PBS: “Putin's Road to War”
Jane Harman and Susan Glasser on CNN: “'We're Entering a New and More Dangerous Phase' in Ukraine”
David Ignatius in The Washington Post: “The Best Peace Plan for Ukraine Is Sending Military Support”
Nicholas Kristof on CNN: “Press Freedom Is Evaporating in Much of the World”
Meghan O’Sullivan quoted by Sabrina Valle, Marcy de Luna, and Arathy Somasekhar in Reuters: “Europe’s Fuel Crisis Re-Energizes Debate Over Natural Gas”
David Petraeus on CNN: “Retired U.S. General Reacts to Russia Striking Near NATO Border”
Condoleezza Rice interviewed by Jed Ngalande for The Stanford Daily: “Q&A: Condoleezza Rice Believes in the Fight for Freedom”
David Sanger in The New York Times: “By Labeling Putin a ‘War Criminal,’ Biden Personalizes the Conflict”
Lawrence Summers in The Washington Post: “The Fed Is Charting a Course to Stagflation and Recession”
Robert Zoellick in Bloomberg: “China’s Smart Move Would Be to Push Putin to Peace”
Rising Leaders in the News
"...The [Indian] government has shifted its approach to how it intends to attract manufacturing jobs: it has developed production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes while also beginning to embrace free trade."
–ASG Rising Leader Akhil Bery ('22) for South Asian Voices by The Stimson Center: "India's Domestic Manufacturing Amidst COVID-19"
Tweet of the Week
Things to Know
Content Relevant to Aspen Security Forum Discussions
Don Clark and Adam Satariano in The New York Times: "Intel to Invest at Least $19 Billion for New Chips Plant in Germany"
Isabel Coles and Brett Forrest in The Wall Street Journal: "Desperation Mounts for Ukrainians in Mariupol as Russia Tries to Capture Key City"
Nosmot Gbadamosi for Foreign Policy: "Can African Oil and Gas Replace Russia's?"
Pavel Polityuk, Natalia Zinets, and Omer Berberoglu for Reuters: "Biden Plans First Europe Visit Since Ukraine Invasion as Refugees Surpass 3 Million"
Lindsay Wise and Andrew Restuccia in The Washington Post: "Ukraine's Zelensky Invokes 9/11, Pearl Harbor in Plea to Lawmakers for More Weapons"
Book of the Week
By Anne Applebaum
"In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them.
Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.
Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first"
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