Ukraine Braces for Russians to Assault With North Korean Troops
Several thousand North Korean soldiers have arrived in Russia’s western Kursk region, where they are expected to support Moscow’s efforts to dislodge invading Ukrainian forces.
A Ukrainian army vehicle passes through the destroyed Russian border post at the Sudzha crossing in August.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
The United States warned on Monday that North Korean soldiers were moving toward Russia’s western Kursk region, which Ukraine invaded in August, as Ukrainian forces braced for what they said could be imminent assaults involving the new troops.
The Pentagon said North Korea had now sent about 10,000 soldiers to train in eastern Russia, with many moving toward the battlefield in the Kursk region. The NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, on Monday confirmed that North Korean troops had been deployed in Kursk, saying it represented “a dangerous expansion” of the war.
Ukrainian and American officials said last week that several thousand North Korean troops had already arrived in the Kursk area. Military experts say that is too small a number to affect the overall situation on the broader battlefield, where both sides have deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but potentially enough to help Moscow reclaim its territory in the Kursk region.
“As their numbers grow, I expect their impact to be seen by the progress of a steady Russian counterattack,” said John Foreman, a former British defense attaché in Moscow and Kyiv.
A Ukrainian official said Monday that the North Korean soldiers had been deployed to camps and were living in temporary barracks between 25 to 40 miles from the Ukrainian border. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal military information, said the North Koreans had not yet joined the fighting.
It is unclear how exactly North Korean troops will support Russia’s counterattack in the Kursk region. Analysts say the soldiers could be used in direct attacks or to guard areas behind the combat zone, thus freeing up Russian troops for assaults, but their effectiveness in battle is untested and could be hampered by coordination issues with the Russians.
On Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the North Korean troops were expected to enter combat operations early this week. Two Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the Kursk area said they had been warned by their commanders that an assault could be imminent.
“They have warned us about an attack in the near future,” Lt. Col. Artem Kholodkevych, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s 61st Mechanized Brigade, said on Saturday by text message. “Probably in the next few days.”
The Ukrainian Army has also issued a Ukrainian-Korean phrase book for its troops to address North Korean soldiers and urge them to surrender, according to two Ukrainian officers who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Russian forces have been battling to reclaim hundreds of square miles of land seized by Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region during a surprise cross-border offensive in August. In recent weeks, Russia has regained several villages, and military experts say the deployment of North Korean soldiers could bolster Russian counterattacks.
Russia’s total recapture of the Ukrainian-occupied area would undermine one of the main goals of Kyiv’s cross-border offensive: seizing land it could use as leverage to push Moscow toward negotiations to end the war.
But how the North Koreans will fare on the battlefield remains to be seen, the experts say.
Viewers in Seoul watched a television news report last week showing soldiers believed to be from North Korea standing in line to receive supplies in Russia.Credit...Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press
North Korean troops have not fought in a war since the 1950s and, if sent to the front line, would face battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers. Sabrina Singh, the deputy press secretary for the U.S. Defense Department, said on Monday that she did not have details on the type of troops North Korea was sending or what kind of weapons they had.
Viktor Kevliuk, a retired Ukrainian colonel now working for the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies, said that coordinating them with Russian troops would also prove complex because they don’t speak the same language, have been trained differently and are not familiar with the terrain where they will fight.
“It could be a huge headache for the Russian Army, which is not used to having large foreign units under its command,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington and chairman of the Munich Security Conference.
The Ukrainian military intelligence services said Russia planned to assign one interpreter for every 30 North Korean soldiers to better coordinate with Russian troops on the battlefield. That claim could not be independently verified.
Ukraine’s surprise offensive in Russia’s western Kursk region in August enabled it to quickly seize around 400 square miles of territory. Since then, the Russian Army has recaptured nearly half of that area, but its response has been hampered by a slow deployment of troops there. Military experts say this is largely attributable to the Kremlin’s decision to prioritize its offensive in eastern Ukraine over its response to the Ukrainian assault on its own territory.
Still, the presence of Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region has been a thorn in the side of President Vladimir V. Putin, shattering his promise that Russia was safe from attack and exposing his inability to protect civilians living in the borderlands.
In recent days, Mr. Putin has hailed his troops’ success in retaking villages captured by the Ukrainians. “He’s determined to evict them from Russia and it has taken too long for his liking,” Mr. Foreman said.
Mr. Kevliuk of the Center for Defense Strategies in Kyiv said he expected the North Korean troops to be used in assaults against Ukrainian positions, following Russia’s long-held strategy of overwhelming the other side with waves of ground attacks.
“North Korean units will storm the most fortified positions” of the Ukrainians “and Russian regular troops will consolidate the captured objects and lines,” Mr. Kevliuk said. “The Russian tactic is unchanged: to realize a numerical superiority in personnel with artillery support.”
Kyiv says that Russia has deployed roughly 50,000 troops in the Kursk region, and has not reported the number of Ukrainians deployed there. Independent military analysis suggests that Ukraine has deployed about 30,000 soldiers. An additional 10,000 North Korean troops could allow Russia to overwhelm Ukrainian forces, experts say.
“Given their numbers, it is possible that they will have an impact on the conduct of hostilities in certain areas,” Colonel Kholodkevych said of the North Korean troops.
Mr. Foreman said he expected the North Koreans instead to “remain on the defensive and shore up the front line,” leaving some Russian soldiers free for offensive operations.
If they are used for direct attacks, he added, “the reliability of North Korean troops will be doubted by the Russians and using them may expose Russian troops.”
The involvement of North Korean troops in the war has raised concerns in the West. On Monday, a delegation of officials from South Korea, which was the first to report the deployment, briefed NATO on the situation at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.
“The deepening military cooperation between Russia and North Korea is a threat to both the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic security,” Mr. Rutte said after the briefing. “It undermines peace on the Korean Peninsula and fuels the Russian war against Ukraine.”
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With Limited Options, Zelensky Seeks a Path Forward for Ukraine
A muted response to Ukraine’s “victory plan” and steep challenges on the battlefield leave Kyiv searching for a Plan B.
The city of Siversk, Ukraine, remains under near-constant shelling from a Russian-occupied territory just to the east.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
For weeks, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has pushed Western leaders to support his so-called victory plan, which he claims will end the country’s war with Russia next year. But Mr. Zelensky has received only lukewarm rhetorical support.
No country has agreed to allow Ukraine to fire Western long-range missiles at military targets deep inside Russia. Nor has any major power publicly endorsed inviting Ukraine into NATO while the war is raging.
By those measures, Mr. Zelensky’s lobbying tour of the United States and Europe over the past six weeks could be seen as a failure.
But the real audience for the plan might be at home, some military analysts and diplomats say. Mr. Zelensky can use his hard sell — including a recent address to Parliament — to show Ukrainians that he has done all he can, prepare them for the possibility that Ukraine might have to make a deal and give Ukrainians a convenient scapegoat: the West.
With waning Western support, losses along the eastern front and in the Kursk region of Russia, and a looming U.S. election that could mean a drastically different policy toward Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky might have few other options.
“He has to go cap in hand to push the plan, sort of carve out a position and then say at home, having asked, that this is now what we have to do,” said Michael John Williams, a professor of international relations at Syracuse University and a former adviser to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He added: “At least he can say he’s tried. He’s exhausted the possibilities.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine speaking with leaders from Lithuania, Belgium and the European Council at an E.U. summit in Brussels this month.Credit...Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Zelensky is doing whatever possible to get the United States and other allies to commit to what Ukraine believes it needs, so he can negotiate from a position of strength. The Ukrainian president is using the arrival of North Korean troops to fight alongside the Russians in Kursk — confirmed by the head of NATO on Monday — to try to build some momentum for his plan.
In an interview session with reporters last week, Mr. Zelensky said that there was no evident Plan B if the West didn’t support his plan.
“I’m not insisting that they do it exactly this way,” Mr. Zelensky said. “I said it will work. If you have an alternative, then please, go ahead.”
He reiterated that he was still against ceding territory. But he also talked about diplomatic steps to resolve issues like protecting energy infrastructure and establishing a safe shipping corridor out of Ukraine on the Black Sea.
And he hinted at one approach that might allow Ukraine to save face if it does not reclaim all the land Russia has captured. “No one will legally recognize the occupied territories as belonging to other states,” he said.
U.S. officials have privately expressed some exasperation with Mr. Zelensky’s victory plan, calling it unrealistic and dependent almost entirely on Western aid. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.
Case in point: In one part not made public, Mr. Zelensky proposed a “nonnuclear deterrence package” in which Ukraine would get Tomahawk missiles, a totally unfeasible request, a senior U.S. official said. A Tomahawk has a range of 1,500 miles, more than seven times the range of the long-range missile systems called ATACMS that Ukraine got this year. And the United States sent only a limited number of those, senior U.S. officials said.
Ukrainian soldiers firing a howitzer toward Russian positions in the Pokrovsk region last month. Ukraine has persistently asked the West for longer range weapons throughout the war. Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Ukraine also hadn’t made a convincing case to Washington on how it would use the long-range weapons, the U.S. officials said. The target list inside Russia far exceeded the number of missiles that the United States or any other ally could supply without jeopardizing missiles earmarked for potential problems in the Middle East and Asia, they added.
Four U.S. officials told The New York Times recently that Mr. Zelensky was stunned that President Biden didn’t grant him permission to use U.S. long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia when they met in Washington in September. In the past, Mr. Biden had usually relented after initially refusing Ukraine’s requests for weapons like Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets and ATACMS.
Mr. Zelensky’s office confirmed that he had been stunned. Dmytro Lytvyn, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said Ukraine had explained repeatedly why it needed to use long-range missiles. “All the details, the list of targets and the arguments are with the Americans,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is still no political decision to proceed.”
As Mr. Zelensky continues to push his plan, the war is extracting deep tolls on both sides. Russia is grinding forward in the east. Ukrainian soldiers, many of whom enlisted after the Russians invaded in February 2022, are exhausted. Not enough new soldiers are signing up. Those who do are often older and poorly trained.
But Russia is suffering steep casualties in its grim march forward; it lost more soldiers to death and injuries in September than any other month of the war, American officials said; U.S. and British military analysts put the toll at more than 1,200 a day.
There is widespread agreement that neither side is ready for formal negotiations. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has claimed repeatedly that he’s ready for talks, including last week, when he said, “The ball is in their court,” referring to Ukraine. But two former Russian officials who remain close to the Kremlin said they didn’t believe Mr. Putin would negotiate so long as Ukrainian forces are in Kursk.
Ukrainian military vehicles passing a sign near a Russian border post that points left to Ukraine and right to Russia. Ukraine still holds about 300 square miles of Russian territory.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
After Russia hosted Turkey and about 30 other countries in the city of Kazan, Mr. Putin told state television that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey had delivered a new proposal aimed at starting negotiations with Ukraine over navigation in the Black Sea “and some other matters.”
Mr. Putin claimed Ukraine had previously made negotiation proposals through Turkey but then declined to engage; he said it was “impossible to make plans on this basis.” Ukrainian and Western officials view Russia’s offers to discuss peace as a demand for capitulation.
In fact, Mr. Zelensky has pleaded with the United Nations to support Ukraine and to prevent Russia from freezing the war.
With polls showing that most Ukrainians still do not favor giving up land, Mr. Zelensky is trying to balance political pressures at home and a changing landscape abroad.
The threat of a widespread conflict in the Middle East has shifted attention from Ukraine. Western fatigue with the war in Ukraine is real, “and increasingly so,” the foreign minister of Finland told the Financial Times recently.
The president of the Czech Republic said last month that Ukraine needed to face the reality that it will have to temporarily cede territory to Russia. Many diplomats and analysts say the most likely outcome in the near future for the war is a deal that would temporarily freeze the two sides along a yet-to-be-determined line. But Mr. Putin would have to be convinced that he could gain no more territory if any cease-fire is going to last.
“More and more we hear in Washington and Europe that Kyiv is unreasonable to expect to regain 100 percent of its territory, and the Ukrainians are beginning to get their heads around it,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general and defense expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations who just visited Ukraine.
“There is a world where they concede Russian occupation for some time,” he said. But there would need to be demilitarization of the front line and “then Ukrainians want super security guarantees to avoid a Russian resurgence of the war in five years.”
The U.S. election, just days away, will go a long way toward determining the war’s future, analysts say.
Former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate, and his running mate, JD Vance, have made clear their skepticism about continuing American support for Ukraine. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, has said she will continue Mr. Biden’s support for Ukraine, but many experts say that she might recalibrate what aid the United States is willing to deliver.
Many experts believe that even Vice President Kamala Harris, who has said she will continue President Biden’s support for Ukraine, may adjust what aid the United States gives Ukraine if she is elected president next month.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
And then there is Mr. Zelensky’s top goal — to win an invitation to NATO during the war. While some NATO allies, like the Baltic nations and Poland, seem open to the idea and NATO has promised repeatedly that Ukraine will eventually join the alliance, the United States and Germany oppose inviting Ukraine during the war because of fears NATO could be drawn into a conflict with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Ukrainians may be hoping that Mr. Biden will do something after the election to burnish his legacy on Ukraine — possibly approving the use of long-range missiles, for example, or a faster track into NATO.
Among Ukrainians, blaming the West — rare in the first year of the war — is gaining traction after delays in military aid and a feeling that Ukraine’s allies are only providing enough weapons for Ukraine not to lose. Europe and the United States have so far spent about $220 billion on aid and military equipment for Ukraine, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.
At the battlefront, the frustration with the United States and its allies is palpable. A drone pilot in the 57th Brigade in Ukraine, who goes by the call sign Fregat, said in an interview that he wanted the current front line to be frozen because the Ukrainians couldn’t beat the Russians with just shovels and machine guns. He blamed the Europeans and America for not providing more high-precision weapons.
A volunteer helping to evacuate people near Pokrovsk, an eastern town that Russian troops are closing in on, said the West just wanted to weaken Russia, not help Ukraine win.
“Soon, there may be no one left even to use the weapons they give us,” said the volunteer, Yevhen Tuzov, “because all our Western partners want is for us to fight until the last Ukrainian.”
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С сожалением и понятными пожеланиями, Dimitriy.
How Russia, China and Iran Are Interfering in the Presidential Election
Eight years after Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, foreign influence with American voters has grown more sophisticated. That could have outsize consequences in the 2024 race.
In 2016, Russia’s interference in the presidential election looked very different from the disinformation campaigns that spread today.Credit...Marina Lystseva/Reuters
When Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, spreading divisive and inflammatory posts online to stoke outrage, its posts were brash and riddled with spelling errors and strange syntax. They were designed to get attention by any means necessary.
“Hillary is a Satan,” one Russian-made Facebook post read.
Now, eight years later, foreign interference in American elections has become far more sophisticated, and far more difficult to track.
Disinformation from abroad — particularly from Russia, China and Iran — has matured into a consistent and pernicious threat, as the countries test, iterate and deploy increasingly nuanced tactics, according to U.S. intelligence and defense officials, tech companies and academic researchers. The ability to sway even a small pocket of Americans could have outsize consequences for the presidential election, which polls generally consider a neck-and-neck race.
Russia, according to American intelligence assessments, aims to bolster the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, while Iran favors his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. China appears to have no preferred outcome.
But the broad goal of these efforts has not changed: to sow discord and chaos in hopes of discrediting American democracy in the eyes of the world. The campaigns, though, have evolved, adapting to a changing media landscape and the proliferation of new tools that make it easy to fool credulous audiences.
Here are the ways that foreign disinformation has evolved:
Now, disinformation is basically everywhere.
Russia was the primary architect of American election-related disinformation in 2016, and its posts ran largely on Facebook.
Now, Iran and China are engaging in similar efforts to influence American politics, and all three are scattering their efforts across dozens of platforms, from small forums where Americans chat about local weather to messaging groups united by shared interests. The countries are taking cues from one another, although there is debate over whether they have directly cooperated on strategies.
There are hordes of Russian accounts on Telegram seeding divisive, sometimes vitriolic videos, memes and articles about the presidential election. There are at least hundreds more from China that mimicked students to inflame the tensions on American campuses this summer over the war in Gaza. Both countries also have accounts on Gab, a less prominent social media platform favored by the far right, where they have worked to promote conspiracy theories.
Iran, Russia and China are engaging in similar efforts to influence American politics, and all three are scattering their efforts across dozens of platforms.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Russian operatives have also tried to support Mr. Trump on Reddit and forum boards favored by the far right, targeting voters in six swing states along with Hispanic Americans, video gamers and others identified by Russia as potential Trump sympathizers, according to internal documents disclosed in September by the Department of Justice.
One campaign linked to China’s state influence operation, known as Spamouflage, operated accounts using a name, Harlan, to create the impression that the source of the conservative-leaning content was an American, on four platforms: YouTube, X, Instagram and TikTok.
The content is far more targeted.
The new disinformation being peddled by foreign nations aims not just at swing states, but also at specific districts within them, and at particular ethnic and religious groups within those districts. The more targeted the disinformation is, the more likely it is to take hold, according to researchers and academics who have studied the new influence campaigns.
“When disinformation is custom-built for a specific audience by preying on their interests or opinions, it becomes more effective,” said Melanie Smith, the research director for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization based in London. “In previous elections, we were trying to determine what the big false narrative was going to be. This time, it is subtle polarized messaging that strokes the tension.”
Iran in particular has spent its resources setting up covert disinformation efforts to draw in niche groups. A website titled “Not Our War,” which aimed to draw in American military veterans, interspersed articles about the lack of support for active-duty soldiers with virulently anti-American views and conspiracy theories.
Other sites included “Afro Majority,” which created content aimed at Black Americans, and “Savannah Time,” which sought to sway conservative voters in the swing state of Georgia. In Michigan, another swing state, Iran created an online outlet called “Westland Sun” to cater to Arab Americans in suburban Detroit.
“That Iran would target Arab and Muslim populations in Michigan shows that Iran has a nuanced understanding of the political situation in America and is deftly maneuvering to appeal to a key demographic to influence the election in a targeted fashion,” said Max Lesser, a senior analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
China and Russia have followed a similar pattern. On X this year, Chinese state media spread false narratives in Spanish about the Supreme Court, which Spanish-speaking users on Facebook and YouTube then circulated further, according to Logically, an organization that monitors disinformation online.
Experts on Chinese disinformation said that inauthentic social media accounts linked to Beijing had become more convincing and engaging and that they now included first-person references to being an American or a military veteran. In recent weeks, according to a report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, inauthentic accounts linked to China’s Spamouflage targeted House and Senate Republicans seeking re-election in Alabama, Tennessee and Texas.
Artificial intelligence is propelling this evolution.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have boosted disinformation capabilities beyond what was possible in previous elections, allowing state agents to create and distribute their campaigns with more finesse and efficiency.
OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool popularized the technology, reported this month that it had disrupted more than 20 foreign operations that had used the company’s products between June and September. They included efforts by Russia, China, Iran and other countries to create and fill websites and to spread propaganda or disinformation on social media — and even to analyze and reply to specific posts. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year for copyright infringement of news content; both companies have denied the claims.)
“A.I. capabilities are being used to exacerbate the threats that we expected and the threats that we’re seeing,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in an interview. “They’re essentially lowering the bar for a foreign actor to conduct more sophisticated influence campaigns.”
The utility of commercially available A.I. tools can be seen in the efforts of John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Florida who now lives in Russia after fleeing criminal charges in the United States.
Working from an apartment in Moscow, he has created scores of websites posing as American news outlets and used them to publish disinformation, effectively doing by himself the work that, eight years ago, would have involved an army of bots. Mr. Dougan’s sites have circulated several disparaging claims about Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, according to NewsGuard, a company that has tracked them in detail.
According to the Department of Justice, Russian operatives have worked to support former President Donald J. Trump on Reddit and forum boards favored by the far right.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times
China, too, has deployed an increasingly advanced tool kit that includes A.I.-manipulated audio files, damaging memes and fabricated voter polls in campaigns around the world. This year, a deepfake video of a Republican congressman from Virginia circulated on TikTok, accompanied by a Chinese caption falsely claiming that the politician was soliciting votes for a critic of Beijing who sought (and later won) the Taiwanese presidency.
It’s becoming much harder to identify disinformation.
All three countries are also becoming better at covering their tracks.
Last month, Russia was caught obscuring its attempts to influence Americans by secretly backing a group of conservative American commentators employed through Tenet Media, a digital platform created in Tennessee in 2023.
The company served as a seemingly legitimate facade for publishing scores of videos with pointed political commentary as well as conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia’s war with Ukraine. Even the influencers who were covertly paid for their appearances on Tenet said they did not know the money came from Russia.
In an echo of Russia’s scheme, Chinese operatives have been cultivating a network of foreign influencers to help spread its narratives, creating a group described as “foreign mouths,” “foreign pens” and “foreign brains,” according to a report last fall by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The new tactics have made it harder for government agencies and tech companies to find and remove the influence campaigns — all while emboldening other hostile states, said Graham Brookie, the senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
“Where there is more malign foreign influence activity, it creates more surface area, more permission for other bad actors to jump into that space,” he said. “If all of them are doing it, then the cost for exposure is not as high.”
Technology companies aren’t doing as much to stop disinformation.
The foreign disinformation has exploded as tech giants have all but given up their efforts to combat disinformation. The largest companies, including Meta, Google, OpenAI and Microsoft, have scaled back their attempts to label and remove disinformation since the last presidential elections. Others have no teams in place at all.
The lack of cohesive policy among the tech companies has made it impossible to form a united front against foreign disinformation, security officials and executives at tech companies said.
“These alternative platforms don’t have the same degree of content moderation and robust trust and safety practices that would potentially mitigate these campaigns,” said Mr. Lesser of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
He added that even larger platforms such as X, Facebook and Instagram were trapped in an eternal game of Whac-a-Mole as foreign state operatives quickly rebuilt influence campaigns that had been removed. Alethea, a company that tracks online threats, recently discovered that an Iranian disinformation campaign that used accounts named after hoopoes, the colorful bird, recently resurfaced on X despite having been banned twice before.
Inside The Washington Post’s Decision to Stop Presidential Endorsements
Post owner Jeff Bezos ended the decades-long practice, weeks after a discussion at a meeting in Miami. The move has drawn criticism in and outside the newsroom.
The decision, made by Post owner Jeff Bezos, plunged The Washington Post into chaos during a crucial stretch.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
A tropical storm was heading toward Florida’s Gulf Coast in late September when senior news and opinion leaders of The Washington Post flew into Miami for a periodic meeting with Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s billionaire owner.
During their visit — which included a working lunch at Mr. Bezos’ sprawling home on an exclusive island in Biscayne Bay and dinner at a nearby restaurant — David Shipley, The Post’s opinion editor, and Will Lewis, The Post’s chief executive and publisher, discussed plans for the future of the newspaper’s opinion section. The election, less than 45 days away, loomed large.
By the end of the meeting, according to four people familiar with it who spoke on condition of anonymity to relay private conversations, it appeared to Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis that Mr. Bezos had reservations about The Post endorsing either candidate in the presidential race. But they also thought he was open to persuasion.
Mr. Bezos’ ultimate decision, to end The Post’s decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates, exploded into public view on Friday, drawing criticism from reporters, editors and readers, along with an unusual rebuke from the legendary Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
It came after additional discussion between Mr. Bezos and the two Post leaders, Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis, who privately made a case not to abandon the tradition so close to an election. The editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, though Mr. Bezos did not read it before his decision, Mr. Lewis said in a statement on Saturday.
The decision by Mr. Bezos had been in the making for weeks. It is not clear what motivated his final determination or its timing.
Mr. Bezos has clashed repeatedly with Ms. Harris’s electoral opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, who for years has been openly hostile to him on social media. In 2019, Amazon sued the Trump administration, blaming Mr. Trump’s animosity toward Mr. Bezos for its loss of a $10 billion cloud computing contract.
The businesses Mr. Bezos founded, including Amazon and Blue Origin, his aerospace company, still compete regularly for lucrative government contracts. Blue Origin executives met with Mr. Trump on Friday, and the company has a $3.4 billion contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to build a lunar lander.
A spokeswoman for The Post said Friday that ending presidential endorsements was a “Washington Post decision.” In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Lewis added that, as publisher, he does not believe in endorsements.
It’s the latest in a series of events that have rocked The Post this year. In June, its executive editor, Sally Buzbee, abruptly left her role, rather than take a new position running a division focused on social media — a so-called “third newsroom” after news and opinion. Ms. Buzbee had clashed with Mr. Lewis over whether The Post should cover an update in a British case related to Mr. Lewis’s involvement in the cleanup of a phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
The decision to abandon presidential endorsements at the The Post followed news that the owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, had quashed presidential endorsements.
In the weeks after Mr. Bezos met with Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis, members of the Washington Post’s editorial board, who write editorials for the newspaper, including endorsements, assumed that The Post would be giving their stamp of approval to Ms. Harris. Two of them had drafted the endorsement, which was awaiting a final sign-off.
It never came.
Instead, on Friday, Mr. Shipley joined the editorial board via video for a regular meeting at 11 a.m. in an eighth-floor conference room at The Post’s headquarters, according to two people who attended. He announced the new endorsement policy without much enthusiasm, one said.
The board members were aghast. They grilled him — why wouldn’t the paper endorse? There was little support for the idea among the editorial board, which had not been consulted on the decision, one of the people said.
Mr. Shipley tried to explain: He said The Post was no longer going to tell people how to vote, a posture that would reflect the paper’s independent bona fides, the two people said. Several of the board members asked for space to write dissenting statements signed under their own names, together or separately. The meeting ended without a resolution on how they should convey their disagreement.
The announcement was sent to the entire newsroom around noon. Mr. Lewis said in the memo that The Post was returning to a prior policy of not making endorsements, trusting readers to “make up their own minds.” The Post has issued endorsements in every presidential election since 1976, when it gave its stamp of approval to Jimmy Carter, though it abstained in 1988. It endorsed President Biden in the last cycle.
The decision, which was reported by NPR before Mr. Lewis sent his email, generated near-instantaneous blowback. Within minutes, Martin Baron, the former Post editor featured in the movie “Spotlight,” posted on X that it amounted to “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Robert Kagan, an editor at large who has written for The Post for more than two decades, dashed off a quick resignation email to Mr. Shipley at 12:56 p.m.
In an interview, Mr. Kagan said that, in his view, the decision not to endorse a candidate was “clearly a sign of pre-emptive favor currying” with Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president.
“The Post has been emphasizing that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy,” Mr. Kagan said. “And so this is the election, this is the time when we decided that we’re neutral?”
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, fabled reporters of The Post’s Watergate era, weighed in on the decision with withering criticism.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
By 1 p.m., top Post editors were fielding questions from their colleagues about the decision. Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, was asked in a meeting about election coverage why the newspaper was ending its endorsements for president but continuing to recommend candidates in other elections, according to a person familiar with the matter. So far this year, The Post has endorsed candidates in House and Senate races in Virginia and Maryland.
On Slack, the messaging app used by The Post, employees reacted to a sudden deluge of readers looking for information on the non-endorsement. Vineet Khosla, The Post’s chief technology officer, instructed Post employees to prevent The Post’s experimental artificial intelligence tool from responding to reader questions about the decision, according to screenshots obtained by The New York Times.
“Let’s block it,” Mr. Khosla wrote, essentially calling a halt to A.I. responses on the topic.
A spokeswoman for The Post said in a statement that it would have been “irresponsible to serve our audience with an AI-generated response summary based off of one article” about the decision not to endorse.
In a 4 p.m. news meeting, Mr. Murray fielded more questions — before a larger audience than usual, he noted, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
He said that he hadn’t been involved in the decision because the newsroom was independent of the Opinion department. He added that he had only found out on Thursday night. But, seeking to reassure newsroom employees, he said, “What this newsroom does is supported up to the very top of this company.”
Later in the evening, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein weighed in. In a statement, they said that — although they respected the independence of The Post’s editorial board — the decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”
By the end of the day, The Post’s opinions department had made its voice heard. In a dissenting editorial, 18 Post opinion columnists signed their names to a column calling the decision not to endorse a “terrible mistake.”
Ann Telnaes, The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, captured the angst more concisely. On Friday evening, she posted her latest cartoon, a rectangular block covered entirely with a swath of foreboding gray paint strokes.
The title of the image evoked The Post’s well-known motto: “Democracy Dies In Darkness.”
У Захаровой несомненно может быть свое мнение, но в данном случае оно не соответствует действительности. По крайней мере газеты империи Безоса отказались от рекламы и иной поддержки кандидатов по причинам отличным от русофобии.
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Американские газеты, воротилы медиабизнеса, одна за другой отказываются поддержать какого-либо кандидата на выборах США.
В этот раз они и не могут никого поддержать, ведь на обоих стоит печать «российский». Трампа американская медиа индустрия сама таковым назначила, вот уже почти 10 лет придумывая небылицы. А кандидатуру Харрис обещал поддержать Путин. Поэтому информационный мейнстрим в Штатах и порвало. Сами загнали себя в тупик.
Вообще мне всю жизнь было интересно, на каком основании в демократическом обществе, как себя величает Вашингтон, как бы независимые СМИ присягали на верность не действующему президенту, а кандидату?
Разве это не ангажированная журналистика? Разве это не бизнес по размещению активов во фьючерсах? Разве это не прямое влияние на аудиторию под видом плюрализма мнений?
Harris Campaign Distances Itself From Biden in the Crucial Final Days
Joint events with an unpopular incumbent would “only hurt” the vice president at this stage of the campaign, as one of her advisers put it. But the president does not want to be sidelined.
Vice President Kamala Harris has mostly avoided campaign events with President Biden, whose approval rating has been between 35 and 40 percent for much of his presidency. Credit...Emily Elconin for The New York Times
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has backed away from President Biden in the final days of the 2024 election, viewing the unpopular incumbent as a liability in her quest to succeed him, according to several White House and Harris campaign officials familiar with the planning.
Officials on Ms. Harris’s campaign think that holding joint events with Mr. Biden would “only hurt her” at the most crucial stage of the race, as one adviser put it. That leaves Mr. Biden, who has expressed an interest in helping stump for her in the coming days, left to arrange his own, campaign-approved events through trade groups and unions.
By all accounts, the vice president has been unflinchingly loyal to the 81-year-old president whose campaign she took over three months ago. She has declined to put much space between her policies and his, and has been careful to show deference, even in moments where she could have broken away.
“Vice President Harris is grateful for President Biden’s support and appreciates that he is campaigning for her,” said Ian Sams, a campaign spokesman.
But personal loyalty is now just one dimension of their complex relationship.
In recent weeks, Ms. Harris has quietly added some new questions to her daily round of calls to outside allies and advisers, a regular routine she has kept up for much of her career to make sure she is taking the pulse of what is happening outside her immediate bubble.
She has gingerly peppered people who are close to Mr. Biden with questions about the president’s mind-set and his emotional and physical health as Election Day draws nearer: “How do you think he’s doing?” she will ask, according to two people briefed on those calls.
Over the weekend, the difference between the vice president’s campaign schedule and the president’s could not have been starker.
Ms. Harris appeared with the pop superstar Beyoncé at a rally on Friday in Texas with tens of thousands of people, and then joined the political superstar Michelle Obama on Saturday at another event, in Michigan. On Saturday, Mr. Biden traveled to Pittsburgh to participate in a get-out-the-vote event with the Laborers’ International Union of North America, speaking to members in a union hall with barely 100 supporters. His team is also hoping to get him out onto the trail in support of Democratic Senate candidates in Maryland and Delaware, according to people familiar with his planning.
“I’ve done a lot of surrogacy, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve always had to be president at the same time,” Mr. Biden told reporters in Delaware on Monday.
President Biden delivering pizza on Saturday to volunteers at a local union headquarters in Pittsburgh. He has expressed an interest in helping campaign for Ms. Harris in the coming days, but has been left to arrange his own events through trade groups and unions.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
One close ally of Mr. Biden’s, who insisted on anonymity to preserve relationships, said the president understood that the campaign wanted “Beyoncé, not Biden.” Another ally of Mr. Biden’s said it was simply more complicated to schedule events for a sitting president than for other surrogates.
Mr. Biden still believes that he could have beaten former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Harris’s Republican rival, but is not saying it as often in his private conversations, according to the two allies.
When he is briefed on polling numbers, the president expresses a mix of frustration, disbelief and anger that the race is so close. He believes, as he did in 2022, that Democrats will have a better-than-expected showing on Election Day, but the polls reflecting a dead-heat race are part of the reason he wants to hit the trail to help Ms. Harris.
Mr. Biden also understands that the surest way his legacy thrives is if Ms. Harris wins. If she loses to Mr. Trump, one friend said, “it will kill him.” Mr. Biden and his advisers believe that he has a place in the campaign, and that he can still appeal to middle-class white voters and help drive home a character contrast between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump.
White House officials note that the president has done more to help Ms. Harris under the radar than is easily evident. Last week, he recorded video appeals to the campaign’s donors. Emails and text fund-raising appeals by Mr. Biden are set to be delivered next week. On two days last week, he delivered remarks to organizers from 173 union locals in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Mr. Biden’s official, non-campaign events can also serve to help Ms. Harris. On Friday, he apologized to Native Americans in Arizona for abuse of Indigenous children in boarding schools from the early 1800s to the late 1960s, delivering a popular message to key voters in a battleground state.
But Harris campaign officials are holding him at arm’s length, in large part because the vice president is trying to present herself as a change candidate and cannot do that easily next to Mr. Biden.
There is also wariness about what Mr. Biden will say or do when he is on the trail. He told supporters on Tuesday at a local Democratic campaign office in New Hampshire, “We got to lock him up,” a reference to Mr. Trump. He quickly backtracked, saying he meant the former president should be locked up “politically,” but the remarks “were not received well” within the campaign, according to two people briefed on the reaction of campaign officials.
Some of the party’s most senior strategists said they believed Ms. Harris had no choice but to distance herself from Mr. Biden because she does not want voters to think of her as merely a continuation of his administration — even if that hurts the president’s feelings.
Mr. Biden made no secret of his desire to run for re-election, and stepped aside only after his closest allies and many of his voters demanded he be sidelined — an outcome he and members of his inner circle are still smarting over. Now, as the race is nearing its end, he is facing another unwanted reality: that he is not as much help to Ms. Harris as he would like to be.
His approval rating has been between 35 and 40 percent for much of his presidency. And concerns about his age — he will turn 82 next month — forced him to abandon his re-election bid this summer.
“If I were running the Harris campaign, the last thing I would want to do is try to make this campaign about Joe Biden,” said Doug Sosnik, a veteran Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000. “And of course I would not want him out campaigning.”
The president has ceded the spotlight in other ways. On Tuesday, when Ms. Harris delivers a speech from Washington highlighting her campaign’s closing argument, the president will not be in attendance, according to a White House official.
Ms. Harris is not the first nominee to grapple with the question of how — and whether — to make use of an incumbent president during a highly contested presidential race.
In 2000, Al Gore, then the vice president, made it clear that he did not want to campaign with Mr. Clinton, in part because Republicans were attacking the president’s morality in the wake of the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern.
Despite that controversy, in which Mr. Clinton eventually acknowledged having sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, the president’s approval rating had risen to above 60 percent by the time Mr. Gore was running to succeed him. Yet Mr. Gore distanced himself from Mr. Clinton on the day he announced his campaign, and went weeks at a time without talking to the president or appearing next to him.
Former aides to Mr. Gore have said he believed campaigning with Mr. Clinton would have only played into the Republican attacks. But many Democratic strategists have lamented the decision, especially after Mr. Gore lost to George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, by just a few hundred votes.
“Gore’s strategy of icing Clinton out of his campaign led to the worst of all worlds — he got none of the benefits of the high approval that the public had for Clinton’s presidency,” Mr. Sosnik said.
“And in Gore’s case, it should have been easy to navigate,” he added. “To the extent that Clinton had baggage, it all had to do with his personal conduct and nothing to do with his performance as president.”
Mr. Biden and his advisers want it to be known that he is still popular among voters who could help deliver Ms. Harris to victory. As a president who spent nearly a half-century confident in his political prowess, Mr. Biden does not want this final campaign to end with him sitting on the sidelines.
On Sunday, the White House announced that he would travel to Philadelphia on Friday to deliver remarks on his administration’s “historic support for unions,” according to the advisory.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that Mr. Biden “knows that every president needs to ‘cut their own path,’ and he will continue to coordinate with the campaign on where and how he can be helpful, like he has done in recent days mobilizing the labor unions he has worked with for decades.”
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Nevertheless, Ted Cruz Persists
Eli Durst for The New York Times
Ted Cruz is looking cocky. Rocking Ray-Bans and an “I voted” sticker on his lapel — it’s the first day of early voting in Texas — he is easing his way across the parking lot of his local polling place, toward TV cameras set up beside his campaign bus. Backed by sign-waving fans, he starts his brief remarks, only to be interrupted by an angry man shouting from a few yards away: “You’re a traitor to democracy!”
Some pro-Cruz women yell back, and the heckler wanders off through the parked cars. Mr. Cruz seems not to even notice, plowing ahead with his call to “Keep Texas Texas” — his campaign motto — and talking up jobs, freedom and security. (That last category consists largely of horrifying stories about violent crimes perpetrated by “Venezuelan gang members.”) He takes shots at his Democratic opponent, Representative Colin Allred, whom he calls a formidable candidate “if he were running for City Council in San Francisco.” (Mr. Cruz uses this line at multiple stops. It’s a real crowd pleaser.) And when asked if he’s concerned about the influx of new voters to Texas in recent years and the state’s shifting demographics, he fires back with absolute confidence:
“We’re going to win.”
With his buoyant delivery and smug smile, Mr. Cruz wants to remind you of something: He is never happier than seeing a liberal fantasy and crushing it. The Democratic dream of turning Texas blue is approaching middle age with nothing to show for it, but this particular hope never dies — and the goal of ousting Mr. Cruz, a bête noire of Democrats if ever there were one, will endure as long as he’s in office. As in his last race in 2018, he is Democrats’ top Senate target this year, with recent polling showing him just a few measly points ahead of Mr. Allred, generally within the margin of error. And once again he is being dramatically out-raised by the Democrats, a disparity made worse by the millions of dollars that national Democratic groups are pouring into the contest. It’s not just that the Democrats see unseating Mr. Cruz as their best shot at holding onto their Senate majority. They also see him as the most promising opportunity to break the Republican Party’s multidecade lock on statewide offices here — giving them that first crucial step toward their dream of turning Texas, if not blue, then at least purple.
But don’t look for Mr. Cruz to crumble. This is basically how he rolls. The senator was a divisive, bomb-throwing, lib-owning loudmouth years before Donald Trump entered the political arena, basking in his critics’ hate as if it was winter sunshine. He is known for annoying his own teammates with bone-headed moves. (Remember “Green Eggs and Ham”?) Yet he somehow manages to be disruptive and bombastic enough to impress Texas Republicans without alienating at least a portion of the state’s independent voters. And his in-your-face partisanship may help him walk an ideological line that might trip up other, subtler Republicans.
In a party where Mr. Trump has dragged down candidates and upended elections for years, with so many Republicans redefining themselves in his image, Mr. Cruz has stood out as a pretty indestructible character for someone so disliked. Or if not indestructible, he persists, and persistence can go a long way in Texas politics. It helps that voters here like their politicians on the scrappy side with a dash of sass. (Pace, Ann Richards and Lyndon Johnson.) It also helps that Mr. Cruz knows how to modulate his extreme partisan jerkiness when useful. Even many voters who find him personally insufferable — and they are legion — wind up pulling the lever for him.
Eli Durst for The New York Times
Eli Durst for The New York Times
Admittedly, this isn’t the prettiest or easiest way to stay in office. In 2018, he came within less than three points of losing re-election to Beto O’Rourke, who was then the Texas Democrats’ star of the moment. And who knows? This election, a less flamboyantly grating Republican candidate might very well be on a glide path to victory rather than locked in a dogfight. Still, Mr. Cruz’s unique brand has served him well enough — and attracted a curious coalition of voters who will probably be enough to win him a third term on Nov. 5.
After he voted,
Mr. Cruz headed to a smallish rally at a Mexican restaurant in the northern suburbs of Houston. In a quiet moment once he was done speaking, I asked him why he thought his race looked like a tight one. “It isn’t complicated,” he said. “If you are a hard-core partisan Democrat, after Donald Trump, there’s nobody in the country you want to beat more than me. You saw this at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago, when my opponent spoke about three minutes, at the end of which the entire stadium spontaneously burst into a chant of ‘Beat Ted Cruz.’ There was no other elected official that got that particular treatment. And I have to admit that I’m actually pretty proud of it.”
Being disliked by all the right people is a badge of honor for Mr. Cruz, and he plays it up at every opportunity. At the restaurant rally, he reminded the crowd of the time he attended a baseball game at Yankee Stadium during the 2022 playoffs decked out in Astros’ orange: “I had more than 200 New Yorkers suggest I do something that is anatomically impossible.” It is a charming bit of self-deprecating humor. It is also a reminder that he delights in being a burr in the butt of the folks his voters hate. For this crowd, being jeered by snotty New Yorkers is almost as good as being flipped off by tree-hugging Californians.
Eli Durst for The New York Times
I’ve been talking with Republicans about Mr. Cruz for years, and feel the need to clarify one point: You know the kind of politician who puts on a big show of being a fire-breathing, narcissistic jerk in public but is widely beloved behind the scenes for his big heart or personal charm? Mr. Cruz is not one of those politicians. Pretty much everyone agrees that Ted is all about Ted. You can almost smell the ambition wafting off him, and his unlikability has long been a punchline in Washington. “Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz,” Al Franken, the former senator from Minnesota, wrote in his 2017 autobiography. “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”
As Mr. Cruz might observe, the reasons are not complicated. He came barreling into the Senate in 2012 as one of the Tea Party revolutionaries whose core mission was to cause trouble for their party’s leadership, which they considered too compromising and compromised. He quickly established himself as the opposite of a team player, promoting himself at the expense of even his Republican friends. Early on, he was best known for shutting down the Senate by reading “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss on the chamber floor in some misguided effort to kneecap Obamacare — a stunt Republicans say taught them how not to handle a showdown. The former House speaker John Boehner once called Mr. Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.”
Of course, Texas Republicans are often willing to forgive their leaders a multitude of sins, provided those leaders are sufficiently skilled at owning the libs. (See: State Attorney General Ken Paxton.) So Mr. Cruz’s Washington shenanigans weren’t likely to damage him too deeply back home. By contrast, his decision to flee to Cancun, Mexico, while millions of his constituents sat shivering without electricity or water in the wake of a freak winter storm in 2021 left serious scars. A photo of the senator masked up and wheeling a roller bag through the airport went viral, capturing his me-first nature in a way that stuck in people’s craw. Three years on, multiple voters pointed to that episode in explaining to me their deep distaste for the senator.
His political and personal challenges notwithstanding, Mr. Cruz is not an unhinged Marjorie Taylor Greene-style raver. He knows that to win statewide in Texas, he needs not to come across as too extreme or crazy, and he can dial down the vitriol when it serves him. Of late, he has been striking a more bipartisan note in ads and on the trail. A key piece of his stump speech involves listing bipartisan infrastructure legislation he has championed. He boasts of joining forces with this Democrat to get this highway bill passed, and that Democrat to get some bridges built. Get it? He’s a political bridge builder. Message to Texans: I can own the libs all day long and still reach across the aisle to deliver for you. Double goodness!
It’s questionable how many voters are buying Mr. Cruz’s bipartisan shtick. In a recent poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, likely voters rated the senator as much more ideologically extreme than Mr. Allred. Even so, the poll also showed that Mr. Cruz has the second-highest job approval rating of the state’s major political leaders, behind only Gov. Greg Abbott.
In some ways, Mr. Cruz is less of an outrageous outlier than he used to be. Back in the day, he stood out as a Senate renegade. But Republicans note that with the emergence of MAGA superminions such as Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee and JD Vance, Mr. Cruz looks almost establishment these days.
Similarly, his political ideology hasn’t kept pace with the party’s rightward creep toward national conservatism, with its protectionist, isolationist, big-government impulses. It’s an interesting dance for him, with Mr. Cruz straddling the line between the new breed of Trumpublican and the slightly older model of conservative.
Mr. Cruz’s performance against Mr. Allred looks not that different from his race against Mr. O’Rourke, according to the Texas Politics Project’s poll. As in 2018, Mr. Cruz is trailing among independents by double digits and enjoys a slight lead among likely voters in the suburbs. In urban areas, however, Mr. Cruz is faring better against Mr. Allred (50 percent to 45 percent) than he did against Mr. O’Rourke (64 percent to 31 percent). He is also polling much better with Hispanic voters. In 2018, the Texas Politics Project showed Mr. Cruz losing Hispanics by a margin of two to one, 33 percent to Mr. O’Rourke’s 60 percent. In this month’s poll, he and Mr. Allred were neck and neck, 49 percent to 47 percent. (In recent years, Texas Republicans have been aggressively working to expand the political inroads Mr. Trump has made among Hispanic voters.)
For all his swagger,
Mr. Cruz can at times sound a touch defensive about how the race is going. He has complained publicly that the national party hasn’t given him enough financial help. And he stressed to me that the Allred campaign had been running ads on TV for several months before Mr. Cruz did. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be on air. It’s that we didn’t have the money.”
That said, he continued, “we’re going to win this race because substance matters. Because records matter,” he added. “And that’s how campaigns should be decided. By the records of each of the candidates.”
This is one of Mr. Cruz’s favorite lines. And you can’t help but think he has latched onto it because it downplays more nebulous, more personal political gifts, such as likability, courage and charisma — in which, to review, Mr. Cruz lacks a natural advantage.
Team Cruz definitely recognizes the threat posed by Mr. Allred. The guy has a great back story, especially in a Democratic Party criticized by Republicans as too elitist and feminized: He was raised in Dallas by a single mother who taught at a public school. (He never knew his father.) He played college football for Baylor University, a Baptist school, then spent five years in the N.F.L. before going to law school and becoming a civil rights lawyer. His badass linebacker image is well suited to this political moment — and to Texas’ rough-and-tumble self-image more generally.
More strategically, even Republicans acknowledge that Mr. Allred has run a smarter campaign than Mr. O’Rourke. He is targeting moderates and keeping the national party at arm’s length. And he came out early with direct attacks on Mr. Cruz, helped by the flood of campaign cash that let him dominate the airwaves.
That said, Mr. Allred is a little light on pizazz. He isn’t the electrifying, if ultimately disappointing, leader of a movement à la Betomania. Perhaps more concerning for Democrats, Mr. Cruz prevailed in 2018, even though that election came in the thick of the Trump administration, when many voters were looking to put a check on the president and his party. This year, with many voters feeling nostalgic for the prepandemic Trump era, the national political winds don’t feel as though they’re blowing as strongly against Mr. Cruz.
As people drifted in and out of the polling station where Mr. Cruz was voting, I chatted with many die-hard conservatives who were voting “Republican all the way,” basically because they think Democrats are ruining America. Several said they liked Mr. Cruz because they could “trust him.”
I also met Democrats aplenty who felt about the bombastic senator as you might expect. “He’s a total A-hole,” said Ray Mills.
But the kinds of voters whom Team Cruz is counting on are those like Laura Sanchez and her father, Albert. Both Sanchezes voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. Laura, a Gen Z-er, says she voted a straight Democratic ticket. They consider themselves political junkies and moderates. They both voiced unhappiness with the direction of the Democratic Party, and both had just voted for Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump.
Eli Durst for The New York Times
Eli Durst for The New York Times
Their stated reasons for souring on the Democrats ranged from basics such as the party’s handling of inflation and immigration — “My parents came into the country legally, and they had to hustle,” said Laura — to more specific discontents, such as the party’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and Ms. Harris’s response to the recent hurricane in Florida. And while Laura isn’t thrilled with the Republicans’ position on abortion rights, “At the moment, that’s not my concern,” she said.
“As Hispanics, we’re conservative by nature,” noted Albert, explaining that while they’re all for gay rights, what they “are not for is the whole transgender position and all that other stuff they’re doing now.” (In Texas, as in many other states this election, Republicans are wielding trans rights as a political cudgel.)
All things considered, said Laura, “Cruz is all right. Mostly.”
Albert was more pointed: “Cruz comes across as being an idiot on TV, but when you look at his voting record …. ”
This, ultimately, may be the secret to Mr. Cruz’s political survival: his ability to cobble together a coalition of voters, many of whom don’t even like him but nonetheless see him as an unapologetic fighter for Texas and for key issues they support — or at least against those they don’t. He may be a jerk. But he is their jerk.
_________________
С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
Russia fires missiles to simulate 'massive' response to a nuclear attack
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MOSCOW, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Russia test-fired missiles over distances of thousands of miles on Tuesday to simulate a "massive" nuclear response to an enemy first strike.
"Given the growing geopolitical tensions and the emergence of new external threats and risks, it is important to have modern and constantly ready-to-use strategic forces," President Vladimir Putin said as he announced the exercise.
It took place at a critical moment in the Russia-Ukraine war, after weeks of Russian signals to the West that Moscow will respond if the United States and its allies allow Kyiv to fire longer-range missiles deep into Russia.
On Monday NATO said that North Korea has sent troops to western Russia, something Moscow has not denied.
In televised comments, Defence Minister Andrei Belousov told Putin that the purpose of the drill was to practise delivering "a massive nuclear strike by strategic offensive forces in response to a nuclear strike by the enemy".
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Владимир Путин дал старт тренировке стратегических сил сдерживания.
North Korea and Russia send political shockwaves with Ukraine war moves
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MOSCOW/SEOUL Oct 29 (Reuters) - North Korea's foreign minister arrived in Russia on Tuesday for talks as the Russia-Ukraine war appeared to take a dangerous new turn, with NATO and South Korea expressing alarm that North Korean troops could soon be joining in on Moscow's side.
NATO said on Monday thousands of North Korean troops were moving toward the front line, a development which has prompted Kyiv to call for more weapons and an international plan to keep those troops at bay.
U.S. officials have said any North Korean troops fighting in the war would be "fair game" for Ukrainian attacks and that Washington would not impose any fresh limits on Ukraine's use of U.S. weapons if North Korean entered the fight.
South Korea, which remains technically at war with the nuclear-armed North decades after the 1950-1953 Korean War, also condemned the deployments, with officials in Seoul worried about what Russia may be providing to Pyongyang in return.
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North Korea’s elite troops are in Russia to fight Ukraine: What we know
The North Korean Special Forces sent to Russia are the state’s best trained troops but they will face challenges with modern warfare technology, experts say.
[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/BZBYCH5PY5SGLT4XPFQYPPWUZ4_size-normalized.JPG[/img]
Korean People's Army soldiers march through Kim Il Sung Square in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, during a military parade marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, on April 15, 2017. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
SEOUL — As many as 10,000 North Korean soldiers are being trained in Russia and some have already been deployed in the war against Ukraine, an unprecedented move by Pyongyang to send its people into danger in a combat zone far from the Korean Peninsula.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appears to have dispatched some of his best soldiers to aid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war effort, including the elite “Storms Corps” unit that had long been training to infiltrate the South, according to South Korean intelligence officials.
U.S. and NATO officials have warned that the infusion of North Korean troops could be a “dangerous expansion” of the war in Ukraine and a “very, very serious issue” that could have reverberations in both Europe and the Pacific. The deployment of North Korean forces is the latest sign of the deepening military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow as they join forces against the West.
What do we know about the North Korean forces being deployed to Russia?
Who serves in the North Korean military?
The North’s military, known as the Korean People’s Army (KPA), was established in 1948 with the backing of what was then the Soviet Union, to support the new state’s founder, Kim Il Sung, as he defended his fledgling regime and sought to dominate the Korean Peninsula by force.
Since the 1950-1953 Korean War halted in an armistice, soldiers on both sides of the Korean Peninsula have been preparing for conflict to resume.
In the decades since, the KPA has evolved into one of the world’s largest militaries with about 1.2 million soldiers, including Special Operations units and an aspiring nuclear force.
Most North Korean soldiers are underfed and poorly equipped, experts and escapees from North Korea say. The level of malnourishment in the population is reflected in the minimum height and weight requirements for military conscripts: soldiers must be at least 4-foot-10 (148 cm) and weigh 95 pounds (43 kilograms) to be eligible to serve, according to research by the South Korean Unification Ministry.
North Korean men are drafted into the military. They typically begin their service at 17 years old, and serve for eight to 10 years. Some women also serve in the military, typically for five years.
Only the most elite North Koreans and those deemed hostile to the regime — for example, family members of North Koreans who have escaped the country — are exempt from military service.
For the vast majority who do serve, they are put to work rather than into military operations. Because North Korea suffers from chronic food insecurity, soldiers are often dispatched to plant or harvest crops.
[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/GH4RW3CE2DKP4C7MCLNYPPYFBM.jpeg[/img]
This undated photo released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on Aug. 26, 2017, shows leader Kim Jong Un presiding over a target strike exercise conducted by the Special Operations Forces of the Korean People's Army at an undisclosed location. (AFP/Getty Images)
What do we know about North Korea’s elite troops being deployed to Russia, including the ‘Storm Corps’?
The soldiers sent to Russia were Special Operations Forces, including from North Korea’s elite 11th Army Corps, often called the “Storm Corps,” South Korea’s spy agency said last week.
North Korea’s Special Operations units are trained with the best equipment, including explosives, chemical and biological agents, parachutes and aircraft — although rudimentary compared to the Special Forces units of other countries, according to a 2021 Defense Intelligence Agency report on North Korea’s military power.
The various Special Forces units comprise more than 200,000 personnel, according to the report. These elite units are highly trained, and have long been training to attack South Korea or defend against foreign attacks on the North.
The Special Forces encompass troops from the navy, army and air force. They operate in specialized units, which include reconnaissance, sniper and commando squads, according to the DIA. They are trained in specialized skills, such as kidnapping key personnel and launching surprise attacks that catch the enemy offguard.
These troops have been involved in some of North Korea’s most notorious military operations over the past few decades, including a 1968 raid on Seoul that led to fatalities on both sides.
These Special Forces are so prized in North Korea that have been featured in state media — often touted as the strongest soldiers, sometimes appearing shirtless to demonstrate their muscular physiques.
Although they are among the North’s best trained troops, these soldiers are likely to face difficulties adjusting to modern warfare, said Hyunseung Lee, a North Korean escapee and human rights advocate who trained with the Storm Corps for six months while he served in the North Korean Army’s Special Forces.
“They’re not trained with the best technology [or] advanced equipment,” Lee said. “If they were deployed in the war’s battlefield, the Ukrainians will use advanced technologies and drones and missiles. They will just not have had that experience before.”
Lee noted that for the vast majority of these Special Forces soldiers, deployment to Russia will be their first time encountering battle — and the outside world. He added that the soldiers are “victims of a ruthless deal between Kim Jong-un and Putin,” and that “many of them are facing their first real battle, ill-equipped and terrified.”
How many troops is North Korea sending to Russia and where are they going?
The Pentagon said Monday that up to 10,000 North Korean soldiers have been sent to eastern Russia for military training, and are probably being trained to augment Putin’s forces. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has given a higher estimate of about 12,000 North Korean military personnel, including three generals.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said Monday that North Korean soldiers have been deployed to Kursk, the Russian border region where Ukrainian forces seized territory in a surprise attack over the summer. Ukrainians have struggled to hold on to their gains in Kursk since their offensive.
…
Kim Yeol-su, a senior security expert at the Korea Institute for Military Affairs in Seoul, said other personnel are probably being sent to Russia to support the elite troops, such as engineering and reserves units and those helping with logistics, ammunition support and transportation.
“The Special Forces are likely to be the main troops being there. But if there are tens of thousands being sent, there must be many more soldiers who are being sent along with the Storm Corps to provide them with food, shelter, ammunition, communications, and so on,” Kim said.
Despite their specialization, the Special Forces troops are likely to be helping with combat missions as they are being trained and learning how the Russians are fighting and communicating, Kim said.
A former Kremlin official, who is still close to government circles, said the North Korean deployment in Kursk was “an act of revenge after what the Kremlin perceives as an escalation in Kursk” and the decision by Kyiv’s Western allies to allow some strikes inside Russia. “This is another step on the escalation scale.”
The former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss sensitive matters, said it’s “cheaper and politically simpler” for the Kremlin to deploy North Korean forces. The official said he believed that North Korea is receiving much-needed cash for the deployment, as well as military experience and battlefield skills for the troops.
South Korea’s spy agency said last week that Russia is expected to pay each North Korean soldier about $2,000 each month — an enormous amount by North Korean standards. The lowest monthly salary for a Russian private soldier in the combat zone is $2,500, Andrei Lankov, a prominent scholar in North Korean-Russian relations, wrote in NK News, a specialist website.
What is North Korea’s military relationship with Russia?
Kim and Putin have deepened their partnership against a Western-led global order since the invasion, and Kim has pledged “full” support for Putin’s fight. Moscow first turned to Pyongyang for weapons that it desperately needs, according to U.S., Ukrainian and South Korean officials.
And now, Kim is sending his own citizens to fight — a highly unusual move for a country that has rarely gotten involved in foreign wars.
Both Russia and North Korea have obliquely acknowledged the presence of the troops, with a North Korean vice foreign minister saying last week that if the “rumor” is true, “it will be an act conforming with the regulations of international law.”
President Putin last week cited the Russia-North Korea defense treaty signed in June, which states that if one country is subject to an “armed invasion,” the other would provide “military and other assistance with all means in its possession.” The treaty was speedily ratified by Russia’s parliament last week.
The two pariah states now appear to be putting that treaty into action.
Autocracy and ‘enemy from within’ are thrust to center of campaign’s final days.
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Vice President Kamala Harris takes a tour and meets union workers Monday at the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades training facility in Warren, Michigan. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Inside a third-floor conference room of the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris was grappling with how to hone her closing argument to voters. How could she warn of the dangers she believes Donald Trump poses, while connecting it to people’s everyday lives?
Drinking an iced tea as she prepared for a live town hall on CNN, Harris settled on a pithy line that has now become the summary of her closing argument at rallies, interviews and other events. As president, she has taken to saying, Trump would sit in the Oval Office stewing over his “enemies list” — while if she prevails, she will focus on a “to-do list” to fix Americans’ problems.
The point Harris is seeking to make — and one she will reiterate on Tuesday, when she addresses a large rally a week before Election Day on the Ellipse in Washington — is that Trump’s vows to eviscerate democratic norms are not just theoretical but would affect people’s day-to-day lives. If Trump is consumed with boosting himself and using his power for revenge, her argument goes, he will not have time to help ordinary Americans.
In the campaign’s final days, the question of whether a vote for Trump would risk letting the country slide into autocracy has been thrust into the center of a bitterly fought race that polls show will come down to razor-thin margins in seven battleground states. Not only has the subject become Harris’s closing argument as she seeks to sway a tiny sliver of undecided voters, but Trump has made incendiary comments about how he would govern that have prompted a string of former staffers and fellow Republicans to speak out against him.
Harris’s campaign is betting that some of the voting blocs where she is strongest — including college-educated voters, who tend to vote in higher numbers — are moved by arguments about how dangerous a second Trump term would be. But the campaign also recognizes that to appeal to a wider swath of voters, Harris and her surrogates must explain why Trump’s threats to democracy matter when it comes to the issues that affect people’s day-to-day lives, from the economy to health care.
It is not clear whether the strategy will work. In the past, character attacks against Trump have not moved independent voters as much as Democrats hoped, two prominent strategists involved in the 2018 and 2020 elections said. Some advisers to the Harris campaign — and Future Forward, a super PAC supporting Harris — have raised concerns about the argument and whether focusing more heavily on a different issue, like abortion rights, might be more effective.
Trump’s supporters agree.
“‘Trump is bad’ is not a winner. You know who tried that? Everybody. I think it zero matters,” said David Urban, a Trump ally.
Polls show Harris and Trump in a deadlocked race that has not moved for weeks, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona. Polls suggest that Harris will perform particularly well with college-educated voters and young women — both of whom tend to be reliable voters — while Trump has gained support among young White men and has cut into support among traditionally Democratic groups like Latinos and Black men.
Harris’s Tuesday speech on the Ellipse — the site where Trump spoke just before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, urging supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol, “fight” for him and to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” as Congress was finalizing the presidential election results — is meant to provide a stark visual reminder of a day when American democracy faced its biggest threat in modern history.
Democrats have often been frustrated that many voters seem willing to look past Trump’s behavior and actions on Jan. 6, appearing to focus more on issues like the economy and immigration.
In an effort to strike a balance between reminding voters of Trump’s behavior and addressing their immediate concerns, Harris is expected to address the former president’s actions before and during the Capitol assault, but to spend most of the speech providing a contrast between what Trump and Harris presidencies would look like.
As part of that argument, she will spend much of her speech discussing reproductive rights and what she has dubbed “Trump abortion bans” across the country. Harris also plans to devote time to the economy and keeping prices down, as well as to how she would uphold national security, while arguing that Trump would destroy it.
“All of these issues are issues that affect and concern the American people, and I will continue to speak on all of them,” Harris told reporters Friday in Houston.
A senior Harris adviser emphasized that the backdrop of the vice president’s speech will be the White House, because they want voters to visualize the choice they have in determining who will occupy that building in January.
“A closing argument should reach all the voters that you think you either need to persuade or motivate, and that’s what we’re going to do,” the adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the speech. “So this is not going to be a narrow message. Because what we’ve seen in research is when voters really focus on, ‘Okay, it’s not theoretical, Donald Trump could really be back in the White House,’ [they ask,] ‘What does that mean for me?’”
For that reason, Harris will address not only issues around the rule of law and democracy, but also the economy, tax cuts, health care and abortion, the adviser said. “This is going to touch all the key issues that all the voters out there who have yet to make a decision are most concerned about,” the adviser said.
Even as she focuses more on Trump, Harris and Democrats up and down the ballot still believe abortion is one of their strongest issues and among Trump’s biggest weaknesses. They cite anger among suburban women over sweeping abortion restrictions that have taken effect in many states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, with justices appointed by Trump bolstering the majority.
Harris has held two abortion-focused events in recent days, including one in Houston that featured pop superstar Beyoncé and one in Michigan, where former first lady Michelle Obama spoke in visceral terms about what could happen to women if Trump is elected, imploring men to take such threats seriously.
“A vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth,” Obama said Saturday. “So fellas, before you cast your votes, ask yourselves, what side of history do you want to be on?”
In the past week, Trump has become increasingly specific about how he would go after his perceived opponents and has made comments that have alarmed Democrats and some Republicans, including his claim that “the enemy from within” is a bigger threat than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, warned that Trump would rule like a dictator, met the definition of a “fascist” and has shown admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Trump has also said that on his first day back in office — a day on which he previously said he would rule like a dictator — he would fire special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his handling of classified documents.
“Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump said Thursday.
The former president has also repeatedly asserted that it is Democrats who are the threat to democracy, urging that the military should be used to handle the “enemy from within,” which he said included former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California). Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), sought to argue that Trump did not mean he would use military force against Pelosi and Schiff, but rather against “left-wing lunatics who are rioting.”
Trump’s campaign advisers, however, argue that voters are not moved by the rhetoric from Kelly and others warning of the dangers Trump poses to democracy — either because they do not believe it, because they endorse some of Trump’s hard-line ideas or because they feel Harris is the worse choice regardless. Even some of Harris’s advisers have questioned privately whether the focus is a smart one in the final stretch.
“People care about what impacts them, what impacts their families. Is Kamala Harris going to spend time with all these nonsensical attacks?” said Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman. “The remaining undecided voters who are out there are angry about how the country is being run and are going to make a decision on that. They are concerned about the economy, they are concerned about the border.”
Some of Trump’s advisers have questioned privately why Harris is not talking about abortion more and believe they still hold the advantage on the economy and immigration.
“Everyone knows who Donald Trump is 100 percent,” one of his advisers said. “What are you going to really tell voters about Donald Trump that they don’t already know?”
Harris’s advisers respond that she does not have to choose between the threat to democracy or pocketbook issues as her closing focus, but can make both pillars of her final argument. The vice president has argued that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, as well as his 34 felony convictions and the multiple legal cases pending against him, are emblematic of how he would govern — focused on himself rather than the people he is supposed to serve.
To make that case, Harris has spent significant time with former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming in the final stretch of the campaign in an effort to persuade Republicans turned off by Trump to cast their votes for her. Last week, Harris campaigned with Cheney in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where Cheney spoke about why Trump’s willingness to upend long-held democratic norms is compelling her to vote for a Democrat for the first time in her life.
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Opinion
Bezos was within his rights to screw this up
Bossing around editorial boards is the province of a newspaper owner.
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Jeff Bezos in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
It turns out editorial writers don’t like having their work spiked.
Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza — and others — resigned last week, after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. A parallel process is underway at The Post following the Friday announcement by publisher William Lewis that committed the paper to a policy of presidential non-endorsements, starting right away.
Poof went a pending Post endorsement of Harris.
Two columnists have left The Post, and editorial writers David E. Hoffman and Molly Roberts have both stepped down from their positions on the Editorial Board. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice,” wrote Hoffman in a letter to David Shipley, who leads the paper’s Opinions section. The turmoil here on K Street is a slow-moving plume, in part because many staffers didn’t foresee this turn of events, myself very much included. In my Oct. 14 media chat, I received a question from D.C. activist and author Peter Rosenstein: Why hasn’t The Post made a presidential endorsement? My response obsessed over the Editorial Board’s likely considerations in timing the piece for maximum impact, never considering the absurd possibility that the endorsement wouldn’t happen.
Well, it didn’t happen. What did I miss and, more important, what now?
No aggressive news organization avoids the occasional public crisis over coverage breakdowns and management upheaval. The Post has contributed its share, reaching back to the Janet Cooke scandal to the Iraq War debacle to the more recent imbroglio over Lewis’s botched transition plan following the departure of former executive editor Sally Buzbee.
Such low points notwithstanding, The Post’s ownership has a decades-long record of taking valiant and principled stands on fundamental journalistic questions. Donald Graham, who led The Post under various titles for decades before the sale to Jeff Bezos in 2013, was famous on Wall Street for abjuring the gospel of short-term profitability. “We don’t do quarters; we don’t do forecasts,” Graham told financial analysts in 2006.
Bezos carried the torch onward. He invested in the newsroom, doubling its head count; he invested in the website; he invested in branding (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”); he proved stalwart when reporter Jason Rezaian was imprisoned in Iran and when Saudi agents assassinated contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
All the while, he avoided foisting his business agenda on the newsroom. “People had a lot of suspicions about Bezos, but the reality is that he never interfered in our coverage in any way, and I was very grateful for that,” former executive editor Martin Baron told the New Yorker. “And he did that despite enormous pressure from Donald Trump, starting when Trump began his campaign for the presidency in 2015.”
Now this. Many others have eloquently described the sudden endorsement outage as a cowardly and unprincipled act. Agreed. I have little to add to the condemnations that have already piled up, other than to say that the decision falls in that column of watershed Post moments. A lot of people would have forgotten about the Harris endorsement slated to run in the newspaper; few will forget about the decision not to publish it.
In a Monday op-ed defending his decision, Bezos fell back on the well-documented decline of trust in the American media, citing Gallup data indicating that our industry has now underperformed even Congress in this category. Although such endorsements don’t move voters, he argues, what they “actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” One issue here: Newspapers have been endorsing candidates for centuries; cratering trust is a modern phenomenon. Another issue here: Endorsements are nothing more than an opinion about the central question of a political campaign, just the way other editorials are opinions about a policy debate, a natural disaster or Metro funding.
So is Bezos taking the first step toward banishing opinions altogether from this space? If so, gird for more subscriber defections, catastrophic ones.
A committee of one — Bezos — is the arbiter of all these questions. In a statement on the controversy, the Washington Post Guild said, “The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial.” Watch out there, Guild: That’s like accusing an NFL coach of “interfering” with the offensive game plan.
“I think it is within his prerogative to make these kinds of decisions,” Baron said of Bezos in an interview Monday. “He is the owner, owns 100 percent of The Washington Post. I think at other places, frequently the owner or the controlling shareholder or the publisher will get involved in those kinds of decisions. A lot depends on the particular institution.”
Correct: Setups vary, but under long-established and idiosyncratic newspapering practices, editorial board decisions fall under the suzerainty of the owner and publisher. To the extent they see fit, they can tell the board what to say about this or that issue.
Preferably, those orders steer clear of decreeing silence on autocratic creep.
Oligarchs who use their editorial boards to pronounce on the world have injected some whimsy into American history. Consider Robert McCormick, the legendary aristocrat who led the Chicago Tribune from 1925 through 1955. In his book “The Colonel,” Richard Norton Smith wrote that McCormick once issued editorial guidance that garden “weeds are among our principal evils.” What’s more, McCormick mounted a campaign for the reform of rabies laws after a stray dog killed one of his sheep and told his editorialists to debunk the image of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Hudson Valley farmer. “What he has is a large suburban estate on the Hudson River. His so-called farm is nothing but suburban acreage … held for speculation.” On less weighty matters, McCormick was a committed isolationist.
Does Bezos’s late-in-the-game endorsement policy portend a retrenchment of McCormick’s “era of personal journalism” at The Post? “Absolutely, that’s what it is,” said Andy Rosenthal, a former editorial page editor at the New York Times. “The Post is not hiding the fact that that is what it is.” Rosenthal worked under former New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; given that title, Sulzberger “could have come in with a list” of imperatives for the editorial board. But that would have been “insane,” said Rosenthal, and instead Sulzberger talked through the issues with the board.
Bezos is fashioning a third model: years and years of exemplary statesmanlike deference and patience, punctuated by an editorially violent and destabilizing fiat. Hey, it’s his paper.
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Post owner Bezos defends endorsement decision.
Facing criticism and subscriber cancellations, Jeff Bezos published an opinion piece Monday calling his decision to end presidential endorsements “principled” and signaled more changes to come.
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The Washington Post's logo near the entrance of its headquarters on K Street Northwest. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos published an opinion piece Monday night on the news organization’s website, defending his decision Friday to end the paper’s practice of endorsing presidential candidates on its opinion page while lamenting that the move was announced so close to Election Day.
Bezos — who did not block presidential endorsements in the two campaigns since he bought The Post in 2013 — called his move to halt presidential endorsements “a principled decision” and also cast doubt on their usefulness. Bezos said his decision is aimed at restoring public trust in the news media.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he wrote. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
The op-ed, which appears in Tuesday’s print edition, comes as nearly one-third of The Post’s 10-member editorial board stepped down Monday in the wake of Bezos’s decision.
The board members — all of whom have said they intend to remain at the newspaper in other roles — include David E. Hoffman, a 42-year Washington Post veteran who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for columns on autocracy and resigned Thursday, the day before publisher William Lewis shocked the board by announcing the decision to cease a long-standing practice of issuing endorsements in presidential races. Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she is stepping down. The third board member is Mili Mitra, who also serves as director of audience for The Post’s opinions section. Bezos made no mention of the resignations in his opinion piece.
“Let me give an analogy,” Bezos wrote. “Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.”
A draft of The Post editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, had been written but was closely held by opinion editor David Shipley, and had not been shared with the full board before Lewis’s announcement, according to two board members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. According to reporting by The Post and other news organizations, Bezos made the decision to end presidential endorsements.
“I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” Bezos wrote. “Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.”
Lewis has said Bezos did not see the endorsement draft or “opine” on it, and Bezos did not say in his piece whether he’d seen the draft.
Bezos did, however, express regret about the timing, which has prompted widespread criticism that he was attempting to aid Trump by suppressing the unpublished Harris endorsement, perhaps in hopes that the Republican candidate would be helpful to Bezos’s business interest if he defeats Harris.
“I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” he wrote. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
Bezos also discussed revelations in news reports that Dave Limp, an executive of one of his companies, Blue Origin, had met with Trump the same day the presidential endorsements decision was unveiled.
“I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand,” Bezos wrote. “There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
His varied business interests are prone to suggest the appearance of conflicts, he said.
“I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me,” he said. “It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.”
While praising The Post’s journalists, he also made clear that he considers the status quo unacceptable. Without going into detail, he wrote that “we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course.”
He also expressed concern about public perception of journalism writ large.
“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.”
The Post’s editorial board is part of the newspaper’s opinions section, which operates independently from the staff that provides news coverage. The remaining members of the board following Monday’s board resignations are Shipley, Charles Lane, Stephen Stromberg, Mary Duenwald, James Hohmann, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.
“It’s extremely difficult for us because we built this institution,” Hoffman said in an interview before the public announcement of his decision to step down. “But we can’t give up on our American democracy or The Post.”
In a letter to Shipley about his decision to step down, Hoffman wrote, “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump.”
Hoffman — who took a buyout in 2009 but returned to the paper in 2012 to join the editorial board — has won two Pulitzer Prizes. In 2010, he was awarded the prize for his book “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.”
Roberts — who writes columns on technology and society, as well as serving on the editorial board — said she decided to step down from the board “because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets.”
“Donald Trump is not yet a dictator,” she wrote. “But the quieter we are, the closer he comes — because dictators don’t have to order the press to publish cooperatively … the press knows and it censors itself.”
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Opinion
The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media
A note from our owner.
By Jeff Bezos
October 28, 2024 at 7:26 p.m. EDT
Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.
I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.
When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.
Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)
While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.
_________________
С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
BREAKING: Pentagon Holds Press Briefing As North Korea Sends Troops To Help Russia Against Ukraine.
Цитата:
The truth about ‘deployment’ of North Korean troops to Russia.
Цитата:
North Korean Troops in Russia May Move to Frontlines, Seoul Warns | News Today | AH1C.
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South Korean president hints the possibility of supplying weapons to Ukraine.
Цитата:
North Korea and Russia send political shockwaves with Ukraine war moves
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MOSCOW/SEOUL Oct 29 (Reuters) - North Korea's foreign minister arrived in Russia on Tuesday for talks as the Russia-Ukraine war appeared to take a dangerous new turn, with NATO and South Korea expressing alarm that North Korean troops could soon be joining in on Moscow's side.
NATO said on Monday thousands of North Korean troops were moving toward the front line, a development which has prompted Kyiv to call for more weapons and an international plan to keep those troops at bay.
U.S. officials have said any North Korean troops fighting in the war would be "fair game" for Ukrainian attacks and that Washington would not impose any fresh limits on Ukraine's use of U.S. weapons if North Korean entered the fight.
South Korea, which remains technically at war with the nuclear-armed North decades after the 1950-1953 Korean War, also condemned the deployments, with officials in Seoul worried about what Russia may be providing to Pyongyang in return.
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North Korean soldiers learning Russian commands and may be sent to Ukraine front lines, South Korean lawmakers say.
Seoul, South KoreaCNN —
North Korean soldiers may be being readied for a move to the front lines of Russia’s war against Ukraine after being taught basic Russian commands, South Korean lawmakers told reporters on Tuesday, citing the country’s intelligence officials.
About 10,000 North Korean soldiers are receiving military training in eastern Russia, the Pentagon estimated on Monday – up from a previous estimate of 3,000 by the White House.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) is now watching for the possibility of “some North Korean personnel, including high-ranking military officials, moving to the front lines,” said lawmakers Lee Seong-kweun and Park Sun-won, who were briefed by the NIS during a closed-door meeting of a parliamentary intelligence committee.
Russia is teaching North Korean soldiers about 100 basic military words like “fire” and “in position,” the lawmakers said.
However, they added, it’s clear that North Korean soldiers are struggling to communicate – and it’s not clear whether they’ll be able to bridge the language gap.
North Korea has also stepped up its security measures – both to protect its dictator Kim Jong Un and to prevent news of the North Korean deployments to Russia from spreading within the highly isolated, impoverished country.
To this end, North Korean officers involved in the Russian effort are banned from using phones, while families of soldiers are told that their loved ones are simply participating in a “military exercise,” the lawmakers said.
Despite these measures, word has spread within North Korea of deployments to Russia – sparking “unrest” in some parts of the country, the lawmakers said.
Some residents and soldiers have voiced fears of possibly being sent to Russia themselves, while others have questioned why they are being sacrificed for a different country, they added.
Last week, Ukraine intercepted Russian transmission channels and released audio, with Russian soldiers heard talking disdainfully about the incoming North Korean soldiers, calling them the “K Battalion” and referring to them as “the f**king Chinese.”
The intercepts also reveal plans to have one interpreter and three senior officers for every 30 North Korean men, which the Russian soldiers are heard in the audio condemning.
“The only thing I don’t understand is that there [should be] three senior officers for 30 people. Where do we get them? We’ll have to pull them out,” one Russian serviceman says.
This could mark the first time North Korea makes a significant intervention in an international conflict. North Korea has one of the world’s largest militaries with 1.2 million soldiers, but most of its troops lack combat experience.
The Kremlin had initially dismissed allegations of North Korean troop deployments, but at the BRICS summit in Russia last week, President Vladimir Putin did not deny that Pyongyang had sent soldiers to the country.
North Korea said on Friday that any troop deployment to Russia to aid the war in Ukraine would conform with international law, state media reported, without explicitly confirming such presence. North Korea had previously dismissed such reports.
North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui is now in Russia for her second trip there in six weeks, having departed Pyongyang on Monday. She likely traveled to discuss potentially dispatching more North Korean troops – and what Pyongyang would receive in return, the lawmakers told reporters.
The news also comes as South Korea’s foreign and defense ministers head to Washington to speak with their counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for an annual ministerial meeting.
Who stole 24 tons of cheddar? ‘Sophisticated’ cheese heist sparks police hunt.
Neal’s Yard Dairy in London reported the theft of more than $389,000 worth of artisanal cheese as part of a “sophisticated fraud.”
[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/2BY24LUFAU7KHFOSP7VNYJDNZM_size-normalized.jpg[/img]
Neal’s Yard Dairy delivered 950 wheels of cheddar, including Westcombe cheddar, pictured, to a fraudster. (Neal’s Yard Dairy)
LONDON — A leading cheese retailer here has reported the theft of more than 24 tons of artisanal cheese as a result of a “sophisticated fraud,” prompting a police investigation and a new local nickname: the “grate cheese robbery.”
Neal’s Yard Dairy, a London-based cheese distributor and retailer, first announced in a statement Oct. 22 that it had been the victim of “sophisticated fraud” and that 950 wheels of three award-winning artisanal cheddars had been stolen. The stolen cheese was worth more than $389,000, the company said.
“The high monetary value of these cheeses likely made them a particular target for the thieves,” Neal’s Yard said, adding that the scammer had posed “as a legitimate wholesale distributor for a major French retailer.” The company delivered the cheese before realizing the fraud, it said.
The stolen cheeses — Hafod Welsh Organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar, and Pitchfork cheddar — are among “the most sought-after artisan cheeses” in the United Kingdom, the company said.
[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/7NDE4QY6F4LJ3NI277ADWVAM4Y.jpg[/img]
A wheel of Hafod cheddar, which was among the cheeses stolen from Neal’s Yard Dairy. (Courtesy of Neal’s Yard Dairy)
London’s Metropolitan Police Service said that on Oct. 21, it received “a report of the theft of a large quantity of cheese” from a manufacturer based in the London borough of Southwark, without naming the company. No arrests have been made, the police told The Washington Post in an emailed statement Tuesday.
Neal’s Yard said it was working with law enforcement to identify the perpetrators and that it was aware that the stolen cheese “may never be recovered.”
While the mass theft caused a “significant financial blow,” the company said it honored its commitment to small-scale suppliers and paid all three cheesemakers in full for the cheeses they supplied. Neal’s Yard added that it was now “taking steps to address the situation to ensure both its financial stability and the continued development of the British artisan cheese sector.”
In a statement shared by Neal’s Yard, Tom Calver, a director of Westcombe Dairy, the maker of one of the cheeses stolen, said the process of making the cheese that was stolen began nearly three years ago, “when we planted seeds for the animals’ feed in the ground.”
“The amount of work that’s gone into nurturing the cows, emphasizing best farming practice and transforming the milk one batch at a time to produce the best possible cheese is beyond estimation,” he said. “For that to be stolen,” he said, is “absolutely terrible.”
He also praised Neal’s Yard for putting suppliers first by ensuring that they were paid for the cheese, “even in the darkest of times.”
In an Instagram post, Somerset-based cheesemakers the Trethowan Brothers — which supplied the Pitchfork cheddar — called on people to keep their “ears and eyes peeled for good cheese going cheap” and hailed Neal’s Yard for “swiftly” paying cheesemakers.
[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/7UAGSBESLSCU2V4VCZGMTBUVO4_size-normalized.jpg[/img]
A Neal's Yard Dairy shop in London's Borough Market. (Simon Dack/Alamy Stock Photo)
British chef Jamie Oliver was among those left reeling by the theft, calling it “a brazen heist of epic proportions.”
In a video shared to Instagram last week, Oliver referred to the heist as “THE GRATE CHEESE ROBBERY” — a phrase now echoed by some British media outlets — and called for those responsible to be brought to justice. Oliver urged his Instagram followers to be alert in case they hear anything about “lorryloads of very posh cheese” being offered “for cheap.”
“I don’t know what they’re going to do with it, really,” Oliver said. “Are they going to unpeel it from the cloth, and cut it and grate it and get rid of it in the fast-food industry, in the commercial industry?”
In a Facebook post Friday, Neal’s Yard called on cheesemongers worldwide to remain vigilant and flag if they are offered or receive cheeses they believe may be associated with the theft, “particularly clothbound Cheddars in a 10 kg or 24 kg format with the tags detached.”
In a post Sunday, Neal’s Yard thanked people for supporting them in the wake of the theft, saying: “Many of you have asked how you can help. To that, we say: continue to support British and Irish cheese. Hafod, Pitchfork, and Westcombe are special examples of farmhouse cheddar. Eat them. Celebrate them.”
[quote]
Цитата:
Эволюция. Мультфильм для взрослых (1983).
Цитата:
Туда и обратно. Мультфильм для взрослых (1986).
Цитата:
_________________
С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
Сегодня в 6:30 утра в Гудермесе в результате беспилотной атаки с воздуха возгорелась крыша пустующего здания на территории Российского университета спецназа. Жертв и пострадавших нет. Пожар потушен.
Следственные органы занялись расследованием происшедшего и установлением причастных к преступлению лиц. Деятельность РУС не приостановлена, все службы работают в штатном режиме.
Военный эксперт Константин Машовец анализирует причины, почему РФ в последние месяцы удается активно продвигаться на фронте.
Он говорит об "изменении всей стратегической парадигмы войны", причиной чего является осознание Москвой ее сильных сторон на поле боя и выстраивание на этой основе российским командованием новой тактики и стратегии ведения войны:
- больший мобилизационный потенциал, что позволяет развернуть группировку, большую украинской по количеству сил и средств;
- больший финансово-экономический и промышленно-оборонительный потенциал, позволяющий "какое-то время" содержать и обеспечивать функционирование такой группировки;
- "геополитический вес" - ядерное оружие и работа спецслужб по всему миру.
"Это дает возможность нашему противнику обеспечивать "минимизацию" помощи со стороны мирового общества Украины и в то же время, обеспечивать почти союзнические действия, по отношению к себе, со стороны целого ряда "не последних в мире" государств", - пишет Машовец.
«В совокупности все это и привело к изменению подходов (стратегии) к ведению войны со стороны Кремля, что и нашло свое отражение и непосредственно, как говорится, на поле боя. От проведения "глубоких, рассекающих ударов", с продвижением в глубь территории, которые на начальном этапе войны, заканчивались, для противника, как правило, разгромом, к устойчивым позиционным формам организации и ведения боевых действий на протяжении многокилометрового фронта, с постоянным и медленным наступательным давлением на украинские позиции за счет преимущества в живой силе и вооружениях, почти на всех операционных направлениях», - пишет эксперт.
«Противник не боится обменивать своих людей на территории, более того он к этому стремится. Одновременно с этим, Украина, в лице ее высшего военно-политического руководства, наоборот, почему-то решила избавиться от удачных достаточно эффективных децентрализованных методов ведения войны, как это было в 2022 и частично 2023 годах и вернулась к банальным постулатам войны "от рубежа до рубежа", согласно канонам старой, доброй советской "военной школы". И теперь пытается, в отличие от удачного, начального этапа войны "оборонять каждый клочок", именно в той стратегической парадигме, которую навязал нам противник. Результаты этих изменений мы и наблюдаем сейчас», - пишет Машовец.
Цитата:
Позиция Вашингтона. Что является ключевым фактором для завершения войны в Украине?
В последнее время из публикаций в СМИ складывается впечатление, что уже почти весь мир хочет скорейшего завершения войны в Украине по линии фронта и только лишь «один в поле воин» Зеленский против этого.
Так, известно о китайско-бразильской инициативе, которая предусматривает остановку войны по линии фронта. Ее поддерживают в той или иной степени и другие страны Глобального юга. Позитивно о ней отозвался и Путин. А вот Зеленский раскритиковал.
Кандидат в президенты США от Республиканской партии Дональд Трамп и его команда также заявляют, что очень быстро закончат войну в Украине, остановив ее по линии фронта. Но Зеленский выступил категорически против этого, сказав, что ни на какие территориальные компромиссы идти не будет и готов воевать до выхода на границы 1991 года (в трактовке Ермака – до выхода на линию разграничения февраля 2022 года).
Наконец СМИ, близкие к Демпартии США, кандидат от которой Камала Харрис противостоит Трампу на выборах, в последнее время ведут линию, что администрация Байдена и руководители других западных стран склоняются к тому, что нужно заканчивать войну и начинать переговоры с РФ, однако Зеленский категорически против и давит на Байдена, чтоб тот дал разрешение на удары по территории России, пригласил Украину в НАТО и предоставил ВСУ все возможные вооружения. Однако Белый дом это делать отказывает, чем «ошеломляет» воинственного Зеленского.
Показательны в этом плане вчерашние статьи в Economist и New York Times, где говорится, что у Запада нет достаточно оружия, чтоб помочь ВСУ отвоевать территории и что, в случае длительной войны, Украина может истощиться раньше РФ и потерпеть поражение.
Причины того, что Зеленский отказывается вести речь об остановке войны по линии фронта, называются разные. Например, опасения недовольства украинцев, нежелание заканчивать войну без получений четких гарантий безопасности в виде членства или хотя бы приглашения в НАТО и т.д.
Многие из этих причин явно надуманные. Например, очень сомнительно, что уставшее от войны украинское общество сильно возмутится ее завершению, о чем мы подробно писали здесь. (https://t.me/stranaua/160189) А что касается членства и приглашения в НАТО, то очевидно, что пока идет война, вероятность этого близка к нулю. И лишь после завершения войны можно говорить о каком-то реальном движении в Альянс.
Но даже не это все является главным повод для сомнений в достоверности тезиса «все, в том числе и США, за скорейшее завершение войны по линии фронта и только один Зеленский против».
Главное то, что сама по себе такая формулировка является совершенно безумной.
Можно по-разному относится к управленческим и интеллектуальным способностям Зеленского и Ермака, но они явно не самоубийцы.
А потому невозможно представить ситуацию, при которой Запад принуждает Киев к остановке войны по лини фронта, намекая, что у него заканчивается оружие и деньги, но Зеленский противится. Потому что для всех очевидно, что без помощи Запада Украина потерпит поражение и дальнейшее сопротивление будет возможно в формате разве что партизанской войны.
Поэтому если Зеленский занимает подобную позицию, то это означает, что ее поддерживает Вашингтон. Это означает, что реальная (а не медийная) позиция администрации Байдена – продолжать войну дальше. И дискуссия там идет только по вопросу, как это делать – расширять военную помощь и в целом участие НАТО в войне, не боясь пересекать «красные линии» Путина. Либо проявлять осторожность, чтоб не допустить прямого столкновения США и РФ с риском ядерной войны.
Что касается публикаций в близких к Демпартии СМИ о том, что «Вашингтон хочет мира, но Зеленский стоит на своем», то это может быть просто срежессированная предвыборная мелодрама с целью перебить тезис Трампа о том, что «Байден и Харрис ведут США к третьей мировой войне». Либо же трансляция позиции представителей «партии мира» в администрации Байдена, которая, на данный момент, не является доминирующей в Белом доме.
Однако, если ситуация поменяется и власти США станут на позицию окончания войны по линии фронта, то это будет решением вопроса на 80%. 20% останутся на согласование условий прекращения огня. Это будет очень непросто (так как условия эти у Украины и РФ противоположные), но возможно. США обладают определяющем влиянием на Киев, а также на своих союзников в Европе. И потому у Вашингтона есть много рычагов, чтоб побудить и украинские власти, и европейцев (если те будут против, что вряд ли) пойти на компромиссы. А на Кремль (если он станет тормозить процесс) можно будет повлиять через Китай и другие страны глобального юга.
Поменяется ли позиция США относительно войны в Украине?
Далеко не факт. Даже не факт, что это произойдет в случае победы Трампа, который обещает «закончить войну за 24 часа». В республиканской партии много своих «ястребов», которые призывают проводить даже более радикальную политику, чем Байден. А комментарии внешнеполитических советников Трампа противоречивы. С одной стороны, они выступают за прекращение войны в Украине по линии фронта, с другой стороны грозят максимально ужесточить санкции против РФ, Китая и Ирана, что может привести не к миру, а к быстрой эскалации.
Но глобально, изменение (или не изменение) позиции США зависит от того, какая концепция победит в кругах американских элит.
Сейчас там доминирует концепция, которая исходит из того, что продолжение войны в Украине для США выгодно и при этом не опасно.
24 февраля 2023 года, на годовщину вторжения, издание Politico опубликовало огромный текст, в котором чиновники администрации Байдена рассказывали подробно, что происходило накануне начала полномасштабной войны. Из их заявлений выходило, что еще с осени 2021 года они знали о планах Путина напасть на Украину. Также они полностью отдавали себе отчет в том, что выдвинутые Москвой в декабре 2021 года предложение к США и НАТО договориться о нерасширении Альянса на восток и о невключении в НАТО Украины являются, по своей сути, ультиматумом, отказ выполнять который приведет к российскому вторжению.
Однако во всем огромном тексте о дискуссиях в США накануне вторжения, ни в одном комментарии не проходила мысль – «так а может быть подпишем с русскими соглашение, что мы не будем Украину брать в НАТО? Жалко ж все-таки украинцев, много людей погибнет. Тем более, что мы сами Украину в НАТО брать не очень-то и хотим и воевать из-за нее с Россией не собираемся».
Никому такое даже в голову, судя по статье, не пришло хотя бы в качестве предложения к обсуждению.
Почему? Наиболее логичный ответ – власти США видели в российском вторжении в Украину не угрозу для себя, ради предотвращения, которой нужно было бы идти на какие-то компромиссы с РФ, а уникальную возможность.
Возможность решить одним махом сразу много проблем.
Во-первых, втянуть своего геополитического противника (Россию) в войну на истощение. Причем Кремль в нее втянулся по своей собственной инициативе, что создало крайне удобный повод для Вашингтона ввести санкции против РФ, а также крепко привязать к себе Европу, обрубив ее связи с Россией, развитие которых в перспективе могло привести к отдалению ЕС от США. Вторжение в Украине эту очень большую для Вашингтона угрозу почти ликвидировало.
Во-вторых, ослабить двух своих основных экономических конкурентов – Китай и Европу. По ЕС нанес серьезный удар разрыв экономических связей с Россией (на чем США еще и хорошо зарабатывают, заместив российский газ американским), а Пекин теряет позиции на европейском рынке, так как оказавшиеся, благодаря войне в Украине, в жесткой связке с США европейцы не в силах отказать Вашингтону в введении заградительных пошлин против китайских товаров.
При этом, для носителей данной концепции, риски войны для США не выглядят слишком уж большими.
Американская армия в войне не участвует. Против РФ воюют ВСУ. И любой исход войны для США, с точки зрения сторонников этой концепции, не будет критическим. Потерпит Россия поражение, а Путина свергнут – очень хорошо. Война уйдет «вдолгую» - тоже неплохо. Россия будет истощаться и дальше. Москва одержит победу и завоюет Украину – плохо, очень неприятно, но не фатально. В конце концов победу талибов в Афганистане США пережили. Могут пережить и поражение Украины, оккупация которой повиснет гирями на ногах у Москвы, заставляя РФ тратить на нее огромные ресурсы. А Европа, напуганная российской угрозой, будет еще ближе к США привязана и экономически еще более ослаблена – в страхе перед новой войной инвесторы ускорят вывод денег из ЕС в Америку. А если еще полыхнет в Азии – на Тайване, между Индией и Пакистаном, либо в Корее, то в США потекут еще и огромные азиатские деньги. Америка станет островком стабильности в бушующем кровавом мире войн будущего. Как Элизиум из известного фантастического фильма. Защищенный двумя океанами, ядерным оружием и мощным военно-морским флотом.
Однако у такой концепции есть противники. Это условная «партия мира» на Западе и ее позиции в последнее время усиливаются, хотя пока и не являются доминирующими.
Главный аргумент сторонников «партии мира» – продолжение войны в Украине создает высокие риски втягивания в нее НАТО, что чревато угрозой ядерной войны, которая уничтожит, в том числе, и американский «Элизиум».
Также они считают, что продолжение войны несет риски поражения и капитуляции Украины. Что для Запада все ж таки безболезненно не пройдет, подорвав доверие к нему союзников по всему миру. Остановка войны по линии фронта сторонниками «партии мира» видится способом гарантировать, что ни разгрома, ни капитуляции Украины не будет. Страна сохранит свою государственность, армию, выход к морю, перспективы вступления в ЕС и даже (в случае достижения договоренностей с РФ) в НАТО.
Кроме того, нарастающие финансовые проблемы Запада (в частности, с огромными внешним долгом и денежной массой) не позволяют увеличивать военные расходы без риска дестабилизации экономики или без значительного сокращения социальных расходов.
Также есть сторонники точки зрения, что Россию (даже с Путиным во главе) можно и нужно включить в «глобальный Запад», превратив его в «глобальный север», который, с учетом природных ресурсов и ядерного арсенала РФ, станет непробиваемой и самодостаточной крепостью.
Кроме того, в Европе (особенно в Германии и Италии) есть немало тех, кто хочет поскорее закончить войну, чтоб восстановить экономические связи с РФ.
Повторимся, позиция «партии мира» пока не является главенствующей на Западе, но влияние ее растет.
И на чью сторону склонится чаша весов зависит не столько от итогов выборов в США (хотя они, конечно, окажут свое влияние), сколько от более глобального выбора стратегии будущего, который стоит перед западными элитами.
Первый вариант - окончательно выбрать стратегию «Элизиума» и тогда войну прекращать не нужно, а наоборот - необходимо ее подпитывать постоянно. И в эту стратегию вписываются заявления Зеленского о «войне до победного конца». Так как дают аргумент против завершения войны по линии фронта - «сама Украина с этим не согласна, а мы ее заставить не можем».
Второй вариант - пойти на договоренности с незападными странами о новом мироустройстве с новой системой глобальной безопасности (если, естественно, на это будут готовы пойти незападные страны, включая РФ). И тогда войну в Украине нужно будет прекращать.
Хотя это и будет очень трудно. Глобальная «партия войны», представители которой есть и в Украине, и на Западе, и в России, постарается торпедировать любые попытки закончить боевые действия, как это уже не раз происходило в прошлом.
Однако изменение позиции США по войне в Украине, безусловно, будет иметь огромное значение и позволит начать путь к ее завершению.
Never-Before-Seen CLERKS Short Film by Kevin Smith!
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of CLERKS, “We Never Smiled in the 90’s” is a short film cut from never-before-seen footage showing - for the first time ever - the making of the black and white cult comedy classic! The music is by Bear McCreary, from his score for The 4:30 Movie. Edited by Kevin Smith. Restoration by Stephen Frezza.
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С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
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For much of the past year, Russian troops launched bloody assaults on Ukrainian positions that often yielded only limited gains. But the relentless attacks are now starting to pay off: In October, Russia made its largest territorial gains since the summer of 2022, as Ukrainian lines buckled under sustained pressure.
Over the past month, Russian forces have seized more than 160 square miles of land in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, the main theater of the war today. That has allowed them to take control of strategic towns that anchored Ukrainian defenses in the area, beginning with Vuhledar in early October. This past week, battle has raged in Selydove, which now appears lost.
Ultimately, experts say, these gains, among the swiftest of the war, will help the Russian army secure its flanks before launching an assault on the city of Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the Donbas.
Russia’s rapid advance is a striking change from the situation last year, when the front lines remained mostly static, with both sides launching ambitious offensives that largely failed.
But the stalemate that defined 2023 laid the groundwork for Russia’s recent progress. However marginal the gains, Russia’s attacks gradually weakened the Ukrainian army to the point where its troops are so stretched that they can no longer hold some of their positions, Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts say.
Half of Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine so far this year were made in the past three months alone, according to Pasi Paroinen, a military expert with the Finland-based Black Bird Group. “The situation in southeastern Donbas rapidly deteriorates,” he said.
Russia made a series of small gains in July across this southeastern pocket of the Donbas. It set its eyes on Pokrovsk, a key rail and road hub that Ukraine depends on to resupply its troops in the area.
In August, Ukraine’s defensive lines buckled, and Russia rapidly advanced 10 miles toward Pokrovsk and closed in on Selydove from the east and north.
Russia’s march toward Pokrovsk slowed as it encountered several lines of Ukrainian defenses and Kyiv sent reinforcements. Instead of attacking Pokrovsk head-on, Russia tried to flank it from the south, tightening its grip around Selydove. Farther south it captured Vuhledar, a hilltop fortress town, after nearly encircling it.
Over the past month, Russia completed its march on Selydove and appears to have taken it this week. It also advanced on Kurakhove from three directions, looking to squeeze Ukrainian forces out of the city.
Mr. Paroinen likened the relentless assaults Ukrainian forces must try to fend off to “a constant game of whack-a-mole, with new crisis points emerging faster than they can be dealt with.” That allows Russia to quickly advance whenever it finds a weak spot.
Vincent Tourret, an analyst at the French Foundation for Strategic Research, pointed to other factors that have helped Russia’s advance, including its increased use of powerful guided bombs, which can destroy fortified enemy positions, and a lack of Ukrainian fortifications in the area where the fighting is now taking place.
“Ukraine’s defenses are more and more battered, the terrain is more and more favorable for Russian offensives and, on top of that, the Russians have a better impact” with the guided bombs, Mr. Tourret said. “The three factors combine to explain the increase in Russian gains.”
Ukrainian forces have also suffered from serious personnel shortages that have them largely outmanned on the battlefield. To address the problem, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told Parliament on Tuesday that an additional 160,000 people would be drafted, with the goal of raising the manning of units to 85 percent.
In the past few months or so, Russian forces broke through Ukrainian strongholds that had sustained prolonged fighting, such as Chasiv Yar. Russian troops had long been thwarted by a canal dividing the town from its outskirts, which served as a natural barrier for the Ukrainians. But recently, according to Britain’s defense ministry, it is “highly likely” that Russia “crossed the canal and “approached the town’s boundaries.”
In other places, the Russian army has used a tactic of threatening encirclement to force Ukrainian forces to withdraw, such as in Selydove. Serhii Kuzan, the chairman of Ukraine’s Security and Cooperation Center, a nongovernmental research group, said Selydove protected Pokrovsk’s southern flank and that its capture would help Russia position artillery and secure supply routes there.
The semi-circles formed around towns by Russia’s encirclement tactics have given the frontline in the Donbas a jagged appearance.
The Donbas, which comprises Ukraine’s two easternmost regions, Luhansk and Donetsk, has long been a prime objective for Russia.
Russia’s recent rapid advance points to another Ukrainian weakness, military experts say: a lack of fortifications.
After seizing the fortress town of Vuhledar earlier this month, Russian forces encountered largely open terrain with sparse Ukrainian defensive lines and few urban areas where Ukrainian troops could entrench to form stiff resistance. In just the past week, Russia advanced roughly six miles north of Vuhledar — an unusually swift pace compared with previous gains.
“The Russians are now well past the old frontline and its extensive minefields, which halted the previous offensives against Vuhledar back in 2023,” Mr. Paroinen said.
To make matters worse, Ukraine has weakened its positions in the Donbas by redeploying seasoned units from there to Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces launched a surprise cross-border offensive this summer.
The troops have often been replaced by less experienced units that are struggling to fend off Russian assaults. Mr. Tourret noted that many units now manning the frontline in the Donbas are from Ukraine’s Territorial Defense — a force largely made up of civilians who volunteered to fight the Russian invaders in 2022, but lack the training and equipment of regular army units.
Mr. Paroinen said Russia’s recent rapid advance supports “the overall picture that we have of Ukrainian forces: Reserves are low, too many quality units are stuck in Kursk and Russia has enough force left to exploit any weaknesses in Ukrainian lines.”
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Zelenskiy blasts allies for 'zero' response to North Korean deployment
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"Putin is checking the reaction of the West ... And I believe that after all these reactions, Putin will decide and increase the contingent ... The reaction that is there today is nothing, it is zero," Zelenskiy said.
He began publicly warning of North Korean involvement in the war on Oct. 13. Western allies have since described the move as a major escalation, but have not announced retaliatory measures or said they are preparing to implement any.
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U.S. Turns to China to Stop North Korean Troops From Fighting for Russia
American agencies have assessed that China dislikes the growing partnership between Russia and North Korea. The State Department has raised the troop issue with Chinese diplomats.
President Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, in a photograph released by the Chinese state media. China is North Korea’s longtime ally and its most powerful economic and military partner.Credit...Ju Peng/Xinhua, via Associated Press.
The Biden administration is turning to an unlikely interlocutor as North Korean troops move into combat position to help Russia in its war in Ukraine.
To convey threats to North Korea, U.S. officials are talking to China.
And American officials say they hope the conversations further stoke any suspicions China might feel about the troop deployment.
The U.S. government has assessed that China is uneasy about the rapidly strengthening security partnership between Russia and North Korea. China is North Korea’s longtime ally and its most powerful economic and military partner, but the Russia-North Korea collaboration means Beijing has to increasingly share influence over Pyongyang with Moscow.
And North Korea’s intervention in Ukraine draws Europe deeper into East Asian security matters, which China does not want. On Thursday, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, its first such test in almost a year, raising alarms among nations around the world.
The State Department has raised the issue of the troops directly with Chinese officials in recent days, a senior administration official told The New York Times. The latest conversation took place on Tuesday, when Kurt Campbell, the deputy secretary of state, Daniel J. Kritenbrink, the department’s top Asia official, and James O’Brien, the top Europe official, all met with Chinese diplomats for several hours at the home of Ambassador Xie Feng in Washington.
And Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke to Andriy Yermak, a top Ukrainian official, the same day about diplomatic efforts with China and other nations, the official said. Mr. Blinken said at a news conference on Thursday that he expected Russia to send the North Koreans into combat “in the coming days,” and that they would be legitimate military targets once they were in battle.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, has urged U.S. agencies to convey the concerns to China and stress potential consequences, a second U.S. official said. The official declined to give more details.
The hope is that China will at the very least pass the message on to Kim Jong-un, the young autocrat leading North Korea, or try to get Mr. Kim to limit or halt the deployment.
Even before news of the North Korean troops emerged in public, Mr. Blinken had raised the country’s growing partnership with Russia in recent meetings with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, the first U.S. official said.
China and Russia have been getting closer themselves over many years. In February 2022, Beijing announced a “no limits” partnership with Moscow right before the Russian military’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. U.S. officials say China supports Russia’s war efforts by buying Russian oil and doing trade that has helped President Vladimir V. Putin rebuild his country’s defense industry, which is under severe American and European-led sanctions.
So on the surface, it might seem that China would support the idea of North Korean troops fighting with Russia against Ukrainian soldiers.
Yet China’s views on the issue are murky, and U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to figure out what China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and other top Chinese officials think of the deployment, which Mr. Biden has called “very dangerous.”
The Pentagon announced on Monday that North Korea had sent 10,000 troops to eastern Russia to train for combat and that many were moving to western Russia to fight Ukrainian soldiers who have seized territory in the Kursk region. Some North Korean troops could end up fighting in Ukraine.
It is reminiscent of the Korean War, when China, North Korea and Russia (then the Soviet Union) fought U.S.-led troops on the Korean Peninsula. But in retrospect, that anti-American alliance was shakier than it appeared, and the nature of its contemporary incarnation is unclear.
American officials and analysts say the three nations with Communist roots are still ideologically aligned against the United States. But they also say China, as the most powerful nation in the group, is uneasy about the renewed bond between Russia and North Korea, which relies on China to prop up its isolated economy.
And China could be irate if European nations get more involved in East Asian security issues — including on Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula — as a result of North Koreans fighting for Russia in Europe, analysts say. China opposes the United States encouraging its Atlantic and Pacific allies and partners to forge greater ties.
If there is tension within China over the North Korean troop deployment, American officials would aim to exploit it.
Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday that the United States had been talking directly to China “to make clear that we think this ought to be a source of concern for China as well as other countries in the region.”
Last week, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said: “We don’t know how President Xi and the Chinese are looking at this. One would think that — if you take their comments at face value about desiring stability and security in the region, particularly on the Korean Peninsula — one would think that they’re also deeply concerned by this development.”
“But,” he added, “you can expect that we’ll be communicating with the Chinese about this and certainly sharing our perspectives to the degree we can — and gleaning theirs.”
When asked to comment on the North Korea issue for this article, the Chinese Embassy in Washington referred to remarks by Lin Jian, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, at a news conference last week in Beijing. Answering a question about the North Korean troops, he reiterated China’s main talking point on the Ukraine war: “We hope all parties will promote the de-escalation of the situation and strive for a political settlement.”
American officials also hope allies will express their concerns about North Korea to China. That includes European nations, Japan and South Korea, all of which have important trade ties with China. On Thursday, Mr. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III spoke with their South Korean counterparts in Washington about the issue.
“It would not be surprising if U.S. officials try to leverage North Korea’s provocation to shift the calculus of their Chinese counterparts,” said Ali Wyne, a senior researcher on U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group.
The American goal, he added, would be “to underscore concerns that are likely growing in Beijing: that it may have overestimated its influence over Moscow and Pyongyang, and that those two care little about the reputational costs that it stands to incur should instability expand across Europe and Asia.”
Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center, said she met with officials in China in September who had a “negative attitude” about Russia-North Korea relations.
The general view, she said, is that Russia and North Korea have “selfish incentives that have acted against regional peace and stability, and that their alignment will only bolster their capabilities in such endeavors.”
“More importantly,” she said, “the Chinese detestation of the Russia-North Korea rapprochement comes from the conviction that Kim Jong-un is ‘using Russia to poke China.’”
In September 2023, Mr. Kim and Mr. Putin pledged closer cooperation when they met at a cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East. This June, the two signed a mutual defense pact that hearkened back to their nations’ Cold War alliance. The North Korean troops going to fight in Russia appear to fit within the contours of that treaty.
China has approached North Korea with wariness in recent years. Chinese officials are disturbed by North Korea’s military provocations in Asia, including its frequent launches of ballistic missiles. China prefers that North Korea curb its robust nuclear weapons program, and it even joined Russia years ago in approving United Nations sanctions pushed by two American presidents against North Korea.
More recently, China has helped North Korea evade some of those sanctions but remains uneasy about its nuclear program, analysts say.
There is no doubt that Chinese officials will be watching to see whether Russia shares nuclear and space technology with North Korea in exchange for its troops.
“From a Chinese perspective, you’re concerned about specific technologies that the Russians could help with to advance the program that much more,” said John Delury, a historian of modern China and the Cold War. “And there’s also intelligence sharing — this is a classic way that countries with this kind of partnership rapidly upgrade their relationship. If you’re China, you’re worried about Russia and North Korea sharing intelligence, which could include intelligence on China.”
The consequences of North Korean troops fighting in Europe could be far-reaching. Besides possibly bringing Europe deeper into East Asian security discussions, it would most likely reinforce the growing military coalition of Japan, South Korea and the United States, which is aimed at countering both China and North Korea.
On the other hand, any reservations Chinese officials might have about the North Korean troops could be minor next to the nation’s foreign policy priorities. Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin have formed a strong personal bond over the years, and China has given Russia diplomatic and economic aid throughout the Ukraine war, while stopping short of sending weapons directly to the Russian military.
“North Korea’s provision of troops to Russia supports this top-tier priority, even though it also complicates Beijing’s efforts to stabilize relations with Seoul and Tokyo,” said Ryan Hass, a China expert at the Brookings Institution who was on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
“Any American judgment that the Russia-North Korea collaboration will create space to drive a wedge between China and Russia would be built on hope, not evidence,” he added. “China is deeply invested in its relationship with Russia. North Korea’s dispatch of troops is not going to diminish China’s decision to stand firmly behind Putin.”
Isabelle de Borchgrave Dies at 78; Traced Sartorial History With Paper
An artist and designer, she transformed simple craft paper into elaborate trompe l’oeil confections, creating stunning life-size reproductions of period garments.
“Fantomes de Papier (Paper Ghosts),” an exhibition of the Belgian artist and designer Isabelle de Borchgrave’s work, runs through Dec. 1 at the Château de Nyon, in Nyon, Switzerland.Credit...Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA, via Shutterstock
Isabelle de Borchgrave, a Belgian artist and designer who made ravishing life-size paper recreations of period garments celebrating hundreds of years of sartorial history, from glittering Elizabethan court gowns to the beaded flapper fashions of Coco Chanel, died on Oct. 17 at her home in Brussels. She was 78.
The cause was cancer, said her son, Nicolas de Borchgrave.
Ms. de Borchgrave was already a well-known interior and textiles designer when she became captivated by period fashions in the painting collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during her many trips to New York City in the 1980s and early ’90s. There, she pored over the Renaissance portraits, as well as the florid costumes in the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Back home, she decided to try her hand at creating a period piece for herself — but out of paper, a material she had worked with before, making clothing for children.
One of her first efforts was inspired by a Bronzino portrait of Eleanor of Toledo at the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, Italy. Painstakingly, she tried to recreate the gold-and-black brocade gown that Eleanor wore, although “it was very badly done because I had no technique,” she told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2008.
“But every day I would learn something new,” she said, “and the technique arrived little by little.”
Ms. de Borchgrave at Versailles in 2011. “I had no idea that I would do so many dresses,” she said. “After I made one, I started a second and then a third. It is crazy and you never stop.”Credit...Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
Ms. de Borchgrave had become friends with Rita Brown, a Canadian costume designer whom she had met on her trips to New York, and they decided to collaborate on a collection of paper garments, with examples from 300 years of fashion history, starting with the 15th century.
Ms. Brown constructed the pieces and Ms. de Borchgrave painted them, gaining skill and confidence as she worked. They plumbed the wardrobes of Marie Antoinette, Queen Elizabeth I and the Empress Eugenie of France; they sampled the oeuvre of Coco Chanel; they made Ottoman Empire caftans.
Their collection, which they called “Papiers à la Mode,” grew to more than 80 pieces and toured museums around the world, including the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Afterward, Ms. de Borchgrave continued with the project on her own.
“I went crazy,” she told The Telegraph. “I had no idea that I would do so many dresses. After I made one, I started a second and then a third. It is crazy and you never stop.”
In time, she became a trompe l’oeil wizard. Her medium: the pattern paper dressmakers use, or ordinary craft paper, “the cheapest you can find,” she liked to say.
First, she would crumple and iron the paper repeatedly, to give it the softness of fabric. Before painting a piece, she would construct it, cutting out and shaping all the parts: a poufy sleeve, a full skirt, a ruched collar. Then she would lay the pieces flat, using acrylic paint and gouache to simulate satin, silk and leather, the glint of light on a pearl, the delicate tracery of lace, the gold thread of an elaborate brocade. Finally, with a small crew of art school students, she would glue the pieces together.
A single garment, which might be composed of hundreds of pieces, could take a month to complete.
Among her greatest hits was a copy of Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Ms. de Borchgrave worked from the original dress — a 1953 ivory silk-taffeta gown made by the couturier Ann Lowe — which had been preserved like a relic in black tissue paper, she said, and was so delicate, it couldn’t be touched.
To create her replica of Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress, Ms. de Borchgrave worked from the original, although it was so delicate, she said, it couldn’t be touched.Credit...via the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; Photo by Joel Benjamin
In 2004, she made a paper coat, handbag and fan in pale lavender for Fabiola Fernanda María-de-las-Victorias Antonia Adelaida de Mora y Aragón — the Spanish-born Queen of Belgium, otherwise known as Queen Fabiola — to wear to the wedding of a nephew in Spain. On the day of the event, it rained, and a bodyguard shadowed the queen with an umbrella to keep Ms. de Borchgrave’s creation crisp and bright.
Ms. de Borchgrave also recreated 40 costumes from the Ballets Russes, using designs by Picasso, Leon Bakst and Coco Chanel, a passion project she undertook working solely from images she found in books.
When Ms. de Borchgrave was invited to do a residency at the Venetian palazzo where the Spanish couturier Mariano Fortuny had lived and worked until his death in 1949, she was so inspired that she not only recreated his well-known pleated Delphos dresses; she also fabricated an entire mise-en-scène that spread over three floors of the palazzo, which is now a museum. It included a paper Oriental tent, with paper rugs and cushions, as well as a paper recreation of Fortuny’s study, with a paper model of the designer seated at his paper desk and a paper hound curled up under a paper armchair.
“Borchgrave produces astonishing effects of scintillating color, weight, transparency and texture,” Roderick Conway Morris wrote in his review for The International Herald Tribune in 2008. “Her renderings of diaphanous gauzes are especially astonishing. Borchgrave describes herself as ‘Fortuny’s spiritual daughter,’ and her response to the Spanish artist’s extraordinary personality and exotically eclectic world is at once passionate and engagingly original.”
Ms. de Borchgrave in her studio in Brussels in 2018. “Borchgrave produces astonishing effects of scintillating color, weight, transparency and texture,” one critic wrote. Credit...David de Lossy
Isabelle Jeanne Marie Alice Jacobs was born on April 10, 1946, in Brussels. Her mother, Françoise Jacobs, who worked in public relations, was the family breadwinner; her father, Albert Jacobs, lived a more relaxed, bohemian life, Ms. de Borchgrave told The Telegraph.
At 14, she left secondary school to study at the Centre des Arts Décoratifs and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, both in Brussels. When she graduated, she began making painted dresses for herself and friends, who clamored for more. But she wasn’t interested in being a fashion designer; instead, she focused on designing textiles and working as an interior designer.
She met Count Werner de Borchgrave, an “anarchist-aristocrat,” as he described himself in a recent interview, at a costume party in the late 1960s. She was dressed as La Goulue, from the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec poster of the Moulin Rouge dancer. Mr. de Borchgrave had come as a cul-de-jatte, or legless person, and was scooting around in a wheeled contraption he had constructed. They fell in love, and he became her business partner. When they married in 1975, Ms. de Borchgrave became a countess, although she never used the title.
In addition to her son and husband, Ms. de Borchgrave is survived by a brother, Jean-François Jacobs; her daughter, Pauline Rombaux; and two grandchildren.
Ms. de Borchgrave with King Philippe of Belgium in 2022 at an exhibition of “Miradas de Mujeres” (“The Gaze of Women”), her fifth collection, at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. It was inspired by her fascination with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.Credit...Dirk Waem/Belga/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
Some years ago, Ms. de Borchgrave was asked by a client to recreate Frida Kahlo’s Tehuana dresses, intricately embroidered costumes in the style of the traditional clothing worn by Mexico’s Indigenous people, the Zapotec, and favored by Kahlo. The client wanted just six pieces, rendered in black and white. The commission was eventually canceled, but by then Ms. de Borchgrave had become fascinated by the artist. She traveled to Casa Azul, Kahlo’s cobalt-blue house in Mexico City, now a museum, and photographed its interiors and gardens.
Over the next three years, she recreated the entire house and its contents — including the dishes in the kitchen, the plants in the garden and Kahlo’s parrots and dogs — along with 60 of the artist’s dresses. Altogether, there were more than 200 full-sized objects, which required some two and a half miles of paper to construct.
Ms. de Borchgrave called the collection “Miradas de Mujeres,” which is Spanish for “the gaze of women.” It was her fifth major collection. In addition to “Papiers à la Mode,” “Mariano Fortuny” and “Ballets Russe,” she created a collection of Renaissance work, “I Medici,” featuring the costumes of famous Florentines. She also collaborated with fashion designers like Comme des Garçons and Hermes, and designed housewares, furniture, jewelry and stationery.
“If I lived another 50 years,” Ms. de Borchgrave told Magazine Horse in 2022, “I would love to recreate the Silk Road: the costumes, the caravans, the horses.”
“This is the force of Isabelle,” said Christine-Aurore Magnée, Ms. de Borchgrave’s longtime assistant. “She had an idea every 10 minutes.”
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С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
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