Letter From the Editors

In the zero-sum game between Putin and the West, rock bottom seems to be hard to find. Another round of escalation is somehow always around the bend in the Ukraine war, which entered its 1,000th (!) day this week. To mark the occasion, Ukraine delivered several strikes deep into Russian territory. The debate raging in NATO capitals over whether to grant Ukraine permission to use Western weapons to do exactly that has been raging for months. Now, it seems outgoing President Joe Biden finally decided to grant that permission – at least according to The New York Times and several other Western sources. Reportedly, the US administration gave Ukraine the green light after confirmation that North Korean troops were fighting for Russia in Kursk. Still, the US was sluggish to confirm (or deny) any of the above. For instance, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said her department could not confirm whether North Korean troops were participating in Ukraine battles or even present in Kursk Province.

In response to the strikes, Putin signed amendments to Russia’s Nuclear Doctrine – changes which made headlines in September, particularly in lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons and for including Belarus under Moscow’s nuclear umbrella. Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin’s most hawkish Telegrammer, already warned that the West’s move paves the way for a third world war. Meanwhile, retired Lt. Gen. Yevgeny Buzhinsky was more level-headed, suggesting that “a symmetric response would be a more effective measure in the situation.”

Lo and behold, one was not long in coming – Moscow battle-tested its newest intermediate-range weapon, the Oreshnik, in Ukraine. The Soviet-era Yuzhmash defense enterprise was reportedly chosen as the target. “The Joe Biden administration’s actions led to this dangerous escalation, since [the Americans] supplied long-range missiles directly to the Ukrainians to strike Russia,” Jeremy Kuzmarov, managing editor of CovertAction Magazine, told Izvestia.

But as the world waited with bated breath to see just how far things can go from bad to worse in Ukraine, a political crisis erupted in partially recognized Abkhazia. The trigger was an investment agreement with Russia that would have allowed wealthy foreigners to buy up the tiny republic’s most valuable asset – land next to the caressing shores of the Black Sea. The crisis also went from bad to worse when the authorities arrested five opposition activists. Even though they were released soon after, an enraged public eventually stormed administrative buildings and demanded the resignation of President Bzhania. The latter at first refused, but eventually gave in.

So while Putin was flexing his muscles on the global arena and spooking NATO countries with the possibilities of a nuclear apocalypse, tiny Abkhazia served up a valuable lesson to the Russian leader, writes Republic’s Aleksandr Zhelenin: “This tempest in an Abkhaz teapot certainly recalls the words of Cesar Millan, the popular American television host and tamer of the world’s crotchety and snappy dogs, that a small dog doesn’t know that it’s small. The Abkhaz also don’t know that they’re small. . . .

they up and bit the big Putin investors.” And really, what is Putin supposed to do in the situation? There aren’t enough Oreshniks to go around. Power to the people is clearly not just a figure of speech for Abkhazia – and the reason why their demands proved successful. Perhaps the exiled Russian opposition can learn a lesson from this tiny self-proclaimed republic. In a Kholod editorial, Timofei Martynenko posits that Russian opposition figures made a major mistake when they rejected the Russian tricolor. While “the emotional impulse behind this decision is understandable,” the move alienated the opposition abroad from a key source of power in any democracy – the people. And ultimately, the battle for Russia is up to the Russian people: “No one knows better than us how to wage this battle, so the most important thing we can do for peace is to be true to ourselves.”