Arnold Schwarzenegger Shares a Powerful Message to the Russian People
Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map
“The Global Trade Sanctions tool produced by Coriolis Technologies and the Institute of Export & International Trade offers a unique searchable database of all global sanctions including:
- UN, EU and UK dual-use goods lists;
- OFAC;
- the UN, US and EU Consolidated Screening Lists;
- Schedule 2 to the Export Control Order 2008;
- Annex I to Council Regulation 428/2009;
- Trade Gov;
- BIS;
- EU Second Wave Sanctions; and
- TARIC lists.
“Paying taxes to the budget of a terrorist country means killing defenseless mothers and children,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal wrote on Twitter. On Thursday, Shmyhal said he had spoken to Nestlé CEO Mr. Mark Schneider about the side effects of staying in the Russian market but that unfortunately he had shown no understanding.
“Hope that Nestlé will change its mind soon,” he added. His comments received over 60,000 likes in the span of 24-hours.
Over 300 Companies Have Withdrawn from Russia – But Some Remain
“Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld is the Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies & Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management, at Yale University. Professor Sonnenfeld has compiled and is updating a listing of 40 companies that remain operating in Russia, with significant business risk exposure. Here is a link to his work on this matter and an updated list of companies via Yale School of Management.
“Professor Sonnenfeld’s related research has been published in 100 scholarly articles which appeared in the leading academic journals in management such as Administrative Sciences Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Social Forces, Human Relations, and Human Resource Management. He has also authored eight books, including The Hero’s Farewell, an award-winning study of CEO succession, and another best seller, Firing Back, a study on leadership resilience in the face of adversity. Professor Sonnenfeld earned the 2018 Ellis Island award from the US Ellis Island Foundation. He was Harvard’s first John Whitehead Faculty Fellow and won outstanding educator awards at Yale, Emory and the American Society for Training and Development. His work is regularly cited by the general media in such outlets as: BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, CBS (60 Minutes), NBC (The Today Show), ABC (Nightline, Good Morning America), CNN, and Fox News, as well as PBS, where he is a regular commentator for FORTUNE and CNBC. BusinessWeek listed Sonnenfeld as one of the world’s 10 most influential business school professors and Directorship magazine has listed him among the 100 most influential figures in corporate governance. He is the first academician to have rung the opening bells of both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.”
Russians Are Finding Ways Around Putin’s Internet Blockade
Bloomberg – “Providers of virtual private networks, or VPNs, are recording a surge in usage from Russia after the Kremlin cracked down on Facebook and other services as part of a broader effort to silence dissent and limit information about its invasion of Ukraine. “In the past week, we saw traffic to our website from Russia increase by around 330% week over week,” Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN, said in an email to Bloomberg on Wednesday. As of Tuesday, Russian interest in VPNs was more than eight times pre-invasion levels, according to data gathered by Top10VPN. Usage peaked at more than 10 times on March 5, the day after Facebook and Twitter were blocked by Russian authorities…”
See also The New York Times: 4 Falsehoods Russians Are Told About the War – Russia’s disinformation machine is working in overdrive inside its own borders.
Stress in America Money, inflation, war pile on to nation stuck in COVID-19 survival mode
“March 11, 2022, marks the second anniversary of the COVID-19 global pandemic declaration by the World Health Organization. In the two years since that declaration, virtually all aspects of life have been altered. To better understand the impact of the past two years on individual stress, the American Psychological Association partnered with The Harris Poll to conduct a survey between February 7 and 14, 2022. In light of recent events leading up to its release, the survey was supplemented by a late-breaking poll, fielded March 1-3. These more recent findings were alarming, with more adults rating inflation and issues related to the invasion of Ukraine as stressors than any other issue asked about since the Stress in America™ survey began in 2007. Top sources of stress were the rise in prices of everyday items due to inflation (e.g., gas prices, energy bills, grocery costs, etc.) (87%), followed by supply chain issues (81%) and global uncertainty (81%)… Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the unpredictability of the extent to which the conflict may intensify is compounding existing financial stressors that were already on the rise. Soon after Russia began bombing Ukraine, world stock markets wavered. Further, economists predict a surge in energy, wheat, corn, steel, and iron prices. Americans are bracing for economic hardship. The March survey found the rise in prices of everyday items due to inflation was rated as a stressor by the highest proportion of adults seen across all stressors asked about in the history of the Stress in America™ survey, with 87% having reported it as a significant source of stress. Not far behind was stress related to supply chain issues (81%). The broader survey fielded in February showed the proportion of adults who noted money as a source of stress (65%) was up significantly from the Stress in America surveys in June (61%) and February (57%) 2021. Similarly, the number of adults who noted the economy as a significant source of stress (65%) has risen significantly from the Stress in America surveys in August (59%)3 and June (58%). Half of all U.S. adults (50%) indicated housing costs as a significant stressor, which is up from February 2021 (46%)…”
BRENDAN O’NEILL: The end of the Age of Fragility: The war in Ukraine has exposed the moral infirmities of the West.
The war in Ukraine seems to be waking up Western European leaders to their own dangerous delusions. It is shaking some from their luxurious conceit that we inhabit a post-war, post-nationhood world in which everything is mostly fine and dandy, give or take the ‘climate emergency’ and all of that. So Germany has started to make unprecedented moves to bolster its military forces. Some German greens are even wondering if the fantasy of living in a non-nuclear world has been firmly shattered by the Russia-Ukraine war, and if it might now be time to resuscitate all those shutdown nuclear power plants. No doubt British officials are also looking at whether their decimation of the military and their capitulation to anti-nuclear greens has been wise, given that war and energy and other historical questions are not as neatly resolved as we thought they were.
Yet even as all of this happens, we need to ask ourselves how we got into this situation. How we arrived in a world in which defending people from supposedly offensive words is considered more important than defending our borders. In which we seem to have so little need for the virtue of ‘strength’ that we’re willing to blacklist the word itself for being gendered and stereotypical. This is where the Ukraine war really confronts us. It interrupts, violently, our post-Cold War conceits. It upends our belief that history, in Europe at least, is largely settled, and now we can concern ourselves with petty things like pronouns and sexual identity or with purposely overblown, mission-creating projects for the technocratic elite, like the ‘climate emergency’. This conceit has impacted on almost every facet of public life in recent decades, nurturing the delusion that ours is a post-war, post-borders, post-everything continent, in which the highest aim of public life is either to manage the public or validate individual identities. Those bombs in Ukraine have shattered this Western arrogance and decadence by reminding us that history lives.