Portion of yesterday’s email from Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Note the implication that Russians are suffering just as much as Ukrainians (in bold):
To the members of the MIT community,
Though 4,500 miles separate Kyiv and Cambridge, several factors make the shock of the Russian invasion and its terrible consequences feel very close to home.
I write to let you know how MIT is responding to this catastrophe and to offer some personal reflections.
Caring for members of our community [bold in original]
First in our minds are our students, staff and faculty who are from the region or have family there; we have reached out directly to everyone we are aware of from Ukraine. We have in addition been in touch with our students from Russia, who are also a long way from home in a difficult time. (As always, support is available to all students at doingwell.mit.edu).
A fellow MIT alum pointed out “Catastrophe makes it sound like an earthquake or a tornado.”
Catastrophe can be a useful term when viewing from the perspective of mass hysteria and geopolitics. I haven’t read the following book but the title indicates that such behavior can approximate that of natural disasters.
“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Harriman Definitive Edition) : The Classic Guide to Crowd Psychology, Financial Folly and Surprising Superstition (Hardcover)
Phil,
Will President Reif weigh in on Steve Kirsch’s open letter? Should MIT refund Kirsch’s prior $2.5 million donation (in 1990s dollars, no less!) to remove the taint of having an auditorium named after such a #science heretic?
I think Luboš Motl captures the collectivist basis of the Russian imperial mentality quite well well (he also used to be quite pro-Russian before the events):
“[…] a Russian patriot who still thinks in a way that is roughly similar to mine would still be annoyed by this war that is forcing thousands of young (and other) Russian men to die against their will. But the supporters of this war don’t seem to care about these deaths of the Russians, either. I think that various pro-Russian writers on the social networks, and maybe some people from our real environments, are actually happy even when these Russian boys are dying.
How is it possible? Because by the Russian patriotism, they don’t really mean anything like the average or median well-being of the Russian population. Instead, they are obsessed with the Soviet Hydra, some nasty collectivist creature with a single big head, several small heads, and tons of tentacles and testicles (sorry if my knowledge of the creature’s anatomy is imperfect). They only care about the “emergent subject” that only exists when collectivism has some absolute power, and when it is so, the individual lives become irrelevant. And they may be actively happy because individual human beings are sacrificed and fed to their Hydra again, that’s something they were apparently missing at least for 30 years (and it hasn’t been this brutal since the 1953 death of Stalin).”
https://motls.blogspot.com/2022/02/we-must-understand-peoples-fanatical.html
We can observe a strange kind of symmetry in the composition of the Kremlin useful idiots, historically speaking. Under the Soviet regime, the brigade exclusively consisted of the lefty crowd, from Walter Durante to Bernie Sanders as two well-known examples, today we see the opposite of the political spectrum taking the . Not sure if today Putin’s fanboys club is as exclusively “conservative” as their mirror images, commies, used to be.
Just out of curiosity, has MIT ever bothered to send out a similar email about the war in Yemen?
The biggest contribution of MIT to the war in Ukraine is Selçuk Bayraktar (MIT Master of Engineering 2006) , CTO of Baykar (Turkey) which makes the TB2 MALE UCAV. Ukraine is successfully using the TB2 against Russian supply convoys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baykar_Bayraktar_TB2
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-2022-02-26/card/ukraine-says-it-uses-turkish-made-drones-to-hit-russian-targets-DrigGO7vkGfDzbBuncnA
Philip, what is your opinion on MIT and Reif stopping MIT SkolTech program? https://skoltech.mit.edu
I am a strong supporter of Ukraine and am against Kremlin imperialism but don’t you think it could be counterproductive? Shouldn’t MIT create collaborative labs with Ukrainian Academy of Sciences instead canceling Skolcovo nerds?
If SkolTech is a national security threat why MIT had it at all for so long?
LSI: I don’t think it is logically consistent with Reif’s previous support for open borders. If no human is illegal and anyone has the right to live anywhere, why does it make sense to stop working with humans who happen to be inside the non-relevant borders of a country whose leaders have done something with which you disagree?
President of MIT sounds like a highly political position which means towing the line of the political class, government and industrial contractors, and the 1% ‘ers who make donations. Open borders rhetoric is politically correct. Checkmate Russia with a NATO Ukraine armed to the teeth is politically correct. Being against or even ambivalent about either of these objectives is not politically correct and subject to being “canceled”.
Closing Skoltech seeems typical for Reif’s recent habit of punishing students for all sorts of imagined faults. Consider, for instance, the draconian prison-like system he’s overseen on the MIT campus for the past two years – this must be one of the most traumatic aspects of the student experience on campus. And the students fault? Presumably being young “asymptomatic cases” that might endanger the geriatric tenured faculty.
What exactly are the students of Skoltech guilty of? Being Russian at the most inopportune time, when Reif needs to virtue signal some more?
The real issue, however, is mixing politics and academia in pursuit of research funding and academic political capital. Reif and his fellow bureaucrats are more than happy to chase political favor whenever materially advantageous. Consider the MIT China Future City Lab initiative, still going strong, despite the credible assertions of уйгурский mistreatment in the Xinjiang autonomous region.
Paul : I am (obviously) against the invasion of Ukraine, but have noticed this as well. It is perfectly virtuous to demand Ukraine membership in the EU and NATO, but what if Canada were to follow the admiration of its PM for China, leave NATO and station Chinese missiles?
If one says the above in public, one is classified as a Putin operative.
Now Ukraine wants to join at least the EU, which fits nicely in the globalist agenda and will drive down salaries in France and Germany even further. If every country in the world is in NATO, we’ll have a dystopian world government.
If NATO had given the no-join guarantee in January, perhaps we wouldn’t have had the war (Trump could have managed that, possibly in private).
I think MIT should allocate all its financial resources for building free housing for the new stream of refugees instead of talking.
Anon, we should not mix EU and NATO (even though nobody planned on staging missiles in Ukraine, nor accept Ukraine to NATO on short to medium term). Serbia’s president provides partial moral support to Putin but he has no intentions of leaving EU (and thus not participate in EU sanctions against Russia). Serbs voted overwhelmingly to join EU and if Russia somehow could invade to end their EU membership I doubt that they would not fight Russia.
PS. I personally do not care about EU membership.
Anon@
I wondered about the EU status as well but then read that the EU isn’t that excited about having potentially millions of Ukrainians flooding west with open borders. Or at least not as excited about we are with having millions from Central and South America flood the US.
Putin clearly said he doesn’t want a NATO Ukraine where a nuclear umbrella Ukraine can start a border war for Crimea and Sevastopol and then all of NATO is obligated to participate. Checkmate Russia. The NATO political and military agenda seems to be very strong otherwise they would have negotiated a compromise long before now.
Paul:
As far as know, Ukraine has had a visa-free regime with its neighboring countries for a while — the borders were already open. I believe Portugal has even had a program to lure workforce from Ukraine (mainly low qualification construction workers). At least that was what a Portuguese acquaintance told me .
Now, of course, there will be, or rather already is, a flood of refugees, which will create some strain on infrastructure in the welcoming countries, but it’s hardly an EU or even NATO fault, surely.
Could Putin have been appeased ? That’s a good question. In the past, Neville Chamberlain tried and, as we hopefully still remember, failed. One may say: “this time, it’ll be different” as commies like to say wrt. to a lefty state building project du jour. Or one could draw a false analogy with the postwar Germany, Marshall plan and the breakup of the Soviet Union and say: “Putin invaded because he was dissed the way the Weimar Germany was, and he could not play in the same sandbox with the other boys”. Why this analogy is false is explained well in Motl’s posting I referenced above. Perhaps, an appeasement should have been tried, but given the mental state of the man, I do doubt he would stop there, Why not grab Moldova (an adjacent to Ukraine small non-EU country) while we are at it ? Apparently, the EU has similar doubts.
@ Ivan
I am not sure about the EU / Ukraine visa free regime, and open borders and what that looks like in practice. That is just something I read.
Looking at the map of the Ukraine, Crimea, Black Sea , its quite obvious that US / EU wants to checkmate Russia, and Russia / Putin doesn’t want that to happen. A NATO Ukraine brimming with the latest in high tech weaponry would be like Sword of Damocles over Russia. I haven’t seen any evidence of guarantees that Ukraine would not join NATO and it appears that Russia suffers anxiety about that as evidenced by the current events.
Pavel, NATO already has a lot of real estate in the Black Sea with Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria being members of NATO. I do not buy this checkmate argument
@ Low Skilled Immigrant
Turkey joined NATO back during Soviet Union, so they are grandfathered in. Bulgaria and Romania are more minor actors that don’t share a border with Russia. Ukraine is spitting distance to Moscow and provides a easy pretext to re-take Sevastopol , Crimea with NATO ships patrolling the Black Sea and conducting “military drills” with impunity. I doubt current events is because Russia is bored and looking for something to do.
Ivan: The non-appeasement policy has clearly failed. From January 10th:
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_190542.htm
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General:
“We have reiterated the decision we made at the Bucharest Summit in 2008 and we stand by that decision. We help Ukraine to move towards a NATO membership by implementing reforms, by meeting NATO standards.”
Like Paul, I wonder what the goal is. Now everyone says that Putin is expansionist, Tzar style, and has plotted to restore the glory of Russia for the last decade. If that was the opinion, what exactly did they expect? Did some “expert” bureaucrats make a grand plan to retake Crimea through Ukrainian freedom fighters, similar to the U.S. supporting the Taliban during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan?
(This is an armchair comment. I have not followed the events closely, but the handling of the situation does not make sense to me.)
Paul:
If one is not sure, one could google, could not one ? Ukraine has had a visa free entry to the EU since 2017:
https://www.etiasvisa.com/etias-requirements/ukrainians
I am not sure what you even mean by a “checkmate”. I can imagine a drunk plumber( an archetypal personage in the Soviet time folklore) in Russia talking about a possibility of a NATO aggression, but if a person in Putin’s position seriously talks about such an eventuality, this person is already, well, clinically insane. Do you seriously believe that the NATO would attack Russia ? For what purpose ? Would the Ukraine as a hypothetical member be “brimming with the latest in high tech weaponry” just as much as the powerful member of the NATO, Germany had been until 5 days ago ?
“Fighter jets and helicopters that don’t fly. Ships and submarines that can’t sail. Severe shortages of everything from ammunition to underwear.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-biggest-enemy-threadbare-army-bundeswehr/
The EU/NATO have been relaxed and complacent about Russia for decades exactly because none of the members was crazy enough to even entertain such an insane idea as invading Russia, and they were quite sure the other side thought along the same lines.
They’ve collectively shrugged off South Ossetia, Abkhasia, Crimea (what is it if not appeasement you seem in favor of?). Now that the war is literally on the Europe doorsteps, they eventually realized who they are dealing with: a bunch of crazy savages, aka the Russian political “elite”.
One of immediate results of Putin’s actions is that the NATO will be unified, the German army will probably become a real one, Finland and the neutral Sweden become NATO members. Some gain for Putin to enjoy assuming the madman won’t obliterate us all soon (which he already promised).
@ Anonymous
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_190542.htm
“Ukraine is a valued and long-standing partner to NATO.
sure looks like NATO poking the Russian bear to me.
@Ivan
https://www.etiasvisa.com/etias-requirements/ukrainians
ETIAS FOR UKRAINIANS – FAQ
“Ukrainians will not be able to study in the Schengen Area using an ETIAS visa waiver. The visa waiver is designed for travel, business, and transit.
this doesn’t look like an open invitation for Ukrainians to move to London or Paris, rent a flat, chase the local girls, get a real world divorce or two, and live happily ever after.
Paul, Turkey is a NATO member since 1952 and controls Dardanelles. Why did not NATO attack all these 60 years? Russia has large swath of Black Sea coast even without Ukraine. Nothing changed strategically for Russia, up till this invasion, and whatever is changing is caused by this invasion of Ukraine. Maybe Putin is an American spy himself and takes orders from DC? Retired Russian generals seem to imply that. But they are not all senile, they have good sense to oppose this invasion.
Anonymous:
Assuming, the NATO leadership is not as insane as Putin which I think is an easy assumption today if not a fact, the Ukraine membership was designed to protect the country from Russia, as was the case with the Baltics, not to threaten Russia with an invasion or retaking Crimea — that would be beyond clinically insane.
As to Crimea, I do not believe Ukraine will ever see the peninsula as its part ever again or even should think in this direction because it would be futile. I lived in Crimea and know locals very well. The latest Russian migration there, the ethnic majority, despite substantial number of the Crimean Tatars, either came from impoverished parts of Russia, or are/were former Soviet Army retirees. They are very attached to the mother ship ideologically, but not economically, and not at all to the land. During the first (legitimate) referendum after the Soviet Union fell apart, the majority of the peninsula voted in favor of being part of Ukraine precisely because Ukraine was much better off then Russia at the time. By 2014, the economic situation reversed itself due to Ukraine’s gross mismanagement of the area economy. Therefore, during the last referendum, although an illegitimate one, the population voted in favor of being part of Russia. If by a miracle Ukraine became a second Switzerland, they would have voted to return to Ukraine. But the likelihood of that is understandably very low.
Regarding Putin’s endgame with Ukraine, I think he was stupid enough, counterintuitively, to believe his own propaganda. He apparently truly believed that after the initial strikes against the Ukrainian army, the liberated population will meet the troops with flowers, “bread and salt” like you can see in the Soviet era movies about the Great Patriotic War (WWII). Of course, if he truly believed that, he is insane in a literal not metaphorical sense. And if I am right, after so huge miscalculation, he will start behave like a cornered бешеная собака/rabid dog which will present a mortal danger not only to Ukrainians but to the rest of us. I am not sure how this situation can be resolved.
There is an very interesting discussion about the Ukraine war situation and Putin’s motivation hosted by Putin’s god daughter Xenia Sobchak, a Russian media personality, in Moscow. She is close to Putin’s family (or used to be), but even she is as stunned as everybody else by the invasion. Her interviewees are very good indeed., better than her in trying to make sense of this terrible situation. Unfortunately, it’s in Russian.
@ Ivan,
“Do you seriously believe that the NATO would attack Russia ?
No, but that doesn’t mean the goal isn’t to bottle them up and allow them to languish.
LSI: Russia knows that the existing NATO countries are not going to attack, that is understood.
The issue here is pursuing NATO membership for a country with an existing territorial conflict (Crimea). Such a membership might draw NATO, perhaps involuntarily, into taking Crimea back if Ukraine were to make such attempts.
It is a pretty novel idea for NATO to hint at membership for crisis regions.
@ Ivan
“Paul, Turkey is a NATO member since 1952 and controls Dardanelles. Why did not NATO attack all these 60 years?
MAD doctrine.
“Russia has large swath of Black Sea coast even without Ukraine.
Not sure about that. Russia seems to be partial to possessing Sevastopol Crimea and a NATO Ukraine would have an easy pretext to get that back , backed by NATO.
Germany smashed Russia twice in the last century and so Russia likely has trust issues.
Anonymous:
“It is a pretty novel idea for NATO to hint at membership for crisis regions.”
No, it’s not novel. Witness Turkey, Greece and the Cypress dispute yet unresolved.
Besides, you admitted that the NATO would not even dream of attacking Russia. In fact, the Crimea annexation was shrugged off by the NATO as easily as the Sudetenland Anschluss, the former erstwhile Russia’s enemy and until 5 days ago its best pal Germany, got itself into an even higher dependency upon Russia’s gas supply by shattering its nuclear power stations. What is it if not appeasement ( Crimea) and an expensive sign of trust (gas) ?
Paul, @LSI is not @Ivan.
“MAD doctrine.” – MAD is from 1970th to early 1990th and from late Putin rule. Up to 1970 US had overwhelming advantage over USSR. I had some friends who served in rocket / missile / strategic air defense forces in former USSR, at end of it. Per their stories USSR was not protected that well.
“Ukraine would have an easy pretext to get that back , backed by NATO.” – Sounds fantastic.
“Germany smashed Russia twice in the last century and so Russia likely has trust issues.” – first time Russia attacked Austria to back Serbia and attacked Prussia by British assistance request. Second time it was Hitler post Molotov-Ribbentrop pact after loosing air War for Britain. Hardly NATO related. So it is at best 50-50 Russia vs Germany and in no way NATO.
Ivan: Small territorial disputes between NATO countries like Gibraltar, Cyprus etc. have of course always existed. I am not aware of any where the other side was Russia.
I must reiterate that I am against the invasion and just bewildered by NATO’s strategy and the apparent absence of competent negotiators like Trump or UN observers who try to verify or disprove claims of Nazis or suppression of Russians in Ukraine.
Even in Irak there were attempts to find WMD, though the results were ignored.
Incidentally, the U.S. is not too keen on halting Russian crude oil imports, either:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-25/white-house-vows-to-avoid-future-sanctions-on-russian-crude-oil
@ Low Skilled Immigrant
The pre-WWI European alliances was a rats nest so I can imagine that was closer to 50/50. The Great Game, Grand Chessboard, or whatever they called that. Russia wanted to have a warm water port and Britain and France did not want them to have a warm water port.
The way I see it, Putin is after Ukraine for the following reasons:
1) After annexing Crimea, Ukraine cut off its main water supply to Crimea and now Crimea has water crisis [1]
2) As of 2019, a vast amount of gas was discovered in Ukraine which if developed, it would make Ukraine second after Russia as a supplier to Europe.
3) The EU has been critical of Russia for years. If Russia loses one of its key source of income from gas and oil, and if it cannot have a good grip on Crimea, it stands to lose it standing in the world stage and fall back to the dark days of when the USSR was no more.
Those factors and the fact that Putin was a USSR patriots, scare the heal out of him and thus was left with the only option of taking over Ukraine to eliminate those threats. Also, keep in mind that the GDP and per capital income of Russians is far behind many EU countries. Russia is a superpower because it has a fast amount of nuclear weapons’.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-19/russia-vs-ukraine-crimea-s-water-crisis-is-an-impossible-problem-for-putin
[2] https://hir.harvard.edu/ukraine-energy-reserves/
U. Chicago also offered “counseling” for students stressed out by the news.
“The Catastrophe and Peace” (c) L. Tolstoy
When Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1993-4 (Clinton I) and accepted the terms of the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for mutilateral security “assurances” – which were not worth the paper they were printed on – did it expect those to last very long?
It looks to me (at least through my very dim eyes) that Ukraine got the wrong end of the bargain! They gave up their very, very real nuclear weapons and therefore traded their security for promises – some of which actually occurred – but nevertheless, less than 30 years later they are being invaded by Russia. They traded the biggest security stick they had for some money and promises to “get with the program” of nonproliferation. Just listening to the radio today from my great distance, it sounds to me like a lot of people in Ukraine feel like they got screwed.
Anonymous:
If you accept that Putin’s grand vision has always been re-integrating Ukraine into Russia not just as a minor part of the empire like various stans or the Baltics but as a spiritually integral part of the pan-Russian identity (“the same people”), then the situation will look rather simple. It has nothing to do with security, lack of respect/acceptance by the West, etc. Here we have two visions that cannot be reconciled: Putin’s mission in life to make the Russian soul (Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia) whole as it were, however insane it may sound, and the Ukraine vision of just being part of Europe rather than Putin’s Slavic “super” state’s.
Ukraine’s joining the NATO makes Putin’s vision dead, and he just cannot accept that. Maybe the West not accepting Putin as a club member a dozen or so years ago did reinforce the idea of “collecting Russian lands” as his purpose in life, I do not know, but it seems the most likely motivation of his actions today. Lubos Motl whom I referenced earlier has a good insight into this kind of collectivist thinking which may be totally alien to a Western European but is natural to a Russian.
If I am right, then no amount of appeasement, even a hypothetical Ukraine’s promise not be a NATO member, will eliminate his desire to eventually grab Ukraine and put it where it belongs in his opinion. Otherwise, his life mission would not be “accomplished”. Purported oppression of ethnic Russians (witness the ethnic Russians defending Kharkov), Nazis under every bed led by cocaine snorting Zelensky who is Jewish, are just absurd pretexts for the Russian subjects’ consumption.
As I wrote earlier, he hugely underestimated Ukrainian’s unwillingness to follow his vision and may have even convinced himself of a Nazi under every bed after pushing the propaganda for so long. Today, I do not see a good resolution of this situation because he painted himself in the corner. Whether the West eventually decides to sacrifice Ukraine as a whole, since Putin won’t accept any other solution, remains to be seen.