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“Why wouldn’t Trump — a man Pence invariably calls “my president” and “my friend” — assume that his vice president would help steal the election? Pence had agreed to so much else, had tolerated every other national and personal indignity with that faraway, worshipful gaze.”
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Mike Pence Is Having a Moment He Doesn’t Deserve
NYT
Nov. 29, 2022
By Carlos Lozada
Mike Pence had a go-to line during his time as vice president of the United States. When his boss would ask him to carry out some task or duty — say, take an overseas trip or run the response to a pandemic — Pence would look President Trump in the eye, nod and say, “I’m here to serve.”
The phrase recurs in Pence’s new memoir, “So Help Me God,” which covers his years as a congressman, governor of Indiana and vice president, with a focus on Pence’s actions during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It is the tale of the loyalist who finally had enough, of the prayerful stand-taker who insisted that he did not have the power to overturn an election, no matter the arguments concocted by Trump and his air-quote lawyers.
With rioters calling for his hanging and Trump tweeting that Pence lacked “the courage to do what should have been done,” the vice president turned to the aides and family members with him in an underground loading dock at the Capitol. “It doesn’t take courage to break the law,” he told them. “It takes courage to uphold the law.” It is an inspiring scene, marred only by Pence then asking his daughter to write down what he said.
Pence has been busy promoting “So Help Me God” on television, distancing himself from Trump (urging him to apologize for dining with a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago last week) and even teasing a possible White House run of his own in 2024. The book debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, and the Justice Department is now seeking to question Pence in its investigation of Trump’s efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election. Clearly, the former veep is having his moment.
Feel free to buy the book, but don’t buy the redemption tale just yet. Pence was indeed in the White House to serve, but he served the president’s needs more than those of the nation. In “So Help Me God,” Pence rarely contradicts the president, even in private, until the days immediately preceding Jan. 6. He rarely attempts to talk Trump out of his worst decisions or positions. He rarely counters Trump’s lies with the truth.
Most damning, Pence failed to tell the president or the public, without hedging or softening the point, that the Trump-Pence ticket had lost the 2020 election, even after Pence had reached that conclusion himself. Americans should be enormously grateful that the vice president did not overstep his authority and attempt to reverse the will of the voters on Jan. 6. But you shouldn’t get the glory for pulling democracy back from the brink if you helped carry it up there in the first place. And, so help me God, Pence did just that.
Why wouldn’t Trump — a man Pence invariably calls “my president” and “my friend” — assume that his vice president would help steal the election? Pence had agreed to so much else, had tolerated every other national and personal indignity with that faraway, worshipful gaze.
The irony is that Pence’s record of reliable servility was a key reason he was in position to be the hero at the end. And so the vice president became that rarest of Trump-era creatures: a dedicated enabler who nonetheless managed to exit the administration with a plausible claim to partial credit. If Pence got to do the right thing on Jan. 6, it was because he had done the wrong one for so long.
The purpose of the vice president, of course, is to serve as second banana, preferably without getting too mottled by lousy assignments, presidential indifference or embarrassing deference. (Pence fills his sycophancy quotas in the book, extolling the president’s physical stamina, likening Trump to Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and noting that he displayed a signed copy of “The Art of the Deal” in his West Wing office during his entire vice presidency.) Still, I searched through the 542 pages of this memoir for any instances in which Pence exercised enough character and independent judgment to tell Trump that he might have been on the wrong course about something, about anything. I found two such cases before the events surrounding Jan. 6. Two.
No, it’s not when the president fired F.B.I. director James Comey in May of 2017, an action Trump took not for self-serving reasons, he assured Pence, but because it was “the right thing to do for the country.” (Apparently Pence is so persuaded by this argument that he quotes it twice.) It’s not when Trump praised the “very fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville tragedy in August 2017. (Any notion of a false equivalence between neo-Nazis and those opposing them, Pence explains, was an unfortunate “narrative” that “smeared” his good friend in the Oval Office.)
It’s not when the administration separated children from their parents at the southern U.S. border. (On immigration, Pence writes, Trump “led with law and order but was prepared to follow with compassion.”) It’s not when Trump pressed Ukraine’s leader to investigate a potential Democratic rival in the 2020 election. (“It was a less-than-perfect call,” Pence acknowledges, but its imperfections were stylistic, the product of Trump’s “casual” and “spontaneous” approach to foreign relations.)
It’s not when Trump confused a frightened populace with his nonsensical coronavirus briefings in the spring of 2020. In fact, Pence explains away those sessions by suggesting that Trump believed that “seeing him and the press argue was in some way reassuring to the American people that life was going on.” And it’s not when Trump shared a stage with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018 and accepted the Russian president’s denials about election interference. Pence says he encouraged Trump to “clarify” his views, but the vice president seemed far more troubled by media coverage of the event. “The press and political establishment went wild,” he writes. “It sounded as though the president was taking Putin’s side over that of his national security officials.” If it sounded that way, it was because that was the sound the words made when they left the president’s mouth.
That is a standard Pence feint: When Trump says or does something wildly objectionable, Pence remains noncommittal on the matter and just condemns the “ever-divisive press” that covered it. When Trump derided Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as “shithole countries” in an Oval Office conversation in early 2018, “the media predictably went into a frenzy,” Pence laments. The former vice president even faults journalists for drawing attention to Covid infection numbers in May 2020, “at a time,” Pence writes, “when cases in more than half of the states were dropping, and case rates were also in decline, numbering 20,000 a day, down from 30,000 in April.” As if 20,000 new Americans infected with a dangerous virus each day was not newsworthy.
The two meaningful disagreements that Pence expressed to the president in real time were these: First, Pence demurred when Trump considered inviting Taliban representatives to Camp David; he suggested that the president “reflect on who they are and what they’ve done and if they have truly changed.” Second, the president and vice president had a testy exchange when Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager, left a pro-Trump super PAC and joined Pence’s political action committee. Pence reminded Trump that he had encouraged the move, but Trump denied having done so. “By that point I was angry,” Pence acknowledges; he even admits to raising his voice. Somehow, the Taliban and Corey Lewandowski rated equally as lines that shall not be crossed.
Between Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, and the tragedy of Jan. 6, 2021, while Trump and his allies propagated the fiction of a stolen vote, Pence enabled and dissembled. Describing the outcome of the vote in his memoir, he offers a gloriously exculpatory euphemism, writing that “we came up short under circumstances that would cause millions of Americans to doubt the outcome of the election.” (Circumstances could not be reached for comment.)
When Trump declared victory in the early hours of Nov. 4, Pence stood alongside him in the East Room of the White House, in front of dozens of U.S. flags and behind a single microphone, and “promised that we would remain vigilant to protect the integrity of the vote,” Pence recalls. In the days that followed, Pence addressed conservative audiences and pledged to continue the fight “until every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is thrown out!”
Note those slippery, wiggle-room formulations. Pence does not directly state that he believed the election had been stolen, yet his rhetoric still appears fully in line with Trump’s position. The ovations at his speeches were “deafening,” Pence notes. So was his public silence about the truth. Less than a week after the election, Pence had already admitted to Jared Kushner that “although I was sure that some voter fraud had taken place, I wasn’t convinced it had cost us the election.” Why not share that conclusion with the public? Why stand by as the big lie grew bigger and Jan. 6 grew inevitable?
The memoir revisits several conversations between Pence and Trump in the weeks immediately preceding Jan. 6 — all missed opportunities to convey the truth to the boss. Instead, Pence reassured Trump that “the campaign was right to defend the integrity of America’s elections.” (Pence often refers obliquely to the actions of “the campaign,” as if he played no role in it, as if his name was not even on the ballot.) He dances around reality, coming closest to it when he advised the president that “if the legal challenges came up short and if he was unwilling to concede, he could simply accept the results of the elections, move forward with the transition, and start a political comeback.”
On Dec. 14, 2020, state electors officially voted and delivered an Electoral College majority to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, leading Pence to acknowledge that “for all intents and purposes, at that point the election was over.” He says so now in the memoir; if only he had said it in public at the time. Yes, he told Trump repeatedly that the vice president lacks the authority to overturn the results of the election. But not once in his book does Pence say to the president that, even if I had the authority, I would not exercise it — because we lost.
Throughout “So Help Me God,” readers find Pence still running interference for Trump, still minimizing his transgressions. When he quotes the president’s video from the afternoon of Jan. 6, in which Trump finally called on the rioters to stand down, Pence makes a revealing omission. Here is how he quotes Trump: “I know your pain, I know your hurt … but you have to go home now, we have to have peace.” What did Pence erase with that ellipsis? “We had an election that was stolen from us,” Trump said in the middle of that passage. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.” So much of Pence’s vice presidency is captured in those three little dots.
Sometimes the problem is not the relevant material Pence leaves out, but the dubious material he puts in. Pence writes, with an overconfidence bordering on overcompensation, that he was going to win re-election as Indiana governor in 2016, that his victory “was all but assured.” In fact, Pence’s approval ratings in the final stretch of his governorship were low and polls indicated a tight contest against his Democratic opponent.
Pence writes that Trump “never tried to obscure the offensiveness of what he had said” on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, perhaps forgetting that Trump dismissed his words as mere “locker room talk” and later suggested that the voice on the recording might not have been his own.
Pence also writes that the White House, busy with its Covid response, did not have “much time for celebrating” after the president’s acquittal in his first Senate impeachment trial in February 2020, even though the next day Trump spoke about it in the White House for more than an hour before a crowd of lawmakers, aides, family members and lawyers. Trump explicitly called the speech a “celebration” and referred to that day, Feb. 6, 2020, as “a day of celebration,” as Pence, sitting in the front row, no doubt heard. The day would indeed prove a high point in the administration’s final year, as a pandemic, electoral defeat and insurrection soon followed.
“I prayed for wisdom to know the right thing to do and the courage to do it,” Pence writes of the days before Jan. 6. Unsurprising for a book with this title, Pence’s Christian faith is a constant reference point. Raised Catholic, Pence describes being born again during his college years and joining an evangelical church with his wife. Throughout the memoir, Pence is often praying, and often reminding readers of how often he prays.
Each chapter begins with a Bible passage, and Pence highlights individuals he deems particularly “strong” or “devout” Christians, with Representative Julia Carson of Indiana, who died in 2007, Senator Josh Hawley, Representative Jim Jordan and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo making the cut. I kept wondering if he would consider the role that his outspoken faith may have played in getting him on the ticket in the first place. If Trump picked him to reassure Christian conservatives, how does Pence feel about that bargain?
In the epilogue, Pence provides a clue. Of all the Trump administration’s accomplishments, he writes, the “most important of all” was making possible the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which ended the constitutional right to abortion. “The fact that three of the five justices who joined that opinion were appointed during the Trump-Pence administration makes all the hardship we endured from 2016 forward more than worth it.” Pence, in other words, is the ultimate “But Gorsuch!” voter. That is what he got out of the bargain, plus a new national profile that he may leverage into a bid for the only higher office left to seek.
In the book’s appendix, Pence reprints several documents that emphasize different aspects of his public service. There is his 2016 Republican convention speech, in which he hailed Trump as both an “uncalculating truth-teller” and “his own man, distinctly American”; his 2016 State of the State of Indiana address; his letter to Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in which he stated that the vice president’s role in certifying an election is “largely ceremonial”; and his letter to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, six days after the attack on the Capitol, refusing to invoke the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Pence also adds two texts in which he takes special pride, and which I imagine him citing in any future presidential run.
First is an essay titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” which Pence published in 1991 after his second failed run for Congress. “It is wrong, quite simply, to squander a candidate’s priceless moment in history, a moment in which he or she could have brought critical issues before the citizenry, on partisan bickering,” Pence wrote. He was describing himself, with regret. The second is a speech that Pence, then representing Indiana’s Sixth Congressional District, delivered at Hillsdale College in 2010. “You must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness,” Pence declared. He was describing the Obama presidency, with disdain. The president, he wrote, “does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision.” Pence warned that “if a president joins the power of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.”
These documents provide an apt coda to Pence’s vice presidency. One day, he may use them to distinguish himself from his president and his friend, to try to show that Pence, too, can be his own man. For now, he does not make the obvious connection between the sentiments in his essay and speech and his experience campaigning and governing alongside Donald Trump. Or if he does, he is calculating enough to keep it to himself.
After all, Mike Pence was there to serve.
Ukraine pleads in Paris for the creation of a tribunal to judge Russian aggression
Kyiv is trying to influence the French position, which remains in favor of the International Criminal Court, to judge this particular crime: the invasion of one country by another.
By Stéphanie Maupas (La Haye (Netherlands), correspondent)
Le Monde
Published on November 30, 2022 at 09h34, updated at 09h42 on November 30, 2022
Anton Korynevych, Ukraine's ambassador for international humanitarian law, and Oksana Zolotaryova, director of legal affairs for Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, speak to the International Court of Justice on March 7, 2022. PHIL NIJHUIS / AP
On a visit to Paris, the Ukrainian ambassador for international humanitarian law, Anton Korynevych, is trying to get French authorities to support the creation of a tribunal to judge Russia's aggression. The diplomat, who said he had to take three trains and a plane to reach the French capital, took part in a Monday, November 28 meeting organized at the request of the presidency of Ukraine by the think tank Synopia. The meeting took place behind closed doors, in the luxurious residential headquarters of the Circle of the Interallied Union club, a few meters from the Elysée Palace. French MPs, officials from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, representatives of the justice and defense ministries, lawyers and judges also attended.
While Paris has been the leading voice in refusing this French-British project launched by the lawyer Philippe Sands at the end of February, the United States and the United Kingdom are also opposed to a new tribunal. In recent weeks, however, French resistance to the idea seems to have waned. At a time when people are talking more and more about the post-war period, Paris is willing to talk about the challenges that such a tribunal would present.
Ukraine is disappointed by the ICC
Ukraine can judge perpetrators of aggression but cannot prosecute Vladimir Putin, who benefits from the immunity of heads of state. Kyiv is therefore calling for a special tribunal to judge the specific crime of invasion of one country by another – the crime considered to be at the origin of the others, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. For Oleksandra Drik, of the Ukrainian NGO Center for Civil Liberties and winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, the aggression tribunal "would allow justice to be rendered for all victims."
But, according to one of the experts at the meeting, which Le Monde attended, aggression, also described as a "crime against peace" during the Nuremberg trials, has become "the blind spot of international justice." In 2010, it took a diplomatic conference to include this crime in the penal code of the International Criminal Court (ICC). At the time, Washington, Paris and London drastically limited the Court's room for maneuver, to the point that today, authorization from the UN Security Council would be required to be able to try Russia for the crime of aggression, which Moscow would obviously veto.
The French government also believes that such a tribunal would compete with the ICC, which is already investigating crimes against humanity and war crimes in Ukraine. In recent years, France has consolidated its support for the Court, considered one of the key players in the multilateralism strongly promoted by Emmanuel Macron. "Our contacts with the ICC are daily, concrete and effective," said Mr. Korynevych. However, although Ukraine has made many declarations of good intentions toward the ICC, it has still not ratified its founding treaty.
Ukraine considers the ICC highly disappointing since, having received a filing from Kyiv as early as 2014, it only opened an investigation into Russian aggression in February 2022. Since the beginning of the war, prosecutor Karim Kahn has been careful not to use Vladimir Putin's name or describe Russia's crimes as "genocide," as he's concerned about the court's independence. He has also reminded the two armies of their responsibilities. And he's opposed to the project of a special tribunal, which he sees as redundant.
'No other solution'
In Ukraine, many believe that the prosecutor will only target secondary criminals. "Will the ICC really be able to prosecute [Vladimir Putin]?" asked Mr. Korynevych. "Idi Amin Dada died in his bed, but today this would not be possible," said Bruno Cathala, a judge and former ICC clerk. Unfavorable to a trial in absentia and aware that it will be difficult to judge the Russian president, "what counts is the indictment," said Mr. Korynevych, as well as the potential effects of future arrest warrants. "Maybe this will bring about changes in Russia, or even already has?" he suggested. It remains to be seen whether the challenge will prompt the ICC to speed up its investigation, and whether ICC-issued arrest warrants for Mr. Putin along with his defense and foreign ministers would end efforts to create the aggression tribunal.
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In any case, "creating a tribunal takes two years," said Mr. Cathala. "Building a political consensus will take time." More than a dozen European countries are now in favor of the special court, and supporters are looking for the broadest possible support because prosecuting Mr. Putin requires that the future tribunal put an end to his immunity. In New York, however, Ukraine war "fatigue" can be observed. On November 14, the UN General Assembly adopted by a very small majority a resolution calling for the creation of a register to record the claims of the Ukrainian population and government, with the aim of obtaining reparations from Russia. During the debates, several countries asked the West to pay for slavery, colonialism, interference and climate change. Still, for Ms. Drik, "there is no solution other" than the formation of the aggression court to "force Russia to pay." For Mr. Korynevych, "the participation of the oligarchs is indispensable." Despite the legal obstacles, Kyiv hopes that the frozen assets of the oligarchs will pay for the reparations.
Putin Seeks to Destabilize Ukraine's Neighbor
Moldova is seeking to join the European Union, but Russia is doing everything it can to destabilize the small republic. The Kremlin has radically throttled gas deliveries and is orchestrating protests in the country.
By Maximilian Popp in Chişinău, Moldova
23.11.2022, 21.15 Uhr
They have gathered in front of the Presidential Palace in Moldova’s capital city Chişinău, just as they have for weeks. Older men in sweatpants and peasant women in headscarves. There appear to be several thousand of them, protesting against energy prices, which have multiplied in Moldova since last year. The Moldovan flag is flying everywhere, and the demonstrators chant in Russian: "Maia Sandu must go!"
DER SPIEGEL 47/2022
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 47/2022 (November 19th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
When the leader of the demonstration, the pro-Russian opposition politician Ilan Şor, is connected by video, a murmur goes through the crowd. A court sentenced Şor to seven and a half years in prison for fraud. But to escape his jail time, he fled to Israel. The United States government has imposed sanctions on him for fomenting unrest in Moldova with Moscow’s help. President Sandu has ruined the economy, Şor claims, and only his party can save the country.
A Proxy Conflict Between Russia and the West
Moldova, sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, has a population of just 2.5 million. With a per-capita income of around 5,100 euros, it is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Yet despite its small size, it is at the center of the conflict between Russia and the West.
Ever since declaring independence in 1991, Moldova has been almost continuously ruled by pro-Russian political forces. Then, in November 2020, voters elected Maia Sandu, a Harvard graduate and former World Bank economist. She removed pro-Russian officials from the state apparatus and, after Russia's attack on Ukraine, she sided with Kyiv. This is likely one of the reasons the European Union moved in June to declare Moldova as a candidate country.
Moscow, on the other hand, is doing all it can to destabilize the country. Gazprom halved natural gas supplies to Moldova in November, according to Sandu. Meanwhile, Ukrainian intelligence reports obtained by the Washington Post provide evidence that the Kremlin has thrown its support behind Sandu opponent Şor.
Without help from Europe, the Sandu government could fall this winter and be replaced by a pro-Russian regime, with consequences for the entire region.
Sandu, 50, is sitting with her winter coat on at the Presidential Palace on a November morning. She has turned off the heat to save energy.
Until recently, Moldova drew 100 percent of its natural gas needs from Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned monopoly. About two-thirds of the flow came through Transnistria, an unrecognized breakaway region in eastern Moldova that is backed by Moscow, with the remaining third coming through Ukraine.
Now, though, Russia has partially cut off gas supplies to Moldova, and Transnistria is also refusing to continue supplying electricity to Chişinău. The problem is compounded by the fact that Ukraine hasn’t been exporting energy for several weeks because of Russia's attacks on its civilian infrastructure. "We are being blackmailed by Moscow," Sandu says. The government is trying to solve the problem by buying gas and electricity on the European market, with much of the power coming from Romania. But the prices are so high that Sandu is having trouble finding the money to pay for it. "We're at risk of a blackout this winter," she says.
Sandu took office two years ago as a reformer, aiming to fight corruption and break the power of the oligarchs. Many young people who had previously lived abroad came to work for her government after she won the election. Her chief of staff has worked for the former head of the European Council, Donald Tusk, in Brussels, and her foreign minister for a think tank in Paris.
Sandu has now become a crisis manager more than anything else. She has greatly reduced energy consumption in the country. In Chişinău, streets are barely lit, and public buildings are only partially heated. She has also scaled back government spending and postponed infrastructure projects. Inflation in Moldova is close to 35 percent, and the economy is expected to stagnate this year. "We reached the pain threshold long ago," says Sandu.
Sandu has placed a sheet of paper full of notes on the table in front of her - she has thought carefully about what she wants to say in our interview. She is widely considered to be a perfectionist, and she has clearly suffered from the fact that she doesn't have much leverage when it comes to influencing the energy crisis. "Everything we've worked for over the years is now at stake," she laments.
Sandu sees herself as a supporter of a unified Europe. A European flag hangs on the wall of her office, and her government embodies all the values the EU so enthusiastically claims to represent: It is democratic, it is open, and it is diverse. But during this crisis, Brussels has largely left Moldova to fend for itself. Still, Sandu shies away from open criticism of the EU. She does, though, make it clear in the interview that she expects more help from the Europeans. "We’re defending democracy under the most difficult conditions," she says.
While European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen promised Sandu 250 million euros in aid during a visit to Chişinău on November 10, government calculations indicate that Sandu needs at least twice that amount. And if the money doesn't arrive quickly, high-ranking Moldovan officials have warned, the state faces bankruptcy. Should that happen, the government would no longer be able to pay the salaries of civil servants, and the lights would go out in Chişinău and other cities.
That's the scenario Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is presumably hoping for. Russia's FSB domestic intelligence service has infiltrated the government apparatus in Moldova for years. Moldovan officials claim the agency worked primarily with Igor Chayka, the Moldovan envoy of Delovaya Rossiya, a pro-Kremlin business association. According to Ukrainian intelligence data, Chayka and his contact at the FSB communicated more than 6,000 times between December 2020 and June 2022.
The FSB Refers to Şor as "The Young One"
The U.S. Treasury Department added Chayka to its sanctions list in October. A statement from the Treasury Department claims he developed "detailed plans" together with Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov to undermine President Sandu's government and "return Moldova to Russia's sphere of influence." It further states that Moscow used Chayka's companies as a front to funnel money to collaborating political parties in Moldova. "Some of these illicit campaign funds were earmarked for bribes and electoral fraud," it states.
Chayka and the FSB relied primarily on exiled politician Şor. The 35-year-old became rich as the head of a bank and a duty-free chain. He also owns a football club. In 2015, voters elected Şor as mayor of the small town of Orhei, which is located about 50 kilometers north of the capital. Two years later, however, a court convicted him of having played a role in the theft of a billion dollars from Moldovan banks. He appealed the decision. Since 2019, he has led his party, named after himself, from exile in Israel. He is currently polling at around 15 percent.
A high-ranking Russian politician recently praised Şor as a "worthy long-term partner." The FSB, meanwhile, refers to him as "the young one," according to the Washington Post. Ukrainian intelligence believes that Russian strategists first traveled to Chişinău on behalf of the Kremlin last spring to advise Şor’s party. Şor himself claims that his party is independent. He considers the Americans' sanctions against him to be a "victory." He claims they demonstrate that President Sandu knows that her days are numbered.
Bags of Cash in Party Offices
Şor is seeking to ratchet up the pressure on the government by organizing protests against the high energy prices. In October, Moldova’s anti-corruption prosecutor arrested 24 people, including members of the Şor Party, on allegations that they had provided illegal funding to anti-government protests. Moldova’s Interior Ministry says investigators found bags of cash in party offices.
In late September, a Şor confidant gained control of the two largest pro-Russian television stations in Moldova, allowing the politician to spread his propaganda even more widely from exile.
"Moscow's campaign against the Sandu government is a prime example of hybrid warfare," says Iulian Groza of the Institute for European Policies and Reforms, a think tank based in Chişinău. "Instead of tanks, the Russians are using energy and disinformation."
If the government under Sandu does indeed fall over the energy crisis, experts fear that this could also have consequences for the war in Ukraine. Aid regularly reaches Ukraine via Moldova, and war refugees also pass through the country on their way to EU countries, and some also stay. A pro-Moscow regime, could create problems for the aid and refugees alike.
On an early November morning, Moldova's Interior Minister Ana Revenco, dressed in sneakers, a fleece jacket and wearing her hair in a ponytail, is traveling in a van from Chişinău to the border with Ukraine. She makes these visits, she says, to gain the trust of her border officials. Revenco assumes that some in her department still mourn the fact that the Russia-friendly Party of Socialists-led government lost the last election.
Since the war began in February, 700,000 war refugees have crossed the border into Moldova; and about one in 10 has stayed in the country. Revenco has had a tent camp erected at the Palanca border crossing, as well as a bus station to register refugees if need be and transport them on to EU states. The minister wants to be prepared in case the war in southern Ukraine escalates. Odessa is only about 50 kilometers away from Palanca.
Update: At a bilateral donor conference in Paris between Germany and France on Monday night, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock pledged 32.3 million euros in additional aid from Berlin, and French President Emmanuel Macros said his country would give further aid to the tune of 100 million euros. "It is Putin's intention to blackmail (countries) dependent on it through energy supplies," Baerbock said. "But this won’t work. Moldova has friends and partners in the EU."
In China, Xi Jinping's absolute power is being challenged
News analysis
Frédéric Lemaître
Beijing (China) correspondent
China's children love their country, writes Le Monde's correspondent in Beijing. But restricting their freedom only leaves them craving for democracy.
Published on November 29, 2022 at 11h40, updated at 12h59 on November 29, 2022 Time to 5 min. Lire en français
During a Shanghai demonstration against China's zero-Covid policy on November 27, 2022. AP
Like any self-respecting dictator, Xi Jinping is convinced that whoever holds the party holds the country. The facts have long proven him right. With its 96 million members (about one adult in 12), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is unparalleled in the world, physically present in the smallest neighborhoods and the smallest businesses in this continental country. Selected among the best pupils and students, its members constitute a technocratic elite that manages China according to Beijing's orders.
In President Xi Jinping's dream world, the CCP knows what is good for the people, since it itself comes from them. And since it makes the right decisions, the people are therefore grateful. One of the sentences he uttered at the 19th CCP congress in 2017 sums up his thinking quite well: "Party, state, military affairs, civil affairs, education, east, west, south, north, center – the party runs everything." His speech on October 16, at the opening of the 20th congress, is equally fascinating. The criticism of his predecessors occupied an infinitely greater place there than the management of Covid-19.
All evils come from abroad
The party was mentioned more than 140 times, far more than any other term. Similarly, following the congress, Mr. Xi did not go to a place symbolic of the China of 2022 to meet his people. Instead, he took the six other CCP leaders to the farthest reaches of Shaanxi, where Mao waited for his time from 1935 to 1949, in a region that is becoming a communist pilgrimage site. It's far from the China of tomorrow, but also from the China of today, which suffers from the zero-Covid policy, unemployment and bankrupt property developers.
Power isolates and absolute power isolates absolutely. Nothing illustrates this better than the demonstrations against the zero-Covid policy over the last few weeks and against the CCP dictatorship over the last few days. When Mr. Xi inspects a province – a communist leader does not "visit," he "inspects" – everything is organized so that he does not encounter any discontent.
A provincial teacher recently recounted how, one evening around 10 pm, the school principal called all the teachers to be present at 7 am because of an "important event." The next day, each teacher, accompanied by a policeman, had to go to a district in the city and give the order to each inhabitant to close and stay away from their windows. Still without knowing the reason for this strange instruction. It was only a few hours later that she realized that Mr. Xi was about to "inspect" the area and meet with a few hand-picked residents.
Similarly, in April 2021, the Chinese leader visited Tsinghua University, the most prestigious university in Beijing. After praising the experts "guided by Marxism," he left, greeted, according to the photos, by hundreds of young people waving small red flags. He probably concluded that the elite of tomorrow was satisfied with his standing. The problem is that these are the same students who, on November 27, demonstrated, sang "The Internationale" and demanded more democracy.
The young people of Generation Z are all the more courageous because many do not know what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989
It is believed that leaders are better informed than the common man. This is not true. The journalists of the China News Agency have two functions: to publish articles intended to spread the official truth among the population and, at the same time, to transmit "real information" to Beijing.
For example, in Wuhan in January 2020, the same reporters explained to the people that the new virus could not be transmitted from human to human while writing the opposite to the leaders. According to a recent Associated Press investigation, the most important dispatches used to land on the prime minister's desk. But Mr. Xi demanded to receive them directly. As a result, journalists no longer dare to bring up bad news.
In the story of the Chinese leader, all of China's ills come from abroad, from a West that wanted to "humiliate" it for more than a century (1839-1949) before the CCP "liberated" it. It's the same West that incited the Arab Spring and the color revolutions starting in 2011, just before Mr. Xi came to supreme power and saved the CCP and the country.
'The same poison as in Hong Kong'
Since this weekend, this little nationalist tune can be heard again. "It's the same poison as in Hong Kong: young people who don't have local characteristics, but have a Taiwanese or Hong Kong accent and a Western appearance – a typical style of the color revolutions," denounced a blogger from Fudan University. "The demonstrations hurt our national solidarity and strengthen our enemies from within and outside," said Li Guangman, another well-known nationalist blogger, who also denounced the Chinese pharmaceutical laboratories, which are private and therefore corrupted by the West. Since Monday, in some cities, the police have been checking young people's cell phones and removing Western apps.
The CCP knows how to crack down on protesters through arrests and intimidation. In the coming days and weeks, the families of the protesters will be visited by the police and told that, in the interests of everyone, they should keep a closer eye on their children.
But the regime is clearly worried by this movement that it did not see coming. "With the relaxation of pandemic controls and the monitoring of the measures [adopted], public sentiment will calm down. I can make an absolute prediction: China will not fall into chaos or [get out] of control," wrote Hu Xijin, one of the regime's top propagandists, on Twitter.
One option for the government would be to relax the zero-Covid policy, while presenting it as a "unique success in the world" and, at the same time, to crack down on protesters, strengthen censorship on social media and increase pressure on teachers. In recent days, the media have been putting more emphasis on the Omicron variant's low-mortality rate and, as Li Guangman's article shows, have found a new scapegoat: the pharmaceutical companies. "If the pandemic is to be controlled, the mess with PCR testing must be stopped," wrote The Health Daily on November 29.
A desire for the West
Beyond the health policy, the weekend demonstrations showed that, despite the propaganda, a segment of the youth is ready to fight in the name of human rights and those values that the regime continues to define as purely "Western."
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Born after 2000, the young people of Generation Z are all the more courageous because a significant number of them know little or nothing about what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Xi Jinping's children are both nationalistic and liberal. They love China and are proud of its successes, but they also want to be able to listen to Korean K-pop, watch NBA basketball games and see Chinese or foreign films that move them. By restricting their freedoms and pursuing an economic policy that makes their lives more difficult, Mr. Xi is awakening in them a desire for rights and openness that in recent years seemed to have lost its power.
Frédéric Lemaître(Beijing (China) correspondent)
"The Regime's Legitimacy Is Eroding"Iran Protests Continue Despite Brutal Repression
The uprising against the Islamist dictatorship in Iran is entering a new phase and the regime is doing all it can to survive. For how much longer can the mullahs cling to power?
By Anne Armbrecht, Julia Amalia Heyer, Muriel Kalisch, Mina Khani, Maximilian Popp, Christoph Reuter, Omid Rezaee und Özlem Topçu
25.11.2022, 17.49 Uhr
There isn’t a single place where she is safe from the regime’s henchmen, says Anoush, not even in her dreams.
It has been just over a month since DER SPIEGEL first spoke with Anoush, a teacher from the Iranian capital of Tehran in her mid-20s. At the time, the protests that erupted following the September death of the young Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini had already spread throughout the country. Anoush says she began taking part in the demonstrations from the very beginning. Now, she has again decided to share her experiences, using long chat messages to do so. She has, however, changed the service she uses: She no longer feels that WhatsApp is secure enough.
DER SPIEGEL 48/2022
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 48/2022 (November 26th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
The regime, she says, has drastically ratcheted up the pressure. The terror, she says, is everywhere, with only a fraction of it making it into the media. An acquaintance of hers, she says, was raped in prison after being arrested, with the guards having fired at her genitals with paintball guns. "Since then, I have been having a recurring nightmare of being raped myself," she says.
Despite the violence, people in Tehran and elsewhere in the country are continuing to take to the streets. Their primary focus this week has been the massacres in the Kurdish areas of the country. It is difficult, however, to determine where the demonstrations are taking place and how large they are since the internet has been blocked in many parts of the country.
"We cry ourselves to sleep and wake up with new hope."
Anoush, a teacher from Tehran
The fight against the dictatorship is no longer finding its expression only in street protests, says Anoush. "We are screaming from the windows, even if security forces are opening fire more frequently. We are boycotting companies that advertise on state television. We are using cash instead of credit cards, collecting money for the people in the Kurdish areas. It is difficult to get help to them, but some people are trying. When we cross the streets, we give each other the V for victory sign. We cry ourselves to sleep and wake up with new hope."
Fewer Mass Protests, More Flashmobs
The uprising against the mullahs has been underway for 10 weeks, longer than most thought possible – Iranian rulers, the international community, and even the protesters themselves. And the shape of the resistance is changing, according to reports from inside Iran. There are fewer mass protests, but more flashmobs. Small groups from a specific district, sometimes even just a single residential building, suddenly emerge and begin shouting: "Down with the dictatorship!," filming the event and then melting away. The anger, however, has remained just as intense. "Nobody is staying quiet," says a 41-year-old from the middle class Tehran district of Sadeghiyeh.
For many Iranians, the uprising has become a part of their everyday lives. In the social networks, images and videos are being shared by tens of thousands of people. You can see videos from Tehran showing people from all walks of life – from young hipsters to elegant, middle-aged women – strolling through the city with their hair uncovered and greeting each other with fist bumps. You can see embracing and kissing in front of their city’s landmarks.
In Iran at the moment, says the Bern-based Orientalist Reinhard Schulze – who is speaking on the phone with friends across the country almost daily – the definition of Iranian nation is currently at stake. The central question: Who represents the Iranians?
"We do," insists the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which continues to have its opponents sentenced to death.
"We do," counter those who have risen up against the regime. Initially, their insurrection came merely in the form of refusing to cover their hair, instead tearing off their headscarves. Increasingly, though, the rebellion is becoming more militant, including the use of Molotov cocktails.
Schulze believes that the character of the Iranian nation has changed over the past several weeks. The population, he says, believes less and less in the promises made by the Islamic Republic and its institutions, which has been in power for 43 years. Day by day, people are demanding a more liberal model in which the rule of law should also play a strong role, says Schulze.
A Slap in the Face for Tehran
The fact that political power in the country is at stake could also be seen on Monday, when the Iranian national team at the World Cup in Qatar demonstratively kept their mouths closed during the playing of their country’s national anthem. It was a clear protest with the world watching – and a slap in the face of the rulers back in Tehran.
Most of the players on the Iranian national team had long been wary of making clear political statements, in part no doubt because of enormous pressure from the regime. On the eve of their departure for Doha, the players even met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Did they have a choice? Images of the meeting distributed by the president’s office show the team sitting on chairs in a circle around Raisi. The players are wearing suits, with several of them bowing, hands over their hearts. Many began referring to them as "Team Mullah," and people on the streets of Tehran lit fire to World Cup posters and pictures of the team.
"The regime's legitimacy is eroding."
Reinhard Schulze, Orientalist
One can only guess at why the national team players ultimately decided to stage their silent protest. They provided no explanation following the match. Were they simply waiting for the largest possible stage for their gesture? Or did the pressure, after months of doing nothing, simply grow too heavy? Did they have a bad conscience vis-à-vis the millions who had idolized them? Or was it merely a desire to be on the "right side" of history?
It also isn’t clear how the regime will react to the anthem boycott. Ahead of the tournament, the national players were reportedly threatened. But it seems unlikely that the regime will exert the same force on the national team as they do against demonstrators on the streets. The players, believes the U.S.-based women’s rights activist Maryam Shojaei, are simply too popular. Shojaei focuses her work on gaining access for women to sporting events in Iran. Speaking of the players on the Iranian World Cup team, she says: "They enjoy an immunity that normal people don’t have."
That's why for Shojaei and other activists, the gesture of the national team players didn’t go far enough. "If you want to see real courage, then look at the young women who are risking their lives at the protests."
It is nevertheless clear that a significant shift is underway in Iranian society. "The regime’s legitimacy is eroding. They are no longer recognized by their own people,” says Orientalist Schulze. He believes that the mullah’s grip on power has become fragile. Of course, he says, it is difficult for many in the population to believe that the mullahs might one day be swept from power. But there is also a significant amount of hope and plenty of courage.
In the beginning, he was part of a group of four, says 23-year-old paramedic Ardalan, from the Kurdish north of the country, who told his story over the course of dozens of voice messages. They were an emergency response team tending to injured demonstrators. "Two were murdered and one was arrested. I’m the only one left." He says that he too was taken to prison and tortured, and charged with "insulting the Prophet" because he had helped the wounded. He was then released on bail, "and I’m still going! We have to treat the wounds immediately, otherwise many of them won’t survive." Early on, he says, they were fired at with teargas and buckshot, but that hasn’t been the case for some time. Now, he says, the regime is using snipers and "dushkas," – large-caliber machine guns that are frequently mounted on the beds of pickups.
Ever since Ayatollah Khomeini grabbed power in 1979, Tehran has been propagating the fight against purported American imperialism and against the discrimination of Shiite Muslims in Saudi Arabia and in other Gulf autocracies.
Even More Brutality in the Provinces
But the Islamic Republic has always been a state that oppresses minorities: the Kurds to the west, the Baluchis in the southeast and Sunni Arabs in the south. Since the first day of the unrest in September, protests in the Kurdish areas as well as those in Sistan and Baluchestan Province have been fired on with live ammunition.
"I don’t want to use the term 'state of war,'" says Ardalan, "because in a war, both sides are armed. But we only have bricks that we pile up to form barricades, while the other side is heavily armed."
Ardalan’s accounts cannot be independently verified, but they are consistent with the stories told by other sources. His identity is known to DER SPIEGEL. "We have established a network for the transportation of medical supplies and bandages," he continues. "We use side streets. All the main roads are monitored. At the roadblocks, they search for medical supplies. If you have any with you, you are arrested."
By law, the Red Crescent – the Muslim world’s version of the Red Cross – would be responsible for helping everyone. "Instead, those who are injured by the Revolutionary Guards are immediately taken to prison,” says Ardalan. "When they arrested me, they broke my fingers." Everyone knows the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, he says, "but far worse things happen in prisons in Kurdistan, more torture." That, he says, is the regime’s method for spreading fear.
Normal life on the streets has been extinguished, says Ardalan. On the one hand, fear has translated into a de facto curfew. "I know women who have been shot simply because they wanted to go out for some bread." On the other hand, almost all store owners are striking and people are boycotting the state-owned supermarkets. Even money is running short, he says. His account has been frozen and cash machines aren’t working. "There are no banknotes any more in Kurdistan!"
Lessons for the City
The brutality in the provinces is intended as a warning to the residents of larger cities in the heart of the country. But this time, the violence has actually triggered the opposite effect. "We sympathize with them. We understand that we are confronting the same enemy,” says a Tehran resident who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her safety.
The old relationships between city dwellers and the rural population have changed, she says. "We can learn from them," the woman from Tehran says. "They have much more experience than we do when it comes to organizing street battles. How to immediately collect elsewhere when the first demonstration is crushed. How to organize help for the injured. How to transform a funeral into a rally."
In Iran, state institutions and, especially, the hundreds of thousands who are part of the Revolutionary Guard and their minions are holding firm, along with the huge number of private citizens who benefit from Iran’s parallel economy. The Revolutionary Guard has control of huge swaths of the economy: airports, oil terminals, hospitals and universities. And this parallel economy is nourished by the Western sanctions, resulting in an army of profiteers who would lose their privileges if the Islamic Republic were to collapse.
Afshon Ostovar, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California, and the author of a book about the Revolutionary Guard, believes the regime is approaching its end. "What we are seeing right now is a generational revolution, the younger generation against the regime," he says. He doesn’t want to predict whether it will be successful now, or only in one, two or five years. "The undoing of the Iranian regime has begun." With every young person who is killed, Ostovar says, the Supreme Leader is also losing the support of the victim’s cousins, aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents.
German-Iranian political scientist Ali Fathollah-Nejad believs it will ultimately depend on how workers respond. There have already been protests among contract workers in the oil and gas sector. Fathollah-Nejad says they are debating whether and when to join the uprising. He says that such a coalition of demonstrators and workers would have good chances for success. "They have something in common: They don’t believe that their lives will improve under this regime."
In Iran’s south, to be sure, where the largest oil fields are located, there have thus far been fewer demonstrations than in Tehran or Kurdistan. But strikes and protests are on the rise there as well. Workers at an oil refinery, long-haul truck drivers and employees of the automobile producer Bahman Motor in Tehran are demanding change – specifically wages that they can survive on.
Ultimately, the slogan used thus far in these protests – Woman, Life, Freedom – could soon be expanded to include another word: Bread