WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Russian forces advancing on Ukrainian town from all sides

Russian forces are intensifying their drive to capture the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, trying to advance on all sides after weeks of fighting, the town's top official was quoted as saying on Monday.

Russian troops have been pressing land and air-based attacks on Avdiivka, since mid-October as the focal point of their slow-moving push through eastern Ukraine's Donbas region in the 21-month-old war.

The latest push, reported by Vitaliy Barabash, head of Avdiivka's military administration, followed reports last week that Ukrainian troops had made some headway in halting and pushing back the Russian advance.

"Things in the Avdiivka sector have become even tougher. The intensity of clashes has been increasing for some time," Barabash told the media outlet Espreso TV.

"The Russians have opened up two more sectors from which they have begun making assaults - in the direction of Donetsk ... and in the so-called industrial zone. The enemy is attempting to storm the city from all directions."

Officials say not a single building remains intact after months of battles in the town noted for a vast coking plant. Fewer than 1,500 residents remain of 32,000 before the war.

Much of the fighting has focused on the industrial zone and the coking plant.

Barabash earlier said that Ukrainian forces had in recent days pushed back Russian forces near Stepove, a village northwest of Avdiivka, pinning them down near a rail line.

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Ukrainain and Western military analysts say Russia has incurred heavy losses, although the battle for the town is rarely mentioned in official Russian military dispatches.

Russian military bloggers also reported Ukrainian gains near Avdiivka last week. On Monday, Russian reports said Moscow's troops had secured control of the industrial zone and were attempting to storm the coking plant.

Reuters could not verify reports from either side.

Avdiivka was briefly captured in 2014 by Russian-financed separatists who seized large chunks of eastern Ukraine.

Fortifications were later built around the town - seen as a gateway to the Russian-held regional centre of Donetsk - and it has resisted attacks since Moscow began its full-fledged invasion in February 2022.

Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in June but has made only marginal gains in both the east and the south. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has acknowledged the slow progress but denies any suggestion the war is at a "stalemate".

Ukrainian military spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun told the news outlet liga.net that wintry weather and strong winds were affecting the use of drones by both sides.

Shtupun said Russian forces had suffered heavy losses near Avdiivka and nearby Maryinka, another largely destroyed town where control has been contested for months.

"Our defenders are holding their ground," Shtupun told liga.net. "We are fighting and will continue to fight despite the weather."

 

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

West ‘screwed over’ Ukraine – ex-Zelensky aide

The West has essentially thrown Ukraine under the bus in its conflict with Russia by failing to provide Kiev with the necessary amount of military aid, Aleksey Arestovich, a former aide to President Vladimir Zelensky, has claimed.

Writing on Telegram on Sunday, Arestovich weighed in on the differing views of Ukrainian officials as to why Kiev’s conflict with Moscow is still in full swing despite several major attempts at peace.

According to the former presidential aide, the West bears most of the blame for the situation.

The real responsibility lies with those who promised Ukraine real support for waging a real, big war and did not provide it. In other words, they screwed us over.

Arestovich claimed that Ukraine “had won its war” by managing to survive in the first few months of the conflict. “This war of ours could have well ended with the Istanbul Agreements,” he suggested, referring to the talks in the Turkish city in the spring of 2022, which initially made some progress but stalled after then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to Kiev. The negotiations collapsed but Russia maintains it is open to diplomatic engagement with Kiev.

After the Istanbul talks, the conflict entered another phase in which Ukraine had no chance of winning without securing massive Western arms supplies, including warplanes and long-range missiles, the former official continued. “But nothing came. We paid a huge price for that.”

Arestovich suggested that the West would now try to force Ukraine to accept the loss of several regions, which overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in a series of public referenda last autumn.

He also suggested that, while Kiev found itself in a tough spot mostly due to the West’s inaction, the Ukrainian leadership’s “stupidity and corruption has given them many formal and informal reasons to screw us over.”

Arestovich’s remarks came amid Ukraine’s faltering counteroffensive, which has been underway since early summer but has failed to gain any significant ground. Last month, Moscow said Kiev had lost more than 90,000 troops since the start of the push, with Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu claiming that Ukrainian casualties had reached more than 13,000 soldiers in November alone.

Earlier this month, Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, admitted that hostilities had reached a stalemate, an assessment rejected by Zelensky. Meanwhile, on Sunday, Mariana Bezuglaya, a senior Ukrainian MP, blasted Zaluzhny over the lack of a strategic plan for 2024 and called on the military leadership to step down.

** Russian forces wipe out Ukrainian command post in DPR over past day

Russian forces destroyed a Ukrainian command post in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) over the past day in the special military operation in Ukraine, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported on Monday.

"A command post of the Ukrainian army’s 5th assault brigade was destroyed near the settlement of Krasnoye in the Donetsk People’s Republic," the ministry said in a statement.

 

Reuters/RT/Tass

The recent worldwide surge of inflation is forcing political change, reminding us how efficiently this old economic problem can topple governments. In democracies, election outcomes often hinge on price developments. But the effect on autocracies is no less pronounced, because inflation erodes the implicit social compact on which they base their authority.

In Argentina, the election of a radical self-styled anarcho-capitalist, Javier Milei, as president can be understood as the immediate consequence of the incumbent Peronist regime’s inability to deal with inflation, which has hit an annualized rate of 143%. Milei’s most important campaign promise was to restore price stability by abolishing the central bank and replacing the Argentine peso with the US dollar.

Ending monetary autonomy is obviously a bold and risky experiment that will severely limit government action. But that is exactly the point. Since the previous government tried to do too much, and manifestly failed, voters now feel as though anything would be better than more mismanagement.

At first blush, Russia looks surprisingly stable by comparison. Its annualized inflation rate recently rose from 6% to 7%, whereas even the United States and the eurozone briefly flirted with inflation in the double digits last year. But the US, the eurozone, and the United Kingdom have all brought inflation back down below 5%, while Russia is moving in the opposite direction.

Moreover, Russian inflation also surged in 2022, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – just as it had done in 2014 after the initial seizure of territory in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Then, from April 2022, the inflation rate fell for a full year, and almost looked as though it would settle at a respectable 2.5%. But that stability turned out to be an illusion. Inflation returned this summer, following Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted putsch, and it now represents the greatest immediate risk to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wartime regime.

Moscow’s city government is candid about this source of angst, and even Putin, who generally avoids acknowledging weaknesses, recently commented on inflation and its threat to Russian families. The Russian central bank has duly hiked its policy rate to 15% – almost three times higher than the US federal funds rate.

As Putin may well know, discontent over prices is often the first sign of an authoritarian regime’s loss of social support. While ordinary citizens cannot complain openly about the government (lest they be arrested or harshly punished), they can and do murmur about prices, especially when inflation is a direct result of increased government spending on a war. The problem arises not just because of higher military expenditures or supply constraints resulting from sanctions, but also because the Kremlin has tried to buy popular support. Soldiers, for example, now make over two and a half times the average salary, and their families are compensated lavishly – receiving five million rubles ($57,000) – when they are killed at the front.

The telltale signs of the resulting inflation are popping up everywhere. Owing to the exodus of 800,000-900,000 young people who were unwilling to risk conscription and mobilization, Russia’s labor market has been transformed for the worse. Skills are lacking, and employers have had to offer much higher pay to attract workers. That might work for a short while; but soon enough, people start to notice that their larger paycheck still does not buy them what they need or want.

History offers powerful lessons here. Inflation was the central dynamic that broke the czarist autocracy’s own social compact with the Russian people in the 1910s. During World War I, the Russian Empire, unable to balance its budget, resorted to the printing press. Since Russia had been a massive grain exporter in the years before the war, Russian peasants initially could sell their excess grain to military-procurement offices, which were willing to pay higher prices. But by late 1916, inflation was accelerating, and the peasants noticed that their paper rubles no longer bought them much. Rather than continuing to sell their grain, they fed it to their livestock.

Importantly, the paper money of the time directly evoked images of the czarist dynasty – featuring Peter the Great on the 500-ruble note and Catherine the Great on the 100 note. Suddenly, these grand historical figures no longer looked so grand. The notes bearing their faces had become worthless, and the peasants refused to accept them as payment. As the grain supply collapsed, the resulting food shortages caused urban unrest that culminated in the double revolution of 1917. Soldiers stopped fighting because they could no longer buy anything with their pay. They preferred to go home to their villages, where they might at least find something to eat.

Once in power, the early Bolsheviks had to do something dramatic to restore price stability, so they hit on the idea of making an explicit reference to gold in the name of the new currency: chervonets (gold coins). They even minted a few gold coins.

One finds an extraordinary degree of continuity in Russian monetary history. The current 500-ruble note, designed in 1997, once again depicts Peter the Great (this time as a statue in the port of Arkhangelsk). And it could fall into similar disrepute.

People turn on governments that have broken their promises, and money constitutes one of the oldest such covenants. Russian monetary machinations are now one of the most tangible signs of a system that cannot deliver what it has promised. It is a system that eventually will be replaced, because it has broken faith with the people.

 

Project Syndicate

Perfectionism might seem like a great quality for a boss to have. It's actually pretty toxic, says Ginni Rometty, former president and CEO of IBM.

Rometty worked at the tech giant for 39 years, starting as a systems engineer in 1981 and rising to the top post in 2012 before stepping down in 2020. In her early days as a boss, she was a poster-child for perfectionism, she said at the 2023 World Business Forum summit on Wednesday.

"My nickname in my early career was Red Pen. I mean, you'd send anything to me [and I'd send it back] completely red," Rometty, 66, said. "I used to think that was a great skill ... to find every mistake and improve it."

A wake-up call from a colleague helped her realize that her obsession with finding mistakes was negatively impacting her employees, she said.

"One person was like, 'You know, people just don't even want to try hard, because you're going to change it and fix it. It's never going to be good enough,''' said Rometty. "That's pretty disabling for people … I was disempowering them. Of course, it was never my intent, but I learned to stop it."

Your perfectionist boss may think they're showing you how to be detail-oriented. Instead, they could be harming your team's anxiety and productivity, Rometty noted.

"Perfectionism is the enemy of progress," she said. "And it's what polarizes people, ideologically. And this is why we make no progress on many things."

How to deal with your perfectionist boss

Perfectionism is a growing problem for the next generation of professionals, according to psychologist Kate Rasmussen.

"As many as two in five kids and adolescents are perfectionists," Rasmussen told the BBC in 2018. "We're starting to talk about how it's heading toward an epidemic and public health issue."

If you want to do something about your perfectionist boss, you can start by helping them recognize that they're creating a negative environment — for both the workplace and themselves. They'll either burn out or lock themselves in a cycle of endless procrastination, mental health author Morra Aarons-Mele told CNBC Make It in February.

Awareness alone may help. The more someone knows about their tendencies, the more they can focus on changing them, Aarons-Mele said — and the less time you'll spend hovering over your computer deconstructing your work at the expense of your mental health.

 

CNBC

Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Limited will be listed on the floor of the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited, Chairman of the company, Aliko Dangote, has revealed.

Dangote, who is the richest man in Africa, confirmed this in an interview with the Financial Times published on Saturday.

The refinery will join other businesses of Dangote currently trading their equities on the NGX, Dangote Cement, Dangote Sugar, and NASCON.

The oil facility, believed to be worth about $20 billion, was launched in May 2023 by the immediate past president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, though it is yet to commence operations.

A few weeks ago, it was reported that the refinery was starved of crude oil supply by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, one of its major shareholders, frustrating its commencement of the production of premium motor spirit (PMS), otherwise known as petrol, which the country desperately needs as it currently relies on the importation of the commodity from Europe, especially from the Netherlands and Belgium.

But in the interview, Dangote confirmed that this issue has been resolved, announcing that the refinery may begin to supply the nation diesel, kerosene and jet fuel from December 2023, which is just a few days away.

“We’re starting with 350,000 barrels a day. [We have sealed a deal for the first cargo of about 6mn barrels [for delivery in December],” he was quoted as saying.

According to him, “We have resolved all the issues of supply [with the NNPC,]” he said, refusing to blame the state-owned oil-firm for the difficulties in supplying crude oil to the refinery.

“Let’s not have the blame game here,” he declared in the interview.

However, he expressed optimism that the oil facility would be a game-changer for Nigeria, especially when it is listed on the domestic stock exchange, stressing that the NNPC was not attempting to increase its stake in the organisation with the supply-restriction tactics.

Recall that in 2021, NNPC acquired a 20 per cent equity stake in Dangote Refinery for about $2.76 billion, and there have been speculations that the firm was planning to increase its shares in the company, which has the capacity to produce 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day and could generate $25 billion a year.

But Dangote, who is 66, played down these rumours, saying, “I don’t think NNPC needs to buy more shares. I think they’re OK with what we’ve given them.”

 

Business Post

A United Nigeria Airlines flight destined for Abuja on Saturday landed in Asaba, the capital of Delta state.

Passengers said they only realised the mistake after the cabin crew announced “Welcome to Abuja” when they landed in Asaba.

“We departed Lagos about an hour ago on Fly United to Abuja and upon arrival, the cabin crew confidently announced that we had arrived Abuja only for us to realise that we landed in Asaba,” Salihu Yakasai, the Kano governorship candidate of Peoples’ Redemption Party in the 2023 election, wrote on X.

After about half an hour on the tarmac, the plane was redirected to Abuja. This was after the pilot announced that the “honest mistake” was caused by a mix-up in the flight plan given to him.

“People were thinking that there’s something we were not being told. Until the pilot announced to us that he received a wrong flight plan, that’s when calmness was restored,” a passenger on the flight said.

But in its defence few hours after the incident, United Nigeria Airlines claimed the flight was diverted to Asaba as a result of bad weather.

Achilleus-Chud Uchegbu, the airline spokesperson, said the pilot was properly briefed about the diversion, noting that the cabin crew made “wrong announcement upon landing safely in Asaba [and] created confusion among the passengers.”

“A united Nigeria Airlines flight, NUA 0504, operating from the MM2 in Lagos enroute Abuja on Sunday, November 26, 2023, was temporarily diverted to the Asaba International Airport due to poor destination weather,” the statement reads.

“At all material time, the Pilot of the aircraft was aware of the temporary diversion and was properly briefed. However, a wrong announcement was made by cabin crew upon landing safely in Asaba creating confusion among the passengers.”

 

The Cable

Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio said most of the leaders of an attack on a military barracks in the capital Freetown earlier on Sunday had been arrested, adding that security operations and an investigation were ongoing.

"We will ensure that those responsible are held accountable," Bio said on national television.

"As your commander-in-chief, I want to assure everybody who is resident in Sierra Leone that we have overcome this challenge," he said, and calm had been restored.

Earlier, the government said security forces had repelled "renegade soldiers" who attempted to break into a military armoury in Freetown during the early hours of Sunday.

A nationwide curfew was imposed. Gunfire was heard across the city as the assailants attacked a prison and a police station.

It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties in the barracks attack or during the gunfire in Freetown on Sunday.

The country's former president Ernest Bai Koroma, said in a statement that a military guard assigned to his residence in the capital was shot point blank, while another was "whisked away to an unknown location".

Koroma did not say who shot the guard. He condemned the killing and the attack on the barracks.

"I am deeply concerned that once again our beloved nation could be subject to such insecurity," he said.

The West African country's civil aviation authority urged airlines to reschedule flights after the curfew was declared, while a soldier on its frontier with neighbouring Guinea told Reuters they had been instructed to shut the border.

A Reuters journalist, who earlier witnessed an armed group of men commandeer a police vehicle near the Wilberforce barracks, said streets were mostly empty on Sunday as residents hunkered down.

"We'll clean this society. We know what we are up to. We are not after any ordinary civilians who should go about their normal business," one of the masked men, who was dressed in military fatigues, said before driving away.

Sierra Leone has been tense since Bio was re-elected in June, a result rejected by the main opposition candidate and questioned by international partners including the United States and the European Union.

In August 2022, at least 21 civilians and six police officers were killed in anti-government protests in Sierra Leone, which is still recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war in which more than 50,000 were killed. Bio said the protests were an attempt to overthrow the government.

In his address to the nation on Sunday night, Bio called on Sierra Leone's political and traditional leaders, and civil

society to work to preserve peace.

"Let us not succumb to fear or division," he said.

Information minister Chernor Bah said earlier on Sunday that security forces were making progress in apprehending those involved in the attack, but gave no further details.

A video on social media showed three men, two in fatigues and one in civilian clothes, with their arms tied behind their backs sitting in a military truck surrounded by soldiers. Reuters has not authenticated the video.

Bah said that major detention centres including the Pademba Road prisons were attacked and inmates released by the unidentified assailants.

It was not immediately clear how many prisoners had broken out of the facility, which a U.S. State Department report said was designed for 324 inmates but held more than 2,000 in 2019.

Videos posted on social media, which were not authenticated by Reuters, showed several people fleeing from the area of the prison, while gunshots could be heard in the background.

"The security forces were forced to make a tactical retreat. The prisons were thus overran," said Bah, who had earlier declared a nationwide curfew and called for people to stay indoors.

The Economic Community of West African States condemned what it called an attempt by certain individuals to "acquire arms and disturb constitutional order" in Sierra Leone. The U.S. embassy in Freetown said such actions were not justified.

There have been eight military coups in West and Central Africa since 2020.

 

Reuters

Hamas releases third group of hostages as part of truce, and says it will seek to extend the deal

The fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was back on track Sunday as the militants freed 17 more hostages, including 14 Israelis and the first American, in a third exchange under a four-day truce that the U.S. said it hoped would be extended. In turn, Israel released 39 Palestinian prisoners.

Most hostages were handed over directly to Israel, waving to a cheering crowd as they arrived at an air force base. Others left through Egypt. Israel’s army said one was airlifted to a hospital, and the director of Soroka Medical Center said Elma Avraham, 84, was in life-threatening condition as “a result of an extended period of time when an elderly woman was not taken care of as needed.”

The youngest hostage released was Abigail Edan, a 4-year-old girl and dual Israeli-American citizen whose parents were killed in the Hamas attack that started the war on Oct. 7. “What she endured was unthinkable,” Biden said of the first American freed under the truce. He did not know her condition and did not provide updates on other American hostages. Biden said his goal was to extend the cease-fire deal as long as possible.

In all, nine children ages 17 and younger were on the list, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. Three more Thai nationals were released. Separately, Hamas said it released a Russian hostage “in response to the efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” The Russian-Israeli citizen was the first male hostage to be freed.

The Palestinian prisoners released were children and young men, ages 15-19, largely accused of public disorder, property damage and in some cases causing or threatening physical harm to Israeli officers by throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. Many were scooped up from protests and confrontations with troops. In turn, many Palestinians view prisoners held by Israel, including those implicated in attacks, as heroes resisting occupation.

A fourth exchange is expected on Monday — the last day of the cease-fire during which a total of 50 hostages and 150 Palestinian prisoners are to be freed. Most are women and minors.

International mediators led by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar are trying to extend the cease-fire that began Friday.

“We can get all hostages back home. We have to keep pushing,” said two of Edan’s relatives, a great aunt and cousin, in a statement thanking mediators.

Hamas for the first time said it would seek to extend the deal by looking to release a larger number of hostages. Netanyahu issued a statement saying he had spoken to Biden and reiterated his offer to extend the cease-fire by an additional day for every 10 hostages Hamas releases. But he said Israel would resume its offensive “with all of our might” once the truce expires.

Ahead of the latest hostage release, Netanyahu donned body armor and visited the Gaza Strip, where he spoke with troops. “At the end of the day we will return every one,” he said of the hostages, adding that “we are continuing until the end, until victory. Nothing will stop us.” It was not clear where he went inside Gaza.

This is the first significant pause in seven weeks of war, marked by the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. More than 13,300 Palestinians have been killed, roughly two thirds of them women and minors, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. The war has claimed more than 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians killed in the initial attack.

In New York, hundreds of Jewish protesters and allies demanding a permanent cease-fire in Gaza shut down vehicle traffic on the Manhattan Bridge in both directions for several hours Sunday. A New York police spokesperson could not immediately provide an exact number of how many people were arrested.

LIFE IN CAPTIVITY

Hamas’ military wing released a video showing militants handing over the hostages to Red Cross workers and paramedics, with some of the balaclava-wearing fighters and hostages waving goodbye to each other.

Families from the southern Israeli town of Kfar Aza embraced, cried, and applauded Sunday at the news that hostages from their town had arrived in Israel. More than 70 members of the kibbutz of around 700 people were killed and 18 were kidnapped.

The freed hostages have mostly stayed out of the public eye. Hospitals said their physical condition has largely been good. Little is publicly known about the conditions of their captivity.

Merav Raviv, whose three relatives were released on Friday, said they had been fed irregularly and lost weight. One reported eating mainly bread and rice and sleeping on a makeshift bed of chairs pushed together. Hostages sometimes had to wait for hours to use the bathroom, she said.

Pressure from families has sharpened the dilemma facing Israel’s leaders, who seek to eliminate Hamas as a military and governing power. Hamas and other militant groups seized around 240 people during the incursion into southern Israel that ignited the war. Fifty-eight have been released, one was freed by Israeli forces and two were found dead inside Gaza.

AID TO NORTHERN GAZA

The pause has given some respite to Gaza’s 2.3 million people, still reeling from relentless Israeli bombardment that has driven three-quarters of the population from their homes and leveled residential areas. Rocket fire from Gaza militants into Israel also went silent.

War-weary Palestinians in northern Gaza, where the offensive has focused, made their way through entire city blocks gutted by airstrikes.

But those among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled the north have been turned back by Israeli troops while trying to return to check their homes.

“They open fire on anyone approaching from the south,” said Rami Hazarein, who fled Gaza City.

The Israeli military has ordered Palestinians not to return to the north or approach within a kilometer (around a half-mile) of the border fence. The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said Israeli forces opened fire Sunday on two farmers in central Gaza, killing one and wounding the other. An Israeli military spokesperson said they weren’t aware of the episode.

The United Nations says the truce made it possible to scale up the delivery of food, water and medicine to the largest volume since the start of the war, but it calls the 160 to 200 trucks a day “hardly enough.”

It was able to deliver fuel for the first time since the war began, and to reach areas in the north for the first time in a month. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said 50 Egyptian aid trucks crossed through Israeli checkpoints to reach Gaza City and northern areas Sunday.

HAMAS COMMANDER KILLED

Hamas announced the death of Ahmed al-Ghandour, who was in charge of northern Gaza and a member of its top military council. He is the highest-ranking militant known to have been killed in the fighting. Israel’s military confirmed the death.

Al-Ghandour had survived at least three Israeli attempts on his life and was involved in a cross-border attack in 2006 in which Palestinian militants captured an Israeli soldier, according to the Counter Extremism Project, an advocacy group based in Washington.

Hamas said he was killed along with three other senior militants, including Ayman Siam, who Israel says was in charge of Hamas’ rocket-firing unit. The Israeli military mentioned both men in a Nov. 16 statement, saying it had targeted an underground complex where Hamas leaders were hiding.

The Israeli military claims to have killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence.

Elsewhere, the war has been accompanied by a surge in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Palestinian health authorities said Sunday that five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin that began the day before. The war toll in the West Bank is now 239.

The Israeli army has conducted frequent raids and arrested hundreds of Palestinians since the start of the war, mostly people it suspects of being Hamas members.

 

AP

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Zelenskiy praises Ukrainians for battles with Russia and the weather

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Sunday thanked Ukraine's military for fighting Russian attacks and its rescue services for tackling the consequences of extreme winter weather that he said had deprived about 400 settlements in 10 regions of power.

In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy said relentless, intense battles were ongoing in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv, while "extremely challenging weather" was affecting areas from Kyiv region in the north to Odesa in the south.

In Russian-controlled territory, Oleg Kryuchkov, a senior Moscow-installed official, said nearly half a million people were without power in Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed in 2014.

The Russian-installed heads of Crimea, of the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, and of the part of Kherson region under Moscow's control, declared days off for Monday amid reports of high winds, flooded homes and snowbound roads, and damaged buildings.

Ukraine's border service said Moldova had temporarily suspended vehicle access to its territory from two crossing points in Odesa region. Moldovan authorities also asked local schools to consider closing due to snowfall and high winds.

Odesa Mayor Henadii Trukhanov urged residents of his Black Sea port to stay at home. Local authorities warned that water supplies were being interrupted by power cuts that stopped pumps from working and urged people to preserve supplies.

Power grid operator Ukrenergo shared a photograph of a transmission tower in Odesa region whose leg had snapped in two due to high winds, adding, "We are doing everything possible to overcome the consequences of the bad weather as soon as possible and restore light to every home."

 

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Twenty-four Ukrainian drones destroyed up to now – Russian Defense Ministry

The Russian Air Defense means destroyed four more Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over Bryansk, Smolensk and Tula Regions, the Defense Ministry reported.

The number of drones downed on Sunday climbed therefore to twenty-four.

"On November 26, at about 09:30 a.m. Moscow time [06:30 a.m. GMT], an attempt of the Kiev regime to commit a terrorist attack by fixed-wing aircraft type UAVs against facilities on the territory of the Russian Federation was prevented. Air defense assets on duty destroyed four Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over the territory of Bryansk, Smolensk, and Tula Regions," the ministry said.

Early in the morning on Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry informed about destroying eleven, and then nine more drones over the territory of Moscow, Tula, Kaluga, and Bryansk Regions.

 

Reuters/Tass

Throughout much of the Western world’s history, the wealthiest have been viewed in their communities as a potentially unfavorable presence, and they have attempted to allay this sentiment by using their riches to support their societies in times of crises like plagues, famines or wars.

This symbiotic relationship no longer exists. Today’s rich, their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, have opposed reforms aimed at tapping their resources to fund mitigation policies of all kinds.

This is a historically exceptional development. Helping foot the bill of major crises has long been the main social function attributed to the rich by Western culture. In the past, when the wealthiest have been perceived to be insensitive to the plight of the masses, and especially when they have appeared to be profiteering from such plights (or have simply been suspected of doing so), society has become unstable, leading to riots, open revolts and anti-rich violence. As history has the unpleasant feature of repeating itself, we would do well to consider recent developments, including legislators’ inability to increase taxes on the rich, from a long-term perspective.

Let us begin with the consideration that the presence of very rich, or even superrich, individuals has always been somewhat troubling for Western societies. Medieval theologians regarded the rich as sinners and thought that the building of large fortunes should have been discouraged. At the very least, the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy and to provide generous bequests to charitable institutions to the benefit of their souls.

But with time, as new economic opportunities in trade and in finance led to the accumulation of fortunes of unprecedented size, the increased presence of extremely wealthy individuals within the community could no longer be dismissed as an anomaly. From the 15th century, and beginning with the most economically developed areas of Europe such as central-northern Italy, the rich were assigned a specific social role: to act as private reserves of money into which the community could tap in times of dire need.

Nobody made this point better than the Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini. In his treatise “De avaritia” (“On avarice”), completed in 1428, he argued that cities that follow the tradition of instituting public granaries to build up food reserves should also be well provided of “many greedy individuals, in order … to constitute a kind of private barn of money able to be of assistance to everybody.”

There is abundant historical evidence that for centuries, across the West, the rich have dutifully fulfilled their role of “barns of money” in a variety of ways, which included accepting to pay exceptional taxes during crises or to provide loans to governments. Often, in early modern times, these were technically “forced” loans to ruling authorities, although the fact that they were not a prerogative of absolute monarchies but were also required, usually in wartime, by republican governments such as that of Venice should make us wary of considering them the mere expression of an arbitrary power. Indeed, the rich merchants who were the main “victims” of forced loans were also the rulers of patrician republics and understood they were contributing their private resources to the public good. For example, forced loans were imposed by Venice upon its richest citizens after the terrible plague of 1630 as well as to fund an exhausting war with the Ottoman Empire during 1645-69, although on both occasions the republic was able to raise much greater amounts from its own patricians by means of voluntary loans.

This is not altogether different from the patriotism with which many among the rich subscribed to various emergency loans during the World Wars, such as the Liberty Bonds issued in the United States in 1917-18 to contribute to funding the Allied war effort. These loans proved to be a poor investment, as the interest tended to become negative in real terms because of hyperinflation. But in the 20th century as in the 17th, the boundary between free choice and constriction was blurred, as governments welcomed any opportunity to increase the social pressure on those reluctant to contribute. Sometimes they went even further: In Britain in 1917 the chancellor of the Exchequer explicitly threatened the nation’s financiers with confiscation of company assets unless specified minimum amounts of capital were raised by a new, “voluntary” War Loan.

In the 20th century, the real novelty in how the rich were required to step up their wartime contribution was the expansion of progressive taxation, with substantial increases in the top rates of the personal income tax (in the United States the historical maximum was reached in 1944-45, at 94 percent for incomes over $200,000) and of estate or inheritance taxes. Of course, historically, wars provide the best possible motivation to ask citizens to contribute more: either with their blood or with their cash. But in the 20th century, also during peacetime economic crises, most notably the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rich were expected to contribute considerably more than the general population to foot the bill of public action. For example, this was explicit in the fiscal package introduced in the United States as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In the past 15 years we have experienced the Great Recession, which in some countries also led to the sovereign debt crisis, followed by the worst pandemic in a century or so, then by an ongoing war in Ukraine and the looming threat of large-scale conflict in the Middle East. Based on history, one would expect that in this period the rich would have been called once again to fulfill their traditional role, and indeed, proposals of this kind have entered the political debate in many Western countries.

But so far, in most of them discussion has not been followed by action, and recent fiscal reforms appear to have done little to make the rich contribute more. Recent surveys of fiscal reforms by European countries in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic show that increases in the top rates of the personal income tax or (where they exist) of wealth taxes have been rare and modest. In the United States, proposals by the Biden administration to increase taxation for the richest, such as the “billionaire minimum income tax,” have repeatedly failed to gather sufficient political support.

This is troubling, because the rich have stopped fulfilling the social role that has been their own for many centuries, making their position in society somewhat unclear.

Related to this, we should also consider whether the exceptional resilience of the rich to recent crises has been obtained in such a way as to make society as a whole less resilient — for the rich, protecting their fortunes from crises also involves protecting them from extra taxation, thus stripping public institutions of resources that could have been used for stronger mitigation policies, including those aimed at abating the sufferings (economic or otherwise) of the poorer strata. To some degree, governments compensated for this by expanding the public debt, which raises the question of who will repay it. Given the fact that many Western fiscal systems do not burden their wealthy to the same degree they once did, it seems probable that the bill for the Covid-19 crisis will weigh on the shoulders of the rich to an extremely low degree relative to the burden during past crises.

How could this be, since the public debate across Western countries strongly suggests that in perfect continuity with history, many (including a part of the rich, as shown by the “In Tax We Trust” campaign) considered it rather natural to ask the affluent to contribute more in these exceptional times? Another cultural constant in the history of the West is the widespread suspicion that if the richest components of society become involved directly in politics, they can exert an outsize influence on the political debate. This was clear in the Middle Ages, when across Europe many republican city governments tried to prohibit the richest families from gaining access to top public offices. And in the Modern Age this suspicion resurfaced regularly: Think of the debate about the growing concentration of economic and financial power in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, leading to (largely bipartisan) worries that a few superrich individuals might have determined the national politics as well.

But today, in many Western countries the political involvement of the very affluent is basically taken for granted, and in some of them, superrich individuals have even become presidents or prime ministers: Silvio Berlusconi, who was first elected prime minister of Italy in 1994, is an early case. Perhaps the recent attempts to make the rich contribute more during crises have been exceptionally unsuccessful because the rich themselves are so exceptionally well positioned to influence policymaking. After all, as affirmed by many of the superrich, in absolute terms they already pay more taxes than anybody else — an argument that could have come straight from the mouth of a 17th-century Venetian patrician, were it not for the fact that a patrician would not have felt compelled to provide any justification for his privileged fiscal treatment.

If the rich have been actively trying to avoid being made to contribute more, then they might not be doing themselves (or anybody else) a favor. In many Western countries, the electoral success of parties with a clear anti-establishment, anti-rich character most likely arises from widespread anger at an economic (and political) elite perceived as self-centered and self-serving. Arguably, this is also because the rich have reneged on a centuries-old social contract, shutting the doors to their barns of money.

** Guido Alfani is an economic history professor at Bocconi University in Milan and the author of the forthcoming book “As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West,” from which this is adapted.

 

New York Times

Oftentimes the consequence of being a reliable, effective worker is … more work.

And, while the reputation of being productive is generally a good thing, even the most organized, go-getter can’t do it all. 

If your boss consistently asks you to take on tasks for which you don’t have the bandwidth, it’s okay to say “no” sometimes, says Brandon Smith, a therapist and career coach known as The Workplace Therapist. 

This isn’t always so easy, though. Denying a request from a person who has some control of your income is understandably nerve wracking.

“You always want to treat a boss like the number one client or customer,” Smith says.

Here’s how to appease your manager and still set a boundary.

“Yes, and …” 

“We want to borrow from our friends in improv,” Smith says. Meaning, don’t flat out say “no.”

Instead, start your reply with “Yes, and …” 

After the “and,” state that it can’t be done right away. He offers up the following example:

“Yes, and I can get to that in a couple weeks.” 

If your boss says they need the task done faster, tell them the other tasks on your to-do list. 

“Share with them the priorities you have and say, ‘which one of these do we need to move?’” Smith says.

This way, you’re demonstrating how you’re an asset to the team, and communicating that right now is not the best time to put more on your plate.

 

CNBC