Bernard Henri-Levy arguing for A Marshall Plan For Ukraine in The Kyiv Post today:
...[F]or the next 200 days you will be called upon to make proposals and suggestions about Ukraine's finances, to be sure, but also about public health, about strengthening the rule of law, and about fighting the open wound, the leprosy, that is corruption.
In the course of the task that awaits you, you will encounter eternal defeatists and professional cynics.
You will encounter those who go around saying that Ukraine is a leaky barrel that is not worth your effort.
You will encounter those who think that history and geography are destiny and fate and that Ukraine belongs almost by natural law in the Russian sphere of influence.
Do not let yourselves be intimidated.
For when your recommendations—followed in 200 days by the Marshall Plan of my dreams—see the light of day, the entire history of this region will be changed.
And you will have written a new page of the history not only of Ukraine but of Europe.
We'll conclude today's live blogging with the latest Power Vertical Podcast, in which our own Brian Whitmore talks about the Nemtsov murder with Mark Galeotti and Sean Guillory.
In Whitmore's words, while we don't know who killed Nemtsov, who we think ordered the assassination and why says a lot about how we view Vladimir Putin's regime.
The focus is not broadly Ukraine, but analysis of events in Ukraine, their effect on developments inside Russia, and Russia on a war footing arises at the 20-minute mark, and is worth listening to for Ukraine watchers.
Podcast: Anatomy Of An Assassination
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaking at a news conference in Kyiv today:
"There is not a military solution to what is happening in eastern Ukraine. There has to be a diplomatic resolution. And so on one level, the provision of weapons is not the way to get to a solution. Unfortunately, however, the only people who seem to believe that there is a military solution to eastern Ukraine are the Russians and the separatists. And they need to be disabused of that notion. So we will continue to look for ways to disabuse them of that notion and to advance a diplomatic solution."
From The Economist, titled Russia After Nemtsov: Uncontrolled Violence.
Russian liberals, including Mr Nemtsov himself, had long worried that Mr Putin’s regime would have no choice but to escalate repression and violence as the only way of consolidating its rule. Over the past year, physical violence has been mainly directed against Ukraine. If Mr Putin has now decided that he has reached the limit of his adventurism in that country, he is likely to try to compensate with more repression at home.
The assassination of Mr Nemtsov, who had served in the government of Boris Yeltsin and even been groomed as his potential successor (see article), has shaken many members of the political elite. It breaks an unwritten pact, agreed after Stalin’s death, that conflicts at the top should be resolved by non-violent means. Those who are still close to the Kremlin and consider themselves liberals now choose their words carefully. Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister who sponsors civic projects, told TV Rain, a liberal internet-based television channel, that this was a “dramatic page in Russia’s history…in modern, political Russia we see an opponent being stopped by a bullet. This is a new and inadmissible reality and it concerns all of us.” No government officials, including Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, spoke out.
Most liberal voices have been drowned in the din of war. The dominant feeling among liberal Russians in the wake of Mr Nemtsov’s murder has been of despondency and emptiness. Grigory Revzin, a columnist, compared the murder of Mr Nemtsov to the killing of Jean Jaurès, a French Socialist leader and pacifist who was assassinated just before the outbreak of the first world war. Mr Nemtsov’s murder, he wrote, was a point of no return.
On March 1st, in place of the planned anti-war rally, tens of thousands of Muscovites marched in complete silence towards the bridge where Mr Nemtsov was killed. The next day, a meeting was held inside the Kremlin. In order to stop the bridge where Mr Nemtsov was killed from turning into a memorial to him, it was decided to use it later this month as the site for a celebration of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Read the entire piece here:
Via Reuters:
Viktoria Dubovyk, spokeswoman for the prosecutor-general in Kharkiv, speaking about the car-bomb blast earlier today that injured senior special police officer Andriy Yangolenko and his wife, Inna.
"The man is a commander of the [police] battalion 'Slobozhanshchyna.' Both were injured, they were taken to the hospital. He has injuries of medium severity, his wife is in a difficult condition, she is undergoing surgery right now."