I had thought of the immediate previous post as a meditation on history rather than food blogging. But ‘death of the author’ and all that, a lot of readers have seen it differently and have been writing in in droves, saying, ‘Dude, where’s the recipe?’ So recipe coming after the jump …
Meanwhile, my wife (in part because we love the taste and healthfullness and in large part to give our crazy young sons – 5 and 7 – something to do on a freezing cold day) is cooking this cabbage soup which is the inheritance of her maternal grandmother.
She was a pre-World War II immigrant to Palestine, traveling alone, from a city in what was then and again now in southeastern Poland, today not far from the Poland-Ukraine border. She lived most of her life in Haifa.
As usual, David Remnick has some of the wisest insights and most tightly crafted writing on the situation in Ukraine. And, unlike virtually everyone else writing and talking, he has a deep knowledge of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Worth your time to read.
This opinion piece by Charles King in the Times also made a lot of sense to me, not for taking a clear position but unfolding many the complexities and extreme dangers of the situation.
Meanwhile my friend Garance Franke-Ruta put together this curated twitter list of various people you’ll want to hear from about the situation in Ukraine – journalists, foreign policy hands, observers, historians, activists.
This article in the Times has details on just how Ukraine’s military would stack up against the Russian Army in battle. In Crimea, Ukraine had only token forces. It was Russia’s for the taking. And Ukraine has no realistic way to dislodge them. The Times piece seems contradictory though on how Ukraine would fare in the rest of the country.
They quote Western sources saying that Ukraine’s military could hold its own and even expose deficiencies in the Russian Army which the one-sided fights in the Caucasus did not. But they have Russian sources suggesting Ukraine’s military is hollowed out and saddled with obsolete weaponry.
One part of the unfolding crisis in Ukraine that in part obvious but can also escape notice is that a key driver of the current situation is the lack of any effectively functioning government in Kiev. There is a nominal head of state in place. In practice there is a power vacuum at the apex of the Ukrainian state. Its ability to react effectively to the situation in Crimea, given the huge Russia military presence already there and the pro-Russian population, would be quite limited in any case. But the fact that the state structure itself is still half-decapitated gives the Russians an even greater ability to dictate the course of events than they might otherwise have.
Unquestionably, we’ve got a dangerous and unpredictable situation unfolding in Ukraine – and a taste of the reinforcing mix of authoritarian tendencies and aggressive behavior that has persistently characterized Russia through the eras of autocracy to totalitarianism and on to the present one of pseudo-democracy. That said, we shouldn’t be blind to the downsides of the current situation for Russia.
Not making this up. McCain declares: “We are all Ukrainians.”
President Obama to appear in the White House briefing room at 4:45 ET to address the situation in Ukraine. Watch live here.