According to press reports, President Joe Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin have not spoken since a February 12 phone conversation. The last contact between Russian and American diplomats was February 23. Much has changed since these previous conversations. The vaunted Russian military, launching an invasion from its home soil, has struggled to achieve objectives in Ukraine. The West has imposed crippling sanctions on the Russian economy. Traditionally neutral nations such as Switzerland have joined in sanctions. Germany, hesitant to send offensive weapons into any combat zone, has made an exception with Ukraine. Mass protests inside of Russia show defiance to the Putin regime.

As Putin’s columns move into Ukraine, some background on Russia’s relations with that nation may prove helpful.

In the winter of 1932, Robert Conquest outlines in Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin set impossibly high grain quotas and blocked all assistance from the outside. As a result, millions of people starved to death, with a high body count in Ukraine. 

Debates about the meaning and limits of free speech typically center on the relationship between the individual and government. Court cases involving the First Amendment are examples.

Watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine was personal for me. In 2020, I had the privilege of participating in two short-term teaching assignments at Berdyansk State Pedagogical University on the Sea of Azov and at Zaporozhye State University. Both are in the eastern part of the country not far from the two separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk that Putin recognized just prior to launching his invasion. I, of course visited Kyiv, which is a beautiful European city. When I live steam the camera at Maidan Square to check in on the city, I think of the scrumptious meal I enjoyed at Last Barricade restaurant situated underground in this city center. The restaurant is something of a museum tracing Soviet repression of the Ukrainian people and claims to have the best traditional Ukrainian food in town. (No argument from me there). Maidan Square is the site of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity when protestors toppled the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych because of his refusal to sign a trade agreement with the European Union and his efforts to keep Ukraine tied to Russia.

“Every year people come to the United States seeking protection,” the U.S. government explains, “because they have suffered persecution or fear that they will suffer persecution” due to race, religion, membership in a particular social group, and “political opinion.” That one now applies to citizens of Canada.

We were greatly saddened by the news that our very dear friend Patrick Jake “P.J.” O’Rourke had passed away on February 15th, at the age of 74, of complications from lung cancer. P.J. was peerless as a maverick journalist, essayist, humorist, and New York Times bestselling author, who we were privileged to know and work with for decades, as he was a founding Member of the Board of Advisors for the Independent Institute.

Over the years, we held numerous events with him, including our 30th Anniversary: A Gala for the Future of Liberty, for which he served as master of ceremonies and at which we honored tech-entrepreneur Timothy C. Draper; Nobel Laureate economist Vernon L. Smith; and North Korean refugee, defector, and human-rights activist Yeonmi Park with the Alexis de Tocqueville Award.

Normally, when people talk about how President Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) failed, it’s about how the stimulus helped create the worst inflation in 40 years. But did you know it was a total bust for creating jobs too?

The great satirist P.J. O’Rourke, who died last week at 74, once said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sounded like “a failed savings and loan.” As it turned out, that was more than a quip.

On President’s Day weekend, let us commemorate the record of the best president in U.S. history: John Tyler.

A random poll of Americans would draw mostly puzzled looks at the name, but according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland, in his 2009 ranking of the presidents, Recarving Rushmore, this 10th U.S. president has the strongest record upholding Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.

One would have thought that the end of the Soviet empire and the triumph of the liberal democratic paradigm (the Hegelian “end of history” Fukuyama so controversially cited at the time) would create an environment in which authoritarians were on the defensive, constantly having to justify themselves under the weight of a universally accepted liberal democratic standard.