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The long reign of his successor, Sigismund III Vasa (1587–1632), raised hopes of a union with Sweden that would strengthen Poland’s standing in the north.

The victory at Klushino in 1610 by Hetman Stanisław Zółkiewski resulted in a Polish occupation of Moscow and the election by Moscow’s boyars of Sigismund’s son Władysław as tsar. Sigismund’s veto wasted this opportunity and instead left a residue of Russian hatred of Poland.

Although the royal forces triumphed in battle, both the king and the reformers were losers in the political realm to the magnates posing as defenders of freedom.

Transferred as a result of the Union of Lublin from the grand duchy of Lithuania to the more ethnically homogeneous Crown, Ukraine was “colonized” by both Polish and Ukrainian great nobles.

This is a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is factored in with the air temperature, providing a number on a coloured scale, starting with 80F (26C) which is yellow – caution, and rising through dark yellow beginning at 91F (33C) – extreme caution, orange at 103F (39.5C) – danger, and up to red beginning at 126F (52C) – extreme danger.

The average number of days per year nationwide with a heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit would more than quadruple to 24 by mid-century and increase eight-fold to 40 by late century

“Our analysis shows a hotter future that’s hard to imagine today,”

The work is the first study to examine the impacts of climate change on the heat index – instead of just temperature – when calculating the impacts of warming,

“These conditions occur at or above a heat index of 127 degrees, depending on temperature and humidity. Exposure to conditions in that range makes it difficult for human bodies to cool themselves and could be deadly,”

But the United States is not taking those kinds of steps today.“There is from President Trump’s America a selfishness that is new,’’

With Mr. Trump’s unembellished nationalism and slogan of “America First,’’ his efforts to blame first China and then Europe for the coronavirus, and his various misstatements of fact, “it means that America no longer serves the planet,’’

“America was always strong on self-interest but it has been very generous,” he said. “That generosity seems to be gone, and that’s bad news for the world.’’

“But this crisis is confirmation of a structural change in U.S. political leadership,’’ she said.

“There is no U.S. global leadership and no U.S. model,’’ Ms. Major added. “Success would be that you manage the pandemic at home, rally allies around you, lead the alliance, supply global public goods and organize the global response, as with Ebola.”

The suggestion that Mr. Trump tried to buy out the German company, “true or not, did not play well in the European media,” Mr. Westmacott said. “It felt more ‘America first’ than America in its traditional role of a big-hearted great power.’’

The United States did provide some early aid to China. But in general, the administration has left even close allies to fend for themselves.

Mr. Trump has defended his ban on all travel from the European Union, but he did not bother to consult with European leaders or even give them advance notice.

it was the energetic French president, Emmanuel Macron, who called Mr. Trump twice in 10 days to suggest a G-7 virus summit by videoconference. Mr. Trump agreed, but left Mr. Macron to organize it.

Germans and Europeans generally are angry about accusations from German officials that the Trump administration, and reportedly Mr. Trump himself, offered $1 billion to a German pharmaceutical company, Cure-Vac, to buy monopoly rights to a potential Covid-19 vaccine.

Whatever the reality, “the point is that people think Trump is capable of that,’’ Ms. Major said. “That’s where we’ve arrived in the trans-Atlantic relationship, that people say, ‘Yes, that sounds right for the American president.’ ’’

Instead, American institutions “don’t seem to be able to cope at home,” she said, and there is “a Trump response to act alone.’’

“Seen from a distance, Trump’s performance has pretty much confirmed the views people over here already had of him — that it’s all about ‘me,’ with no acceptance of responsibility for earlier failures.’’

The contrast is to China, which made huge mistakes at the onset of the crisis, but since then appears to have managed it effectively, using harsh quarantine measures others are studying.

China is also now sending aid — needed respiratory and surgical masks, ventilators and medical personnel — to Italy and Serbia, which have condemned their European allies for not providing early and efficient help.

On Wednesday, China offered the European Union as a whole two million surgical masks, 200,000 advanced N95 masks and 50,000 testing kits

The Chinese billionaire Jack Ma has even offered aid to the United States, promising to send 500,000 virus test kits and a million protective masks.

“There is a serious battle of narratives,’’ Ms. Major said. “And the Chinese have become good at what was once America’s tool, soft power.’’

The Chinese, she said, are “trying to make everyone forget that a lot of what we’re experiencing is because of their domestic failure.’’

even as China provides aid to Italy and Serbia, she said, “it is asking, ‘Where are your European friends?’ and giving the impression that China acts, is coordinating, leads.’’

But the United States, she said, “seems unwilling or unable to lead.’’

The United States “seems at least as fragmented as the European Union, if not more so,’’ said Marietje Schaake, a former European legislator now at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

“The U.S. looks more fragile in part because it lacks the social structures we have in Europe,” she added. “There is comfort in knowing that there is a bottom, a net that will catch you.’’

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In retrospect, the crisis may also mark a moment of fundamental global shift.“What will this mean in five years for great-power competition?” asked Ms. Major. “In 10 years will we say, ‘This is the moment that China rose and the U.S. declined,’ or will the U.S. rebound?”

The union, which began meeting with workers in 2015, escalated its public efforts in April with a fiery meeting highlighting arbitrarily enforced rules and retaliation against those who speak up.

The company reached an agreement in March that reduced the amount to $100,000 and required corrective measures.

In 2014, a Chinese copper tube maker called Golden Dragon opened a plant in Wilcox County, Ala., to Fuyao-esque fanfare, investing more than $100 million to create an anticipated 300 local jobs. By the end of the year, amid complaints about lax safety and low wages, workers narrowly voted to unionize.

Mr. Vanetti said that Fuyao remained committed to its original four-to-five-year timetable for handing the plant to a predominantly American management corps, and that it recently hired two more American vice presidents.

The original iteration – call it “Liberal Order 1.0” – arose from the ashes of World War II to uphold peace and support global prosperity.

Liberal Order 1.0 had its limits – namely, sovereign borders. Given the ongoing geopolitical struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, it could not even quite be called a “world order.” What countries did at home was basically their business, as long as it didn’t affect the superpower rivalry.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union

Liberal Order 2.0 – penetrated countries’ borders to consider the rights of those who lived there.

But now the West itself is rejecting the order that it created, often using the very same logic of sovereignty that the rising powers used

With the United Kingdom having rejected the European Union and US President Donald Trump condemning free-trade deals and the Paris climate agreement, the more fundamental Liberal Order 1.0 seems to be under threat.

European countries are unsure how to respond to this new global disorder. Three potential coping strategies have emerged.

The first would require a country like Germany, which considers itself a responsible stakeholder and has some international heft, to take over as a main custodian of the liberal world order

A second strategy, exemplified today by Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Turkey isn’t trying to overturn the existing order, but it doesn’t feel responsible for its upkeep, either.

extract as much as possible from Western-led institutions like the EU and NATO,

ostering mutually beneficial relationships with countries

The third strategy is simple hypocrisy: Europe would talk like a responsible stakeholder, but act like a profit maximizer. This is the path British Prime Minister Theresa May took when she met with Trump in Washington, DC. She said all the right things about NATO, the EU, and free trade, but pleaded for a special deal with the US outside of those frameworks.

Students in Magdeburg took comfort in Germany’s stability but voiced pessimism about the safety of the world — somewhat the inverse of the perspective with which earlier generations came of age. 

“I’m afraid about the future,” said Philipp Thiel, 27, who is training to become a teacher at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. “I don’t expect a third world war but maybe something like that, with North Korea, Turkey, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, Trump,” he said.

Merkel, he said, is a contrast to bellicose world leaders. “She’s someone who will say, ‘Okay guys, calm down.’ ”

much of her audience sees Merkel only for her role on the world stage — her ability to keep Russia in line, her willingness to counter President Trump and, most recently, her appeal for talks with North Korea.

“A feeling that I sometimes sense among our viewers is, ‘Could somebody please stop the world for a moment, just so I could try to understand one crisis at a time?’ ” said Schulz, who is 27 and described 9/11 as the moment “politics started” for her. Her parents, she said, did not worry about terrorism, and they believed they had moved past the brand of politics it breeds — nationalism.

in traveling across the country to prepare for the show, Schulz said, she heard one view repeatedly: “We are doing fine as a generation.” Germany boasts the lowest youth unemployment rate, 6.5 percent, of any E.U. country. Quibbles, Schulz said, are dismissed as “Luxusprobleme,” best translated as “First World problems.”

But this idea — almost a sense of gratitude — may be dissuading young people from getting more involved in politics, Schulz warned. Just six lawmakers in the Bundestag, the 630-member lower house of Parliament, were born after 1985. 

Wolfgang Gründinger, author of the book “Old Geezers’ Politics,” said Germany’s older generations “are robbing the youth of their future,” pointing to the lack of attention to education and child poverty in this month’s electoral debate.

Although Gründinger is an active member of the Social Democrats, he does not spare the party blame. “Fewer than 3 percent of SPD members are younger than 25, which means that the lives of younger people play virtually no role in the everyday debate,” said Gründinger, referring to the party.

Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.

But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate.

Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”

If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.

he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.

Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”

For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.

What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”

The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…

it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.

disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:

in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-sate is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions

Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.

Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.

its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.

These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.

This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.

preliminary investigations indicated that Eritrean soldiers had killed an unknown number of civilians in Axum, an ancient city in northern Ethiopia. It said the killings were in retaliation for an earlier attack by TPLF soldiers.Amnesty said Eritrean soldiers executed men and boys in the streets and engaged in extensive looting.

China claims much of the South China Sea for itself and has built several artificial islands, as have some of the other claimants to the contested waters. But the scale of China's building far exceeds that of other countries, and this latest move has drawn international concern. It's raised fears that China perhaps aims to occupy and reclaim Whitsun Reef while intimidating its regional rivals.

Gregory Poling says that's suspicious. Poling runs the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. He says the boats, tied up "with military precision" beside each other, "are not fishing," they're parked.

The reef where the Chinese ships are massed lies on the northern edge of a larger atoll known as Union Banks, inside the sprawling Spratly Islands chain, known for its disputed ownership. Historically Union Banks has been a fishing ground for Filipino fishermen.

Poling says Whitsun Reef lies within a mile of two of existing Chinese bases and four small Vietnamese outposts. "So, it's a pretty congested area," he says. "And for China, it seems like they are now using Whitsun Reef as an anchorage, a safe place to harbor around this bigger area called Union Banks."

The Chinese have denied they are up to anything unusual and said that its "fishing vessels" were merely sheltering from "rough seas." Batongbacal says there have been no "adverse weather conditions" in the area in the weeks the Chinese have been there.

Today the reef is China's biggest outpost in the South China Sea. Mischief sits on the eastern edge of the seven artificial islands China has built in the Spratly archipelago.

Batongbacal says back then, China said that it was using the reef to shelter fishermen. By 2015, he says the Chinese had built one of the world's largest artificial islands, which "now hosts a full-blown military base," all protected by "missile emplacements."

Whitsun is unlikely to become another artificial island, believes Poling. "China's goal is to control the water, the seabed, the airspace. And so they don't really need an eighth outpost to do that. What they need is an overwhelming dominance when it comes to the number of vessels in the Spratlys," he says.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also claim parts of the South China Sea. China's claims to nearly all of the waters were rejected by a ruling in a tribunal at the Hague in 2016.Poling says to assert its vast claim, Beijing increasingly uses its fishing fleet as a maritime militia.

A statement released Monday by Beijing's Embassy in Manila said, "There is no Chinese Maritime Militia as alleged. Any speculation in such helps nothing but causes unnecessary irritation."

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has gone out of his way to not irritate Beijing, and Batongbacal says Duterte has been "very, very accommodating" to China in the South China Sea. "The Chinese are emboldened."

Indeed, Poling says China's maritime intimidation is discouraging oil and gas exploration, and jeopardizing fishermen. It's getting "harder and harder," he says, not to see this an "implicit threat" that carries the added risk of miscalculation.

This week, Philippine National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana called the Chinese move a "clear provocative action" of "grave" concern. "We call on the Chinese to stop this incursion and immediately recall these boats violating our maritime rights and encroaching into our sovereign territory," his statement read.

Poling says the Chinese are not likely to disperse. "Once China moves in, it doesn't leave. It might decrease the number. It might play nice for a little while, maybe it ratchets down the tension for short term political gain, but it is unlikely to vacate this reef," he says.

In a statement, the U.S. embassy in the Philippines waded into the controversy: "The PRC uses maritime militia to intimidate, provoke, and threaten other nations," adding, "We stand with the Philippines, our oldest treaty ally in Asia." Japan, Australia, the U.K. and Canada expressed support for the Philippines as well, saying the Chinese flotilla was threatening regional security.

Poling says the unified call for China to withdraw shows "a realignment of international fears and anxieties about Beijing's maritime claims." He says that if the international community is going to draw a line in the sand, or try to "compel or cajole" China into compromise, "it has to do so now." The "space for compromise," Poling says, "is getting worrying small."

“Blue America is increasingly buoyed by the knowledge economy,” the analysis concludes, while “red America is struggling to find a viable growth model for the twenty-first century.”

A big part of the problem, the authors argue, is conservative governance.

The analysis looks at the political economy of 26 states that voted Republican in presidential elections three times since 2000. Of those, 21 are what the authors call “low road states.

Mostly Southern, they largely maintain that model centered on weak unions and low wages, and tend to have smaller governments and far fewer urban centers.

those states have aggregate wage averages that rank below those in the states that voted blue three times since 2000

Another group — “left behind states” — are the ones in the industrial Midwest. They, too, are struggling in the knowledge economy. But they have legacies of progressive policies strengthening unions and public spending

To address resulting regional disparities, the analysis argues, these states should want expanded federal cash transfers and bigger federal spending on health care, social insurance and infrastructure

Instead, red state politicians have increasingly embraced a national agenda that is focused on tax cuts and aggressive deregulation and hostile to federal transfers.

Why? Because GOP policy at the federal and state levels is largely set by “national business groups and organized wealthy backers.

Meanwhile, the rescue package’s child allowance is the sort of policy that “conservative populist” Republicans who want to wean the GOP off its addiction to plutocratic policies should support.

GOP political elites are able to continue insulating themselves from accountability for this disconnect, not just “through identity appeals rooted in racial and cultural backlash,” but also because of the bias “of the American electoral system toward nonurban areas.”

“The tragic irony is that this huge rural bias also helps Republicans get away with ignoring the economic needs of their own constituents.”

It’s good to see this kind of realism. Remember, back in 2016 Donald Trump promised that he would restore coal to its former greatness, reopening shuttered mines — and voters in coal country believed him

The union’s document is in effect an endorsement, at least in principle, of the Biden administration’s plans to make action against climate change a centerpiece of its boost to infrastructure spending

It’s also a small but encouraging vindication of the thinking behind Build Back Better, the belief that climate action is most likely to be politically feasible if it eschews economic purism and relies more on carrots than on sticks.

The council, whose creation was announced in 2017, calls for carbon fees whose proceeds would be redistributed to families. This plan is part of a “bipartisan road map” for action.

This is, however, not the path the Biden administration is taking. Why?

First, the economic case for relying almost exclusively on a carbon tax misses the crucial role of technological development.

The reason large reductions in emissions look much easier to achieve now than they did a dozen years ago is that we’ve seen spectacular progress in renewable energy: a 70 percent fall since 2009 in the cost of wind power, an 89 percent fall in the cost of solar power.

And this technological progress didn’t just happen. It was at least partly a result of investments made by the Obama administration.

In retrospect, however, it is clear that government spending provided a crucial technological lift. And this suggests that public investment, as well as or even instead of a carbon tax, can be a way forward in fighting climate change.

Second, the idea that a carbon tax can achieve bipartisan support is hopelessly naïve. Only 14 percent of Republicans even accept the notion that climate change is an important issue

What might win over at least some of these voters, however, is the kind of program the United Mine Workers is calling for: targeted spending designed to help retrain former miners and support development in coal country communities.

while there’s a compelling case against relying exclusively on a carbon tax to fight climate change, public investment alone also probably isn’t enough. Eventually we will almost surely have to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, politically difficult though that will be.

Promoting job creation in West Virginia or eastern Kentucky won’t be easy, and may be impossible.

we can and should make a good-faith effort to help workers and regions that will lose as we try to avoid environmental catastrophe, and in general to make climate policy as politically palatable as possible, even at some cost in efficiency. Climate action is too important a task to insist that it be done perfectly.

In Donetsk, these included not just the Red Flag of the defunct Soviet Union and the black-yellow-white tricolor of the long-gone Tsarist empire, but at times also the emblem of an even more distant, failed venture, the Confederate States of America.

But what was most familiar about the insurrectionists in Washington on Wednesday was their certitude, an unbending conviction that, no matter what anyone else or the law might say, right was on their side.

“Victory is ours. All we need is courage,” shouted a self-declared commander of the “army of patriots” who, in the fall of 1993, helped take control of the White House that at the time housed the Russian legislature on the banks of the Moscow River.

When insurrections began in Moscow in 1993, and then in eastern Ukraine in 2014, failure looked inevitable. The leaders, along with their followers, seemed deranged, intoxicated by nostalgia, wild conspiracy theories and fantasies about the depth of their public support.

A barrage of propaganda on Russian television, the main source of news for much of the population, spread fear and anger, embedding a conviction that anti-Russian protesters in the distant Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, would soon descend on Donetsk with guns and knives to wreak havoc.

The war that followed has now dragged on for six years, killing more than 13,000 people, nearly all civilians. People who wanted nothing to do with the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” who, according to opinion polls carried out shortly before its declaration, constituted a large majority, have mostly left the “republic” that no other country, including even Russia, recognizes.

But the winners squandered the victory, unleashing a wave of crooked privatizations and staging a deeply flawed presidential election in 1996 that kept an infirm and increasingly erratic Mr. Yeltsin in the Kremlin for a second term. When that was nearly done, he handed over power to Vladimir V. Putin.

A former KGB officer who believed in order above all else, Mr. Putin had no time for insurrection but he embraced the revanchist cause, reviving Russia’s ambitions as a global power, the reach of the security services, the music of the Soviet national anthem, Soviet-era emblems for the military and patriotism as a cudgel against his critics.

Commenting on the tumult in Washington, Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia’s upper house and a Putin loyalist, scoffed at American democracy as “limping on both feet.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo appeared to support Mayor Bill de Blasio in his desire to keep schools open, announcing on Monday that the state would not stick with its plan to close schools if the positivity rate hit 9 percent by the state’s metrics, and would instead leave the decision to local leaders.

But the teachers’ union quickly poured cold water on that plan by saying it wanted schools closed if the city hit the 9 percent state mark.

As the virus has spread in the broader New York City community — and a rapidly rising number of schools have been closed when two or more positive cases emerged in the building, and no link could be established between them — the Department of Education decided to change its quarantine policy.

The change is most likely intended to prevent the situation the city found itself in last month, when as many as 201 school buildings were closed for two weeks at one point. The students in the 103 schools that are temporarily closed are learning remotely.

One faction of the United Federation of Teachers called on the union and the city to immediately close all schools for in-person learning, rather than waiting to see if the numbers worsen. “Too many students, families and staff will become sick,” if schools remain open, U.F.T. Solidarity, a left-leaning caucus within the union, said in a recent statement.

“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay to the 1619 Project, said on Friday that Cotton’s bill “speaks to the power of journalism more than anything I’ve ever done in my career”.

On Sunday, she tweeted: “If chattel slavery – heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit – were a ‘necessary evil’ as Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.

“Imagine thinking a non-divisive curriculum is one that tells black children the buying and selling of their ancestors, the rape, torture, and forced labor of their ancestors for PROFIT, was just a ‘necessary evil’ for the creation of the ‘noblest’ country the world has ever seen.

“So, was slavery foundational to the Union on which it was built, or nah? You heard it from Tom Cotton himself.”

Cotton responded: “More lies from the debunked 1619 Project. Describing the views of the Founders and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery. No surprise that the 1619 Project can’t get facts right.”

Between 1890 and 1910, for example, the population of major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow nearly doubled, resulting in overcrowding and destitute living conditions for a new class of Russian industrial workers.

The massacre sparked the Russian revolution of 1905, during which angry workers responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country.

Russia entered into World War I in August 1914 in support of the Serbs and their French and British allies. Their involvement in the war would soon prove disastrous for the Russian Empire.

Czar Nicholas left the Russian capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1915 to take command of the Russian Army front. (The Russians had renamed the imperial city in 1914, because the name “St. Petersburg” had sounded too German.)

Russian nobles eager to end Rasputin’s influence murdered him on December 30, 1916. By then, most Russians had lost faith in the failed leadership of the czar. Government corruption was rampant, the Russian economy remained backward and Nicholas repeatedly dissolved the Duma, the toothless Russian parliament established after the 1905 revolution, when it opposed his will.

The leaders of the provisional government, including young Russian lawyer Alexander Kerensky, established a liberal program of rights such as freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the right of unions to organize and strike. They opposed violent social revolution.

The Russian Revolution paved the way for the rise of communism as an influential political belief system around the world. It set the stage for the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power that would go head-to-head with the United States during the Cold War.

At Monticello, you will learn the history of Jefferson, the man who was president and wrote the Declaration of Independence, and you will learn the history of Jefferson, the slave owner. Monticello is an almost perfect memorial, because it reveals him with his moral failings in full, an imperfect man, a flawed founder.

And it’s time to honor one of our founding mothers, a woman who fought as an escaped slave to free those still enslaved, who fought as an armed scout for the Union Army against the Confederacy — a woman who helped to bring into being a more perfect union after slavery, a process that continues to this day. In Jefferson’s place, there should be another statue. It should be of Harriet Tubman.

To see a 19-foot-tall bronze statue of a Black woman, who was a slave and also a patriot, in place of a white man who enslaved hundreds of men and women is not erasing history. It’s telling the real history of America.

Today’s unstable world, however, looks more like that of the 1910s or the 1930s, when social and economic unrest were widespread and multiple powerful players crowded the international scene, some bent on upending the existing order. Just as China is challenging the United States today, the rising powers of Germany, Japan, and the United States threatened the hegemonic power of the British Empire in the 1910s. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an economic downturn reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The history of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates all too vividly that unchecked or unmoderated tensions can lead to extremism at home and conflict abroad. It also shows that at times of heightened tension, accidents can set off explosions like a spark in a powder keg, especially if countries in those moments of crisis lack wise and capable leadership.

If the administration that succeeds Trump’s wants to repair the damaged world and rebuild a stable international order, it ought to use history—not as a judge but as a wise adviser.

WARNING SIGNS

A knowledge of history offers insurance against sudden shocks. World wars and great depressions do not come out of the clear blue sky; they happen because previous restraints on bad behavior have weakened

In the nineteenth century, enough European powers—in particular the five great ones, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—came to believe that unprovoked aggression should not be tolerated, and Europe enjoyed more peace than at any other time in its troubled history until after 1945

Further hastening the breakdown of the international order is how states are increasingly resorting to confrontational politics, in substance as well as in style.

Their motives are as old as states themselves: ambition and greed, ideologies and emotions, or just fear of what the other side might be intending

Today, decades of “patriotic education” in China’s schools have fostered a highly nationalist younger generation that expects its government to assert itself in the world.

Public rhetoric matters, too, because it can create the anticipation of, even a longing for, confrontation and can stir up forces that leaders cannot control.

Defusing tensions is possible, but it requires leadership aided by patient diplomacy, confidence building, and compromise.

Lately, however, some historians have begun to see that interwar decade in a different light—as a time of real progress toward a strong international order.

Unfortunately, compromise does not always play well to domestic audiences or elites who see their honor and status tied up with that of their country. But capable leaders can overcome those obstacles. Kennedy and Khrushchev overruled their militaries, which were urging war on them; they chose, at considerable risk, to work with each other, thus sparing the world a nuclear war.

Trump, too, has left a highly personal mark on global politics. In the long debate among historians and international relations experts over which matters most—great impersonal forces or specific leaders—his presidency surely adds weight to the latter.

His character traits, life experiences, and ambitions, combined with the considerable power the president can exert over foreign policy, have shaped much of U.S. foreign policy over the last nearly four years, just as Putin’s memories of the humiliation and disappearance of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War have fed his determination to make Russia count again on the world stage. It still matters that both men happen to lead large and powerful countries.

When Germany fell into the clutches of Adolf Hitler, in contrast, he was able to start a world war.

THE NOT-SO-GOLDEN AGE

In relatively stable times, the world can endure problematic leaders without lasting damage. It is when a number of disruptive factors come together that those wielding power can bring on the perfect storm

By 1914, confrontation had become the preferred option for all the players, with the exception of the United Kingdom, which still hoped to prevent or at least stay out of a general European war.

Although they might not have realized it, many Europeans were psychologically prepared for war. An exaggerated respect for their own militaries and the widespread influence of social Darwinism encouraged a belief that war was a noble and necessary part of a nation’s struggle for survival. 

The only chance of preventing a local conflict from becoming a continent-wide conflagration lay with the civilian leaders who would ultimately decide whether or not to sign the mobilization orders. But those nominally in charge were unfit to bear that responsibility.

In the last days of peace, in July and early August 1914, the task of keeping Europe out of conflict weighed increasingly on a few men, above all Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. Each proved unable to withstand the pressure from those who urged war.

THE MISUNDERSTOOD DECADE

With the benefit of hindsight, historians have often considered the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to be a failure and the 1920s a mere prelude to the inevitable rise of the dictators and the descent into World War II.

Preparing for conflict—or even appearing to do so—pushes the other side toward a confrontational stance of its own. Scenarios sketched out as possibilities in more peaceful times become probabilities, and leaders find that their freedom to maneuver is shrinking.

The establishment in 1920 of his brainchild, the League of Nations, was a significant step, even without U.S. membership: it created an international body to provide collective security for its members and with the power to use sanctions, even including war, against aggressors

Overall, the 1920s were a time of cooperation, not confrontation, in international relations. For the most part, the leaders of the major powers, the Soviet Union excepted, supported a peaceful international order.

The promise of the 1920s was cut short by the Great Depression.

Citizens lost faith in the ability of their leaders to cope with the crisis. What was more ominous, they often lost faith in capitalism and democracy. The result was the growth of extremist parties on both the right and the left.

The catastrophe that followed showed yet again how important the individual can be in the wielding of power. Hitler had clear goals—to break what he called “the chains” of the Treaty of Versailles and make Germany and “the Aryan race” dominant in Europe, if not the world—and he was determined to achieve them at whatever cost.

The military, delighted by the increases in defense spending and beguiled by Hitler’s promises of glory and territorial expansion, tamely went along. In Italy, Mussolini, who had long dreamed of a second Roman Empire, abandoned his earlier caution. On the other side of the world, Japan’s new rulers were also thinking in terms of national glory and building a Greater Japan through conquest.

Preoccupied with their own problems, the leaders of the remaining democracies were slow to realize the developing threat to world order and slow to take action

This time, war was the result not of reckless brinkmanship or weak governments but of powerful leaders deliberately seeking confrontation. Those who might have opposed them, such as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, chose instead to appease them in the hope that war could be avoided. By failing to act in the face of repeated violations of treaties and international law, the leaders of the democracies allowed the international order to break.

OMINOUS ECHOES

Led by Roosevelt, statesmen in the Allied countries were determined to learn from this mistake. Even as the war raged, they enunciated the principles and planned the institutions for a new and better world order.

Three-quarters of a century later, however, that order is looking dangerously creaky. The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the world’s economy and set back international cooperation.

Tensions are building up as they did before the two world wars, with intensifying great-power rivalries and with regional conflicts, such as the recent skirmishes between China and India, that threaten to draw in other players.

Meanwhile, the pandemic will shake publics’ faith in their countries’ institutions, just as the Great Depression did.

Norms that once seemed inviolable, including those against aggression and conquest, have been breached. Russia seized Crimea by force in 2014, and the Trump administration last year gave the United States’ blessing to Israel’s de facto annexation of the Golan Heights and may well recognize the threatened annexation of large parts of the West Bank that Israel conquered in 1967.

Will others follow the example set by Russia and Israel, as happened in the 1910s and the 1930s?

Russia continues to meddle wherever it can, and Putin dreams of destroying the EU

U.S.-Chinese relations are increasingly adversarial, with continued spats over trade, advanced technology, and strategic influence, and both sides are developing scenarios for a possible war. The two countries’ rhetoric has grown more bellicose, too. China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomats, so named by Chinese officials after a popular movie series, excoriate those who dare to criticize or oppose Beijing, and American officials respond in kind.

How the world copes will depend on the strength of its institutions and, at crucial moments, on leadership. Weak and indecisive leaders may allow bad situations to get worse, as they did in 1914. Determined and ruthless ones can create wars, as they did in 1939. Wise and brave ones may guide the world through the storms. Let us hope the last group has read some history.

the 2020 election is the first in history where climate change has played a pivotal role in a major candidate’s campaign, even if the issue wasn’t always in the headlines.

For the last two years, Trump has repeatedly played to his base with various rejections of climate science. The Biden campaign, in contrast, has used the issue to carefully build a broad coalition.

A landmark climate report in the final months of 2018 sparked a global awakening on the issue and, in the U.S., the Sunrise Movement pressed politicians on the topic in high-profile protests.

Last summer, Biden introduced his first full-throated plan, which proposed a $1.7 trillion federal outlay over ten years to tackle climate change.

Biden’s all-in strategy on climate may have already paid dividends: analysts say the youth vote has surged in early voting.

Biden leaned in rather than back down. Two-thirds of Americans support aggressive action on climate change, according to a Pew Research poll released in June, one of many showing heightened voter concern over the issue.

a growing group of Americans rank the issue among their top concerns and cite it as a motivating factor in their political engagement.

To activate these voters, Biden created a handful of task forces and committees to address the issue. Climate change played a key role in a “unity task force” composed of Biden and Sanders supporters. Meanwhile, Biden convened a separate “advisory council” made up of high-profile environmental, labor and environmental justice leaders as well as climate activists to develop a common-ground plan.

Historically, candidates track to the center to appear more palatable for a general election audience. Widespread voter concern over the spread of COVID-19 also could have bumped the issue from Biden’s agenda.

In recent years, young people have been the most vocal activists calling for action on climate change, and Biden allies saw taking a vocal stance on the issue as a strategic move to push young people, who often stay home on Election Day, to the polls.

the campaign framed the $2 trillion program as an opportunity to create jobs, invest in protecting communities of color and decarbonize the economy. “It was not that they went off in a room and came up with it,”

“If you go out and talk to most young people in America right now, the issue at the top of their list is going to be climate change.”

“They asked us questions—policy questions, personal questions: what are you dealing with? What are you hearing?” says Justin Onwenu, a community organizer at the Sierra Club in Michigan and a member of the DNC’s platform committee. “I think that went a long way.”

“I’m the first person I’m aware of that went to every major labor union in the country and got them to sign on to my climate change plan,” Biden said on Pod Save America on Oct. 24. The move to engage unions almost served a prebuttal of the Trump campaign’s primary climate talking point: that addressing the global warming would be too expensive and cost jobs.

In recent years, Trump’s climate policy has largely consisted of rolling back regulations and aiding fossil fuel companies, policies that remain deeply unpopular with American voters. This cycle, the campaign’s message — which was sometimes disrupted by off-the-cuff remarks from Trump — has shifted the focus slightly, asserting not that climate change isn’t real, but that addressing it would be too costly.

“Joe Biden has even admitted that he will be an anti-energy president,” said Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and President Trump’s first energy secretary on a call of journalists. “Biden’s radical proposal to eliminate oil and gas and coal from the US power grid by 2035 will have a devastating consequence on workers and families.”

Trump’s messaging may resonate in some parts of Pennsylvania where the fracking industry employs some 25,000 and indirectly supports many more jobs. Trump has hammered home the talking point in messaging in the state, including TV ads running there.

Biden clarified that move would be gradual and not be completed during his time as president. He would, instead, end subsidies for fossil fuels. At the same time, he reiterated his promise to create more jobs in clean industry.

There’s a sense among the activists and strategists who have spent months if not years plotting how to engage voters on climate that the acknowledgement of the oil industry’s long-term decline may not have struck the chord that it would have even a few years ago.

“I think [Biden] has been on the defensive a bit,” on fracking, said Michael Catanzaro, a former energy and environmental policy advisor in the Trump White House, before the debate. “But I think it’s actually working for him… he’s talking to union voters. He’s using his blue collar roots to push back pretty hard.”

The biggest question thrown up by this history is why the West failed to see the danger earlier.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization made a statement in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join, and over nearly 14 years never followed through on membership. The EU drew up a trade deal with Ukraine without factoring in Russia’s strong-arm response. Western policies didn’t change decisively in reaction to limited Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, encouraging Mr. Putin to believe that a full-blown campaign to conquer Ukraine wouldn’t meet with determined resistance—either internationally or in Ukraine, a country whose independence he said repeatedly was a regrettable accident of history.

The roots of the war lie in Russia’s deep ambivalence about its place in the world after the end of the Soviet Union

Viewed from elsewhere in Europe, NATO’s eastward enlargement didn’t threaten Russia’s security. NATO membership is at core a promise to collectively defend a member that comes under attack. The alliance agreed in 1997 not to permanently station substantial combat forces in its new eastern members that were capable of threatening Russian territory. Russia retained a massive nuclear arsenal and the biggest conventional forces in Europe.

Mr. Putin thought of Russian security interests more broadly, linking the preservation of Moscow’s influence in adjacent countries with his goals of reviving Russia’s global power and cementing his authoritarian rule at home.

U.S. intelligence learned in 2005 that Mr. Putin’s government had carried out a broad review of Russian policy in the “near abroad,” as the Kremlin termed former Soviet republics. From now on, Russia would take a more assertive approach and vigorously contest perceived U.S. influence.

Mr. Bush asked Mr. Putin why he thought the end of the Soviet Union had been the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Surely the deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens in World War II was worse, Mr. Bush said. Mr. Putin replied that the USSR’s demise was worse because it had left 25 million Russians outside the Russian Federation, according to Ms. Rice, who was present.

Perceptions changed in January 2007, when Mr. Putin vented his growing frustrations about the West at the annual Munich Security Conference. In a long and icy speech, he denounced the U.S. for trying to rule a unipolar world by force, accused NATO of breaking promises by expanding into Europe’s east, and called the West hypocritical for lecturing Russia about democracy. A chill descended on the audience of Western diplomats and politicians at the luxury Hotel Bayerischer Hof, participants recalled.

“We didn’t take the speech as seriously as we should have,” said Mr. Ischinger. “It takes two to tango, and Mr. Putin didn’t want to tango any more.

“I need a MAP. We need to give the Ukrainian people a strategic focus on the way ahead. We really need this,” Mr. Yushchenko said, Ms. Rice recalled. Ms. Rice, who was initially uncertain about having Ukraine in NATO, gave a noncommittal answer. When the request was debated in the National Security Council, Mr. Bush said NATO should be open to all countries that qualify and want to join.

Try as it might, the White House couldn’t overcome German and French resistance to offering a MAP to Ukraine and Georgia.

Berlin and Paris pointed to unsolved territorial conflicts in Georgia, low public support for NATO in Ukraine, and the weakness of democracy and the rule of law in both.

Ms. Merkel, remembering Mr. Putin’s speech in Munich, believed he would see NATO invitations as a direct and deliberate threat to him, according to Christoph Heusgen, her chief diplomatic adviser at the time. She was also convinced Ukraine and Georgia would bring NATO no benefits as members, Mr. Heusgen said.

Ms. Rice, a Soviet and Russia expert, said Mr. Putin wanted to use Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia to rebuild Russia’s global power, and that extending the shield of NATO membership could be the last chance to stop him. German and French officials were skeptical, believing Russia’s economy was too weak and dependent on Western technology to become a serious threat again.

In the final session, Ms. Merkel debated in a corner of the room with leaders from Poland and other eastern members of NATO, who advocated strenuously on behalf of Ukraine and Georgia. Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus strongly criticized Ms. Merkel’s stance, warning that a failure to stop Russia’s resurgence would eventually threaten the eastern flank of the alliance.

“We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” it read. But it didn’t say when. And there was no MAP.

Many of Ukraine’s supporters were heartened. But some officials in Bucharest feared it was the worst of both worlds. NATO had just painted a target on the backs of Ukraine and Georgia without giving them any protection.

Mr. Putin joined the summit the next day. He spoke behind closed doors and made clear his disdain for NATO’s move, describing Ukraine as a “made-up” country.

“He then became a fervent nationalist,” said Mr. Heusgen. “His great anxiety was that Ukraine could become economically and politically successful and that the Russians would eventually ask themselves ‘Why are our brothers doing so well, while our situation remains dire?’ ”

Mr. Putin’s show of military force backfired politically. He had won control of Crimea and part of Donbas, but he was losing Ukraine.

divisions manifested themselves during Ukraine’s bitterly fought elections and during the Orange and Maidan revolutions. But they receded after 2014. Many Russophone Ukrainians fled from repression and economic collapse in separatist-run Donbas. Even eastern Ukraine came to fear Russian influence. Mr. Putin was doing what Ukrainian politicians had struggled with: uniting a nation.

Mr. Putin never tried to implement the Minsk accords, said Mr. Heusgen, the German chancellery aide, because their full implementation would have resolved the conflict and allowed Ukraine to move on.

At a conversation at the Hilton Hotel in Brisbane, Australia, during a G-20 summit in late 2014, Ms. Merkel realized that Mr. Putin had entered a state of mind that would never allow for reconciliation with the West, according to a former aide.

The conversation was about Ukraine, but Mr. Putin launched into a tirade against the decadence of democracies, whose decay of values, he said, was exemplified by the spread of “gay culture.”

The Russian warned Ms. Merkel earnestly that gay culture was corrupting Germany’s youth. Russia’s values were superior and diametrically opposed to Western decadence, he said

He expressed disdain for politicians beholden to public opinion. Western politicians were unable to be strong leaders because they were hobbled by electoral pressures and aggressive media, he told Ms. Merkel.

Ms. Merkel’s policy reflected a consensus in Berlin that mutually beneficial trade with the EU would tame Russian geopolitical ambitions.

The U.S. and some NATO allies, meanwhile, began a multiyear program to train and equip Ukraine’s armed forces, which had proved no match for Russia’s in Donbas.

The level of military support was limited because the Obama administration figured that Russia would retain a considerable military advantage over Ukraine and it didn’t want to provoke Moscow.

President Trump expanded the aid to include Javelin antitank missiles, but delayed it in 2019 while he pressed Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to look for information the White House hoped to use against Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden and Mr. Biden’s son, an act for which he was impeached.

in telephone conversations from 2020 onward, Mr. Macron noticed changes in Mr. Putin. The Russian leader was rigorously isolating himself during the Covid-19 pandemic, requiring even close aides to quarantine themselves before they could meet him.

The man on the phone with Mr. Macron was different from the one he had hosted in Paris and the Riviera. “He tended to talk in circles, rewriting history,” recalled an aide to Mr. Macron.

The U.S. no longer saw Europe as a primary focus. Mr. Biden wanted neither a “reset” of relations with Mr. Putin, like President Obama had declared in 2009, nor to roll back Russia’s power. The NSC cast the aim as a “stable, predictable relationship.” It was a modest goal that would soon be tested by Mr. Putin’s bid to rewrite the ending of the Cold War.

In early 2021, Mr. Biden became the latest U.S. president who wanted to focus his foreign policy on the strategic competition with China, only to become entangled in events elsewhere.

When Mr. Zelensky met with Mr. Biden in Washington in September, the U.S. finally announced the $60 million in military support, which included Javelins, small arms and ammunition. The aid was in line with the modest assistance the Obama and Trump administrations had supplied over the years, which provided Ukraine with lethal weaponry but didn’t include air defense, antiship missiles, tanks, fighter aircraft or drones that could carry out attacks.

U.S. national security officials discussed the highly classified intelligence at a meeting in the White House on Oct. 27. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned that Russian forces could be ready to attack by the end of January 2022.

On Nov. 17, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, urged the U.S. to send air defense systems and additional antitank weapons and ammunition during a meeting at the Pentagon, although he thought the initial Russian attacks might be limited.

Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Mr. Reznikov that Ukraine could be facing a massive invasion.

Work began that month on a new $200 million package in military assistance from U.S. stocks. The White House, however, initially held off authorizing it, angering some lawmakers. Administration officials calculated arms shipments wouldn’t be enough to deter Mr. Putin from invading if his mind was made up, and might even provoke him to attack.

The cautious White House approach was consistent with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s thinking. He favored a low-profile, gradual approach to assisting Ukraine’s forces and fortifying NATO’s defenses that would grow stronger in line with U.S. intelligence indications about Russia’s intent to attack.

A paramount goal was to avoid a direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces—what Mr. Austin called his “North Star.”

On Dec. 27, Mr. Biden gave the go-ahead to begin sending more military assistance for Ukraine, including Javelin antitank missiles, mortars, grenade launchers, small arms and ammunition.

Three days later, Mr. Biden spoke on the phone with Mr. Putin and said the U.S. had no plan to station offensive missiles in Ukraine and urged Russia to de-escalate. The two leaders were on different wavelengths. Mr. Biden was talking about confidence-building measures. Mr. Putin was talking about effectively rolling back the West.

Gen. Mingus had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, been wounded and earned a Purple Heart, and he spoke frankly about the challenges Russian forces would face. Invading a territory was one thing, but holding it was another, and the intervention could turn into a yearslong quagmire, he said. The Russians showed no reaction.

Mr. Macron found Mr. Putin even more difficult to talk to than previously, according to French officials. The six-hour conversation went round in circles as Mr. Putin gave long lectures about the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine and the West’s record of hypocrisy, while the French president tried to bring the conversation back to the present day and how to avoid a war.

Mr. Scholz argued that the international order rested on the recognition of existing borders, no matter how and when they had been created. The West would never accept unraveling established borders in Europe, he warned. Sanctions would be swift and harsh, and the close economic cooperation between Germany and Russia would end. Public pressure on European leaders to sever all links to Russia would be immense, he said.

Mr. Putin then repeated his disdain for weak Western leaders who were susceptible to public pressure.

Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. His answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading. Aides to Mr. Scholz believed Mr. Putin would maintain his military pressure on Ukraine’s borders to strangle its economy and then eventually move to occupy the country.

Mr. Putin said he had decided to recognize the independence of separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine. He said fascists had seized power in Kyiv, while NATO hadn’t responded to his security concerns and was planning to deploy nuclear missiles in Ukraine.

“We are not going to see each other for a while, but I really appreciate the frankness of our discussions,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Macron. “I hope we can talk again one day.”