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Biden’s strategy with Putin is decades in the making

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Biden’s strategy with Putin is decades in the making

In response to a dozen interviews with White Home officers, members of Congress and others concerned within the effort, Biden has intentionally labored with allies overseas to disclaim the Russian chief the one-on-one, Washington vs. Moscow dynamic that the President and his aides assume Putin desires. Publicly and privately speaking concerning the warfare as a struggle for freedom and democracy, Biden has left different leaders to talk with Putin.

“What Putin is making an attempt to do is encompass and encircle Kyiv,” stated Rep. Greg Meeks, a Democrat who’s chairman of the Home International Affairs Committee. “What Biden is making an attempt to do is have the entire world encompass Putin.”

A part of the lesson Biden took from being concerned as vp throughout Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea was that NATO nations would wish a a lot quicker, extra humiliating and extra cohesive response than the months of infighting that produced sanctions so weak that Putin rode them out. But administration officers admit privately that if Putin had invaded Ukraine a yr in the past, occasions may need unfolded a lot otherwise coming proper off 4 years of former President Donald Trump’s damaging relationships and calling NATO out of date.

Campaigning in 2020, Biden spoke concerning the confrontation he noticed coming.

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“Putin has one overriding goal: To interrupt NATO, to weaken the Western alliance and to additional diminish our capacity to compete within the Pacific by figuring out one thing with China,” Biden instructed CNN’s Gloria Borger on the time. “And it isn’t going to occur on my watch.”

Biden’s personal final dialog with Putin was on February 12, greater than every week earlier than the invasion began. And for a President and aides who on virtually the whole lot else complain that they do not get the credit score they deserve, on Ukraine he and administration officers have ducked discuss him being chief of the free world, regardless of how a lot of the sanctions and worldwide response are a results of Washington’s steerage and strain.

The result’s Putin’s being boxed in additional than even Biden had anticipated, together with a sustained degree of consideration to the warfare overseas and in America that has stunned White Home aides — with out rebooting a Eighties-style Chilly Struggle.

“Joe Biden,” a senior administration official stated, “has recognized Vladimir Putin for many years and is aware of precisely who he is coping with.”

Reducing Putin off — actually and figuratively

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Reducing off Putin started, as Biden may say, actually.

At any time when they’d communicate, Biden would interrupt Putin because the Russian President launched into complaints that American officers see as a whataboutism tactic designed to distract and undermine.

No, Biden would say, that is not what we’re speaking about, in keeping with one senior administration official who has witnessed these conversations. Or, no, that is not how issues occurred 20 or 25 years in the past, in whichever previous grievance Putin was bringing as much as justify his conduct.

“President Putin cannot use a variety of his widespread tips with President Biden, like making an attempt to confuse individuals by taking place lengthy historic tangents or meandering into the trivialities of insurance policies as a result of President Biden sees these ways coming a mile away and does not take the bait. He’ll attempt to get President Biden off subject by citing an obscure part of the Minsk agreements or a speech somebody gave within the late Nineteen Nineties,” a senior administration official stated, including that Biden “goes to all the time steer the dialog instantly again to what he is come to speak about.”

Biden has typically instructed a narrative of a gathering with Putin on the Kremlin in 2011, when he was vp, and telling the Russian chief, “I am trying in your eyes and do not assume you have got a soul” — a reducing response to President George W. Bush’s notorious 2001 feedback getting a way of Putin’s soul from trying him within the eye and discovering him to be “very easy and reliable.” A Biden administration official, in contrast, despatched CNN highlights of Biden’s historical past on the subject over time, from calling Putin a “bully” in 2006 to calling him a “kleptomaniac” in 2019.

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A White Home aide who was within the State of affairs Room for a rushed Nationwide Safety Council assembly on February 10 stated Biden’s sense of Putin was on show all through how he ran the dialog by which the White Home’s evaluation of an invasion moved from a risk to an virtually certainty.

“He was clear and clear eyed in that assembly that he believed that Putin would do that,” the aide stated. “He spoke with the expertise of anyone who is aware of Putin and has handled Putin.”

Biden learns from 2014 and the significance of unity

Biden thinks he would not have the ability to hold the present ranges of unity — within the US and all over the world — if Putin sparked the type of partisan breakdown that he did in 2014, when many prime Republicans spoke admiringly of his energy and management largely as a result of he was taking up Barack Obama.

Biden hasn’t — as some in his celebration need — gone after Trump, introduced up the assault on the 2016 elections or attacked Republicans for voting towards the previous President’s first impeachment when Trump leveraged withholding navy support to Ukraine — in pursuit of filth on Biden.

“The disaster in Ukraine is clarifying what was at stake again then, and there ought to be accountability for that,” stated Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Home Democrats’ marketing campaign arm. “I do not assume it is sensible to play politics with a warfare. I believe it is sensible to be an ethical voice for what’s proper and what’s incorrect — and I am proud that I belong to a celebration, and we’ve a president, who is aware of the nice guys and the unhealthy guys in Ukraine. And the opposite aspect appears to be fighting that.”

That message will not be coming from the President himself.

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“Putin needed to divide us. We have been united. It is vital that we ship that sign to the world,” the White Home aide stated.

Most Republicans — with a number of notable outliers, together with Trump’s personal clear wrestle to attempt to erase the reminiscence that his first response to the invasion was calling Putin “good” and “savvy” — haven’t gone on the assault towards Biden, regardless of many variations amongst Republicans and Democrats alike about particulars of the President’s response.

Republicans haven’t, although, been satisfied on the opposite a part of Biden’s technique: Calling rising gasoline prices “Putin’s worth hike” and “Putin’s fuel tax” as an try to assuage voters.

“These are usually not Putin fuel costs. They’re President Biden fuel costs,” Home Minority Chief Kevin McCarthy stated final week.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Chief Mitch McConnell added, “It is fairly clear that Vladimir Putin just isn’t the reason for this rampant inflation.”

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White Home aides are monitoring all of the Republicans within the Home and Senate who’re calling for harder power sanctions on Russia — getting ready to attempt to undermine them as hypocrites in the event that they complain about greater fuel costs on the marketing campaign path this fall. However on the similar time, Biden himself has saved up outreach to Republican lawmakers.

That is included personally briefing all 4 prime congressional leaders collectively final month and stunning a bipartisan delegation to the Munich Safety Convention with a name to thank them for his or her assist. Throughout that decision, Vice President Kamala Harris held her cellphone to a microphone so the lawmakers may hear Biden talking from behind the desk within the Oval Workplace.

Putin has been monitoring what Biden has been doing and saying about him for years. That features pleasant Russian commentators complaining in 2009 that Biden was a “grey cardinal” secretly orchestrating a troublesome Obama administration response to Putin’s management after the then-vice president stated Russia was limping alongside, or a Kremlin spokesman on Thursday saying that Biden’s warfare legal comment was “unacceptable and unforgivable.”

Whilst Biden has ramped up what he is been saying about Putin, there’s solely to date he can go earlier than tripping into the escalation he is so desperately making an attempt to keep away from.

“It hurts him to see the devastation in Ukraine, and it could be straightforward to say, ‘That man’s evil and we’re going after him and we’ll get him,’” Meeks stated. “The query is: Is that the fitting factor? As a result of then you definitely’re speaking about World Struggle III.”

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Russia launches Christmas Day attack on Ukraine’s energy system

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Russia launches Christmas Day attack on Ukraine’s energy system

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Russia has carried out a Christmas Day attack on Ukraine’s energy system, leaving more than half a million people without heating, water and electricity. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attack, the 13th large-scale assault of 2024 on the country’s grid, was “deliberate” and not a coincidence. “What could be more inhuman?” he wrote on X.

About 50 of the 70 missiles fired in the attack were intercepted, along with a “significant” portion of the more than 100 attack drones deployed, he added.

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This year Ukrainians marked Christmas Day on December 25 for the second time, after switching to the western Gregorian calendar last year. The decision to stop celebrating Christmas on January 7 in line with the Orthodox calendar was made by Kyiv to break with Russian influence.

Oleh Syniehubov, governor of Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, told Ukraine’s national television news that the attack had left more than 500,000 people without heating, water and electricity.

Temperatures across Ukraine are around freezing point.

Heating supplies were also cut in some areas of Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, in the west and south of the country. 

Ukraine’s energy grid operator, Ukrenergo, urged consumers to limit consumption by not switching on multiple appliances at once, adding that the system was still recovering from the previous Russian attack on December 13.

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Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said that its power stations had been damaged and one of its long-term employees killed.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, said on X that the attack reflects Russian President Vladimir Putin’s response to “those who spoke about illusionary ‘Christmas ceasefire’”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said last week that Zelenskyy had rejected his proposal for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange on the January 7 Orthodox Christmas.

Ukraine denied that such a proposal was ever on the table, asking Hungary to “refrain from manipulations” regarding the war. On Friday, Heorhii Tykhyi, spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, described it as “PR, a move” by Orbán.

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American Airlines lifts ground stop that froze Christmas Eve travelers

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American Airlines lifts ground stop that froze Christmas Eve travelers

An American Airlines agent talks to a customer at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Ill., last week. On Tuesday, the airline issued a national halt to flights.

Kamil Krzacznski/AFP via Getty Images


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Kamil Krzacznski/AFP via Getty Images

American Airlines passengers across the U.S. endured a sudden disruption of service on Christmas Eve, as a “technical issue” forced the airline to request a nationwide ground stop of its operations.

“The ground stop has now been lifted,” the Federal Aviation Administration told NPR shortly after 8 a.m. ET.

On Facebook and X, passengers shared stories of boarding planes early on Christmas Eve — only to be left waiting on the tarmac. In some cases, they described being told the flight would return to its gate so everyone onboard could deplane.

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The ground stop lasted for about one hour, according to the airline.

 “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning,” the airline said.

In a statement sent to NPR, American says the widespread delays were caused by a “vendor technology issue” affecting systems that are needed for a flight to be “released” — one of the final key steps before a plane takes off from an airport.

Early circumstances around Tuesday’s outage seemed ominous, reminding travelers of a nightmare scenario that played out two years ago when computer problems fueled a meltdown for Southwest Airlines as it tried to cope with bad weather during the holidays.

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Southwest stranded millions of travelers — and was later ordered to pay a $140 million civil penalty.

Aviation industry veterans like George Hamlin, a consultant, notes that Southwest took the brunt of the blame for the meltdown — but, he adds, “now we’re finding out that it’s a larger, more endemic problem than that.”

Delayed American Airlines passengers who posted to social media Tuesday said pilots blamed the slowdown on a computer system that aims to ensure an optimal center of gravity by balancing planes’ cargo weight and other factors.

Winter weather also threatens to snarl Christmas Eve travel, including storms along the East and West Coasts of the U.S.

The FAA’s operations page shows nearly a dozen airports were deicing planes Tuesday morning, including at Philadelphia International, and Dulles International and Reagan National outside Washington, D.C.

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If you’re flying, the FAA recommends checking your airline’s flight status updates for potential delays. As of 9 a.m. ET, the FlightAware website’s “Misery Map” showed some 544 flights had been delayed and five canceled since 6 a.m. Nearly 120 of those delays were at Charlotte, N.C.’s, airport.

Nearly 12.7 million passengers are expected to fly on American Airlines this winter holiday season, comprising more than 118,000 flights, according to the airline. The most-traveled days in that span are both Fridays, ahead of and just after Christmas.

NPR’s Joel Rose contributed reporting.

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Private equity payouts fell 50% short in 2024

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Private equity payouts fell 50% short in 2024

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Private equity funds cashed out just half the value of investments they typically sell in 2024, the third consecutive year payouts to investors have fallen short because of a deal drought.

Buyout houses typically sell down 20 per cent of their investments in any given year, but industry executives forecast that cash payouts for the year would be about half that figure.

Cambridge Associates, a leading adviser to large institutions on their private equity investments, estimated that funds had fallen about $400bn short in payments to their investors over the past three years compared with historical averages.

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The data underline the increasing pressure on firms to find ways to return cash to investors, including by exiting more investments in the year ahead.

Firms have struggled to strike deals at attractive prices since early 2022, when rising interest rates caused financing costs to soar and corporate valuations to fall.

Dealmakers and their advisers expect that merger and acquisition activity will accelerate in 2025, potentially helping the industry work through what consultancy Bain & Co. has called a “towering backlog” of $3tn in ageing deals that must be sold in the years ahead.

Several large public offerings this year including food transport giant Lineage Logistics, aviation equipment specialist Standard Aero and dermatology group Galderma have provided private equity executives with confidence to take companies public, while Donald Trump’s election has added to Wall Street exuberance.

But Andrea Auerbach, global head of private investments at Cambridge Associates, cautioned that the industry’s issues could take years to work through.

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“There is an expectation that the wheels of the exit market will start to turn. But it doesn’t end in one year, it will take a couple of years,” Auerbach said.

Private equity firms have used novel tactics to return cash to investors while holdings have proved difficult to sell.

They have made increasing use of so-called continuation funds — where one fund sells a stake in one or more portfolio companies to another fund to another fund the firm manages — to engineer exits.

Jefferies forecasts that there will be $58bn of continuation fund deals in 2024, representing a record 14 per cent of all private equity exits. Such funds made up just 5 per cent of all exits in the boom year of 2021, Jefferies found.

But some private equity investors are sceptical that the industry will be able to sell assets at prices close to funds’ current valuations.

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“You have a huge amount of capital that has been invested on assumptions that are no longer valid,” a large industry investor told the Financial Times.

They warned that a record $1tn-plus in buyouts were struck in 2021, just before interest rates rose, and many deals are carried on firms’ books at overly optimistic valuations.

Goldman Sachs recently noted in a report that private equity asset sales, which had historically been done at a premium of at least 10 per cent to funds’ internal valuations, have in recent years been made at discounts of 10-15 per cent.

“[Private] equity in general is still over-marked, which is leading to this situation where assets are still stuck,” said Michael Brandmeyer of Goldman Sachs Asset Management in the report.

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