Russia’s recruitment efforts are getting increasingly desperate

Tempting the Tatars

While the global effort to support Ukraine was the central focus of last week’s NATO summit, Russia’s recruitment efforts are getting increasingly desperate. The central Russian region of Tatarstan, home to 2 million of Russia’s 5.3 million ethnic minority Turkic group, is offering 100,000 rubles to anyone who can persuade their friends or relatives to fight for Moscow in Ukraine. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

The move follows the increase in January of the maximum conscription age from 27 to 30, and the recruitment of untrained soldiers lacking military skills and experience. It’s hardly the best look for a military force that expected to take Kyiv within five days, but instead has lost over 350,000 troops, and is now stuck in a bloody stalemate more than two years on.

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The number of EU countries who met the deadline for filing a National Energy and Climate Plan, which details each nation’s plan to hit its share of the EU’s environmental targets.

Oh, dear. Looks like Europe’s political leaders are too preoccupied with trivialities like immigration, inflation, and rising geopolitical tensions. This democracy business really does have a habit of upending the agendas of unelected bureaucrats and NGOs, doesn’t it?

DSA Drops AOC

The Democratic Socialists of America has dropped its endorsement for one of Congress’s most high-profile radical lefties and anti-Israel voices, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Their former protégée’s crime? Hosting a panel with two Jewish activists condemning anti-Semitism and BDS, supporting the Iron Dome, and refusing to back the decriminalization of anti-Zionist activities. That was too much for DSA, who accused AOC of conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (how terrible!) and they also mentioned her support for a House resolution that acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.

It’s a surprising about-face for AOC, not known to be a friend of Israel, and likely has more to do with her constituency, which includes parts of Queens and the Bronx, than any change in attitude. But perhaps the DSA’s blatant disregard for combatting anti-Semitism, which all mainstream parties pay lip service to, will open her eyes to what kind of people she’s been allying with until now.

“Myself.”

—Embattled French president Emmanuel Macron, in answer to the question, “With whom do you share your deepest feelings when the burden of office weighs you down?”

The answer, which smacks of arrogance and hubris, goes some way to explain both his past behavior and current woes. Pretentious photoshoots that portray the dapper former banker as a heroic strongman, and the decision to call snap parliamentary elections that have created needless political chaos, are evidence of a man besotted with his image and slightly deluded about his own capabilities.

Who’s Up

Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, whose coalition of far-right parties in the European Parliament has gained the support of Austrian, Czech, Slovakian, Italian, and French like-minded parties.

Right-wing populists across Europe see him as a model of an electorally successful hardliner who punches above his weight, and they’re plumping for his alliance over the center-right European People’s Party (the largest group in the European Parliament).

Orban, who’s won four consecutive elections since 2010, is thoroughly enjoying winding up the EU, whose rotating presidency Hungary currently holds. His provocative visit to Moscow last week has unnerved Brussels, but six months into the presidency, they can do little except stew. Which is just how Orban likes it.

Who’s Down

Former Conservative home secretary and right-wing hardliner Suella Braverman.

She was sacked by Rishi Sunak in late 2023, and has been agitating for bolder immigration policies ever since, pitching for the leadership even before the election was lost. But as the post-election Tory leadership race kicks off, insiders say her campaign is “already dead,” with her mentor and veteran MP John Hayes reportedly backing the more centrist-but-still-hawkish-on-immigration Robert Jenrick.

Meanwhile, former business secretary — and current frontrunner — Kemi Badenoch has said Braverman is having “a very public nervous breakdown.” Ouch.

Meta Endorses Martyrdom

Social media giant Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, announced last week it would remove the ban on the word shahid (Arabic for martyr) on all its platforms, because an independent  oversight board (funded by Meta) said the rule failes to account for the word’s “variety of meanings, as it has a broad range of religious uses.”

It was the most-removed word or phrase on Meta’s platform last year, and it stretches credulity to ignore the “coincidence” that the last three months of 2023 were dominated by events in Israel. So the idea that the proliferation of shahid on Meta in 2023 was, on balance, innocent, is for the birds.

While Meta pledged to remove any violent content using the word shahid, it’s clear that the glorification of violence against Israel is not enough to outweigh the potential inconvenience of social media users having to find a synonym for whatever else it was they intended to call shahid. Another logic-defying move from the corporate establishment that signals to Israel that it’s very much alone.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1020)