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From Vox

So I think this is also about him feeling this is … I wouldn’t say his last chance, but one of his last chances to stand up for Russia and make sure that Russia asserts its real place in the world, forces the West to acknowledge that and in the process, that’s what gets him into the history books, [so] he’s a chapter rather than just a paragraph.

Dylan Matthews

Where things are today, how likely do you think an actual Russian incursion into Ukrainian territory is?

Mark Galeotti

I’m still optimistic. The military wonks are very pessimistic. They think it’s almost certain that there will be an invasion. The political wonks tend to be much more optimistic. I reckon it’s about 30 percent. It’s absolutely a possibility, but I don’t think [a military escalation is] Putin’s Plan A. It’s his Plan B or his Plan C, if he can’t get what he wants or enough of what he wants by political means, means which include the intimidating presence of a large number of Russian troops and heavy metal on Ukraine’s border.

Dylan Matthews

If Russia is partially doing this to try to extract concessions, what are the kind of concessions they want? Is there a deal that could be made with with Ukraine and with the United States that would satisfy them and avert conflict here?

Mark Galeotti

The only honest answer I could possibly give is, I don’t know.

We’re still trying to divine Putin’s real goals and above all, his appetite for risk. He’s trying to give the impression that he has this very maximalist list of demands. What he wants is Ukraine to be forced into a state of neutrality, which means that it will always be vulnerable to Russia, and guarantees that it’ll never join NATO, even though back in 2009, NATO had promised that Ukraine and Georgia would become members.

Also, he wants NATO basically rolled back to where it was in 1997. Countries which have already become members of NATO [such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechia] would either be kicked out or more likely would become second-class NATO members or something.

My view is that he must know that he’s not going to get that. To some people, that proves that war will definitely happen. But we can reassure Russia without giving away things that we shouldn’t be giving away. We can’t, for example, actually say Ukraine will no longer be allowed to join NATO, even though, if we’re honest, Ukraine is not going to join NATO for at least another decade.

But maybe what we can do is say, “Well, look, it’s going to take time anyway, but we will guarantee that we will not put NATO troops or security architecture on Ukrainian soil. Ukraine might come under the NATO’s umbrella of defense, but in peacetime, at least you’re not going to have to worry about that.”

There’s ways of trying to package things that are actually relatively reasonable. We’re going to have to package them up nicely in really big flowery wrapping paper with a nice silver bow because Putin is going to have to both feel that he’s made some kind of advances and also has to be able to tell his own people that he has triumphed.

Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images
Putin meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow on January 31.

Dylan Matthews

A deal does seem preferable to war, but I think there’s a fear that we can’t trust Putin. If we offer him a concession, next time he will do a similar ramp up, or attack Georgia again, or otherwise lash out to try to extract additional concessions. Is there a way to avoid it becoming a blackmail cycle, as opposed to a lasting settlement?

Mark Galeotti

It’s a fair point, and I think in some ways the answer is that there is a there is a strange and perverse legalism to Putin. This is a man who absolutely is willing to lie, cheat, blackmail and murder — not personally, but he’ll have people do it.

On the other hand, this is a man who does feel the need to observe the forms. He may rig elections, but he will hold elections. He won’t just simply declare that he will change the constitution to allow him to to stay in power. There will have to be a constitutional process and debates and a referendum and so forth.

It’s interesting that his demand, at the moment, is precisely that he wants pieces of paper. He wants formal written guarantees precisely because he doesn’t trust the West. Well, this gives us the opportunity also to look for full guarantees from Putin.

The honest answer is that actually our leverage on Putin is quite limited. Putin has spent the last seven and a half years turning Russia into as sanction-proof an economy as he can manage. And they’ve done a pretty good job of it. They have massive financial reserves in the West. They made a decision to favor security over economic growth. The Russian economy is pretty stagnant. But on the other hand, it’s also really hard to knock over.

The real thing that we could do that would absolutely devastate the Russian economy is not buy any Russian [natural] gas or oil, which is fine, except that it would mean massive increases in prices and massive shortages, particularly of gas in Europe. It’s winter now. How many people are willing to say I’m perfectly happy for granny to freeze to death so long as I show that nasty Mr. Putin what I think of his policies towards Ukraine?

I think there is a point where we have to be realistic. We can do harm to Putin. Absolutely. And if he escalates, we can and we should. But on the other hand, if he is absolutely willing to take that hit, there’s nothing we can do. The reason why he probably won’t escalate in Ukraine is not so much because of Western sanctions. It’s because the Ukrainians will fight, the Ukrainian military is stronger than it has ever been. The Russians will win, but if they’re going to try and occupy territory and particularly go into cities, you know, they’re going to face a nation up in arms against them.

The Russians would absolutely hate [this parallel], but the only real parallel I can draw is what happened in Ukraine during World War II. The Germans invaded and they faced this massive mobilized Partizan resistance. Well, okay, this is going to be a slightly different war. But nonetheless, that’s the kind of challenge.

In Guinea-Bissau, for example, the recent attempted coup is one of many since the nation gained its independence from Portugal in 1974, the Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Bariyo writes. The nation has struggled to establish democratic traditions and institutions; notably, President Umaro Sissoco Embaló — the man whom this week’s failed coup tried to oust — came to power in 2020, after a contested election which was still being reviewed by the nation’s Supreme Court when Embaló took office.

And in Guinea — a separate country that borders the smaller Guinea-Bissau — last year’s successful coup came after President Alpha Condé changed the constitution and mounted a power grab that gave him a third term in office. Although he initially won a democratic election in 2010 — the first Guinean leader to do so — his power grab, combined with corruption and deep inequality, apparently provided the impetus the military needed to mount a takeover last September.

The mechanics of these takeovers are different as well; for example, Chad’s military led a “covert coup” last year, installing the son of the deceased President Idriss Deby, himself a military commander, as the leader in violation of the constitution. The younger Deby’s government is supposed to be “transitional” — his father was Chad’s authoritarian leader for three decades — but since it abolished the constitution and dissolved the previous government and Parliament, it’s not clear where such a transition could lead.

Sudan’s coup, too, came after decades of authoritarian rule; after civil society leadership organized mass protests and ousted former dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, a transitional government comprising military and civilian leadership took over. That power-sharing agreement briefly set Sudan on a democratic trajectory before the military took over last year, eventually leading to civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s resignation this past January.

Characterizing the coups as contagious also discounts the influence of outside powers, Sany and Siegle told Vox — primarily Russia and China, and to a lesser extent, Turkey and Gulf states like Qatar. Broadly speaking, these nations don’t necessarily foment coups, but they do take advantage of instability to support regimes that allow them to exercise influence, legitimize their own antidemocratic systems, and extract resources from nations rich in diamonds, bauxite, and other valuable materials.

“It fits the mold of situations where you have an unelected, unaccountable military leader who doesn’t have a lot of political support, so make him indebted to the Russians,” Siegle said of the recent coup in Guinea. “They’ll get access to their iron ore, and [a military leader will] give them political cover. So I see them as very vulnerable to that kind of influence.”

“If you want to know where Russia will go next, look for instability,” Sany said, pointing to the situations in Mali and Burkina Faso in particular. According to Siegle, the junta in Mali in particular, facing a security crisis due to Islamist extremism, is heavily reliant on mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group — a costly arrangement which could further erode the junta’s ability to provide basic services for people, creating fertile ground for further instability. Economic and social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as anti-French, anti-colonial sentiment, Sany said, made for “an explosive cocktail.”

“These military leaders were very savvy to take control,” he said.

That points to another commonality in the recent takeovers, Siegle told Vox. “The coup leaders themselves aren’t necessarily saying what they’re going to do differently, and I think that the similarity that we’re seeing across all the coups is these military actors, which all happen to be mid-level, colonel-level military leaders, they all seem more intent on seizing power and holding power for power’s sake,” he said. “They’re not offering some sort of reformist agenda, a security plan, somehow a return to democracy or improving government, or reducing corruption — anything along those lines.”

The long- term outcome of coups could depend on outside intervention

Despite their initial success, Sany and Siegle both told Vox, many of these coup leaders will fail in the long term because they’re not equipped to govern, and because they’re working in countries that don’t have the institutions to deliver on any promises they might make. Given that possibility, the road ahead for these nations is unclear at best.

In Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups, Naunihal Singh, a professor at the US Naval War College, points out that citizen and civil society groups can rarely influence military coups as they are happening, and the undoing of a government takeover or the transition to democracy depends either upon fractiousness within the military or the intervention of outside forces, and often a combination of the two.

And there’s good reason for the world to take notice: According to Singh, the “frequency and ubiquity” of coups means they pose a real problem for other democracies.

“Indeed,” Singh writes, “coups are responsible for roughly 75% of democratic failures, making them the single largest danger to democracy.”

That presents outside powers with a choice: work with civil society leaders and military governments to help these nations develop and strengthen institutions and a timeline for democratic transition, or exploit the chaos to gain a foothold for resource extraction and further exploitation, as Russia has done in several recent cases.

However, sanctioning these nations and isolating them, as the European Union and the US have done to Malian coup leaders, does nothing but harm the citizens of those countries and only pushes coup leadership away from democratic foundations, Sany said. “We are asking these nations to be like Denmark, when they don’t have the resources,” he told Vox.

According to Sany, Western countries and institutions — which have their own vested interests in the region; their own brutal, exploitative, and extractive history of colonialism in Africa; and their own strangleholds on poor nations in the form of debt — impress upon unstable nations with undemocratic leadership the importance of the rule of law and punish them when they don’t live up to those ideals, but don’t speak to the actual needs of the people living in those nations.

Nor, he said, do they present particularly viable pathways for a transition to democracy: “By putting on blanket sanctions, you alienate and punish citizens” without addressing the root cause of the instability, Sany told Vox, precipitating further instability and potentially even further coups.

Instead, according to Sany, Western powers need to work better with these countries to look honestly at the root causes of conflict, poverty, and instability; help them build up and invest in stronger institutions; and work with civil society and military leaders to lay out a path to democratic transition. Furthermore, working with regional groups like ECOWAS and neighboring African countries to encourage cooperation and reduce isolation can be an effective way to reduce the risk of undemocratic takeovers, since peer nations can be highly influential, he said.

Without support for democratic systems, civil society, and institutions for justice and transparency, Sany warns, history will repeat itself.

“Coup breeds coup,” he said. “There will be protracted instability unless the world community gets involved.”

Many candidate cities for the Winter Olympics — including past hosts — won’t be consistently cold or snowy enough to hold the games in the future. This means the pool of host cities will shrink drastically, or hosts will have to spend far more time, money, and energy to prepare for future Winter Olympics. For example, Chamonix and Innsbruck in the Alps — a mountain range that lends its name to the Olympic event of Alpine skiing — may have to be ruled out for good if greenhouse gas emissions continue spewing unchecked.

Chart comparing Slippery Slopes: How climate change is threatening the Winter Olympics
Potential Winter Olympics host cities may have less reliable conditions for the Games depending on different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.

Climate change could become a crisis for winter sports

Beyond the Olympics, winter recreation areas like ski resorts are becoming more expensive to operate or are struggling to stay open, increasingly making winter sports the purview of the privileged elite. By one estimate, the winter recreation season in the US will be cut in half by 2050.

Without direct experience, fans may have a harder time getting interested in and following professional winter sports, according to Kellison. “I do think as participation goes down in these sports, there will be concerns about the [fandom] of that sport at the highest levels,” he said.

The love of winter sports poses a dilemma for some fans and athletes. “To face a future without these sports is challenging, but it’s equally challenging to wrestle with the massive environmental footprint that our sport can have, from the emissions involved in getting to the mountain, to snowmaking, and the energy involved in operating lifts and lights and all the rest,” said Madeline Orr, founder of the Sport Ecology Group and a lecturer Loughborough University London, in an email. “That said, I have full confidence the industry and snow sports community will find ways to continue innovating on this issue and finding ways to adapt, because snow sports are central to our culture.”

For Jones, the big mountain snowboarder, climate change has made him rethink how he pursues his career. “My approach drastically changed to the point of way less travel, and no longer embracing helicopters and snowmobiles,” Jones said. He said he’s “really focusing on human power — foot-power snowboarding where I’m hiking these mountains.”

He acknowledged that in the big picture, losing places to ski, snowshoe, and snowboard are less devastating than other impacts of climate change. Rising winter temperatures are slowing the accumulation of snowpack in key watersheds, and in areas like the Sierra Nevada, that’s leading to patterns of flooding in the winter and drought in the summer. Declining snowpack is a key factor in wildfire risk and recovery in the Western US. Warmer winters are also fueling more severe allergy seasons, helping disease-carrying critters spread further, and creating a mismatch between flowering plants and their pollinators.

But winter sports also help create more than $800 billion in economic activity in the US, support more than 7 million jobs, and inspire millions to head outdoors into chilly weather, according to Protect Our Winters. The Winter Olympics are a prime opportunity to channel the world’s attention toward a threat and motivate people to find solutions.

“To me, it’s this opportunity to collectively come together around trying to save winter,” Jones said. “We need urgency on climate action.”

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