There is nothing to discuss

Recently: What do you do if you’re the European Union, sitting on €200 billion belonging to the Kremlin? Sir William Browder on a potential turning point in the Ukraine war.

Today: Putin addressed his Defense Ministry on Wednesday. His message: We’re going to take what we always wanted.

+ For members: What happened to the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong? Glacier Kwong on Beijing’s political and security takeover of the enclave.

& New music from Nas and DJ Premier ...

‘Historical lands’

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addressed his Defense Ministry’s annual board meeting on Wednesday with a remarkable message for Washington: There is nothing to negotiate. If Ukraine and its European backers refuse “substantive discussions,” he said, Russia will achieve “the liberation of its historical lands” by military force. He praised North Korean troops fighting in the Kursk region. He announced the Oreshnik hypersonic missile will enter combat duty by year’s end. He called European warnings of Russian aggression “lies and nonsense.”

The timing was pointed. U.S. and European negotiators have spent weeks assembling what U.S. officials describe as the most serious security package ever offered to Kyiv—guarantees along the lines of NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense pact, a multinational force, a path to Senate ratification. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy indicated he’d drop Ukraine’s NATO membership bid in exchange. And Putin’s response was an ultimatum dressed as a policy address.

So what counts as “substantive discussions” in Moscow’s view? Putin didn’t say. What he meant by “historical lands”—the annexed oblasts, everything east of the Dnipro, or all of Ukraine—he left undefined. But the speech made one thing unambiguous: Russia isn’t responding to American pressure with counteroffers. It’s responding with conditions Washington can’t deliver and Kyiv can’t accept. Whether this is a negotiating posture or a final answer, nothing since Istanbul 2022 suggests there’s a difference. … See “Putin’s dreams.”

Meanwhile

• The Senate and the strikes. The U.S. Senate voted 77-20 on Wednesday to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, a $901 billion military policy bill that includes a provision withholding part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon provides Congress with video of strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. The bill also requires a 48-hour notice before cutting intelligence support to Ukraine and maintains troop levels in Europe.
• ‘Top secret.’ Hegseth told reporters on Tuesday that the Pentagon won’t release the full video of the September 2 strike—which included a follow-up missile that killed two survivors of the initial attack—calling it classified. Democrats described the briefing as “incoherent”; Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said the video should be shared with all of Congress. The strike has drawn accusations from some lawmakers that it constituted a war crime.
• Fifty-nine charges. Australian authorities charged Naveed Akram, 24, with 59 offenses on Wednesday—including 15 counts of murder and one count of committing a terrorist act—after he emerged from a coma following an attack police say was motivated by ISIS propaganda on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. His father, who was killed at the scene, had traveled with him to the southern Philippines in November. The first funerals began under tight security.
• Safi underwater. Morocco launched a nationwide emergency relief operation on Tuesday after flash floods killed at least 37 people in the coastal city of Safi on Sunday—the country’s deadliest such disaster in over two decades. A single hour of torrential rain flooded homes and businesses in the historic old town and swept cars through the streets. Prosecutors are now investigating infrastructure failures that residents say they’ve been warning about for years.
• Tens of thousands. Satellite imagery analyzed by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab shows Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed civilians on a massive scale after capturing al-Fasher in late October, then systematically destroyed evidence—burning, burying, and removing human remains over several weeks. Researchers identified 150 clusters of objects consistent with bodies; 38 percent disappeared within a month. The estimated death toll, “likely in the tens of thousands.” … See “The vanishing of al-Fasher.”

For members

Who’s afraid of Jimmy Lai?

What happened to the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong? Glacier Kwong on Beijing’s political and security takeover of the enclave.

On December 15, Hong Kong’s High Court convicted Jimmy Lai on two charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one charge of conspiracy to publish seditious materials. Lai, 78, was the publisher of the now-defunct newspaper Apple Daily, which authorities shut down in June 2021.

Lai fled China at 12 and built a fortune in Hong Kong, founding successful retail and media businesses. He now faces a life sentence, with his pre-sentencing hearing scheduled for January 12. Lai was convicted under the national-security law Beijing imposed on the enclave in 2020, following months of massive street protests against a bill that would have allowed the extradition of some criminal suspects to the mainland.

In the years before the 2019 demonstrations, mainland authorities had steadily tightened controls on political dissent and freedom of speech in Hong Kong. After the protests, police arrested thousands of pro-democracy activists—and hundreds of journalists, including about a dozen from Apple Daily.

What was Apple Daily?

For decades, it was Hong Kong’s main pro-democracy newspaper—immensely popular, even though it was often sensationalist, as Glacier Kwong explores here in The Signal. It was also a frequent critic of the government in Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party elites, and of their rampant corruption, in particular.

The paper was part of an extensive network of pro-democracy activists, and its closure left many of them deeply shaken. It made clear how far repression from the mainland had accelerated, says Glacier, who was a pro-democracy activist and former Apple Daily columnist before fleeing Hong Kong in July 2020.

The crackdown following the 2019 protests largely crushed the pro-democracy movement. Many activists continue looking for ways to keep resistance to authoritarianism alive, but China’s efforts to stifle dissent and free expression appear to have been effective.

“Most of my friends are activists,” Glacier says, “and 80 percent of them are either behind bars or in exile in different places around the world.”

New music

‘GiT Ready’

Nas and DJ Premier have been collaborating for three decades. Their new record has moments of corniness—Nas raps he’s the “cryptocurrency Scarface,” which, sure—but his flow is great and Premier’s production is as sharp as ever.