Press Review: Musk’s Twitter Files, Dark Christmas at Kyiv, Finnish Confessions

Elon Musk and Twitter: It’s the Christmas gift pairing that nobody asked for but that somehow keeps on giving. The social’s new owner has access to internal Twitter emails that the Daily Mail reported “show staffers censoring tweets at the behest of the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign.” Now, in the name of transparency, Mr. Musk has shared those emails with a journalist, Matt Taibbi, who on Friday night started posting them on — you guessed it — Twitter. In another part of the world, other concerns: Will there be Chrismas lights at Kyiv this month? As Russia’s war against Ukraine lurches toward the 10-month mark, it is not looking very likely. Although Kyiv’s indefatigable mayor, Vitali Klitschko, told the RBC-Ukraine news agency, “No one is going to cancel the New Year and Christmas,” Reuters reported that Christmas trees will be erected around the capital but without lights as rolling blackouts continue.Despite the $4.5 billion in budgetary support for Ukraine that Secretary Yellen announced in late November — on top of military aid — the Kyiv Independent reported on Friday that according to Ukraine’s economy minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, the embattled country’s GDP is expected to plunge by more than a third this year due to Russian missile strikes on energy infrastructure. Yet if you ask the world’s biggest Grinch, Vladimi Putin, he would have you believe that Ukraine forced his hand. In an hour-long phone call with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the Russian president insisted that Moscow “had long refrained from precision missile strikes against certain targets on the territory of Ukraine” but that “now such measures have become a forced and inevitable response to Kyiv’s provocative attacks on Russia’s civilian infrastructure.” Mr. Putin then referenced the attack in October on a modern bridge in Russia-annexed Crimea.No matter where one travels this time of year, the repercussions of the war in Europe are seldom very far behind. They followed Finland’s young prime minister, Sanna Marin, to Australia, where, in the course of an official visit, she copped to European weakness. In a speech delivered at Sydney, Ms. Marin said, “I have to be completely honest with you: Europe is not strong enough at the moment, we would be in trouble without the U.S.” She added that Europe for a long time followed a strategy aimed at “buying energy from Russia, we thought that this would prevent a war” — an approach that in her estimation turned out to be “very bad.”President Trump, of course, had warned Europe in general and Germany specifically to think twice about becoming overdependent on Russian fuel. The New YorkTimes on Friday reported on how a “shadowy arm” of the German state actually helped a Russian energy giant, Gazprom, complete the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The pipeline “was a priority for Moscow and Berlin alike, with German officials from both major parties acting as eager cheerleaders,” according to the Times. No gas has been coming through the Nord Stream pipelines following a mystery explosion in September, but Russian oil still flows — though EU diplomats have finally agreed to cap the price at $60 a barrel. In the meantime the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, ended her week at Athens, where she participated in a parley of the European People’s Party, saying in a tweet, “We need to improve our toolbox to support households and businesses dealing with high energy prices.”That’s innocuous enough, but something absent from the high-flying Eurocrat’s toolbox is tact, at least according to some in Britain’s governing Conservative party. In an address to a joint sitting of the Irish parliament at Dublin on Thursday, Ms. von der Leyen appeared to compare Britain’s relationship with Ireland in the past to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Today, another European nation is fighting for independence,” she said, adding, “of course, Ireland is far away from the front line in Ukraine. But you understand better than most why this war matters so much to all of us.”That line of assertions ruffled a few feathers at London. One of the most influential Tory MPs, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said, “It is an extraordinary thing for Ursula von der Leyen to say, undiplomatic, unwise, and wrong. It shows she is not entirely aware of the historic circumstances.” He added that “it shows ignorance of the U.K.’s relations with Ireland and a tragic failure to understand the depths of the wickedness of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which has led to the slaughter of innocent people.”Credit the French for staying out of that particular fray. With so much focus on Emmanuel Macron’s state dinner at the White House this week (and so much traffic tied up in Washington because of it), it was easy to tune out a couple of interesting culture notes in France. As Thrillist reported, the iconic French baguette received the cultural imprimatur of Unesco this week. The elongated loaves will henceforth be on the UN’s list of “intangible cultural heritage,” and that is a badge of honor for President Macron who in a tweet said, “50 grams of magic and perfection in our daily lives. A French way of life.”If only French bread and art were all — they are not, but more power to them. One of our favorite French newspapers, Le Figaro, reported that the city of Besançon welcomed from a Swiss fondation a previously little-viewed sculpture by Auguste Rodin of Victor Hugo, who hailed from the lovely French city near the border with Switzerland. Unsurprisingly for Rodin aficionados, the writer of “Les Miserables” was depicted in the nude: “For me, you don’t put a riding coat on a god,” Mr. Rodin is said to have told one of his associates, the sculptor Camille Claudel.

Press Review: Musk’s Twitter Files, Dark Christmas at Kyiv, Finnish Confessions

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