The 18th-century military commander and lover of Catherine the Great helped conquer Ukraine and looms large in the version of history the Kremlin uses to justify the war.

A portrait of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin.Credit…Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

announced in September was complete.

Speaking at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin

broadcast on state television, Shoigu told Putin: “The task set by you of (mobilising) 300,000 people has been completed. No further measures are planned.”

Shoigu said that of the 300,000 mobilised recruits, 218,000 remained in training, while 82,000 had been deployed to the conflict zone, of which 41,000 had been assigned to their units.

He said that in future, recruitment for the Ukraine campaign would be based on volunteers and professional soldiers, rather than mobilising more of Russia’s several million reservists.

Putin declared a “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists on Sept. 21, after a series of military defeats saw Russian forces routed from east Ukraine’s Kharkiv region and under increasing pressure in the southern Kherson region.

The move touched off an exodus of military-age men from Russia, with tens of thousands heading for countries including Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan, which allow Russians to enter without visas.

Over 2,000 people arrested at anti-mobilisation protests across Russia. There was public outcry over cases of men being mobilised despite medical exemptions, or a lack of military experience.

Responding to Shoigu, Putin

acknowledged problems with mobilisation, saying that they were “inevitable”, and said that it was necessary to make “corrections” to the development of Russia’s armed forces.

MOSCOW, Oct 28 (Reuters) – Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday said that the “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine that Russia announced in September was complete, with tens of thousands of them already sent to the combat zone.

Speaking at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin broadcast on state television, Shoigu said: “The task set by you of (mobilising) 300,000 people has been completed. No further measures are planned.”

Shoigu said that of the 300,000 mobilised reservists, 218,000 remained in training, while 82,000 had been deployed to the conflict zone, of which 41,000 were on active service with their units.

“I want to thank them for their dedication to duty, for their patriotism, for their firm determination to defend our country, to defend Russia, their homes, their families, our citizens and our people,” Putin said.

In future, Shoigu said, recruitment for the Ukraine campaign would be based on volunteers and professional soldiers, rather than mobilising more of Russia’s several million reservists.

Putin declared a “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists on Sept. 21, after a series of military defeats saw Russian forces routed from east Ukraine’s Kharkiv region and under increasing pressure in the southern Kherson region.

The move touched off an exodus of military age men from Russia, with tens of thousands heading for countries including Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan, which allow Russians to enter without visas.

Over 2,000 people arrested at anti-mobilisation protests across Russia. There was public outcry over cases of men being mobilised despite medical exemptions, or a lack of military experience.

Responding to Shoigu, Putin acknowledged problems with mobilisation, saying that they were “inevitable”, and said that the Ukrainian campaign had shown the need for “corrections” to Russia’s armed forces.

Putin said: “Based on the experience of conducting the special military operation, we need to think over and make corrections to the way all components of the armed forces, including the ground forces, are constructed.”

Russia’s armed forces have struggled in the eight months since Putin ordered tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, in what Moscow calls the “special military operation”.

Russian armed forces abandoned an attempt to seize Kyiv and other northern Ukrainian cities in April, before losing ground in the south and east to Ukrainian counter-attacks since August.

Reporting by Reuters; editing by John Stonestreet/Guy Faulconbridge

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Spotted

14:30

by Aris Roussinos

Credit: Getty

As the seasons change, the war in Ukraine has entered a new phase. Following a series of major reverses the Russians are digging in, in the hope that the autumn rains will bog down any further Ukrainian counter-offensives, perhaps allowing time to train and equip their newly-mobilised conscript army for a second push next spring.

In the meantime, Russia’s attention has shifted towards knocking out Ukraine’s electrical grid from the air. Over the past three weeks, waves of cruise missile and Iranian Shahed drone strikes have battered Ukraine’s power infrastructure, damaging or destroying around 40% of its power network, leading to blackouts and outages across the country, including western cities hitherto barely affected by the war. In his nightly address last night from a blacked-out Kyiv, standing next to a downed Shahed UAV, Zelensky asserted: “We are not afraid of the dark. The darkest times for us are not without light, but without freedom.” 

But if the disruption of power supplies continues into winter, it will affect civilian morale, as is no doubt intended. Urging Ukrainians to limit their electricity consumption on Wednesday, Zelensky stated that “Russian terrorists have created such difficult conditions for our energy workers that no one in Europe has ever seen or encountered” but “we need victory over Russia in the energy sphere as well.”

The coinciding of the new bombing campaign with the appointment of the Russian Air Force general Sergey Surovikin, who oversaw much of the brutal and successful aerial bombardment of rebel-held Syrian cities following Russia’s 2015 intervention, has naturally led to speculation that his appointment is an attempt to apply the “Syrian playbook” to Ukraine.

Yet expert analysts urge caution: as the Institute for the Study of War observed, all the Russian commanders overseeing the Ukraine war so far have previously commanded operations in Syria, using much the same methods. In any case:

If anything, the surprise is that Russia did not pursue this aerial campaign at the beginning of the war. A “shock and awe” campaign against civilian and dual-use infrastructure, like American bombing of Iraq’s power nodes in 2003, would ordinarily precede a ground offensive. Perhaps the better analogy is with the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, in which the destruction of the electric grid only began after three months of limited success striking military targets. 

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea briefed then that “the fact that lights went out across 70% of the country shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch now… We can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want.” No doubt Putin, who frequently cites NATO’s Kosovo intervention as a precedent, is aiming to send a similar message. But the takeaway lesson is surely that Russia has dialled back its war aims, even as the conflict’s hardships affect a broader swathe of Ukraine’s civilian population.

Back in February, Putin ordered lightly-armed troops to invade much of Ukraine, leaving the country’s infrastructure intact in the seeming belief the war would end in days with a puppet government installed. In destroying Ukraine’s power grid, Putin is signalling, perhaps unintentionally, acceptance that his broadest ambitions will not be realised. Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure is now a target precisely because the country will not become part of Russia’s sphere of influence. The escalation of the bombing is in its own way a quiet admission of defeat.

Merrick Garland hasn’t tipped his hand, but it’s clear to me that he will bring charges against the former president.

Attorney General Merrick Garland welcomes new U.S. citizens on Ellis Island in celebration of Constitution Week and Citizenship Day, on September 17, 2022. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

As an appellate judge, Merrick Garland was known for constructing narrow decisions that achieved consensus without creating extraneous controversy. As a government attorney, he was known for his zealous adherence to the letter of the law. As a person, he is a smaller-than-life figure, a dry conversationalist, studious listener, something close to the opposite of a raconteur. As a driver, his friends say, he is maddeningly slow and almost comically fastidious.

And as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, he is a hyper-prudential institutionalist who would like nothing more than to restore—quietly and deliberately—the Justice Department’s reputation for probity, process, and apolitical dispassion. Which is why it is so difficult for me to imagine him delighting in the choice he now faces: whether to become the first attorney general in American history to indict a former president.

But this is what I believe he is preparing himself to do.

I have been observing Garland closely for months. I’ve talked with his closest friends and most loyal former clerks and deputies. I’ve carefully studied his record. I’ve interviewed Garland himself. And I’ve reached the conclusion that his devotion to procedure, his belief in the rule of law, and in particular his reverence for the duties, responsibilities, and traditions of the U.S. Department of Justice will cause him to make the most monumental decision an attorney general can make.

Let me be absolutely clear: Garland did not tell me he was going to indict Donald Trump. In fact, he did not tip his hand to me in any way—he is far too cautious to signal his intentions to even his closest friends, much less a reporter. Nor did his top aides suggest the announcement of an indictment. When his department says that it doesn’t discuss ongoing cases, it means it—at least in this case.

Before I lay out the reasons I believe I am correct in this assessment, I want to discuss why it is entirely possible I am not. The main reason to disbelieve the argument that Garland is preparing to indict is simple: To bring criminal charges against a former president from an opposing political party would be the ultimate test of a system that aspires to impartiality, and Garland, by disposition, is repelled by drama, and doesn’t believe the department should be subjected to unnecessary stress tests. This unprecedented act would inevitably be used to justify a cycle of reprisals, and risks turning the Justice Department into an instrument of never-ending political warfare.

And an indictment, of course, would merely be the first step—a prelude to a trial unlike any this country has ever seen. The defendant wouldn’t just be an ex-president; in all likelihood, he’d be a candidate actively campaigning to return to the White House. Fairness dictates that the system regard Trump as it does every other defendant. But doing so would lead to the impression that he’s being deliberately hamstrung—and humiliated—by his political rivals.

Garland is surely aware that this essential problem would be evident at the first hearing. If the Justice Department is intent on proving that nobody is above the law, it could impose the same constraints on Trump that it would on any criminal defendant accused of serious crimes, including limiting his travel. Such a restriction would deprive Trump of one of his most important political advantages: his ability to whip up his followers at far-flung rallies.

In any event, once the trial began, Trump would be stuck in court, likely in Florida (if he’s charged in connection with the Mar-a-Lago documents matter) or in Washington, D.C. (if he’s charged for his involvement in the events of January 6). The site of a Washington trial would be the Prettyman Courthouse, on Constitution Avenue, just a short walk from the Capitol. This fact terrified the former prosecutors and other experts I talked with about how the trial might play out. Right-wing politicians, including Trump himself, have intimated violence if he is indicted.

Trump would of course attempt to make the proceedings a carnival of grievance, a venue for broadcasting conspiracy theories about his enemies. The trial could thus supply a climactic flash point for an era of political violence. Like the Capitol on January 6, the courthouse could become a magnet for paramilitaries. With protesters and counterprotesters descending on the same locale, the occasion would tempt street warfare.

The prospect of such a spectacle fills Merrick Garland with dread, his friends say. Indeed, for much of his tenure he’s been attacked by critics who claim he lacks the fortitude to meet the moment, or to take on an adversary like Trump. Members of the House committee charged with examining the events of January 6 have publicly taunted Garland for moving tentatively when compared with their own aggressive and impeccably stage-managed hearings. Representative Adam Schiff has complained, “I think there’s a real desire on the part of the attorney general, for the most part, not to look backward.” Privately, even President Joe Biden has grumbled about the plodding pace of Garland’s investigations.

But I believe, if the evidence of wrongdoing is as convincing as it seems, he is going to indict Trump anyway.

Over the course of my reporting, I came to appreciate that the qualities that strike Garland’s critics as liabilities would make him uniquely suited to overseeing Trump’s prosecution. The fact that he is strangely out of step with the times—that he is one of the few Americans in public life who don’t channel or perform political anger—equips him to craft the strongest, most fair-minded case, a case that a neutral observer would regard as legitimate.

United States v. Donald Trump would be about more than punishing crimes—whether inciting an insurrection, scheming to undermine an election, or absconding with classified documents. An indictment would be a signal to Trump, as well as to would-be imitators, that no one is above the law. This is the principle that has animated Garland’s career, which began as the Justice Department was attempting to reassert its independence, and legitimacy, after the ugly meddling of the Nixon years. If Garland has at times seemed daunted by the historic nature of the moment, that is at least in part because he appreciates how closely his next move will be studied, and the role it will play in heading off—or not—the next catastrophe.

I have also come to see that the Garland of 2022 is not the same man who was sworn into office as attorney general in March of the previous year. At the age of 69, his temperament is firmly fixed, but a year and a half on the job has transformed him.

It was just a few months ago that I saw a different version of the attorney general begin to emerge. While his investigation of January 6 continued at its slow pace, his sparring with Trump over the documents at Mar-a-Lago escalated quickly. The former president is no longer a figure on television, but his adversary in court. Garland approached him with an aggression that suggested he was prepared to do the very thing that critics said he didn’t have the guts to do.

The Merrick Garland who took over the Justice Department may have hoped he could restore its reputation without confronting Trump, or dragging him to a courtroom. But the nation has changed in the intervening months, and so has he.

President Barack Obama’s announcement for his Supreme Court nomination is shown on a TV in an empty Senate Radio TV studio on March 16, 2016, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong / Getty)

Before he became attorney general, Merrick Garland’s life was defined by a job he has never held.

Twice, Barack Obama considered lifting him from the D.C. Circuit onto the Supreme Court, and twice Obama passed him over. After those failed attempts to move beyond the short list, Garland seemed to age out of the possibility, past the point where the actuarial tables suggest that an appointment is a worthwhile investment. Then, in 2016, Antonin Scalia died; Garland got his nomination after all—only to see it scuttled in the Senate by the obstructionist tactics of Mitch McConnell.

When Garland returned to the Court of Appeals after his nomination was blocked, he was greeted with an ovation from his colleagues. No doubt it was heartwarming, but the truth was that he was returning to an old routine after having been taunted with the job of his dreams. It would have only been human for his mind to ponder a fresh start.

In the fall of 2020, with polls showing Joe Biden primed to defeat Donald Trump, friends began asking, Would you ever want to be attorney general?

When Garland’s name showed up on the list of Biden’s potential AGs, it was fair to assume that he hoped the job would nudge the Supreme Court debacle out of the first paragraph of his obituary. But Garland told friends that he wanted to return to the Justice Department, where he’d worked as a young lawyer and first found his sense of professional purpose, to restore an institution that he revered. It had been damaged by a succession of Trump appointees, who carried out the policy of separating migrant children from their parents, distorted the findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation, and allegedly brought cases in order to settle the president’s political scores.

From the September 2022 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on the secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy

As Garland prepared to take the job, he often sounded nostalgic for his first stint at DOJ, in the final years of the Carter administration, when he worked as a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. Nobody thinks of the late ’70s as the height of idealism, but that’s how Garland remembers the time.

In the aftermath of Watergate, he sat by Civiletti’s side as he continued the work of reforming the Justice Department: writing new rules and procedures to prevent another president from ever abusing the institution. They were preserving the rule of law by bubble-wrapping it in norms, so that it would be thoroughly insulated from political pressure.

This June, I visited Garland in his wood-paneled office, one of the cozier rooms in DOJ’s cavernous building. He wore a navy suit that looked as if it had been purchased at Brooks Brothers in 1985. A tray of coffee with demitasses was laid out on a coffee table, but he sipped from a mug.

As Garland spoke about his approach to his job, he asked an aide to pass him a copy of a tattered blue book that was sitting on a side table, Principles of Federal Prosecution, published during his time with Civiletti. He kept extolling the neutrality of the department, how it should never favor friends or penalize foes, how it should only bring cases that persuade juries and survive appeals. “What I’m saying isn’t novel,” he said. “It’s all in here.”

Thumbing through the document, he seemed briefly distracted. I asked him if he’d had anything to do with its publication. “I helped edit it,” he said, and then wistfully recalled his mentors in the department who oversaw its production. It struck me that Garland isn’t just by-the-book. In some profound sense, he is the book.

This unbending fidelity to rules and norms has often looked impotent in the face of the democratic emergency that is Donald Trump. In his quest to avoid the taint of politics, Garland allowed certain Trump-era policies to remain in place. He ordered the DOJ to continue defending Trump against a defamation lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused him of raping her. He has permitted the Special Prosecutor John Durham’s investigation of the origins of Russiagate to persist, despite a raft of Democrats clamoring for him to shut it down. (I should note here that Durham mentioned my reporting on Trump and Russia in court filings, and his lawyers asked witnesses about it in his prosecution of a Clinton campaign lawyer, whom a jury acquitted.) Those flash points created an impression of passivity; instead of rushing to confront the legacy of Trumpism, he seemed to be meekly deferring to it.

It is not difficult to see why anti-Trump partisans could grow frustrated with Garland’s obdurate commitment to the traditions of the department when Trump is so intent on trampling them. His faith in them feels antiquated—and detached from the Democratic Party’s broad reconsideration of norms that were once seen as pillars of the American system. Not so long ago, expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court or eliminating the filibuster seemed like subversive thought experiments. Now they are touted as necessities for preserving majoritarian politics.

But the post-Watergate reforms that Garland wants to defend weren’t aimed at abstract threats. They emerged as responses to very real abuse committed within living memory. And they arguably did an effective job at blunting Donald Trump’s desire to turn the Justice Department into his plaything, even if they couldn’t prevent every transgression. Norms held and prevented nightmare scenarios from unfolding.

These norms may not hold the next time, but that doesn’t obviate their ethical power. No matter how much one fears Trump, the prosecution of a former president can’t be undertaken lightly. The expectation that political enemies will be treated fairly is the basis for the legitimacy of the entire legal system. That’s why Garland’s hand-wringing and fussiness matter. Any indictment he brings against Trump will have survived his scrutiny, which means that it will have cleared a high bar.

Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick takes a meeting with Amy Jeffries (left), counsel to the DAG, and Merrick Garland (right), principal associate DAG, in her office at the Justice Department, in September 1995. (Bill O’Leary / The Washington Post / Getty)

When Garland talks about how he handles complex, emotionally fraught investigations, there’s a historical antecedent that he likes to cite as his formative experience. On the morning of April 19, 1995, the Department of Justice’s leadership learned that a bomb had destroyed much of a massive federal office building in Oklahoma City, ripping off its facade and killing 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s day-care center.

At the time, Garland held a job known as the PADAG, or the principal associate deputy attorney general. It’s a mystifying title, but one of the most prized offices in the department: It afforded him a seat in the attorney general’s morning meeting and access to DOJ’s most closely held secrets. Garland used his privileged position to ask if he could travel to Oklahoma City to oversee the investigation.

Before Garland left, Attorney General Janet Reno pulled him aside. Of all things, she wanted to talk about O. J. Simpson. The football star’s trial was going to be running on a split screen alongside the Oklahoma City investigation. Everything the public was about to witness in a Los Angeles courtroom would make the justice system look like a tawdry joke. She told Garland that his job was to show how the legal system could be the antithesis of that circus.

“I want you to be meticulous,” she told him. “I don’t want to have any chance of losing a conviction. I want this to be picture perfect, so that the public understands what justice is.”

The bombing case triggered a strong emotional reaction across America, particularly those who feared the emergence of right-wing militias. Although much more straightforward than the chaotic events of January 6, the crime ignited a similarly intense desire to quickly punish the perpetrators. But Garland vowed to Reno that he would take the long way around.

Paying strict attention to procedure came naturally to Garland, even when the FBI seemed inclined to take shortcuts. He ordered agents to obtain warrants and subpoenas from courts even when they weren’t unambiguously necessary. In his quest for immaculate justice, his investigators conducted 28,000 interviews.

These decisions arguably made the prosecution’s case harder and certainly delayed the gratification of a conviction. But they also guarded against humiliating slipups that might have provided the basis for an appeal. In the end, Timothy McVeigh’s attempt to overturn his conviction failed and he was executed in 2001. His co-conspirator Terry Nichols was sentenced to life, a sentence that an Appeals court affirmed.

David A. Graham: How did the Oklahoma City bombing shape Merrick Garland?

Garland has taken a similarly meticulous approach to Trump. Rather than starting with the offenses of the president himself, the department has devoted its resources to tediously building cases against every gym teacher and accountant who breached the Capitol on January 6, some 900 indictments in total. The volume of cases has risked overtaxing prosecutors—and pushing back the work of building more-complicated cases against Trump’s inner circle.

But what looks like donkeywork is a necessary step in a formulaic approach, a set of prescribed practices that have their own embedded wisdom. As Garland explains it, the department has no choice but to begin with the most “overt crimes,” and slowly build from there. To start with Trump would have reeked of politics—and it would have been bad practice, forgoing all the witnesses and cellphone data collected by starting at the bottom.

By focusing on Trump, Garland’s critics tend to underestimate the importance of the other arms of the January 6 prosecutions. The Justice Department has made an example of the foot soldiers of the insurrection, and has thus deflated attendance at every subsequent “Stop the Steal” rally. Evidence supplied by the minnows who invaded the Capitol helped the Justice Department indict leaders of the Oath Keepers (Elmer Stewart Rhodes) and Proud Boys (Henry “Enrique” Tarrio) on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most meaningful steps that the government has taken to dismantle the nation’s right-wing paramilitaries. (Both men have pleaded not guilty.)

From the November 2020 issue: Mike Giglio on the pro-Trump militant group that has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans

Based on subpoenas and the witnesses seen exiting the grand jury, the department is clearly moving up the ladder, getting ever closer to Trump’s inner circle and to Trump himself. But there comes a moment when the rule book that Garland reveres ceases to provide such clear guidance. That’s the juncture that allows for prosecutorial discretion. In the case of Donald Trump, the prosecutor is Merrick Garland and discretion would allow him to decide that an indictment is simply not worth the social cost, or that the case is strong but not strong enough. Garland’s critics fret that when confronted with this moment, his penchant for caution will take hold.

Over the course of his career, institutions were good to Merrick Garland—and he was good to institutions. He was a true believer in the American system. That’s why he struggled to come to terms with the reality of Mitch McConnell.

For 293 days after Obama announced his selection to fill Scalia’s seat, Garland was trapped in limbo, waiting for Senate Republicans to provide him a fair hearing. The whole world knew that they never would; Garland remained patient. One of his old teachers from Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe, told me, “What was heartbreaking was to see that the system really wasn’t as good as he hoped it was.”

The human response to McConnell’s brazen tactics was rage. Garland’s wife and daughters certainly channeled that emotion, as did his friends and former clerks. The people around Garland couldn’t contain their fury, but he did. When friends would call to vent, he would try to comfort them, to tamp down their ire. “Don’t feel too sorry for me,” he told them. “I’ve had a great run. Don’t worry.”

Such placidity wasn’t anomalous. He was always the calm one, his friend Jamie Gorelick told me. Ever since college, he had counseled her to not let emotions roil her. Back then, she was enraged that Harvard gave free football tickets to men, not women. After a contentious meeting where she railed against the injustice, he took her aside: “You’re right to be upset, but you shouldn’t be this upset. Over time, this will get fixed.” Gorelick valued his circumspection so highly that she hired him to serve as her deputy in the Clinton Justice Department. Even then, his advice was the same. He encouraged her to put angry letters she wrote in a drawer, until she restored her sense of equilibrium.

This tendency could be described as repression. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had another name for it. He called it the “spiritual discipline against resentment,” a phrase from his theory of political persuasion. He urged victims of injustice to resist the self-defeating instinct to righteously trumpet their own victimhood. That’s not a personal credo for Garland, or anything like it. But with his preternatural self-control and his sense of rectitude, he seems to regard anger, especially on his own behalf, as a dangerous emotion.

This can make him seem out of step with the zeitgeist, which is defined by rage. On January 7, 2021, when Joe Biden unveiled him as his nominee, he seemed strangely detached from the depredations of the previous day, which he referred to only once, as “yesterday’s events in Washington.” He argued that the insurrection showed that “the rule of law is not just some lawyer’s turn of phrase.” Even accounting for Garland’s tendency to overthink his choice of words, his conclusion felt like a massive underreaction.

With the investigation of Trump, the legitimacy of the judicial system is at risk. Of course, the MAGA set will never regard an indictment of their leader as anything other than a sham. But the perceptions of the rest of the country matter too. And it’s important that, if DOJ moves forward with an indictment, the public views it as the product of a scrupulous examination of facts, not the impulse for revenge. Indicting the candidate of the opposing party, if it occurs, should feel reluctant, as if there’s no other choice.

The attorney-general nominee Merrick Garland is sworn in during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 22, 2021. (Al Drago / The New York Times / Redux)

It’s hard not to think of Garland as a character from another time. When I suggested this to him, he protested, jokingly (I think), citing a marker of cool highly significant to males in their 60s. “You know, I was there at the Bruce Springsteen concert in 1974, the one Jon Landau wrote about in his famous column in The Real Paper. ‘I’ve seen the future of rock and roll.’”

When he was on the bench, Garland would occasionally orient new clerks to his idiosyncrasies by playing a song by the band Vampire Weekend which contains the refrain, “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” It was amusing because the band was so distant from his range of expected cultural references, and because the strait-laced attorney general would never utter that sentence himself. It was also funny because Garland does care about punctuation, deeply.

Garland likes everything in its place. When, as a judge, he asked his clerks to prepare reading material, they would comb through it with a ruler in hand. The margins needed to be just so, with space for them to draw lines next to matters of import. A single line drawn parallel meant the clerks had material worthy of his attention; a triple line signaled the crux of the argument. When he found methods that worked, he clung to them. He may have been the last American to use WordPerfect.

Garland took office as attorney general with old-fashioned ideas about what was possible. He told his aides that he hoped he might help lower the temperature in the nation. He believed that he could use the department to restore a measure of civility that seemed to slip away during the Trump years.

One of the exhilarations of the new job was the sense of agency it offered. As a judge, he couldn’t pick and choose the matters that came across his desk. The docket was the docket. Now he could get exercised about an article in the morning newspaper, walk into his 9 a.m. meeting with deputies, and then insist that the department do something about it.

Every day, Garland kept encountering stories about appalling instances of harassment, a national epidemic of rudeness and rage. Flight attendants risked physical assault for asking passengers to wear masks. School-board officials received death threats. Police officers were harangued for doing their job.

Garland wanted to make an example of such behavior. The department began to aggressively prosecute illegal threats of violence, seeking stiff penalties for the sake of deterrence. But to his dismay, these efforts proved ineffective. No matter how many cases he brought, the DOJ couldn’t stanch the flood of invective. There was something profoundly wrong with the national culture, a dyspepsia that undermined the possibilities for collective coexistence and healthy democratic practice.

This year, as he came to understand the limitations of the job—all the broken facets of American life that the department is incapable of repairing—he began to appreciate the depths of the nation’s crisis. His public comments began to betray a sense of alarm. In May, he returned to Harvard to deliver a commencement address, issuing a grim report on the health of democracy. The historic metaphor he used to capture the urgency of the moment was the Justice Department’s founding in 1870, when its task was crushing the nascent Ku Klux Klan. Although the speech had grace notes of hope—the rousing calls to service that are de rigueur for the genre—it was hard to avoid its underlying pessimism, his warning that “there may be worse to come.”

At one point during my June visit, I called Garland an “institutionalist,” which I thought was an unobjectionable description of his political temperament. Upon hearing this, he turned to his aides, “I don’t think I’ve ever used the word to describe myself.” If I wanted, they would check, he said. But he was certain he had never uttered it.

I was surprised he would resist the term. I think he wanted me to understand that he is alive to the perils facing democracy—and isn’t naive about what it will take to defeat them. Norms alone are not enough to stop a determined authoritarian. It wasn’t quite a reversal in his thinking; radicalizing Merrick Garland would be impossible. But it was an evolution. His faith in institutions had begun to wobble.

With his optimism bruised, and his heightened sensitivity to the imminent threats to democracy, he’s shown a greater appetite for confrontation. There is no sharper example of this than his willingness to spar with Trump over the sensitive documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago. Searching the home of a former president is unprecedented. The warrant was executed knowing that Trump would demagogue the event—and that he might even encourage his supporters to respond violently.

With Trump, Garland has lately shown a pugnacity that few had previously associated with him. When Trump began to assail the search of Mar-a-Lago, Garland asked the court to unseal the inventory of seized documents, essentially calling out the ex-president’s lies. Rather than passively watching attacks on FBI agents, whom Trump scurrilously accused of planting evidence, Garland passionately backed the bureau. As Trump’s lawyers have tried to use a sympathetic judge to slow down the department’s investigation, Garland’s lawyers have responded with bluntly dismissive briefs, composed without the least hint of deference. (“Plaintiff again implies that he could have declassified the records before leaving office. As before, however, Plaintiff conspicuously fails to represent, much less show, that he actually took that step.”)

The filings can be read as a serialized narrative, with each installment adding fresh details about Trump’s mishandling of documents and his misleading of investigators. On August 31, the department tucked a photo into a brief, showing classified documents arrayed across a Mar-a-Lago carpet. This was both a faithful cataloging of evidence and sly gamesmanship. Garland permitted the department to release an image sure to implant itself in the public’s mind and define the news cycle. Lawfare described the entirety of that filing as “a show of force.”

In the Mar-a-Lago case, Garland is facing Trump in court for the first time. He arguably dillydallied on his way to the fight. But now that he’s entered it, he’s battling as if the reputation of the DOJ depends on winning it. During our interview, Garland reminded me that he was once a prosecutor himself. The unstated implication was that he knows what it takes to prevail.

There’s a date on the calendar when excessive meticulousness potentially precludes holding Trump to account. On January 20, 2025, Merrick Garland might not have a job. His post could be occupied by an avatar of the hard right. And any plausible Republican president will drop the case against Donald Trump on their first day in office.

The deadline for indicting Trump is actually much sooner than the next Inauguration Day. According to most prosecutors, a judge would give Trump nearly a year to prepare for trial, maybe a bit longer. That’s not special treatment; it’s just how courts schedule big cases.

If Trump is indicted for his role on January 6, he might get even more time than that, given the volume of evidence that the Justice Department would pass along in discovery. And if the evidence includes classified documents, the court will need to sort out how to handle that, another source of delay.

Depending on the charges, a trial itself could take another week—or as long as six months. That means Garland has until the late spring of 2023 to bring an indictment that has a chance of culminating in a jury verdict before the change of administration.

The excruciating conundrum that Garland faces is also a liberating one. He can’t win politically. He will either antagonize the right or disappoint the left. Whatever he decides, he will become deeply unpopular. He will unavoidably damage the reputation of the institution he loves so dearly with a significant portion of the populace.

Faced with so unpalatable a choice, he doesn’t really have one. Because he can’t avoid tearing America further apart, he’ll decide based on the evidence—and on whether that evidence can persuade a jury. As someone who has an almost metaphysical belief in the rule book, he can allow himself to apply his canonical texts.

That’s what he’s tried to emphatically explain over the past months. Every time he’s asked about the former president, he responds, “No one is above the law.” He clearly gets frustrated that his answer fails to satisfy his doubters. I believe that his indictment of Trump will prove that he means it.

BOOK REVIEW

“Putin”
By Philip Short
Henry Holt and Co., July 2022

As Russia continues its devastating war in Ukraine, those inside and outside both countries strain to understand Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite some shortcomings, Philip Short’s new biography “Putin” is valuable to anyone eager to learn more about Russia’s leader.

At nearly 700 pages, the book is exhaustive though not comprehensive, in that few if any biographers could have full access to the Kremlin’s internal operations or to Putin’s confidantes (if any truly exist). Short conducted nearly 200 interviews during eight years of research; his narrative of Putin’s pre-Moscow life, which makes up the first third of the book, is especially rich and engaging. These chapters establish Vladimir Putin as a human being—calculating, reticent, prideful, easily provoked and at times reckless—rather than a crafty super-spy or a comic-book villain.

Short has likewise usefully integrated the parallel stories of Putin’s career and Russia’s post-Soviet history. His prologue, about the 1999 apartment bombings that many see as covert state acts of terror to enable Putin’s rise to the presidency, illustrates Russia’s murky internal affairs. His description of St. Petersburg Putin’s post-KGB work in local government helps to decode the later Moscow Putin’s complex relations with Russia’s economic reformers. And his chronicle of Putin’s growing disappointment with the West during the George W. Bush administration sets the stage for the unraveling of U.S.-Russia relations.

Still, “Putin” is not flawless. While some have criticized Short’s characterization of Putin as “more sympathetic” than other English-language biographies by American, British and Russian émigré writers, the book’s true weakness lies less in Short’s presentation of Putin—which does not shy from the Russian leader’s flaws—than in an apparent contempt for U.S. foreign policy and some U.S. officials that sometimes distorts history.

Many might agree with Short’s view that Washington has made numerous mistakes—in managing U.S.-Russia relations and in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere—and share his desire for greater humility from U.S. officials past and present. Nevertheless, Short’s editorial commentary detracts from “Putin” by derailing the narrative and presenting simplistic, at times misleading or baseless interpretations. This is especially evident in his account of the Bush administration and its policies. (I was a political appointee and a senior advisor to the under secretary of state from 2003 to 2005.)

One example is Short’s assertion that “neoconservatives in the White House” provoked Moscow to invade Georgia in August 2008 by pressing for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. While a Russia-Georgia war might not have occurred in 2008 absent NATO’s April communique promising eventual membership, securing NATO Membership Action Plans (MAPs) for the two countries was a bipartisan project with support well beyond unnamed neoconservative aides to President Bush. Short does not acknowledge that one month before the NATO summit, in March, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling for MAPs for the two countries by unanimous consent. Moreover, while Washington was the most influential advocate for Ukrainian and Georgian membership, it was neither the only nor the most ardent supporter of the policy.

Short likewise goes somewhat astray in his discussion of Russia’s energy exports to Europe during this period, wrongly asserting that concerns over Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas “took on additional significance” at the time of Gazprom’s 2006 cutoff of gas deliveries to Ukraine because “Washington was seeking European markets for U.S. exports of liquified natural gas.”

Washington (that is, the Bush administration) was not able to seek European or any other additional markets at that time. The surge in America’s natural gas production that enabled LNG exports occurred only during the Obama administration, when officials approved 24 export licenses and created conditions for the rapid expansion in exports under President Donald Trump. Where U.S. LNG exports were concerned, Trump often acted like a salesman-in-chief, but George W. Bush had no new LNG to sell. Nor would the entirety of America’s 2006 LNG exports have materially affected European imports from Russia: Germany’s alone were over 100 times larger than America’s total LNG exports in 2006.

“Putin” raises several important questions that the book does not answer fully. One is when and why Russia’s president lies. Short recounts several occasions when Putin was untruthful, such as Putin’s efforts to obscure his service in the KGB’s Fifth Main Directorate (the department charged with monitoring and suppressing dissent inside the Soviet Union) and to manufacture a story explaining his transition from KGB officer to St. Petersburg official. Short describes these falsehoods as conveniences or necessary for Putin’s purposes at the time but does not offer a systematic explanation for Putin’s dissimulation.

Short refers more often to Putin’s risk-taking, including some rather dangerous personal behavior in his youth, and to his later attempts at greater caution. Yet here also he does not present a theory to explain the Russian president’s behavior as a young man, a KGB officer and official or as head of state. As a journalist rather than an academic, Short appears more interested in the individual stories of Putin’s risky conduct than in their structure, classification and implications. Readers must each draw individual conclusions.

One intriguing question is only implicit in Short’s work: Is Putin out of touch with today’s Russia and, for that matter, with Russian-speakers in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries? As the book progresses, and as Putin’s career advances, the narrative necessarily becomes increasingly remote. First-hand accounts from ordinary people who knew Putin in his early life understandably disappear in favor of publicly available information, though Short does present some details from his past interviews.

While Russia’s president continues to encounter ordinary people, these interactions—like those of any president in a large country—are highly structured. During the 22 years that Putin has been president or prime minister, Russia has evolved dramatically; he may have intimately understood public anger over Russia’s domestic chaos and international decline during the 1990s, but how well does he understand his country today? Short does not fully explore either Russia’s evolution or Putin’s connection to its disparate social groups.

In concluding “Putin,” Short grapples with one of the biggest questions in U.S.-Russia relations since 1991—was today’s hostility inevitable? In Short’s view, it was: “America, the dominant global power, believes that its role is to lead. Russia refuses to be led.” These two short sentences capture the enduring tension at the heart of Washington’s interaction with Moscow over the last 30 years. But they prompt another question—namely, if conflict was inevitable, how much does Putin really matter? That Russians appeared shocked by their president’s decision to invade Ukraine in February, notwithstanding broad agreement with his grievances toward America and the West, suggests that some of Putin’s choices have been unique and consequential. Likewise, while their approaches to European security have not been equivalent to Putin’s war, it is conceivable that leaders in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and other Western capitals could have developed different policies to pursue their hopes and avoid their fears. Short effectively conveys Vladimir Putin’s bitterness that they did not.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. Photo by Kremlin.ru shared under a Creative Commons license.