Her paw was bitten. Our cat stopped sitting on our neighbors squirrel house. She did crossword puzzles for The New York Times. Her husband was a Times correspondent stationed in Singapore during WWII. We read The Sunday Times on the Morris Arboretum lawn

Betsy with cat at our home on Durand St.
In Mt. Airy, Philadelphia PA 

We would get the Sunday New York Times. If conditions were good we would read it on the lawn of UP's Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill. Halfway around the world the Vietnam War raged. 

Our neighbors didn't like the Vietnam War. 

Our cat sat on top of a squirrel house our neighbors across Durand St. built. Said cat had her paw bitten and stopped sitting on the squirrel house. 

She did crossword puzzles for The New York Times. Her husband was a New York Times correspondent stationed in Singapore during & after World War II. 

Our neighbors were more accepting of a different cat named Peaches. When the former New York Times correspondent & New York Times puzzle maker walked their dog. Peaches walked beside her dog friend. 

***

Roger Cohen is the Paris bureau chief. He has worked for The Times for 33 years and has served as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor and an Opinion columnist. In 2023, he won a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award as part of Times teams covering the war in Ukraine. 

A few lines from Roger Cohen's article. I suggest reading his article:

"Along the way, I encountered fear and fervid bellicosity, as well as stubborn patience to see out a long war. I found that Homo sovieticus, far from dying out, has lived on in modified form, along with habits of subservience. So with the aid of relentless propaganda on state television, the old Putin playbook — money, mythmaking and menace of murder — has just about held."

 

"He has always used war — in Chechnya, in Georgia and in Ukraine — to unite Russians in the simplistic myths of nationalism and to usher them to the simplistic conclusion that his increasingly repressive rule is so essential that it must be eternal.”

"For all of Mr. Putin’s efforts to vilify the West, it still lives in the Russian imagination as a chimera of cool.”

“Our values are different,” Mr. Tolstoy said. “For Russians, freedom and economic factors are secondary to the integrity of our state and the safeguarding of the Russian world.”

"Repression has become fierce and the war Mr. Putin started in Ukraine has been waged with near total unconcern for the consequences of his decision, a human trait that John le Carré once described as “a primary qualification for psychopathy.”

Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families, ferocious attacks on a “unipolar” American world with revived Russian imperialist aggression — all held together by the ruthless suppression of dissident voices and recourse to violence when necessary.”

"Nobody, he argues, knows what the country really thinks. All that is known is that the older generation believes in Mr. Putin with a religious passion."

"As for the young, up to one million of the best and the brightest have left since the war began. These young Russians, Mr. Muratov tells me, did not want to kill or be killed. They did not think that glory was attained through bloodshed. If anything, they believe glory lies in art and intellect. To replace them will take a generation or more, he believes."

"On my last day in Moscow, I went to the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge beneath the Kremlin. A small shrine marks the spot where Boris Y. Nemtsov, a towering opposition figure, was gunned down on Feb. 27, 2015 — a flagrant political murder.

Somebody is always present at the shrine, watching over it, making sure there is a fresh bouquet of flowers. On this day, the task fell to Arkady Konikov, who told me: “Nemtsov was an honest politician, a very unusual thing. He was a brave man, a great man.”

The year before Mr. Nemtsov died, almost a decade ago, as the Russian-instigated fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine began, he wrote on his Facebook page: “Putin has declared war on Ukraine. This is a fratricidal war. Russia and Ukraine will pay a high price for the bloody insanity of this mentally unstable secret-police agent. Young men will die on both sides. There will be inconsolable mothers and sisters.”

"More recently, just before Mr. Gorbachev’s death on Aug. 30, 2022, Mr. Muratov, the Novaya editor, visited his friend as he lay in a Moscow hospital. The condition of the Soviet leader who decided to set Russians free, and whose funeral Mr. Putin would not attend, was grave. He could not understand much.

There was a big TV in his room. On it, playing over and over, were images of bombings and explosions in Ukraine. As Mr. Muratov left the room, he heard Mr. Gorbachev say: “Who could be happy because of this?”

MORE AT:

The New York Times

Putin’s Forever War

Aug. 6, 2023

Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?

By Roger Cohen