I met with Russian chess prodigy and Human Rights Foundation founder Garry Kasparov after his TED Talk and took some notes:
“The sanctions must stay, unified into a total economic blockade as long as Ukraine is occupied.”
“Russia’s oil and gas industry may not be functional in six months due to sanctions on spare parts. Unlike apartheid South Africa which withstood sanctions for many years, Russia has integrated into the global economy and has become dependent on it.”
“We must maintain the sanctions AND message clearly that the sanctions will stay. We have to be willing to push Russia back to the stone age.”
“In the West, we don’t have leaders. We have managers. They are not willing to take historical responsibility. We have to stop announcing what we will not do.”
“We should announce that any Russian unit that deploys a WMD, nuclear or chemical, will be destroyed by NATO. Will they follow orders knowing what will come?”
“Ukraine has 200 thousand soldiers, and they are better trained than Russia’s. They have already killed 20 thousand Russian soldiers and probably wounded 4x as many.”
“Success is very attractive. Boris visited Kyiv because there is a sense Ukraine is winning. Even China thinks Russia is not winning. We will see the outcome in 2-3 weeks.”
“The only way for us to take back our country [Russia] is for Ukraine to win. The fate of global democracy depends on it. If might makes right, it’s all over.”
“For the first time since 9/11, the American people want to do more in foreign affairs.”
“Putin needs cash to stay in power. He has to pay for the police, the army, and the propaganda. Their loyalty is not ideological. If he runs out of money, he loses them.”
“My prediction: Putin will use chemical weapons in the Ukraine, but right on the Polish border.”
“Our financial ties to Russia weaken our resolve. You could finance the entire resistance effort by auctioning off Putin’s notebook that shows all of the politicians he has bought off. For example, Germany needs to charge [former German Chancellor] Schröder with war crimes.”
“Putin is the richest man in the world, as long as he remains in the Kremlin. It peaked at over $1 trillion.”
And here are some quotes from Kasparov’s talk, the opening of TED 2022, now online.
“I regularly say in my lectures on artificial intelligence that humans will always have a monopoly on evil. It’s not a threat, just a reminder that people choose. We are not algorithms. We are not bound by code or commandments or laws or treaties. We have them. But we choose.
Compromise? Not black and white? Are you sure? Compromise with this? You cannot look at the images from Ukraine in recent weeks and say there is no pure evil. Mariupol destroyed, Bucha slaughtered, Kramatorsk train station massacred. And worse is yet to come.
These horrors are not from Poland in 1945. This is Europe this week. How could this happen? How did we forget what evil can do? We have lost the generation that saw World War II firsthand. We reserve absolute evil for fiction.
In fables, they believe in true evil. Good is harder to define. There is no pure good. In fantasy tales of hobbits and elves and dwarves, there was an idea that good comes in different forms and shapes, often in conflict. But they had to be united when facing absolute evil.
We celebrated the end of the Cold War, but for too long, we forgot that evil doesn’t die. It can be buried for a while under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, but it grows back through the cracks of our apathy.
We called it diplomacy when Putin was embraced by the leaders of the free world as equal despite his crimes. We called it engagement when we bought trillions of dollars in Russian oil and gas, money that built Putin’s police state and his war machine. Let us call these things what they are: it was appeasement, it was collaboration.
Ukraine is now on the front line of the war, global war of freedom against tyranny. Putin, like every dictator before him, underestimated the free will of free people. They deserve every weapon, every resource to win this war. Because they’re fighting for us.
Meeting evil halfway, it’s still a victory for evil. Evil tempts us with our weakness, with our desire for comfort, being comfortable, cautious, rational, civilized. What kind of civilization are we fighting for, if we allow war crimes and genocide again? What kind of world are we leaving for our children and grandchildren if we only talk of the past and the future while ignoring murder and misery in the present?”
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