 Our top story of the day, as it is in most news outlets, whether mainstream or otherwise, that you might see today, is the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky's visit to the United States, his first visit outside of the country, since Russia launched its military operation in Feb of this year. It's been over 300 days of conflict in Ukraine. The president of Ukraine is meant to meet with the top leadership in the United States, including an address that he's already made to a joint session of both houses. In that speech, he has invoked all kinds of things, including comparisons with the victory against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. He's also talked about support to Ukraine being the equivalent of support for a global fight for democracy. For a wider perspective on this, as well as the reaction it might bring from Russia and in the wider context of the war that is ongoing, we have with us in studio Abdul Rehman of People's Dispatch. Abdul, typically strong rhetoric, as you would expect from someone in Zelensky's position at that point. What do you make of the speech in general in terms of its language and the kind of impact that he's at least hoping it would have? Well, it was quite, you can say, depends how you see it. It can be assertive, it can be aggressive. It can be a kind of assertion that the war will continue for the coming months at least, if not years, because Ukrainians are not ready to give up. Instead of talking about the need of peace, what Zelensky was mentioning was that war will continue until Ukrainians are able to retake all the territories they have lost to Russians. He also talked about how it is an investment by the foreign countries, particularly the US, if they provide Ukrainians with more weapons, provide Ukrainians with more money to basically sustain the war conditions. In a way, he basically defied all the possibilities of kind of talks, which is considered to be crucial to basically end the war. And he, in fact, mocked the idea of peace, and he talked about how peace for Ukrainians would mean that all the territories are liberated and Russia is defeated. So, this talk of aggressiveness, this talk of kind of not having any kind of dialogue with Russians at this moment is basically a talk of, which basically confirms that the war, as the world is hoping, and some of the countries which are also supporting Ukrainians so far, feeling the heat of it, now they are trying to kind of push the Ukrainians to, for negotiations, that pushing will not work. And it has been encouraged, in fact, if you see how the US has placed more money, already around $1.8 billion have been placed before he landed in US, and US also agreed to provide patriotic missiles, which basically is another provocation in the war. So, all the hopes with Zelensky's visit, the hopes of resumption of dialogues between the Ukrainians and Russians have further vanished, and that is the only takeaway from this visit. From a US perspective, because there is a change going to happen in the House, and there is some talk of the Republicans wanting to reduce sort of aid to Ukraine, will that be a factor in the months going forward, or what would you see happening next in sort of diplomatic terms? Well, if you see, as far as the Russian reaction is concerned, yesterday Russian ambassador to US and today Russian president said that this is yet another confirmation that US is directly involved in the war against Russia. So the claims of proxy war gets more credibility with this kind of pushing by the US, particularly Zelensky is addressing the US Congress. As far as its domestic context is concerned, there are commentaries about how Biden sees the war in Ukraine as a distraction from his own failures, his administration's failure in US, and basically providing the US public some kind of distraction in Ukraine and Europe, given the fact that if you see the overall performance of the Biden administration on all the basic fronts, there are credible questions about it. Zelensky taking over the Congress and some of the Republicans expressing doubts about diverting an essential amount of public money to the war in Ukraine, hampering the US economic scenario, US economy in different ways, is a serious concern. We do not know at this moment whether the Republicans, those who express their concerns about stopping the aid to Ukraine or reducing it significantly will be able to prevail, because even Republicans will see it as a possible distraction. Also the way Zelensky was received, both in the US media and by the US politicians, is quite clear that as someone has said before that the Americans see it as a possibility of a kind of cornering Russia in the international politics, reducing the international competition while using Ukrainians, the last Ukrainians as they say it. So this visit basically, as some of the Russian newspapers have said, that this is basically a kind of confirmation of the things which were said all this while and it has nothing new to offer. After doing that special on Netflix with David Letterman, I do not even know why Zelensky in that sense needed to make the visit all the way to the US. But thanks very much for that and while we have you Abdul, we are going to talk about another important story, an unfortunate story, news coming in from Afghanistan where the Taliban, the de facto rulers of Afghanistan at this point have announced a decision to ban women from attending university. The decision came at a meeting shortly after high school examinations were held in which several girls of course gave those examinations despite having been banned from attending classroom education since the Taliban took over Kabul this year. Abdul, along expected lines, all the sort of talk of a moderate version of the Taliban ruling this time around in Afghanistan have pretty much gone out of the window. There were reports, there were, of course, in different media about how the Taliban is not anonymous when it comes to how the quote unquote their version of Islamic laws applies to women this time. It is different from what it was in 1996. It also basically defies the US claims of quote unquote good Taliban versus the bad Taliban. All those binaries which were created ever since US started negotiating with Taliban much I think long past in 2016-15 to justify its basically attempts to come out from Afghanistan to find an excuse to withdraw forces from Afghanistan at least the physical prisons in Afghanistan basically has been yet again proved false and how shallow they were. So this also basically yet again establishes that the current leadership of Taliban has not moved away from their quote unquote basic position about how their version of society is basically a male dominated society where women are not allowed in public spaces. So the barring them, barring women from attending universities is the latest move. If we see what they have done in the last one year since they took over power in August 2021, more than one year, they have adopted unlike in 1996, they adopted a very gradual approach. First they shut down the secondary schools for women claiming that they are basically fixing some logistical issues, slay bus and so on and so forth and they will reopen the schools in March. That did not happen and it's unlikely that that will happen anytime soon. They also gradually introduced laws related to banning women from public spaces from parks, from other places, public swimming pools and so on and so forth. They also introduced law about women covering their faces and kind of making the complete veil compulsory. So this is yet another move and I think if there is not strong opposition from within, this may continue further. So on that subject of reactions or even internal opposition building from a political sensible, any reports that are coming in that indicate there is a space even for people to mobilize, for women to mobilize and other organizations to get together behind it? One good thing about this that there are no demands for external intervention as such. Of course, learning from the devastating impact it has had in the past. Of course, there are small scale demonstrations which have been reported from both Kabul and from other parts of the country. There are videos circulating on social media. Of course, the veracity of those videos, it is not established but they are claiming that there are male students in particular in some parts of the country who have bichorted their classes saying that this particular rule is not acceptable until women are allowed into the universities. They will not attend the classes either. Then of course, there are women and particularly the teaching community in Afghanistan have expressed their opinion in public and that is a welcome development in which they have questioned the legality and the need of such policies and some of them also have asked for organizing a movement against this. There is already a movement on social media and all the ground in Afghanistan about let them something related on the lines of let the girls study. And I think that movement there is an attempt to kind of make that movement stronger. Given the nature of Taliban and given its aloofness with the larger world politics as such, it is difficult to say at this moment whether those movements will be able to mobilize large scale demonstrations and large scale movement. We will be able to build a large scale movement and will have any impact on Taliban government changing its rule. But we will have to wait and see. Alright. Thanks for that update on a tough situation in Afghanistan. We move on to our final story for this episode of Daily Debrief which comes from the US. The House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection that ended with a bloody attack on the US Capitol building in Washington DC voted a couple of days ago to refer former President Donald Trump to the Justice Department to face criminal charges for his role in both fomenting the riots as well as attempting to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election which of course Joe Biden won. The committee tasked with understanding Trump's plot to keep Biden out of office made the recommendations after over 18 months of investigation. I spoke a little while earlier to Anish via video conference for more details on this story. So Anish it's been a couple of days since the committee made its recommendations and asked the Justice Department whether they are interested in taking over and framing charges against Donald Trump. What do we see happening next? How does the process, where does the process go from here? Well the legality of this committee's recommendations of what it calls referrals is quite limited and to pretty much a symbolic gesture in many cases. So because the Congress as it works in the United States presidential system the Congress cannot interfere in the workings of the executive including the Justice Department. But these four charges that they or referrals that they have given to the Justice Department can be used as proper charges against Donald Trump if the attorney general is convinced that they have enough evidence against him to actually make a conviction at least in one of those cases. Now some of the charges can be in the gray area where the evidence can be quite problematic to get especially in the part where he's been charged with defrauding the state, defrauding the United States which is usually and as always been very narrowly defined as financial corruption on the part of an office holder and not necessarily somebody who is trying to undermine the constitutional process or engage in any kind of political corruption. So but there is the charge of him actually trying to undermine the constitutional process to begin with and also the fact that he has tried to actually even put a different slate of electoral college boards in so that can also be grounds for conviction later because there is definitely public evidence to it but it is the manner in which the Supreme Court gives gravity to these charges and the evidence that will be presented. So we need to wait and see how this is going to work out because the Biden administration definitely wants to be careful at this point because if there is a failed conviction or if they fail to convict him to begin with or a failed trial that could actually make him a political martyr. He's already made statements where he has called this a partisan witch hunt against him and which in many cases is true considering the fact that the committee members have including the two Republican members in the committee were against Donald Trump politically speaking. So there is definitely a kernel of truth but the thing is like the committee did give extensive attention to details that were brought out during the hearings and that can actually if we need to remember that this is not the only thing that was going against Donald Trump there are multiple investigations against him including that of financial fraud of his family's company. There is also an investigation in Georgia where he and his officials have been accused of trying to undermine the vote counting itself and then there is definitely a parallel investigation that is already happening under the Department of Justice regarding the January 9 incident. So this definitely is going to all of these factors can definitely help in the next coming months but we need to wait and see because there is definitely two more years for the elections to go on and how this will pan out is something that we need to pay attention to. You must have seen in your coverage of the story and reports coming in Anish already reactions from various parts of U.S. polity and this is like we were saying the first time a former president has been even faced with potential criminal charges in this kind of a context. So what has been some of that reaction and what sort of impact is it likely to have? Well a lot of progressive and liberal sections are lauding the committee definitely because of the fact that it has done something unprecedented. There have been impeachments and which also includes Donald Trump himself against former presidents and including sitting presidents but this is a very different case altogether where a person who served as a president is deemed to be liable to be convicted or prosecuted as a criminal or guilty of federal crimes is something definitely unprecedented in many ways. It is also going to be new territory for U.S. legal and political system because this only opens up possibilities that future presidencies and future Congresses can actually charge sitting former presidents of criminal charges that can actually lead to maybe a long drawn prosecution or even a conviction. So we need to wait and see because in many ways there are plenty of people within the establishment Democrats who are not very keen on taking the risk actually go down that road to taking that risk because obviously you can never be very sure of your own standing in the next few years itself. So definitely they want to take it safe but if a prosecution goes through with enough evidence and if there is a conviction that happens that will be really, you know, sort of ground-shattering in many ways and we need to see if how these things actually pan out politically because obviously we are looking at a whole host of other factors. We are not looking at the base that Donald Trump already has, the right wing base and also the right wing support supermajority that he has installed in the Supreme Court as well. So the political ramifications of all of these things needs to be countered and before we actually to get how these things are going to have, you know, wider implications. Right. Thanks, Anish. We will definitely keep a close eye on developments and see whether, you know, some of this unprecedented what would be setting a new president that would potentially hold even the highest office in the US accountable or the people in that position at least the time they are in power. So it will be an interesting one to watch. Thanks for the update for now. That's all we have time for today. Thanks for joining us. That's all we have on this episode of The Daily Debrief. For more on these stories, as always, we invite you to head to our website peoplesdispatch.org and of course give us a follow on the social media platform of your choice for regular updates. We will be back again same time, same place tomorrow. Until then, stay safe. Goodbye.