Attention to the Unseen

James Rushton and Michael Weiss report: The road to Kherson, scattered with burned-out tanks and vehicles, at one point stops being functional due to a collapsed bridge, requiring a hastily constructed dirt track. The postapocalyptic scenery around Ukraine’s recently liberated city is unsurprising, considering that until about a week ago this area of otherwise unremarkable countryside was among the most fiercely contested pieces of land on Earth. Almost every building on both sides of the road shows some sign of…

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Politico reports: The Ukrainian government is warning Western allies that it is anticipating increased Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure in the coming days and that Kyiv does not have enough replacement parts to bring heat and power back online if those occur, according to two congressional officials and one Western official briefed on U.S. intelligence. Ukrainian officials have in recent days asked their American counterparts and more than half a dozen European countries for assistance preparing for a prolonged…

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Anne Applebaum writes: The precise chain of events doesn’t matter. Whether the missile that landed in the Polish border village of Przewodów yesterday was, as President Joe Biden, Polish President Andrzej Duda, and other NATO officials have suggested, the result of a Ukrainian antimissile defense barrage, or whether it was, as some initially suspected, a Russian targeting mistake makes no difference. The real cause of this explosion and the deaths of two people is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Top NATO officials said a missile that crashed in Poland and killed two people was likely a Russian-made weapon fired by a Ukrainian air-defense system, and that there was no evidence it was directed there intentionally. “Ukraine defended itself, which is obvious and understandable, by firing missiles whose task was to knock down Russian missiles,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said Wednesday. “The Russian side is to blame for this tragic event.” Russia unleashed one of…

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Julian Borger writes: If it was a Russian missile that struck a Polish village on Tuesday, killing two people, it would be the first time a Russian weapon has ever come down on Nato territory. The Soviet Union and the US managed to get through the whole cold war without making such a mistake, because Washington and Moscow were well aware of the risks of going to war by accident or miscalculation. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a far less predictable…

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