Attention to the Unseen

Timothy Snyder writes: Teaching a lecture class on Ukrainian history last fall, I felt a touch of the surreal. The war in Ukraine had been going on for half a year when I began. A nuclear power had attacked a state that had given up its nuclear weapons. An empire was trying to halt European integration. A tyranny was attempting to crush a neighboring democracy. On occupied territories, Russia perpetrated genocidal atrocities with clear expressions of genocidal intent. And yet,…

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Vasyl Cherepanyn writes: The “never again” slogan, the EU’s common ideological denominator, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in a perverted sense. Indeed, if one literally accepts the principle that “it should never happen again,” then war is thought of as impossible simply because it’s unimaginable in spite of realities on the ground. The EU has fetishized the idea of peace to the extent that it completely repressed the realities of war—only to be totally unprepared when the repressed came back….

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Freddie Sayers, at Unherd, interviews Fiona Hill, former advisor to Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump: FS: But how does this end? I understand that we must appear strong and united. But as the years pass, if proposing a settlement is seen as a sign of weakness, how will we ever reach one? FH: That’s not the way to look at this. The way to look at this is to try to create the circumstances for a real negotiation, not a…

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Uilleam Blacker writes: In the 2007 film “Katyn,” directed by Poland’s acclaimed Andrzej Wajda, a young woman in wartime Krakow tries to sell her hair to raise money for a headstone for her brother, who has been murdered and buried in an unmarked grave by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. She finds a buyer in a local theater, an actress who survived Auschwitz and lost her own hair. The actress watches as the woman’s long braids are cut off…

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Rolling Stone reports: Dženita Mulabdić hugged the ground, the sound of gunfire fast approaching. The pregnant 20-year-old Bosnian woman and her husband, Muhamed, eyed the locked basement door. Their toddler played close by, unaware of the armed men outside. The commandos from Belgrade, wearing black balaclavas, jumped the fence and entered the house in the ethnically mixed Bosnian city of Bijeljina, a two-hour drive from Serbia’s capital. They trudged downstairs to the basement, encountering a barricade in front of a…

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