Attention to the Unseen

The Associated Press reports: On Oct. 14, a Russian engineer named Gleb Karakulov boarded a flight from Kazakhstan to Turkey with his wife and daughter. He switched off his phone to shut out the crescendo of urgent, enraged messages, said goodbye to his life in Russia and tried to calm his fast-beating heart. But this was no ordinary Russian defector. Karakulov was an officer in President Vladimir Putin’s secretive elite personal security service — one of the few Russians to…

Read More Read More

The Wall Street Journal reports: As Moscow prosecutors prepare an espionage case against jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, lawyers with experience in the Russian judicial process predict a journey through a justice system with the familiar features of Western courts but little of their substance. Like in the U.S. and other Western legal systems, Mr. Gershkovich is guaranteed a defense lawyer in Russia. But in practice, there is no promise of when his lawyer will be allowed to…

Read More Read More

Reuters reports: Finland will join NATO on Tuesday, marking the completion of a swift journey into the military alliance for the Nordic nation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, officials said. Finland has a 1,300-km (810-mile) border with Russia, meaning NATO’s frontier with Russia will roughly double in length, and the move drew a pledge from Moscow that it will beef up its forces in border regions. “Tomorrow we will welcome Finland as the 31st member of NATO making Finland safer…

Read More Read More

“You have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements.” Russia is taking away senior officials’ and executives’ passports, fearful a disloyal elite could defect.https://t.co/caCbW44dfj — max seddon (@maxseddon) April 3, 2023

Josh Rogin writes: The Biden administration seems to have forgotten about Syria these days. The only moves it has made recently were responses to February’s devastating earthquake or a recent attack on U.S. troops by an apparent Iranian drone. The administration has abdicated diplomatic leadership to Moscow and is turning a blind eye as Gulf states welcome the Assad regime back into the diplomatic fold. Privately, many Biden officials tell me they just don’t see any good U.S. policy options….

Read More Read More

Mikhail Shishkin writes: My dearest one, They stole the language from us. We spoke and corresponded with you in the language of great Russian literature. Now, for the whole world, Russian is the language of those who bomb Ukrainian cities and kill children, the language of war criminals, the language of murderers. They will be tried for crimes against humanity. I would like to believe that all those who prepared and participated in this war, who supported it in one…

Read More Read More

Michael Weiss and James Rushton write: An infamous pro-Russian combatant turned propagandist, known by the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in a St. Petersburg cafe on Sunday, in an explosion that injured at least 25 others, according to the Russian government. Footage captured on a cellphone just before the explosion showed Tatarsky examining a statuette of a miner. Tatarsky was himself formerly a miner, and his Ukrainian hometown is in a region known for its coal mining and heavy industry….

Read More Read More