Attention to the Unseen

Timothy Snyder writes: Some observers of the Russo-Ukrainian war seem to think that its greatest danger is that Ukraine will win, or win too quickly, and that this will be uncomfortable for Putin, and that we should care. This is a deeply perverse way of seeing things. Putin has chosen to fight a war of aggression and destruction in Ukraine. Wherever Russia controls Ukrainian territory, Russians commit genocidal crimes against citizens of Ukraine, including mass rape, mass killing, and mass…

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Ivan Philippov writes: The day of the invasion – 24 February – is a day that will be forever seared into my memory. The enormity and the irrationality of the war was like a physical blow. In my carefully constructed social bubble, there wasn’t a single person who supported the war. We felt like leaves, scattered by a hurricane. We still feel like this. Some of us left Russia and some stayed. I left with the film director Kantemir Balagov….

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The Washington Post reports: In a video address early Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the situation on the battlefield in Donbas was “very difficult,” with Russian forces attacking Ukrainian positions with “maximum artillery and maximum reserves.” “We are defending our land insofar as the defense resources we have today will allow. We’re doing everything we can to strengthen them — and we will strengthen them,” Zelensky said. “If the occupiers think Severodonetsk or Lyman will be theirs, they are…

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Tom Mutch reports: Flowers bloom over an unmarked grave in Kharkiv. We never found the woman’s name, but the neighbors buried her in a shallow grave in the garden she had tended her whole life. Springtime has come to Ukraine’s biggest city, which has mostly been relieved of the agony of three months of Russian bombardment. Galina, a 61-year-old teacher from Kharkiv, lived underground for nearly three months, but her daughter in Russia refused to believe that their city was…

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Politico reports: Half of Washington, D.C., is in the business of analyzing Vladimir Putin’s every word and move these days. But when CIA Director William Burns speaks of the Russian leader, an autocrat waging a brutal war on Ukraine, his words carry unusual weight. Putin is the epitome of a “peculiarly Russian combination of qualities”: “cocky, cranky, aggrieved and insecure,” Burns has written. The Kremlin chief is “an apostle of payback,” Burns has declared. Instead of giving up on his…

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Anders Aslund writes: In his grand work Capital, Thomas Piketty has established that the total capital of a country, including everything, such as land and minerals, is historically usually four times GDP, that is, $800 billion for Ukraine, and much of this capital persists. The next question is how can this possibly be financed. Ideally, it should be financed by Russia as war reparations. Needless to say, the Kremlin is not likely to accept that voluntarily, but the beauty of…

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The New York Times reports: When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey threatened this month to block NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, Western officials were exasperated — but not shocked. Within an alliance that operates by consensus, the Turkish strongman has come to be seen as something of a stickup artist. In 2009, he blocked the appointment of a new NATO chief from Denmark, complaining that the country was too tolerant of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and too…

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In an editorial, the Washington Post says: Wars end. Many, if not most, end with negotiation. That might be what happens with the war Russia launched against Ukraine on Feb. 24, too, though one former Moscow regime member warns against urging Ukraine to negotiate while President Vladimir Putin is still bent on more conquest. “You just can’t make peace now,” Boris Bondarev, who recently resigned from his mid-level Russian Foreign Ministry post to protest the war, said in an interview…

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Giles Harvey writes: On the morning of Feb. 25, the day after Russian bombs began falling on his country, Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine’s most famous living writer, received a phone call at his home near Independence Square in central Kyiv. The call was from an old friend, a businessman with close ties to the government, who had just got hold of some privileged information: Kurkov, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, was on a list of “pro-Ukrainian activists” drawn up by…

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Politico reports: Accusations of broken promises and spreading fake news. Criticism from within the government coalition’s own ranks. And a chancellor defending his course with references to Emperor Wilhelm II. In other words: Just another week of Olaf Scholz’s wavering policy on military support for Ukraine. The German chancellor, who has steadfastly refused to visit Kyiv or even say he wants Ukraine to “win” the war, has been under heavy fire since March for hesitating on delivery of tanks to…

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The Observer reports: On the ninth day of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, editor-in-chief Viktor Muchnik gathered the staff of TV2 for a meeting at their small newsroom in the Siberian city of Tomsk. New wartime laws meant the whole newsroom risked jailtime for reporting on the conflict, Muchnik told them, and TV2 had just been officially blocked by Russia’s communications watchdog, along with many other independent media outlets. “All of us who wanted to change things for the better…

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Natalia Antonova writes: The companies that have already left have tended—with good reason—to emphasize the moral risks. McDonalds, for instance, stated, “[O]ur values mean we cannot ignore the needless human suffering unfolding in Ukraine.” And that hasn’t meant abandoning Russian staff; many firms have been providing salary continuations or directly evacuating personnel. The businesses that are staying might think—or at least tell Western governments—that they can remain separate from Russia’s increasingly unhinged political system. But if they really think that,…

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