Attention to the Unseen

Ali Wyne writes: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered Europe’s post-Cold War hopes that the continent would avoid a large-scale armed confrontation, renewed global anxiety over the spectre of a great-power war that could escalate to the nuclear level, and evoked distressing comparisons to the march of militaristic authoritarians during the 1930s. Although the US worked assiduously to prevent a worst-case scenario, declassifying intelligence assessments of Russia’s intentions and threatening crippling economic sanctions, Moscow nonetheless proceeded. Russia’s fateful decision highlights…

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Eliot A. Cohen writes: In most intense conflicts of this kind, armies engage in a kind of competitive collapse, victory going to the side that can hold out longer. The Ukrainians have kept their own losses and exhaustion well-guarded secrets, as they should, but outgunned as they are, and seeing their civilians slaughtered and tortured, they have to feel the strain. As fighting shifts to open areas where guerrilla tactics and handheld anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles will no longer be…

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The Guardian reports: A military commander concluded that “toxic substances” or “potent toxic substances of suffocating action were used” – but acknowledged it was not possible to engage in a toxicological analysis because the Ukrainians were living in siege conditions. It is too soon to say definitively what happened. One chemical weapons expert, Dan Kaszeta, the author of a history of nerve agents, cautioned that remote diagnosis was always difficult and questioned why, in the initial report, such a specific…

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The Daily Beast reports: Bill Browder was headed for breakfast at his Madrid hotel when two men with shirts reading “Policia Nacional” suddenly approached him and took him into custody on a Russian arrest warrant. Browder, a financier who had once been the largest foreign investor in Russia, had long been a thorn in Moscow’s side before he was detained that day in May 2018. Years earlier, Browder had discovered that many of the companies he had invested in were…

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  More on Bill Browder here.

The New York Times reports: Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of…

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