Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: Nearly 300 civilians have been buried in mass graves by local authorities in this small suburb of Kyiv after Russian troops withdrew last week, one of several regions where Ukrainian officials and independent rights watchdogs say they are uncovering evidence of war crimes perpetrated by occupation forces. Footage taken by the Ukrainian military shortly after Russian forces abandoned Bucha showed streets littered with bodies of civilians, some of them with their hands tied. Human Rights…

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Politico reports: More than a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House is preparing for the possibility of a brutal, violent quagmire that could last several months or more and test the West’s resolve. Western military and intelligence assessments that had believed Russia would quickly topple Kyiv and seize control of much of Ukraine were proven incorrect, as Ukrainian forces, backed by NATO weaponry, have shown surprising resistance. Russia’s military has suffered extraordinary losses in troops and equipment…

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The New York Times reports: The stream of antiwar letters to a St. Petersburg lawmaker has dried up. Some Russians who had criticized the Kremlin have turned into cheerleaders for the war. Those who publicly oppose it have found the word “traitor” scrawled on their apartment door. Five weeks into President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there are signs that the Russian public’s initial shock has given way to a mix of support for their troops and anger at…

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Politico reports: J.D. Vance was on the warpath. “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,” he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. “We don’t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.” Vance wasn’t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown…

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Politico reports: The U.S. government is reportedly set to transfer Soviet-made tanks to support Ukrainian defense efforts against continued Russian attacks in the country’s east. A government official in Washington told the New York Times on Friday that the decision of U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration had come as a response to requests by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to support his country’s war effort with military equipment, including tanks. Following Zelenskyy’s appeals last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had…

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Serge Schmemann writes: It is hard to feel sorry for Russia today, when its army is savaging Ukraine. But for those of us who were in Moscow on that August morning in 1991 when a warm sun rose over people massed outside the “White House,” the embattled seat of the Russian government, and we realized that the tanks were not coming, that the coup had failed, that the Soviet yoke had been lifted, it’s also hard to escape a deep…

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The New York Times reports: Russia is running its military campaign against Ukraine out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, according to American officials who have studied the five-week-old war. That approach may go a long way to explain why the Russian war effort has struggled in the face of stiffer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, the officials said. The lack of a unifying military leader in Ukraine has meant that Russian air, ground and…

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