Attention to the Unseen

Frederic Wehrey writes: Footage and eyewitness accounts have conveyed harrowing scenes from the storm-struck Libyan town of Derna: overflowing morgues and mass burials, rescuers digging through mud with their bare hands to recover bodies, a corpse hanging from a streetlight, the cries of trapped children. Two aging dams to Derna’s south collapsed under the pressure of Storm Daniel, sending an estimated 30 million cubic meters of water down a river valley that runs through the city’s center and erasing entire neighborhoods. Some 11,300 people are…

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Courtney Dobson writes: “I burned my Russian passport — I was so angry,” Nikita Andreev said. It was Feb. 27, 2022, three days after Russia initiated its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Andreev was attending an anti-war demonstration in the U.S., where he has been living since 2011. The act, Andreev told New Lines, was spontaneous. Perhaps he was caught up in the moment as he stood near an open pit, surrounded by people singing Ukrainian folk songs and waving…

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Anne Applebaum writes: One evening in September 2022, a group of Ukrainian sea drones sped out into the Black Sea, heading for Russian-occupied Crimea. Their designers—engineers who had been doing other things until the current war began—had carefully targeted the fast, remote-controlled, explosive-packed vessels to hit ships anchored in Sebastopol, the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. But the drones ran into a problem: Starlink, the satellite-communications system that Ukraine had been using since Russia invaded early last year, unexpectedly…

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Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: At first, it looks like ordinary surveillance footage of a large military plane sitting on the tarmac. But then the wing catches fire. A second plane flickers across the screen, and in an instant its fuselage is engulfed in flames. Even in grainy black and white you can see the smoke billowing up into the night sky. Two Russian Ilyushin IL-76 strategic airlifters were destroyed by Ukrainian drones on Aug. 29 at Kresty air…

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inews reports: Anti-regime protests that are spreading across Syria could be the spark of another revolution, opposition activists have said, 12 years after similar demonstrations turned into a full-scale civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Videos on social media have shown hundreds of people gathering in the main square of Suwayda, waving flags of the Druze minority and chanting “long live Syria, and down with Bashar al-Assad”. Others shout: “Step down Bashar, we want to live in…

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Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes: Syria is a country of only 71,498 square miles in area, with a population of less than 24 million, and yet two global superpowers (the United States and the Russian Federation) and three of the largest regional powers (Iran, Turkey and Israel) are present on its territory. Israel has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since 1967, and carries out almost nonstop incursions into Syrian air space today. In centuries past, prior to the heyday of European…

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The Observer reports: Ukrainian forces have decisively breached Russia’s first defensive line near Zaporizhzhia after weeks of painstaking mine clearance, and expect faster gains as they press the weaker second line, the general leading the southern counteroffensive has said. Brig Gen Oleksandr Tarnavskiy estimated Russia had devoted 60% of its time and resources into building the first defensive line and only 20% each into the second and third lines because Moscow had not expected Ukrainian forces to get through. “We…

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CNN reports: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has tapped Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar, to become his next defense minister, replacing Oleksii Reznikov at a critical time for Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Umerov will have a bulging in-tray if and when the Ukrainian parliament approves his appointment. The change in leadership comes as Ukraine’s relationships with allies and donors enter a new phase. Kyiv is trying to accelerate the training and deployment of F-16 combat planes and acquire a host of other equipment…

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Phillips Payson O’Brien writes: Europe and the United States are on the verge of the most momentous conscious uncoupling in international relations in decades. Since 1949, NATO has been the one constant in world security. Initially an alliance among the United States, Canada, and 10 countries in Western Europe, NATO won the Cold War and has since expanded to include almost all of Europe. It has been the single most successful security grouping in modern global history. It also might…

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Layla Maghribi writes: “Have you seen the TikTok reels?” I groaned at the question a friend posed a few days before I traveled to Damascus. I had caught glimpses of the social media content created by certain traveler-influencer types but had largely avoided them to keep good humor. But as my first visit to my mother’s country in a few years approached, and I contemplated how I would perceive it, I found myself tempted to have a look at what…

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Jan Kallberg writes: The bleakness of the Western commentariat’s recent output is striking — Ukraine’s counteroffensive has made little progress, they say. Major US news outlets cite intelligence agencies opining that things are “grim” and that hopes are fading that Ukraine can reach its (supposed) objective of Melitopol, more than 50 miles away. This is simply wrong. Intelligence analysts may look at the map of Southern Ukraine and see distances; military planners will apply the military math and see something…

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