Attention to the Unseen

The Moscow Times reports: The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group on Friday accused the country’s military leadership of ordering strikes on the group’s camps and killing a “huge” number of forces. In an extraordinary declaration against the Defense Ministry, with whom he has been feuding publicly for months, Yevgeny Prigozhin vowed to “stop” Russia’s top military brass and urged ordinary Russians to remain calm. [Continue reading…] A new FSB statement: "Prigozhin’s statements and actions amount to calls for the…

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An editorial in the Washington Post says: In the spring of 2012, Vladimir Putin was feeling the pressure. For months, anti-Putin protests had surged through the streets of Moscow and other cities following fraudulent parliamentary elections the previous December. Mr. Putin, who was about to be sworn in for a third term as president, harbored a fear of “color” revolutions — the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine — as well as other popular revolts…

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HuffPost reports: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday he believes Russia acted in “good faith” amid the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, adding the U.S., in fact, bore heavy responsibility for the ongoing war. Kennedy, who announced his bid for the Democratic nomination in April, made the comments on SiriusXM’s “The Briefing with Steve Scully.” Scully asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued effort to seize part of Ukraine despite international condemnation. Kennedy claimed the way forward involved “baby steps” toward…

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Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Ukraine might be a victim of its own success. Last year, Kyiv launched a surprise operation to recapture territory in Kharkiv Oblast from Russian forces, liberating territory roughly the size of Denmark in the space of five days. That campaign, a closely guarded secret, was unforeseen by just about everyone — especially the Russians. But it set high expectations for Ukraine’s long anticipated spring counteroffensive. That spring has finally arrived, and Ukraine has gone…

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CNN reports: The Pentagon announced Tuesday that the accounting error revealed last month was significantly more than previously stated and aid provided to Ukraine was overvalued by $6.2 billion rather than $3 billion. The accounting error includes fiscal years 2022 and 2023 and occurred because “in a significant number of cases,” when the US transferred weaponry, military officials counted the value of replacing the weapon instead of the value of the actual weapon, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh explained…

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The Observer reports: Olena Yahupova was first taken by the Russian occupiers in the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar last October. Neighbours she knew had informed on her, telling the FSB secret police that her husband was a Ukrainian military officer. What followed, she says, was two days of torture with the secret police – which turned out to be only a prelude to a nightmare of five months of detention and forced labour, during which she also had to act…

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The New York Times reports: Even in a war that has razed entire cities, the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine stands out. Thousands of people were displaced by flooding from one of the world’s largest reservoirs, which was vital for irrigating farmland considered the breadbasket of Europe. The disaster puts global food supplies for millions at risk and could threaten fragile ecosystems for decades. The dam was visibly scarred by fighting in the months before the…

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Michael Weiss and James Rushton write: It has been nine days since the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and hydroelectric facility caused the worst ecological disaster in Ukraine’s history since Chernobyl. Because Ukraine is a nation that has been at war for almost a year and a half, the flooding of more than 80 settlements in the Kherson region, resulting in the death of at least 10 people, with another 42 still missing, has already slipped from international headlines. The…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Around 3:30 a.m. one recent morning, more than a dozen Russian missiles flashed on the radar screens of the Ukrainian air-defense crew defending this capital city. The missiles were coursing toward Kyiv, some as fast as six times the speed of sound and many heading directly for the crew’s missile battery. The Ukrainians didn’t panic, their commander said in an interview. They didn’t have time. But they did have a U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air missile system,…

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The Guardian reports: Is Russia about to experience a period of dramatic political change? If so, can exiled democratic forces unite into a coherent bloc, and is there any way for them to force themselves on to the political scene? Nearly 300 exiled Russian opposition politicians and activists gathered to discuss these questions in the European parliament earlier this week, the congress coming as news broke of the Nova Kakhovka dam destruction, the latest grim episode in Vladimir Putin’s war…

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On May 17, the New York Times reported: Water levels at a reservoir that supplies southern Ukraine with drinking water have reached a 30-year high, increasing the possibility of flooding in the area and signaling a lack of regulation. The sudden increase in levels at the Kakhovka reservoir appears in altimetry data — which uses satellites to measure height — published on Friday by Theia, a French earth data provider. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service has not…

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The Washington Post reports: Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces. Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022….

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