Attention to the Unseen

Roger Cohen writes: Through towering pine forests and untouched meadows, the road to Lake Baikal in southern Siberia winds past cemeteries where bright plastic flowers mark the graves of Russians killed in Ukraine. Far from the Potemkin paradise of Moscow, the war is ever visible. On the eastern shore of the lake, where white-winged gulls plunge into the steel-blue water, Yulia Rolikova, 35, runs an inn that doubles as a children’s summer camp. She is some 3,500 miles from the…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: A combined Russian and Chinese naval force patrolled near the coast of Alaska last week in what U.S. experts said appeared to be the largest such flotilla to approach American shores. Eleven Russian and Chinese ships steamed close to the Aleutian Islands, according to U.S. officials. The ships, which never entered U.S. territorial waters and have since left, were shadowed by four U.S. destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft. “It is a historical first,” said Brent…

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Forbes reports: A trio of civilian cargo ships—one each from Israel and Greece plus one with Turkish-Georgian registration—ran the Russian blockade in the Black Sea on Sunday and anchored at one of Ukraine’s grain ports on the Danube Delta. Twenty-two days after Moscow canceled a deal with Kyiv—which had allowed Ukraine safely to export tens of millions of tons of grain—and then threatened to halt maritime traffic to Ukrainian ports, the world has called the Russians’ bluff. “Reports of three…

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Joshua Yaffa writes: On May 20th, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, stood in the center of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, and recorded a video. The city once housed seventy thousand people but was now, after months of relentless shelling, nearly abandoned. Whole blocks were in ruins, charred skeletons of concrete and steel. Smoke hung over the smoldering remains like an early-morning fog. Prigozhin wore combat fatigues and waved a Russian flag. “Today, at twelve noon, Bakhmut was…

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Bryan Bender writes: This summer, as the public is treated to a rare thriller about the development of the atomic bomb in director Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer, the nation’s leading nuclear policy wonks like [Ed] Geist [at RAND] are more concerned than ever about the specter of a nuclear war — and warn that we are far less prepared than during the Cold War to deal with a more expansive threat. As Oppenheimer reminds us, the bomb itself was the…

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CNN reports: China is providing technology and equipment to Russia that is increasingly important to Moscow’s war in Ukraine, according to a newly released report compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The report, titled “Support Provided by the People’s Republic of China to Russia” and dated 2023, is unclassified and largely cites open-source data and western press reporting to support its claims. But it includes the US intelligence community assessment that China “has become an increasingly…

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Michael Weiss and James Rushton write: One of the difficulties in covering the Russo-Ukraine War as a journalist is the tendency of so many in this profession to assemble facts in favor of whatever the prevailing narrative of the day is. Sixteen months ago, it was hard to find many people in prominent Washington think tanks or at major broadsheets who did not think Kyiv would fall in three days. When it didn’t, those wedded to the notion that Russia…

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Lawrence Freedman writes: Governments start wars in pursuit of various objectives, from conquering territory to changing the regime of a hostile state to supporting a beleaguered ally. Once a war begins, the stakes are immediately raised. It is one of the paradoxes of war that even as its original objectives drift out of reach or are cast aside, the necessity of not being seen as the loser only grows in importance—such importance, in fact, that even if winning is no…

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The Guardian reports: Russian drones launched a four-hour attack on Ukraine’s Danube ports of Reni and Izmail, destroying grain warehouses and other facilities, as Moscow appeared to escalate its attempts to strangle Kyiv’s globally important agricultural exports. The attacks, using Iranian-supplied drones, follow Russia’s withdrawal this month from the Black Sea deal that allowed Ukraine to export its grain and threats by both Moscow and Kyiv to target civilian carriers visiting ports. Ukrainian officials said 15 Shahed-136 drones were launched…

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The Washington Post reports: When Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, launched his attempted mutiny on the morning of June 24, Vladimir Putin was paralyzed and unable to act decisively, according to Ukrainian and other security officials in Europe. No orders were issued for most of the day, the officials said. The Russian president had been warned by the Russian security services at least two or three days ahead of time that Prigozhin was preparing a possible…

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The Guardian reports: ‘Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.” The priest dabbed tears from his eyes as his sonorous voice emerged from loudspeakers hastily assembled outside his devastated cathedral, the incantation competing with the crash of debris being loaded into trucks and the drilling of repair works on neighbouring buildings. This was the second time that the vast, sand-yellow Transfiguration Cathedral, which sits in the heart of Odesa’s Unesco-listed historic centre, had been attacked: in the 1930s,…

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Politico reports: African leaders have long been reluctant to criticize Russia and now that President Vladimir Putin has killed off a deal to allow Ukraine to export grain, they know they are more dependent than ever on Moscow’s largesse to feed millions of people at risk of going hungry. Having canceled the pact on Monday, Moscow unleashed four nights of attacks on the Ukrainian ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk — two vital export facilities — damaging the infrastructure of global…

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CNN reports: A prominent Russian pro-war blogger who has criticized President Vladimir Putin and his military’s mishaps in Ukraine was arrested on Friday, in a move that suggested the Kremlin’s patience with dissent has grown thinner in the wake of the Wagner mercenary rebellion last month. Igor Girkin, a former KGB officer who helped Russia seize Crimea and was convicted of mass murder for his role in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, was taken from…

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