Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: In a dimly lit room, a dozen or so men in Russian military uniforms, their faces concealed by dark balaclavas, stood around a man reading out a letter addressed to President Vladimir Putin. “As of today, we still have not received weapons and ammo,” the man said, identifying his group as soldiers from the 580th Separate howitzer Artillery Division from Serpukhov, a city 62 miles south of Moscow — a unit he said is now stationed…

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David Ignatius writes: Pentagon strategists have always divided the world into East and West, with U.S. regional forces under European Command or Indo-Pacific Command. But looking at the embrace of Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin this week, you wonder whether we may need a single “Eurasian Command” to handle an integrated threat. A strong China is bolstering a weak Russia. That’s the real headline that describes the showy meetings in Moscow this week between the two countries’ leaders. The…

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The Associated Press reports: Like a salesman buttering up his best customer, President Vladimir Putin gushed about China’s economic success as he welcomed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to the Kremlin. “We even feel a bit envious,” Putin said Monday as Xi grinned. That was more than idle flattery. China isn’t just Moscow’s diplomatic partner in opposing what they see as U.S. domination of global affairs. Its thriving economy is the biggest buyer of Russian oil and gas exports, pumping billions…

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Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Ukraine is now getting warplanes, although not the coveted U.S.-made F-16s it has been pushing for. In what counts as another milestone in the West’s willingness to increase security assistance to the war-ravaged nation, Poland and Slovakia, both NATO members, announced last week they will jointly be donating their entire inventory of Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine. Speaking alongside newly elected Czech President Petr Pavel in a press conference in Warsaw on Thursday, Polish President…

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The Washington Post reports: For Vladimir Putin, the state visit to Russia by Chinese President Xi Jinping, which begins on Monday, provides a giant morale boost and a chance to showcase the much-vaunted new world order that the Russian leader believes he is forging through his war on Ukraine — in which the United States and NATO can no longer dictate anything to anyone. Xi’s visit to Russia, just after cementing his precedent-breaking third term in power, brings together two…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Years of investment in cities along the China-Russia border were intended to open the door to mutual prosperity and close partnership between the two global powers. The potholed streets, stray dogs and empty storefronts of Heihe, on the border in China’s far north, are more reminiscent of a declining U.S. Rust-Belt city. The city’s International Trade Center, a three-story shopping complex, was once popular with Russian shoppers looking for furs, leather coats and shoes. Now,…

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The Daily Beast reports: A group funded by Ben & Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen is running a media campaign against U.S. military support for Ukraine. The organization—Eisenhower Media Network (EMN)—has been reaching out to reporters to push claims that the U.S. is spending too much money trying to help Ukraine fight off Vladimir Putin’s invasion. EMN is a project run by the People’s Power Initiative, a group that counts Cohen as its president and a major backer. The ice-cream mogul…

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Alissa J. Rubin writes: A couple of streets away from the new buildings and noisy main road of the desert city of Falluja, there was once a sports stadium. The goal posts are long gone, the stands rotted years ago. Now, every inch is covered with gravestones. “This is the martyrs’ graveyard,” said Kamil Jassim Mohammed, 70, the cemetery’s custodian, who has looked after it since 2004, when graves were first dug for those killed as U.S. troops battled Iraqi…

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Steve Brown writes: In his Dec. 8 address to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Michael Tirre, the Europe Program Manager for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal, said: “The humanitarian impact of landmines and unexploded ordnance was already severe in eastern Ukraine following the 2014 invasions and, tragically, this has been magnified exponentially by Russia’s [2022] full-scale invasion.” Tirre estimated that the area of Ukraine severely impacted by ERW was at least 160,000 square…

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Henrietta Wilson writes: On the night of Sept. 25, 1991, Chief Inspector David Kay and his deputy, Robert Galluci, had a strange request for a group of Iraqis who were stopping them from leaving a carpark. If you’re going to beat anyone up, they asked, will you make sure it’s us? It was three days into a week-long standoff involving a team of unarmed inspectors mandated by the U.N. Security Council and their armed Iraqi inspection hosts. The issue at…

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