Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: President Vladimir Putin’s moves to mobilize as many as 300,000 reservists, threaten nuclear strikes and annex occupied parts of Ukraine show how badly the war has gone for Russia, military and political analysts say, and are unlikely to stop the Ukrainian advance or reverse the battlefield situation in the immediate future. Mr. Putin made these announcements a day after snap referendums on joining Russia were called for Friday in the Russian-occupied parts of the Donetsk,…

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Politico reports: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Russian President Vladimir Putin must return all land that Russia has occupied, including Crimea. The Black Sea peninsula should be returned to its “rightful owners,” Erdoğan told PBS NewsHour on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, in comments likely to provoke ire in Moscow. Asked whether Russia should be allowed to keep Crimea in a negotiated end to the war, Erdoğan said, “These are our descendants…

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NBC News reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin has a problem. For more than two decades now, Putin’s expanding grip on power has been predicated on his portrayed strength and justified as essential to Russia’s existence. Over time, as the political opposition and the independent media were gradually whittled away, Kremlin propagandists fostered a sense of inevitability underpinning his continued stewardship. “Russian society, just as the Russian army, is decaying and falling apart because of corruption.” From the start, Putin’s invasion…

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The New York Times reports: Underlining Russia’s widening isolation on the world stage, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India told President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday that it is no time for war — even as the Russian president threatened to escalate the brutality of his campaign in Ukraine. The televised critique by Mr. Modi at a regional summit in Uzbekistan came just a day after Mr. Putin acknowledged that Xi Jinping, China’s leader, had “questions and concerns” about the…

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The Guardian reports: Ukrainian officials have said some of the bodies pulled from a mass grave outside the recently recaptured city of Izium showed signs of torture. Oleg Synegubov, the regional governor, said some of the more than 440 bodies buried in a forest near the north-eastern city also had their hands tied behind their backs. “We are at the site of the mass burial of people, civilians who were buried here, and now, according to our information, they all…

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Diane Francis writes: Ukraine has Russian President Vladimir Putin’s armed forces on the run and has recaptured land the size of the state of Maine in a matter of days. But a more serious setback is the public distancing of Russia by his so-called “no limits” partner, Chinese President Xi Jinping. It seems there are limits, and Xi articulated these before and after a meeting with Putin in Uzbekistan. Beijing is distancing itself from Moscow as its war against Ukraine…

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Politico reports: Ukraine has stopped publicly asking for high-end U.S. weapons such as Patriot air defense systems, F-16 fighter jets and Gray Eagle drones. But behind the scenes, the push hasn’t stopped for weapons that could turn the tide of the war. Kyiv’s just getting savvier about its requests. Both sides are discussing whether to send all three items as long-term financing deals are being hammered out, according to advisers to the Ukrainian government, Pentagon officials and defense industry executives….

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Michael Colborne writes: I work at the investigative journalism website Bellingcat, where I lead our project using open-source research methods to monitor the far right across central and eastern Europe. In the Balkans, we’re seeing how Serbia’s far-right fringes are bolstering Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. These groups aren’t just helping fan the flames in support of Russia’s war; they’re also receiving Russian help to push their own dangerous agenda in an already fractious part of Europe. As Russia’s war…

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The New York Times reports: As Russia massed troops on its border with Ukraine and invaded the country at the start of the year, Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Company quietly invested more than $600 million in Russia’s three dominant energy companies. Then, over the summer, as the United States, Canada and several European countries cut oil imports from Russia, Saudi Arabia doubled the amount of fuel oil it was buying from Russia for its power plants, freeing up its own…

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Reuters reports: Vladimir Putin’s chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia’s demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign, according to three people close to the Russian leadership. The Ukrainian-born envoy, Dmitry Kozak, told Putin that he believed the deal he had hammered out removed the need for Russia to pursue a…

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Alexey Kovalev writes: A new Russian protest movement is coalescing, but it’s neither pro-democracy nor anti-war. Instead, it’s the most extreme of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supporters, who have grown increasingly furious at the unfolding military disaster for Russia in the six-month-long war in Ukraine. They want Putin to escalate the war, use more devastating weapons, and hit Ukrainian civilians even more mercilessly. And they’ve openly attacked the Russian military and political leadership for supposedly holding back Russia’s full might—even…

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The New York Times reports: The strategy behind Ukraine’s rapid military gains in recent days began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials about the way forward in the war against Russia, according to American officials. The counteroffensive — revised this summer from its original form after urgent discussions between senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials — has succeeded beyond most predictions. Ukrainian forces have devastated Russian command and control, and appear…

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euronews reports: The European Union will survive “Russia’s blackmail” of energy supplies and the looming “long winter” but only if the bloc maintains its “unity, determination and courage,” said Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. “Russia may challenge us, blackmail us and threaten us, but we will not give in,” she told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, speaking in Finnish. “Russia’s actions have unified the West as never before, while Russia is lonelier than ever.” During her speech before the plenary,…

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