Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: They have handed out Russian passports, cellphone numbers and set-top boxes for watching Russian television. They have replaced Ukrainian currency with the ruble, rerouted the internet through Russian servers and arrested hundreds who have resisted assimilation. In ways big and small, the occupying authorities on territory seized by Moscow’s forces are using fear and indoctrination to compel Ukrainians to adopt a Russian way of life. “We are one people,” blue-white-and-red billboards say. “We are with…

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CNN reports: Days after Moscow launched its bloody war on Ukraine, a Russian cargo plane stood on a Khartoum runway, a strip of tarmac surrounded by red-orange sand. The aircraft’s manifest stated it was loaded with cookies. Sudan rarely, if ever, exports cookies. A heated debate transpired between officials in a back office of Khartoum International Airport. They feared that inspecting the plane would vex the country’s increasingly pro-Russian military leadership. Multiple previous attempts to intercept suspicious Russian carriers had…

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Joe Cirincione writes: International relations scholar John Mearsheimer is brilliant, provocative and deeply insightful. I have had the pleasure to know him and to have lectured to his class at the University of Chicago. On Ukraine, however, he is dangerously wrong. In numerous essays and articles, Mearsheimer focuses his fire on U.S. and NATO policies for causing the Ukraine war and for its continuation. His speech, “Why Is Ukraine the West’s Fault?” has been viewed more than 27 million times….

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: The United States and its allies are leaning heavily on economic sanctions to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But a key element in that strategy, restrictions on Russian oil exports, mostly appears to be causing pain for ordinary people in other countries. European nations, in particular, are causing considerable damage to their own economies without reducing Russia’s oil revenue. Nations seeking to help Ukraine are aiming at the wrong target….

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Reuters reports: When the first armoured vehicles of Russia’s invading army reached the heart of Chornobyl nuclear plant on the afternoon of Feb. 24, they encountered a Ukrainian unit charged with defending the notorious facility. In less than two hours, and without a fight, the 169 members of the Ukrainian National Guard laid down their weapons. Russia had taken Chornobyl, a repository for tonnes of nuclear material and a key staging post on the approach to Kyiv. The fall of…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Opera singer Oleksandr Melnychuk picked up a shotgun shortly after Russian tanks rolled to Kyiv’s outskirts in February, joining a territorial defense battalion to protect northern approaches to the Ukrainian capital. The city of some 3.5 million emptied, with antitank barriers blocking the streets and artillery cannonades keeping remaining residents awake at night. Kyiv’s opera and ballet theater was shut down, as were all restaurants, bars, museums, shopping malls and pretty much everything other than…

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The Guardian reports: Reported plans for the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to visit Taiwan could spark one of the most perilous moments in cross-strait relations for decades, analysts have warned. Pelosi’s visit has not been confirmed but there is speculation it could occur in the coming weeks. She would be the highest-ranked US official to visit since Newt Gingrich in 1997. China has warned that a visit by Pelosi would have “consequences”. “I think the Chinese have to do…

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Michael Weiss reports: Sitting in her office in Stenbock House, a well-appointed neoclassical building in the heart of Tallinn’s medieval Old Town, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas wanted to discuss the last 80 years of European history. But she had only 20 minutes. An attorney by training and a former member of the European Parliament, Kallas was in a tenuous position when she met with Yahoo News on July 8, so much so that she nearly had to cancel her interview….

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The Associated Press reports: Russia’s top diplomat said Moscow’s overarching goal in Ukraine is to free its people from its “unacceptable regime,” expressing the Kremlin’s war aims in some of the bluntest terms yet as its forces pummel the country with artillery barrages and airstrikes. The remark from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov comes amid Ukraine’s efforts to resume grain exports from its Black Sea ports, something that would help ease global food shortages, under a new deal tested by…

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The New York Times reports: The two Mi-8 helicopters tore across enemy territory early on the morning of March 21, startling the Russian soldiers below. Inside were Ukrainian Special Forces fighters carrying crates of Stinger and Javelin missiles, as well as a satellite internet system. They were flying barely 20 feet above ground into the hottest combat zone in the war. Ukraine’s top generals had conceived the flights as a daring, possibly doomed, mission. A band of Ukrainian soldiers, running…

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Luke Mogelson writes: People in Ukraine sometimes describe the intensity of shelling in simple auditory terms. A place can be “quiet” or “loud.” As the volume increases, so do the chaos, misery, death, and fear. You cannot experience such fatal noise without instinctively grasping its purpose, which is to brutalize psychically as much as physically—to demoralize and stupefy. Nowhere on earth is louder today than the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Russia has concentrated its forces and its firepower…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia launched a missile attack on Ukraine’s key grain-exporting port of Odessa, officials said, hours after signing an international agreement to ease its blockade of the Black Sea coastline and allow for the safe transport of grain and other foodstuffs necessary to alleviate a looming global food crisis. The attack on Odessa appeared to violate the terms of the United Nations-brokered agreement signed by Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on Friday, which stipulated that both…

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Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: The anonymous whistleblower behind the bombshell leak known as the Panama Papers has emerged anew to warn how offshore companies are enabling Russia’s war machine. John Doe, as the whistleblower insisted on being called, had only spoken out publicly once before, but reached out recently to the two German journalists who had received the leak of documents in 2015 concerning the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Those two reporters from Suddeutsche Zeitung, Frederik Obermaier…

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