Attention to the Unseen

Matthew Duss writes: [T]he administration’s framing of the Russian war on Ukraine as symbolic of a battle between democracy and autocracy might be rhetorically satisfying but obscures more than clarifies the challenges and opportunities of this moment. First, it overlooks that the contest between democracy and autocracy is being waged within states as much as between them, including within the United States, as authoritarian-leaning ethnonationalist forces continue to gain strength—indeed, draw strength—from an us versus them discourse of civilizational struggle….

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Peter Dickinson writes: The Russian Foreign Minister’s very public descent into the squalid depths of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories highlights the mounting difficulties facing the Putin regime as it attempts to justify the war in Ukraine. Officially, Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that the aim of his “special military operation” in Ukraine is to “de-Nazify” the country. However, neither Putin nor any of his colleagues have been able explain exactly why they regard Ukraine as “Nazified.” Instead, they have relied…

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David Ignatius writes: Among Russia’s most costly mistakes when it invaded Ukraine was the expectation that it would dominate the electronic warfare part of the battle. Instead, Russia has stumbled and lost its way in the little-known realm of intercepting and jamming communications, an increasingly essential element of military success. Russia’s unexpected failure on the electronic battlefield offers a case study in what has gone wrong for Moscow since the invasion began Feb. 24. The Russians overestimated their own capabilities,…

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Yaroslav Trofimov writes: As a young poet in the Soviet Union, Joseph Brodsky was persecuted by the authorities before escaping to the U.S. in 1972 and going on to win the Nobel Prize in literature. In Soviet-era Kyiv, Ukrainian intellectuals used to trade coveted samizdat reprints of Brodsky’s poems, reciting them at clandestine gatherings. But the affection wasn’t mutual. At a reading in 1992, less than a year into Ukraine’s existence as an independent nation, Brodsky offered a new poem…

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Maxim Trudolyubov writes: Geopolitics cannot but attract those political leaders who cultivate various historical injustices as the basis for their revanchism. This is a political program not only of the Russian president but also of politicians with similar attitudes, including, to various degrees, the leaders of Cuba, China, Hungary, Iran, Serbia, Turkey, and Venezuela. All of them constantly complain about past humiliations, the lack of international recognition, the hostility of certain external forces, and wrongly drawn borders. What is less…

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The New York Times reports: Oleg Y. Tinkov was worth more than $9 billion in November, renowned as one of Russia’s few self-made business tycoons after building his fortune outside the energy and minerals industries that were the playgrounds of Russian kleptocracy. Then, last month, Mr. Tinkov, the founder of one of Russia’s biggest banks, criticized the war in Ukraine in a post on Instagram. The next day, he said, President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration contacted his executives and threatened…

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RFE/RL reports: Early in the morning on April 27, a drone crashed in a muddy field southwest of the Russian city of Kursk, around 100 kilometers northeast of the border with Ukraine. Locals tracked down the destroyed device not long after, and posted photographs to Telegram and other social media. The device appeared to be a Bayraktar TB2, a versatile Turkish-designed unmanned aerial vehicle capable of long-distance surveillance as well as dropping guided bombs or firing anti-tank missiles. It wasn’t…

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Robin Wright writes: America has crossed a threshold in Ukraine, both in its short-term involvement and its long-term intent. The U.S. was initially cautious during the fall and winter as Russia, a nuclear country with veto power at the U.N. Security Council, amassed more than a hundred and fifty thousand troops along the Ukrainian border. It didn’t want to poke the Russian bear—or provoke Vladimir Putin personally. Two days after long convoys of Russian tanks rolled across the border, on…

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Peter Pomerantsev writes: When the russian army first began shelling Lukashivka, a village in northern Ukraine, dozens of residents fled to the Horbonos family’s cellar. Children, pregnant women, bedridden pensioners, and the Horbonoses themselves headed down below the family’s peach orchard and vegetable patches, and waited. For 10 days, they listened as shells whistled and crashed above several times an hour. The attacks left huge craters in the land, incinerating the Horbonoses’ car and destroying the roof of their house….

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The Times of Israel reports: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday said that the fact that Ukraine’s president is Jewish does not contradict Moscow’s claims that it launched the invasion to “denazify” the country, claiming that even Hitler “had Jewish blood.” In an interview with Italian news channel Zona Bianca, Lavrov was asked how Russian President Vladimir Putin could claim he was trying to “denazify” Ukraine when Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s democratically elected president, was Jewish. “So what if…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Every day, convoys of cars and minivans trickle to a processing center on the edge of Zaporizhzhia, packed with civilians fleeing the areas of southern Ukraine under Russian occupation while they still can. A swath of southern Ukraine, including almost all of its Kherson region and the majority of its Zaporizhzhia region, have been under Russian military rule since early March. Russian occupation authorities are swiftly integrating these areas into Russia, appointing collaborationist administrations and…

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Craig Kennedy writes: As the Russian naval cruiser Moskva was engulfed in flames on the Black Sea earlier this month, Vladimir Putin gathered with senior ministers to deal with a different unwelcome consequence of his war on Ukraine — one far less dramatic than the sinking of a flagship but more dangerous to the ultimate strength of his regime. The agenda for this meeting was to find solutions to what was euphemistically termed “the current situation in the oil and…

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Fred Kaplan writes: The war between Russia and Ukraine is swiftly evolving into a war between Russia and NATO. In one respect, this is good: It gives Ukraine a higher chance of repelling Moscow’s invasion and even winning. In another respect, it is risky: The wider the war spreads, and the more Russia seems to be losing, the more compelled Vladimir Putin may feel to lash out with extreme violence. This shift in the West’s approach to the war was…

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The Observer reports: A dog came bounding over as Oleh Bondarenko walked towards the garden containing the burned-out house where he had been beaten, tortured and left to die. “Hey, friend,” he shouted, stroking her head and explaining the affectionate greeting. “I talked to her a lot when I was here”. He lost several teeth to Russian assaults, his torso is covered with scars, and the damage to his spine may be permanent. But his sense of humour has somehow…

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Katie Stallard writes: The Russian president is the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes, and I have seen this playbook in action in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insist that they too are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries. Yet we must not assume…

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