Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Hundreds of thousands of professional workers, many of them young, have left Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, accelerating an exodus of business talent and further threatening an economy targeted by Western sanctions. Those leaving the country include tech workers, scientists, bankers and doctors, according to surveys, economists and interviews with emigrants. They are departing for countries including Georgia, Armenia and Turkey. More are expected to follow. A mid-March survey by OK Russians, a nonprofit…

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George Packer writes: Ukraine’s survival requires the sustained support of its most important ally, the United States. Time will not be on Ukraine’s side. If the war drags on for months, it will grow murkier to Americans watching at a distance; its moral clarity will start to blur. Ukrainians’ justifiable rage at all things Russian will produce images that foreigners will find less easy to love than the picture of a string quintet performing in the ruins of a Kharkiv…

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The New York Times reports: Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.” After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views. “Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them. “No longer,” one of the girls…

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Kevin T. Dugan writes: Six weeks after the U.S. and the G7 countries weaponized the global financial system to impose their harshest-ever sanctions on Russia, the fissures are becoming apparent. The ruble strengthened to its prewar value against the dollar by Thursday, a sign that the capital controls set by the country’s central bank were working. As the currency continued its rise on Friday, the Central Bank of Russia surprised the world by cutting its interest rates 3 percentage points…

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Politico reports: The prospects of Sweden and Finland joining NATO will ultimately be decided by how many people feel the same way as Peter Gustavsson. A long-time Social Democrat lawmaker in the Swedish city of Uppsala who now edits a party newsletter in Stockholm, Gustavsson says Moscow’s decision to attack Ukraine has scrambled the security picture facing Russia’s neighbors and it is now time for Sweden to join the defense alliance. “It is a whole new chapter,” Gustavsson said. “We…

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Kareem Shaheen writes: One of the most fascinating and deplorable subplots of the Syrian war (which entered its 12th year last month) has been the proclivity of the anti-imperialist left to justify Russia’s intervention in the war on the side of Bashar al-Assad and to excuse the myriad war crimes that Moscow engaged in or abetted, such as bombing hospitals and civilians, carrying out starvation sieges or protecting a regime that deployed chemical weapons on its own people. The central…

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Jasmin Mujanović writes: In the months leading up to the resumption of open Russian aggression in Ukraine, another European country consistently made international headlines concerning renewed threats of conflict: Bosnia and Herzegovina. Beginning last summer, Serb nationalist authorities in the country’s Republika Srpska entity (RS) — one of the two administrative regions within Bosnia created after the conclusion of the Bosnian War (1992-95) — launched a renewed secessionist bid following the imposition of an anti-genocide denial law. By January, the…

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The Guardian reports: Two days after Russia began its war in Ukraine, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency accidentally published an article celebrating the country’s lightning-quick victory over Kyiv, crowing that the “period of the split of the Russian people is coming to an end”. After a bloody month of war, after the discovery of evidence of war crimes in cities like Bucha and Borodyanka, the language in that same publication has grown even more extreme, containing calls for societal…

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