Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: Over the past 120 years, a Beirut bakery has survived civil war, Lebanon’s financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fighting in Ukraine, disrupting food and energy supplies world-wide, may soon put it out of business. Zouhair Khafiyeh’s storefront is empty of the pastries and meat-stuffed pies he has sold for years, which helped put his children through college. The cost of a bag of flour on the black market has gone up more than 1000%…

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Andriy Yermak writes: Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s horrific invasion has exceeded every outside prediction. Many in the West did not understand Ukrainians’ love for their freedom, for their democracy. For us, losing our country would be worse than death. And that’s why we fight — because defeat is not an option. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered this message to a joint session of the U.S. Congress and to parliaments across Europe. He also pleaded for greater military assistance and the establishment…

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The Times of Israel reports: The Jewish president of a country fighting for its very survival addressed the lawmakers of the perenially threatened Jewish state on Sunday evening. One might have expected the event to be stirring and electrifying. Instead, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech was angry, accusatory, despairing, and brief — lasting less than 10 minutes. He used it to make clear his belief that the Israeli government’s refusal to provide arms and fully open its doors to Ukrainian…

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Mstyslav Chernov reports: I knew Russian forces would see the eastern port city of Mariupol as a strategic prize because of its location on the Sea of Azov. So on the evening of Feb. 23, I headed there with my long-time colleague Evgeniy Maloletka, a Ukrainian photographer for The Associated Press, in his white Volkswagen van. On the way, we started worrying about spare tires, and found online a man nearby willing to sell to us in the middle of…

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Eliot A. Cohen writes: The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and…

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Nataliya Bugayova writes: The U.S. has routinely attempted to reset relations with Russia since the rise to power of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000. The Soviet Union’s collapse led legions of scholars and policy-makers to pivot towards the new issues of a post-Soviet Middle East, Europe, and Asia. An entire generation of Americans hardly thought about Russia. The Russian Federation was seen as a former foe that could be integrated – albeit uneasily – into the international system led…

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John Sweeney reports: I’d heard reports that the Russian Army was not just stalled but that here, on this, the eastern claw of its pincer attack on Kyiv, it was going backward. “Have the Russians moved?” “No,” says Denis. “They are staying in the same place, neither moving forward or back.” “How are they?” “The villagers say that they are begging for food. They’re so hungry, they come to the villagers and ask for something to eat. The villagers say…

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Political scientist, Ivan Krastev, once met Vladimir Putin in Sochi, on the sidelines of a conference shortly after the annexation of Crimea: DER SPIEGEL: What was your impression of Putin? Krastev: Very intelligent and quick, forthright, confrontative. Sarcastic when speaking with someone from the West. But it is the small things that reveal the most about people. He held forth about the situation in the Donbas like a foreign service agent who knows how many people live in each village…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: On his first official visit abroad, the new senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, was taken to a facility in Ukraine where the U.S. helped scientists working with dangerous biological materials. But rather than produce biological weapons, U.S. officials in that ramshackle building were trying to prevent lethal pathogens from falling into the hands of terrorists. “I removed a tray of glass vials containing Bacillus anthracis, which is the bacterium that causes the anthrax,” recalls Andrew…

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Masha Gessen writes: In the world as it existed before Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24th, the Vnukovo International Airport, in Moscow, was a point of departure for weekend-holiday destinations south of the border: Yerevan, Istanbul, Baku. In the first week of March, as tens of thousands of President Vladimir Putin’s troops advanced into Ukraine, Vnukovo teemed with anxious travellers, many of them young. The line for excess baggage split the giant departure hall in half. These people weren’t going…

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Nick Cohen writes: Across the west, institutions that collaborated with Vladimir Putin’s Russia are having a moment of revelation. Lawyers who persecuted investigative journalists and a financial service industry that feasted on oligarchical loot are shocked beyond measure by the invasion of Ukraine. They happily overlooked the levelling of Grozny, the war crimes in Aleppo, the missile attacks on civilian flights, the invasion of Crimea, the destructions of Russian democracy, the endemic corruption, the endless lying, and the poisoning of…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Recriminations and finger-pointing have begun within Russia’s spy and defense agencies, as the campaign that Moscow expected to culminate in a lightning seizure of Ukraine’s capital has instead turned into a costly and embarrassing morass, U.S. officials said. The blame game, which includes the detention of at least one senior Russian intelligence official, doesn’t appear to pose any immediate threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s iron grip on power, but the U.S. officials are watching…

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