Attention to the Unseen

Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg write: Kyiv is halfway normal now. Burnt-out Russian tanks have been removed from the roads leading into the city, traffic lights work, the subway runs, oranges are available for purchase. A cheerful balalaika orchestra was performing for returning refugees at the main rail station earlier this week, on the day we arrived to meet Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. The normality is deceiving. Although the Russians botched their opening campaign, they continue to bombard…

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Michael Hirsh writes: As Russian President Vladimir Putin readies a new offensive in his stalled war with Ukraine, strategists still talk of some form of Ukraine’s “Finlandization”—a kind of cowed neutrality—as a possible negotiated solution. But Finland itself may be about to tilt the balance dramatically the other way—and perhaps hand Putin his biggest defeat yet. On Wednesday, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin at a joint news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said a decision whether to discard…

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Reuters reports: One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies warned NATO on Thursday that if Sweden and Finland joined the U.S.-led military alliance then Russia would have to bolster its defences in the region, including by deploying nuclear weapons. Finland, which shares a 1,300-km (810-mile) border with Russia, and Sweden are considering joining the NATO alliance. Finland will make a decision in the next few weeks, Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Wednesday. Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s…

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Ishaan Tharoor writes: As the war drags on, the parallels deepen. The Russian invasion has already spawned an enormous refugee crisis, hollowed out many Ukrainian cities and towns, and led to the suffering of countless Ukrainian civilians. The conflict, a growing body of analysts contend, ought to be seen in a continuum with Russia’s 2015 intervention in the Syrian civil war, which played a key role in turning the tide of battle in favor of embattled Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad….

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Yahoo News reports: A trillion dollars: That’s how much money famed investor Bill Browder believes Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs have stolen from the Russian people since the fall of the Soviet Union. “And that was money that was supposed to be spent on health care and education, roads and services,” Browder said at a Manhattan event to celebrate the publication of his second book, “Freezing Order,” which chronicles how he became a Putin nemesis as a result of his…

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Cathy Young writes: Pundits skeptical of or even hostile to Ukraine’s cause in its defensive war against Russia have different reasons, or rationalizations, for their views and hail from different points on the political spectrum. But there is one belief that unites nearly all of them: the conviction that Ukraine is not a democracy fighting for its survival but an American “Deep State” project, with a regime installed by a 2014 coup that was led by Ukrainian far-right extremists and…

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Meduza reports: On March 18, Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon published a video message addressed to Ukrainians living in territories occupied or surrounded by Russian troops. He warned that there are “two types of humanitarian corridors” — those organized by Ukraine and those organized by Russia, and urged people not to use the latter. “According to our information, Ukrainians who leave through the humanitarian corridors organized by the Russian authorities go through severe tests. And they end up in so-called filtration…

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Siamak Tundra Naficy writes: In On the Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin wrestled with the question of why people would ever be willing to risk themselves for strangers. Only in 1871, in The Descent of Man, did Darwin find an answer: Societies that include brave people in their population would have an advantage when faced with hopeless causes — situations in which the brave act without regard for personal survival in the event of success. In other words, particularly…

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Ali Wyne writes: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered Europe’s post-Cold War hopes that the continent would avoid a large-scale armed confrontation, renewed global anxiety over the spectre of a great-power war that could escalate to the nuclear level, and evoked distressing comparisons to the march of militaristic authoritarians during the 1930s. Although the US worked assiduously to prevent a worst-case scenario, declassifying intelligence assessments of Russia’s intentions and threatening crippling economic sanctions, Moscow nonetheless proceeded. Russia’s fateful decision highlights…

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Eliot A. Cohen writes: In most intense conflicts of this kind, armies engage in a kind of competitive collapse, victory going to the side that can hold out longer. The Ukrainians have kept their own losses and exhaustion well-guarded secrets, as they should, but outgunned as they are, and seeing their civilians slaughtered and tortured, they have to feel the strain. As fighting shifts to open areas where guerrilla tactics and handheld anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles will no longer be…

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The Guardian reports: A military commander concluded that “toxic substances” or “potent toxic substances of suffocating action were used” – but acknowledged it was not possible to engage in a toxicological analysis because the Ukrainians were living in siege conditions. It is too soon to say definitively what happened. One chemical weapons expert, Dan Kaszeta, the author of a history of nerve agents, cautioned that remote diagnosis was always difficult and questioned why, in the initial report, such a specific…

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The Daily Beast reports: Bill Browder was headed for breakfast at his Madrid hotel when two men with shirts reading “Policia Nacional” suddenly approached him and took him into custody on a Russian arrest warrant. Browder, a financier who had once been the largest foreign investor in Russia, had long been a thorn in Moscow’s side before he was detained that day in May 2018. Years earlier, Browder had discovered that many of the companies he had invested in were…

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