Attention to the Unseen

Rebecca Solnit writes: In 2014, the Putin regime invaded Ukraine’s Crimea. In 2016, the same regime invaded the United States. The former took place as a conventional military operation; the latter was a spectacular case of cyberwarfare, including disinformation that it was happening at all and promulgation of a lot of talking points still devoutly repeated by many. It was a vast social-media influencing project that took many forms as it sought to sow discord and confusion, even attempting to…

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Ivan Krastev writes: The West can win over skeptics of its efforts to combat Mr. Putin only if it succeeds in showing those outside Europe that what is at stake in Kyiv is not the fate of a pro-Western regime but the sovereignty of a newly born postimperial state. Some already understand that idea: Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations captured what is happening in Ukraine when he said, “The situation echoes our history. Kenya and almost every African country…

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The New York Times reports: The United States and the European Union have been unwilling to put sanctions on Russian energy exports in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. But some oil traders appear to have concluded that buying oil from Russia is just not worth the trouble. One of the three top oil producers in the world, after the United States and Saudi Arabia, Russia provides roughly 10 percent of the global supply. But in recent days traders…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin has justified his war on Ukraine by the need to “de-Nazify” its government, falsely claiming that Kyiv is controlled by a cabal of American-sponsored neo-Nazis. To Ukrainian Jews, and many Jewish leaders world-wide, it is a brazen insult to the memory of the Holocaust, especially now that Moscow is indiscriminately shelling Ukrainian cities. “War crimes are happening here,” said one of Ukraine’s leading rabbis, Moshe Reuven Asman, in an emotional video…

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James Ball writes: The number of people across the world looking on in horror and willing to amplify Ukrainian messaging vastly outnumbers the dwindling cohort of useless idiots who will push pro-Russia messages. The country’s supposedly unassailable info ops are reduced to noise on the sidelines. This is true even within Russia, where Putin enjoys huge control over state media, keeps independent journalism on a tight leash, and has muted most of social media. There are limits to what Putin…

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The New York Times reports: Senior Pentagon officials told lawmakers in closed briefings on Monday that Russian and Ukrainian military deaths appeared to be the same, at around 1,500 on each side in the first five days, congressional officials said. But they cautioned that the figures — based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports — were estimates. For a comparison, nearly 2,500 American troops were killed in Afghanistan over 20 years of war. For Mr….

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The Kremlin has exerted tight control over news and social media in an effort to control the information Russians receive about the Ukraine war. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images By Cynthia Hooper, College of the Holy Cross Russian President Vladimir Putin is locked in a vicious struggle not only to subjugate Ukraine, but also to keep his own citizens united in support of Kremlin policy. But as Ukrainian fighters capture the admiration of the world in Twitter posts and TikTok…

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Masha Gessen writes: Take a walk through Moscow these days, and you will see giant, gaudy light displays—entire galleries and faux building façades composed of light bulbs. You will see gleaming arrays of luxury goods, messengers scurrying with cubic backpacks, and restaurants that fill up late in the day and stay full well into the night. Some of those restaurants have giant televisions, and you may see sports competitions, music videos, and news channels on them, but what you will…

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Daniel W. Drezner writes: Sanctions should be a means to achieving a larger end. Maybe the goal is to nudge Putin’s elite coalition — you know, the guys sitting at the other end of the long table — into forcing him out. Maybe it is to delegitimize Putin in the eyes of a country that remembers the pre-Putin 1990s as a time of humiliation. If the goal is to compel, then the sanctioners need to be explicit about what Russia…

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Fiona Hill: We first have to think about what Vladimir Putin has done and the nature of what we’re facing. People don’t want to talk about Adolf Hitler and World War II, but I’m going to talk about it. Obviously the major element when you talk about World War II, which is overwhelming, is the Holocaust and the absolute decimation of the Jewish population of Europe, as well as the Roma-Sinti people. But let’s focus here on the territorial expansionism…

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Vice News reports: Former President Trump’s top national security adviser thinks his old boss did “a lot of damage” to U.S.-Ukraine relations during his time in office—and emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton said Trump’s delay of military aid to Ukraine in 2019, as he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for dirt on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, made clear to Putin exactly how little Trump cared about Ukraine. “He obviously saw that Trump had contempt…

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The Times of Israel reports: A group of Chechen assassins sent to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were “eliminated” after their plot was foiled, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council said Tuesday. The announcement from Oleksiy Danilov came days after Ukraine’s military reportedly destroyed a column of Chechen tanks controlled by Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov near Hostomel, a key battleground outside Kyiv. “The Kadyrov forces unit, which came to kill our President, was eliminated,” Danilov told Ukraine…

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Bloomberg reports: The invasion of Ukraine is causing a mass exodus of companies from Russia, reversing three decades of investment by Western and other foreign businesses there following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The list of those cutting ties or reviewing their operations is growing by the hour as foreign governments ratchet up sanctions against Russia, close airspace to its aircraft and lock some banks out of the SWIFT money messaging system. With the ruble plunging and…

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Ilya Marritz writes: Though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort. One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani. It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one…

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Politico reports: Vladimir Putin just achieved the impossible: genuine European unity. The Russian president’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has united Europe and the transatlantic sphere like nothing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as even his erstwhile allies on the Continent abandoned him over the weekend. From Sofia to Stockholm, Europe’s internal divisions over how to react to Putin’s aggression have melted away in recent days as the historic dimensions of the invasion — the greatest challenge to the…

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