Attention to the Unseen

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has warned that if Vladimir Putin attempts to conquer all of Ukraine, it will lead to the “downfall” of Russia, while also criticising Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a Sunday night post on Truth Social. “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post, adding, “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just…

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Mairav Zonszein writes: On May 12 an American-Israeli dual citizen and Israeli soldier, Edan Alexander, was released from Hamas captivity in Gaza after direct U.S.-Hamas negotiations that sidestepped Israel. The images that accompanied his release looked like an American operation that just happened to take place in Israel. It was a U.S. hostage negotiator, Adam Boehler — who conducted direct talks with Hamas in March — who accompanied Mr. Alexander’s mother on the flight from her home in America to…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: On a call Monday, President Trump told European leaders that Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t ready to end the war in Ukraine because he thinks he is winning, according to four senior European officials familiar with the conversation. In what the officials characterized as a rambling and at-times contradictory call, Trump also said he believed Putin ultimately desired peace, albeit on Russia’s terms, they said. The Europeans’ takeaway was that Trump didn’t believe that a…

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  Investigative journalist and editor of The Insider, Michael Weiss, tells Times Radio‘s Fergus Macphee how despite Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s 2 hour long phonecall, no real progress has been made to ending the war.

Meron Rapoport and Oren Ziv report: In early April, just weeks after resuming its assault on Gaza, Israeli forces announced that they had taken control of the southernmost city of Rafah to create the “Morag Axis,” a new military corridor further dissecting the Strip. Over the course of the war, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the army had destroyed more than 50,000 housing units in Rafah — 90 percent of its residential neighborhoods. Now, the army proceeded to flatten…

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Anne Applebaum writes: On Saturday, I asked Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, in western Ukraine, whether he expected the Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul to lead to a cease-fire. “No,” he told me. Later, I asked the audience at the Lviv Media Forum whether any of them expected a cease-fire soon. About 200 journalists and editors were in the room. No one raised their hand. Many laughed. Over several days in Lviv I didn’t meet anybody who believed that the…

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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: In 2015, a decade before the Assad family’s fifty-three-year rule over Syria ended, the Obama administration was spooked by the advances of a rebel alliance from Idlib, which seemed poised to topple the government in Damascus. The administration reviled Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but since the rise of ISIS in 2014, it had treated Syria as a front in the War on Terror, and it was loath to see Damascus fall to Islamists, some with links to…

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