Attention to the Unseen

Joshua Yaffa writes: It was still dark on the morning of February 24th when Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, a midsize city in southern Ukraine, awoke to the sound of explosions. He thought it was a thunderstorm and went back to sleep. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that in the twenty-first century some sick mind would think to start firing missiles in the center of Europe,” he said. A duty officer called, waking him again, and…

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Matti Maasikas, Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine, writes: Many things have changed since 24 February this year. European leaders are no longer just talking about the need for dialogue (dialogue with an aggressor is, in any case, questionable) and are not refraining from action just out of a fear of ‘provoking Russia’. The cliche that there is no military solution to the conflict, which is at best ignorant and at worst only serves to stoke…

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The New York Times reports: The destruction wreaked on a Russian battalion as it tried to cross a river in northeastern Ukraine last week is emerging as among the deadliest engagements of the war, with estimates based on publicly available evidence now suggesting that well over 400 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded. And as the scale of what happened comes into sharper focus, the disaster appears to be breaking through the Kremlin’s tightly controlled information bubble. Perhaps most striking,…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: North of Donbas, a string of Ukrainian military victories in recent days pushed Russian forces outside of field artillery range of the city of Kharkiv, where more than 2,000 residential apartment buildings have been destroyed in more than two months of pounding. In a sign of relative normalcy returning to Kharkiv, the municipality said public-transport services would resume Monday. It will initially be free of charge given that so many city residents have lost their…

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  Michael Weiss reports: Is Vladimir Putin sick or even dying? The tabloid press, bolstered by a sudden efflorescence of Twitter diagnosticians, certainly seems to think so. Since his Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine got underway, the 69-year-old Russian president’s deteriorating health has been a subject of frenzied speculation — speculation that press secretary Dmitry Peskov has downplayed, citing Putin’s “excellent” health. Boris Karpichkov, a KGB defector to Britain (and formerly an officer of the Second Chief Directorate, specializing in…

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Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogana write: Russians are fleeing their country in droves. Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan; Estonia, Latvia, Montenegro. In the first two weeks of the war alone, Georgia took in 25,000 Russians, and Armenia was receiving some 6,000 Russians per day. By the end of March, 60,000 Russians had gone to Kazakhstan. And many more have sought refuge in a number of different countries in eastern Europe. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began, Russians who have…

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