Music: GoGo Penguin — ‘Atomised’
The West underestimated Ukraine’s bravery. Now, it’s underestimating Russia’s brutality
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…
Ukraine’s President Zelensky castigates Israel for failing to help his country fight off Russia
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…
The only international journalists left in Mariupol
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…
Ukraine is winning the war
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…
UN secretary general says global climate target ‘is on life support’
The Washington Post reports: The head of the United Nations on Monday warned that the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” as the ongoing pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a lack of political willpower undermine humanity’s efforts to slow the warming of the planet. “There is no kind way to put it,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told attendees of the Economist Sustainability Summit, saying in prepared remarks that the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris accord —…
Can brain scans reveal behavior? Bombshell study says not yet
Nature reports: In 2019, neuroscientist Scott Marek was asked to contribute a paper to a journal that focuses on child development. Previous studies had shown that differences in brain function between children were linked with performance in intelligence tests. So Marek decided to examine this trend in 2,000 kids. Brain-imaging data sets had been swelling in size. To show that this growth was making studies more reliable, Marek, based at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (WashU), and his colleagues…
A large solar storm could knock out the power grid and the internet – an electrical engineer explains how
Typical amounts of solar particles hitting the earth’s magnetosphere can be beautiful, but too much could be catastrophic. Svein-Magne Tunli – tunliweb.no/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA By David Wallace, Mississippi State University On Sept. 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. The operators of the telegraphs reported receiving electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the evenings, the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, could be…
Music: GoGo Penguin — ‘Ascent’
Putin’s worldview is Russia’s foreign policy
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…
Russian soldiers worry more about finding food than besieging Kyiv
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…
Putin has become hostage to his own rhetoric
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…
Pentagon’s work with Ukraine’s biological facilities becomes flashpoint in Russia’s disinformation war
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…
Ukrainian Americans struggle to get fleeing relatives into United States
The Washington Post reports: Every morning and every night, from her home in Falls Church, Va., Nadiia Khomaziuk messages her sister Lidiia in her hideaway in western Ukraine. Is Lidiia still okay? How about her kids, who are 7 and 11? Every day, Khomaziuk scours the Internet, calls U.S. government offices and connects with lawyers and other Ukrainian Americans, in search of a path to bring her family to safety in the United States. To get to there, Khomaziuk’s family…
The Russians fleeing Putin’s wartime crackdown
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…
Those on the right who loudly praised Putin have now fallen strangely silent
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…