Attention to the Unseen

Vanity Fair reports: As the war in Ukraine was about to drag into its second weekend, rightly dominating news coverage, I found myself craving perspective about that coverage from an expert on Russia and Ukraine. For that I turned to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist, senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and author of two books about Russian disinformation and propaganda. Pomerantsev was born in Kyiv, spent years living in Moscow, and has friends…

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The Associated Press reports: As the West condemns Russia, President Vladimir Putin has vocal supporters in China, where the ruling Communist Party tells its people they are fellow targets of U.S.-led harassment. “If Russia is destroyed, we will be next. This is for sure,” said Wang Yongchun, a retiree in Beijing. “The United States wants to dominate the world.” Such comments reflect the stance of a ruling party that is the closest thing Putin has to a major ally: The…

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Reuters reports: As Russian troops slowly advanced on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv on Thursday, some people back in Moscow were attempting to flee to destinations abroad that have not banned flights from Russia, stomaching soaring prices in the rush to escape. The Kremlin dismissed speculation that Russian authorities plan to introduce martial law following the invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special operation”, or that they will stop men of fighting age leaving Russia, but some did not want to…

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The Guardian reports: Five Russian soldiers sit in a brick building. They are blindfolded: the latest prisoners to be captured inside Ukraine. A Ukrainian voice interrogates them. “Speak,” he says to the group’s Russian officer. What message would he like to send to his soldiers and to Russians back at home? “Frankly speaking, they tricked us,” the officer replies, referring to his military superiors sitting in Moscow. “Everything we were told was a fake. I would tell my guys to…

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Simon Shuster writes: Western leaders were still divided two days after the invasion, when they met to agree on a package of sanctions to punish Russia for its attack. Germany, Hungary, and Italy initially wanted to water down these measures. Then Zelensky dialed in to their meeting. Calm but determined, his pale face covered in stubble, he told the leaders of the free world that this might be the last time they would see him alive. “The enemy has marked…

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The New York Times reports: On Feb. 23, Razil Malikov, a tank driver in the Russian Army, called his family and said he would be home soon; his unit’s military drills in Crimea were just about wrapping up. The next morning, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Malikov hasn’t been heard from since. On Monday, Ukraine published a video of a captured soldier in his unit, apologizing for taking part in the invasion. “He had no idea they could send him…

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A Russian warship, the Patrol Ship Dmitry Rogachev, travels through the Dardanelles on Feb. 15, 2022. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images By Alpaslan Ozerdem, George Mason University As bad as the Ukraine war is so far, an international agreement signed in 1936 is preventing it from getting even worse. The Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits gives Turkey control over the water route between the Black Sea – home to a major Russian naval force – and the…

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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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