“Commentators on the Ukraine War have sought to place North Atlantic Treaty Organization and particularly American training as central to Ukraine’s success. It provides a comforting story for American military superiority. While training on weapon systems and battle drills undoubtedly has proven valuable, it is unclear what insights the United States has offered Ukraine in understanding a threat it has been fighting since 2014. As the Ukrainian military conducts its counteroffensive, it is pursuing an appropriate attritional approach. Ukraine faces an enemy that has created a continuous defense in depth. Russia has spent months scattering minefields, digging trenches, and emplacing obstacles. The Russian military can mass artillery on any force attempting to breach minefields and has reserves prepared to counterattack any breakthrough. It is possible that Ukraine was pushed too hard by overly optimistic Western advisors to gamble on a mechanized breakthrough of Russia’s defense at the start of its counteroffensive. During this offensive, the Ukrainian military lost an estimated 20 percent of the equipment provided by the West. The U.S. Army does not train for this type of attritional fight.” (Robert Rose/War on the Rocks)
“One of the most striking aspects of the Russia-Ukraine War over the past six months has been the intensification of Ukrainian drone strikes against targets throughout the Russian Federation. While the Ukrainian authorities remain reluctant to officially acknowledge responsibility for these attacks, there is little doubt that they reflect the steadily expanding capabilities of Ukraine’s increasingly impressive drone army.” (Mykola Bielieskov/Atlantic Council)
“Feinstein is now both the definition of the American political Establishment and the personification of the inroads women have made over the past 50 years. Her career, launched in a moment of optimism about what women leaders could do for this country, offers a study in what the Democratic Party’s has not been able to do. As Feinstein consolidated her power at the top of the Senate, the party’s losses steadily mounted. It has lost control of the Supreme Court; it is likely about to lose control of Congress. Children are being gunned down by the assault weapons Feinstein has fought to ban, while the Senate — a legislative body she reveres — can only stand by idly, ultimately complicit. States around the nation are banning books about racism as Black people are being shot and killed in supermarkets. Having gutted the Voting Rights Act, conservatives are leveraging every form of voter suppression they can, while the Senate cannot pass a bill to protect the franchise. The expected overturning of Roe v. Wade this summer will mark a profound step backward, a signal that other rights won during Feinstein’s adulthood, including marriage equality and full access to contraception, are just as vulnerable.” (Rebecca Traister/The Cut)
“The best thing Pence had to say for himself in the spin room was that he was a “consistent conservative.” He followed up by saying that Donald Trump had once been a consistent conservative, too, but had strayed from the path. If Pence believes that, he is just nuts; if his campaign team told him to say that, they are incompetent. Pence is so careful when he speaks about Trump that he is incoherent, sometimes at the level of the sentence and the paragraph.” (Claire Potter/Political Junkie)
“Russia’s decision not to extend the Black Sea Grain Initiative amid the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict has raised further concerns about grain and fertilizer prices. As the world’s largest food importer, food security has always been a top concern for China, and even more so amid the current global food crisis. In recent years, a plethora of challenges, including pandemic-related disruptions, systemic competition with the United States, and the impact of climate-related shocks have cast a shadow over the resilience of China’s food system, raising domestic and international concerns about the country’s ability to feed its 1.4 billion population.” (Genevieve Donnellon-May and Zhang Hongzhou/The Diplomat)
“A $100 million U.S.-backed plan for Kenya to lead a multinational security force to help Haiti restore order in the face of mounting gang violence is attracting growing criticism. Kenyans, Haitians and foreign affairs experts on Capitol Hill have all questioned the wisdom of the proposal, arguing that the intervention is fraught with risks. The Caribbean nation of Haiti has been gripped by chaos and violent crime since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The unelected government has struggled to maintain order as an estimated 200 gangs have taken control of 90% of its biggest city Port au Prince. Prime Minister Ariel Henry appealed to the international community last year for a ‘specialized armed force’ to help break the gangs’ control and the United Nations promised to support Haiti. Kenya’s President William Ruto told the UN General Assembly in New York last week that international solidarity and collective action are needed to address Haiti’s surging violence. He said, ‘Kenya is ready to play its full part’ in helping Haiti fight the gangs and restore order. The plan to dispatch 1,000 policemen to Haiti is backed by the Biden administration, which is offering logistics including intelligence, airlift, and medical support to the mission. Kenya would lead the operation, joined by Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Antigua and Baruda who have pledged personnel. But some Kenyans have expressed their disapproval over the plan arguing that Ruto is acting at the behest of Western hegemony.” (Muchira Gachenge and Yinka Adegoke/semafor)
“IN THE CENTER of Siena, Italy, a cathedral has stood for nearly 800 years. A black-and-white layer cake of heavy stone, fine-cut statuary, and rich mosaics, the imposing structure—now visited by more than a million tourists each year—would seem to be a permanent fixture of the city’s past, present, and future. Most people call it, simply, ‘the cathedral.’ But Stefano Campana, a 53-year-old archaeologist at the University of Siena, calls it something else: ‘the church that is visible now.’ Campana has seen his fair share of excavations, along with the dust and sunburns that accompany them. But archaeology, for him, is not always about digging up the past; it also means peering down into it using an array of sensitive electromagnetic equipment. One device Campana uses is ground-penetrating radar, which works by transmitting high-frequency waves into the earth to reveal ‘anomalies’—subsurface features that are potentially architectural—in the signals that bounce back. In early 2020, when Covid lockdowns emptied Italian tourist sites of their crowds, Campana and his collaborators received permission to survey the Siena cathedral’s interior. Using instruments originally developed for studying glaciers, mines, and oil fields, they spent days scanning marble floors and intricate mosaics, on the hunt for walls and foundations in the deep. With the selfie-stick brigade gone, Campana and his crew were able to find evidence of earlier structures, including, potentially, a mysterious church constructed there nearly 1,200 years ago, lurking like a shadow in the radar data.” (Geoff Manaugh/WIRED)
“It is hard to imagine any world leader wanting to share the foreign policy swamp in which the beleaguered Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, currently finds himself. Having spent the past months fighting accusations that he acted too slowly to address serious allegations that China attempted to meddle in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections, Trudeau’s has landed in a potentially costly diplomatic dog fight with the world’s most populous democracy, India, at exactly the time he needs Delhi the most. Put simply, the timing couldn’t be worse.” (Michael Bociurkiw/CNN)
“The wife of Gabon’s deposed President Ali Bongo Ondimba has been charged with ‘money laundering’ and other offences, the public prosecutor said Friday, a month after a coup toppled her husband. Sylvia Bongo Valentin has been under house arrest in the capital since her husband was overthrown on August 30, moments after being proclaimed the winner in a presidential election. Her eldest son, Noureddin Bongo Valentin, has already been charged with corruption. The former first lady was charged by an investigating judge on Thursday, prosecutor Andre Patrick Roponat announced on state TV channels on Friday. Her house arrest order has also been upheld, Roponat said. One of her lawyers said earlier this month that she was being kept ‘incommunicado outside any legal framework.’ The Bongos’ son, Noureddin, has already been charged with corruption and embezzling public funds with several former cabinet members and two ex-ministers.” (Al Jazeera)
“Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered a former Wagner boss to take control of “volunteer units” and rejoin the frontline in Ukraine. Signalling the Kremlin’s intention to continue using the mercenaries following the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin told Andrei Troshev in a meeting late on Thursday that his task is to ‘deal with forming volunteer units that could perform various combat tasks, primarily in the zone of the special military operation.’ Troshev is a retired military officer who has played a leading role in Wagner since its creation in 2014 and faced European Union sanctions over his role in Syria as the group’s executive director. Deputy defence minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was also present at the meeting, a sign that Wagner mercenaries will likely serve under the Defence Ministry’s command.” (Athena Stavrou/The Independent)
“In a recent interview, Quentin Tarantino, whose next film is reportedly called The Movie Critic, admitted that he no longer reads critics’ work. ‘Today, I don’t know anyone,’ he said (in a translation of his remarks, first published in French). ‘I’m told, ‘Manohla Dargis, she’s excellent.’ But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don’t care!’ This is probably because Rotten Tomatoes — with help from Yelp, Goodreads, and countless other review aggregators — has desensitized us to the opinions of individual critics. Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no-budget documentary Hoop Dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses.” (Lane Brown/NYMag)