Ukraine Still Holds the Line
Plus: Biden's Gaza thesis statement.
Day one of the testimony of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen is in the books in Trump’s New York hush-money trial. Monday was the peaceful day—Cohen laying out his testimony of how Trump directed him to pay off porn performer Stormy Daniels under searching questions from the prosecution.
Today, Trump’s lawyers get their crack at Cohen. Much of Trump’s legal strategy rests on convincing a jury that they can’t trust any testimony from Cohen—who, after all, has spent time in prison himself for crimes including lying under oath to Congress. Sparks should fly.
Oh, and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s there too. Happy Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in Russia . . .
With the world distracted by other matters, Vladimir Putin’s May 7 inauguration after his farcical election “victory” last March went almost unnoticed. But then, it’s hard to say how many Russians noticed either: According to TASS, only about 9.7 percent of the population watched the ceremony, which was broadcast on 14 channels. The rest skipped the experience of watching Putin embark on his fifth presidential term in a palatial Kremlin hall, praise the soldiers serving in Ukraine, promise stability and security, and end with the vow that “together, we will prevail.”
Perhaps the most notable inauguration moment came after the mass that followed the swearing-in. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, unctuously wished Putin God’s blessings until the end of his days—and then added, “I will also have the temerity to say, may God grant that the end of your days should also be the end of your term in power.” That line was later excised not only from the Moscow Patriarchate’s press release but also from the YouTube video of the service posted on the Patriarchate’s official YouTube channel. Apparently, openly wishing for Putin to be president-for-life is still a bit much even in 2024.
Despite the pomp, the inauguration was, in a sense, a diminished one. The European Parliament recently recommended treating Putin’s election as illegitimate; while the decision is non-binding, most EU countries, as well as the United States and Canada, boycotted the inauguration. (France and Greece were the only major exceptions.)
Two days later, on May 9, an even more diminished parade for Victory Day, modern Russia’s supreme national holiday, was held on Red Square. Just like last year, the usual tank column was reduced to just one lonely tank, the World War II-era T-34—a visual that inevitably brings to mind Russia’s staggering losses of hardware in Ukraine. Russia’s hopes to have a new trophy by May 9—such as Chasiv Yar, a ruined and practically depopulated but strategically important town in the Donbas—remained unfulfilled; while Ukrainian troops near the town are in a tough position due to not-yet-remedied shortages of weapons and munitions, they are still holding the line.
For all the predictions during the congressional battle over military aid to Kyiv that Ukraine had already lost, aid or no aid, and that its frontline was collapsing or about to collapse, no collapse has happened so far. The Russian offensive is mostly stalled, except for some gains in less defended areas—such as the Kharkiv region, where Russia began a new operation on May 10.
As before, those gains have come at the cost of massive losses; official Ukrainian reports (obviously not without bias, but usually ballpark reliable) estimate more than 1,700 Russian dead and wounded just last Sunday, along with 30 lost tanks and 42 destroyed armored vehicles. Expatriate Russian YouTube analyst Michael Nacke, a generally trustworthy source, says that as Russia tries to expand its offensive, more and more videos are turning up online in which Russian soldiers, many of them identified by name and tag number, complain about being sent into suicidal assaults, describe their predicament, and plead for help.
Another expat journalist and video blogger, the caustic Alexander Nevzorov, has suggested that the “farcical” Kharkiv offensive was responsible for Putin’s decision to finally remove Sergei Shoigu as Defense Minister. That may or may not be the case; but the reshuffling in which Shoigu goes to the Security Council and Andrei Belousov, an economist with no military experience, takes over at the Ministry of Defense does not jibe with official Russian claims that the war is going well. (For what it’s worth, Belousov is known for his strong commitment to state intervention in the economy as well religious devotion and traditionalism, causing the pro-Kremlin Moskovskiy Komsomolets to dub him—approvingly—an “Orthodox Christian Bolshevik.”) Or perhaps the changes reflect nervousness in the Kremlin about a shift in momentum once Ukraine gets more weapons, including its first F-16s.
It still remains to be seen whether Ukraine’s Western allies will finally overcome their hang-ups about letting Ukraine use long-range weapons to strike military targets on Russian territory. In the meantime, though, Ukrainian drones are continuing to decimate Russia’s oil refineries—marking Victory Day with a strike at a record distance of 1,500 kilometers, or almost a thousand miles.
The “hot summer” cliché seems likely to come true.
—Cathy Young
Biden’s Gaza Thesis Statement
Throughout Israel’s war in Gaza and especially intensely recently, the Biden administration has found itself trying to manage political pressures from an incredibly divided Democratic base—from progressives who see support for Israel’s war against Hamas as tantamount to genocide to Israel hawks who see even the most mild and marginal critiques of Israel’s prosecution of that war as offering comfort to terrorists. Somehow each faction manages to think Biden is operating in thrall to the other.
That dynamic is why, seven months into the war, the White House is still taking great pains to publicly communicate the first principles of its approach to the conflict. Yesterday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan took to the White House press briefing to lay out the fundamentals of Biden’s view. Here’s the bulk of what he said:
One: This is a war between the state of Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, whose mission is to annihilate Israel and kill as many Jews as they can. The war began on October 7, when Hamas massacred 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages. There was a ceasefire in place on October 6. Sinwar broke it. The president has made clear the United States wants to see Hamas defeated and justice delivered to Sinwar. There can be no equivocation on that.
Two: The Palestinian civilians caught in the middle of this war are in hell. The death and trauma they’ve endured are unimaginable. Their pain and suffering are immense. No civilian should have to go through that. This is on the president’s mind every day.
Three. Israel has an unusual, even unprecedented burden in fighting this war, because Hamas uses hospitals and schools and other civilian facilities for military purposes and has built a vast network of military tunnels under civilian areas. That puts innocent civilians in the crossfire. It does not lessen Israel’s responsibility to do all it can to protect innocent civilians.
Four: We believe Israel can and must do more to ensure the protection and wellbeing of innocent civilians. We do not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. We have been firmly on record rejecting that proposition.
Five: The United States will continue to lead international efforts to surge humanitarian assistance throughout the Gaza strip . . .
Six: The United States has sent a massive amount of military assistance to Israel to defend itself against all threats . . . We are continuing to send military assistance, and we will ensure that Israel receives the full amount provided in the supplemental. We have paused the shipment of 2,000 pound bombs, because we do not believe they should be dropped in densely populated cities. We are talking to the Israeli government about this. We still believe it would be a mistake to launch a major military operation into the heart of Rafah that would put huge numbers of civilians at risk without a clear strategic gain. The president was clear that he would not supply certain offensive weapons for such an operation were it to occur. It has not yet occurred, and we are still working with Israel on a better way to ensure the defeat of Hamas everywhere in Gaza, including in Rafah . . .
Seven: Military pressure is necessary but not sufficient to fully defeat Hamas. If Israel’s military efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back, and Israel will remain under threat . . .
Eight: Israel’s longterm security depends on being integrated into the region and enjoying normal relations with the Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. The advantages of strong partnerships were on display recently when a coalition of countries helped Israel defend itself against Iranian missiles and drones . . . We should not miss a historic opportunity to achieve the vision of a secure Israel flanked by strong regional partners presenting a powerful front to deter aggression and uphold regional stability . . .
Nine: We are urgently and relentlessly working for a ceasefire and a hostage deal, starting with the first phase and building to an enduring calm. As the president said this weekend, there could be a ceasefire tomorrow if Hamas simply released women, wounded, and elderly hostages, all innocents. Israel put a forward-leaning proposal on the table for a ceasefire and hostage deal. The world should be calling on Hamas to come back to the table and accept a deal . . .
Ten: Iran and its proxies have tried to take advantage of the war in Gaza to launch attacks on Israel. Hezbollah is attacking every day. The threat posed by Iran and its proxies to Israel, to regional stability, and to American interests is clear. We are working with Israel and other partners to protect against these threats and to prevent escalation into an all-out regional war through a calibrated combination of diplomacy, deterrence, force-posture adjustments, and use of force when necessary to protect our people and to defend our interests and our allies. We will not let Iran and its allies succeed.
You can boil down the White House’s view like this: Hamas is responsible for what’s happening in Gaza and must be destroyed. But Israel must take all pains to minimize civilian suffering in Gaza as it does so—notwithstanding that Hamas deliberately makes this as difficult as possible—not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also in the interest of building toward a lasting peace in Gaza and the broader region. And the U.S. sees its responsibility not only as supplying Israel with the arms and support to prosecute its war, but also acting as a voice for temperance in how it does so.
“[Biden’s] commitment to Israel is ironclad,” Sullivan said. “Ironclad doesn’t mean you never disagree, it means you work through your disagreements as true friends do.”
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
High interest rates are hitting poorer Americans the hardest: New York Times
Biden administration raises tariffs on electric cars from China: NBC News
Trump and Biden’s appeal to Rust Belt turns on tariffs: Politico
Trump is gagged. So his surrogates say the forbidden stuff for him: Washington Post
Biden’s polling denial: Why he doesn’t believe he’s behind: Axios
Israel on the defensive as its military and humanitarian strategy is questioned: The Dispatch
Quick Hits
1. ‘We’re looking to the future’
The ongoing MAGA effort to salt the fields of American democracy has two main components. Up at the top, there’s Donald Trump, pumping out the unfiltered sludge of his election lies on a daily basis and strong-arming every other prominent Republican to go along for the ride. And then, down at the state and local level, there’s the stuff you don’t see from the people you’ve never heard of—the true believers and bad actors lovingly spreading that sludge around the roots of the tree.
Sticking up for our institutions means fighting back against this sludge-pumping, which means pushing back on Trump and the efforts of his allies. But some groups continue to indulge in a ruinous fantasy: That it’s possible instead to rebuild trust in our elections by ignoring Trump’s efforts to subvert them. One such group, as Bill Lueders writes on the site today, is the Wisconsin Alliance for Civic Trust:
Like many other state groups and their patron organization, WisACT bills itself as above partisanship; each group has two chairs, one Democrat and one Republican. The Wisconsin co-chairs are David Haynes, a Democrat, who recently capped off a forty-six-year journalism career as opinion editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Scott McCallum, a Republican who served for two years as the state’s governor. . .
[WisACT’s] May 7 press conference in the senate parlor of the Wisconsin state capitol was attended by about two dozen people, mostly supporters of the cause. Bernier, the former state senator, was present, as she had been at the Milwaukee event. Only a small handful of journalists turned out. . .
“Why are we here?” Haynes asked, getting right to the point. “I don’t think I have to tell any of you that we live in a highly polarized environment. The polarization, though, is a little bit different than it was in the past, and I think it’s more toxic and worse,” to the point that people in the public eye are being threatened. McCallum, in turn, said the solution was “to provide a platform for people to get actively involved, to stick up for democracy, to stick up for our system.” . . .
Then it was time for questions. The Washington Post’s Patrick Marley, a top-notch Wisconsin reporter who worked for many years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, noted that Trump, in his interview with that paper, had suggested he might claim the 2024 election is rigged, as he did last time.
“If you’re trying to make your organization a bipartisan or cross-partisan organization,” Marley wondered, “how are you going to respond to rhetoric like that if it escalates and are you worried that if you respond in a forceful way that you will then be perceived as a partisan organization and turn off Republican voters you might otherwise be able to engage?”
McCallum gave a boilerplate answer that WisACT is trying to draw people into the process.
Marley tried again: “Are you going to speak out against rhetoric like [Trump used] if it continues or escalates?”
McCallum dodged again: “We’re hoping a majority of people are willing to stand up and say, ‘We’re making sure that this is going to be a fair and honest election. And we’re participating in it, and we’re going to be monitoring it.’”
I had a question: “So how about right here, right now? Trump said last week to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he won the Wisconsin election, that that was a sure thing. He refused to say he would accept the outcome of the upcoming election. Do you condemn that?”
McCallum: “We’re looking to the future.” He said the courts had upheld the 2020 election result, and people needed to respect that. But, he added, genuflecting on some unseen altar, “as we know, there were things that were not entirely by the book in the last election.” I asked for an example and McCallum brought up the use of absentee ballot dropboxes, which a conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court decided to ban after the fact—a decision a new liberal-led court is likely to overrule.
I asked McCallum if the bad things that happened in the last election had corrupted the results. He replied: “The Supreme Court decided they didn’t.”
“What did you decide?” I asked.
There’s lots more there, most of it depressing. Read the whole thing.
2. ‘Did she do it?’
If you followed the trial last year of Lucy Letby—the British neonatal nurse accused of the serial murder of babies in her care—this stunning investigative piece from the New Yorker, which casts enormous doubt on the justice of her conviction, is a must read. In fact, it’s a must-read even if you’ve never heard of Letby, contemplating serious questions about how a person might become a scapegoat for all sorts of systemic societal ills—a country fiercely loyal to its public healthcare system that doesn’t want to accept the ways in which it has begun to fall apart at the seams and a criminal-justice system that fiercely suppresses public discussion of a trial:
Letby had worked on a struggling neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service, in the West of England, near Wales. The case centered on a cluster of seven deaths, between June, 2015, and June, 2016. All but one of the babies were premature; three of them weighed less than three pounds. No one ever saw Letby harming a child, and the coroner did not find foul play in any of the deaths. (Since her arrest, Letby has not made any public comments, and a court order has prohibited most reporting on her case. To describe her experiences, I drew from more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts, which included police interviews and text messages, and from internal hospital records that were leaked to me.)
The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”
But the chart didn’t account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country’s most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.
We mean it: Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
Thanks for diversifying the column's topics. We can all get the NYT/WP take on things, but finding more granular stories coast to coast is legit useful.
That a standing Speaker of the House is “required” to stand on a sidewalk and bellow like a carnival barker on behalf of a dude in court for felonies involving high priced hookers tied to his business “expenses” is abominable.