Desperate Days

Last night, the Academy Award for Best Documentary went to 20 Days in Mariupol. The director, Mstyslav Chernov, said he wished he had never had to make the documentary. He would trade the documentary and the Oscar for no Russian attack on Ukraine, no Russian occupation, no mass murder.

Last year, the Academy Award for Best Documentary went to Daniel Roher’s film about Alexei Navalny, who has since been killed by Putin’s dictatorship.

I wish these films did not have to be made — but I am grateful for those who make them, who render a service to all.

• Last Friday, Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian leader, huddled with Donald Trump in Florida. Back home, Orbán said this: Trump “will not give a penny into the Ukraine–Russia war and therefore the war will end.” He further said, “If the Americans do not give money and weapons, and also the Europeans, then this war will be over. And if the Americans do not give money, the Europeans are unable to finance this war on their own, and then the war will end.”

Yes — it will end with the re-subjugation of Ukraine, and all the attendant horrors.

• Nikki Haley is a different kind of Republican:

But Trump and Trumpism hold sway on the right: the Republican Party, the media, the think tanks — all of it.

• By Dara Massicot, in Foreign Affairs: “Time Is Running Out in Ukraine.”

• By Tim Mak and Joseph Roche, for The Dispatch: “For Front Line Ukrainian Troops, American Dithering Is Devastating to Morale.”

• A report from Reuters, dated March 6: “A Russian missile missed Ukraine’s president and the prime minister of Greece by hundreds of metres on Wednesday when it slammed into port infrastructure in the Black Sea city of Odesa.” Five people were killed. (Volodymyr Zelensky and Kyriakos Mitsotakis were not among them.)

Putin’s Russia is a terror-state, obviously. Yet it has plenty of support in the Free World.

• Something from Francis Scarr, who monitors the Russian media for the BBC:

Over the years, I have noticed: Russian officials themselves are often far more candid than their apologists in the West.

• By Ian Garner, in Foreign Policy, a piece called “The West Is Still Oblivious to Russia’s Information War.”

• George Weigel is clear and candid. In an interview, he said, “I’m afraid there are a lot of people, many of them quite ignorant, who are very susceptible to Russian propaganda. Putin is no more a defender of Christian civilization than Adolf Hitler or Genghis Kahn.”

• “You’ve got to be carefully taught,” said Oscar Hammerstein. I myself have a saying, adapted from “You are what you eat”: “You are the media you consume.” Listen to some Americans at a Trump rally: “He isn’t doing anything” (the “he” being Putin). “He just wants back what was his.” “Putin is trying to save his country from the likes of idiots like Zelensky and the elitists.”

I have never heard a purer expression of populism in all my life. Anyway, the relevant video:

• Illia Ponomarenko, I believe, has it right:

• A report from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty:

The Kremlin and its echoers in the West will tell you that Russia is trying to liberate people, especially in eastern Ukraine, from Nazis. It is the most shocking lie.

• War is not an abstraction. You can’t know the names and faces of all victims. But we should at least know a few.

I hope the Ukrainians repel their invader and would-be subjugator. I hope they can continue to live free. I think the Free World ought to help them. It’s in our interest as well as theirs.