Dear Progressive Reader,

Russia has invaded Ukraine. As I write this, Russian troops have been attacking the capital city of Kyiv and are engaged in street fighting with Ukrainian defense forces.

In addition to fears for the lives of those being directly impacted by this week’s military attack come concerns of an expansion of the conflict into the rest of Europe. I hosted a radio program on Friday with political science professor Andrew Kydd, who addressed many of these concerns and some of the history behind the current conflict. Earlier this week, anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote for our website about the potential risks to Ukraine’s nuclear power infrastructure. “Hiding in plain sight,” he says in the days before the first guns were fired, “amidst the chaos of a possible war in Ukraine is the horrifying potential of another Chernobyl-scale apocalypse.” By late Thursday, Russian forces had captured the Chernobyl site.

Much of the conversation in U.S. media the past few days has been about how the intelligence agencies “got it right” in predicting Russia’s military action. But even up to the moment of the first attacks, there were voices on both sides calling for a diplomatic solution to avoid war. Independent journalist Olga Churakova, reporting for Forbes in the Rostov region in western Russia two days before the attack began, interviewed soldiers and contractors there who said, “We were told there would be no war.” Immediately following the incursion into Ukraine, peace demonstrations began around the globe, including in the center of the Russian capital city of Moscow. More than 1700 people have been arrested in protests in fifty-four Russian cities, some threatened with charges of treason.

Following the September 11 attacks, people’s historian Howard Zinn (whose 100^th birthday anniversary is being commemorated this year) wrote in the November 2001 issue of The Progressive, “We need new ways of thinking. . . . We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”

In other news this week, Jeff Abbott reports on efforts to extradite former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández on drug charges. James Goodman continues to follow the four-year-long case of a young woman who remains in ICE detention in upstate New York. Eleanor Bader reviews a new book on Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society. Edward Frantz looks at the authoritarian impulse behind the current book-banning wave in states across the country. And Dr. Princess Currence pens an op-ed on the need for more Black physicians to create true health care equity.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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