Dear Progressive Reader,

Reports of civilian casualties in the war in Ukraine, now entering its fourth week, continue unabated. According to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, there are now more than 3.2 million people who have left the country, with millions more internally displaced within Ukraine. But Russians are now also leaving their home country. Many are dissidents, others are journalists who are unable to report the news freely. One Russian journalist friend writes, “Off we go. And no, we don't know when [we’ll be] back.” She goes on to say that right now in Russia, “working as a journalist is very hard, [a great deal of material had to be] cut out of the text because of military censorship.” The Russian television employee, Marina Ovsyannikova, who bravely interrupted a recent television broadcast in Moscow holding a sign calling for an end to the war was detained and questioned for fourteen hours by Russian authorities. “It was impossible for me to remain silent anymore,” she told Reuters on Wednesday. “Ordinary people like me — ordinary Russian women — need to do something about it.”

This week, cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates the ways in which Vladimir Putin’s government seeks to keep the population in the dark with falsehoods and propaganda, combined with threats and the repression of dissent. Mike Ervin explains how the cancellation of next year’s Special Olympics games in Russia may have an impact on the war. “Maybe he thought all of the sanctions, boycotts, denunciations, alienation, and tersely worded U.N. Security Council resolutions in the world couldn’t deter him,” he writes. “But when he made the Special Olympics come out against him, he really stepped on a hornets’ nest.”

In other international news, John Dinges reports from Chile on the inauguration of a new president and the hope it is inspiring. And Jeff Abbott chronicles the recent indictment against the former president of El Salvador, Alfredo Cristiani, for his role in the twenty-three year old crime of the murder of six Jesuit priests and two women who worked with them. Another of the intellectual authors of this crime, Colonel Inocente Montano, was convicted in Spain in 2020 for his role in the “the decision, design and execution” of the murders and sentenced to 133 years in prison. This coming week also marks the anniversary of the March 24, 1980 murder of El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was made a saint in October 2018 by Pope Francis.

Also this week, Bill Lueders reviews a new book on the false allocation of blame in “accidents.” Sarah Cords looks at whistleblowing and incidents of harassment in Big Tech. And Joe George turns a lens on the class politics of the new film, The Batman.

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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