-Ted Cruz, to the airline staff who supposedly worship him

The Ukrainian military has continued to fiercely defend Kyiv and Mariupol against Russian advances, leading Western officials to conclude that the Kremlin a) would not achieve its goals in Ukraine and b) would not react well to it.
 

• Ukrainian troops have regained control of a strategically important suburb of Kyiv, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. Russian forces stepped up their assault on Mariupol with shelling from the sea, airstrikes, and street fighting, after Ukraine rejected an ultimatum to surrender the city; Mariupol’s city council said that Russian strikes were turning it into the “ashes of a dead land.”
   
• The Pentagon has reportedly assessed that Russia’s “combat power” has dipped below 90 percent of its original force for the first time, reflecting the high rate of Russian casualties. President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that the Russian military had “badly underperformed” and would not be able take Ukraine away from its people. 
   
• Those assessments have come alongside new warnings about potential shifts in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tactics. The U.S. and NATO officials have said it’s increasingly likely that Belarus will join Russia in the war. President Biden said Monday that Russia’s false accusation about chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine was a “clear sign” that Putin was considering using those weapons himself, and military experts are worried that a stalemate could lead Putin to deploy one of the smaller nuclear bombs in his arsenal.

As the invasion stalls, Russia has escalated its crackdown on dissent.
 

• A Russian court has sentenced imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny to nine years in a more remote, high-security prison on fraud charges, a ~cleverly disguised~ move to keep him locked up after his current sentence expires in 2023. Navalny had been urging Russian citizens to protest the war from jail, via letters that his lawyers and aides post on social media. 
   
• In a sign that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s video appeal to the Russian people successfully cut through Kremlin censorship efforts, Russian state media has been forced to address it. Days after Schwarzenegger first posted the video to Twitter and Telegram, state-TV host Vadim Gigin raged about it on a broadcast: “That face is the cover page of American imperialism and colonialism.” Other prominent Putin mouthpieces, including powerlifter Maryana Naumova and writer Zakhar Prilepin, have also denounced Schwarzenegger’s message. 

Putin is visibly desperate to maintain control of the war narrative as the prospect of actual victory slips away from him. Unfortunately for Ukraine, regular Russian people, and the rest of the world, his failure may only make him more dangerous.

Check out the first two episodes of Stuck With Damon Young! In "Stuck on Sh*t My Dad Did”, Damon talks to Nikole Hannah-Jones, and then his actual dad, about all of the racial and economic factors impacting where he decides to send his kids to school. And on “Stuck on 'One Minute Man'”, Damon is joined by Saida Grundy and Jason Reynolds to deconstruct all the weird, awkward and terrifying intraracial anxieties we have about sex. Follow Stuck with Damon Young, only on Spotify, to get new episodes every Tuesday.

Republican Senators began questioning Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on the second day of her confirmation hearings, covering a range of important issues from “why are you soft on crime, based on stuff I made up?” to “what do you think of this children’s book I found?” Jackson was able to rebut, for the first time, false, QAnon-baiting accusations from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that she had been lenient when sentencing child porn offenders: “As a mother and a judge who has had to deal with these cases, I was thinking that nothing could be further from the truth.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who despite his past support for her lower-court nominations does not seem likely vote for Jackson this time, pressed her on her religious faith (solely to air his grievances about the questions that Justice Amy Coney Barrett was asked), and about her utterly unobjectionable representation of Guantanamo Bay detainees during her time as a public defender. Unable to find a compelling reason to oppose Jackson, Republicans have simply cranked up the racism dial, with both Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and the official GOP Twitter account attempting to link her to the bogeyman of critical race theory.

• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that he was working with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and other Republicans to find a deal on new COVID-relief funding, without which the Biden administration cannot finance tests, vaccines, or antiviral pills.
   
• White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that she has tested positive for COVID for a second time, after having two “socially distanced meetings” with President Biden on Monday. Psaki will thus not accompany Biden to Europe as previously planned.
   
• A federal judge has convicted Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin of trespassing on Capitol grounds in the Justice Department’s second January 6 trial. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden acquitted Griffin of a second disorderly conduct charge.
   
• Evan Neumann, a January 6 insurrectionist who fled to Belarus when the FBI came after him, has been granted asylum, according to Belarusian state media.
   
• Today in Things Republicans Are Just Serenely Saying Out Loud Now, here’s Sen. Mark Braun (R-IN) arguing that interracial marriage shouldn’t be a federal right.
   
• Rescuers have found no survivors in two days of searching after Monday’s China Eastern Airlines crash. Anxious flyers are advised to keep scrolling, but this seems to be a video of the plane plunging vertically towards the ground. 
   
• Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) on Monday confirmed the authenticity of a leaked public-safety plan that includes rolling back bail-reform laws, which has not gone over well with progressive lawmakers in the New York legislature. 
   
• Disney employees across the U.S. walked out of work on Tuesday in protest of the company’s mealy-mouthed response to the Florida GOP’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. 
   
• Three senior editors at Buzzfeed News resigned on Tuesday as the company prepared to make further cuts to its newsroom. 
   
• Donald Trump, Jr., and other former Trump staffers have launched a news (“news”) aggregation app that somehow is not called the Grudge Report. In other apps that certainly aren’t grifts, disgraced former president Donald Trump hasn’t posted on Truth Social since it launched over a month ago.
   
• Award season is upon us, by which we of course mean that it is time to vote for mollusc of the year. (Naval shipworm was transcendent in The Power of the Dog, but don’t let us sway you.)

A Trump-appointed federal judge has partially blocked a Biden administration directive that sought to limit deportations, siding with a challenge from three GOP-led states. In a September 2021 memo, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas directed ICE agents to focus on targeting immigrants who had been deemed a threat to national security or public safety, or who had recently crossed the U.S. border illegally. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Newman ruled that the Mayorkas enforcement priorities—which pertained to “apprehension and removal” decisions, not detention decisions—somehow violated mandatory detention rules. Newman also found that it was inappropriate to direct ICE to consider the totality of each person’s circumstances (things like, how serious a crime was this person convicted of? Had they ever been arrested previously?) before taking action. It’s not entirely clear what Newman’s ruling will mean for deportation rates, but it’s the latest egregious instance of right-wing courts stepping in to block the Biden administration’s agenda for purely political reasons. 

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Govs. Eric Holcomb (R-IN) and Spencer Cox (R-UT) have vetoed anti-trans sports bills in Indiana and Utah, respectively. 

A Starbucks store in Seattle has become the seventh U.S. location to unionize. 

Justice Patricia Guerrero has become the first Latina confirmed to serve on the California Supreme Court. 

A California court has freed Amanda Bynes from her conservatorship after nearly a decade.