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Whether as a potential endgame, a face-saving maneuver, or a bit of both, the Russian military has begun a new offensive in eastern Ukraine.
- A much-anticipated Russian assault on the frontline of the war in Donbas and Kharkiv, according to Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Now we can state that the Russian forces have started the battle for the Donbas that they have been getting ready for a long time,” he said. Russian forces precipitated the assault with stepped up missile strikes on supposed fuel and ammunition supplies across the country.
- That Ukrainian warning matches a U.S. assessment that Russia has deployed 11 new battalion tactical groups to its fighting force since last week. Those 76 units are concentrated heavily in eastern and southern Ukraine, according to U.S. officials, and drawn in large part from the Russian retreat from Kyiv and surrounding regions, which are now free from occupation.
- It also, unfortunately, matches reports that Ukraine is on the brink of losing its fight for control of the strategically significant city of Mariupol, and casts doubt on recent hope that Ukrainian forces might simply drive invaders out of their country. One Ukrainian marine commander published a desperate plea for the U.S. and European allies to supply more heavy artillery—enough of which, he claims, would allow surrounded Ukrainian forces to regain full control there.
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On the other hand, Russia’s most powerful propagandists aren’t exactly exuding confidence that everything’s under control.
- In echoes of the Republican Party’s evolution into a right-wing-media-run party, one of Russia’s top state-media figures just uncorked this screed at the Russian ministry of defense, demanding answers about the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser. Meanwhile the top editor of RT, Margarita Simonyan, has advocated for a totalitarian ban on social media companies like YouTube, and for emulating China’s iron-handed control over the information available to its citizens, to ultimately prevent Russians from hearing about tempting ideas like “freedom.”
- Perhaps that is because their efforts to keep a lid on the scale of the damage Vladimir Putin has done to the Russian economy are starting to fail. Russia’s own central-bank chief warned Monday that the effects of western sanctions were just beginning to snowball, and could quickly materialize in a banking collapse, supply shortages, and mass unemployment even in Moscow. Her warnings conflict with the Kremlin line that the western sanctions regime has failed because it didn't send the Russian economy into instant collapse.
There seems to be little doubt that Ukrainian forces are staring down one of the biggest challenges they’ve faced since the war began. But there may be solace to take in the fact that even Putin’s paid liars seem spooked by what’s happened so far, and what is yet to come.
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Have you signed up to be part of your region’s Midterm Madness team? We just launched our official Midterm Madness hub, where you’ll be able to learn more about your regions, our targets in them, and more ways to get involved right now! Check it out and sign up to be part of your region’s team: East, South, Midwest, West and receive actions you can take every week to get involved in the most important elections in 2022, from the Senate to your school board. Visit votesaveamerica.com/midterms to sign up and learn more.
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The bigoted right-wing craze of banning books in schools has jumped venues to public libraries. In deep-red counties, reactionary community members are appealing to sympathetic public officials to disappear books that, for example, depict gays and lesbians, or racial minorities in a positive light, or grapple openly with systemic discrimination. This Washington Post story homes in on a censorship campaign in Llano County, TX, aimed at getting materials as wide-ranging as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and various sex-education books removed from shelves. But similar strategies—including the purging of library boards and anti-censorship rules—have begun to spread across the country. Not to be outdone, Florida’s Department of Education has justified rejecting dozens of math textbooks by claiming they contain CriTiCAl RaCe TheOry and other Republican bogeymen. In case Democrats needed just one more reason (ok, two more reasons) to join and win the culture wars…
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- The White House will host a virtual, global COVID-19 summit on May 12, in case anyone in Congress was thinking about passing more pandemic-mitigation measures.
- Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has rescinded his illegal policy of stopping every commercial truck crossing the southern border, though it remains unclear if his just-as-illegal off-the-books diplomatic agreements with Mexican governors remain in effect.
- A Trump-appointed federal judge deemed unqualified for her job by the American Bar Association has unilaterally voided the CDC’s mask mandate for airports and other transit hubs.
- A different federal judge has upheld a GOP-passed law in Georgia that allows a fundraising committee formed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) to raise unlimited sums of cash, but forbids his likely general-election opponent Stacey Abrams from doing the same until she becomes the Democratic Party’s official nominee.
- Disgraced former one-term president and trust-fund baby Donald Trump has endorsed billionaire-backed, cosplay fascist JD Vance over the more-clownish-but-also-more-committed fascist Josh Mandel in the Ohio GOP Senate race.
- Trump’s first, corruption-plagued EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, who resigned in disgrace in 2018 amid some of the era’s most hilarious scandals, will run for Senate.
- A top Defense Department counterintelligence official seems to have been deeply compromised by his behavior toward a female subordinate and his use of personal email, yet was allowed to keep his job for two years after the Pentagon learned about his conduct in April 2020.
- Texas Republicans are threatening to retaliate against Citibank, and presumably other companies that cover expenses for employees who must travel across state lines to obtain abortions.
- Turns out the consequences of Brexit have driven the U.K. to dramatically increase legal immigration from non-E.U. countries, exactly as the British far-right wanted.
- Murders hit an all-time high after rising 25 percent in the woke left-wing bastion of (checks notes) South Carolina.
- In other South Carolina horrors, a prisoner who’s been on the state’s death row for over 20 years has chosen to die by firing squad.
- Tucker Carlson seemingly has MAGA men across the country applying ultraviolet radiation to their balls. Whatever floats their scrote, I guess.
- A 19 year-old California man who’s been missing for over two years has been found alive in Utah.
- Congrats to all who ran the Boston Marathon.
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A group of research economists has proposed a significant refinement to our understanding of the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to hierarchical states. The classical understanding holds that modern civilization is rooted in the adoption of farming, which made land more productive, generating food surpluses and a need for governing figures to organize distribution, enter trade, and collect tax. Citing data spanning millennia, these economists suggest the key development wasn’t agriculture per se, but the specific advent of farming cereal grains, which are far less prone to rot than roots and tubers. On this theory, a relative abundance of stored, durable grains enticed elites in early societies to tax and seize control of the food supply, driving humans toward hierarchical social systems governed by laws and/or entrenched power—a.k.a. civilization.
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People don’t always realize that physical symptoms like headaches, teeth-grinding and even digestive issues can be indicators of stress. And let’s not forget about doom scrolling, sleeping too little, sleeping too much, undereating and overeating.
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