Plan B for Vladimir Putin
A second month of war begins in Ukraine
Ukraine’s navy says it destroyed a Russian landing ship at Russian-occupied Berdyansk, southwest of besieged Mariupol, as the war enters its second month. Ukraine has refused to surrender the city, a key land bridge between Russian-controlled Crimea and the Donbas region. Leading experts say this is Plan B for Vladimir Putin. Bombardments have left the city without electricity and water. One resident told the BBC she had watched children die of thirst while subsisting in her apartment building’s underground shelter.
Welcome to Globe Trot, a newsletter I’m today compiling while attending an event at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Share with friends and family as we explore global news, work to be informed and form community. The poet Mary Oliver reminds us, “It’s a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.”
President Joe Biden met with NATO allies in Brussels yesterday, the one-month anniversary of war in Ukraine. They pledged new sanctions and humanitarian aid in response to Vladimir Putin’s assault, but their offers fell short of the more robust military assistance President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for in a pair of live-video appearances.
Russian shelling is endangering “the homes and families of those operational personnel that ensure the nuclear and radiation safety” of the Chernobyl nuclear site, reports the IAEA in a statement Thursday. Workers had to remain at the site and could not return to their homes for four weeks, it said.
With heavy weapons fire reported east of Kyiv this morning, here’s a look at how pastor Oleg Magdych and others have mobilized to defend the capital.
Images from a month of war.
Nigeria: Suspected Fulani herdsmen on March 17 kidnapped 46 Christians and a number of their children in an attack in Kaduna state, according to local residents. Three days later, another attack nearby in Kaduna killed more than 25 people and left 100 houses burned, local sources told International Christian Concern, all without response from Nigerian forces.
“As the world’s attention turns to Ukraine, we must not forget the suffering of Nigerians,” said Baroness Caroline Cox in a report following a fact-finding trip to Nigeria’s embattled Middle Belt region where the group of three humanitarian organizations saw evidence of the ongoing attacks plaguing southern Kaduna. “The escalation of violence must also be seen in the context of the growth of Islamist extremism across the Sahel,” the report notes.
Sweden: An apparent knife attack at Malmo’s historic Latin School left two teachers dead, one of a series of such attacks in the past year. As Malmo’s immigrant Muslim population has increased to 25 percent of its population, so has crime, yet authorities generally now won’t disclose religious affiliation or motive in such cases.
North Korea: Some stats after North Korea test-fired its massive Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) for the first time on Thursday, demonstrating the capabilities of a weapon potentially able to deliver a nuclear warhead to anywhere in the United States. State media today is showing a swaggering Kim Jong Un directing the launch.
RIP: Madeleine K. Albright, a child of Czech refugees escaped Nazi and Communist oppressors to become the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, died on Wednesday at 84. Raised a Roman Catholic, she only learned after she became secretary of state that her family was Jewish and that 26 relatives had died in the Holocaust.
Netherlands: A Dutch publisher has pulled an investigative book on who betrayed World War II heroine Anne Frank and her family—after six historians and academics describe the findings in The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Canadian Rosemary Sullivan as "a shaky house of cards."
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