Walking point
Ukrainians greet danger to help their neighbors
Two weeks ago I noted the death of South African professor Francis Wilson, who led a kind of hidden life defending Africans. This week I want to highlight a long-time friend who is very much alive and busy with other hidden-life kind of work.
I first got to know Hobie Smith via email when he was stationed at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, working to train teams carrying out search-and-destroy missions for roadside bombs. Years later, I met him in the middle of Nineveh Plain in Iraq. No longer with the military, he volunteered his time in a war zone to manage security for a field hospital at the height of the coalition fight against ISIS.
This week I caught up by phone with Hobie in Ukraine. Like other Westerners, he’s giving his skills and time to the war effort through a U.S. aid organization. This week he was helping to move food across the country to areas where it’s needed most. He and his church partners focus on getting supplies into isolated areas cut off by fighting, places where civilians seek to hold their towns and keep their families alive. Some partners have lost their homes to war. Yet they work as volunteers and even navigate Russian checkpoints while trying to avoid the line of fire.
“Shame on me, I’m an ugly American,” he told me. “I’m so blessed, and I go to places like Ukraine and I am so embarrassed. I don’t know their culture or their history.” The Ukrainians amaze him, he said: “The people of God are walking point, exposing themselves to danger to help their neighbors.”
Welcome to another Globe Trot. The war in Ukraine is about to enter its fourth month with no easy end in sight, plus fighting continues in Somalia, Syria, and Myanmar. COVID-19 stubbornly remains a lethal enemy, especially if you are a North Korean. For such times are the words of the good wizard Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: “I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay.”
Ukraine: Fighting in the eastern Donbas provinces is “hell,” says Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and soldiers there say Vladimir Putin has turned their days into nights. There’s new evidence of Russian-led executions in Bucha, plus a grim account of combat in Mariupol told through video captured by a well-known and now disappeared Ukrainian medic (smuggled out in a tampon).
Russia: Putin’s decision to launch a large-scale invasion is one of the worst strategic decisions any leader of a powerful country has made in decades, argues Ian Bremmer. Every plausible outcome in Ukraine leaves Putin and his country worse off than before the war began. Inside Russia this week, you could hear the disinformation-icebergs cracking and tumbling into the sea as experts openly question the war.
“You shouldn’t take informational sedatives,” military analyst and retired Russian colonel Mikhail Khodarenok told news anchors in one extraordinary exchange challenging Kremlin war accounts.
A sign of stress: Russia’s State Duma will take up a bill allowing those over 40 to enlist.
Stories that Putin is ill may be true, or false. An insightful piece on the “counterintelligence state” from Andrew Fink at The Dispatch:
The importance of identifying enemies in a counterintelligence state is so great that eventually “Police and counterintelligence operations (such as arrest, investigation, penetration, provocation, deception, entrapment, denunciation, informants, spy mania, censorship, dossiers, and so on) soon characterize the behavior of the whole state structure, not just of the security organs.”
Belarus: The democratic opposition is alive and well despite the government’s alliance with Russia.
North Korea: A double-masked Kim Jong Un made a night-time visit to a local pharmacy, underscoring efforts to battle a COVID-19 outbreak some say is spreading like wildfire. Experts warn the outbreak may get worse, with an impoverished healthcare system and an unvaccinated population.
President Joe Biden is in South Korea to discuss COVID-19, trade, and the pressure cooker that is North Korea.
Lebanon: Hezbollah and its allies lost their parliamentary majority in the first general election since the 2020 port explosion and economic meltdown—a surprising blow to the terror group reflecting anger with the ruling Shiite movement.
Iran: An Israeli Defense Forces spokesman said the son-in-law of assassinated Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, killed in a 2020 U.S. drone strike, is smuggling advanced weaponry from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon via Syria. Israel has long accused Iran of transferring munitions to the Lebanese terror group through Syria, but says it’s endangering civilians currently by using civilian flights bound for Damascus.
Somalia: President Biden signed an order Monday to redeploy hundreds of U.S. special forces to Somalia to counter the Islamic extremist group al-Shabab, an effort U.S. military leaders said was hampered by a Trump’s decision to withdraw them during his last days in office.
Canada: On the anniversary of the discovery of 215 unmarked graves for children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, the reckoning continues over the residential school system for Indigenous children.
United Kingdom: An accidental discovery that scallops love disco lights has commercial fishermen … well, dancing.
I’m reading Walking Home by Simon Armitage in anticipation of some summer hikes along the backbone of England.