Very, very, very weird story. A raid was conducted on two men in Washington, DC this evening. The two impersonated federal law enforcement officers and gave gifts and other enticements to ingratiate themselves with members of the Secret Service, one of whom was on the First Lady’s protective deal. But to what end? What’s especially weird about the first AP story here is that it doesn’t address what these two men were trying to accomplish. Here’s a thread with photos of the raid. Let’s keep an eye on this story.

Out of the blue the government of Naftali Bennett appears to be on the brink of collapse as one of the members of his own party, Idit Silman, has moved to the opposition. The development is part of the on-going splintering of Bennett’s own party, Yamina. But a catalyst or trigger appears to have been opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu offering her a ministry in a new Netanyahu-led right-wing government.

For now, the coalition government has lost its majority. But the Knesset isn’t currently in session. So there’s no immediate way for the opposition to topple it. And it would be difficult for Netanyahu to form a majority himself. So this likely means new elections.

In the first weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine we saw what appeared to be almost universal global condemnation of Russia’s actions. There was that lopsided UN vote condemning the action in which only four other nations, all pariahs or under de facto Russian occupation, took Russia’s side. But over time, a somewhat different story has emerged. Russia has very, very few backers. But there’s a big chunk of the world, likely the majority of the world’s population, living in countries where the governments basically do not want to take sides.

We have mentioned to you a few times what you almost certainly remembered: that President Trump’s first impeachment was over Ukraine and that Trump’s disgraced 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work was in Ukraine for the Russia-aligned former President of Ukraine. But there’s more to it than that. If we step back we can see a thread stretching back at least a decade, weaving from one crisis to the next until this moment. We start in the uprising against Viktor Yanukovych, the so-called Maidan Revolution, an event which was triggered by Yanukovych’s decision to move away from integration with the European Union. Vladimir Putin has always blamed Yanukovych’s ouster from power on the U.S. And this was actually the context for an incident which people in the U.S. foreign policy and national security world later saw as a harbinger of what was to come.

A gruesome, horrifying topic but also a stunning, remarkable piece of data, visual and explanatory journalism. The Russian defense ministry has released a statement claiming that the bodies of executed civilians left on the streets of Bucha in Ukraine are another Ukrainian “provocation,” a hoax engineered by Ukraine meant to discredit Russia. They claim that the killings happened after the Russian army evacuated the city. The Times has an article that graphically and dramatically refutes these claims. You’ve likely seen those videos of drive-throughs through the shattered city in which the bodies, most shot execution style and many with bound hands, are visible on the side of the road. Times journalists cross-referenced these harrowing videos with satellite imagery which shows very clearly that the bodies were there when the town was under Russian occupation. It feels unseemly to to be so praiseful of something that is about chilling war crimes. But the work is still remarkable. The dispositive nature of the refutation is hard to fully appreciate without seeing it. See it here.

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The Times has this harrowing, disturbing report from Trostyanets. It’s a good, reported, observational piece on what happened. One key takeaway is that civilians describe the initial Russian occupying force as professional and agreeable enough. Eyewitnesses describe many of them as disoriented, not even quite sure why they were there. (Remember, the Russian soldiers apparently had very little advance warning they were actually going to war.) But as time went on they got antsy and started running low on supplies. That led to a cycle of looting and the tensions that follow from it. But things really went bad when this initial force was cycled out and replaced with Chechen separatist paramilitaries.

As I’ve mentioned to you before, I continue to find Michael Kofman, who works at CNA, the big Navy think tank, the most measured and informative analyst for information on the war in Ukraine. Today he posted a Twitter thread which has as many questions as answers. But there’s a key dynamic I want to highlight. We tend to make fun of the Russian insistence on calling the Ukraine war a “special military operation.” But this turns out to have important real world implications.

As I’ve shared with you, I’ve spent a lot of the last month closely reading on-the-ground reports from Ukraine as well as accounts from a spectrum of military analysts, reporters, soldiers of fortune, people on the ground in Ukraine and more. In recent days I had seen a number of claims that Russian troops had carried out mass executions before evacuating or being driven out of towns in Ukraine. Most of these were claims of mass killings of men of military age but others of men and women of all ages. I haven’t known what to make of these accounts because claims of civilian atrocities are the most established kind of wartime propaganda. There is the deceit of war and the fog of war that demands caution in evaluating all new information. Most of these were either anecdotal, second hand or from sources I wasn’t familiar with. But over the last two days reporters have followed in the wake of Ukrainian troops or evacuating Russian troops. Now some of these claims are being validated. They may be widespread, not limited to a few incidents.

I wanted to flag this article for your attention. It’s written by an Austrian military analyst named Gustav Gressel. He’s one of the military analysts I’ve been following on Twitter. The argument is that Russia isn’t retrenching or narrowing its goals to seek a diplomatic settlement. Rather, it’s in an operational pause in which Russia is restocking men and materiel for a second offensive which will be modified and optimized based on what the Russians learned in their mostly failed original war plan. Based on this analysis Gressel says NATO/U.S. should be pouring more and more big ticket arms into Ukraine in advance of that next onslaught. I’m unable to independently analyze this argument and increasing the scale of arms transfers is a policy question more than an analytic one. But I want to put the argument in front of you because it does seem to square with what a number of these analysts and observers are saying.

Also, Kazakhstan seems to be saying more clearly it’s not taking Russia’s side over Ukraine.