Here is a great companion piece to the Journal article on Bucha that I linked to earlier. It’s from Der Spiegel. But it’s in English. It’s a very different sort of article but largely lines up in the story it tells. There’s quite a lot here, a lot of it hard to read. But I wanted to draw your attention to one passage which drives home just how critical the very early battlefield successes of the Ukrainian Army were to galvanizing the resistance of the Ukrainian population (emphasis added) …

I hope you’ve had a chance to read Josh Kovensky’s exclusive about the DC feds impersonators. Normally we wouldn’t be terribly interested in whether someone’s rents were months or years in arrears. But in this case it makes this story even more baffling and mysterious. We’ve been wondering for a couple days, Who was behind this? Where’d the money come from? As Josh reports, it wasn’t coming from anywhere. Because these guys never paid rent at all. The landlord eventually sued them but when it came time to evict they were protected by COVID-era eviction moratoriums.