WAR IN UKRAINE: May 10, 2023

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 441

  • Ukraine media reported Russian missile fire on Kherson overnight.

  • Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he and visiting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discussedUkraine's progress toward integration into the European Union, European ammunition deliveries for the Ukrainian military, and fresh Russia sanctions.

  • Pentagon spokesman Patrick Ryder officially confirmed that the Ukrainians shot down the Russian Kindzhal missile from the Patriot air defense system

  • Exiled former Russian politician-turned-dissident Ilya Ponomarev claims Russian resistance fighters were behind the brazen drone attack on the Kremlin. "Russian resistance is growing," he tells Christiane Amanpour.

  • Croatia, Moldova and Switzerland led the finalists of the first round of the Eurovision contest late Tuesday. Ukraine was not among the top ten.


Required reading..

Putin Is Fighting, and Losing, His Last War

In the Brezhnev era of Vladimir Putin’s youth, May 9 was an occasion for Soviet militarism, a celebration of weapons and might. It could be forgotten, at least for a moment, that Leonid Brezhnev’s war of choice would be fought and lost in Afghanistan less than two decades after he began the May 9 celebrations, much as what is likely Mr. Putin’s last war is today being fought and lost in Ukraine.

During both conflicts, people in the West worried, understandably, about nuclear war.

Today’s Russia issues an unending stream of nuclear threats. In the West today, unlike during the Cold War, these are discussed in psychological rather than strategic terms. How does Mr. Putin feel? How do we feel?

Read Timothy Snyder’s analysis in The New York Times here