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Each day brings forth some new enormity perpetrated by the Russian military against the people of Ukraine, as it has for three long years now. In recent weeks we have seen Russian ballistic missiles rain down on Odesa’s historic city center, severely damaging the Bristol Hotel on Italiiska Street, the Odesa Philharmonic Theater, several museums, a children’s outpatient facility, and a daycare center. A Russian drone smashed into a thermal power plant in Mykolaiv, and another one into the protective shell covering the radioactive remains of Chornobyl’s reactor No. 4, precisely the kind of insane aggression on the part of the Kremlin that we have come to expect by now. Cruise and ballistic missiles, aerial bombs, and Shahed drones have flattened residential buildings in Poltava, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, while in Kherson a bomb strike destroyed a high-rise apartment building, grievously injuring a pair of fourteen-year-old twins. Their mother was found dead in the rubble later that day. More villages, towns, and cities in Donetsk have been wiped off the face of the earth, more civilians killed, displaced, or left without heat in the dead of winter, more Ukrainian prisoners of war executed in cold blood, more priceless heritage reduced to calcined wreckage, more fields and rivers poisoned, and all of it in plain sight.
The hostilities continue in the information space as well, in social media, on the airwaves, and in print, even as American and Russian envoys lay the groundwork for a ceasefire (lasting or otherwise), and ultimately a peace deal (just or otherwise). For Russia’s representatives, this means more opportunities for their trademark mendacity. On the second day of the war, as street fighting raged in the suburbs of Kyiv and Russian cruise missiles slammed into civilian infrastructure, the supremely loathsome Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov swore that “nobody is going to attack the people of Ukraine,” and that there would be “no strikes on civilian infrastr...