A news report from yesterday: “Russia says it has captured 5 villages in northeast Ukraine as more than 1,700 civilians flee.” For that article, from the Associated Press, go here. You often hear that people in eastern Ukraine consider themselves Russian and wish to be ruled by Moscow. The millions who have fled, since 2014, put the lie to this.

• The AP report includes a photo by Evgeniy Maloletka, a photo that seems to capture what Ukraine as a whole is experiencing. The caption reads, “Tetiana, 82, cries with her daughter as she is evacuated from Vovchansk, Ukraine, Saturday, May 11, 2024. Her husband was killed in their house after a Russian airstrike on the city.”

Look: Putin’s Russia is a terror-state. And it will keep on terrorizing until it is stopped.

• A powerful report, from our “radios”:

• On seeing the below, some people will think of Myra Hess and her friends, playing through the Blitz at the National Gallery.

I admire these people, the Ukrainians, a lot: their determination to keep their country; their determination to resist conquest and subjugation. I hope they succeed.

• A team from the Wall Street Journal has published “Ukraine’s Stolen Children Fight to Get Home: ‘This Is My Country.’” The subheading reads, “Kids forcibly removed from occupied territory by Russia are racing against time with the help of charities, governments — and their own wits.”

To read the report, go here.

I will say once more, I am incredibly grateful for the war correspondence — for all the excellent and often brave reporting that people have done in this war (as in others).

• On the theme of stolen children, a thread by a Ukrainian-American prof at Case Western:

• At Bucha, Putin’s forces committed some of their worst atrocities of the war — flat-out butchery and terror. The below is of interest.

Garry Kasparov had a shrewd comment: “The completion of the usual Russian cycle of atrocity, denial, obfuscation, admission, and then boasting.”

• From RFE/RL:

Ukraine’s SBU security service said it “thwarted” an assassination attempt against President Volodymyr Zelenskiy by a network of five Ukrainian agents linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.

I imagine this happens often. It is an incredibly dangerous job: president of Ukraine. Zelensky is despised by a great many in the Free World. See how they talk at CPAC or Turning Point, for example. But how many could show the courage and presence of mind that Zelensky has? (Plus the stamina?)

For the RFE/RL article in full, go here.

• A development — a sign of our times: “Poland’s leader says his country is ready to host NATO members’ nuclear weapons to counter Russia.” (For that report, from the AP, go here.)

• Meduza — a Russian news organization in exile — has produced a stunning report: “‘The main risk is that they’ll kill us all’: How Navalny’s team worked while he was in prison — and what changed after this death.”

The courage of these people — it is barely fathomable.

• Igor Sushko has shared a video that is starkly illuminating:

• A story to note — part of a pattern, long-standing: “Occupiers transferred Greek Catholic Church in the Kherson Region to the Moscow Patriarchate.”

• Another stunning report from Meduza — by Anna Conkling: “‘War found me again’: A German aid network provides vital support for Ukraine’s elderly survivors of Nazi persecution.” Here.

One of those twists of history. All honor to that German aid network.

• By Rob Portman, the former senator from Ohio: “A Plan for Victory in Ukraine.” Portman was once the Republican co-chairman of the Senate Ukraine Caucus. He was replaced in the Senate by J. D. Vance (also a Republican). There is no neater illustration of the trajectory of the GOP than that.

• Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian political prisoner. He is a journalist, historian, filmmaker, politician, etc. He is one of the finest people I have ever known. A man of great courage and conscience. In 2015 and 2017, Putin’s agents tried to kill him with poison. In 2022, they arrested and imprisoned him. Putin had launched his full-scale invasion. Kara-Murza had criticized it, of course. And that was his crime.

Putin’s men then sentenced Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison. His health is very bad. His family and friends worry he could die soon, as Alexei Navalny did earlier this year.

In 2017, Kara-Murza started to write columns for the Washington Post. While in prison, he has managed to send some columns through a lawyer — risking worse treatment as a result. And he has now won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

This puts a spotlight on a political prisoner, which is good. Such prisoners need spotlights. Dictators want them forgotten in dungeons. But the prize also rewards a first-rate writer and thinker.

As I said in a post last February, I think President Biden should give Vladimir the Presidential Medal of Freedom. There is precedent for this: In 2007, George W. Bush gave the medal to a Cuban political prisoner, Óscar Elías Biscet, in absentia.

That was so like him.

Dr. Biscet survived prison, released in 2011. The medal — the attention, the spotlight — perhaps helped keep him alive. Eventually, he received his medal from Bush (who was out of office) in person.

Something to think about.