The Atlantic Daily: The Evolving Situation in Ukraine
Here’s where things stand as the fighting stretches into a second month.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.
Let’s begin with two big updates from the diplomatic front: First, President Joe Biden seemingly went off script in a speech on Saturday, saying that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” Our contributing writer Tom Nichols called the comments an “unforced error,” and the White House later attempted to walk them back. Today Biden said that he was expressing his personal outrage, and not announcing a change in American policy. Second, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced ahead of talks with Russia that his country is open to discussing neutrality.
On the military front, our writers have been analyzing the quickly evolving situation in Ukraine.
- Putin holds outdated views on warfare. “Tanks were a great symbol of strength during the Second World War,” the author Antony Beevor observes. “That Putin can still see them that way defies belief.”
- Ukraine has a key advantage. Napoleon once said that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one,” Elliot Ackerman writes, and those “words have held true, proving in many ways decisive.”
- A Ukrainian journalist explains why she has stayed in Kyiv. “You never leave your loved ones, and Kyiv is my love,” Veronika Melkozerova writes.
- And this artist shares her wartime diary. Our senior editor Gal Beckerman talks to the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets about making art during war.
More on Russia’s war on Ukraine: RT America, which closed this month, “was less a well-funded, sleek propaganda outfit than a clumsy waste of Russia’s money,” Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. Find all of our coverage here.
What to read if you’re still processing last night’s Oscars:
David Sims calls Will Smith slapping Chris Rock the most shocking moment in the Oscar ceremony’s history. And Sophie Gilbert writes that “all of it felt a little like an exercise in entertainment-industry gaslighting. Did we really see what we thought we saw? Did it matter?”
The slap overshadowed some genuinely notable events in the show. Our Hollywood-based correspondent, Shirley Li, recaps two heartfelt acceptance speeches. And in her newsletter, Brooklyn, Everywhere, Xochitl Gonzalez recounts five moments that were great for women.
Latest dispatches:
Life as an employee at WeWork was even weirder than how WeCrashed portrays it, Jordan Calhoun writes in the latest edition of Humans Being. In The Third Rail, David French argues that the most shocking Ginni Thomas text was not actually one she wrote.
Tonight’s Atlantic-approved activity:
You can tell the quality / by the hard, lucid surface, / the refined luster of survival. Read Greg Delanty’s poem “Pearl.”
A break from the news:
Pleasure and enjoyment are not the same thing. One is more worth pursuing than the other.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.