The Week Magazine March 4, 2022

Russia just took another bite out of Ukraine by trucking “peacekeepers” into the eastern provinces—a clear act of aggression. (See Main Stories, p. 4.) But to hear Vladimir Putin tell it, it’s always the Russians who are the victim, forever betrayed by the West. The Russian president’s immediate pretext for his escalation was a fictional Ukrainian “genocide” of Russian speakers. The underlying reason, though, was his fury at what he sees as NATO’s breach of promise. Putin purports to believe that German reunification in 1990 came with the understanding that East Germany was the only ex–Warsaw Pact member that would join NATO. The Baltic states’ accession in 2004, he says, was in bad faith, and Ukraine’s would be utter treachery. In the real world, there was no such deal, as…

What happened Ukraine braced for war this week, after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into separatist-held areas in the country’s eastern Donbass region and declared the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were now independent republics. “This is the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,” said President Biden. Putin’s action came after an emotional televised speech in which he claimed that Ukraine was “created by Russia” and remains “an inalienable part” of it but has become “a colony” of the West. He accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of running a corrupt “puppet regime” hostile to Moscow and asserted Russia’s right “take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security.” Ukraine’s Parliament declared a state of emergency as the country was hit with a wave of cyberattacks and Russia’s 190,000…

What happened A truncated closing ceremony at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium this week capped off an Olympic Games marked by scandal and harsh Covid-19 restrictions. China kept the Olympic Village in a bubble, strictly sequestering athletes, testing them daily for Covid, and confining the infected to bleak quarantine hotels with no training equipment or palatable food. Only 100,000 Covid-vetted spectators were allowed in over the two weeks of events, compared with more than 1 million at the last winter games. As pushback against a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott over China’s human rights abuses, particularly its genocide of Uighur Muslims, authorities selected a Uighur to bear the opening torch. They also brought out tennis star Peng Shuai, who disappeared last fall after saying a senior Communist Party official had sexually assaulted…

After suffering a stroke eight years ago, Kevin Eubanks was devastated that weakness in his arm meant he could no longer hug loved ones. His daughter, Emily Sisco, an occupational therapist and adjunct professor in Arkansas, recently recruited her students to help design a solution. They came up with a strap — aptly named HugAgain — that allows Eubanks to guide his weakened arm around a person using his opposite hand. He tried it out on his grandson, and their tear-filled embrace, which Sisco filmed and posted, has been viewed more than 4 million times. Stela Borbas’ yoga instructor told her “to do good for someone that day.” She got the chance right away: Driving to work at 8:30, Borbas saw a car stopped on a busy Miami street,…

“San Francisco experienced a moderate earthquake” last week, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, and the “seismic waves” spreading across the nation could portend a “bigger quake in November.” In a citywide special election, more than 70 percent of citizens in that liberal bastion voted to recall three ultra-progressive members of the city’s school board for putting their “woke obsessions” ahead of children’s educations. The ousted members—Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga—belonged to a board that, faced with the unfolding disaster of remote learning, kept schools closed for most of 2020 and much of 2021, focusing instead on renaming 44 local schools to expunge the legacies of such notorious white supremacists as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Dianne Feinstein. Many parents were also enraged that the…

Good week for: Cheap eats, after a new survey found that 39 percent of pet owners admit to having sampled their pets’ food before serving it to them, with 29 percent saying it tasted surprisingly good. Normalcy, when Karex, the Malaysian firm that produces 20 percent of the world’s condoms, informed shareholders that it expects to see a sharp growth in sales this year as “societies begin to adapt to post-pandemic life.” Introverts, after a new British study of 17,000 kids ages 8 to 18 found that one third actually reported feeling happier during the pandemic. They got more sleep and exercise, suffered less bullying, and because of online friendships felt less lonely. Bad week for: Useful idiocy, after former President Trump lavished praise on Vladimir Putin for his “genius”…