Pinned
The wars in Ukraine — and now, Iran — show that the strong can’t quite do what they want, and the weak don’t always suffer as they must. My analysis of how the new age of empires may have been oversold.
Yaroslav Trofimov
32K posts
Yaroslav Trofimov
@yarotrof
Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent of WSJ. Author of 📚No Country for Love 📚 and 📕Our Enemies Will Vanish📕 and 📘Siege of Mecca 📘Insta @yarotrof
Joined April 2009
- Trump visits the coronavirus swab production line in Maine, without a mask, and the manufacturer says it will now have to throw away the day’s output.
- So Zelensky did everything Trump asked him to do, signed away mineral rights, agreed to an unconditional ceasefire, and the U.S. still cut off previously funded weapons supplies, leaving Ukrainian cities defenseless against Russian missile strikes. A lesson to all here.BREAKING: White House confirms it has halted weapons that Ukraine was scheduled to receive, including PAC3 Patriots, 155mm artillery rounds, GMLRS, Stinger, AIM-7, and Hellfire missiles. @AnnaKelly47 tells me: “This decision was made to put America’s interests first following a
- I was going to stop posting videos from Kherson but can’t resist with this one. Especially the poster at the end.
00:00 - Orban’s peace mission to Moscow was a great success.
00:00
- Putin basically says Ukraine shouldn’t exist. “A steady statehood didn’t occur.” Almost the same words that Stalin said about Poland in 1939.
- Zelensky: it seems like Russia and the U.S. are preparing an ultimatum to Ukraine, talking about Ukraine without Ukraine. We didn’t accept ultimatums in 2022, when the situation was much more serious and nobody was helping us, and I have no intention of accepting any ultimatums
00:00 - Blow up pagers, force the surviving Hezbollah cadres to rely on walkie talkies, and then blow up the much bigger explosive devices inside the walkie talkies. A TV spy series producers would rule out this twist plot as impossible to believe in.
- Did anyone think this through? Some two-thirds of European defense procurement is spent on American weapons. If the U.S. indeed switched off the targeting of HIMARS in Ukraine — a country fighting a war that not just Kyiv, but most of Europe, consider existential — buying any
- Hold on, so Steve Witkoff was participating in the Signal group discussing war plans against Houthis while being physically in Moscow, perhaps even in the Kremlin? He met Putin late on March 13.
- Liberated Kherson singing Chervona Kalyna, a song that was banned for nine months. No electricity — Russia destroyed the power lines before leaving.
00:00 - Russia’s rapid thrust into Voznesensk was meant to showcase its military prowess. Instead, the Ukrainian town dealt Russian forces one of the most humiliating defeats of the war. My report from the battlefield where Russian bodies are still being collected
- Putin: I consider occupied areas of Ukraine to be Russia and any attempt to reclaim them will trigger a nuclear response. If this principle is allowed to stand, what’s to stop him announcing that he considers Warsaw or Riga or Berlin to be Russia?
