“If they continue to do what they are doing, they are calling into question the future of Ukrainian statehood,” said Putin. “And if this happens, it will be entirely on their conscience.”

Putin may have anticipated a repeat of Russia's seizure of Crimea, but what we have seen is more similar to Chechnya.

Russian leader also says Western sanctions against his country following Ukraine invasion are akin to war declaration.

Last month, as Delta Flight 1580 made its way from Utah to Oregon, Michael Demarre approached one of the plane’s emergency-exit doors. He removed the door’s plastic covering, a federal report of the events alleges, and tugged at the handle that would release its hatch. A nearby flight attendant, realizing what he was doing, stopped him. Fellow passengers spent the rest of the flight watching him to ensure that he remained in his seat. After the plane landed, investigators asked him the obvious question: Why? COVID vaccines, he told an agent. His goal, he said, had been to make enough of a scene that people would begin filming him. He’d wanted their screens to publicize his feelings.

I did it for the attention: As explanations go, it’s an American classic. The grim irony of Demarre’s gambit—his lawyer has not commented publicly on the incident—is that it paid off. He made headlines. He got the publicity he wanted. I’m giving him even more now, I know. But I mention him because his exploit serves as a useful corollary. Recent years have seen the rise of a new mini-genre of literature: works arguing that one of the many emergencies Americans are living through right now is a widespread crisis of attention. The books vary widely in focus and tone, but share, at their foundations, an essential line of argument: Attention, that atomic unit of democracy, will shape our fate.

Demarre’s stunt helps to make these books’ case, not necessarily because of a direct threat it posed, but because it is a bleak reminder that in the attention wars, anyone can be insurgent. Americans tend to talk about attention as a matter of control—as something we give, or withhold, at will. We pay attention; it is our most obvious and intimate currency. But the old language fails the new reality. The attention economy may imply fair trades within a teeming marketplace, people empowered as life’s producers as well as its consumers. But in truth, the books argue, that economy makes us profoundly vulnerable. Our time and our care belong to us right up until they don’t. One day, a man got on a plane with an apparent desire to hijack attention. His fellow passengers, and then masses of others, were left to contend with all the fallout.

As I write, the Russian military is escalating its attacks on Ukraine. Pundits are arguing that Putin’s invasion was spurred by American “wokeness.” A Texas state agency began investigating parents for the purported crime of believing their children. A court declared Kim Kardashian to be single again. Zoë Kravitz wore a Catwoman-themed dress to the premiere of The Batman. The January 6 committee laid out a potential criminal case against Donald Trump. Colin Jost helped to product-test Scarlett Johansson’s new skin-care line. Ketanji Brown Jackson is meeting with senators in advance of her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A U.N. report warned that climate change’s catastrophes are now encroaching so rapidly that without radical intervention, they might overwhelm any effort to mitigate them. The 5,978,096th person has died of COVID-19.

“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” the pioneering psychologist William James wrote in the late 19th century. His observations about the mind, both detailed and sweeping, laid the groundwork for the ways Americans talk about attention today: attention as an outgrowth of interest and, crucially, of choice. James, we can safely assume, did not have access to the internet. Today’s news moves as a maelstrom, swirling at every moment with information at once trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud—so much of it, at so many scales, that the idea of choice in the midst of it all takes on a certain absurdity. James’s definition, at this point, is true but not enough. The literature of attention updates his paradigms for the age of infinite scroll.

In the new book Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari interviews James Williams, the aptly named ethicist who is currently a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute. Williams shares his three-tiered definition of attention. “Spotlight” is the most familiar form—fleeting, targeted, the kind required of everyday tasks (getting dressed, watching a TV show, reading an article on TheAtlantic.com). The second layer is “starlight”: the focus one applies to long-term desires and goals. The third layer is “daylight.” This form—so named because sunshine allows people to see their surroundings most clearly—is the focus one applies to oneself. It is akin to mindfulness; it’s how you know what you want, and why.

[Read: How to rebuild an attention span]

The layered framework is familiar; it recalls Freud’s triptych model of the psyche, for one, or the distinction, in yogic practice, between bahya drishti, an external point of focus, and antara drishti, which turns the gaze inward. Starlight, as a pragmatic matter, might look like bullet journals or vision boards. But dreams for the future take on new clarity when they’re understood specifically in terms of focus and distraction. So do the web’s temptations. Far too often, I find myself mindlessly twitch-clicking on an enticing headline, and then reading, and then regretting. I pay my attention; I instantly wish for a refund. Starlight might help me to navigate just a little bit better. Do I want to spend a portion of my one wild and precious life considering the sartorial choices of candy? Maybe so, but at least I can make that decision consciously. Williams’s framework emphasizes the deep connections between the now and the later: Distraction in the short term is also distraction in the long. Starlight cannot orient you if you’re forever failing to look up for it.

Jenny Odell proposes a similar recalibration in 2019’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. American culture has moved so far from the Jamesian mode of attention—so far from the simple dignity of choice—that our lexicon itself can be misleading. Attention, Odell argues, has become bound up in the same apparatus that remade hobbies into “productive leisure” and that values people’s time only insofar as it proves economically viable. The essential problem is not simply the internet; the villain of her story, instead, “is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”

Odell, similarly, is not opposed to distraction as a very broad category. An artist as well as a writer, she spends much of the book celebrating the value of wandering minds. They are sources, after all, of creativity and curiosity. But there is a stark difference between being open to distraction and being driven to it. (Doing nothing, in Odell’s analysis, is not the absence of action; it is an act of reclamation. It is an attempt to make free time free again.) The challenge is to wander mindfully.

How to Do Nothing’s arguments echo in some of the web’s newer vernaculars: Clickbait, doomscrolling, and similar terms acknowledge attention as an ongoing struggle. As Tim Wu argues in The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, attention is ours, yes, but it is theirs too—a commodity fought over by corporations that seek ever thicker slices of our psyches. Wu’s targets are Facebook, Google, and the many other businesses that reduce humans to sets of “eyeballs” and treat the mind as an extractive resource. The digital industrialists engage in what Wu calls, in full dystopian dudgeon, “attention harvesting”—the reaping of people’s time and care, for profit.

[Read: Are we having too much fun?]

Wu published The Attention Merchants in 2016. It has earned in the meantime one of the best distinctions a book can hope for: It has grown only more relevant. Wu’s ultimate theme, like Odell’s, is resistance. Distraction, Wu notes, tends to empower the industrialists and demean everyone else. If people are to avoid life lived at their mercy, he writes, “we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”

Discussions of attention, sooner or later, can tend toward the polemic: We are spending our time this way, when we should be spending it that way. This is frivolous; that is meaningful. One of the valuable elements of these books, though, is that they cede their final definitions to the individual. They echo James’s sense of attention even as they complicate it. Wu’s appeal is to the dignity of one’s own time; Odell repeatedly uses the word humane. You have your starlight. I have mine. They’re different. They should be.

But attention, in these frameworks, is also political. In the aggregate, attention is a collective good. A distracted democracy is an endangered one. The authors make liberal use of the collective we, and the choice functions not as a glib imposition of commonality on a fractured world, but instead as a simple recognition: In a shared polity and a shared planet, our fates are bound together. Starlight, as personal as it is, can be social too. Considered communally, a sense of common destiny might orient our attention to questions both ancient and newly urgent: What kind of country do we want? What kind of people do we want to be?

During Joe Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this week, the president called on Congress to aid U.S. service members who were exposed to toxins while they served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Biden’s son Beau, a veteran, died of cancer in 2015. As Biden spoke of illnesses that would put soldiers “in a flag-draped coffin,” Lauren Boebert, a Congresswoman from Colorado, yelled at him from her seat.

“You put them there. Thirteen of them!” she shouted, seeming to refer to soldiers who had died in Afghanistan last year.

It would not be the only interruption of the evening. Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, repeatedly attempted to wrest attention from the president as his speech went on. The two began by pointedly turning their backs on the president’s cabinet as they entered the chamber, allowing Boebert to display the writing on her shawl: “Drill Baby Drill.” As Biden talked about immigration, the two began chanting: “Build—the—wall.” The Washington Post reported that they spent the rest of the speech laughing at some lines and live-tweeting their animosity toward others. (“Here’s another way to fight inflation,” Boebert tweeted, at one point. “Resign.”)

The whole thing had a tautological quality: Lawmakers, elevated to their positions in part by their skill at making scenes, scene-making once more. The dynamics that set in afterward were similarly foreseeable. Nancy Pelosi condemned their behavior (they should “just shut up,” she said), and then people wrote about how Nancy Pelosi had condemned it, and the flurry of it all, in the end, served pretty much no purpose save for the political interests of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Fringe views used to stay where they deserved to: on the fringes of things. Now, those who espouse conspiracies and bigotries get air time—and, consequently, our time—precisely because their errors are so outrageously clickable.

[Read: Tucker Carlson’s manufactured America]

The paradox of attention is that, at any moment, there’s a very good chance that it won’t seem worth attending to. Attention, after all, is so navel-gazy. There are always so many other things—more specific and urgent and obviously worthy things—clamoring for people’s focus. But that there’s never a good time to think about attention is precisely why we should be thinking about it—right now, urgently. Climate change looms. People’s rights are under threat. Books are being banned. The Big Lie keeps lying; disinformation, compounding the chaos, competes for our care just as fervently as all the scattered truths do. The volume of the distractions only grows; like Boebert and Greene’s antics, they threaten to drown out everything else. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Steve Bannon, that noted purveyor of noise, said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The strategy works. Attention is zero-sum; that makes distraction a potent weapon. The era of attention crisis is also the era that has given rise to “paper terrorism,” a flood-the-zone approach carried out with bureaucratic forms and filings. It is the era that finds the Supreme Court making binding pronouncements about the most intimate areas of Americans’ lives not through its standard proceedings, with all their pesky scrutinies, but via shadow docket. Activists have boasted about how simple it’s been for them to dissolve hard-won voting rights with the flick of a pen, in part because many of the people who would be horrified at the regression are unaware that it is happening at all. “Honestly, nobody even noticed,” one of those activists said. “My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’”

When people aren’t looking, though, it can be. Hannah Arendt, the great scholar of democracy and its discontents, observed that propaganda, pumped out as a fog that never lifts, can make people so weary and cynical that they stop trying to distinguish between fact and fiction in the first place: everything as possible, nothing as true. A coda to her insight is that plain old news can foster the same kind of exhaustion. To combat it, the books call for a new focus on attention itself. They argue for a particular kind of mindfulness—a collective gaze that detaches from the tumult, looking anew at the body politic, seeking insight and maybe even wisdom.

Our many crises will not be undone quickly or easily. They might not be undone at all. But the first step toward solving them is to acknowledge them as emergencies. The next is to give them the undivided focus that emergencies deserve. The starlight is there, if we remember to look for it. The people move; the constellations don’t. If we find a way to focus on what matters, we may be spared the need to admit, to the generations that follow: We didn’t mean for it all to happen. But we weren’t paying attention.

The United States, United Kingdom, and European Union had barely announced sanctions on overseas Russian wealth when the oligarchs began to whine and protest. That meant the policy—enacted after Russia invaded Ukraine—was working as intended, to punish Russia’s elites for supporting President Vladimir Putin. By last weekend in Moscow, the Russian-state-television host Vladimir Solovyev raged on camera over what the sanctions would mean for him personally: loss of access to his two luxury homes in Lake Como, Italy, near the villa of George Clooney.

Amid a broad suite of economic sanctions targeting the Russian financial system, which has driven the ruble’s value to record lows, Western powers also are significantly increasing their efforts to identify and freeze the assets of Putin’s business allies. And some of Russia’s best-known oligarchs—business figures who have built up huge fortunes, in most cases through their connections to the state—are now calling for an end to the war. By Sunday, the billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman, a founder of Russia’s largest private bank, both urged an end to Putin’s war. This was a startling break in ranks among the country’s elites. Deripaska is on the U.S. sanctions list; Fridman is on the EU’s. Even those who have not yet faced individual sanctions appear to be feeling pressure. Another billionaire businessman and close associate of Putin’s, Roman Abramovich, has put his British soccer club up for sale and vowed to donate the proceeds to “all victims of the war in Ukraine.” Over the weekend, Abramovich also accepted the Ukrainian government’s request for mediation help in peace talks with Russia. Oleg Tinkov, a banker and entrepreneur, frequently uses his Instagram account to post photos of things like his 253-foot yacht with mini submarine, but he told his 634,000 followers last week, “Innocent people are dying in Ukraine now, every day, this is unthinkable and unacceptable.”

If figures like these are calling for, even demanding, an end to the war, the sanctions are far more effective than past efforts by Western powers to target the Russian elite.

[Faith Hillis: Seize the oligarchs’ wealth]

The oligarchs play essential roles in Putin’s Russia: They provide invaluable public support for the regime, lead key companies and institutions, and distract attention from and, by some accounts, help conceal the president’s own enormous wealth. As the jailed anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has been arguing for years, Putin’s continuing ability to exercise power requires the cooperation and support of others. Navalny listed 35 such individuals as essential supports to Putin’s regime. (Navalny, the U.S., the U.K., and the EU all have somewhat different names on their lists.)

Precisely how much power these figures exercise over Putin is a matter of debate, and some critics have argued that sanctions are designed only to make Westerners feel good. But the wealthiest Russians are far better placed than the average citizen to communicate to Putin how his invasion is devastating his own country. And the lavish lifestyles that oligarchs and their families lead mean they’re highly vulnerable to external pressure—if Western powers make a more concerted effort to target them than they have in the past.

Oligarchs who are cut off from accessing their offshore wealth won’t starve, but they will be unable to maintain their jet-setting luxury lifestyle. As Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, quipped in a now-deleted tweet, this means:

No more:

Shopping in #Milano

Partying in #SaintTropez

Diamonds in #Antwerp

That tweet attracted attention precisely because it touches on a phenomenon of great significance that is often overlooked: Looting your country’s wealth is pointless if you can’t show off the spoils.

What is an oligarch without ostentation? For many Russian elites, the answer is apparently “nothing.” The sanctions threaten oligarchs with a kind of annihilation, similar to the phenomenon that sociologists describe as “social death.” That is why Russian elites were so quick to gather up their expensive toys as soon as sanctions were announced, and why several have taken the extraordinary step of publicly begging Putin for a quick end to the war.

Although economists and policy makers may pooh-pooh such ideas, sociologists—including me—have long understood that the need to see and be seen is a fundamental driver of human affairs. Perhaps surprisingly, oligarchs need not just to be filthy rich; the need to be seen as such seems to only increase with economic wealth. That’s one reason billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson flamboyantly compete among themselves to launch rockets into space amid great media fanfare, rather than discreetly enjoying their fortunes in private.

[Brooke Harrington: Inside the secretive world of tax-avoidance experts]

I have spent the past 15 years researching the offshore wealth of the super-rich. In my efforts to understand how oligarchs’ wealth was hidden from tax agencies, divorcing spouses, and disgruntled business partners, I have been astonished again and again at how many oligarchs cannot seem to live without the splashy public display of their wealth, even when it puts them at risk. In recent days, Internet sleuths and government agents alike have been closely tracking the movements of Russian oligarchs’ private jets and multimillion-dollar yachts. Instagram posts from plush locations are a major strategic asset for anyone seeking to impose accountability on people who otherwise seem to be untouchable. For example, a niche profession has developed in tracking down transnational oligarchs via their social-media posts so they can be served with legal papers to freeze their assets in debt-collection proceedings. These high-end collection agents, the Boba Fetts of the ultra-high-net-worth crowd, can do their job precisely because the oligarchs and their globe-trotting family members can’t help themselves. They seem compelled to post photos of themselves hobnobbing with celebrities or posing with race cars, even when they know they are under investigation. Many people claiming bankruptcy in the face of heavy fines and court judgments have been exposed to the courts as frauds after unintentionally or intentionally exposing the extent of their assets.

This tendency appears pronounced among the families of Russian oligarchs. The now-locked Instagram account “Rich Russian Kids” acquired 1.5 million followers just aggregating the images of decadent luxury posted by the sons and daughters of wealthy Russians.

As social scientists have argued for more than a century, the evidence is overwhelming that, beyond a subsistence level, people will fight even harder for status than they do for money. We see that fight now in the anti-war comments and peacemaking efforts of Russia’s elites, after just a few days of sanctions pressure. They’re behaving exactly as sociologists would expect when status is threatened among a group accustomed to impunity: They’re angry, and they’re anxious. Their discomfort has not yet persuaded Putin to stop his aggression in Ukraine, but it’s a reminder that the U.S., U.K., and EU can and should confront a kleptocratic system that allowed Russia’s president to amass so much power in the first place.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine looks like a horrific Cold War throwback. Once again, a strongman rules in Moscow, Russian tanks are rolling across borders, and a democratic nation is fighting for its survival, street by street, day by day, armed with little more than Molotov cocktails and a fierce belief in freedom. For all the talk of emerging technologies and new threats, the violence in Ukraine feels raw and low-tech, and the world suddenly looks old again.

And yet, amid all these echoes of the past, Russia’s invasion has ushered in one development that is altogether new and could dramatically change geopolitics in the future: the real-time public disclosure of highly classified intelligence.

Never before has the United States government revealed so much, in such granular detail, so fast and so relentlessly about an adversary. Each day over the past several weeks seemed to bring new warnings. Not vague, “Russia may or may not be up to something” kind of warnings, but “Here’s the satellite imagery showing up to 175,000 Russian troops in these specific locations near the border” kind of warnings. Even as Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that he had no plans to invade and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky complained that the U.S. was hyping the threat and roiling his economy, the intelligence disclosures kept coming—detailing updated troop numbers and locations, invasion timetables, casualty estimates, and more. It felt like watching a hurricane barreling toward landfall.

The disclosed intelligence wasn’t just about military movements. It was about secret plans at the core of Russia’s intelligence operations. American and British intelligence agencies sounded the alarm about plots to stage a coup in Kyiv, install a puppet regime, and conduct “false-flag operations” designed to generate phony pretexts to justify a real invasion. According to U.S. officials, one Russian scheme involved sending saboteurs to Eastern Ukraine to attack Russian separatists there, making it look like Ukraine was the aggressor and Putin’s troops were coming to the rescue. Another involved making a phony video depicting Ukrainian atrocities, complete with actors and corpses.

It is hard to overstate how much of a shift this represents. Intelligence is a closely guarded world, one where officials are loath to publicly air what they know, or how they know it, for fear of putting sources at risk or revealing to their rivals just how much information they have. In the past, the U.S. has openly shared intelligence only with the closest of allies, and restricted its use. Why has the White House been so open this time? So far, the Biden administration isn’t saying much about the aims of its radical-candor intelligence strategy. But three explanations seem likely.

The first has to do with inoculating the world against information warfare by getting the truth out before the lie. The essence of U.S. and allied intelligence disclosures has been “Don’t believe a word the Kremlin is going to tell you. It’s all a con.” The Russians are deception pros, and in previous episodes—as recently as the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2016 U.S. election—they’ve had the upper hand. Putin’s strategy has been to flood the zone with falsehoods, spreading disinformation early and often. Psychology research suggests why this is so effective: Once lies are believed, they are hard to shake, even in the face of overwhelming facts. The first-mover advantage in information warfare is huge. Getting the truth out before the con helps rally allies and shore up support in the U.S. and abroad.

Revealing intelligence also generates friction for Putin, knocking him off-balance. Instead of calling the shots and managing the Ukraine crisis on his schedule, Putin has to react to Washington. And instead of acting with impunity, he has to spend his most precious asset—time—worrying about his own intelligence weaknesses. How do the U.S. and its allies know what they know? What will they do with this advance knowledge? What Russian-intelligence vulnerabilities must be fixed? The more Putin stews about his own intelligence lapses, the less attention he can devote to hurting others. U.S. Cyber Command adopted a similar approach in 2018 called persistent engagement. The idea is simple but powerful: Weaken an adversary’s offense by making it work much harder at defense. Putin is an ideal target for this kind of strategy. He’s a former Russian-intelligence operative with a paranoid streak who obsesses about domestic enemies, not just foreign ones. You can take the man out of the KGB but not the KGB out of the man.

Finally, proactively disclosing intelligence makes it much harder for other countries to sit out the conflict or provide quiet support to Putin by hiding behind his fig-leaf narratives. Think of it as covert action in reverse—a forced outing of what’s really going on so that everyone has to take a side.

In covert action, governments conceal their official involvement in an activity. One of the key benefits of covert action is that it enables other countries to help on the sly. Even if everyone knows the truth, they pretend not to, and history suggests even the flimsiest of excuses can give countries surprising room to maneuver. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, for example, the U.S. launched a huge covert operation to arm the Afghan mujahideen. The Soviets knew what the U.S. was doing, and the U.S. knew that the Soviets knew. But the covert action enabled Pakistan and Egypt to quietly help American efforts without fear of Soviet reprisal. It benefited the Soviets, too, keeping a proxy war in Afghanistan from spiraling into a hot war against the U.S. and its nuclear arsenal.

In the current Ukraine crisis, intelligence disclosures are doing the opposite. By removing the fig leaf, the U.S. and its allies are leaving precious little room for other countries to stay on the sidelines or assist Putin easily. Switzerland, a country famous for its neutrality and willingness to bank with bad guys, signed on to European Union sanctions. Germany is wobbly no more, finally nixing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and moving from NATO defense-spending laggard to leader with head-spinning speed. On Tuesday, about 100 diplomats literally turned their backs on Russia, walking out of a United Nations Human Rights Council meeting as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov was speaking. Even China has issued a relatively muted response over the invasion, calling for diplomatic solutions.

To be sure, it’s early days. World unity on any crisis never lasts that long. China still tilts heavily toward Moscow in almost everything. And intelligence is just one among many factors at play. No country wants to be caught in the cross fire of global sanctions, castigated as the weak link in NATO, or seen as being on the wrong side of history. But intelligence disclosures have become a powerful new tool in the mix. It’s a lot harder for countries to hide behind Russia’s false narrative when the narrative is debunked before it even comes out of Putin’s mouth.

This intelligence strategy is new and clever. But it’s not risk-free. Using secrets now may mean losing secrets later. Anytime intelligence is publicly disclosed, there’s a danger that sources and methods will be discovered by the enemy, threatening the lives of people on the ground and jeopardizing the ability to keep collecting intelligence from technical and human sources in the future. That’s why intelligence agencies have always so fiercely resisted disclosures.

Intelligence disclosures can also make crises harder to manage. Going public with an adversary’s secret intentions and capabilities can be humiliating. That may feel good, but the key to resolving crises isn’t backing your enemy into a corner; it’s finding face-saving exits. Diplomacy is giving the other guy a way out even if you hate him for what he’s done.

Finally, in a radical-disclosure world, intelligence successes can be misconstrued as failures. Imagine, for example, that the intelligence revelations about Putin’s invasion plans had changed his mind, and he decided not to invade Ukraine. The intelligence would have been accurate and effective, but it would have looked wrong and feckless. Many would have concluded that Putin must never have intended to invade in the first place, and that U.S. spy agencies—criticized over the Iraq war, the failure to stop 9/11, and countless other missteps—had erred again. Confidence in America’s intelligence community would erode, even though it shouldn’t.

So far, however, evidence from the Ukraine crisis suggests that the rewards of this intelligence-disclosure strategy far outweigh the risks. Until now, cyber-enabled deception seemed to have the upper hand—whether it was COVID misinformation or Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ukraine has taught us all that truth and disclosure can still be powerful weapons, even in the digital age.

'He wants to think himself as a nowadays Stalin,' renowned Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats tells Marc Lamont Hill.

Western states have failed to stop the Russian onslaught and are even expecting things to worsen. But their options for intensifying pressure are likely to ...