Pakistan's political unrest, coupled with the Afghan Taliban regime's support for terrorists, has grave implications for international security.

Photographs by Emin Özmen

The Magnum photographer Emin Özmen remembers the day in 1993 when radical Islamists set fire to the Madımak Hotel in his hometown of Sivas, Turkey, killing 37 people. Intellectuals and artists had gathered there for a festival honoring a 16th-century Alevi poet.

Many of those who died were themselves Alevis, members of a Muslim sect that is a minority in Turkey. During the 1970s, right-wing Sunni groups often fought Alevi leftist groups in the streets. The violence eventually subsided, but tensions remained—the horror at Madımak, when Özmen was 8 years old, was the result. It made Özmen want to become a witness.

A mourning crowd at the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, the day after a failed coup attempt by the Turkish military in which at least 265 people died, including soldiers, police, and civilians, July 2016 Syrian children play in the Istasyon neighborhood of Mardin, October 2, 2020. Protesters support Bogaziçi students who were arrested for displaying a rainbow flag at another protest, in Istanbul, March 2021.

On Sunday, May 14, Turkey’s first Alevi candidate for president, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, faced off against Turkey’s longtime autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a Sunni Muslim who rose to power in 2003, five years before Özmen became a working photojournalist. Over the course of Özmen’s career, he has watched and documented as Erdoğan has transformed Turkey from an aspiring democracy into a polarized autocracy with a failing economy.

[Ayşegül Sert: Turkey’s trust in government has turned to dust]

Those Turks who have suffered from repression, violence, and hunger these past 20 years believed Kılıçdaroğlu might have a chance at winning this week, despite the vociferous opposition to him from Turkey’s right-wing populace, which disdains him because he is an Alevi liberal and because he is not Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But neither candidate gained the required 50 percent of the vote. The election will go to a runoff on May 28, and Erdoğan still has a chance—many Turks see it as a foregone conclusion—to prevail as president for another five years.

“A whole generation and I were only going to know this shadow,” Özmen writes in his beautiful new book, Olay. “To grow up despite this shadow, to try to build ourselves despite this shadow. This shadow is still there, twenty years later.”

Left: A fire seen near a gas station in Hasankeyf, 2020. Right: The bodies of 12 people are kept in a slaughterhouse in Sirnak. Turkish riot police use tear gas as Syrian Kurds illegally cross the Turkish-Syrian border in Suruc, September 2014. A boat full of migrants is illuminated by the flashlights of Turkish coast guards, who have come to rescue them near the Greek-Turkish border. This small boat's engine failed, and seven refugees from Syria, ‎Pakistan, and Afghanistan were stranded in the middle of the sea near Bodrum, 2015.

Özmen sought to capture in his photographs the sense of constant terror his generation and his people have endured, particularly in the past 10 years. As he writes, many Turks have been silenced under Erdoğan, and his photos, even those of active violence, have an eerie quietness to them, as if the volume has been turned off on a TV. (His work recalls Gilles Peress’s influential Telex Iran.) Özmen uses this quality to evoke what he describes as a sense of “powerlessness in the face of so much injustice and violence.”

The events (olay can mean “event” or “incident” in Turkish) he depicts are famous ones: the 2013 Gezi Park protests, in which thousands of people revolted over the construction of a mall on one of Istanbul’s last stretches of green space; the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the southeast in 2015; the attempted military coup against Erdoğan in 2016; the continuing Syrian-refugee crisis.

Most of the photos are black-and-white and without captions, choices that foster the strange effect of universality—documenting the tragedies as ones the Turkish people experienced collectively, even if they themselves never marched in the streets, or ran from bombs, or attempted to sneak illegally across the Greek border. The events are what Turks carry inside them; they are what their country has become. Özmen calls his own mind “the victim of a violent wind.”

Left: Smoke and tear gas fill the sky as Turkish police and protesters clash near Taksim Square, in Istanbul, on the first day of the Gezi Park protests, June 2013. Right: The minaret of a sunken mosque emerges from the reservoir of the Birecik dam, in Gaziantep, 2019. People watch from a building as protesters clash with Turkish police during the Gezi Park protests, in Istanbul, June 2013. The civil unrest began in May 2013, when a sit-in protesting an urban-development plan was violently evicted from the park. A women lies down on the ground in shock as police use tear gas to disperse the crowd at Taksim Square on the first day of Gezi Park protests, in Istanbul, May 2013. People gather in Istanbul to show solidarity with Palestinians after Israel's assault on Palestinian civilians at the Gaza border, May 2018.

Over the course of the decade that Özmen recorded, Turkey endured several natural catastrophes: earthquakes in Van, Elazığ, and Düzce, as well as raging wildfires in the Aegean region. The government’s responses to these events struck many Turks as a surprising failure. They were a harbinger of the country’s future.

In February, two devastating earthquakes struck southern Turkey in 24 hours, killing at least 50,000 and as many as hundreds of thousands, while making millions homeless. By now much has been written about why the earthquake was so deadly. Erdogan had built his authoritarian system on a corrupt construction economy and centralized the state so much around himself that many of its institutions failed to respond to the disaster. In many ways, the weeks after the earthquake felt like the culmination of the Turkish people’s psychological experience of the past 20 years.

[Read: Is this the end for Erdoğan?]

Turks were not only grieving or terrorized in February. Many knew that the 21st-century dystopian future that haunts our collective dreams, whether because of climate change or war or authoritarianism, had come for them. Thousands of people, rich and poor, lay crushed under their own possessions, and as day turned to night, in rain and snow, dead bodies lay in the street with no one to bury them; men, women, and children cried out from the rubble with no one to save them.

Those left alive were forced to witness this new world: Their families were gone, their houses were gone, food and water were gone, the roads were gone, the airports and ports were gone, the police were gone, the fire department was gone. They now lived in a wasteland, the kind we often say only nature is powerful enough to create. But only man could have created such a magnificently rigged apocalypse, and in 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Turkish republic, this act of creation was the work of one.

Turks always remind me that their country has been around for a long time. The Erdoğan era has lasted only 20 years, and even this strongman couldn’t crush the Turkish people’s history—that enduring, democratic desire to live and love that Özmen portrays so heartbreakingly in his photos.

Left: A religious frame with the inscription "God" remains on the broken wall of a house in Hasankeyf, an abandoned historical town in Batman that was engulfed a few months later by the Ilisu Dam project, in 2020. Right: In January 2016, civilians in Nusaybin hang a white flag on their house to show that they are unarmed. Since October 2, 2015, Turkish authorities have imposed seven very strict curfews in this Kurdish town in southeastern Turkey. People remove the bodies of their loved ones and relatives from the village cemetery after a government hydroelectric project causes water levels to rise in the Ilisu Dam reservoir lake, in Sirnak, September 2019. People in shock flee their homes Akcakale during fighting between the Turkish military and Kurdish PYD rebels the day after Turkey launched its military operation in northern Syria, 2019. A fire rages in Dalaman over a village near the airport, August 2021. In July and August 2021, 299 forest fires ravaged the Mediterranean region of Turkey in the worst-ever wildfire season in the country’s history.

One month after the earthquake, I was eating dinner on the terrace of my hotel in İskenderun, where a group of men and women sat at a nearby table drinking and smoking. A car pulled up and a woman got out, screaming, and a blond woman from the table ran to help her sit down.

“How could I not have known they were dead!” she cried. “I just saw on Facebook … How could I not have known!”

They consoled her. She kept crying. They tried sterner words.

“Sister, calm down,” one man said. “We have to be strong. Look, I have buried 40 friends.”

They were stealing sips from a bottle of spirits under the table, ordering more wine. The woman was still weeping. The blond woman spoke to her again with a clear voice.

“Sister, God is testing us,” she said. “Look at her.” She nodded at another woman across the table, who bowed her head. “Her friend is in the hospital. When they found her children in the rubble, they were hugging.”

There might be some Americans who, a year-plus into the Ukraine war, might be growing numb to it. Some of those Americans might include me, the new host of Radio Atlantic. In my first episode, I confess this to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Anne Applebaum, who have just returned from a trip to Ukraine. We talk about their interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, why continued American support is necessary, and why my flagging attention doesn’t matter.

Applebaum, who has covered the war from start, clarifies the confusing but potentially critical recent developments. Anti-Putin forces conducted a raid inside Russia. And after months of a bloody battle, Bakhmut, Ukraine, is for the moment under Russian control, while Ukrainian forces push at the flanks of the city. We analyze whether this is the start of the much-discussed spring offensive, and where the war might be headed.

The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. My colleagues, Atlantic staff, writer Anne Applebaum and editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg just got back from Ukraine. They returned with a sense that something big was going to happen, and now it seems to be starting. This week, it looks like Russia has taken Bakhmut, a city where the fighting has been vicious and sustained, although the Ukrainians haven't surrendered yet. At the same time, there’s been a raid inside Russia by anti-Putin forces. Now, I have to admit: I’ve become a little numb to this war. I’m just not following it as closely as I used to. So, I got Anne in the studio to bring this moment into focus.

Rosin: All right, I think maybe let’s start with the attacks behind the Russian border. What do we know about what happened?

Anne Applebaum: We know that a small group of people describing themselves as “Free Russian” forces crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia near a city called Belgorod and occupied several villages. They seemed to have frightened people enough to cause a major evacuation.

They stayed for some period of time, so it wasn’t just that they crossed over for an hour and came back. And they described themselves as wanting to use this as a way to provoke Putin or unseat Putin.

Rosin: It’s really hard for me to tell how big a deal this is in the context of the war, because partly you’re describing it as almost like a political stunt.

Applebaum: It’s a political move. My guess—and I’m just guessing; I can’t prove it—is that part of the point is to show that Putin is weaker than people think he is. It’s also clearly designed to show ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they think they are, and that the war isn’t going as well as the Kremlin says it is going. Maybe it also has greater military significance, but that we can’t know right now.

Rosin: It feels like a piece with the generally unconventional nature of tactics that the Ukrainians have been trying.

Applebaum: It’s part of a series of events and random explosions and actions that are designed to unnerve the Russians, unsettle Putin, unsettle the Russian elite, and convince ordinary Russians eventually that the war isn’t worth it, that they aren’t safe, and that the war is coming toward them.

Rosin: Got it. So the point is not necessarily “We are invading Russia.” The point is “This war is not worth your time.”

Applebaum: Yes.

Rosin: Like, it’s a psychological move.

Applebaum: Yes,remember, the Ukrainians do not have to occupy Moscow. They do not have to occupy any Russian territory. They don’t have to conquer anything.

All they have to do in order to win is get the Russians to go home.

Rosin: So this was happening at the same time that Bakhmut seems to be falling under Russian control.

Applebaum: But the Ukrainians haven’t surrendered Bakhmut. So it’s not the end of that piece of the conflict.

Rosin: These two things happened this week. Is this the beginning of what they’ve been talking about—the spring offensive?

Applebaum: It’s not gonna be like, there’s a moment when, you know, someone puts up a big banner and says, right, “Spring offensive has now begun.”

It just isn’t gonna look like that. Somebody quite senior in the U.S. military said to me a few days ago that what you’re likely to see over the next few weeks is lots of small things.

Rosin: This could be like a successful, isolated incident, or it could be the beginning—

Applebaum: —Or it could be the beginning of a different phase of the war. Yes.

So that's an update on where we are in this war. Now, I want to bring you a conversation I had with Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum when they were fresh from visiting Ukraine because they had a real point of view on how we should think about this war..and I didn't. And it really helped me see what they see.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I wanted to see if Ukraine could win without the more concentrated help of the United States. That answer is abundantly clear. The United States in this conflict is the indispensable nation. Ukraine can’t lose because of their own moxie and spirit and fighting ingenuity, and the help that they’ve been getting from NATO and the United States so far. But Ukraine can’t win without a much more concerted U.S. and NATO effort to provide the Ukrainians with weapons on the highest level of complexity and effectiveness and scale.

Rosin: Okay. So your question is: How necessary is American help?

Goldberg: Yeah. And the cloud hovering over all of this is the possibility that Donald Trump could become president once again. We know he will take the United States from the Ukrainian side over to the Russian side. So I want to understand what the Biden administration has to do in the next year and a half in order to guarantee a Ukrainian victory, because I’m extremely worried about what happens if Donald Trump becomes president again. And, by the way, I’m not saying that I believe that Donald Trump is going to win right now. But Donald Trump has a very good chance of being the Republican Party nominee. And anyone who says that Donald Trump can’t win the presidency obviously doesn’t remember what happened in November 2016.

Rosin: Okay. The clock is ticking. We have to figure this out now. And this might actually be a critical year. You know what question just popped into my head?

Goldberg: No.

Rosin: Why do you care?

Goldberg: Me?

Rosin: Yeah. Like I’m asking that sincerely. Like, you’re an American guy sitting over here in this lovely office. Why do you care? There’s a lot of atrocities, and a lot of people living outside freedom. So, yeah.

Goldberg: If [Russia’s] allowed to win, it’s a signal victory for the forces of cruelty, barbarism, and authoritarianism. Authoritarians are on the march. It’s a little bit on the nose that Russia is buying drones from Iran. Russia is at the center of a global authoritarian movement that murders, tortures, uses poison gas, rapes, commits genocide. And the United States, at its best, is the country that leads the forces of progressivism and liberalism and humanism against those darker forces.

Rosin: Anne? What do you think?

Applebaum: I would add something to that: namely that it’s pretty clear that Russia launched the war not only to conquer Ukraine, but also as a kind of “screw you” to the international system. We don’t care about your stupid borders; we don’t care about human rights. We’re not bothered about your rules, about the treatment of children. We’re fine kidnapping and deporting children. We’re not interested in the Geneva Convention and the laws on war. And we’re going to prove it to you and show it to you every single day.

Rosin: So was there any reason you guys decided to go now? Like, is this a critical moment when you thought, Okay, we’ve got to be there now?

Applebaum: Yes. This is a critical moment. Neither side is advancing very far. If the Ukrainians are going to win the war, that needs to change. And so the question is: What are the Ukrainians doing to change the way they fight in the next phase of the war? So, we’re actually at a real turning point.

Rosin: What did you think you’d see when you got there? Did you drive around? Was it easy to get around?

Applebaum: We went together with a colonel: a former colonel from the Ukrainian Special Services, who took us to see a group of drone operators.

Goldberg: Wait, explain to me something. So we’re—this is just an abandoned house.

Translator: [Ukrainian speech.]

Goldberg: A civilian house. And you move from house to house for safety?

Speaker 4: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we change our position.

Translator: Yeah. So people allowed them to be here.

Goldberg: You ask permission?

Translator: Yes. They ask permission. Yes, that’s the thing.

Rosin: And this was the drone workshop?

Applebaum: We actually saw two drone workshops. And what they’re doing is reconfiguring commercial drones. I mean, you can buy them on the Internet. The defense minister described them as wedding-ceremony drones, because in Ukraine, lots of people have them at their weddings.

Goldberg: What do you call them?

Oleksii Reznikov: Wedding-ceremony drones.

Goldberg: Why?

Reznikov: Because you use small drones to making footage of your wedding. Or, your daughter or son. So for wedding ceremony, you will use that camera? Yeah.

Applebaum: You know, you also have to imagine in Ukraine, it’s as if all the clever engineers from Silicon Valley have come to work at the Pentagon to save the country. And that’s something like what’s happening in these drone workshops—of which I should say there are probably dozens.

Goldberg: Dozens, if not hundreds. A drone workshop ... three people in a village can decide that they’re going to invent a better drone and then go do it.

Applebaum: You know, you think of [the] “defense industry” as being billion-dollar companies, and, you know, you think of the military having this kind of strict chain of command. In fact, in Ukraine, what you have is these almost volunteer units, so people of their own volition decide they’re going to create a drone workshop. It’s actually this kind of grassroots, networked, half–civil society, half-military effort that is fighting in different ways.

Rosin: All right. Let’s move on to the Zelensky interview.

Rosin: Was there a moment in the room with Zelensky when you felt something, or were genuinely moved? I mean, like an unexpected moment where you really felt the urgency that he feels.

Applebaum: When Zelensky talks about the civilizational differences between Ukraine and Russia—and by “civilization,” he means Ukraine is a modern democracy. It’s a networked, grassroots society. It’s fighting a brutal autocracy. And when he talks about that, he becomes unusually animated.

Goldberg: So the goal is to teach Russia to behave just like everybody else. Not better or worse, just like everybody.

Volodymyr Zelensky: To show everybody else, including Russia, that to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity. To respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take which is not yours.

Applebaum: And, you know, even when we asked him some questions about technology, he also clearly really liked talking about the tech university that he hopes to build one day. The achievements of Ukraine’s digital ministry, which has created this amazing app that every Ukrainian has: all their documents in their phone. Which has been, you know, hugely important for refugees and for people moving around the country. He becomes kind of expansive and enthusiastic.

And I think the reason for that is that those are the things that will make Ukraine this, you know, networked democracy that he wants it to be. So he has a very clear vision of what kind of country it is, and where it’s going. In order to achieve those things, he has to win the war. So it’s not so much that, you know, he becomes excited saying, I need this kind of weapon and that kind of weapon. He becomes excited when he’s talking about what he wants to build: you know, his dreams for the Ukraine of the future.

Rosin: And why does that matter to you?

Applebaum: Because it echoes with what so many other people I know in so many other parts of the world want also. Right before I went to Ukraine, I had a conversation with an Iranian friend of mine.

And he said to me, “We in Iran are waiting for the results of this war, because it will be so inspiring to us if a society like Ukraine can defeat a society like Russia. Because that’s what the Iranian human-rights movement, the Iranian democracy movement wants to do, too.”

And the conversations I’ve had with Venezuelans, with Belarusians, even with Poles—all of them find this war unbelievably inspiring. And it’s because it’s a war for a civilization that they also aspire to. So, there is a universal aspect of it.

Rosin: It’s really very basic. It’s: What kind of world are we gonna live in?

Applebaum: Yes. Are we going to live in a world, you know, where we talk about tech universities and new ways of making people’s lives better?

Or are we going to live in the kind of world that Russia wants to create, where the powerful can rape and murder and kidnap the weak? And those really are two choices in front of us.

Goldberg: [Zelensky] has this domino theory that goes like this: If the West allows Ukraine to fall, or to come under even partial permanent control of Russia, Russia does not stop. Russia goes into Moldova.

Zelensky: If they will occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they will occupy Moldova through Belarus, they will occupy Baltic countries, which are members of NATO. Of course they are brave people and they will fight—but they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapon. And when they will occupy NATO countries, the question is, will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.

Rosin: Like, do we think Russia is going to invade Estonia?

Applebaum: Yes. I think Russia would invade Estonia. Putin, the interesting thing about him is, he always says what he’s going to do. He and others around him have made comments about Poland, you know, and the Baltic states as well. So I’m not as much in doubt of that. Remember, we just got through an American presidency during which, you know, Trump made it very clear several times on the record and multiple times off the record that he doesn’t like NATO. And the Russians heard that. And so I think this was the beginning of a kind of test. You know, if everybody caves on Ukraine, if they’re not going to defend Ukraine, why would they defend Poland?

Rosin: So the fact that it lands in my head like “foreign-policy chess game” is just because [of] a failure of imagination?

Applebaum: It’s a failure of imagination. And also, you’re not listening to Putin. I mean, he’s telling us all the time what he’s going to do. He’s telling us how he thinks.

Goldberg: That’s a failure of moral imagination. Because if somebody were being rounded up on the next street over to you and shot behind their houses and buried in a grave 100 feet from your house, you would be appalled, and you would rise up and fight them, even to your death. So there’s no difference between that and what’s happening in eastern Ukraine, except distance. Just keeps it just out of sight, out of mind. And that, by the way, I am being very, very careful and explicit to say that neither Anne or I or really anyone we know [is] advocating for the use of American troops in any combat situation. I mean, I think if there’s something that we’ve learned from previous American adventures—from Vietnam to Iraq and so on—is that if the people who are seeking liberation can’t do the physical fighting themselves, it’s not worth getting involved in that conflict. But here, you have a conflict that’s tailor-made for the U.S.’s strength. I don't think that Americans are anti-war. Americans are anti–“wars that you don’t win quickly.”

Rosin: I guess it’s that we have been, in the past, romanced by overseas narratives of freedom and democracy: gotten involved, spent a lot of money. And for what? Now you’re saying this is not one of those cases.

Applebaum: Well, we’re also not sending American soldiers there. You know, on the contrary, by investing in Ukrainians, you know, we might be saving American soldiers down the line. Again: The occupation of Ukraine, the presence of Russia on the borders of Poland or the Baltic states, these would then begin to be direct threats to people whom our treaties say we need to defend, ourselves. It would be very nice never to have to face that problem.

Rosin: I just want to end this episode sort of speaking to people who, you know, have stopped reading, basically. Like I’m a stand-in for those people.

Goldberg: You know what? We’ve been in Korea since 1950. The thing that allows us to stay in Korea that did not allow us to stay in Iraq or Afghanistan is that American soldiers aren’t dying. If the bullied, if the oppressed, if the invaded can defend themselves—if we provide them with some guns—isn’t that a better formula? And, by the way, it’s also a formula that Americans can live with, because Americans themselves are not in harm’s way.

Rosin: This is actually the perfect and correct kind of engagement for an age of limited attention span. Who cares if people don’t care? Who cares if people aren’t reading? Like, my question is not that relevant a question , because we’ve actually designed a form of engagement that’s effective, necessary…

Applebaum: But, you know, the point of this war isn’t to entertain Americans. The point of the war is to win. I actually have a Ukrainian friend who’s often outside the country, and she appears often on panels in conferences. And she says the most irritating question to her as a Ukrainian is, you know, “What will happen if everyone gets bored of the war?” And she’s like, well, “You know, I can’t afford to get bored of the war.”

The war is not there to entertain you. The point isn’t to be exciting.This is the moment when we’re making a principled stand in favor of Ukraine, but also in favor of a kind of world order and a set of rules that we believe in. Right now, there is political consensus.

Rosin: Mm hmm. That’s the T-shirt. Our war is not here to entertain you.

Goldberg: That actually is sort of an amazing statement.

Hari Budha Magar, a former Gurkha soldier for British army in Afghanistan, now wants to help people with disabilities.

Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin

Paolo Pellegrin has been covering conflict zones for the past two decades, in places including Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. As he leaves on each assignment, Pellegrin’s thoughts turn to familiar concerns: Did I forget to turn out the lights? Did I leave the oven on? But then, unlike the rest of us, Pellegrin begins to consider what he describes as “putting yourself on the edge of an abyss.” He goes because he’s driven by a sense of responsibility. “There’s a relationship to image-making and history,” Pellegrin told me. A photograph “creates a record. It holds a memory.”

Pellegrin told himself that the battle to retake Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 would be his last trip: He now had young kids he needed to think about. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, he reconsidered. “How this ends will shape not only Ukraine but also large parts of the world,” Pellegrin said.

Pellegrin has been to Ukraine four times since the conflict began, making pictures of the front lines, the offensives, the retreats, and the evacuations. His photographs, selections from which accompany Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent cover story about the stakes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, make a distant war more tangible. The war, in its physicality, feels of another era, filled with human waves, tanks, trenches, and scattered pieces of twisted metal.

In the photographs below, Pellegrin focuses his lens on another aspect of the war: how the conflict reverberates off the battlefield. On the front lines, Pellegrin feels, there is an order to the fighting—one side shoots, and the other shoots back. But in civilian spaces, the shells still fall. Soldiers recovering in a clinic in Kharkiv, civilians trying to survive and maintain some semblance of a normal life, the duties of war: Pellegrin captures moments that reveal how brutality lingers.

In an undisclosed location in the Kharkiv region, soldiers undergo trauma therapy before returning to the front lines. An elderly resident walks to a food-distribution center in Chasiv Yar, Donbas. Left: An elderly couple sell their possessions along the roadside in Kostyantynivka, Donbas. Right: People stand in line waiting for bread in Kostyantynivka, Donbas. An elderly woman in Lyman. She lives with her family in a semi-destroyed apartment building with no heat. On March 14, 2023, an apartment building in Kramatorsk was devastated by a Russian air strike. Top: Men walk through a shelled apartment in Kramatorsk. Bottom: Natalya, 74, in her home in the village of Oleksandrivka. The village was occupied by Russian forces at the beginning of the war and then liberated by the Ukrainian army. A soldier and his girlfriend embrace in a trauma-treatment center in Kharkiv. Medics from Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, an organization made up of civilian health-care workers, spend the night in a safe house. They wait for a call to go evacuate wounded soldiers from the front lines. Top: A soldier with a Ukrainian mortar team outside Bakhmut. Bottom: One of several deposits of Russian shells in Kharkiv, on March 16, 2023. The Kharkiv office of the prosecutor collects Russian shells as evidence of war crimes.

Residents of Lviv pay respects to a fallen soldier. Such processions have been a regular, sometimes daily, occurrence since the start of the war.

Trenches in Kramatorsk, Donetsk

The Oscar-winning actress speaks to the BBC ahead of the premiere of her documentary on Afghanistan's women.

The United States has suffered from a deliberate fuzziness in formulating its objectives in the Russian war in Ukraine. Flaccid phrases like “helping Ukraine defend itself” or, even worse, “putting Ukraine in the best possible position for negotiations” are either meaningless or insipid. Bureaucratic mental fog is masquerading as artful policy, and it is dangerous. Strategy is the matching of means to ends. In war it is easy to become obsessed with action rather than purpose, and thereby to fall into Nietzsche’s famous description of the most common human stupidity: forgetting what one intended to do in the first place.

Ukraine knows how it defines victory: the pre-2014 borders cleansed of the invader, its exiles and refugees returned, its society and economy rebuilt, membership in the European Union and NATO attained, and some measure of justice for Russian rapists, torturers, and murderers secured. Similarly, we know how the Russians define victory: a Ukraine broken and severed from the West, much of its territory annexed; a Europe in disarray that resumes its addiction to cheap natural resources and business opportunities in Moscow; and the reconstruction of much of the old Russian imperial state.

We should want victory as Ukraine defines it. But to achieve it, the West must not only aid in the defeat of Russia—it must convince Russia that it has been defeated.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

A Russia that prevails would be a Russia even further empowered to meddle in Europe and to expand its influence with unlimited violence; a Russia that will have learned that it can commit slaughter and atrocities with impunity; a Russia whose ambitions will grow with success. A Russian victory would, as well, teach the world that the West—including the United States—lacks the resolve, despite its wealth, to follow through on its commitments, offering Beijing an encouraging lesson.

Conversely, Russian defeat would put Beijing—already somewhat nervous about its partner’s incompetence and wild statements—on the defensive, consolidate the Western alliance, and help preserve some of the essential norms of decent behavior in those parts of the world most important to us. Above all, it would block the Russian imperial project for good, because without Ukraine, as the historian Dominic Lieven has noted, Russia cannot be an empire.

Russian defeat does not require a march on Moscow (rarely a good idea in the past), and it does not require a Russia that is defenseless and devastated (impossible without World War III). Rather, it will be achieved inside the heads of Russia’s leaders and population. Russia must be convinced that the military instrument, and its deployment in large-scale war, will inevitably fail, and it must realize that Ukraine is permanently and completely lost.

Such things have happened before. Israel did not occupy Arab capitals in 1967, but that war caused the Arab states to abandon the notion that they could annihilate the Jewish state through conventional means. The 1973 war forced the conclusion that even limited conventional conflict was too hazardous to attempt.

In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States was defeated without losing a single battle. We became convinced that fighting was both futile and painful, that our enemies were implacable and unbeatable, and that the price paid in blood, treasure, and attention was in no way worth the cost and never would be.

Carl von Clausewitz, the German philosopher of war, said that war is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.

[Hein Goemans and Branislav Slantchev: Why Ukraine shouldn’t talk to Russia—yet]

Russia’s theories of victory in Ukraine have collapsed one by one. Putin began by believing that the country would fall in a week; then that it would succumb to a month or two of hard fighting; then that Europe would abandon it during a cold winter without Russian gas; then that Ukraine could be bludgeoned into submission by attacking its cities. The final theory of victory—that the West does not have the heart to pour vast resources into Ukraine indefinitely—needs to be disproved as well, because there is nothing beyond that.

To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use, including long-range missiles to break for good the 11-mile Kerch bridge between the mainland and Crimea, and cluster munitions to devastate Russian fighting vehicles and infantry. Breaking the Russian army, as we have, by spending only a small fraction of our defense budget and none of our blood is an astounding strategic bargain.

Russians must, moreover, conclude that Ukraine—formerly, in their view, a pseudo-state containing “cousins” or “little brothers”—is gone forever. That means speedy accession to the EU and NATO, but also a deep Western commitment to rebuilding Ukraine economically and, most important, arming it to the teeth for years to come.

The paltering of the administration about giving our superabundant F-16s to Ukraine is foolish and shortsighted. These jets might not make a difference on the battlefield two months from now, but the knowledge that several hundred of them are in the pipeline for the next five years would have profound symbolic importance. We should be talking about how we will rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces, the West’s largest, most combat-tested, and in some ways most determined army.

The West needs an aggressive information campaign to drive home the reality of Russian defeat. Russians need to be reminded that their faltering economy is only a tenth the size of the EU’s; that they cannot build and deploy a modern tank; that their latest high-performance jet, the Su-57, will be outnumbered by the F-35s of the four small Nordic states; that their generals are superannuated and incompetent; that their high command is indifferent to their men’s lives; that their equipment is inferior to that of Ukraine; and that their logistics are rotted by graft and corruption.

Information warfare should be reinforced by continued sanctions, whose aim is not so much to win the war as to cripple Russian war-making potential for the long run by depressing the economy and forcing Russia to make do with inferior components and spare parts.

Russia must be isolated politically and psychologically as well, thereby playing on the country’s historical ambivalence about the West, represented in its two capitals: St. Petersburg, facing Europe, and Moscow, facing Asia. But Russian literature, art, culture, and political practice are rooted in its relationship with Europe. The time may come—years or, more likely, decades from now—when a postimperial Russia will turn westward again.

This is all doable. In fact, it has happened on a smaller scale before. Russian leaders became convinced in the late 1970s and early ’80s that they could not keep up with advances in Western military technology, even as they fought and lost the war in Afghanistan. The Gorbachev upheaval was in part the result of this realization.

[David J. Kramer, John Herbst, and William Taylor: The only realistic answer to Putin]

But our expectations today should be measured. Unfortunately, a defeated Russia will still be malevolent, angry, and vengeful; it will probably still be ruled by the “vertical of power,” the hard men from the security ministries; it will be suffused with lawlessness and murder; and it will engage in subversion, political warfare, and malicious behavior of all kinds. But who would not prefer to deal with a thousand troll farms and front organizations than one Mariupol? And this Russia would be far less dangerous to us, far less useful to China, far less likely to raise monstrous new threats in the years to come.

The key to this strategy is courage. We must conquer our fears of Russian threats and escalation, of its nuclear bravado, and even of Russian collapse. We must be strategic and shrewd, but nothing can be accomplished without courage. In the words of John Paul II—the unarmed, lone old man who did so much to bring Soviet communism to its knees—“Never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”

This article was adapted from a speech given to the Polish Institute of International Affairs’s Strategic Ark conference on May 17, 2023.

Kabir has been associated with Taliban leadership since 2006, when Mullah Omar appointed him as a military commander.

Dear Mom,

It is 2 a.m. I am sitting up awake in the quiet hell of night, worrying about my sister and wishing you were here. I don’t know when this everlasting winter will end. It is hard to keep our ground-floor apartment warm with its high ceilings. I am writing to you from our dining table, where we have never feasted, thousands of miles away from you. It is one of those cursed nights when I can’t sleep. The traffic of my thoughts overwhelms me. You know how much I used to love sleeping, Mom, but now I don’t remember the last time I rested peacefully. Maybe a year ago? Maybe more. Maybe since my sister and I escaped from the Taliban and left Kabul behind. Maybe since I left you behind.

Today is Mother’s Day in the U.S. Americans celebrate this day on a different date than we did back home. I never thought I would be here on this day without you. It has been 626 days since the last time I saw your face, since our last hug, and since the last time I smelled and kissed you. I don’t remember our last lunch together or the last time I ate your homemade cookies. I wonder how much you have changed. Maybe there are a few more lines by your eyes or on your forehead. Perhaps your hair is starting to gray. I am grateful to still be able to hear your voice, but our phone calls have never been the answer to the way I want to see you.

[Read: I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban so I could write this story]

I keep thinking about the times we celebrated Mother’s Day—your day—together. You would always put makeup on, model your stunning dresses, and pretend to be surprised at the bouquets and presents we’d gotten you, even though you secretly already knew they were coming. Now this is the second year we don’t have you with us to cut the cake. This year is quiet, the same as last.

Still, living here, I understand Mother’s Day more deeply. When I came to the U.S., you asked me to take care of my sister, and I became her legal guardian at age 21. But I wasn’t ready. The responsibilities and the burdens—the guardianship—were beyond my capability at a time when I myself still needed somebody to rely on. I never expected I’d be responsible for a child while still being so close to my own childhood. But I tried my best to be a good mother figure to her. I started acting like you, thinking like you, seeing her like you, caring for her like you.

Since then, I’ve come to understand that to be a mother is to be a companion, a mirror, and a teacher at the same time. I’m caught between sisterhood and motherhood; I want to be both, but I’m not fulfilling either. There is so much about her I don’t know. I don’t understand the reasons behind her silences or her random smiles. Sometimes she likes what I cook, and sometimes she hates it. Sometimes she seems like a child who wants me to do everything for her, and sometimes she wants to do everything on her own. The closer I try to get, the more I end up distancing myself from her. The moment I became a confident speaker in our conversations, I realized I was the worst listener for not giving her the chance to talk. Is it always this hard to be a mother? Or is it just this hard to be a mother of a teenager?

I worry that I am failing my sister, that I am not doing as good of a job at mothering her as you did, Mom. I am sorry for not being as kind to her as you were, for not understanding her as well as you did, for not cooking as deliciously as you cooked for her. I love her as a sister, but I don’t know how to love her as a mother. Sometimes all I do is think about her—what makes her happy, what makes her sad, what she loves and hates. Sometimes I think about her so much that I forget to think about myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m being erased. How have you been doing this all your life?

I don’t even know whether you can read this or not. I know Dad taught you a few words of English. Tell me, are you still pronouncing checkup as “catch-up”? I wish I could ask you for advice, Mom. But I don’t dare look you in the eye and tell you that you were wrong about me taking good care of my sister. I don’t dare tell you how I learned that it has never been easy to be you. I don’t dare tell you how acting as a mom has made me realize how much I still need a mom—how much I still need you.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

I have advocated for giving Donald Trump’s sociopathic behavior full exposure. But CNN’s decision to run a town hall with the former president enabled that behavior and managed to harm journalism, the network’s reputation, and the American political process all at once.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

MSG is finally getting its revenge. America’s unconvincing reasons for denying F-16s to Ukraine Night at the Vatican

A Trump Dream

I have long argued that Americans need to see more, rather than less, of Donald Trump.  Because I believe that Trump is an existential menace to American democracy, I have encouraged covering Trump as closely as possible. I know this seems counterintuitive: Trump built a following over the years by being on television, and his base can’t get enough of him, so why should the media encourage more adoration? But for ordinary Americans who did not join the cultish following that congealed around Trump in 2016—many of whom are the independent voters who will decide the next election—“Trump exhaustion” is a real thing, and the more of it, the better.

Watching Trump for any extended period of time is enervating and deeply uncomfortable. The man is a quivering bag of weird verbal and physical tics. And when he gets rolling, listening to a Trump speech is like standing nearby while someone throws a match into a box of cheap bottle rockets: When the fusillade of annoying noise, misfires, duds, and smoke is over, all that’s left is a general stink in the air.

This discomfort is exactly my point: If you want to stop Donald Trump from returning to power, putting him on TV is the way to go. But doing so requires either that you hand him a microphone and let him immolate himself, or that you sit him down with a reporter who will not let up on calling out his lies and fantasies until he melts down.

Last night, however, CNN chose one of the worst possible options. Instead of a candidate interview, CNN Chairman Chris Licht apparently thought it would be a great idea to cast Trump in a remake of The Jerry Springer Show, complete with vulgar jokes, hooting fans, and a mild-mannered host—in this case, the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins—stuck with the thankless of job of trying to intervene in the shouting and angry finger-pointing. Instead of an important one-on-one interview with a dangerous and malevolent demagogue, CNN presented another episode of Trump’s ongoing reality show.

The result was a disaster that was not only foreseeable but also as predictable as the laws of physics, a cringe-inducing display that damaged CNN’s reputation, put one of its rising stars in a no-win situation, cheapened journalism, and undermined our political process—all in the span of little more than an hour.

To be clear, I am not taking issue with CNN offering Trump time on the network. Trump is far and away the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Neither CNN nor any other network can refuse to cover him; as I’ve said, it would be a disservice to let him spread his toxic slurry out of the public eye. But “covering” Trump does not mean packing an audience with supporters and then setting the resolutely misogynist Trump against a young female reporter in a situation that practically could have been designed by the Trump campaign itself.

Indeed, Licht and his producers seemed determined to place Trump right in his comfort zone. Although Collins tried repeatedly to contradict Trump, Licht had to know—perhaps was even expecting—that Trump would simply steamroll her, as he did. (She also missed several opportunities—particularly on abortion—to stop Trump as he rocketed beyond the Van Allen belts, but I accept that correcting him is basically impossible.) Only once did she finally manage to get under his skin with repeated questioning, and in response, he pulled out his standard insult of calling her “nasty.”

The audience, for their part, was a Trump dream, even standing and applauding his entrance and exit. But where did they come from? I emailed CNN’s head of strategic communications, Matt Dornic, and he referred me to his tweet this morning explaining that the attendees were “curated by CNN through community groups, student politics and government, faith groups, agriculture and education orgs, as well as [Republican] groups. The school and campaign also invited guests.” I asked Dornic whether he had reached out directly to the New Hampshire GOP, and he replied that it was “just one of many groups we tapped for audience.”

(The chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, in an email to Atlantic senior editor Kelli Korducki, said that CNN had provided some seats for New Hampshire party attendees and had the email addresses of the party’s executive-board members, adding that he saw CNN’s email invite “shared around” and that it was all “very professional,” whatever that means.)

Whoever they were, Trump was jazzed by their support. Every slimy comment got a laugh or applause, including many about E. Jean Carroll, the woman who successfully sued Trump for sexual abuse and defamation this week. (Trump was so vile, Carroll says, that she is reportedly thinking of suing him again.) Collins had to ask about Carroll, of course, but after that, the plan—if one existed—seemed to be for her to stand there and take it while Trump talked over her, made dirty jokes, and basked in audience laughter. Trump’s sleaziness, like everything else in this train wreck, was completely foreordained—and, again, Licht and his producers had to know it.

So what, exactly, was CNN’s objective here? According to a transcript obtained by Politico, Licht praised Collins in an editorial call with CNN’s troops this morning: “If someone was going to ask tough questions and have that messy conversation, that damn well should be on CNN.” Collins indeed asked the questions, but there was no conversation. Trump commanded the stage, played to the crowd, and swatted Collins aside as if she were an annoying intern trying to fix his lapels.

Licht then added:

While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story, because the people in that audience represent a large swath of America. And the mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist.

How anyone—especially the head of a news network—can believe that this group of people has been ignored is astonishing. Perhaps he missed the many years of journalists conducting ritual pilgrimages to America’s diners and asking every angry old guy in a red hat to please, please tell us what he wants.

Perhaps what Licht really meant is that CNN should see MAGA world as an underserved community that is up for grabs while Fox News reels from its scandals. It seems an odd strategy, however, to push Collins onstage as the blood sacrifice for an hour, and then follow that up with Jake Tapper and other CNN hosts wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of talking about what a miserable fiasco their own network just splattered across the nation’s screens.

As many observers have noted, CNN has learned nothing since 2016. Or maybe CNN has learned everything since 2016, and intends to do it all over again.

Related:

The worst thing to come out of Trump’s town hall didn’t come from Trump. Entirely unrepentant

Today’s News

Title 42, a COVID-era public-health restriction that allows authorities to swiftly expel migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border—in many cases preventing them from applying for asylum, but with almost no legal repercussions for crossing—expires tonight. Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the release of former Prime Minister Imran Khan as protests swept the country. The White House called for a “thorough investigation” into the death of Jordan Neely, who died after being choked by a fellow New York City subway rider.

Evening Read

Olivier Douliery / AFP / Getty

‘We Are Not Ordinary People’

By George Packer

There are few ways of escape from the Taliban’s Afghanistan. One of them crosses the mountainous eastern border with Pakistan in a town called Torkham. Last September, Safia Noori; her husband, Fakhruddin Elham; and their four-month-old daughter, Victoria, traveled to Torkham and joined a throng of Afghans waiting to be allowed across by Taliban guards. The day was hot; the baby was crying; the crowd pressed in. Noori and Elham, in their early 20s, were carrying just two small bags, one with the baby’s clothes, the other with their own. They had sold everything else, including the furniture and handmade curtains and bedspread that made up Noori’s wedding dowry, to buy passports. They hadn’t seen their parents since the fall of Afghanistan a year before.

Read the full article.

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Choose the activism that won’t make you miserable. The fiscal choice the GOP needs to make Photos: Some winners of this year’s challenge in close-up photography

Culture Break

Courtesy of Elevation Pictures

Read. BlackBerry is a new kind of business biopic.

Listen. Check out a preview of The Atlantic’s flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, which is relaunching on May 25 with senior editor Hanna Rosin as its host.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I won’t be back with you here at the Daily until next week, but I want to remind you to keep your eye on this week’s episode of HBO’s Succession, and particularly on the set at ATN, the fictional, Fox-like network owned by the Roy family. You’ll see a pundit on the network’s screens, a rather portly fellow in a blue suit and the de rigueur flag pin. He bears a remarkable resemblance to a writer of your acquaintance.

Fine, it’s me (playing a role, not as myself), and it’s a banger of an episode. Titled “America Decides,” it takes place on Election Night, and … well, that’s all I can tell you. But I’m writing about what it was like to be on the set of this amazing show, and about my too-brief tenure as a right-wing ATN commentator. Look for it in The Atlantic after the show airs on Sunday night.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.