Politics

Every drone Ukraine fires at a Russian oil terminal is meant to defund Moscow's war in Ukraine. Right now, each one may be doing the opposite. Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil export infrastructure are intended to starve Moscow of the budget revenues that fund its war machine. The logic is straightforward: disrupt exports, reduce revenues, constrain the war effort. Kyiv has been explicit about this: Ukrainian officials consistently frame attacks on oil terminals as direct hits on Russia's war chest, treating every barrel that cannot be shipped as a ruble that cannot be spent on missiles or mobilization. Reuters puts the scale of that disruption in stark terms – at least 40 percent of Russia's crude export capacity, roughly 2 million barrels per day, is currently offline.

Mark Twain famously wrote that “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, and similar rumors have proliferated about King Charles’s state visit to the United States not taking place as a direct result of the ongoing conflict in Iran. Dubiously-informed sources have suggested either that Charles himself is so personally offended by the outbreak of war that he has refused to head to America in a month’s time, or alternatively that the British government, smarting from the tongue-lashings that President Trump has handed out to the hapless Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, have suggested that it would be a bad idea for the trip to go ahead at this time, and that the King should postpone the visit to the fall.

In the pantheon of Trump adversaries, Robert Mueller may rank at the very top. Everything about Mueller – his rectitude, his formality, his blueblood ancestry, his lifelong marriage to his high school sweetheart – was anathema to Trump who has sought, as far as possible, to disestablish the Washington establishment. Yesterday, Trump engaged in a round of gloating over Mueller’s death at age 81, declaring on social media that it couldn’t have come soon enough: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” Gee whiz. No crocodile tears from him for the G-Man who had devoted his life to public service. “It is clearly wrong and unchristian behavior,” Republican Rep. Don Bacon wrote. It should, however, come as no surprise.

As Ukraine emerges battered but unbowed from the third and most terrible winter of the war against Russia, its people have proved that they can survive and fight on even as Vladimir Putin's troops destroy swaths of their country’s heating, transport and electricity infrastructure. But one thing that Ukraine cannot survive without is money – and that, the European Union seems critically unable to provide.  On Thursday, a Council of Europe summit once again failed to remove a veto by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, on a €90 billion ($104 billion) tranche of funding for Ukraine.