Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s compelling video address before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday drew sustained applause from both sides of the aisle – a reflection of the widespread admiration for his bravery as well as the continuing horror over Russia’s relentless war on his country. 

Speaking from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, he ended by addressing President Joe Biden directly in English. 

“Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace,” said Mr. Zelenskyy, wearing his trademark military-green T-shirt.

Yet in the short term, the dramatic speech by the comedian-turned-wartime leader is likely to make President Biden’s job only more difficult. The stirring appeal, which invoked both Pearl Harbor and 9/11, put direct pressure on the United States to do more to help Ukraine, despite Mr. Biden's stated concern that certain forms of assistance could lead to a broader war. 

It may also widen political rifts at home over the conflict – and over whether Mr. Biden's leadership has been a display of weakness or a master class in de-escalation and behind-the-scenes diplomacy in the face of the most serious threat to the global order in decades. 

Soon after Mr. Zelenskyy spoke, Mr. Biden announced that the U.S. would provide another $800 million in defensive weaponry to Ukraine. But he did not relent on Mr. Zelenskyy’s pleas for MiG fighter jets or the establishment of “humanitarian no-fly zones” over his country to allow basic supplies to reach besieged Ukrainians. Mr. Biden aims to avoid direct conflict between NATO and Russian forces, which would be tantamount to “World War III,” he has said. 

To that end, national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke Wednesday to his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev – the first publicly announced high-level call between U.S. and Russian officials since the Ukraine invasion started Feb. 24. Mr. Sullivan warned Mr. Patrushev against the use of chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, the White House said.

The domestic U.S. political calculus is also evolving. After early bipartisan support for Mr. Biden’s approach to Ukraine, including praise for sanctions against Russia and agreement that U.S. troops should not be sent into Ukraine, which is not a NATO ally, GOP leaders have lately ramped up criticism. 

Republicans accuse Mr. Biden of being slow in helping a nation that has fought to become independent and democratic, after long subjugation by Russia. “American strength is not the provocation. American weakness is,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a statement. “We need to help get air defense systems to Ukraine without wasting another second.”

In U.S. political terms, “the days of a big ‘rally around the flag’ are past,” says Christopher Gelpi, a political scientist who studies military force and public opinion at Ohio State University. “They could come back again, but right now the public is so polarized.” 

Patrick Semansky/AP

President Joe Biden pauses after signing a provision for security aid to Ukraine, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus in Washington, March 16, 2022. Behind him, from left, are Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Mr. Biden’s approval rating is at 43%, according to the Pew Research Center, up slightly from 41% in January. His approval rating for handling of the Russian invasion is slightly higher, at 47%. 

President Biden has long experience in foreign policy, both as a senator of 36 years and in eight years as vice president. Some foreign affairs analysts praise the president for how quickly and effectively he helped pull the Western alliance together to address the crisis.

“The administration really laid the groundwork nicely in the run-up to the invasion, and that’s one of the reasons why they were able to reap the dividend of allies going faster than was imagined after the invasion,” says Hal Brands, professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

He adds, “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing our diplomatic work for us so far by offering up a provocation that is so outrageous that it simply can’t be ignored.”

Some experts are also crediting Mr. Biden for not being “showy” in how he's approached the crisis. Mr. Biden has at times ceded the public spotlight to two NATO leaders – French President Emmanuel Macron and the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz – who took lead roles in trying to resolve the conflict with Moscow before the war started. 

To some extent, that makes a virtue out of a Biden weakness: his lack of a forceful public presence. Public speaking is not the president’s strong suit, and he seems to have no problem sharing the burden when it comes to taking on Mr. Putin’s aggression. 

Still, experts say Mr. Putin would like nothing more than to portray the standoff as a conflict with the U.S. Mr. Biden hasn’t allowed that to happen. Mr. Zelenskyy, too, has played an outsize public role, choosing not to flee Ukraine and putting out regular videos on social media as he fights for his country’s freedom. That has further set the narrative firmly as Ukraine vs. Russia, not the U.S. vs. Russia. 

But that’s not to suggest that the U.S. isn’t a major player in the Ukraine crisis. A lot is happening out of public sight, says Elizabeth Saunders, an expert on the politics of U.S. foreign policy at Georgetown University.  

“You don’t observe this kind of unity in alliances unless there’s been a lot of preparatory work behind the scenes,” says Professor Saunders. “In some ways, this is a return to the norm of off-camera coordination with allies.”

Mr. Biden suffered a blow to his reputation on international affairs after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last August. Russia’s Ukraine invasion – the biggest assault on a European nation since World War II – is probably the last thing he wanted. 

But it has given him the opportunity to demonstrate his chops in a part of the world he knows well – albeit not for wholly positive reasons. Ukraine was central to former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, over allegations that he pressed Mr. Zelenskyy to provide dirt on Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to help Mr. Trump win reelection. The younger Mr. Biden had served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma.

Adam Schultz/The White House/AP

President Joe Biden listens during a video call with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in the White House Situation Room, March 7, 2022. Some analysts applaud Mr. Biden for ceding lead roles to Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz in diplomatic efforts that aimed to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The contrast with the Trump presidency is sharp. President Trump had hinted at pulling the U.S. out of NATO, the long-standing military alliance among the U.S., Europe, and Canada aimed at deterring Soviet and then Russian aggression, and he had used that cudgel to get NATO members to spend more on defense. Such a pullout would have fulfilled a long-held dream of Mr. Putin to weaken the alliance. 

Instead, the 2020 election of the internationalist Mr. Biden ensured NATO’s longevity and allowed the U.S. and its allies to use their collective force to stand up to Russia. Next week, Mr. Biden will travel to Brussels for a special summit of NATO leaders on the Ukraine crisis. 

Simultaneously, the European Union – a political and economic union of 27 European states – has also used its collective clout to pressure Russia on the economic front. When the U.S. announced its embargo of Russian oil earlier this month, EU nations also signaled plans to wean themselves from Russian energy, a more significant undertaking.  

Further sanctions could be in the offing, if Russian aggression in Ukraine continues. One option is “secondary sanctions,” which target anyone doing business with a sanctioned state like Russia, says Daniel McDowell, an expert on international political economy at Syracuse University. 

But Mr. Biden shouldn’t just sanction Russia as heavily as possible, Professor McDowell says. The president may face domestic pressure to respond more forcefully, he says, but the more America acts alone, the harder it becomes to coordinate allies from Germany to Japan. “Keeping the coalition together is really critical, and I think in that respect, they’ve done a really good job.”

The foreign minister of Moldova, a country of 2.5 million people on the western flank of Ukraine, does not mince his words. The Moldovan army, he admits, is small and ill-equipped.

“We are not a very big country and we do not have a very well-endowed army with sophisticated equipment,” Nicu Popescu said in a recent briefing in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau, a city of hulking Soviet-era government buildings, broad boulevards, and snow.

He was responding to questions about whether this small nation, which is squeezed between Ukraine and Romania, might be the next target after Ukraine on Vladimir Putin’s menu.

There is intense speculation that if Russian forces are able to take the port city of Odessa, in southern Ukraine, they might push westward and cross the border into Moldova.

In the early hours of Wednesday, Russian warships fired missiles at Tuzly, southwest of Odessa on the Black Sea coast, 50 miles from the Moldovan border.

For Moldovans, there are alarming parallels between their country and Ukraine.

Like Ukraine, Moldova was once part of the Soviet Union, gaining its independence in 1991 when the USSR disintegrated.

Like Ukraine, it is not a member of either NATO or the European Union – meaning it could not expect the protection of either bloc in the event of a Russian invasion.

Sergei Grits/AP

Women and children in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, carry banners and Ukrainian flags showing support for neighboring Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion on International Women's Day, March 8.

And as with the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine, Moldova has a pro-Moscow, breakaway region within its borders that is occupied by Russian troops.

The region, called Transnistria, runs in a strip down eastern Moldova, along the frontier with Ukraine. When the region announced that it was splitting from the rest of Moldova in 1991, a brief war broke out in which hundreds of people died. No country recognizes tiny Transnistria as an independent state – not even Russia.

In a throwback to Soviet times, it has a hammer and sickle on its flag, statues of Lenin still standing in its squares, and streets named after Marx and Engels.

The territory, which lies on either side of the Dniester River, hosts a garrison of around 1,300 Russian and local troops, as well as a huge stockpile of 20,000 tons of weapons.

Karen Norris/Staff

If the Russians did swallow up Transnistria – or indeed the whole of Moldova – they could use the territory as a springboard from which to open a new front in Ukraine.

Moldovans were deeply alarmed two weeks ago when Russia’s apparent battle plan for the region was revealed by Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian ruler of Belarus.

A close ally of President Putin, the dictator was seen standing in front of a map with arrows that represented Russian lines of attack pointing from southern Ukraine into Moldova.

“I was afraid when I saw Lukashenko and the map with the arrow pointing toward Moldova,” says Aline Frunza, while taking refuge in a cafe in Chisinau from a snow storm outside as the temperature plunged to 23 degrees.

“If Russia invades, we can do nothing,” says the lawyer, as waitresses serve up plates of pancakes and pizza in the brightly lit restaurant. “A lot of Moldovans are leaving the country because of the situation,” she adds. “Others are packing their bags in case there is an emergency.”

Sergei Grits/AP

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) and Moldovan President Maia Sandu greet each other as they attend a joint news conference following their talks in Chisinau, Moldova, March 6, 2022. Mr. Blinken pledged America’s support to the small Western-leaning former Soviet republic that is coping with an influx of refugees from Ukraine and warily watching Russia’s intensifying war with its neighbor.

While some Moldovans flee west, more than 300,000 refugees have crossed the eastern border with Ukraine. The streets of Chisinau are clogged with cars bearing Ukrainian number plates and miniature blue and yellow Ukrainian symbols.

“A lot of people are in transit. They’re moving through Moldova to places like Romania,” says Andre, a businessman who fled Odessa a few days after the war started.

A country that is normally given scant attention on the international stage has now been pitched into the front line of the biggest conflict in Europe since the World War II.

“Get familiar with Transnistria. You’ll soon be hearing a lot more about it,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio wrote in a recent tweet.

Nicholas Myers, a senior fellow at Strategy and Future, a think tank in Warsaw, Poland, thinks it is likely that Russia will move on Transnistria, but less probable that Moscow would try to seize the whole of Moldova.

If Russia were able to occupy the Odessa region in southern Ukraine, a linkup with Transnistria might be irresistible, he predicts. “I think that is quite likely. If the Russians take Odessa, that puts them right next to Transnistria,” he says.

One Western diplomat in Chisinau agrees. “I think there’s a very good chance that he would” seek to capture Transnistria “even though it is still a de jure part of Moldova,” he says. “I don’t think Putin would be able to resist the temptation. It would be very provocative.”

He also believes that the likelihood of Russia invading the whole of Moldova is a more distant prospect, but that if it came to pass, “Moldova couldn’t really put up much resistance.”

“Its military has very little kit, there’s no air force, and it has missiles so old that when you fire them in one direction they go off in another because the guidance systems are degraded,” he says.

Sergei Grits/AP

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (left) and Moldovan Foreign Minister Nicu Popescu attend a news conference during their meeting in Chisinau, Moldova, March 12, 2022.

The Russian objective would be to unseat Moldova’s current pro-Western government and replace it with a pro-Russia administration. To thwart any such plans, Moldova has been lavished with an unusual level of attention by a stream of Western leaders in the past two weeks.

They included Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief; Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister; and Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, who said, “We stand with Moldova and any other country that may be threatened in the same way.”

What that means in practice is hard to say. NATO has refused to fight to defend Ukraine, so would not be expected to commit troops to save Moldova.

Western countries are pledging money and humanitarian supplies, but cash and kind words go only so far. If Mr. Putin does decide to invade, “the fate of Moldova is whatever Putin’s whim happens to be,” forecasts Mr. Myers. “If he decides, ‘what the hell,’ then there’s really nothing to stop the Russians.”

Sam McNeil/AP

Chinese leader Xi Jinping (middle row, center) applauds during the closing session of China's National People's Congress in Beijing, March 11, 2022. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has put him in an awkward spot.

Xi Jinping is “unsettled.”

That’s the term the director of America’s CIA has used to assess the Chinese leader’s mood in the face of the unexpected difficulties that his closest ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, is facing in Ukraine.

And it has set the context for this week’s U.S. diplomatic push to dissuade China from making an end run around Western economic sanctions on Russia, or from providing Moscow with drones or other weapons. National security adviser Jake Sullivan met Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi in Rome on Monday, warning him of “the potential implications and consequences” of such support.

It also helps explain Beijing’s exercise in diplomatic fence-sitting so far: abstaining in a United Nations vote condemning Mr. Putin’s attack rather than opposing the motion, but also refraining from any criticism of Russia’s action.

China has its own reasons for wanting the violence in Ukraine to end, but Mr. Xi’s perspective on how that should come about, and what should follow, remains dramatically different from the West’s.

Jin Mamengni/Xinhua/AP

Yang Jiechi (left, foreground), China's top foreign policy official, meets U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan in Rome, March 14. Mr. Sullivan warned China not to support Russia's invasion of Ukraine with weapons or help in evading Western sanctions on Moscow.

His top short-term interest: to ensure Mr. Putin’s invasion doesn’t end in outright defeat or, even worse, in a loss of power for his autocratic ally.

That’s because of Mr. Xi’s larger long-term vision of a “Chinese century,” when his nation’s economic and political heft, he believes, will make Beijing the world’s dominant power. China will need one major ally, at least, on the world stage.

That vision is one he hopes to see validated, with Ukraine in the rearview mirror, at a Communist Party conference later this year confirming him as the first leader since Mao Zedong to serve a third term of office.

Indeed if Mr. Xi thinks that Mr. Putin has reached a point in the Ukraine onslaught when he can somehow claim a degree of “victory,” the Chinese leader could yet seek to step up to take the diplomatic lead in forging an agreement acceptable to all sides.

None of that, however, minimizes the challenges that the violence in Ukraine poses him. In fact, “unsettled” may well be an understatement.

The war itself presents a basketful of problems. The big picture is that China, like the Kremlin and most Western observers, had assumed that Mr. Putin’s huge advantage in troop numbers and armaments would make any invasion fairly quick and easy. Beijing also seems to have expected that Western sanctions would be piecemeal and fairly tame.

Both assumptions have proved false.

But the fighting has also directly affected China’s interests; Ukraine is a valued trading partner, important because of its huge grain exports as well as its Black Sea port of Odessa – now hunkering down for an expected Russian attack.

Richard Drew/AP

China's U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun addresses the U.N. Security Council, March 14, 2022.

Mr. Putin’s invasion has also disrupted China’s ambitious Belt and Road initiative to create a land bridge for growing Chinese trade with Europe and beyond. The land bridge’s key rail links go through Russia and Belarus – both now targeted by unexpectedly far-reaching Western sanctions.

As Washington has increasingly been signaling to Mr. Xi, China itself could risk sanctions if it does anything to help Russia offset the impact of Western sanctions.

That presents a conundrum for Beijing. On the one hand, it does not want – and almost surely does not intend – to turn its back on its Russian ally. Besides, it depends on significant imports of gas and other commodities from Russia.

Still, China’s trade with Russia is dwarfed by its commerce with the West, amounting to just one-tenth of the total business it does with Europe and America. That is trade that Beijing will not want to endanger.

China’s response to the sanctions problem may well turn out to be the economic equivalent of the fence-sitting it has adopted at the United Nations.

It will likely increase commodity trade with Russia, and it may boost its exports of basic consumer products, to help the Russian government. But sanctions-busting by major Chinese companies seems less likely, if only because of their own self-interest in safeguarding far more lucrative Western markets.

A potentially bigger, long-term problem for China is harder to quantify: the reputational risk it would run, not just with governments, but with Western citizens and major Western businesses, if Mr. Xi is seen to be an enabler of the brutal violence being visited on Ukraine.

The widespread sense of horror and anger at the violence has already helped prompt an array of sanctions far tougher than Mr. Xi could have expected.

Maybe, over time, that sense of unity and purpose in the West will wane. Mr. Xi will hope so.

But if not, fence-sitting – as the old saying goes – could yet leave China with a serious case of splinters.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The Federal Reserve building is seen in Washington, Jan. 26, 2022. The Fed’s move to raise short-term interest rates Wednesday aims to correct what is widely perceived as its own error of letting inflation make a comeback.

As the Federal Reserve starts to tighten its money spigot for the economy for the first time since the pandemic began in 2020, today’s boost in interest rates feels different. 

This policy about-face comes in circumstances more sensitive than most economic cycles: Inflation is at a 40-year high, a war in Ukraine is rattling global energy and food markets, and the pandemic still weighs on households around the world. 

Amid all this, the Fed is expected to act as an economic stabilizer. 

The central bank is not a wizard, but Congress has granted it vast financial clout – with the mission of pursuing twin goals of price stability and full employment. Historically, this translates into keeping inflation under control and seeking to minimize recessions or financial panics.

The Fed played a big role in facing down a panic in 2020 as the pandemic lockdowns struck. But sometimes the economy’s stabilizer-in-chief can also be a source of turbulence. The current inflation surge has been caused partly by the Fed’s own monetary stimulus, which has boosted consumer demand even as other forces – the pandemic and now war – have crimped supply.

“There are just a lot of really adverse shocks right now,” says Tufts University economist Michael Klein, citing price jumps in 2021 plus surges in the cost of oil and wheat since Russia invaded Ukraine last month. “We’re going to probably see some aggressive moves by the Fed. … There is concern that inflation expectations might become embedded, although the data from financial markets doesn’t seem to suggest that yet.”

A delicate balancing act  

Today, U.S. consumers are feeling price pressures at gas pumps and checkout lines. They are signaling their worry in polls on economic confidence. And their expectations for future inflation – which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy – have edged up.

The Fed faces a balancing act in the months ahead: tamping down price pressures while also seeking to avoid squeezing the economy into a recession. And they are under pressure to show a vigilance that hasn’t been so needed in 40 years – since legendary Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed inflation with sharp interest rate hikes in the early 1980s.

But even as the Fed has been drawing criticism for being slow to act, some economists say a bit of forbearance is warranted. 

“It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback,” says Dr. Klein, executive editor of EconoFact, a website where academic economists discuss hot topics including inflation. 

“In the spring of 2020, we were facing the most precipitous decline in employment that we’ve seen,” he says. “There was the possibility of a real financial disruption. And they stepped in. And it didn’t make the news because [such a crisis] didn’t happen, but it could have been a really problematic thing.”

Similarly, during and after the global financial crisis of 2008, the Fed’s efforts addressed very real concerns.

Helen Popper, an international economist at Santa Clara University in California, says that even as the Fed sought to restore sound growth over the past decade, it hadn’t grown blind to inflation risks. Prior to the pandemic, policymakers had begun to tighten interest rates. Now, that process is beginning again.

“It’s like steering a big boat. You can’t react to every little thing,” she says.

SOURCE:

Macrotrends, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, World Bank

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“They were too confident”

Some worry, however, that the Fed has fallen behind the curve, making it harder to simultaneously tamp down inflation and avoid a recession. 

A new policy framework in 2020 described public inflation expectations as “well anchored” and said an “appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time.”

Mohamed El-Erian, a finance expert and president of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, wrote recently that “that [framework] quickly became outdated and counterproductive.”

On one hand, the Fed had reason to focus on reviving the pandemic economy – which is still falling short of pre-pandemic employment levels.

But on the other, the central bank’s own stimulus was matched by big spending packages from the U.S. Congress. All of that bolstered consumer demand even as supplies of goods were being constrained by the pandemic’s effects on the global supply chain and on the availability of workers.

And now the war in Ukraine and a new COVID-19 lockdown in parts of China will be adding to global strains on the supplies of everything from oil to grains to manufactured goods like phones and cars.

Tom Williams/AP

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifies before the Senate Banking Committee hearing, March 3, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. After a decade of quiescent inflation, policymakers are being pushed toward a mindset of vigilance that hasn’t been so needed in 40 years.

“Right now we need tightening. … The Federal Reserve really kind of played down this inflation problem,” says William Yu, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They were too confident that they were able to control it” and are playing catch-up.

“I don’t think the Fed can do too much” to control the supply side of the inflation equation, like boosting production of oil or semiconductors, says Dr. Yu. 

Yet through its influence over money supply and credit conditions, the Fed can affect overall consumer demand, and that’s an equally important piece of the policy puzzle, he says.

What lies ahead is a delicate test in which one danger is “stagflation” – with policymakers achieving stability in neither prices nor economic growth. 

“The Fed needs to be very careful, very nimble,” Dr. Yu says.

An era of global inflation?

After today’s move – which raises the Fed’s short-term lending rate from near zero (induced by the pandemic) to a target of 0.25% to 0.5% – additional interest rate hikes are expected in coming months as part of a steady shift away from monetary stimulus.

Multiple events outside the Fed’s control could help too. An easing of the war in Ukraine, global efforts to boost food and energy production, or unwinding kinks in the global supply chains would all reduce price pressures.

Yet some finance experts say an era of global inflation may persist. British economist Charles Goodhart argues that, after a time of abundant labor supply as the Cold War ended and China’s market opened, the world is now in a period when working-age people will be in relatively shorter supply in many nations.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine adds its own longer term danger. A new analysis from experts at the International Monetary Fund says that “increased geopolitical tension further raises risks of economic fragmentation, especially for trade and technology.” 

This doesn’t mean solutions won’t be found – by central banks and others around the world. 

But “there’s just huge complexity going on here,” Dr. Klein, from Tufts, says. “A lot of these events are beyond what the Fed can control, but it does have to react to them.”

AP

The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.

The United Nations’ top court on Wednesday ordered Russia to end its military assault on Ukraine, citing “innumerable civilian deaths.” Yet the real punch in this ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) isn’t the order itself, which is largely unenforceable. Rather, it is a finding that Ukraine has a plausible argument against one of Russia’s more puzzling excuses for the war: preventing alleged genocide against Ukraine’s minority Russian speakers.

Defeating Russia’s lies with truth has been a potent weapon for Ukraine so far in rallying both its people and global support – as well as reaching the Russian people. One of its best avenues are international courts like the ICJ, also known as the World Court.

“President [Vladimir] Putin’s short game is force. The world’s long game is law,” said Harold Koh, a lawyer for Ukraine who participated in the March 7 hearing before the ICJ.

Four days into the invasion, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court announced that he would start an investigation into Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine. The speed of the decision was unprecedented for the world’s only permanent court for atrocity crimes.

Six days after the invasion, the European Court of Human Rights granted an interim order for Russia to cease attacks on civilians and to provide corridors for humanitarian aid. 

Any of these courts’ findings and rulings will probably not be accepted by Russia or could come after the conflict ends. And criminal rulings against particular Russian leaders or soldiers might only prevent them from leaving their country out of fear of arrest. Yet for now, the preliminary moves of the courts have bolstered international resolve to support Ukraine, hold Russia accountable, and reset normal of international order.

Countering Russia’s propaganda is taking place on many fronts, but it may be the meticulous work of these courts that might be most persuasive. In all attempts at justice, the first step is eliciting the facts behind a crime or ripping away the justifications for it.

The late Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov once wrote, “We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and the goals we only dimly perceive.” In relying on international courts to expose the truth about Russia’s war, Ukrainians are on one crucial path to liberating their country of foreign forces. A lie exposed may be as good as a battalion of soldiers.