Nate Cohn: “In a striking — if perhaps not surprising — shift over the last year and since Russia’s invasion, an overwhelming majority of Americans now say Ukraine is a friendly country. In a new YouGov survey, 81 percent of Americans say Ukraine is either friendly or an ally, a figure that rivals or even exceeds that of many longtime U.S. allies like France or Japan. Only Britain, Canada and Australia earned more favorable ratings from voters.”

“At first, the White House resisted calls from Congress to ban Russian oil imports to the U.S. And then, it did just that,” the AP reports.

“The administration hit the brakes on legislation that would have revoked Russia’s normal trade status, until President Joe Biden announced the move Friday. The administration persuaded senators to hold off on imposing Russian sanctions, then slapped stiff sanctions itself. It rejected efforts in Congress to stop the Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline, then led allies in halting it.”

“It’s an emerging pattern that has not gone unnoticed during the escalating war in Ukraine: A remarkably unified Congress is out front on foreign policy, pressuring Biden to go further and faster with a U.S. response to a devastating conflict that has no clear endgame in sight.”

Washington Post: “The Biden administration, under pressure to expand the arsenal of weapons that Ukraine has in its conflict with Russia, is working with European allies to expedite more sophisticated air-defense systems and other armaments into the war zone.”

“Discussions were ongoing ahead of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s planned trip next week to meet with NATO allies in Brussels and Slovakia, which along with Poland and Romania has indicated a willingness to transfer military aid to its embattled neighbor. Slovakia also possesses the S-300 surface-to-air missile system, which is used to shoot down enemy aircraft and is familiar to the Ukrainians.”

Financial Times: Russia threatens to attack Western weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Walter Russell Mead: “The best way to think about Mr. Putin is as a gifted tac­ti­cian com­mit­ted to a strate­gic im­pos­si­bil­ity: for Rus­sia to re­gain the su­per­power sta­tus once held by the So­viet Union. Such lead­ers are un­ap­peasable be­cause their goals can never be reached. The rise of China, Rus­sia’s con­tin­u­ing de­mo­graphic de­cline, and its con­tin­u­ing in­abil­ity to cre­ate a mod­ern and dy­namic econ­omy will not end be­cause Russ­ian flags fly over the ru­ins of Kyiv.”

“There are two mistakes we can make about figures like Mr. Putin. One is to underestimate their talent for troublemaking if they don’t get what they want. The other is to believe that by giving in to their demands we can quiet them down. The West has made both mistakes with Mr. Putin in the past. We must try to do better now.”

“Russian forces appeared to make progress from northeast Ukraine in their slow fight to reach the capital, Kyiv, while tanks and artillery pounded places already under siege with shelling so heavy it prevented residents of one city from burying the growing number of dead,” the AP reports.

“In past offensives in Syria and Chechnya, Russia’s strategy was to crush armed resistance with sustained airstrikes and shelling that leveled population centers. That kind of assault has cut off Ukraine’s southern port city of Mariupol, and a similar fate could await Kyiv and other parts of the country if the war continues.”

“In Mariupol, unceasing barrages have thwarted repeated attempts to bring in food and water and to evacuate trapped civilians. On Friday, an Associated Press photographer captured the moment when a tank appeared to fire directly on an apartment building, enveloping one side in a billowing orange fireball.”

Wall Street Journal: Russian strikes intensify near Kyiv.

Deutsche Bank said Friday that it was winding down its operations in Russia, one day after its chief financial officer said it wasn’t “practical” to shutter the unit, CNBC reports.

“American officials are examining the ownership of a $700 million superyacht currently in a dry dock at an Italian seacoast town, and believe it could be associated with President Vladimir Putin, the New York Times reports.

India said that it accidentally fired a missile into Pakistan this week, blaming a “technical malfunction” for a mishap that could fire up tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A new Wall Street Journal poll finds Russian president Vladimir Putin with an insanely bad 4% to 90% favorable rating.

Aaron Blake: “We looked back through the Roper Center’s polling archive to see how Putin’s new numbers compared to some of the most nefarious leaders in the recent past. The upshot: Putin is now in the territory of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un, Fidel Castro and Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”

Tom Nichols: “The bombs of 1945 represented the advent of a new age, in which nuclear weapons would lurk behind even the smallest conflicts. But they also brought to an end centuries of assumptions about war; as Bernard Brodie wrote a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sheer power of nuclear arms meant “the end of strategy as we have known it,” because of the inability to match any political goal to the devastation of a nuclear war.”

“This new age also created a new priesthood of nuclear experts and strategists, people who dealt every day with the arcane and the unthinkable… These experts advised the policy makers who would have to make terrifying decisions; their terms and concepts—assured destruction, first strike, secure second-strike capability—would, especially during moments of crisis, make their way into the public mind.”

“When the Cold War ended, we collectively decided to stop thinking about things like nuclear strategy… Now here we are again, trying to make our way around nuclear terms and concepts as war rages in the middle of Europe.”

President Biden stressed that the U.S. and NATO allies would not fight Russia in Ukraine, The Hill reports.

Said Biden: “We’re going to continue to stand together with our allies in Europe and send an unmistakable message. We will defend every single inch of NATO territory with the full might of the united and galvanized NATO.”

He added: “We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry alleges that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the advanced stages of plotting a terror attack on the Chernobyl nuclear plant that he plans to blame on Ukrainian forces, iNews reports.

“Negotiations in Vienna aimed at reviving the Iran nuclear deal were called off indefinitely on Friday after Russia upended the talks by raising objections to Moscow’s participation while under the new U.S. sanctions imposed in punishment for its invasion of Ukraine,” the Washington Post reports.

“A drone that flew over several NATO countries all the way from the Ukrainian war zone crashed overnight on the outskirts of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, triggering a loud blast and damaging parked cars but causing no injuries,” the AP reports.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light on Friday for up to 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East to be deployed alongside Russian-backed rebels to fight in Ukraine, doubling down an invasion that the West says has been losing momentum,” Reuters reports.