“I don’t want to believe it, and I do not believe it.”

— Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, quoted by Reuters, when asked if he thought a nuclear war could be triggered by the war in Ukraine.

“The Biden administration confirmed Thursday that North Korea recently conducted two tests of a relatively new intercontinental ballistic missile system, ratcheting up tensions between leader Kim Jong Un and the U.S. at a precarious time in world politics,” CNBC reports.

Washington Post: “While the administration viewed the launches as an escalation, the new system so far has not shown the same capability nor range as the three intercontinental ballistic missile tests by North Korea in 2017.”

“Putin knows it’s costly, and he knows he can’t do it. This is him leveraging to see what he can get. He doesn’t want to expand… I don’t think Russia wants to go to war.”

— Nikki Haley, in an interview with Brian Kilmeade on January 26, 2022.

“When an evil dictator thug says they’re going to do something, we need to believe them. Putin said he was going to take Ukraine, and he is.”

— Haley, in an interview with Dave Rubin on March 7, 2022.

“We are not planning to attack other countries. We didn’t attack Ukraine in the first place.”

— Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, quoted by the Daily Beast.

“The Ukrainian Anonymous hacker group has hacked into Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency responsible for monitoring and censoring media, and released 360,000 files,” the Jerusalem Post reports.

“Among the censored documents released by Anonymous, some of which are dated as late as March 5, are ones that show Moscow censored anything that referred to the war as a Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

Politico: “The transfer might have been possible if the deal was kept under wraps, but that became impossible after Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy chief, declared unequivocally to reporters on Feb. 27 that the bloc would provide Ukraine with fighter jets. The announcement came as a shock to many, U.S. and European officials said, including aides in Eastern European capitals who hoped to keep the transfer quiet.”

“But the Ukrainian government heard the proposal and ran with it, producing infographics claiming they were about to receive 70 used Russian fighter jets from Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. A Ukrainian government official told Politico that Ukrainian pilots had even traveled to Poland to wrap up the deal and bring the planes back over the border.”

National Review: Biden’s baffling MiG-29 reversal.

Olga Khazan: “In Russia’s version of the war, Russians are liberators, Ukrainians are Nazis, and the West is full of mendacious hypocrites. To turn on Russian TV news is to enter a parallel universe, one where even the word war is forbidden. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government has now blocked or restricted any other sources of coverage, so this is the only version of the world most Russians see.”

“To get a sense of what Russians are told about the war, I fired up Russian state TV for a few hours a day over the past week from my laptop.”

“Hosts and panelists stick closely to the same Kremlin talking points, lending the broadcasts an endless, looping quality, even by cable-TV standards. One panel of white guys who love Putin dissolves into another, and another.”

Goldman Sachs is exiting Russia, becoming the first major Wall Street bank to announce plans to do so after the invasion of Ukraine, Bloomberg reports.

“Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is in Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday as part of a mediation effort to end the war in Ukraine,” Politico reports.

“Schröder has come under fierce criticism at home and abroad for refusing to sever his close ties to Moscow following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Even several of his office staff quit last week after he insisted on keeping his senior roles at Kremlin-linked energy giants Rosneft and Gazprom.”

“Russian-Israeli oligarch Leonid Nevzlin announced Tuesday that he plans to give up his Russian passport in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the Washington Post reports.

Said Nevzlin: “Everything that Putin touches dies. I am against the war. I am against the occupation. I am against the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”

“When Russia first invaded Ukraine just over two weeks ago, the near-unanimous global assumption was that it would score a quick and easy military victory over its neighbor to the west,” the Washington Post reports.

“But now — with the Ukrainians waging a fierce resistance and Russian forces bogged down outside nearly every major city — the Biden administration and its allies say they see no clear end to the military phase of this conflict.”

“The situation seems destined to result in an even deadlier and more protracted slog, wreaking devastation on Ukraine and causing a massive humanitarian crisis.”

China has refused to supply Russian airlines with aircraft parts, after Boeing and Airbus halted supply of components, Reuters reports.

“The Russian army’s unexpected struggles in Ukraine are prompting calls for a fresh look at widely shared assumptions about the effectiveness of President Vladimir Putin’s military machine,” Bloomberg reports.

“Putin spent well over a decade modernizing a conscript-based military that proved wanting in Chechnya during the 1990s, and Georgia in 2008. Its first test in a large-scale conflict since the end of the Cold War has raised questions about what that boom in spending achieved.”

“Pakistan’s opposition parties moved a no-confidence motion seeking the ouster of Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday, accusing him of mismanaging the economy and poor governance in the toughest challenge he has faced since taking power in 2018,” Reuters reports.

John Harris: “The fact that Zelensky — joined by vast numbers of his fellow Ukrainians — is willing to sacrifice everything makes him a clarifying agent in the great contest of the age, between free societies and despotic ones.”

“Zelensky has joined such iconic figures as the Chinese student who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989, or the Flight 93 passengers on 9/11, or the firefighters that same day who raced up the stairs of the burning World Trade Center. All of them cause many people to interrogate themselves: What would I have done in those circumstances?”

“When President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion two weeks ago, he said a primary goal was the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine. He referred to the Ukrainian government as a ‘gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis,’ making it clear that his aim was to topple it,” the New York Times reports.

“But in recent days, the language has shifted, with the Kremlin signaling that Mr. Putin is no longer bent on regime change in Kyiv. It is a subtle shift, and it may be a head-fake; but it is prompting officials who have scrambled to mediate to believe that Mr. Putin may be seeking a negotiated way out of a war that has become a much bloodier slog than he expected.”