This week: Pope Leo on tyrants, a poet on Hormuz, a pastor killed in Zaporizhzhia, a Tory MP on Europe's forgotten Shire, and Yom HaShoah in Kyiv.
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“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters,” said Pope Leo XIV, holding his ground this week in Cameroon during his Africa tour.
With the focus on Trump—much of which Trump brought upon himself—everyone seemed to miss Putin, who clearly is among the warmongers whose actions Leo routinely condemns.
“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.” —Pope Leo XIV
Soundtrack: This reel features “Now in the Fading Light of Day,” the opening hymn of Compline—the nighttime prayer that 'shuts out' the devil—recorded at Mount Saviour Monastery in New York. I attended a silent retreat there years ago with some rowdy friends from Philadelphia—a cop, boxer, pro baseball player, doctor, dentist, and a few others, one of them since departed in a bad way. The neighborhood priest, from the Oratory church in the Ukrainian sector of Philly, had rounded us up to attend, to steer our souls.
That retreat gave us a real grounding in the virtue of pursuing what matters. And every night, after a day in silence on our own, we would gather with the monks in the chapel on a bluff over a river in upstate New York.
Each night, amid a few candles and with a guitar, the monks would chant the song you hear in the video, and it always reminded me of the night-before-battle song “ Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold” from
Bonus: Here is a video of the soundtrack in the video above in its original element, at Mount Saviour in New York State:
We talk about this critical Middle Eastern oil chokepoint every day lately. But do you know its history? And that the poet John Milton used Hormuz to capture the opulence of Satan's throne in Paradise Lost? It’s always been an access point for unbelievable riches:
“If the world were a golden ring, Hormuz would be its jewel.”
Did you see this news from Europe this week?
Illegal immigrant terrorists attacked BOTH a Jewish community center AND a Christian church in the same city.
Why is the West silent against this murderous terror?
Do you know what happened? Russia bombed the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on 16 April, hitting the Jewish center and a Baptist church and, we are told, killing a pastor.
In order to get the attention of people in the West, we try to frame the story in a truthful way they might understand: Russians are indeed illegal immigrants into Ukraine, and they are the worst sort: armed with tanks, drones, missiles, and bullets.
Fact is: Ukraine is saving Europe—or giving Europe a chance to hold on.
But has Europe wasted the chance?
“They were in fact sheltered. But they had ceased to remember it.” —Tolkien
These words of Tolkien from The Fellowship of the Ring describe today’s situation well. Europeans are, despite their other problems, living a dream, while Ukrainians protect them from reality:
“There in that pleasant corner of the world [the Shire] they plied their well-ordered business of living. And they
heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved.
“—until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk.
“They forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians and ofthe labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire.They were in fact sheltered. But they had ceased to remember it.”The Fellowship of the Ring, Prologue, §1 ('Concerning Hobbits')
The UK’s Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Tory MP and government minister, ▶gives great credit to Ukraine on the Telegraph’s Daily T podcast with Camilla Tominey.
April 14 was Yom HaShoah, Israel’s day of Holocaust commemoration. In Kyiv, President Zelensky signed legislation making antisemitism a crime.
Ukraine’s Jewish history is full of great feats but also of heinous suffering. Since the 2014 Revolution, Ukraine has become one of the safest countries in Europe for Jews — except when Russians are bombing.
And as a bonus, here is a look at some of the Jewish history of Ukraine. Did you know Israel’s national anthem was written by a man from just outside of Lviv?
Announcing: Paid journalism internships for Ukrainians in KyivOur friends atSich Media Foundationare sponsoring paid, mentored summer journalism internships for Ukrainians at four top media outlets in Kyiv. War veterans are welcome, too. If you or someone you know would be interested, please visit and sharethis page.The application deadline is 26 April, so move fast!
Increasing Scalehas
Air3Fmovedits heavy bomber droneinto serial production.Mangush
Built on a 15-inch multirotor frame, the platform is designed for logistics and precision payload release, with a single-drop capacity of up to 9 kg or two 3.5 kg payloads, flight endurance of up to 35 minutes, range of 15 km, altitude ceiling of 1,500 meters, and top speed of 110 km/h—at a listed price of 91,000 hryvnias (about $2,150).
Kyiv Puts More Steel on Display Than Brussels Puts Into PolicyUkraine’s foreign ministryuseda new defence exhibition not for ceremonial self-congratulation, but to send ablunt message: Ukraine is no longer merely consuming weapons, it is increasingly producing them at scale. Officials sayUkraine now manufactures more than half of the arms used on the battlefieldand employs over 400,000 people in its defence industry. The updated display added a wide range of systems, fromNeptune cruise missilesandMagura V7naval drones to interceptor drones, ground robots, and loitering munitions, but the standout was the newly unveiled**Sichen****deep-strike drone,**reportedly built for strikes out to 1,400 kilometres with a 40-kilogram warhead and claimed accuracy within 20 metres.
A City in War Finds Another Kind of Horror
In a highly unusual event despite four years of war,a gunmanon Saturday, first shooting civilians in the street and then barricading himself inside a supermarket with hostages before special police units stormed the building and killed him after negotiations failed.killedsix people in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district
Ukrainian authorities say the case is being investigated as terrorism, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said one of the dead was a hostage, while also noting that the attacker was born in Russia and had lived for a long time in the Donetsk region. That does not automatically answer every question about motive, but it certainly makes the story darker in a country already living under years of war, sabotage fears, and social strain.
China’s War Machine Says Thank You for the Research
A sharp piece inThe Spectatormakesthe uncomfortable point that China’s military rise is not being powered only by espionage or theft, but byWestern greed, institutional laziness, and the old delusionthat commerce somehow neutralizes hostile ambition.
The pattern runs from alleged chip-smuggling schemes and tailor-made export-control workarounds toPentagon-linked cloud systems maintained by China-based engineers, British semiconductor know-how drifting east, and universities on both sides of the Atlantic co-authoring research with institutions tied to Beijing’s armed forces.
Some of this may cross legal lines; much of it does not need to. That is precisely the scandal. The front door has been left open because too many executives, academics, and politicians still treat China as a market first and a strategic adversary second. The result is as absurd as it is dangerous: the West is effectivelyfinancing, training, and technologically enabling the power that most openly intends to surpass it.
Your Majesty, Your Emergency
Lviv mayorAndriy SadovyiaccidentallygreetedSweden’s King Carl XVIGustaf as**“Your Emergency”**instead of “Your Majesty” during the monarch’s visit to the city on April 17, a small diplomatic mishap that, in a region used to missile alerts and geopolitical melodrama, at least had the courtesy to be funny.
Sadovyi later leaned into the mistake on X, joking that everyone was free to make memes, while the king reportedly took it in stride during his walk through Lviv.Pyongyang Sees Chaos and Smells Opportunity
North Koreafiredmore ballistic missiles into the sea on Sunday, April 19, marking its fourth missile launch this month and seventh this year, with South Korea saying the missiles were launched from near Sinpo and flew about 140 kilometers.Russia’s Black Sea Hub Keeps Springing Leaks
Ukrainesaysthe SBU’s Alpha unit carried out acoordinated strike in occupied Crimeathat hit the large landing ships Yamal and Azov, an additional warship of still unspecified type, and possibly a Project 21980 Grachonok anti-sabotage boat, while also damaging the Dolphin communications antenna block, the MR-10M1 Mys-M1 radar, and fuel tanks at the Yugtorsan oil depot.
Kyiv’s message is straightforward: Crimea is not some untouchable rear area but a military platform to be steadily degraded until it stops functioning like one.
Belarus Starts Trouble at the Border Again
KyivsaysBelarus isbuilding roads toward the Ukrainian borderand setting upartillery positions near the frontier, with Zelensky warning that Russia is once again trying to drag Minsk more directly into the war. Ukraine has already signaled to Belarus that it is ready to respond, which is the sort of message that becomes necessary when your neighbor keeps flirting with “not participating” while conveniently hosting the infrastructure of intimidation.
Belarus, after all, already served as a launchpad for the 2022 invasion and still remains one of Moscow’s most useful auxiliaries. For now, this looks less like proof of an imminent new offensive than another exercise in pressure, distraction, and psychological warfare, but Europe would be foolish to dismiss it merely because Minsk dictatorLukashenkoprefers ambiguity to open commitment.
Deborah Fairlamb on the IPO That Made Everyone Suddenly Notice Kyiv
In a new interview withDefender Media,Green Flag Venture’s Founding Partner Deborah Fairlamb, an American in Kyiv, is betting that Ukrainian mil-tech companySwarmer’sstrong U.S. market debut is more than a flashy one-off: In her view, itshattered a psychological barrier for Ukrainian defense tech, showed that Ukrainian talent plus Western capital is a potent combination, and forced investors to pay attention to a sector many had conveniently overlooked.Green Flag, a Ukraine- and US- based venture capital fund, says its first fund closed at just under $20 million. It is now planning several more investments by June and is preparing a second fund targeting about $60 million, with Ukraine still central but a wider aperture across the Nordics, Baltics, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The fund is backing firms likeMaXonandBabAIbecause the demand is real. But Fairlamb argues the West still misunderstands the lesson of Ukraine’s war, acting as if one clever drone can replace doctrine, training, layered air defence, and serious battlefield integration.
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