How will Russia invade Ukraine?
Acting on the advice of American intelligence agencies, President Biden said on Friday he was convinced that Vladimir Putin would attack Ukraine “in the coming week, in the coming days.” But how the Russian leader will do it — all at once, as senior U.S. military and intelligence officials expect, or in a series of smaller attacks — remains unclear.
One possible option is a python-like squeeze, made all the easier by the fact that Belarus is allowing Russian troops to remain indefinitely in the country, where they can menace Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Putin might be betting that he can shatter Ukraine’s economy and oust its government without having to roll in tanks immediately.
If Putin struck to take the whole country in a single blow, it could provoke the largest, most violent battle for European territory since the Nazi surrender in 1945. There is little question that the full package of sanctions against Russia and technology export cutoffs would be invoked almost immediately. International condemnation would follow, though it might not last.
On the ground: Russian artillery fire escalated sharply in eastern Ukraine over the weekend, deepening fears of an imminent attack and potentially giving Russia a pretext to invade. Ukrainians reluctantly left their homes, with some evacuating to Russia.
Queen Elizabeth II tests positive for the coronavirus
Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longstanding monarch, has been infected with the coronavirus, Buckingham Palace said yesterday, rattling the country she has led for seven decades. Elizabeth, who turns 96 in April, is one of several people at Windsor Castle who are infected, suggesting an outbreak at the royal residence.
“Buckingham Palace confirm that the queen has today tested positive for Covid,” the palace said in a statement. “Her Majesty is experiencing mild coldlike symptoms but expects to continue light duties at Windsor over the coming week.” Elizabeth met this month with her eldest son, Prince Charles, who later tested positive and went into isolation.
The queen has experienced other health concerns in the past year, canceling multiple public appearances and increasingly using a walking stick. Her frailty is deepening anxiety that her extremely popular reign may be coming to an end. The news came as Boris Johnson, the prime minister, prepares to introduce plans to lift remaining coronavirus restrictions in England by the end of the month.
By the numbers: Britain reported 25,696 new coronavirus cases yesterday. Nearly 1,300 people were admitted to hospitals, and 74 people died.
Here are the latest virus updates and maps.
In other pandemic developments:
China’s joyless triumph at the Winter Olympics
The Winter Olympics concluded last night with athletes marching into the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing to the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. For all that Chinese officials insisted that the Olympics were not about politics, but rather sports, this was the most contentious Olympics in years, haunted by controversy and scandal.
Over the past weeks, the International Olympic Committee has faced questions about the conditions for athletes who isolated after testing positive for the coronavirus; about Peng Shuai, the tennis player and former Olympian who accused a senior Chinese official of sexual assault; and about the inevitable injection of politics into an event officials hoped, perhaps futilely, would rise above them.
The most indelible memory of the Games — besides images of workers and volunteers enrobed in hazmat gear — will very likely be of the 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valieva’s fall on the ice after being allowed to compete despite a test showing traces of a banned heart medicine. She broke into tears, only to be berated by her coach.
Medals: Norway, which won the first gold medal of the Beijing Games and then kept on winning them for two weeks, added its 16th and final gold yesterday in the final cross-country skiing race of the Games. The country won 37 medals in total, putting it at the top of the medals table.
Capturing the moment: Gabriela Bhaskar, a photographer for The Times, documented the Winter Games on her 50-year-old Polaroid SX-70 — until the camera froze in the subzero conditions.
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Pandemic fiction
More than two years into a global health crisis that has reshaped society and daily life, Covid-19 is leaving its mark on literary fiction, Alexandra Alter reports for The Times. In a new crop of books, authors are exploring, sometimes reluctantly, the emotional and psychological reverberations of the pandemic.
Many of these pandemic-themed novels seek to capture the strange new texture of daily life: the corrosive effect of isolation, the tedium and monotony of lockdowns and quarantines, the strain on relationships, the way the coronavirus changed casual interactions and ripped some families apart and brought others together.
Gary Shteyngart’s social satire “Our Country Friends,” which I read last week on vacation, was among the earliest of these pandemic novels. But others are in the offing: Ian McEwan’s forthcoming novel, “Lessons,” follows a British man from the 1940s to his twilight years in 2021, when he’s living alone in London during lockdown, looking back on his life.
And in Isabel Allende’s “Violeta,” the narrator’s life is bookended by two pandemics: the Spanish flu and the coronavirus. “The experience of the whole planet frozen in place because of a virus is so extraordinary that I am sure it will be used extensively in literature,” the author said. “It is one of those events that mark an era.”
Though it might feel too soon to write about the pandemic, writing about anything else seems somehow harder, the author Sigrid Nunez said. “If it’s set now,” she said, “it has to be part of the story.”
