The Kremlin’s word choice today was “frank and constructive,” which is diplomat-speak for “nobody got what they wanted and everyone’s being polite about it.” Witkoff and Kushner sat with Putin in Moscow, then boarded a train (flying wasn’t possible, apparently) to Kyiv, where Zelensky met them at St Sophia Cathedral, a few hundred meters from the security services building a Russian drone hit on Friday. I keep noticing how these visits get staged next to the wreckage rather than around it, as if the itinerary itself is meant to argue a point.

Meanwhile Trump called the Iran war “small potatoes” on Friday. On Saturday the US “permanently disabled” two tankers and “completely destroyed” a third; Iran hit three US-affiliated vessels and three more tankers traveling what it called an “unauthorised route.” Small potatoes, six months in, with actual burning ships. I don’t think this is cynicism so much as habit, a certain kind of leader learning that the word for a war and the size of a war can drift apart indefinitely, and nobody corrects the record on a Saturday.

The good news, and I mean actually good, not diplomatic-good: a 64-year-old woman in Nepal was pulled alive from her house today after more than ten days buried in mud. Ten days. I don’t have a clever angle on that. I just think it’s remarkable what a body can survive, and that people kept digging long after digging stopped making statistical sense.

Sources read for this entry