Ukraine

* As Russian troops withdraw from Ukrainian towns around Kyiv, they're
leaving behind evidence of heinous war crimes they committed. For example,
the mayor of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha said the Chechnyan fighters who
occupied it "shot everyone they saw," and killed over 300 people-including
civilians. (Russia blamed the bodies in Bucha on the "heinous provocation of
Ukrainian radicals").
* European leaders are rightly outraged at the reports out of Bucha,
and making fresh calls to ban Russian gas imports to cut off the $850
million per day those gas sales give Russia. Germany and France expelled 75
Russian diplomats between them.
* Pres. Biden called for Pres. Putin to face a "war crime trial," and
the hacker collective Anonymous leaked the personal data of 120,000 Russian
soldiers, saying that "all soldiers participating in the invasion of Ukraine
should be subject to a war crime tribunal."
* Pres. Zelensky plans to address the UN Security Council today to
call for tougher sanctions in light of clearer evidence of Russian war
crimes.
* Meanwhile, Russian airstrikes hit oil refineries in Odesa and
Kremenchuk, and Russia appears to be preparing a new assault on the eastern
Donbass.


China

* China doesn't have the same qualms about buying Russian gas as the
U.S. and EU do: Bloomberg reports that Sinopec and PetroChina are quietly
buying up cheap Russian gas the West doesn't want. Their negotiations have
been discreet to avoid the image that China is overtly supporting Russia.
* On a related note, China's Communist Party is running a propaganda
campaign aimed at officials and students to soften Russia's image by
portraying the West as the bad guy (see NYT article pasted below).
Similarly, Ukrainian intelligence also says Chinese state-backed hackers
helped support Russia by carrying out a cyberattack on Ukrainian nuclear and
military facilities days before Russia invaded.
* The consistent thread in China's dealings with Russia is subtlety:
by only offering Russia discreet help, China can plausibly deny it's acting
against the West.
* Separately, Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, said she would
not seek a second term. Lam has been criticized for her government's botched
COVID response; she's also unpopular among younger Hong Kongers for her
firmly pro-Beijing views.


Sahel

* New reports are raising concern about the military operation that
killed 200 to 400 insurgents in Mali last week: Human Rights Watch called it
"the worst atrocity in Mali's decade-long armed conflict," and local reports
suggest Russian Wagner Group mercenaries participated aside the Malian
troops they're training.


Guyana

* ExxonMobil confirmed its final investment decision for the
Yellowtail project that just received the Guyanese government's
environmental approval. Exxon will invest $10 billion in the project, which
is its fourth-and largest-in the Stabroek block.


Other News

* Hungary's PM Orban claimed victory in Sunday's election. Orban has
been a controversial PM: he's fairly friendly with Pres. Putin, and referred
to Pres. Zelensky and EU leaders as "opponents" in his victory speech.

Bristling Against the West, China Rallies Domestic Sympathy for Russia (NYT)

China's Communist Party is mounting an ideological campaign aimed at
officials and students. The message: The country will not turn its back on
Russia.

While Russian troops have battered Ukraine, officials in China have been
meeting behind closed doors to study a Communist Party-produced documentary
that extols President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a hero.

The humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, the video says, was the result
of efforts by the United States to destroy its legitimacy. With swelling
music and sunny scenes of present-day Moscow, the documentary praises Mr.
Putin for restoring Stalin's standing as a great wartime leader and for
renewing patriotic pride in Russia's past.

To the world, China casts itself as a principled onlooker of the war in
Ukraine, not picking sides, simply seeking peace. At home, though, the
Chinese Communist Party is pushing a campaign that paints Russia as a
long-suffering victim rather than an aggressor and defends China's strong
ties with Moscow as vital.

Chinese universities have organized classes to give students a "correct
understanding" of the war, often highlighting Russia's grievances with the
West. Party newspapers have run series of commentaries blaming the United
States for the conflict.

Around the country, the Communist Party has organized sessions for officials
to watch and discuss the history documentary. The 101 minute-long video,
which was completed last year, does not mention the war in Ukraine but
argues that Russia is right to worry about neighbors that broke away from
the Soviet Union. It describes Mr. Putin as cleansing Russia of the
political toxins that killed the Soviet Union.

"The most powerful weapon possessed by the West is, aside from nuclear
weapons, the methods they use in ideological struggle," says the
documentary's stern-voiced narrator, citing a Russian scholar. The
documentary was marked for internal viewing - that is, for audiences chosen
by party officials and not for general public release - but the video and
script have recently surfaced online in China.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, it says, "some countries in Eastern
Europe, Central Asia and Transcaucasia have become forward positions for the
West to contain and meddle in Russia."

China's leaders have long used the Soviet collapse as a cautionary tale, but
Mr. Xi has given that tale a more urgent, ominous spin. In doing so, he has
embraced Mr. Putin as a fellow authoritarian lined up against Western
dominance, demonstrating to the Chinese people that Mr. Xi has a partner in
his cause.

It's unclear whether allegations of atrocities by Russia soldiers, with
civilians found shot in the head or with their hands tied behind their back
before being killed, will affect China's support of the Russian invasion.

But China has so far refused to condemn Mr. Putin for the war, which has
killed thousands of civilians. Despite pressure from other world leaders to
use its influence over Moscow to help end the crisis, Beijing has done
little besides call for peace. And on Thursday Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign
minister, expressed his country's commitment to strong ties with Moscow
during talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in China.

The Biden administration has cast the war as a contest between democracy and
authoritarianism. Chinese officials are mounting a counternarrative that
American-led domineering is the source of conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere.
They regard China and Russia as both menaced by "color revolution," the
party's phrase for insurrections backed by Western governments. President
Biden's recent comments calling for Mr. Putin's ousting are likely to
reinforce Beijing's view.

"They actually believe their own narrative about color revolutions and tend
to see this whole situation as a U.S.-led color revolution to overthrow
Putin," said Christopher K. Johnson, the president of the China Strategies
Group and a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst of Chinese politics.

"Both domestically and internationally, Xi has been peddling this dark
narrative since he took power," Mr. Johnson said in an interview. "It allows
him to justify his accumulation of power and the changes he's made by
creating this sense of struggle and danger."

The documentary depicts the collapse of the Soviet Union as a lesson to
Chinese officials not to be seduced by Western liberalism. China, the
documentary says, must never follow the course taken by Mikhail S.
Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader who had started glasnost, or
openness, and engagement with the West.

In 2013, propaganda officials under Mr. Xi put out a documentary on the
lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This latest take offers an even
more conspiratorial interpretation.

The documentary attributes the decline of the Soviet Union to political
liberalization, especially what Beijing calls "historical nihilism," or
emphasizing the Communist Party's mistakes and misdeeds. It accuses
historians critical of the Soviet revolution of fabricating estimated death
tolls by many millions for Stalin's purges.

Stalin, it argues, was a modernizing leader whose purges went too far but
initially "were something of a necessity" given the threats to Soviet rule.
It suggests that rock music and modern fashion were symptoms of the moral
rot that later set in.

"They've taken only one lesson from all of this, and that is you do not
allow any freedom of expression," said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who studies Chinese
and Soviet history, "because this kind of freedom inevitably leads to loss
of political control and that creates chaos."

The documentary credits Mr. Putin with restoring Russia's spirit.

It shows Mr. Putin marching in a parade marking Russia's victory over Nazi
Germany, and young Russians kissing a banner featuring his portrait.
Previous leaders in Moscow - above all Mr. Gorbachev and Nikita S.
Khrushchev - are portrayed as dupes, bewitched by the siren song of liberal
reform and Western superiority.

The documentary, "Historical Nihilism and the Soviet Collapse," has been the
centerpiece of a months long campaign aimed at party officials that has
continued since Russia began its full assault on Ukraine on Feb. 24,
according to reports on local government websites. Officials overseeing the
screenings are often described in official notices as calling for cadres to
maintain firm loyalty to Mr. Xi.

"Loving a party and its leader is not a cult of personality," Zheng Keyang,
a former deputy director of the party's Central Policy Research Office and a
consultant on the documentary, said in a discussion about the documentary
published by a pro-party website this month.

Chinese leaders have been debating why the Soviet Union fell apart ever
since it dissolved in 1991. More than his predecessors, Mr. Xi has blamed
the Soviet Union's breakup on lack of ideological spine and Western
political subversion.

"If you have the worldview that you see in this documentary, you could tell
yourself the story that the Russians are facing a real threat from the
West," Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at American University in
Washington who studies elite politics in China and Russia, said in an
interview.

The study drive is aimed at instilling loyalty among cadres before a Chinese
Communist Party congress late this year where Mr. Xi appears set to claim a
third term.

Political loyalty has become more crucial to Mr. Xi as Beijing tries to
contain Covid outbreaks with stringent lockdowns, and manage a slowing
economy. China's foreign policy is under scrutiny, after some Chinese
scholars posted essays criticizing Beijing's refusal to condemn Mr. Putin.

Many of the critical essays have been deleted and the party has pushed
harder to defend its stance in recent weeks. Editorials in Communist Party
newspapers have amplified the Chinese leadership's argument that the real
culprit in Ukraine is the United States and NATO, for undermining Russian
security.

"It was the United States that personally lit the fuse of the present
conflagration between Russia and Ukraine," stated one of a series of
editorials in the Liberation Army Daily, the military's main newspaper.

Universities and colleges have organized indoctrination lectures for
students, suggesting that officials are worried that young, educated Chinese
may be receptive to the criticisms that Beijing has been too indulgent of
Mr. Putin.

Liu Zuokui, a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told
an audience of college students in eastern China that the war arose from
"NATO's eastward expansion that squeezed Russia's space for survival," an
online summary of the lecture said.

China, another speaker told physicists in Beijing, had to protect its
strategic partnership with Russia from "intense shocks and impacts."

The party's demands for conformity over the crisis will make it harder for
any dissent to coalesce into a pushback against Mr. Xi.

"There's an 'either we hang together or we hang separately' attitude that
comes into play," Mr. Johnson, the former C.I.A. analyst, said of Chinese
leaders. "If it's a strong nationalist approach, then who in the party
doesn't want to be a good nationalist?"