Happy Wednesday! Due to the high unemployment rate and social stigma attached to being jobless, companies in China are letting people pay to pretend to work. And for a little extra, customers can even pretend to be the boss of the fake office or even stage a workers’ revolt against managers. If the TMD team ever needs to blow off some steam, we know where we’re going.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- Israeli military officials said Tuesday that Israel Defense Forces soldiers fired warning shots at a group of Gazans who, according to the IDF, strayed from a designated route to access aid provided by Israel and the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The Red Cross and the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health claimed that 27 people were killed; an IDF spokesman said those claims are exaggerated. “We fired warning shots toward a group of people who posed a threat to our forces, far from where they were supposed to be. Warning shots were fired, not to hit anyone,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin told reporters. “According to the claims, people were hit, so we are investigating, but it will take time.” These were not the first such claims of Israeli soldiers firing on civilians trying to receive aid; Palestinian authorities have now accused the IDF of killing more than 60 people in the past three days—accusations that Israeli officials have denied. On Monday, the GHF confirmed that Boston Consulting Group, which helped establish the entity, had terminated its contract with the group.
- Ukrainian officials said the country’s military struck the Crimean Bridge, which connects Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, with underwater explosives on Tuesday. The Security Service of Ukraine claimed that no civilians were killed or injured in the attack, but that “the underwater support pillars were severely damaged.” The attack is the third on the bridge since the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, and comes only two days after a massive surprise Ukrainian drone strike against Russia that, according to Ukrainian officials, destroyed a third of Russia’s bomber fleet.
- President Donald Trump said Monday that the U.S. will not agree to a nuclear deal with Iran that allows for enrichment, seemingly in response to reports that Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, offered an interim deal to Iran that would allow low-level uranium enrichment. Previously, the White House had not explicitly denied the reports. Iranian officials have maintained that they will not accept a deal that prevents the country from enriching uranium, and Reuters reported Monday that they are preparing to reject the Trump administration’s proposal.
- Opposition party leader Lee Jae-myung won a snap presidential election in South Korea on Tuesday, succeeding the conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, who infamously declared martial law in December in an attempted power-grab, sparking protests and eventually leading to his arrest. Lee is more left-leaning than Yoon, taking a softer approach to China and North Korea, while also promising to improve South Korea’s economy. Despite his victory, Lee is embroiled in several legal issues regarding alleged corruption, and he will still face a trial over allegations of election law violations. One of the first challenges of Lee’s presidency will be negotiating a trade deal between South Korea and the United States, something he has emphasized is a priority.
- The Dutch government collapsed on Tuesday after the populist Geert Wilders withdrew his far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) from the Netherlands’ four-party governing coalition. The coalition, which was in place for less than a year, dissolved over disputes about migration, with Wilders pushing for measures that would have curbed immigration into the country. Coalition partners accused Wilders of orchestrating the collapse for his own political ends; Wilders himself said Tuesday he intended to become prime minister and “ensure that the PVV becomes bigger than ever in the next elections.” The dissolution will trigger early elections, although it is unlikely they will take place before October.
- Trump sent a rescissions package to Congress on Tuesday, requesting lawmakers claw back $9.4 billion in spending and codify some of the spending cuts highlighted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The package asks lawmakers to cut back on spending already approved, mostly targeting funds going toward foreign aid—including cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development and AIDS relief—and publicly funded media like NPR and PBS. The package would only need to be approved by a simple majority in both chambers, though Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has openly discussed using impoundment to formalize the cuts without Congress.
- Elon Musk ramped up his attacks on the Republican reconciliation bill on Tuesday, just days after exiting Washington. Musk called the bill a “disgusting abomination” in a post on X, criticizing the effect it would have on the deficit. Some GOP senators expressed their support for Musk’s sentiment, while House Speaker Mike Johnson said that Musk was “terribly wrong.” President Trump has increased his pressure this week on possible Senate GOP opponents of the legislative package, emphasizing that he wants to sign the bill by the Fourth of July.
‘There’s a Card Game Going On This Summer’
Russia and Ukraine met for another round of talks in Istanbul on Monday, reportedly making no progress toward a peace deal in yet another setback for President Donald Trump’s efforts to resolve the war diplomatically by forcing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.
But on the battlefield, both Ukraine and Russia have traded severe counterpunches over the past week. Russia, as it tries to outlast Western support for Ukraine, unleashed massive airstrikes on Ukrainian cities. And Ukraine, trying to prove to its allies that it is still capable of effectively countering Russian attacks, conducted one of the most audacious covert strikes of the war, disabling large portions of Russia’s bomber fleet. Congress is preparing to pass legislation imposing new sanctions on Russia as diplomatic efforts stall and the war rages on, but how the Trump administration will respond to Putin’s continued aggression remains to be seen.
For much of his second term, Trump has generally blamed the war between Russia and Ukraine on Zelensky and former President Joe Biden, rarely criticizing Putin and Russia’s role in the conflict. In February, after the White House opened talks with Russia without Ukrainian involvement, a contentious Oval Office meeting with Zelensky led to Trump briefly cancelling U.S. aid to Ukraine. A series of separate meetings with both countries produced little, with Putin rejecting a 30-day U.S. ceasefire proposal that Ukraine had agreed to.
But last week, following ongoing Russian airstrikes in Ukraine, Trump began to express frustration with the man actually responsible for the war, writing on Truth Social that Putin had gone “absolutely CRAZY!” He also appeared to give Russia a deadline of sorts. “I’ll let you know in about two weeks,” he said when asked by reporters if he thought Putin was serious about ending the war. “We’re gonna find out whether or not [Putin is] tapping us along or not.”
Events in Istanbul this week seemed to show that the “tapping along” continues, with talks lasting only around 90 minutes and producing almost no progress toward a ceasefire, let alone a peace treaty.
Ukraine publicized its conditions for peace last week, but Russia refused to present Ukraine with its own proposal until the day of the meeting, when it published a “peace memorandum.” The demands contained within are nearly identical to longstanding Russian war aims: international recognition of the annexation of Crimea, the annexation of the Luhansk, Kherson, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia provinces (none of which are fully controlled by Russia), a commitment to Ukrainian neutrality that bans the country from entering NATO, and strict limits on the future size of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Russian officials said that they never intended for the meeting to lead to the kind of deal that Trump envisions. “The Istanbul talks are not for striking a compromise peace on someone else’s delusional terms but for ensuring our swift victory and the complete destruction of the neo-Nazi regime,” senior Russian defense official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday, referring to the Ukrainian government.
Those terms are obviously a non-starter for Ukraine. “No one will surrender their lands, their people, their homes,” Zelensky said earlier this month. He flatly rejected the prospect of officially ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia, although the Ukrainian peace conditions do say that the front line can serve as a “starting point” for negotiations. Zelensky has also maintained that any peace will require security guarantees from the West.
Russian negotiators refused a Ukrainian request for a full 30-day ceasefire, proposing instead a two-to-three-day ceasefire along certain parts of the front line, in order to facilitate the one agreement to come out of the meeting: the return of 6,000 bodies of dead soldiers from each side of the conflict, and the exchange of at least 1,000 prisoners of war. Ukrainian officials also reportedly handed Russia a list of hundreds of children that they say have been abducted from Ukrainian territory by the Russian government, a fraction of the 20,000 Ukraine claims Russian forces have captured. In response, Russia reportedly proposed returning 10 children by mid-July.
To get Russia to negotiate in earnest, Zelensky believes that more pressure from the West is needed. “If the Istanbul meeting brings nothing, that clearly means strong new sanctions are urgently needed [from both Europe and the U.S.],” he said at a meeting of Eastern European and Nordic states in Vilnius on Monday. He also reiterated the Ukrainian demand for meetings between the top leaders of Russia, the U.S., and Ukraine, which the Kremlin on Wednesday said was “unlikely” to happen soon.
As it waits for more Western support, Ukraine is also seeking to apply pressure of its own. On Sunday, it conducted “Operation Spiderweb,” one of the most audacious special-operations strikes of the war. Positioning 117 drones in specially constructed dummy mobile homes on top of trucks, Ukrainian drone operators launched strikes on four Russian airbases after smuggling the containers deep inside Russia using covert operatives. One of the bases struck was in Siberia, 3,400 miles from Ukraine’s border—roughly the distance between Washington, D.C., and London, and thousands of miles beyond the range of any Ukrainian weapon launched from within its borders.
The operation, a year and a half in the making, was Ukraine’s deepest and most extensive strike within Russia yet and inflicted a serious blow to Russia’s air force and its ability to bomb targets deep inside Ukraine. Although the full extent of the damage has yet to be confirmed, Ukrainian military officials said that 41 aircraft were damaged or destroyed, reflecting a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet—which includes nuclear-capable Tupolev (Tu) bombers. Some Russian military bloggers called the attack Russia’s “Pearl Harbor.”
Analogous to America’s fleet of B-52 bombers, Tupolevs are the heaviest hitters in Russia’s aerial arsenal, used to launch guided-missile attacks. One such strike in January saw a Tupolev launch a missile designed to sink aircraft carriers at an apartment block in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, leveling it and killing 35 civilians. This week’s drone attack “did damage to Russia’s ability to carry out strikes and showed that Ukraine can hit Russia anywhere,” Bob Hamilton, the director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told TMD.
Ukrainian drones also reportedly disabled a Beriev A-50, an airborne command center. Russia possesses fewer than 10 of these planes, each worth roughly $500 million. Western sources have yet to confirm the full extent of the damage, but senior officials say that at least four Tu-22s, a supersonic bomber that can only be reliably targeted by American-made Patriot missiles, and seven Tu-95s, which can carry nuclear warheads, were destroyed.
Many of the destroyed Tupolev models no longer have dedicated construction facilities, making them virtually irreplaceable. Russia is also now faced with a serious threat to its nuclear forces, as Tu-95 bombers made up one pillar of its nuclear “triad” (bombers, ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines)—the foundation of nuclear deterrence.
That said, though the loss of bombers may blunt some of its most destructive capabilities, Russia has continued massive drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian targets in recent days. In an overnight strike just before Ukraine’s drone operation, Russia set a new record for the largest drone attack of the war, launching 472 drones at Ukraine along with multiple ballistic missiles. On Tuesday, Russia launched attacks on the Ukrainian border region of Sumy, killing multiple civilians, according to Zelensky.
But despite Putin’s continued attacks on civilians, Trump has as of yet declined to slap more sanctions on Moscow. Other than a package targeting aspects of the Russian oil industry introduced on January 10, the administration has actually eased sanctions enforcement: in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded Justice Department teams tasked with targeting the assets of Russian oligarchs, citing the need to focus more resources on immigration and border enforcement.
The Senate, however, has begun to take matters into its own hands. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, announced last week that they had secured a veto-proof majority in support of a bill that would impose massive sanctions on Russia. Introduced by Graham earlier this month, the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 now has 82 Senate cosponsors, evenly split by party (when counting Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, as a Democrat)—well above the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto.
Graham has maintained that the bill has the White House’s support, even if Congress will be the first mover. “There’s a card game going on this summer,” he said from Kyiv on Friday, speaking at a joint press conference with Blumenthal after meeting with Zelensky. “The first cards are going to be played by the United States Senate and the House.” However, Graham, who has gone to great lengths in the past to stay on Trump’s good side, also claimed that the president supports the bill. “I have coordinated with the White House on the Russia sanctions bill since its inception,” he wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal last week.
Trump’s response to the bill, however, has been noncommittal. “I have to see it. I’ll take a look at it,” he told reporters on Friday when asked if he supported it. He has also repeatedly warned that the U.S. is willing to “walk away” from negotiations entirely if Russia and Ukraine remain at an impasse.
Blumenthal, however, is hopeful that the sanctions will have the president’s support. “I’m very encouraged,” he told The Dispatch’s Charles Hilu on Tuesday. “There have been conversations [with the White House] over time.” He also pointed to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s statement on Monday in favor of the sanctions.
But some Republicans may still be waiting to see what Trump decides. “We are prepared to move forward as soon as they feel like the timing is right. They’re leading,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma and one of the bill’s cosponsors, said Monday. “We don’t want to get in front of the White House.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, Trump himself has said nothing more about the Ukrainian drone strike or the pending sanctions bill. “He remains positive about the progress that we’ve seen,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during Wednesday’s press briefing.
But if Senate leaders have their way, the White House will have to weigh in soon. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday that he expected the chamber to start work on the bill this month, and Graham has said he wants the sanctions package passed by June 15, the start of the G7 summit.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that he will push to pass the bill no matter what Trump says. “Frankly, senators from both sides of the aisle are getting tired of Donald Trump’s wishy-washy approach to Putin,” Schumer said Monday on the Senate floor. “If Donald Trump won’t stand up to him, the Senate must.”
Today’s Must-Read
There Is No Deep State
Washington’s left-wing milieu, even within bureaucracies where the majority of their upper echelons probably vote Democratic (the State Department), doesn’t make for a Borg collective. Far from it. For those of us who have worked in the most opaque part of the “deep state”— Langley—and have had a fair amount of contact with FBI agents, this conspiracy seems wildly exaggerated, if not surreal, and deeply unfair to most officials who have conducted themselves professionally. “Deep state” believers hyperventilate on mundane facts: Government workers tend to vote Democratic; some bureaucracies prove resistant to presidents who advance policies senior bureaucrats don’t like. To which anyone who has had serious government experience should reply, “So what?”
Toeing the Company Line
Worth Your Time
- Derek Thompson, a TMD favorite, penned a piece in The Atlantic exploring President Trump’s tendency to flip-flop on major policy decisions. “A useful one-sentence guide to the second Trump administration might go something like this: A lot happens under Donald Trump, but a lot un-happens, too. … This is not to say that Americans should ignore Trump’s efforts to make confetti of the Constitution. Rather, when evaluating any one Trump policy, one has to keep front of mind the possibility that it simply won’t exist by the end of the week,” he wrote. “Questions of popularity aside, however, businesses tend to prefer certainty over promises and threats that keep disappearing. At some point, Trump’s pledge to reinvigorate American industry and energy will require fat investments in factories and supply chains. Multi-hundred-million-dollar investments require clear expectations of financial return. Those aren’t going to happen in a world where each policy idea boasts a half-life of 48 hours. Steve Bannon coined one of the most famous Trump-world truisms when he revealed MAGA’s media strategy to ‘flood the zone with shit.’ Far stranger, however, is the administration’s insistence on flooding the policy zone with Schrödinger’s cats—executive orders and Truth Social posts that exist in a liminal state among existence, nonexistence, and imminent radioactive decay.”
CNN: FEMA Head Told Staff He Was Previously Unaware U.S. Has a Hurricane Season
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, after former GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio accidentally walked into the Democratic lunch rather than the Republican one on Tuesday: “Portman, you’d fit better here than in that one right now.”
In the Zeitgeist
After four movies and a spinoff TV show, the John Wick franchise is expanding once again. This time, it will star Ana de Armas in Ballerina, which releases this week and takes place between the third and fourth movies in the franchise.
Let Us Know
Are you encouraged by the Senate’s efforts to impose additional sanctions on Russia?