Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sending troops over the border and shelling cities across the country. Already, dozens of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the assault, and millions more people in the region are now in mortal danger. Countries around the world are likely to feel some effects as well, via physical disruptions of agricultural and energy supplies, and digital disruptions caused by Russian cyberattacks.

Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine confronts President Joe Biden with complex challenges at a time when he is already beleaguered—but it also presents him with an opportunity for a reset on the core foreign-policy promise he made to voters during his 2020 campaign.As a candidate, Biden offered voters not so much a change in specific international policies as an alternative approach to interacting with other nations.

Mike Pompeo is of two minds about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the one hand, the former secretary of state is critical of America’s failure to deter the attack. “President Biden has been weak toward Putin, unstable and unclear—he doesn’t understand what is at stake in the fight against Russia and doesn’t know that it takes strength to defend America and keep us out of war,” he wrote in a Fox News column Thursday.

Dear God, calamity again!
It was so peaceful, so serene;
We had just begun to break the chains
That bind our folk in slavery
When halt! Once again the people’s blood
Is streaming …
The poem is called “Calamity Again.” The original version was written in Ukrainian, in 1859, and the author, Taras Shevchenko, was not speaking metaphorically when he wrote about slavery.

Few Americans know more about occupying a country and then facing a determined armed resistance than David Petraeus. The former four-star general and ex-director of the CIA wrote his Ph.D. thesis about the Vietnam War; helped oversee the writing of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency field manual; was its commanding officer in Iraq during the surge of troops there; and then ran U.S.

Of the great male voices to come out of the grunge era—Kurt Cobain’s, Layne Staley’s, Chris Cornell’s—the greatest was Mark Lanegan’s. It was simultaneously the fullest and the most evacuated by sorrow, the warmest and the closest to the grave, the strongest and the most self-immolating, the purest and the most polluted, the largest-hearted and the loneliest.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Every Friday, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Inflation is high. So are gas prices. War in Ukraine could exacerbate both.

It’s February 15, 11 p.m. my time and just past 6 a.m. the next day Kyiv time, still dark. The Reuters livestream camera is pointed at Independence Square. Maidan. Light from the city reflects in the predawn sky, which turns purple, then red, then pink, then gray. This may be the day Russia moves deeper into Ukraine, American intelligence reportedly says. In the bottom-right corner of my screen, I notice that the building that burned during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity has been rebuilt.