Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, your regular dispatch from Washington, D.C. It’s been a while since I’ve written to you. The last two weeks have been consumed with travel: to L.A., for Real Time with Bill Maher, and to New York, for a debate on NATO and Ukraine at the city’s legendary Comedy Cellar. 

It has been just over five weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine but, for a lot of us, it has felt more like five agonizing months. As I joked with my friend and Puck’s co-founder, Jon Kelly, I’m even running out of fumes to run on. And yet, it doesn’t seem like the war is anywhere close to over. It’s hard to imagine what happens next—which is the subject of this week’s newsletter—but everyone I’ve spoken to in Washington and Moscow has warned me to brace for months, if not years, of war in Ukraine.

Before we get into it, though, I wanted to thank you. A couple weeks ago, I sent out a link to a GoFundMe and asked you to contribute to help the journalists of TV Rain, the last independent TV channel in Russia that was shut down on March 3 under the Kremlin’s harsh new martial censorship laws. With your help, we raised over $70,000 to help the journalists who fled Russia survive the next few months while they regroup and find a way to recreate the network so that they can continue telling Russians the truth about what their government is doing in Ukraine. I’ve gotten lots of messages from people who used to work for the channel and they were all bowled over by your generosity. In this time of profound crisis—they have lost their homes, their jobs, and their country—they have been so heartened by your support. Thank you from them, and from me. I am so humbled by the community we have built here, together. 

P.S. As a reminder, you're currently receiving the free version of Tomorrow Will Be Worse at {{customer.email}}. For full access to my reporting, and to all of my talented colleagues, I hope you'll subscribe here to support the work we're doing at Puck.

How Putin’s Game Ends

Contrary to Western optimism, there is emerging evidence that, after the initial shock and despair of a poorly planned invasion, Russians are now rallying around their flag and their president. Some are refusing to accept anything less than total victory.

Thursday marked five weeks since the Russian army crossed the border into Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s dreams of a lightning conquest of the cradle of Russian civilization went up in smoke. When Ukrainian soldiers ambushed columns of Russian tanks, they torched not just the military hardware, but the dress uniforms that Russian soldiers carried with them for the planned victory parade in Kyiv. And yet, victory for either side remains elusive. 

These days, the question asked most frequently in Washington and in Russia and foreign policy circles is: How does this end? No one, myself included, has a good answer—or much of an answer at all. This week brought more talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations, first in Istanbul on Tuesday, then by video conference on Friday. The negotiations on Tuesday, in particular, seemed to produce something that many, especially in the West, were eager to cling to as a ray of hope...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT