The War Room:  Russian forces are pounding cities into rubble as they advance into Ukraine and a cease fire to allow citizens to flee collapsed almost as soon as it began. It’s a war against civilians.

  The southern city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov has been without heat, electricity, or water. The evacuation of the population of a half million people was halted when the Russians resumed shelling despite the agreement to stop firing. “The Russian side is not upholding the cease-fire and is continuing to shell Mariupol and the surrounding regions,” the city administration said.

  “The terrible expectation is that the suffering we’ve already seen is likely to get worse before it gets better,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Brussels. “When we say it is likely to get worse, it’s unfortunately based on everything we know about President Putin’s methods when it comes to seeking to subjugate another country to his will. We saw it in Chechnya. We’ve seen it in Syria.”

  As many as 1.2 million people have already fled Ukraine, the United Nations estimates, creating the biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II. 

  Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky yesterday was critical of the West’s refusal to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine. He angrily rejected the argument that enforcing a no-fly zone could pull NATO into the war saying, “All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you. Because of your weakness, because of your disunity.”

 Despite what he’s doing in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin  called yesterday for the “normalization” of relations with other nearby countries, saying Moscow has “absolutely no ill intentions with regard to our neighbors.” While his troops pressed on into Ukraine, Putin said, “I think that everyone should think about normalizing relations and cooperating normally.” 

The Body Count: Russia admits that a senior General was killed in action this week. The circumstances of the 47-year-old’s death were not given, but the official newspaper Pravda said he was killed “during a special operation in Ukraine.” That’s their euphemism for war.

  At least three senior Russian officers are reported to have been killed, one of them by sniper fire. 

Information War: As an example of how the Russian government is lying to the world about its invasion of Ukraine, the embassy in Ontario, Canada, issued a statement describing the unprovoked war as “a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”

  The statement goes on to say that “The Russian army does not occupy Ukrainian territory and takes all measures to preserve the lives and safety of civilians.” It says, “The strikes are targeting military facilities only, being carried out exclusively with high precision weapons.”

  Video and photographs prove that many residential areas and apartment buildings have been hit. The entire center of a high rise apartment building collapsed after an air strike.

  But the statement from the Russian embassy in Canada says, “We are witnessing an unprecedented wave of lies, fake news, distorted and fabricated facts aimed at discrediting our actions.”

The Spin Rack: The US economy added 678,000 jobs in February. The country is still short of 2 million jobs lost during the pandemic. —  A powerful bomb inside a Shiite Muslim mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, killed at least 58 worshippers and wounded dozens more. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he will quickly sign a new law forbidding abortion in his state after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It’s modeled after the Mississippi law that’s probably going to be approved by the Supreme Court.  — Iowa has become the 11^th state to ban transgender girls and women in the state from competing in sports according to their gender identity rather than their birth sex. The ban governs public and private K-12 schools, community colleges, and colleges and universities affiliated with the NCAA and NAIA. — The Supreme Court yesterday by a vote of 6-3 reinstated the death sentence for 28-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. That comes even though the federal government has a moratorium on executions for now. The attack killed three people and injured 260. Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan, died in a shootout with the police.

Disappointment: Former attorney general William Barr said in an interview with NBC anchor Lester Holt that former president Donald Trump is “responsible in the broad sense of that word” for the January 6^th insurrection.  Barr said, “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress, and I think that that was wrong.”

  Barr is hawking his new book in which he says Trump was repeatedly told back in 2020 that there was no election fraud and the president kept claiming that there was. Trump issued a statement yesterday calling Barr a “coward,” a “big disappointment” and “lazy.”

  Trump’s statement said, “Former Attorney General Bill Barr wouldn’t know voter fraud if it was staring him in the face—and it was.” 

  Trump has yet to produce any evidence of voter fraud that cost him the election.

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