The War Room: Ukraine today marked the anniversary of the Russian invasion without a feared Russian onslaught. President Volodomyr Zelensky said, “We were not defeated.” 

  The US today announced another $2 billion worth of new drones and anti-drone systems for Ukraine.

  China renewed its basically empty peace plan that does not condemn the invasion or call for a Russian pullback. The United Nations General Assembly yesterday adopted a resolution calling for a lasting peace and the withdrawal of Russian troops — equally ineffective. 

  The war has been reduced to stalemate with the Russians taking territory virtually by inches at the cost of thousands of lives. The Russians for some self-defeating reason released video of a warehouse stacked with the crated coffins of dozens of soldiers.

  Yevgeny Prigozhin,^, the leader of Russia’s Wagner Group private army, also released pictures of dozens more dead Russians in a ditch. He blamed  “shell hunger,” a shortage of artillery shells, for the deaths of so many of his mercenaries and accused the defense ministry of a treasonous attempt to destroy his army.

  “Mothers, wives and children will get their bodies,” Prigozhin said. “Who is guilty that they died? The guilty ones are those who should have resolved the question of us getting enough ammo.”

  In Berlin, a group of artists and activists placed a destroyed Russian tank opposite the Russian Embassy, its gun facing the building.  

Most Foul: Disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who’s on trial for murder in the deaths of his wife and son, testified in his defense yesterday, denying the results of evidence testing that found blood on the shirt he wore that night. 

  His lawyer Jim Griffin asked, “Did you get, on your shirt, high-velocity blood spatter from being within the distance of shooting of Maggie or Paul?”

  Murdaugh answered, “There’s no way I had high-velocity blood spatter on me.”

“I have seen reports that said that,” he added. “I was nowhere near Paul and Maggie when they got shot.”

  Murdaugh tearfully described the moment he said he discovered the bodies of his wife and son. “I could his brain laying on the sidewalk,” he said. 

  A video on the late Paul Murdaugh’s cellphone revealed that his father was present shortly before the murders. The accused Murdaugh has admitted that he originally lied when he claimed that voice was not his and blamed his lies on a years-long addiction to opioids. “Once I told a lie — then I told my family — I had to keep lying,” he said.

  Murdaugh has tried to suggest that the killings were related to his son’s drunken boat accident in which 19-year-old Mallory Beach was killed. Murdaugh said, “He got the most vile threats. I mean, the stuff that was on social media, I mean it was, you couldn’t believe it.”

  The prosecution theory is that Murdaugh killed his wife and son to distract from pending accusations that he misappropriated and embezzled $8.5 million from legal clients.

Train Wreck: The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board said that the toxic train crash in East Palestine, Ohio was “100 percent avoidable.” But the NTSB’s Jennifer Homendy also said the train crew was not to blame.

  The crew of a Norfolk Southern freight train had tried to slow the train only moments before it derailed because an alarm went off revealing that a jammed wheel had reached 253 degrees above the ambient temperature, according to a preliminary report from the NTSB. 

  The report says that the train travelled through Ohio as the wheel steadily heated and no alarm went off. The crew noticed fire and smoke before reporting that a derailment was imminent. Five of the derailed cars were carrying a total of 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride, a colorless carcinogenic gas.

Baby Prison: A pregnant Florida inmate is suing the state claiming that her unborn baby is being unlawfully detained. Natalia Harrell’s lawyer wrote in a court filing that the “unborn child is a person as defined under the Florida Constitution and United States Constitution.” That’s a concept that has gained popularity since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and many states, Florida among them, have eliminated legal abortion.

  Harrell was six weeks pregnant when she fatally shot another woman and she’s waiting for trial. Her lawsuit demands that she be set free until her baby is born. Harrell’s lawyer told The Washington Post that, “The unborn child has been deprived of due process of law in this incarceration.”  

The Spin Rack: R&B singer R. Kelly, who’s already serving 30 years for racketeering and sex trafficking, was sentenced yesterday to another 20 years for a second conviction on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor. The sentences would be served consecutively with only one year added to the end of the first. — Former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the predator who spawned the #MeToo movement in 2017, was sentenced yesterday to 16 years in prison for committing sex crimes in Los Angeles County. He was ordered to serve it after finishing his 23-year term on a sexual assault conviction in New York. He’s in for good. — Federal prosecutors have filed a motion to force former Vice President Mike Pence to testify before a grand jury about attempts to overturn the 2020 election even before Pence has filed any formal objection to his subpoena.

Below the Fold: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy defended his decision to give Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 44,000 hours of Capitol security footage of the January 6^thinsurrection. He had promised during his campaign for speaker that he would release the video.

  McCarthy told The NY Times, “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.” 

  Except that giving the video only to Fox is releasing it into the dark.

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