The War Room: Fierce artillery battles continued over the weekend as Russia presses its invasion of eastern Ukraine. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had struck 800 targets across Ukraine, including a hangar in the port city of Odessa that it said held weapons and ammunition delivered by the United States and Europe.

  Fighting has been intense around Kharkiv as Ukrainian forces attempt to push Russian forces away from what was once Ukraine’s second-largest city.

  Russian attacks on fuel depots are leading to shortages of  gasoline, leaving Ukrainian drivers in long lines down the street.

  The British military’s defense intelligence agency said today that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have probably been “rendered combat ineffective.” 

  The Brits estimate that the Russians have lost as many as 15,000 solders. Their defense intelligence agency said that some of the elite units have taken the greatest losses and it might require years to get them reconstituted in fighting order.

  Some evacuations are finally taking place from the levelled city of Mariupol where the Ukrainian army is still making a last stand. Roughly 100 women and children hiding in tunnels and bunkers beneath a sprawling steel production plant have been taken to safety, according to Ukrainian officials and the United Nations.

  Ukrainian authorities say they are determined to continue evacuating civilians even as the shelling continues.

  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky over the weekend wearing a bright blue pantsuit and presenting a target that could have been seen from space. Pelosipledged US support  for Ukraine “until victory is won.’”

  Movie star Angelina Jolie made an unannounced visit to Lviv in western Ukraine, where she met with refugees and people who had been wounded in an attack on a train station.

  The Russians are quickly Russifying occupied territories. They are replacing elected mayors with pro-Russian appointees, introducing Russian documentation, education, and requiring use of the ruble as currency.   Even couples getting married are issued a Russian marriage license.

  The Russians are reported to have disconnected most of the occupied areas in southern Ukraine from Ukrainian cellphone service and internet providers, cutting off free and accurate information from the West.  The Russians are maintaining the fiction that they have ended Nazi rule in the lands they’ve taken. They have even begun to reinstall statues of Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of Soviet Russia.

  The Russians also say that nearly a million people have been moved to Russia from Ukraine in voluntary “evacuations,” countering claims that they are actually being forcibly deported.

The Ghost Lives: After the death of the Ukrainian fighter pilot known as “The Ghost of Kyiv” hit the press, including this news report, the country’s Air Force Command admitted that the Ghost wasn’t dead because he never existed. The Times of London had identified the Ghost as 29-year-old  Stepan Tarabalka, credited with shooting down 40 Russian aircraft, six of them on the first day of the war.  A Facebook post said that “Tarabalka is NOT ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ and he did NOT shoot down 40 planes.” 

  But, “The #GhostOfKyiv is alive,” the Air Force posted on Twitter. “It embodies the collective spirit of the highly qualified pilots of the Tactical Aviation Brigade who are successfully defending #Kyiv and the region.”

  One Ukrainian lawmaker, wrote , “He can’t be killed — he is a ghost.”

The Obit Page: Naomi Judd, the mother in the country music duo The Judds who were a hit in the 1980s, has died at age 76, her family says. Along with her daughter Wynonna, The Judds were chart toppers.

  The Judds performed together only last month. Last night they were honored at the Country Music Awards. 

  The family did not give a cause of death. Daughter Ashley Judd, the actress, said, “We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness.” Naomi Judd had lived for years on a farm in the hills above Franklin, Tennessee outside Nashville.

— Kathy Boudin, who gained infamy as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and ’70s taking part in the 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck that left one guard and two police officers dead, has died at age 78. She spent 22 years in prison then turned to helping former inmates. 

  The Weather underground was a violent spinoff of Students for a Democratic Society,  taking its name from the Bob Dylan lyric, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”  They carried out a string of bombings of public buildings. Boudin had teamed up with the Black Liberation Army when they did the Brinks job.

The Spin Rack: Three University of Oklahoma meteorology students died in a car crash in Oklahoma on Friday night returning from Kansas, where they had been storm chasing. The three students ages 19, 20, and 22 were killed when their disabled car was hit by a truck. — President Biden’s approval rating has ticked up to 42 percent. It hit a low of 37 in February. — A bat used by baseball great Jackie Robinson in the 1949 All-Star Game sold at auction Saturday for $1.08 million.

The Nerd Prom: The White House Correspondents dinner was held Saturday night for the first time since 2019, and Joe Biden was the first president to attend in six years. Donald Trump had refused to mix with the “fake news.” As Biden said during his address, “We had a horrible plague followed by two years of Covid.”

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