On Foreign Soil

The FBI has accused five men of conspiring to intimidate, threaten, or murder people on US soil and around the world on behalf of Russia. The accusation points to a campaign targeting Ukrainian allies overseas, an extension of the war into countries that are not party to it. The FBI's statement is specific: these are not spies gathering intelligence. These are people tasked with violence against individuals identified as supporting Ukraine.[1]

This is the kind of story that should be bigger than it is. A foreign state organizing killings on US soil is, by any historical standard, a major escalation. But it is competing for attention with a news cycle that includes space weapons, AI CEOs asking for their own regulation, a helicopter crash in Los Angeles, and the US limiting visas for South African officials. The surface area of the news is so wide that an assassination campaign can fit into a single bullet point.[2]

Meanwhile, a war-damaged building in Gaza City collapsed, killing 21 people, including eight children. The building had been hit by an Israeli strike last year. Approximately 10 families had been living in it since, because there was nowhere else to go. Dozens are still missing beneath the rubble. The Israeli military has not commented on this specific incident. The building was already damaged. The people living in it knew that. They lived there anyway, because Gaza does not offer safe alternatives.[3]

In The Hague, former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci was sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes committed during Kosovo's violent break from Serbia in the 1990s. The court held him criminally responsible for torture, arbitrary detention, and murders carried out by Kosovo Liberation Army forces under his command. Thaci had presented himself as a liberator and a statesman. The court saw a war criminal. The sentence took decades. The victims waited that long.[4]

And in Saudi Arabia, the government says it shot down a Houthi drone south of Mecca. The Houthis deny targeting the holy city. Saudi Arabia called it a "disgraceful act" and warned of a red line. The Houthis, who now control Mayun island at the entrance of the Red Sea and have shut down a major Saudi oil pipeline, are pushing against a boundary that even Iran has historically respected. Mecca is not a military target in any sane calculation. The fact that Saudi Arabia felt the need to say so tells you something about the state of the calculation.[5]

Three stories, three countries, three kinds of violence. State-sponsored assassination attempts abroad. A building falling on children because a war damaged it and nobody fixed it. A drone near a holy city because a pipeline was shut down and a strait was captured and the rules are gone. The connective tissue is that all of this is happening simultaneously, and the systems that are supposed to prevent it, the ICC, the FBI, the UN, the treaties, the norms, are all operating on delays measured in years or decades, while the violence operates in real time.[6]