Your Wednesday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/briefing/russia-falters-ukraine-europe-covid.html

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Russian progress has slowed: Ukrainian forces have mounted multiple counteroffensives, and they said yesterday they had recaptured the strategic town of Makariv, west of Kyiv. Satellite imagery also shows that Russia has withdrawn most of its helicopters from the airport in Kherson, the largest city that it had captured so far.

Russian military losses have mounted: The Pentagon has assessed that its “combat power” in Ukraine has dipped below 90 percent of its original force for the first time.

Now, questions are mounting about President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, as deaths of high-ranking officials continue to climb. Retired military officials are leveling thinly veiled criticisms of the invasion and the quality of the intelligence that preceded it. “The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” one former leader said.

Amid the military disappointments in Ukraine, a Russian court sentenced the already imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny to nine years in prison on fraud charges. The move is widely seen as a Kremlin attempt to control the war’s narrative: Navalny, via letters from jail that his lawyers post to social media, has been urging Russians to protest the invasion.

Diplomacy: President Biden is heading to Europe, where he will seek to maintain unity with allies and bolster sanctions against Russia.

Analysis: The war in Ukraine and the pandemic are straining the interdependent global economy and Western ideas of post-Cold War stability.

Dissent: Moscow expanded its recent draconian crackdown on speech, making it a criminal offense to discredit the activities of all state agencies working abroad.

State of the War

Russian forces have made little progress on their efforts to encircle Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Here are live updates.

Some 100,000 civilians, or 22 percent of the city’s original population, remain stuck in Mariupol, the Ukrainian government said.

One of the biggest surprises: Russia’s failure to defeat the Ukrainian Air Force.

Wildfires are burning around Chernobyl, raising fears of radioactive smoke.

Other updates:

In a speech to Italy’s Parliament, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned of a global famine and of a Russian push farther into Europe.

The war risks unwinding efforts across Europe to shut down coal mines and stop drilling.

TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas company, said it would stop buying oil from Russia by the end of the year.

A senior W.H.O. official said coronavirus cases were rising in 18 European nations because they eased restrictions too soon. Rather than take a gradual, measured approach, said Dr. Hans Kluge, the organization’s regional director for Europe, those countries “are lifting those restrictions brutally, from too much to too few.”

Despite the surge, Dr. Kluge said he saw reasons for optimism: Spring weather means fewer indoor gatherings, and a large proportion of the countries’ populations probably have some level of immunity, either from vaccination or a past infection.

Details: Dr. Kluge blamed BA.2, the highly transmissible Omicron subvariant, for the increase in new cases. He noted that mortality from Covid-19 was still declining in the 18 countries, but he urged nations to protect vulnerable people.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In other news:

Pfizer will sell up to four million treatment courses of Paxlovid, its Covid-19 pill, for use in lower-income countries.

Hong Kong’s high death rate shows the importance of vaccinating older adults.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, tested positive, one day before she was scheduled to travel to Europe with President Biden.

The Swedish police said they were still trying to determine a motive for the deadly attack at a high school in the southern city of Malmo.

The two victims, both women in their 50s, died after police officers found them late Monday. The police said they arrested an 18-year-old man at the scene.

Context: In the past year, there have been a series of attacks in Swedish schools, though such crimes are uncommon in the country. Last August, a 15-year-old knifed a teacher. In January, a 16-year-old stabbed a teacher and a fellow student. But those victims survived.

Around the World

Chinese rescue teams have found no survivors after a Boeing 737 plane crashed Monday with 132 people on board.

Conservative U.S. senators played to the extremes of their base in a barrage of questions to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court nominee.

In the third attack on Israeli Jews in less than a week, four people were killed in a knife and car-ramming attack in Beersheba, a city in southern Israel.

The leaders of Egypt, Israel and the U.A.E. met for their first summit meeting, the latest sign of a swift realignment of Middle Eastern political alliances.

Few Tunisians participated in an initial step of their country’s constitutional reform process, which analysts described as a sign of widespread discontent with the growing power of President Kais Saied.

Ashleigh Barty, the No. 1-ranked women’s tennis player, is retiring.

Business News

Tesla officially began making cars in Europe yesterday at a new plant just outside Berlin.

The U.S. scaled back metal tariffs as Britain lifted duties on American whiskey and jeans, removing Trump-era trade barriers.

China Evergrande will delay its annual financial report, another setback for the hugely indebted real estate giant.

The cryptocurrency mining industry has embarked on a rebranding effort to change the prevailing view that its energy-guzzling computers harm the climate.

A Morning Read

For over 200 years, Britain has plucked Nepal’s best and brightest to fight in the British army. The colonial-era policy left a deep economic mark, leading the country’s fittest young people to seek their fortunes abroad. Veterans are also fighting the British government: They earned significantly less pay — and stunningly smaller pensions — than their fellow soldiers.

Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, has spent decades probing the evolutionary roots of our mathematical instinct. He believes that it is the inclination to imagine — a triangle, the laws of physics, religion itself — that captures the essence of being human.

Lately, he has zeroed in on a related question: What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? The answer, he argues, may lie in our ability to recognize shapes like squares and rectangles.

Dehaene is not the first thinker to pursue this line of thought. Plato believed that humans were uniquely attuned to geometry; Noam Chomsky argues that language is a biologically rooted human capacity. But Dehaene’s holistic approach — he uses computational models, cross-species research, A.I. and brain scans — is novel.

And his team may have found a signature difference between human and nonhuman primates. Dehaene’s research suggests that humans can perceive regular shapes, and identify outliers, no matter their education level. Baboons cannot, a finding that just may provide the “signature of human singularity.”

What to Cook

Spicy tahini boosts this vegetarian take on shawarma.

What to Read

“After the Romanovs” traces the Russian encounter with Paris: From expat playground to city of exiles after Russian Revolution.

Wellness

Does so-called “preventative Botox” actually prevent wrinkles later in life?

Now Time to Play

Play today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Like Machu Picchu (five letters).

Here’s today’s Wordle and the Spelling Bee.

You can find all our puzzles here.

That’s it for today’s briefing. Thanks for joining me. — Amelia

P.S. Times journalists won top awards from the Overseas Press Club in four categories and received one citation.

The latest episode of “The Daily” is about Russian oligarchs.

You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com.