Eco-Terrorism, Ukrainian-Style

Sohrab Ahmari’s Newsletter and Round-Up

Compact editorial fellow Stephen Adubato, who usually writes our Friday Substack round-up newsletter, is on vacation. Meanwhile, I’m on the road for a most unusual reporting trip. More on that later—perhaps much later.

For now, permit me to offer a quick combined Sohrab-post-plus-round-up. I’ve been devoting a lot of energy to warning the Trump campaign about its current trajectory: away from the populist themes of 2016 and toward Elon Musk’s politics: a combination of online edginess and plutocrat-friendly libertarianism (hilarious, given Musk’s dependence on government subsidies and the cooperation of a host of federal defense and space agencies). You can read my latest on that here.

But Trump campaign woes—and the surprising nimbleness of Kamala Harris’s effort—aren’t the only thing on my mind these days. I’m also struck by the nonchalant way that the Atlantic establishment now admits that Russia wasn’t behind the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This week, German authorities issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor, identified as Volodymyr Z., and several others for their role in this gross act of ecological and economic terrorism.