Hello and happy Saturday. It’s a busy weekend here in the Ohio bureau. Our oldest is home from college for a few days, our middle son is going to homecoming with a group of friends, and apparently we are hosting the (well-chaperoned, alcohol-free) after-party. 

I could attempt to wax eloquently about the moments in which the joys of parenting teenage boys outweigh the moodiness, the smelly feet, and the discovery of half your cereal bowls under an empty Doritos bag in a bedroom corner.

But that is an evergreen topic. Meanwhile, as I’m writing this, news is breaking in Ukraine. Good news. Last weekend, Russia held “referendums” in the territories that they control in Ukraine. I put “referendum” in scare quotes because, well, for all of the perceived problems with voting in the United States, we tend not to send the military door to door to force people to vote at gunpoint.  

On Friday, Putin used the results from those sham referendums to “annex” Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. It’s a blatant violation of international law. As it turns out, it’s also not representative of the situation on the ground.