This week in the saga

Two hundred missiles and drones go into Kyiv overnight and kill twelve people, and at twenty-four minutes past eight on Thursday morning the reply is four sentences long and addressed to one man by his first name. Vladimir, stop. It is the first time in the second term that he has asked anybody for anything. An hour later he is back on the university, which has now become a lawyer he wants fired and a company he no longer runs. On Friday he flies to Rome for a funeral, and in a side room of the basilica, before the mass, he sits knee to knee with the president of a country at war in plain gilt chairs that somebody carried in and set facing each other — fifteen minutes, no table, no aides, the only negotiation of the spring that happens in a room instead of a post. On Sunday the border number comes in at three people for the whole month and he puts it up like a scoreline. On Monday, the morning Canadians go to the polls, he offers them a way out of the tariffs: become the fifty-first state.