Putin wants to erase a nation. His war made my Ukranian pride soar.

Jaden Amos | Paste BN

Happy Wednesday! Here's what we have today:

Putin wants to erase a nation. His war made my Ukranian pride soar.

By Ben Reytblat

On the night Vladimir Putin announced his special noninvasive operation, I did the only thing I could think to do: I called my dad.

Papa Reytblat, born in the small Ukrainian town of Korosten just after the Great Patriotic War, had been proclaiming for months that a Russian invasion was impossible. "Vladimir Putin is a lot of things, but he’s not a schlemiel," he had said in Russian with a shpritz of his native Yiddish.

As the first kindergarten-seeking missiles struck Ukraine, my dad was sure: "Putin doesn't know what's coming. He messed with the wrong people."

I never thought of myself as Ukrainian before the war, even though it's my ancestral home. For starters, no one here in the United States ever seemed to know where or what Ukraine was, which I'll admit was a bit embarrassing growing up. As a Jewish American kid whose first language was Russian, it was hard enough to fit in without trying to explain the complexities of nationality in my parents' bygone USSR. Russian or Jewish were easy identifiers for Americans to digest. The few times I opted for specificity prompted a question I got tired of answering: "Ukraine … that's in Russia, right?"

What Trump understood about Russia's use of energy as a weapon

By James S. Robbins

Better late than never, the Biden administration has discovered the benefits of using energy as a tool of American global strategy.

One positive outcome of the president’s trip to Europe last week was the announcement of a new partnership with the European Union to cut Europe’s dependence on Russian energy. Under the terms of the deal, the United States will supply an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquified natural gas (LNG) for Europe this year and expand sales to 50 billion cubic meters annually by 2030.

This will completely wean Europe off of Russian gas. Meanwhile, Europe will develop expanded gas storage facilities, build port infrastructure to offload shipped LNG and make gas-powered facilities more efficient.

“It’s not only the right thing to do from a moral standpoint,” President Joe Biden said Friday, “it’s going to put us on a much stronger strategic footing.”

We're in 8th grade. A NASA scientist is helping us with our Mars dream

By Elliana Cabellon, Isabella Renaud, Aby Manzueta, Genesis Ponce and Gabriella Rodriguez

When we were in kindergarten two things happened: We became best friends and we fell in love with Mars. From that point on we knew that we wanted to become scientists and make contributions to change the world. We began by pretending that we were scientists and started inventing things. Our love for science, STEM and anything related to outer space stayed with us all the way into middle school.

That’s when our guidance counselor, Dr. John MacDonald, introduced us to the American Student Assistance (ASA) Solve Together Career Exploration Competition. It’s a national challenge that has kids work together with an adult to solve a real world problem that might lead to a future career. We signed up right away and decided that our project would be to act as a team of botanists to create a livable colony on Mars. We called ourselves the Galactic Girls, and our team of five went on to win first place and $10,000 for our school.

In the beginning, our project to make hydroponic farms went well, but we hit a wall trying to figure out what type of power source to use. Dr. MacDonald knew that we were onto something big and reached out to someone with a connection to NASA.

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This newsletter was compiled by Jaden Amos.

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