Ukraine’s unilateral ceasefire took effect at midnight, and the first hours of it were quiet. President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the “silence regime” on Monday, saying Ukraine would halt hostilities starting at 00:00 on the night of May 5 to 6. “We will act reciprocally starting from that moment,” he said, the Kyiv Independent reported.
The timing was deliberate. Russia had declared its own ceasefire for May 8 and 9, the two days Moscow marks the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Zelensky moved first by forty-eight hours. It was, in diplomatic terms, a dare: Russia’s Defense Ministry had warned that if the Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9 were “disrupted,” it would launch a large-scale missile strike on central Kyiv, Euronews reported. By starting the silence before Russia did, Zelensky reframed the question. The issue was no longer whether Ukraine would observe Moscow’s holiday. The issue was whether Moscow would observe its own.
The night before the ceasefire took effect told the other story. Russian forces fired 11 Iskander-M ballistic missiles and 164 strike drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure overnight from Monday to Tuesday, killing at least five people and wounding 39 across multiple regions, ABC News reported. Zelensky called it “utter cynicism.” The phrase is accurate. In January 2023, Russia declared a thirty-six-hour unilateral ceasefire for Orthodox Christmas. Ukraine rejected it. Fighting continued throughout. Unilateral ceasefires in this war have been, until now, performative. Whether this one holds is a question the next seventy-two hours will answer.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that the military operation against Iran is finished. “The operation is over. Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we’re done with that stage of it,” Rubio told reporters, CNN reported. He added: “There’s no shooting unless we’re shot at first.”
Separately, President Trump announced he is pausing Project Freedom, the effort launched Monday to guide stranded commercial vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said the pause was based on “the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement” with Iran, NPR reported. The American blockade of Iranian ports remains in place. The administration has said that nearly 23,000 sailors on vessels representing 87 countries have been stranded in the Persian Gulf since Iran effectively closed the strait sixty-seven days ago, CBC News reported. Two merchant ships passed through a U.S.-guarded lane on Monday. Hundreds more remain bottled up.
The United States began Operation Epic Fury in February. Iran’s fourteen-point peace proposal calls for guarantees against future attacks, withdrawal of U.S. forces from around Iran, the release of frozen Iranian assets, reparations, and a new mechanism for the strait, Al Jazeera reported. Washington wants the strait open first. Tehran wants guarantees first. The space between those two positions is where the next phase of this war, or its end, will be determined.
President Trump endorsed primary challengers against seven Republican state senators in Indiana who had voted against a redistricting plan he supported. On Tuesday, five of those seven incumbents lost, NBC News reported.
The defeated include Travis Holdman of Markle, who served in the state Senate since 2008, and Jim Buck of Kokomo, who served in the legislature since 1994. Buck is eighty years old. His challenger, Tracey Powell, a Tipton County commissioner, won with Trump’s endorsement and an estimated $9 million in outside spending across all seven races, ABC News reported.
Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray said: “The amount of money that was spent in Indiana is material, it matters, and that was very, very difficult to overcome,” NBC News reported. U.S. Senator Jim Banks said: “President Trump is the single most popular Republican among Hoosier voters,” the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported.
Presidential intervention in state legislative primaries is uncommon. This was not intervention. It was retribution, organized at scale, for a specific vote on a specific bill. The message it sends to Republican state legislators elsewhere in the country does not require interpretation.
In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy won the Republican primary for governor. The Associated Press called the race minutes after polls closed at 7:30 p.m., NBC News reported. Ramaswamy, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, will face Democrat Amy Acton in November. Acton, the state’s former health director during the early months of the Covid pandemic, ran unopposed in her primary.
“I know the American Dream exists because I’ve lived it right here, in the state where I was born and raised,” Ramaswamy said in a statement after the race was called, ABC News reported. Governor Mike DeWine is term-limited. The seat is open for the first time since 2018.
Reporters Without Borders released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, and the United States ranked sixty-fourth out of 180 countries, a drop of seven places from last year and the lowest ranking in the index’s history, RSF reported. In 2002, when RSF first published the index, the United States ranked seventeenth.
RSF wrote that Trump “has turned his repeated attacks on the press and journalists into a systematic policy,” citing funding cuts to public broadcasters, political interference in media ownership, and politically motivated investigations targeting journalists, the Washington Times reported. Globally, press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in twenty-five years. More than half of all countries are now classified as being in a “difficult” or “very serious” situation.
The trajectory is not new. The speed of it is.
Two hikers were injured by at least one bear on the Mystic Falls Trail in Yellowstone National Park on Monday, marking the first bear-related injury in the park for the 2026 season, the National Park Service confirmed. The victims, a twenty-eight-year-old man and a fourteen-year-old, were airlifted to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center.
Craig Lerman, a hiker from Baltimore, found one of the victims on the trail after noticing bear prints in the mud. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Lerman told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s not something you ever want to walk up to,” Cowboy State Daily reported. The park closed several trails and backcountry campsites while the investigation continues.
The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is home to an estimated 700 grizzly bears. The park averages about one bear-caused injury per year. The Mystic Falls trailhead is near Old Faithful.
And one good thing.
The 2026 Tony Award nominations were announced Tuesday morning by Uzo Aduba and Darren Criss on CBS, NPR reported. Among the nominees was June Squibb, who received her first Tony nomination for her performance in “Marjorie Prime.” She is ninety-six years old, the Hollywood Reporter reported. She is now the oldest acting nominee in the award’s history.
Squibb made her Broadway debut in 1959, playing Electra in the original production of “Gypsy” opposite Ethel Merman. That was sixty-seven years ago. She has worked steadily since, in theater and film, including an Academy Award nomination for “Nebraska” in 2014. She did not stop. She did not slow down. She performed in a play on a Broadway stage, and the nominators watched, and they wrote her name on the ballot.
Sixty-seven years between a debut and a first nomination. There is no word for that except patience, and patience is not quite right either. It is closer to persistence. It is closer to the simple act of continuing to show up and do the work, for sixty-seven years, in a profession that forgets people faster than most.
It is Wednesday. The ceasefire holds for now. And on Broadway, June Squibb has earned something that was sixty-seven years in the making. That’s the day.
