◼ Three Indian citizens have been charged in Canada with the murder, in a Vancouver suburb, of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an activist for the establishment of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan. Such demands for their own state led to a violent insurgency during the 1980s. It met a fierce response and eventually faded, but support for Khalistan has thrived in the Sikh diaspora. Nijjar traveled to Canada in 1997, claiming that he had been persecuted. The claims were rejected, and his marriage shortly thereafter was found to be one of convenience. Nevertheless, he became a Canadian citizen in 2007. India later designated Nijjar a terrorist (which he denied) and called for his arrest. Canada, citing both its own investigations and information received from the U.S., suspects that New Delhi may have had a hand in the killing. Meanwhile the U.S. is alleging Indian-government involvement in a murder plot against a Sikh activist in this country. There is nothing new about a region’s sometimes violent politics following its diaspora—something worth remembering amid talk of accepting refugees from Gaza—and this matter is complicated by India’s geopolitical importance. Nevertheless, we and Canada should insist that in our countries, our rules apply.

◼ Ukrainian authorities announced the arrest of two colonels in its State Protection Department, the agency tasked with the personal protection of President Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior government officials. The two men were allegedly plotting with the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, to take Zelensky hostage and kill him. Another target was Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of Ukraine’s military-intelligence service. The plotters, according to the Ukrainians, had hoped that Budanov would “be eliminated” before Orthodox Easter as an inauguration gift to Vladimir Putin, who was sworn in for a fifth term as Russia’s president this week at the Kremlin. As Russian dissidents and those who would resist Putin’s imperium have repeatedly learned, few are entirely safe from the Kremlin’s murderous plans.

◼ Demonstrators in Tbilisi, Georgia, have been gathering by the thousands. They oppose a bill that would designate any nongovernmental organization an “agent of foreign influence” if funding from abroad accounted for more than 20 percent of its revenue. NGOs have been crucial to the functioning of the post-Soviet government of this nation of 4 million people in the South Caucasus, promoting policies and values consistent with Western liberal democracy. Bills that would have crippled NGOs provoked mass protests in March 2023 and were soon withdrawn or defeated in parliament. Last month, the ruling party announced plans to revive the legislation, and demonstrators returned to the streets. “No to Russian law,” the placards read; the underlying conflict between Georgia’s pro-Russian government and its pro-European public bears striking resemblance to Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests of 2013–14. Georgia applied for membership in the European Union in 2022 and was denied on grounds of government corruption. Now a Putinist minority pressures the ruling party to placate Moscow even as crowds in the streets wave the flag of Europe. The U.S. State Department has indicated support for the protesters and should consider their call to sanction officials pushing the “foreign influence” law.

◼ MIT announced last week that it will no longer require diversity statements for potential faculty hires. Sally Kornbluth, last woman standing among the three elite university presidents who testified before the House last winter about the post-10/7 outbreak of antisemitism on campuses, wrote, to mark the occasion, that “compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” One can only agree, while wondering why they were considered to work prior to this moment.

◼ Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian journalist, historian, democracy leader, and political prisoner. Twice, agents of the Russian state tried to kill him with poison: once in 2015, once in 2017. He was imprisoned shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He was sentenced to 25 years. He is in terrible health, and his family and friends worry that he will soon die, as another Russian political prisoner, Alexei Navalny, did last February. In 2017, Kara-Murza started to write columns for the Washington Post. While in prison, he has managed to send some columns through a lawyer—risking worse treatment as a result. He has now won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. This puts a spotlight on a political prisoner, who needs a spotlight. But it also rewards an outstanding writer and thinker. President Biden should consider giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. There is precedent for this: In 2007, President George W. Bush gave the award to a Cuban political prisoner, Óscar Elías Biscet, in absentia. It perhaps helped keep him alive. Biscet was released in 2011, and he eventually received his medal from Bush, by then an ex-president, in person: a precedent that we should hope will be followed for Kara-Murza.