Russian missiles pounded the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv this week. Moscow now says it downed five Ukrainian military balloons in what has largely become a war of attrition.

Threat Status special correspondent Guillaume Ptak continues to report from the front line. He has a deep dive from the eastern Ukrainian town of Orikhiv, which was the starting point of Ukraine’s 2023 summer counteroffensive but is now in the middle of a two-way artillery firing range.

On Feb. 21, a Russian 550-pound “glide bomb” tore through the dome of the Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the center of Orikhiv before blowing out the stained-glass windows and scattering shrapnel all over the edifice. 

“That’s the Russian world right there,” the soft-spoken head of the press service of Ukraine’s 118th Mechanized Brigade reflected on a recent day in the town, gesturing at the surrounding devastation and shaking his head in disbelief.

China’s communist government is engaged in large-scale political warfare and influence efforts it calls united front operations that are seeking to subvert all sectors of the United States, according to an investigation by the House oversight committee.

“This is a huge problem,” Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said at a hearing Wednesday that was the first public phase of a major investigation by the panel into Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence operations.

“The Oversight Committee’s message to federal agencies is this: the threat from the CCP is grave,” the Kentucky Republican said. “You must step up and recognize what the CCP is seeking to do to our country. If agencies don’t see that the CCP is our adversary — they can’t effectively counter China when it targets the American communities for whom the federal government is responsible.”

Mr. Comer went on to assert: “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence consistently recognizes the CCP as THE threat to American security and our economy. Yet too many agencies are not doing enough because they don’t have a China strategy, creative solutions, and proactive, aggressive methods.”

An ex-TikTok worker says the social media giant shares U.S. user data with counterparts in Beijing via a stealth chain of command through which the company’s U.S.-based workforce answers to Chinese higher-ups.

TikTok hid connections with its China-based parent company ByteDance from the public, according to Evan Turner, who worked at TikTok as a senior data scientist from April to September 2022. Mr. Turner told Fortune that he initially reported to a Beijing-based executive for ByteDance but was later reassigned to answer to an American manager in Seattle, as concerns spread that U.S. user data was vulnerable to the Chinese Communist Party.

TikTok has long denied sharing data with the Chinese government and trashed the Fortune report as old news intended to mislead people. In a statement on X, TikTok said the Fortune article relied on fabrications and cited past information, before TikTok implemented new strategies to safeguard data.

The House passed legislation last month that would force TikTok to divest ByteDance or face a U.S. ban. The legislation is currently stalled in the Senate. Foundation for Defense of Democracies China Program Director Craig Singleton discussed TikTok’s lobbying efforts in an exclusive Threat Status Influencers video earlier this year. He also warned that ByteDance was in a dangerous position to share information with China’s government.

The U.S. Army recently dispatched a new long-range missile system to the Philippines for the first time since the U.S. in 2019 exited the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned such deployments.

Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific forces, says the deployment of the new missile system is “historic” and highlights continuous Army transformation to deal with a complex and challenging environment.

“The planning, transportation and deployment of the newest U.S. Army long-range precision fires system supports a safe, stable and secure Indo-Pacific in partnership with our allies from the Armed Forces Philippines,” Gen. Flynn tells National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz, whose Inside the Ring column is published every Thursday.

At the time of Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel, President Biden said the U.S. commitment to Israel is “ironclad” and that any such attack will not and cannot be tolerated.

Columnist Tim Constantine compares Mr. Biden to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who advocated for appeasement of Hitler’s Germany because he wanted to avoid a second world war. 

Mr. Biden’s “ironclad” comment “was a great soundbite and show of strength by the U.S. commander in chief during a campaign year in which he is being painted by his political opposition as weak,” Mr. Constantine writes. “Unfortunately, it was mere hours later when Mr. Biden walked back the ironclad commitment and told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate, and if he did, America would have no part in it.”

Washington Times Editor-at-Large David Keene offers a sobering look at U.S. policy failures relating to Haiti over decades. “Then-President Donald Trump may have painted with too broad a brush when, in 2018, he cavalierly described some Third World nations as ‘s—-hole’ countries, but in singling out Haiti, he was dead on,” argues Mr. Keene.

“Early this spring, the gangs in Port-au-Prince forced the government to resign. Civilians are butchered on the streets by rival gangs, the most powerful headed by Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier, a thug blamed for a 1988 gang offensive that killed more than 70 civilians and burned hundreds of homes,” he writes.