“Here’s a delicious story,” says Cory Doctorow in Medium. Russian looters in Ukraine stole $5m worth of John Deere farm equipment – but when they shipped the kit home, the company remotely activated an “inbuilt kill switch” that rendered the machinery totally inoperable. Ha! Take that, bad guys! Alas, scratch at the surface of this tale of glorious comeuppance, and you find a “far scarier parable”. Bizarre as it may sound, Deere’s kill switches “put the entire food supply chain at risk”.

Fiona Hill has, in her own words, gone “from the coal house to the White house”. The 56-year-old foreign affairs specialist, who has advised George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump about Russia, was born in the former mining town of Bishop Auckland in northern England. Her mother was an NHS midwife, and her father was a coal miner turned hospital porter who advised her to leave their town, saying: “There’s nothing for you here, pet.” The family were too poor to have a television, Hill tells Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs, and she had to turn down a scholarship to a local private school because they couldn’t afford the uniform and books. Instead, she would take refuge in the quietest part of their small house and look things up in their complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The sixties was “the best decade for travel”, says Hilary Bradt in The Daily Telegraph – but it was not for the faint of heart. After World War Two, in a bid to protect the pound, the government limited the amount of cash you could take abroad to just £25. In the early 1960s restrictions were relaxed, but in 1966 Harold Wilson tightened them again, bringing in a £50 limit. There were ways around it, of course. A friend’s mother used to send £5 notes, hidden inside Knorr soup packets, to a prearranged foreign address. The tin foil of the soup packet bamboozled Post Office X-rays.

Ukraine is a country “dreamed into existence by a poet”, says Askold Melnyczuk in LitHub. In the 18th century, Taras Shevchenko’s nationalist poetry had the effect of “solidifying and fortifying the indigenous people’s sense of themselves”, and ever since poets have held a “singular importance” culturally. That’s why Russia has long been waging war on the Ukrainian language. In 1863, Moscow introduced a ban on Ukrainian poetry. In 1876, Emperor Alexander II outlawed all publications in Ukrainian, including imported books, theatre productions and songs. In 1930, Ukraine had 260 active writers; by 1938, only 36 remained – the rest had mostly been shot, arrested, or disappeared without a trace.