April 15 is a curiously fraught day in American history.
In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 a.m., and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who adored the president, said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
In 1912, the British passenger liner RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m. after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
In 1920, two security guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, were murdered on this date; Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti would be accused of the crime, convicted, and, in 1927, executed.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color line in baseball.
And in 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others.
The significance of April 15, 2021 is not nearly as obviously dramatic as any of these other landmark days, but there was, in fact, new information that shifts our understanding of both our past and our future.
Today, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against sixteen entities and sixteen individuals working with the Russian government who tried to swing the 2020 presidential election or who were involved in the recent cyberattack on federal agencies and American businesses. The sanctions have teeth: they prohibit U.S. banks from investing in Russian bonds, making it hard for Russia to borrow money. The U.S. also expelled ten Russian diplomats. NATO officials expressed their support for the U.S. move, British officials called in the Russian ambassador to express their concern at Russia’s “pattern of malign activity,” and Poland expelled three Russian diplomats.