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2022/07/30 | Ukraine Calls for Investigation Into Prisoner Deaths as Outrage Grows | As global outrage grew over an explosion that killed at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners held at a Russian detention camp, Ukrainian authorities called for an international investigation on Saturday while marshaling evidence that they said would prove that Russia had orchestrated what they described as a “terrorist attack.”
Since the explosion late Thursday at Correctional Colony No. 120, a prison camp in the Russian-occupied eastern region of Donetsk, the warring parties have presented diametrically opposed accounts of what happened, further embittering a war now entering its sixth month.
Russian officials claimed that Ukrainians, using precision weapons supplied by the United States, had attacked the prison themselves, to deter defectors. The Ukrainian authorities rejected the narrative as absurd and said that the deaths were a premeditated atrocity committed by Russian forces from within the prison, where survivors described being given just enough food to survive and suffering ritual beatings, including with chains and metal pipes. |
2022/07/31 | As Ukraine Orders Civilians to Evacuate the East, Residents Face a Grim Choice | DONETSK PROVINCE, Ukraine — Thuds from the artillery pounding Ukraine’s embattled east reverberated in the distance, yet it was the shouts of playing children on a recent afternoon that echoed across the yard near the front line.
The scene spoke to the grim choice that residents face after President Volodymyr Zelensky called this weekend for a mandatory evacuation of the region, directing hundreds of thousands of civilians in eastern Ukraine to leave their homes.
“We could go,” said Natasha, a 46-year-old mother of six, talking over the din of war with unflagging calm. “But how would we earn money? And I have kids to feed.” |
2022/07/31 | A former Kremlin adviser is hospitalized in Europe. | Anatoly Chubais, who resigned as a top Kremlin adviser shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was hospitalized on Sunday in a western European country in critical condition with the symptoms of a rare neurological disorder. Mr. Chubais had suddenly grown numb in his hands and legs, his wife, Avodtya Smirnova, told the Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak.
Mr. Chubais, 67, told Ms. Sobchak himself that he had been diagnosed with the rare Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves.
According to Ms. Sobchak’s news channel, specialists in “chemical protection suits” examined the room in which he suddenly became ill. |
2022/07/31 | The Red Cross says it still doesn’t have access to the prison camp where dozens of Ukrainians died. | However, the I.C.R.C. said hours later that — despite having requested access to the site, the wounded and the dead as soon as it learned of the attack — it still had not yet received any confirmation that access would be granted.
It noted in a statement that all parties to the conflict have an obligation under international law to give the I.C.R.C. access to prisoners of war.
“We are ready to deploy to Olenivka,” the I.C.R.C. said, adding that it already had medical, forensic and humanitarian teams in the vicinity. “It is imperative that the I.C.R.C. be granted immediate access to the Olenivka facility, and other places where the wounded and dead might have been transferred.”
The Olenivka facility is a few miles from the front line in Donetsk, where fighting has intensified following a brief pause in July after the Russians gained control over nearly all of the neighboring Luhansk Province. |
2022/07/29 | Lebanon says it is investigating Ukraine’s claim that a docked ship contains plundered grain. | Lebanese authorities said Friday that they were investigating a Ukrainian claim that a Syrian ship under U.S. sanctions that docked in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli was carrying Ukrainian grain stolen by Russia.
The Laodicea, a Syrian-flagged cargo ship owned by the state transport company, arrived in Lebanon on Wednesday carrying nearly 10 tons of wheat and barley. Soon after, the Ukrainian Embassy alerted Lebanese authorities that they believed the grain had been stolen by Russia. Russia is a close ally of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and intervened in that country’s civil war to prop him up.
Lebanon’s customs authority is inspecting the ship’s documents to assess whether the cargo is under sanctions or was stolen, according to Raymond El Khoury, director general of the authority. But he said that the Ukrainian Embassy had sent no evidence to back up its allegations, and that if no proof was found that the grain was stolen, it would be unloaded. It was not clear where the grain was ultimately bound. |
2022/07/29 | I’m Ukraine’s Foreign Minister. Putin Must Be Stopped. | KYIV, Ukraine — Russia, apparently, is ready for a cease-fire. The door to negotiations, the Kremlin’s spokesman said last week, has never been closed.
No one should be fooled. Whatever its officials may say, Russia remains focused on war and aims to ruin Ukraine and shatter the West. The sight of Odesa, hit by Russian missiles just hours after a deal was reached to allow grain exports from southern ports, should dispel any lingering naïveté. For Vladimir Putin, a cease-fire now would simply allow his depleted invasion forces to take a break before returning for further aggression.
The truth is simple: Mr. Putin will not stop until he is stopped. That’s why calls for a cease-fire, audible across Europe and America, are badly misplaced. This is not the time to accept unfavorable cease-fire proposals or peace deals. The task instead is to defeat Russia and limit its ability to attack anyone again in the foreseeable future. With sustained and timely assistance, Ukraine is ready and able to do so. |
2022/07/31 | One of Ukraine’s richest businessmen is killed in the port city of Mykolaiv. | MYKOLAIV — The first air raid alarm rang out over Mykolaiv at 1:01 a.m. and for the next four hours, explosions thundered as Russian missiles rained down on this already battered southern port city.
By dawn, a hotel, a sports complex, two schools, a service station and scores of homes were in ruins and emergency crews raced between blast sites were working to establish the full casualty count. But one of Ukraine’s richest businessmen, Oleksiy Vadaturskyi, and his wife were among the dead after what President Volodymyr Zelensky called “one of the most brutal shellings” since the war began.
Mr. Vadaturskyi’s company, Nibulon, confirmed that he and his wife, Raisa, died in their home.
Tributes to Mr. Vadaturskyi — who had been declared a “Hero of Ukraine” more than a decade ago for his contributions to society — poured in from across the country as news of his death spread. Mr. Zelensky called it “a huge loss for Mykolaiv and for all Ukraine,” later referring to Mr. Vadaturskyi as a “hero.” |
2022/07/29 | Lethal missile strikes in Kharkiv hit sites related to Ukraine’s military, a new pattern. | KHARKIV, Ukraine — Two missile strikes hit military compounds in central Kharkiv just before dawn on Friday, the latest in a series of powerful nighttime strikes on the city that seem increasingly targeted at sites used by the Ukrainian armed forces.
At least two soldiers died, according to rescue workers and police officers at the scene.
Ukrainian officials rarely release information on military casualties or damage done to military sites and forbid photographers from recording the destruction at them. The head of the regional administration in Kharkiv, Oleh Synyehubov, said only that a 71-year-old civilian had been wounded in the head from the blasts.
On Friday, soldiers and emergency workers covered in brick dust cleared away the rubble from the courtyard of a two-story building. Two vehicles, an S.U.V. and a jeep, caked in dust and crushed by falling debris, had been dragged out into the street. |
2022/07/30 | Europe’s Race to Secure New Energy Sources Is on a Knife’s Edge | As Russia tightens its chokehold on supplies of natural gas, Europe is looking everywhere for energy to keep its economy running. Coal-fired power plants are being revived. Billions are being spent on terminals to bring in liquefied natural gas, much of it from shale fields in Texas. Officials and heads of state are flying to Qatar, Azerbaijan, Norway and Algeria to nail down energy deals.
Across Europe, fears are growing that a cutoff of Russian gas will force governments to ration fuel and businesses to close factories, moves that could put thousands of jobs at risk.
So far, the hunt for fuel has been met with considerable success. But as prices continue to soar and the Russian threat shows no sign of abating, the margin for error is thin. |
2022/07/28 | The Prisoner Swap | Bout is serving a 25-year jail sentence after his conviction in 2011 on four counts of conspiracy, including conspiring to kill American citizens. He is probably the highest-profile Russian in U.S. custody, and Russian officials have pressed for his return since his conviction.
The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said today that while negotiations on a deal were ongoing, “no concrete result has been achieved.”
A former officer in the Soviet Air Force, Bout was notorious among American intelligence officials, earning the nickname Merchant of Death as he evaded capture for years. His exploits helped inspire a 2005 film, “Lord of War,” that starred Nicolas Cage.
In 2008, he was taken into custody in Bangkok after being ensnared in a foreign sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration. His extradition to the U.S., which Russian officials strenuously opposed, took more than two and a half years. |
2022/07/28 | Why does Ukraine fight? So it can exist, Zelensky says. | Ukraine already celebrates Independence Day, on Aug. 24, to mark the country’s break from the Soviet Union in 1991. But officials have said the government felt the need to create the new holiday last summer after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, fomented rebellion in the east and threatened further aggression.
In contrast to Independence Day, Statehood Day is meant to address a more existential question by stretching back a millennium to demonstrate that Ukraine has its own history and culture independent of Russia.
Questions of history — and how to interpret that history — might have once been the subject of nuanced discussion in university lecture halls. But they were weaponized in the run-up to the war in Ukraine as President Vladimir V. Putin sought to justify his unprovoked invasion of a neighbor that shared deep cultural and historical ties.
Only three days before launching the first missiles at targets across Ukraine on Feb. 24, Mr. Putin declared Ukraine an invention of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin. He argued that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction and that it had been a mistake to endow Ukraine with a sense of statehood by allowing it autonomy within the newly created Soviet state. |
2022/07/27 | Britain’s Power Grid Warns of a Tight Energy Supply This Winter | Britain’s power grid raised the prospect of a tight energy supply this winter, publishing an unusual early forecast to help the energy industry prepare for strains over the winter related to the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“While Britain is not reliant on Russian gas to the extent that the rest of Europe is, it is clear that the cessation of flows of gas into Europe could have knock-on impacts, including very high prices,” Britain’s National Grid said in a new report.
The organization said it would cope with expensive and unpredictable energy, along with any outages, by delaying the closure of coal plants and encouraging greater participation in “demand side response” from energy users. |
2022/07/28 | Here are some prisoner swaps that freed Americans. | The prospect of the United States exchanging a Russian prisoner for the basketball star Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, a former Marine, is reminiscent of the fraught deals Washington orchestrated with Moscow and its allies during and after the Cold War.
Perhaps the most dramatic exchange was the 1962 swap on a fog-shrouded bridge between East Germany and West Berlin that became the stuff of Hollywood. The United States exchanged Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, a Soviet spy, for Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot of a U‐2 spy plane that shot down over the Soviet Union two years earlier. More than 50 years later, the trade was portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 2015 film, “Bridge of Spies.”
Now, experts say a prisoner exchange may be the only path to freedom for Mr. Whelan and Ms. Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who plays for the Phoenix Mercury. |
2022/07/28 | The Final Frontier Soon May No Longer Belong to All of Us | The symbolic value of the treaty is obvious: Nationality recedes into the background when astronauts are floating in space. But beyond that, it has created standards and practices to prevent environmental contamination of the moon and other celestial bodies. It promotes data sharing, including about the many objects, like satellites and spacecraft, launched into space, which helps to avoid collisions. And its codified norms of the common heritage of mankind, peaceful use and scientific cooperation help preserve multilateralism in the face of states’ derogations.
But the looming prospect of the commercialization of space has begun to test the limits of international space law. In 2020, NASA, alone, created the Artemis Accords, which challenge the foundational multilateral principles of prior space agreements. These are rules primarily drafted by the United States that other countries are now adopting. This is not collaborative multilateral rule making but rather the export of U.S. laws abroad to a coalition of the willing.
The accords take the legal form of a series of bilateral treaties with 21 foreign nations, including Australia, Canada, Japan, the U.A.E. and Britain. This is not simply a relic of the antiglobalist rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration. Just two weeks ago, Saudi Arabia signed the Artemis Accords, during President Biden’s visit.
Moreover, the accords open up the possibility of mining the moon or other celestial bodies for resources. They create “safety zones” where states may extract resources, though the document states that these activities must be undertaken in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty. Legal experts point out that these provisions could violate the principle of nonappropriation, which prohibits countries from declaring parts of space as their sovereign territory. Others suggest that it is important to get in front of the changing technological landscape, arguing that when mining the moon becomes possible, there should already be rules in place to regulate such activities. Failure to do so could result in a crisis similar to that around seabed mining, which is poised to begin even though U.N. rules have yet to be finalized. |
2022/07/31 | What’s a Critic Doing in a War Zone? | Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
A news organization needs all sorts of journalists and professionals to cover a war zone effectively: reporters and photographers who can gather information, local journalists and interpreters to gain access to sources, security experts and drivers to help everyone stay safe. One person you almost never need is a critic.
Yet I spent several weeks this July in Ukraine, leaving behind my usual bailiwick of art galleries and biennials to look head-on at military conflict and humanitarian crisis. As one of The New York Times’s critics at large, my job is to help readers understand culture against wider backdrops of history, politics, cities and climate. And this era-defining war is, at its core, a culture war: an imperial incursion buttressed by misrepresentations of history, language and religion.
So I headed to Kyiv — one of the most artistically vibrant cities in Europe, its avenues now punctuated by military checkpoints — to survey its museums and monasteries, to interview its artists and archivists, and to check on the capital’s fabled nightclubs. I also traveled to several mangled towns north of Kyiv, carefully navigating the ruins of blasted heritage sites, and reported from Lviv, the handsome Hapsburg city in the west of Ukraine, where many of the country’s cultural preservation initiatives have been masterminded. |
2022/07/27 | The Battle for Kherson | Ukrainian long-range missiles hit a bridge overnight that is critical for Russia to resupply its forces in Kherson. Dozens of Russian missiles also struck targets across the Ukrainian regions of Odesa and Mykolaiv as Moscow moved troops and military equipment in the direction of Kherson to reinforce its positions, according to the Ukrainian military high command.
Both armies are trying to limit their opponents’ logistics operations.
Since long-range Western weapons systems started arriving, Ukraine has pounded Russian ammunition depots and command and control center behind the front lines.
Ukraine’s southern military command said today that its forces took back two villages in the north of the Kherson region, Andriivka and Lozove. A spokeswoman for the military command said that retaking the villages put more Russian positions within range of Ukrainian artillery.
Recapturing Kherson could help restore momentum to Ukraine, and give its troops a much-needed morale boost, my colleague Michael Schwirtz reported from the Kherson border region. |
2022/07/29 | Your Friday Briefing | U.S. debates climate and the economy
The gross domestic product of the U.S. shrank again, fueling fears of a recession.
G.D.P. fell 0.2 percent in the second quarter after a 0.4 percent decline in the first. That means by one common but unofficial definition, the U.S. economy has entered a recession, two years after it emerged from the last one.
News of the back-to-back contractions heightened a debate in Washington over whether a recession had begun and, if so, whether President Biden was to blame.
Democrats are increasingly focused on taming inflation. They argue there’s one possible step forward. It’s the energy, tax and health care agreement that was announced Wednesday after Senator Joe Manchin reversed his opposition to the bill. |
2022/07/28 | German Inflation Hits 8.5 Percent, Again Driven by High Energy Prices | So far, energy providers have been bearing the brunt of the exorbitant increase in the price of natural gas. One financially troubled German energy company, Uniper, was bailed out last week by the government, which took a 30 percent stake. But starting this fall, the government will introduce an energy surcharge of several cents per kilowatt-hour on consumer energy bills that will be passed along to utilities. Officials expect the charge will translate to an annual increase of several hundred euros per household.
Germany, which still relies on Russian natural gas for about a third of its needs, has been hit especially hard by Russia’s decision to sharply reduce deliveries of the fuel. This week, Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, reduced flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany to 20 percent of capacity, a further restriction on already limited deliveries.
Economists have said Germany is on the edge of a recession, as business sentiment declines and officials urge citizens to cut their energy use in any way possible, even by taking cold showers.
Last week, the European Central Bank raised interest rates for the first time in more than a decade to control rising prices amid mounting concerns over an economic slowdown. |
2022/07/29 | Dry Fountains, Cold Pools, Less Beer? Germans Tiptoe Up the Path to Energy Savings | “If Putin gets the impression that he can really hurt the economy of the biggest European countries, he won’t hesitate to cut off gas supply,” he said. “If it’s not hurting too much, he’ll choose taking the money over inflicting the pain.”
While not binding, for now, the E.U. consumption targets have sent a clear signal not only of European resolve to stand up to Mr. Putin, but also real concern that European economies are at risk, especially if Germany, the continent’s economic powerhouse, takes a hit.
The Kremlin-controlled Gazprom underlined the threat this week when it reduced flows through Nord Stream 1 into Germany to just 20 percent, citing, unconvincingly for many, problems with its German-made turbines.
Roughly half of all homes in Germany are heated with gas, while a third of the country’s gas is used by industry. If the coming winter is particularly cold, a cutoff would be brutal. |
2022/07/27 | The U.S. offered a prisoner swap to free Brittney Griner and another American, an official says. | In response to a question last week about potentially trading Mr. Bout, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, did not sound enthusiastic, calling Mr. Bout “a creep.”
Mr. Bout, 55, is a former Soviet military officer who made a fortune in global arms trafficking before he was caught in a federal sting operation. Russian officials have pressed his case for years, and in recent weeks Russian media outlets had directly linked his case to Ms. Griner’s.
Russia has held Ms. Griner, 31, since mid-February, when she was arrested at a Moscow airport on charges involving hashish oil found in her luggage. She has pleaded guilty to the drug charges against her and said in a court appearance outside Moscow on Wednesday that she accidentally packed a small amount of the cannabis-related substance, which she uses at the direction of a doctor to manage pain. Russia has notoriously strict drug laws. At her trial on Wednesday, she testified of her ordeal navigating an unfamiliar legal system. |
2022/07/08 | Russia Votes to Shut Down Last U.N. Aid Route Into Syria | “Our position has been clear on the issues here and have been known to everybody from the very beginning,” Mr. Polyanskiy said. “We haven’t misled anyone.”
He urged diplomats to support the Russian plan, “if, of course, the fate of the project is important, and not your dubious political games.”
More than 5.7 million Syrians have fled the country since civil war began in 2011. The border crossing’s closure could force thousands more to leave, setting off another refugee crisis in countries in the Middle East and Europe that are already dealing with an influx of people escaping conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and sub-Saharan Africa.
It was also one of the few areas of compromise between the United States and Russia, which had for years negotiated agreements to leave the route open but ended nearly all diplomatic communications after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February.
U.N. officials have described the Bab al-Hawa route as the gateway for the world’s largest humanitarian aid operation, one that has delivered more than 56,000 truckloads of lifesaving supplies to Idlib Province in northwestern Syria over the last eight years. As many as four million people in Syria — including an estimated 1.7 million who are living in tents — receive supplies that are delivered to Idlib.
Aid groups estimate that 70 percent of Syria’s population does not have reliable food supplies.
“Closing the cross-border could result in catastrophic consequences,” Dr. Khaula Sawah, the president of the U.S. chapter of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, said in a statement ahead of the U.N. vote. |
2022/07/28 | Crops ‘Stored Everywhere’: Ukraine’s Harvest Piles Up | There is political will from Ukraine’s allies: The White House welcomed the accord, as did the United Nations and international aid organizations, which have warned of potential famine and political unrest the longer Ukraine’s grain remains blocked.
Freeing the grain for shipment is expected to ease a growing hunger crisis brought on by Russia’s aggression — not so much because Ukrainian grain may be shipped to desperate countries faster, but because more supplies can help bring down prices, which spiked after the war but have been falling recently. “It’s quite positive,” said Nikolay Gorbachov, head of the Ukrainian Grain Association. “It’s possible to find the way.”
Yet even when reopened, the Black Sea ports are expected to operate at just about half of their prewar capacity, experts say, covering only a portion of the more than 20 million tons of backlogged grain. Ships will steer through a path cleared of Ukrainian mines used to prevent Russian ships from entering, and endure inspections in Turkey to ensure they don’t carry weapons back into Ukraine.
And it is uncertain that enough ships will venture back. Shipping companies that once operated in the Black Sea have taken on other cargo routes. Insurers are wary of covering vessels in a conflict zone, and without insurance, no one will ship.
In the meantime, Ukraine’s farmers are grappling with vast amounts of trapped grain from last year’s harvests. Before the war, new crops moved in and out of grain elevators — from harvest to export — like clockwork. But Russia’s Black Sea blockage created a massive pileup. |
2022/07/28 | Your Thursday Briefing | U.S. proposes a prisoner swap
The U.S. offered a prisoner swap to Russia: Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer, for Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star, and Paul Whelan, a former Marine.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that he would speak to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine about a “substantial proposal” to free Griner and Whelan. The U.S. State Department says the two were wrongfully detained.
Blinken’s comments came the same day that Griner, who has been detained in Russia on drug charges since February, testified in court. She said that she had been tossed into a bewildering legal system with little explanation of what was happening. Here are live updates. |
2022/07/28 | Why a Vogue Cover Created a Controversy for Olena Zelenska | Still, other readers have come to the defense of Ms. Zelenska, seeing the shoot as a symbol of national pride: a means to show the world Ukrainian elegance; a reminder of the balm that can be found in beauty; and a subtle nod to shared humanity in the face of inhuman aggression. She is not, after all, in a ball gown eating cake. She is in a war zone, looking haunted.
To a certain extent, the debate simply shows how tangled our feelings about fashion still are and how entrenched the view of it as a nonserious subject remains — despite the fact that fashion is a key part of pop culture and the rare equivalent of a global language. It’s one that every politician, and public figure, employs to their own ends, whether they want to admit it or not. (That’s why, despite the risks, they keep appearing in magazines like Vogue.)
The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a war being conducted on all fronts: on the ground, in the air, in the digital sphere and in the arena of public opinion. (See, for example, Ms. Zelenska’s appearance in Washington last week.) Vogue — and, indeed, any outlet that allows the Ukrainian people to reach different swaths of the global population and influence sentiment — is one of them. As Ms. Zelenska and her husband, who founded one of the biggest television entertainment production companies in Ukraine before getting into politics, know.
By putting Ms. Zelenska on its cover, Vogue is furthering her role as the relatable face, and voice, of the struggle; bringing her up close and personal for the watching world. And by appearing in public, and raising issues in public, when her husband cannot, she is keeping her country’s needs alive in the international conversation at a time when other crises are vying for attention. She has, essentially, weaponized Vogue. |
2022/07/28 | Your Friday Briefing: Biden and Xi’s Fraught Phone Call | A tense call between the leaders of the U.S. and China
President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China spoke by phone for two hours and 17 minutes — their first direct conversation in four months during which relations between their countries have soured.
China and the U.S. have been at odds over Russia’s war in Ukraine, tariffs and aggressive Chinese action in the Asia-Pacific region. The future of Taiwan, a self-governing island which China covets and which Biden has said he would defend with force, has become a particularly contentious issue, especially since Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is reportedly planning to visit.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the call was productive, but issued a stern warning against what it considered American provocations, without directly mentioning Ms. Pelosi. |
2022/07/11 | Germany on Edge as Russian Gas Pipeline Goes Offline for Repair | “It’s simply a situation like we haven’t had before,” Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, told German public radio Deutschlandfunk on Monday. “We honestly always have to prepare for the worst and work a little bit for the best.”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz convened the heads of big German companies in Berlin on Monday to discuss the impact that the war in Ukraine and the economic sanctions against Russia is having on their businesses. Industry leaders are faced with high energy prices and growing uncertainty while struggling to emerge from disruptions caused by pandemic shutdowns and supply chain snarls. Economists are predicting that a full gas cutoff could tip Germany, Europe’s largest economy, into a recession.
Over the weekend, Mr. Habeck reached an agreement with Canada for a turbine needed for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that had been sent to Montreal for repairs to be returned to Germany. The turbine’s return had been held up by sanctions against Russia, and Gazprom had cited the missing equipment as the reason it was forced to reduce supplies through the pipeline.
Even as Germans are flocking to the beaches and mountains for their summer vacations, the economy ministry is calling on them to begin servicing their furnaces, installing water-saving shower heads and preparing to lower their heating by at least one degree in the coming winter to save energy. |
2022/07/27 | Germany Counts on Chilled Gas to Keep Warm Over Winter | WILHELMSHAVEN, Germany — When a major energy company wanted to bring liquefied natural gas to Germany through the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven three years ago, the proposal hit a brick wall. The company couldn’t find enough customers, the government offered only tepid support and residents denounced the scheme as a threat to a local apple orchard.
“Apple juice, not L.N.G.,” protesters said. The company, Uniper, shelved its plans.
Now, steel pipes are being rammed into the sea floor to prepare for the arrival of a nearly thousand-foot-long L.N.G. processing vessel, the Höegh Esperanza. Nearby, construction crews in bulldozers are digging along the perimeter of a forest to clear the way for a new 20-mile pipeline to connect to Germany’s gas grid.
The hope is for gas to start arriving here before the end of winter, Uniper said, as the demand for heating homes soars. |
2022/07/27 | Special Military Cell Flows Weapons and Equipment Into Ukraine | About 75 percent of the arms are sent to staging bases in Poland, where Ukrainian troops pick up their cargo and take it back across the border. Admiral Heinz declined to identify two other neighboring countries where shipments are delivered, citing security concerns by those nations. The planners use different border crossings into Ukraine for weapons and for humanitarian assistance, he said.
In nearly five months, the center has moved more than 78,000 tons of arms, munitions and equipment worth more than $10 billion, U.S. and Western military officials said.
Many Baltic and Eastern European countries have donated Soviet-standard weapons and ammunition that the Ukrainian military has long used. But given the intense fighting, those stocks are running low, if not already depleted. One factory in Europe is making some Soviet-standard munitions, including howitzer shells, and it is operating 24/7, Admiral Heinz said. The shortage has required Ukraine to begin transitioning to Western-standard weapons and ammunition, which are more plentiful.
Once the weapons are in Ukraine, U.S. and other Western military officials say they are not able to track them. They rely on Ukraine’s accounts of how and where the arms are used — although U.S. intelligence and military officials, including Special Operations forces — are in daily contact with their Ukrainian counterparts, U.S. officials said.
American and Ukrainian officials have downplayed reports that some weapons are being siphoned off on the black market in Ukraine, but Admiral Heinz acknowledged that “we are not serial-number tracking these once they go across the border.”
Russia has attacked Ukrainian train depots and warehouses but has not shown it can effectively strike moving targets — like weapons convoys — with its rapidly diminishing arsenal of precision-guided munitions, American officials said. |
2022/07/08 | Russia’s Lavrov Is Pariah at Group of 20 Event, but Only for Some | NUSA DUA, Indonesia — He was like a skunk at the tropical resort party, shunned by many, though by no means all.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, attended a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations in Bali on Friday, despite his country’s pariah status in Europe and elsewhere over its brutal war in Ukraine. His country’s invasion of its neighbor drove two central topics of discussion at the annual event: global disruptions of food and energy supplies.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declined to meet with Mr. Lavrov, as did several other Western foreign ministers. So many attendees refused to pose with Moscow’s top diplomat that a customary group photograph was canceled. |
2022/07/26 | Navigating mines and threatened by war, ships laden with grain are expected to leave Odesa soon. | If all goes to plan, a ship captain will weigh anchor at a wharf in Ukraine’s Odesa region in the coming days and steer a cargo vessel loaded with grain through the port before heading gingerly out into the Black Sea. A government vessel will lead the ship through a maze of mines and a rescue boat will follow.
Many eyes will be tracking the voyage. It would be the first since the signing of a deal last Friday to allow a resumption of Ukraine’s grain exports, which have been blocked since Russia’s invasion five months ago by Moscow’s dominance in the Black Sea and Kyiv’s decision to mine its southern ports to forestall a Russian amphibious assault.
Ukraine and Russia together supply more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, and Russia is also a major supplier of fertilizer. Ukraine is also a leading exporter of barley, corn and sunflower. |
2022/07/28 | This 150-Year-Old Mining Law Hurts Taxpayers and the Environment | Last year, the bipartisan infrastructure act created the first-ever abandoned hardrock reclamation program. But no money was allocated to pay for it. To get the money, a fair royalty for hardrock mining on public lands would be established by the proposed legislation, one like the royalties established long ago for coal, oil and gas. The royalties would be used to clean up these abandoned mine sites.
The problem is so large that the federal government cannot reclaim the worst of the sites without help. But states, counties, nonprofits and other potential partners in reclamation efforts are hamstrung by federal laws that treat volunteers who want to help clean up abandoned mines as if they were the very polluters who created the messes.
An example is the effort to clean up the Lilly/Orphan Boy mine near Helena, Mont., one of several abandoned mines on Telegraph Creek in the Little Blackfoot watershed. Under a partnership between the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and Trout Unlimited, toxic mine waste was removed from a floodplain. But the partners could not legally treat the acidic pollution flowing directly from the shuttered mine into the creek without taking on liability for a mess they didn’t create. As a result, though the mine was shut down in 1968, the pollution continues.
That’s why another of the proposed measures would provide states, counties and nonprofit groups with carefully prescribed liability protections, allowing these public-private and nonprofit partnerships to begin working on the root of the problem by directly treating toxic discharges.
As the United States pursues a transformation to renewable energy, responsible mining has a crucial role to play. The pandemic revealed major flaws in our reliance on foreign supply chains, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has highlighted the need for secure domestic sources of critical minerals that are the raw materials of clean power generation, electric vehicles and other emerging technologies.
At the same time, we need to invest a fair share of today’s gains into cleaning up the lasting consequences of more than a century of mining on our rivers and streams, fish and wildlife and communities that depend on clean water and healthy landscapes.
Martin Heinrich, a Democrat, represents New Mexico in the U.S. Senate. Chris Wood is the president and chief executive officer of the conservation group Trout Unlimited. |
2022/07/28 | The Role of Art in a Time of War | High on a wall of the Palazzo Pitti, in Florence, hangs a famous painting that Rubens completed in the last years of his life.
At its center is Mars, the god of war, surging out in battle armor from the doors of the Temple of Janus.
In Roman peacetime, this temple’s gates were always closed. Now they have burst open, and the frenzy has begun.
Beneath Mars’s feet lie victims about to be trampled. You see a mother looking up with terror at the gathering violence, desperate to protect her wailing child.
Next to her are two figures who have fallen to the ground and are on the verge of destruction. One is a woman with a lute, her instrument already broken. Another is a personified Architecture, his compass falling from his hand.
These are “The Consequences of War,” as Rubens saw them in 1638. Civilians suffer, but not only them; culture is a casualty too. |
2022/07/27 | Your Wednesday Briefing | A new Constitution in Tunisia
Tunisians have approved a new Constitution that cements the one-man rule instituted by President Kais Saied, according to the results of a referendum on Monday.
The referendum could spell the end of a young democracy. The Arab Spring uprisings began in Tunisia more than a decade ago. At the time, the country was internationally lauded as the only democracy to survive the revolts.
But in the years since, many Tunisians have come to view the government as corrupt and inadequate. In 2019, frustration with political paralysis and economic devastation led many to look to Saied, a political outsider at the time. That same anger drove some voters to vote yes on the referendum this week.
“If you tell me about democracy or human rights and all that stuff, we haven’t seen any of it in the last 10 years,” a 50-year-old bank employee said. He said he did not mind the Constitution’s concentration of powers in the hands of the president. “A boat needs one captain,” he said. “Personally, I need one captain.”
Context: The Constitution was approved by 94.6 percent of voters, according to the results released yesterday. But most major parties boycotted the vote to avoid lending it greater legitimacy.
Background: Saied suspended Parliament and fired his prime minister a year ago, effectively giving himself almost absolute power. |
2022/07/07 | Brittney Griner Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges in Russian Court | American officials insist they are doing all they can to secure the release of Ms. Griner, 31, a seven-time W.N.B.A. All-Star, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the first openly gay athlete signed to an endorsement contract by Nike. At Thursday’s hearing, the chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy in Moscow, Elizabeth Rood, handed Ms. Griner a letter from President Biden.
“Ms. Griner was able to read that letter,” Ms. Rood told reporters outside the courtroom. “I would like again to emphasize the commitment of the U.S. government at the very highest level to bring home safely Ms. Griner and all U.S. citizens wrongfully detained.”
But with tensions between the United States and Russia at their worst level in decades because of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has few options to secure her freedom. That was underscored by Mr. Ryabkov on Thursday as he made some of the most extensive comments by any Russian official about Ms. Griner’s case in the nearly five months she has spent in custody.
“Hype and publicity, for all the love for this genre among modern politicians, only gets in the way in this particular instance,” Mr. Ryabkov said. “This does not just distract from the case, but creates interference in the truest sense of the word. That’s why silence is needed here.”
He hinted, however, that Moscow was interested in negotiating over Ms. Griner’s fate, saying she would be helped by “a serious reading by the American side of the signals that they received from Russia, from Moscow, through specialized channels.”
Mr. Ryabkov did not specify what those signals were, though Russian state media has suggested that the Kremlin might be interested in exchanging the American athlete for Mr. Bout, 55, a former Soviet military officer who made a fortune in global arms trafficking before he was caught in a federal sting operation. |
2022/07/27 | Hardly Anyone Talks About How Fracking Was an Extraordinary Boondoggle | Update: This newsletter has been updated to reflect news developments.
In the energy scramble provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American liquid natural gas has so far played the role of Europe’s white knight. If Europe manages to keep its lights on, homes heated and factories running this winter, when energy demand is highest, it will be in large part thanks to shipments of American gas, which have more than doubled since the war began. Today, two-thirds of American oil and even more of its gas come from hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, which has played this heroic-seeming role before, in the country’s long effort post-9/11 to get out from the grip of Middle Eastern producers and secure what is often described as “energy independence.” (Donald Trump preferred the term “energy dominance.”) It hasn’t proved quite as useful as you might think: Because energy prices are set on global markets, domestic production doesn’t mean Americans pay less at the pump. But thanks in large part to fracking, the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and gas.
Perhaps the most striking fact about the American hydraulic-fracturing boom, though, is unknown to all but the most discriminating consumers of energy news: Fracking has been, for nearly all of its history, a money-losing boondoggle, profitable only recently, after being propped up by so much investment from Wall Street and private equity that it resembled less an efficient-markets no-brainer and more a speculative empire of bubbles like Uber and WeWork. The American shale revolution did bring the country “energy independence,” whatever that has been worth, and more abundant oil and gas. It has indeed reshaped the entire geopolitical landscape for fuel, though not enough to strip leverage from Vladimir Putin. But the revolution wasn’t primarily a result of some market-busting breakthrough or an engineering innovation that allowed the industry to print cash. From the start, the cash moved in the other direction; the revolution happened only because enormous sums of money were poured into the project of making it happen.
Today, with profits aided by the energy price spikes of the last year, the fracking industry is finally, at least for the time being, profitable. But from 2010 to 2020, U.S. shale lost $300 billion. Previously, from 2002 to 2012, Chesapeake, the industry leader, didn’t report positive cash flow once, ending that period with total losses of some $30 billion, as Bethany McLean documents in her 2018 book, “Saudi America,” the single best and most thorough account of the fracking boom up to that point. Between mid-2012 and mid-2017, the 60 biggest fracking companies were losing an average of $9 billion each quarter. From 2006 to 2014, fracking companies lost $80 billion; in 2014, with oil at $100 a barrel, a level that seemed to promise a great cash-out, they lost $20 billion. These losses were mammoth and consistent, adding up to a total that “dwarfs anything in tech/V.C. in that time frame,” as the Bloomberg writer Joe Weisenthal pointed out recently. “There were all these stories written about how V.C.s were subsidizing millennial lifestyles,” he noted on Twitter. “The real story to be written is about the massive subsidy to consumers from everyone who financed Chesapeake and all the companies that lost money fracking last decade.” |
2022/07/26 | Our Leaderless Free World | The central fact about the democratic world today is that it is leaderless.
Twenty-five years ago, we had the confident presences of Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl and Tony Blair — and Alan Greenspan. Now we have a failing American president, a timorous German chancellor, a British prime minister about to skulk out of office in ignominy and a chairman of the Federal Reserve who last year flubbed the most important decision of his career. Elsewhere: the resignation of Italy’s prime minister, a caretaker government in Israel, the assassination of Japan’s dominant political figure.
This is bad in normal times. It is catastrophic in bad ones. We are stumbling, half-blind, into four distinct but mutually reinforcing crises, each compounding the other.
The first crisis is one of international credibility. The war in Ukraine is not merely a crisis unto itself. It is a symptom of a crisis, which began with a withdrawal from Afghanistan that telegraphed incompetence and weakness and whose consequences were easily predictable. Beyond Ukraine, in which President Biden has committed enough support to prevent outright defeat but not to secure a clear victory, there is an imminent nuclear crisis with Iran, in which the president seems to have no policy other than negotiations that are on the cusp of failure, and another looming crisis over Taiwan, in which he alternates between challenging Beijing and trying to mollify it. |
2022/07/26 | The I.M.F. warns that a global recession could soon be at hand. | “Under this scenario, both the United States and the euro area experience near-zero growth next year, with negative knock-on effects for the rest of the world,” Mr. Gourinchas said.
According to the report, the likelihood of a global recession is rising. It said the probability of a recession starting in one of the Group of 7 advanced economies was now nearly 15 percent, four times its usual level. And it said some indicators suggested that the United States was already in a “technical” recession, which the I.M.F. defines as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Data set for release on Thursday is expected to show that the U.S. economy grew little or perhaps shrank in the second quarter of 2022.
At a news conference following the release of the report, Mr. Gourinchas added that the I.M.F. was not currently projecting that the United States was in a recession and that even if its economy contracted in the second quarter, defining a recession can be complicated.
“The recession in the way it is defined typically is looking at more than just output, you want to take into account the strength of the labor market,” Mr. Gourinchas said. “The general assessment as to whether the economy is in a recession overall is a little bit more complex.”
Mr. Gourinchas also suggested that the kind of “soft landing” that the Fed was trying to engineer — where it cools the economy just enough without setting off a recession — would be difficult to achieve. As the labor market cools, even a small “shock” could tip the economy into a recession, he said. |
2022/07/25 | Inside the Azovstal Siege | On Feb. 24, at the start of Russia’s invasion, the director of Azovstal and its board made a decision that would shape the battle for eastern Ukraine: They turned the plant into a refuge for employees and their families. The plant’s 36 bomb shelters, some more than 20 feet underground, had enough food for weeks.
Ukrainian soldiers also arrived at Azovstal, which they saw as the perfect place to make a last stand, surrounded on three sides by water and ringed by high walls.
But Azovstal also became a trap. The presence of civilians hampered the soldiers’ ability to defend themselves. The presence of Ukrainian fighters meant the civilians had to endure a vicious siege as food and clean water ran out.
On March 21, two helicopters carrying Ukrainian Special Forces fighters, crates of Stinger and Javelin missiles and a satellite internet system made a daring descent into the Azovstal complex. It was the first of seven missions in “Operation Air Corridor” to bring weapons in and wounded soldiers out. |
2022/07/26 | Your Tuesday Briefing | Thatcher looms large in U.K. race
Either Rishi Sunak, a former top finance official, or Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, will be the next prime minister of Britain.
Each candidate has tried to adopt the style of Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister whose right-wing policies remain popular among the Conservative voters that Sunak and Truss hope to win over. They are casting themselves as the heir to Thatcher’s free-market, low-tax, deregulatory revolution at home and her robust defense of Western democracy abroad.
But experts on Thatcher say the candidates are cherry-picking the legacy of the woman known as the Iron Lady. They are emphasizing the crowd-pleasing elements while glossing over the less appetizing ones, like tax increases in 1981, during the depths of a recession, at a time when she was determined to curb runaway inflation.
Sunak: He kicked off his campaign over the weekend in Grantham, Thatcher’s birthplace, and described his agenda as “common-sense Thatcherism.” His approach echoes Thatcher’s belief in balancing the books and her dislike of borrowing, which she viewed as a burden on future generations.
Sunak served in Boris Johnson’s government and is responsible for some of the economic policies he now proposes to sweep away. |
2022/07/26 | Bryan Young, an American volunteer who died fighting in Ukraine, felt called to help. | Bryan Young feared for his adopted homeland, his partner said. That’s why Mr. Young, a U.S. Army veteran, left the Republic of Georgia, where he settled and got married after an international cycling trip, and volunteered to fight the Russians.
“We had a very, very big fight because I didn’t want him to go,” said Mr. Young’s partner, Maria Lipka.
In March — not long after Russia invaded Ukraine — Mr. Young traveled to Istanbul, and then Ukraine, enlisting as a volunteer fighter. “He wanted to be useful and he wanted to use his knowledge because he’s former military,” Ms. Lipka said. |
2022/07/26 | Kyiv Nightlife Comes Back Amid Urge for Contact. ‘This Is the Cure.’ | KYIV — The rave had been planned for weeks, with the space secured and the D.J.s, the drinks, the invites and the security all lined up.
But after a recent missile strike far from the front lines killed more than 25 people, including children, in central Ukraine, an attack that deeply unsettled all Ukraine, the rave organizers met to make a hard, last-minute decision. Should they postpone the party?
They decided: No way.
“That’s exactly what the Russians want,” said Dmytro Vasylkov, one of the organizers. |
2022/07/25 | As Prices Soar in Ukraine, War Adds Economic Havoc to the Human Toll | LVIV, Ukraine — At his compact stall in Lviv’s main outdoor food market, Ihor Korpii arranged jars of blueberries that he and his wife had picked from a nearby forest into an attractive display. Fragrant dill and fresh peas harvested from their garden lay in neat piles on a table.
A schoolteacher surviving on modest pay, Mr. Korpii peddles produce during summers to supplement his family’s income. But this year, he has had to raise prices by over 10 percent to make up for a surge in fuel and fertilizer costs brought on by Russia’s invasion. Now, buyers are scarce, and sales have slumped by more than half.
“War has driven up the cost of almost everything, and people are buying much, much less,” Mr. Korpii said, pointing with weather-beaten hands to a heap of unsold carrots. “Everyone, including us, is tightening their belts,” he added. “They’re trying to save money because they don’t know what the future will bring.” |
2022/07/25 | U.K., Eurovision Runner-up to Ukraine, Will Host Song Contest in 2023 | Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, said in a statement on Monday that the 2023 contest “will showcase the creativity and skill of one of Europe’s most experienced public broadcasters whilst ensuring this year’s winners, Ukraine, are celebrated and represented throughout the event.”
Representatives from UA:PBC, a Ukrainian broadcaster, will work with the BBC on the Ukrainian elements of the show, Eurovision said in a statement. Mykola Chernotytskyi, the chief executive of the broadcaster’s managing board, said in a statement that the event “will not be in Ukraine but in support of Ukraine,” adding that organizers would “add Ukrainian spirit to this event.”
Although the decision was reached with the Ukrainian government, at least one of the country’s past winners still appeared unhappy with Monday’s announcement. Jamala, who won Eurovision in 2016 with “1944,” a song widely interpreted by Eurovision fans as a comment on Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, said in an emailed statement that the decision still felt “a bit premature.”
“With this gesture, they are taking away the hope of Ukrainian people to win this unprovoked war in the near future,” she added. |
2022/07/24 | Your Monday Briefing | In declaring the disease a “public health emergency of international concern,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, overruled a panel of advisers, who could not reach a decision.
The declaration signals a public health risk requiring a coordinated international response. That could lead member countries to invest more in their response to outbreaks and encourage nations to share vaccines, treatments and other key resources.
Details: The U.S., Britain and Spain have each recorded about 3,000 cases, and monkeypox has infected more than 16,000 people worldwide, overwhelmingly men who have sex with men. Many infected people report no known source of infection, indicating undetected community spread.
Context: This is the seventh public health emergency since 2007. Currently, the W.H.O. designation is used to describe two other diseases: Covid-19 and polio.
What’s next: One expert estimated that it might take a year or more to control the outbreak. By then, the virus is likely to have infected hundreds of thousands of people and may have permanently entrenched itself in some countries. |
2022/07/09 | There is no sign of a Russian ‘pause’ for one Ukrainian town under fire. | BAKHMUT, Ukraine — Russia’s defense ministry has said that it is conducting an “operational pause” in the war in Ukraine to allow units that have been fighting to rest, prompting military analysts to suggest that Russia was not ready to press into a full assault within Donetsk Province after its capture of neighboring Luhansk.
Yet while Russian troops have eased up on the sort of intense, all-day artillery strikes that they unleashed to help capture the final city in Luhansk Province, they have begun launching almost daily strikes on the next line of cities — Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Bakhmut.
On Friday, families were fixing broken roofs and windows in the city of Bakhmut after another night of Russian shelling. One man died, and three were wounded when multiple rockets smashed into a street of small one-story houses on the eastern side of the city. |
2022/07/25 | U.S. Officials Grow More Concerned About Potential Action by China on Taiwan | WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has grown increasingly anxious this summer about China’s statements and actions regarding Taiwan, with some officials fearing that Chinese leaders might try to move against the self-governing island over the next year and a half — perhaps by trying to cut off access to all or part of the Taiwan Strait, through which U.S. naval ships regularly pass.
The internal worries have sharpened in recent days, as the administration quietly works to try to dissuade House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from going through with a proposed visit to Taiwan next month, U.S. officials say. Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, would be the first speaker to visit Taiwan since 1997, and the Chinese government has repeatedly denounced her reported plans and threatened retaliation.
U.S. officials see a greater risk of conflict and miscalculation over Ms. Pelosi’s trip as President Xi Jinping of China and other Communist Party leaders prepare in the coming weeks for an important political meeting in which Mr. Xi is expected to extend his rule. |
2022/07/25 | As Ukraine Signs Up Soldiers, Questions Arise About How It Chooses | Ukraine has long had conscription, and young men are required to do military service unless they fall into an exempt category, like being enrolled in a university, having a disability or having at least three children. After the war began, all nonexempt men ages 18 to 60 were required to register with their local recruitment offices and undergo medical screening for possible service, but at times enforcement and record-keeping have been haphazard.
Government officials say that only those with military experience or specifically needed skills have been drafted so far, but that others are likely to be called up as the war continues. Critics say that conscription has not been as selective as officials make it out to be, and that with the military in charge of recruitment, registration and drafting, the process is shrouded in secrecy, with little transparency about the standards applied to each step.
“This process of handing out summonses fully complies with the law,” said Yevheniia Riabeka, former legal adviser to the commander in chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “This is a normal attempt to register citizens who are obligated to defend their country.”
Each local recruitment center is given targets for numbers of people to register, she said — but those figures are “completely secret information.” |
2022/07/24 | ‘We Survived Another Night’: In Ruined Suburb, Solace in a Small Community | SALTIVKA, Ukraine — On a recent Saturday morning, Yevhenia Botiyeva weeded the flower bed outside her apartment building, a routine she has taken on since she returned home in late spring.
She worked methodically, seemingly unbothered by the apocalyptic landscape of burned buildings, shattered windows and the occasional thud of artillery that surrounded her.
Her husband, Nikolai Kucher, who had survived Covid-19 and a heart attack and now had cancer, would emerge soon from their first-floor apartment to build a wood fire to heat water in a blackened kettle for coffee. But for now it was just Ms. Botiyeva, 82, tending to the overgrown lilies. |
2022/07/24 | An American killed in Ukraine was moved to volunteer by his heritage, a friend says. | Mr. Young’s family did not immediately respond to messages and calls on Sunday.
A longtime friend of Mr. Lucyszyn’s, Corey Mesimer, 29, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., confirmed on Sunday that his friend’s family had been informed that Mr. Lucyszyn was killed in battle.
Mr. Lucyszyn, 31, felt a responsibility to travel and fight in Ukraine because his grandmother was born there, and he felt close to his heritage, Mr. Mesimer said.
“That was something that he needed to do; he felt very strongly about it,” Mr. Mesimer said by phone on Sunday. “And even talking to him while he was over there, he felt like it was something that he needed to do for the country of Ukraine.”
Mr. Mesimer said that Mr. Lucyszyn, whom he described as the “life of the party,” had been living in Myrtle Beach for the past two years and that the two had played on the same paintball team there, the Carolina Rage. |
2022/07/24 | Fears rise for a rights activist captured while fighting for Ukraine. | The man they know, they say, is the opposite of the one portrayed on Russian television.
“He never accepted either the extreme-right views or the extreme left,” said his mother, Yevheniia Butkevych. “He took shape as a person who is absolutely alien to extreme positions, which, as a rule, are aggressive.”
In fact, Ms. Butkevych said, her son was a pacifist who had maintained after Russian proxies invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014 that the best use of his talents was as an activist. But that changed on Feb. 24, when Russian missiles crashed into his hometown, Kyiv, and cities and towns across the country.
The same day, Mr. Butkevych, 45, reported to a military recruitment center.
“He said, ‘I will leave my human rights work for a while, because now it is necessary, first of all, to protect the country,” Ms. Butkevych recalled. “Because everything I have worked on all these years and everything that we all worked for, the rules of our lives and of our society are now under threat.’”
Mr. Butkevych, her only child, was called up on March 4 and became a platoon commander around Kyiv, before being sent in mid-June to try to reinforce the army as it fought to keep Sievierodonetsk. |
2022/07/24 | Last Stand at Azovstal: Inside the Siege That Shaped the Ukraine War | “We locked eyes,” he said. “There was unbelievable happiness.”
Along with the other women in her unit, Ms. Polyakova had been told to stand down on the third day of the war, as the shelling in Mariupol intensified. She hid in the basement of the couple’s apartment building until it was hit by a shell and burned to the ground.
Then she had fled the city on foot.
She made it as far as the outskirts when she was arrested at a checkpoint manned by Russian forces. They had searched her phone, discovered that she was the wife of an Azov soldier and taken her into custody. They called her a fascist and made her sing the Russian national anthem. They told her that her husband was most likely dead.
“Azov fighters are not taken prisoner,” she said they told her. “They are shot on sight.”
She alone from her prison camp was selected as part of the same trade that freed her husband. Ukrainian officials had pressed for their release for the sake of their children, who had been left in the care of an ailing grandmother.
“When I saw him, I simply — I’m even crying now,” she said.
Today, the other surviving soldiers from Azovstal are being held at a prison camp in a Russia-controlled part of eastern Ukraine. The commanders, including Captain Palamar, were transferred to Russia and are being held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a place of torture during Stalin’s purges.
Ukraine’s leaders have vowed to bring them back alive, but Russian officials are threatening to charge some of them with war crimes. Of the dead, so far the bodies of more than 400 soldiers have been returned to Ukrainian-held territory for burial.
An unknown number remain entombed in the ruins of Azovstal. |
2022/07/08 | At Europe’s Largest Port, Russia Sanctions Meet Their Toughest Test | “That first weekend, when the first regulation went into force, we didn’t want to take any risks that a container with certain goods which were not allowed to go to Russia ended up in Russia,” said Mr. Kamp. “So we blocked at the time, a large number of containers, about six or seven thousand. They had to be stopped, we would first investigate,” he added.
The number of backlogged containers languishing at Rotterdam is now down to about 100 awaiting detailed inspection — not enough to slow the humming of this highly automated port that seldom requires human hands to touch a container.
Mr. Kamp had bolstered his staff in previous years because of Britain’s departure from the European Union, building an 850-strong team that left him relatively well-equipped to deal with this new crisis.
“We put in place overtime shifts, extra people from other regions of the country, and we have had dozens of people working on the sanctions," he said in an interview. |
2022/07/23 | Turkey’s Leader Remains a Headache for Biden Despite Aiding in Ukraine Deal | Mr. Biden seemed especially grateful for the breakthrough. “I want to particularly thank you for what you did putting together the situation with regard to Finland and Sweden,” he told Mr. Erdogan in the presence of reporters.
The two-page agreement said in generalized language that Sweden and Finland would address Turkey’s “pending deportation or extradition requests of terror suspects expeditiously and thoroughly.” But Turkish officials have said they expect the extradition of more than 70 individuals. It was unclear whether Sweden and Finland would agree or how Mr. Erdogan might react if they did not.
On Monday, Mr. Erdogan warned that he could still “freeze” NATO’s expansion if his demands were not met.
Mr. Biden also told Mr. Erdogan in Spain that he supported the sale of 40 American F-16 fighter jets that Turkey requested last fall, along with technology upgrades for dozens of fighters it already owns. Turkey wants those planes in part because the Trump administration canceled plans to sell the country advanced F-35 fighter jets in 2019 after Mr. Erdogan, in one of his more confounding recent moves, purchased Russia’s S-400 antiaircraft missile system in defiance of U.S. warnings.
Mr. Biden denied that he offered the planes to buy Mr. Erdogan’s support for NATO’s expansion. “And there was no quid pro quo with that; it was just that we should sell,” he said. “But I need congressional approval to be able to do that, and I think we can get that.”
Congress’s approval may not be a given. And it was unclear whether Mr. Erdogan might block NATO’s proposed expansion until he reaches a deal on the F-16 jets. |
2022/07/22 | The Grain Deal | Given the realities on the ground and the lack of trust, getting the two sides to stick to the deal could be a challenge, and the risks that it could unravel are high, analysts and officials warned. U.S. and Ukrainian officials expressed skepticism that Russia would follow through on its commitments.
Ukraine and Russia together supply more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, and Russia is also a major supplier of fertilizer. Ukraine is also a leading exporter of barley, corn and sunflower.
When Russia invaded, Ukraine mined its ports to prevent an assault from the sea. Those mines, along with Russia’s blockade, prevented Ukraine from safely resuming its exports and trapped its grain.
How the deal will work
The first shipments out of Odesa and the neighboring ports of Chornomorsk and Yuzhne are expected within weeks, U.N. officials said. |
2022/07/23 | Four Things Nations Can Do to Conserve Energy | This month, temperatures in Britain reached a record 40.3 degrees Celsius, or 104.5 Fahrenheit, capping a brutal heat wave that scorched Europe and sent electricity demand soaring.
It came amid a war in Ukraine that has upended the global energy market.
The energy crunch prompted European Union nations to agree on Tuesday to reduce their gas consumption by 15 percent between now and next spring as officials prepare for Russia to cut deliveries of natural gas in the coming months.
Here are of some of the things countries could do to curb energy demand, and some of the potential pitfalls:
Adjust thermostats, starting in government buildings
Setting an air-conditioner just one degree Celsius, or about two degrees Fahrenheit, warmer could reduce the amount of electricity used by 10 percent a year, according to the International Energy Agency. |
2022/07/23 | Spouses of world leaders to join Ukraine’s first lady in a discussion on postwar lives. | The spouses of world leaders will be talking about the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine this weekend during the second Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen, hosted by Olena Zelenska, the nation’s first lady.
Some of Ms. Zelenska’s counterparts will participate through a video link from studios sin Brussels, Warsaw, London and Washington. The main studio leading the event on Saturday will be in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
In a statement released earlier this month, Ms. Zelenska, who initiated the summit last year, said the central focus of this year’s would be human capital because often too much emphasis is placed on the economy and infrastructure when discussing reconstruction. |
2022/07/22 | Draghi’s Fall Reverberates Beyond Italy | ROME — Just over a month ago, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy boarded an overnight train with the leaders of France and Germany bound for Kyiv. During the 10-hour trip, they joked about how the French president had the nicest accommodations. But, more important, they asserted their resolute support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. The pictures of the men tucked in a cabin around a wooden conference table evoked a clubby style of crisis management reminiscent of World War II.
The mere fact that Mr. Draghi had a seat at that table reflected how, by the force of his stature and credibility, he had made his country — one saddled by debt and persistent political instability — an equal partner with Europe’s most important powers. Critical to that success was not only his economic bona fides as the former president of the European Central Bank, but also his unflinching recognition that Russia’s war presented an existential challenge to Europe and its values.
All of that has now been thrown into jeopardy since a multi-flanked populist rebellion, motivated by an opportunistic power grab, stunningly torpedoed Mr. Draghi’s government this week. Snap elections have been called for September, with polls showing that an alliance dominated by hard-right nationalists and populists is heavily favored to run Italy come the fall. |
2022/07/09 | An American arrested in Russia last year was sentenced by the court handling Brittney Griner’s case. | With the spotlight on the case of Brittney Griner, the American basketball star who has been detained in Russia since February, the sentencing of a former U.S. Embassy worker in Russia last month on similar drug charges has his loved ones also pleading for him to be allowed to return home.
Marc Fogel, a teacher who previously worked for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was convicted of drug smuggling, according to his family and Russian news outlets. He was sentenced in June — by the same court that is handling Ms. Griner’s case — to 14 years in a high-security penal colony.
Mr. Fogel, 60, worked at the Anglo-American School of Moscow and was arrested in August when customs officers at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow found marijuana in his luggage after he arrived from New York. The cannabis, according to a statement from the Russian Interior Ministry, had been packaged in a container carrying contact lenses, and cannabis oil was also found in e-cigarette cartridges. |
2022/07/22 | N.B.A. Mostly Keeps Low Profile in Public Campaign to Free Brittney Griner | The N.B.A. is a $10 billion corporation that has the power and reach to promote not just its teams and players but to provoke discussion and debate around social issues. It has used that influence most prominently to fight racism in the United States.
Yet when it has come to Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star who has been detained in Russia since February, the N.B.A.’s teams have been mostly absent from the public campaign for her release. The N.B.A. founded the W.N.B.A. and still owns about half of it, but the N.B.A. has been relatively muted outside of news conferences as Griner’s family, her agent and the women’s league and its players have led the public push for her freedom. N.B.A. players have also shown support.
Officials in both leagues said they had stayed quiet at first at the urging of U.S. government officials who worried that publicizing the case would backfire and jeopardize Griner even further. But even after the U.S. State Department said that it had determined she had been “wrongfully detained” and government officials began regularly speaking about Griner, the N.B.A. and team owners remained mostly quiet, fueling sentiments that the case has not gotten the kind of spotlight Griner’s supporters have demanded. |
2022/07/21 | New Weapons, New Confidence | Ukraine’s stepped-up attacks are consistent with preparations for a ground offensive, analysts say.
“It’s important, I think, for the Ukrainians themselves that they demonstrate their ability to strike back,” Richard Moore, the head of MI6 British foreign intelligence service, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
“To be honest, it will be an important reminder to the rest of Europe that this is a winnable campaign, because we are about to get into a pretty tough winter,” he said.
Moore added that Ukrainian forces would have an opportunity to mount a counteroffensive in the coming weeks. The Russian military is “about to run out of steam,” he said, and will be forced to suspend its offensive.
In the east, the Ukrainian military claimed a small but important victory recently when it recaptured the village of Pavlivka, my colleague Carlotta Gall writes.
It marked a welcome turnaround in the region for Ukrainian troops, who have been on the back foot for months.
It also gave them a close-up view of the enemy, and what they saw gave them confidence.
“They were well-spoken, educated and well-equipped,” Kryha, who led Ukraine’s 53rd Brigade in seizing the village and who goes by a code name, said of the Russians taken prisoner. “But they were all tired and lacked motivation.” |
2022/07/21 | Putin is ‘entirely too healthy,’ the C.I.A. director says. | Western intelligence officials, as well as the Kremlin, this week dismissed longstanding rumors that Vladimir V. Putin, the 69-year-old Russian president, is unwell.
Mr. Putin coughed during a speech in Moscow on Wednesday, leading observers to raise concerns about his health. His planned meeting that day with officials from South Ossetia was canceled, fueling speculation that he was sick. In June, when a video released by state media showed him grasping a table tightly, for a moment too long, many on social media were convinced that his health was declining.
“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health and as far as we can tell he’s entirely too healthy,” William J. Burns, director of the C.I.A., said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Wednesday. |
2022/07/22 | Inside Ukraine’s Thriving Tech Sector | “What’s really frustrating are the clients who work with Russian companies and aren’t willing to change,” Ms. Hameliak said. “I try to be polite.”
The corruption problem
Last year, the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International ranked Ukraine as the second-most-corrupt country in Europe, behind Russia. For years, a small group of oligarchs owned a huge swath of the economy, and bribery was commonplace. As bad, a shadow economy of unreported transactions has long eroded the tax base. Four years ago, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology estimated that 47 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product was essentially invisible to the government.
The situation is improving, many executives here say, as more companies vie for contracts in the international economy, where integrity is more highly prized. But young entrepreneurs understand that, before the war turned the country into a symbol of resistance, it had an image problem. And there was no point in waiting for the government to fix it, or even provide basic social services, like a safety net. People here live on what they earn or they don’t retire, or they live in misery.
Staffs understood that companies were at risk of hemorrhaging customers and would disappear if they could not prove that they were every bit as viable as they were the day before hostilities began. Plus, focusing on work was a good way to ignore unfolding horrors.
“We felt a lot of emotions, and most of them were pretty negative,” said Illia Shevchenko, a Ukrainian manager at EPAM Systems, a digital product design company that is based in Pennsylvania and has offices around Ukraine. “The best way to distract yourself from these emotions is to work. There’s a specific task. You sit down and think about it.”
Mr. Shevchenko was speaking over a video call from a small bedroom in an apartment in Kremenchuk, where his wife and two children moved soon after Kharkiv, their former hometown, was attacked. He wore a red T-shirt with an illustration of Einstein on it, and gave a tour of his new office that lasted about six seconds. He lifted his laptop and pointed it at the tiny table and chair where he now works. |
2022/07/21 | Ukraine Tries to Make the Case That It Can Win, Citing Recent Strikes | Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, carried the message personally to Washington on Wednesday, making a rare appearance before Congress by a foreign first spouse. She pleaded for more weapons, saying Russia was “destroying our country.’’
Despite the Ukrainians’ renewed optimism, military analysts and Western officials say it’s far too soon to forecast a turn in fortunes, and that a long slog seems likely. And they caution against hanging too many hopes on particular weapons amid the chaos and fluidity of a front line that winds hundreds of miles from Kharkiv in the north to Mykolaiv in the south.
“We are now achieving what we have not achieved before,” said Taras Chmut, the director of a nongovernmental group aiding Ukrainian soldiers. “But there was no breakthrough at the front. There is no panacea, no magic wand, that will lead to victory tomorrow.”
Still, in interviews in Kyiv this week, senior Ukrainian security officials projected optimism.
“The faster our partners supply us with weapons, the faster we will end this war,” said Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security council. Ukraine has no intention of ceding territory in a negotiated settlement, as some in the West have suggested, he said. “This is just a question of who beats whom.”
Ukraine received affirmation of its strategy from the United States on Wednesday, when the Pentagon committed to supplying four more HIMARS rocket launchers and other potent weaponry, including two NASAM air-defense systems to help Ukraine protect against missile strikes. And Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III offered a more optimistic assessment of Ukraine’s chances. |
2022/07/21 | Your Friday Briefing | Officials hope the move will be a powerful tool to help control rapid inflation, and the central bank described it as an effort to “front-load” its rate increases. And in a sign of investor confidence, European stocks ended the day roughly where they started.
Financial context: Last week, the euro fell to parity with the dollar for the first time in 20 years. That added to the bloc’s inflationary pressures because the lower currency value increased the cost of imports. Concern is growing that the bloc will enter a recession.
Global context: The increase follows similar measures taken by the U.S. Federal Reserve and dozens of other central banks this year. The world’s outlook has worsened in recent months, as pandemic-induced disruptions and the war in Ukraine have continued to disrupt supply chains.
Resources: Here are answers to questions you may have about what causes inflation and how interest rate increases — which make it more expensive to borrow money — can help fight it. |
2022/07/21 | A Village Retaken, and a Confidence Boost for Ukraine’s Troops | Pavlivka, just a few miles from the nearest Russian positions, remains a precarious foothold for the Ukrainians. The Russians have bombarded the village so heavily since losing it that only a small group of Ukrainian soldiers were hunkered down at the entrance. The few civilians still living there were taking cover, nowhere to be seen.
Villages, towns and cities across eastern and southern Ukraine have suffered similar destruction as the Russian forces have made their slow, grinding advance over the last five months, pummeling Ukrainian troops with relentless artillery strikes and killing tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians.
Yet the retaking of Pavlivka was a welcome turnaround for Ukrainian troops in the region, after months of being on the back foot. It also gave them a close-up view of the enemy, and what they saw gave them confidence. |
2022/07/21 | Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair | LONDON — There’s a chill in the air at the Almeida Theater, notwithstanding the record-breaking heat here. That drop in temperature comes from the coolly unnerving “Patriots,” a new drama whose look at power politics in Russia over the last quarter-century induces a shiver at despotism’s rise.
The gripping production, directed by Rupert Goold, runs through Aug. 20.
Written by Peter Morgan (“The Crown,” “Frost/Nixon”), “Patriots” surveys the sad, shortened life of Boris Berezovsky, the brainiac billionaire who died in 2013, age 67, in political exile in London. An inquest into Berezovsky’s mysterious death returned an unusual “open verdict,” but on this occasion, it is unequivocally presented as a suicide: The play ends with this balding man, bereft of authority, preparing to end his life.
An academic whiz-turned-oligarch who expedited the rise of the younger Vladimir V. Putin, Berezovsky later fell out with the onetime ally who enlarged his power base, according to the play, with promises of “liberalizing Russia,” yet proceeded to do anything but. |
2022/07/21 | In Washington, Olena Zelenska Dressed for Ukraine | On Wednesday, on the third leg of an unofficial three-day trip to Washington, D.C., Olena Zelenska, the wife of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, became the rare first lady to address Congress.
But despite the fact that she had, on the initial two days of her trip, engaged in what could have been called typical first lady things — posing primly with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his office; warmly greeting President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, who met her with a bouquet of flowers; wearing an array of dresses and suits by Ukrainian designers, with nods to the colors of the Ukrainian flag — she was not, as she said in her speech, there to talk about typical first lady things.
“Usually the wives of presidents are exclusively engaged in peaceful affairs,” she said as she stood in the Capitol in a black suit dress by the Ukrainian label AMG, a slice of white fabric bisecting one side of the jacket. “Education, human rights, equality, accessibility.” |
2022/07/21 | I Was Wrong About Capitalism | By the time I came to this job, in 2003, I was having qualms about the free-market education I’d received — but not fast enough. It took me a while to see that the postindustrial capitalism machine — while innovative, dynamic and wonderful in many respects — had some fundamental flaws. The most educated Americans were amassing more and more wealth, dominating the best living areas, pouring advantages into their kids. A highly unequal caste system was forming. Bit by bit it dawned on me that the government would have to get much more active if every child was going to have an open field and a fair chance.
I started writing columns about inequality. I called around to my right-leaning economist friends and they sensed inequality was a problem, but few had done much work on the subject or done much thinking on how to address it.
I saw but didn’t see. By the time the financial crisis hit, the flaws in modern capitalism were blindingly obvious, but my mental frames still didn’t shift fast enough. Barack Obama was trying to figure out how to stimulate the economy and I still had that 1990s “the deficit is the problem” mind-set. I wrote a bunch of columns urging Obama to keep the stimulus reasonably small, columns that look wrong in hindsight. Deficits matter, but they were not the core challenge in 2009. I opposed Obama’s auto bailout on free-market grounds, and that was wrong, too.
Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.
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2022/07/20 | Your Thursday Briefing | The E.U. prepares to ration gas
The E.U.’s executive branch put forth a plan to avert an energy crisis from a likely Russian gas cutoff and yesterday called on member states to ration natural gas.
Europe is being asked to cut its use of natural gas by 15 percent from now through next spring, the European Commission said. The 27 member nations would have to approve the proposal and pass legislation to go with it. If ratified, the proposal would put Europe’s economy on a war footing.
“I know this is a big ask for the whole of the European Union, but it’s necessary to protect us,” the commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said yesterday, adding, “We have to prepare for a potential full disruption of Russian gas, and this is a likely scenario.” |
2022/07/20 | The Energy War Escalates | “Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said as she introduced the plan.
If the E.U.’s 27 member countries agree to the measure, it will put Europe’s economy on a war footing, my colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff writes. E.U. energy ministers are set to meet next week in Brussels to debate the plan.
The E.U. imported 155 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia last year, some 40 percent of its total gas imports. Gas makes up a quarter of its energy mix and is overwhelmingly what Europeans use to heat their homes.
Since the start of the war, Russia has cut supplies to the bloc. There are fears that a key pipeline, currently down for regular maintenance, may not come back on at full steam. |
2022/07/06 | How War in Ukraine Roiled Russia’s ‘Coolest Company’ | Its success as a search engine and service provider was founded, as is Google’s and that of other social media giants, on public trust. Before the war, around 50 million Russians visited its home page every day, where a list of the five top headlines was a main source of information for many.
Executives at Yandex, and its users, had come to accept the Kremlin’s curation of news sources, but considered it a limited slice of a sprawling, groundbreaking tech empire. With the invasion and the Kremlin’s crackdown on any public discussion of the war, however, Yandex quickly became the butt of jokes.
Online, some users mocked its longstanding slogan of “Yandex. You can find everything,” as “Yandex. You can find everything but the truth,” or “Yandex. You can find everything but a conscience.”
“Yandex was like an island of freedom in Russia, and I don’t know how it can continue,” said Elena Bunina, a math professor whose five-year tenure as Yandex’s chief executive ended in April, when she emigrated to Israel.
Interviews with 10 former and current employees of Yandex reveal a portrait of a company stuck between two irreconcilable imperatives. On one side, it needs to satisfy the demands of a Kremlin determined to asphyxiate any opposition to what it veils as its “special military operation” in Ukraine. On the other are Western governments, investors and partners horrified by Russia’s war, as well as the more worldly segments of its own Russian audience. |
2022/07/20 | Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss Will Compete to Replace Boris Johnson | “Hasta la vista, baby!” he said to lawmakers, borrowing a familiar farewell from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also famously said, “I’ll be back.”
How successfully Mr. Sunak and Ms. Truss escape Mr. Johnson’s shadow may determine their success in the next six weeks of campaigning. That could pose a bigger challenge to Ms. Truss, who sat alongside Mr. Johnson in the House of Commons on Wednesday and has stayed in his cabinet when several others, including Mr. Sunak, quit.
Mr. Sunak will likely present himself as a responsible steward of the nation’s finances during a period of extreme stress, with surging inflation and the specter of recession. His victory caps a remarkable comeback from last spring when his political career appeared finished following the disclosure that his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter of an Indian billionaire, did not pay taxes on all her income in Britain.
So far, analysts said, Mr. Sunak has conducted a smooth, disciplined campaign, refusing to be drawn out on policy details and giving journalists few openings to investigate him. Ms. Truss’ campaign has gotten off to a shakier start, though she has gained momentum. On Wednesday, after her victory, she posted on Twitter that she was ready “to hit the ground from day one,” forgetting to add “running.”
Ms. Truss will be viewed as the candidate of hard-line Brexiteers, pursuing aggressive negotiations with the European Union over trade in Northern Ireland. Critics say she undermined the talks with Brussels to pander to the Brexiteer wing of the party, and now risks triggering a trade war.
She will also likely play up her hard-power credentials as foreign secretary during the war in Ukraine. At a recent televised debate, Ms. Truss was the only candidate to say she would be willing to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at a meeting of the Group of 20 industrial countries in November — positioning herself as an adversary who would get tough with the Russian leader for his aggressions. |
2022/07/20 | War and Warming Upend Global Energy Supplies and Amplify Suffering | Deadly heat and Russia’s war in Ukraine are packing a brutal double punch, upending the global energy market and forcing some of the world’s largest economies into a desperate scramble to secure electricity for their citizens.
This week, Europe found itself in a nasty feedback loop as record temperatures sent electricity demand soaring but also forced sharp cuts in power from nuclear plants in the region because the extreme heat made it difficult to cool the reactors.
France on Tuesday detailed its plan to renationalize its electricity utility, EDF, to shore up the nation’s energy independence by refreshing its fleet of aging nuclear plants. Russia, which for decades has provided much of Europe’s natural gas, kept Europe guessing as to whether it will resume gas flows later this week through a key pipeline. Germany pushed the European Union to greenlight cheap loans for new gas projects, potentially prolonging its reliance on the fossil fuel for decades longer. |
2022/07/19 | Putin Finds a New Ally in Iran, a Fellow Outcast | But the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed the calculus.
Increasingly cut off from Western markets, Russia is looking to Iran as an economic partner, as well as for expertise in skirting sanctions.
Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, has signed a nonbinding $40 billion deal to help develop gas and oil fields in Iran, according to Iranian reports. And, American officials say, Russia is looking to buy much-needed combat drones from Iran for use over Ukraine, a matter that was not addressed publicly in Tuesday’s meetings.
Ahead of Mr. Putin’s visit, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told an Iranian broadcaster that Iran and Russia could soon sign a treaty on strategic cooperation that would expand their collaboration in banking and finance. He evoked the 16th-century diplomacy between Russia and Persia to set the scene for what he promised would be a new era of friendship between Tehran and Moscow.
The courtship between the two countries started even before the war began on Feb. 24, as Russia’s tensions with the West were escalating. In January, Mr. Raisi, the Iranian president, went to Moscow. Then last month, the two men met again at a regional summit in Turkmenistan, where the Russian leader sought to cement support from countries on the Caspian Sea.
On Tuesday, as he and Mr. Raisi met for the third time this year, Mr. Putin said the two countries’ relations were “developing at a good pace” in economic, security and regional affairs. He said he and Mr. Raisi had agreed to strengthen cooperation in energy, industry and transportation, and to increasingly use national currencies — rather than the U.S. dollar — to denominate their trade. |
2022/07/19 | Iran Backs the War | The endorsement went well beyond the much more cautious support offered by another key Russian ally, China. Khamenei repeated Putin’s claim that the West had left the Kremlin no choice but to act.
It was a signal to the world that after Europe and the U.S. hit Russia with sanctions comparable to those that suffocated Iran’s economy for years, Moscow and Tehran were broadening their relationship into a more far-reaching partnership, my colleagues Anton Troianovski and Farnaz Fassihi write.
“Russia and Iran still don’t trust one another, but now need each other more than ever,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group. “This is no longer a partnership of choice, but an alliance out of necessity.”
It is also one in which Russia will hold most of the power, as Farnaz Fassihi, The Times’s U.N. correspondent and an expert on the Middle East, told us last week. |
2022/07/07 | In Russia, Gay People Are Routinely Targeted. That’s Why This Ukrainian Soldier Is Fighting. | lulu garcia-navarro
From The earliest days of the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen the images of everyday Ukrainians signing up to defend their country against the Russian invasion leaving behind the lives they’d been living just days before. Wars can be uniting in that way with citizens coming together against a shared enemy, putting their differences aside. Oleksandr Zhuhan, Sashko for short, was one of those who joined Ukraine’s volunteer forces. He’s gay, and for him, Putin’s Russia held particular terror. Gay people are routinely targeted their, arrested without cause, even tortured. And among the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine, he said the country had embraced values, quote, “contrary to human nature.” But Sashko had also experienced homophobia within Ukraine in the years leading up to the war. So when he started talking to my colleague, Courtney Stein in the early days of the fighting, he was facing dual fears a future under Russia, but also how he might be treated by the soldiers he was serving alongside. From “New York Times Opinion,” this is “First Person.” I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Today, Sashko and the fight for his future in Ukraine. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney. Today is calmer than it was yesterday, but still it’s not safe here. Anyway —
courtney stein
When we first started talking, Sashko was too busy to get on the phone. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN We hear bumping sounds like every 15 minutes or every half an hour. He was just a couple of days into his enlistment, and these were the early days of the war when Russia was shelling Kyiv. His unit was stationed in what had been a mall there. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And we are sleeping now next to the window shop. It looks somehow surrealistic because we see that beautiful clothes and we are wearing the same clothes that we came here in. So I asked him to send me voice memos whenever he had a free minute. And what most came through was just how disorienting this all was for him.
oleksandr zhuhan
I haven’t — I hadn’t held a gun in my life until the 24th of February. I skipped all the lessons of —
courtney stein
In Ukraine, boys learn how to shoot guns in school. But Sashko never wanted any part of that sort of thing. He’d never imagined fighting in a war, even up to the moment he enlisted alongside the partner he calls his husband, though they can’t be legally married.
oleksandr zhuhan
We didn’t think that we would be given guns. We thought that we would do something like, I don’t know, cooking or cleaning or carrying heavy things, something like that. My husband is a director, and I am an actor and a director and a playwright. We are very stereotypically gay, if I can put it this way, like we are a gay couple who are vegans and we are very anti, I don’t know, war.
courtney stein
Or at least they had been, then Russia invaded. Sashko and Antonina spent the night of the invasion hiding in their bathroom, weighing whether to enlist.
oleksandr zhuhan
For both of us, it was a very difficult decision because we used to avoid places where there are lots of manly men, like stereotypically heterosexual men who want to fight. And we have met violence against gay people before and it was difficult.
courtney stein
But the day after Russia invaded when it became clear just how serious the situation was, both Sashko and Antonina signed up. They weren’t telling anyone they were together though.
oleksandr zhuhan
There was a situation when a man from our unit came up to us and asked, so are you brothers or friends? And since he only gave us like two options, I said friends very quickly. But then I was sorry and I kept thinking to myself, what would have happened if I had said we are husband and husband? What would have changed? I’m not sure.
courtney stein
In Ukraine, boys learned how to shoot guns in school. But Sashko never wanted any part of that sort of thing he’d never imagined fighting in a war, even up to the moment he enlisted alongside the partner he calls his husband, though they can’t be legally married.
oleksandr zhuhan
So I grew up in a small town in the Central Ukraine. When I was born, it was still the Soviet Union.
courtney stein
As a kid, Sashko spoke Russian in school. Then in 1991 when he was seven, Ukraine declared its independence. But it wasn’t a big patriotic moment in Sashko’s memory. What he remembers is the economic collapse that followed.
oleksandr zhuhan
People had to survive and they did different things, like some people stole, some people — I don’t the word for that. They did very bad things to survive and to get some food for their children.
courtney stein
Sashko and his parents lived in an apartment block with a shared courtyard.
oleksandr zhuhan
All the kids knew one another from the moment they were born. And I knew that there were some boys that my mom said, you mustn’t be friends with those boys because they smoke and their parents are not a very good family. Some of them smoked cigarettes beginning at the age of five I suppose.
courtney stein
What?
oleksandr zhuhan
Yeah. Yeah. That’s true.
courtney stein
Sashko wasn’t that kind of kid though. He was a rule follower.
oleksandr zhuhan
I was really very out of touch with the reality I think. I mean, I didn’t know much about sexuality, about homosexuality, or anything like this. I really like to draw, and I drew things like every day. I had albums. Do you do you say album or notebooks?
courtney stein
Notebooks.
oleksandr zhuhan
Filled with sketches. Yeah. And I had a secret notebook where I drew all like naked, people naked men. And I was about, I don’t know, 10 or 11 years old. And my mom found it and she said, oh my god, what was that? I was so ashamed. And she said that it was really a bad thing.
courtney stein
That was the message Sashko got from basically everyone growing up.
oleksandr zhuhan
Homosexuality was something that you should be ashamed of. And it was something that people in prison, you know, prisoners used to punish other prisoners. Does it make sense what I’m saying?
courtney stein
So it wasn’t like that people were actually gay. It was just a punishment.
oleksandr zhuhan
Yeah. Yeah. Or whenever you heard the word homosexuality, it was considered some of the world’s biggest threats, you know, like homosexuality atomic war.
courtney stein
And given that, when he left his hometown and went to Kyiv for college, he stayed in the closet. But in his second year, he fell in love with his roommate who was straight.
oleksandr zhuhan
One day I just decided that, oh my god, if he doesn’t love me then I have no more reason to live. I know now that it was very stupid, but I was 16. So I got all the drugs that I had, I mix them with alcohol and I drank them all. And at first, I fainted, but then my friends found me and they called the ambulance.
courtney stein
He ended up in the hospital. They called his mom to take him home.
oleksandr zhuhan
And of course, she started asking questions, and I had to tell her.
courtney stein
How did she respond?
oleksandr zhuhan
She said, it’s OK, I love you. Maybe one day you’ll meet a woman and you’ll have children and I’ll pray for you. Let’s pray together. And I said, oh my god, mom, don’t. Please, I — and that was like second coming out. I said, I don’t believe in God. I’m an atheist. Yeah. And then some years later, I’m a vegan. And you know, like it was a bingo, gay vegan atheist. No more hope for mom.
courtney stein
Which one was hardest for her, the atheist, the veganism, or the being gay?
oleksandr zhuhan
I don’t think that she accepted anything, any of these.
courtney stein
When he finished college, Sashko stayed in Kyiv. He met some other gay people, but he said it was still too early to call it a community. He started dating, but it didn’t always go well.
oleksandr zhuhan
One of them was a criminal, so that was that bad. Yeah. And so I embraced that some people find their partners in life and some people don’t. Some people die lonely. And it stopped scaring me because before that, I thought that it was one of my biggest priorities, you know, to find a partner, to make family, and so on.
courtney stein
Then in 2014, Sashko got a message on a dating site.
oleksandr zhuhan
And at that stage, I met Antonina. I looked through his profile and I found out that he was into theater and that he was a refugee from Crimea. And that looked interesting.
courtney stein
Antonina recently began identifying as non-binary and using she and her pronouns. But Sashko still goes back and forth.
oleksandr zhuhan
He or she, yeah, I’m still confusing these things. We arranged a meeting. It wasn’t a date. It was a meeting.
courtney stein
They connected at a big moment in Ukraine, the moment a lot of Ukrainians say was the actual beginning of this war. The Ukrainian president at the time, who Putin supported, had just fled to Russia after months of protests forced him from office. Within days, Russian troops moved in to occupy Crimea. And like a lot of L.G.B.T.Q. people there, Antonina fled and ended up in Kyiv.
oleksandr zhuhan
We met on the bridge which is non-existent now. And we spend the night like talking and drinking coffee, talking about children, about theater and all kinds of things. And it was like, I don’t know how many hours. And that’s how we met. I think that talking to him and spending evenings and nights talking about what’s right and what’s wrong made me the person I am today.
courtney stein
Not long after they met, Sashko says he and Antonina decided to stop speaking Russian. And they helped create a theater group that performed pieces calling out Russian aggression in Crimea and homophobia within Russian culture. Outside the theater, they were also calling on Ukraine to recognize L.G.B.T.Q. rights and taking part in some of the earliest Pride celebrations.
oleksandr zhuhan
I think it was 2015, the biggest slogan of this Pride was that we exist. And there were like less than 50 people and lots and lots and lots of the police.
courtney stein
Since then, Pride in Kyiv has grown. In recent years, the parade has attracted thousands of people, part of a broader liberalization, especially among young people in the cities. But with that liberalization, there’s also been a backlash. Sashko told me about a night last November when he and Antonina were approached by two men in the street.
oleksandr zhuhan
First they came up to us, and Antonina was wearing a tiny — what’s this thing called that’s not a stripe but ribbon? Oh, I forgot the word.
courtney stein
Rainbow?
oleksandr zhuhan
Rainbow. Yes, rainbow ribbon. Thanks. And I felt this danger right away the way they looked at us. And they were like about 50 meters away, and the street was empty. And one of them started following us. And they started talking to us in a very rude manner like, hey, are you fags? What are you wearing? Do you believe in God? Are you patriots? And they started pushing us and so on. And that was the first time when all I am like anti-violent person. If there is a chance for the words to work it out, I usually use the words.
courtney stein
But then, one of the guys pushed Antonina to the ground.
oleksandr zhuhan
And I was like off. I went bananas. And I was so mad that I felt I could tear those men with my bare hands because I was like, I don’t know where I got the strength. But it was like the first, maybe the second time in my life when I got to hit a person right in the face. And I felt so, I don’t know, empowered. That was the word. Like I hit back, and they didn’t expect it. Like, they thought that they were like no attacking to fags who couldn’t hit back.
courtney stein
The attack was still fresh in Sashko’s mind when Russian forces invaded Ukraine just a few months later. It was all part of what was weighing on him and Antonina that night they spent huddled in their bathroom considering their options.
oleksandr zhuhan
I definitely had doubts like, I was not afraid to go and fight, but I was really — I felt a great anxiety if I would fit in. And being gay was part of things that gave me that anxiety. But on the second day when Russia went full scale and when we understood that it was not a joke, it’s going to be for a long time, we couldn’t make any other choice really. What mattered was to protect our country.
courtney stein
So that’s how Sashko and Antonina came to enlist in this war, fighting to protect a country that hadn’t always protected them alongside soldiers who in peacetime might have been their enemies.
oleksandr zhuhan
I’m not considering the option of losing my freedom, because for an L.G.B.T.Q. person to lose freedom, to get captured by the Russians is worse than death, so I’ll be fighting until I win or I die. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney. It’s the eighth of March, Tuesday. So I’m going to go on describing what life has become for me since the war started.
courtney stein
Not long after he enlisted, Sashko sent me this voice memo. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN It’s been 13 days since Russia attacked Ukraine for no reason. I’m sick now, and almost everyone in our unit is either sick or getting better. And it’s because it’s always cold in here. We’re sleeping on the floor now in sleeping bags. But I’m not complaining, it’s just that you ask me to describe what it is like here. I go patrolling three times a day. On these patrols, Sashko and Antonina were often together but still keeping their relationship a secret. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN The commander is very loyal. Well, he doesn’t know or he doesn’t want to know that we are a gay couple. We don’t touch or we don’t hold hands, we don’t hug each other. And the riskiest thing that my husband has done since the first day he kissed me on the forehead when I said that I probably had temperature. And he pressed his lips against my forehead like just to check if I had temperature. But it was a kiss, I knew it. He’s the one person who can — I don’t know, who can calm me down and ask if I’m OK. Hello, Sashko? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Courtney, can you hear me now? I can hear you. Can you hear me? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Oh, that’s perfect. Yeah. As winter turned into spring, Russia continued to focus a lot of its air power on Kyiv. At this point, the volunteer forces were largely playing a support role away from the fighting. So Sashko and Antonina weren’t seeing active combat, but the war was all around them. How are you? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Well, it’s been tough time. Tonight, there were like three regions where the bombs fell, and one of them was right next to us, next to our base. But it’s OK. We’re alive and more or less healthy. In 15 minutes, I’ll have to go to unpack the big cars with provisions and ammunition. So that’s our job. That’s the riskiest thing I’ve done so far. We’re just defending the base. And how are you feeling about that being your role right now? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN I’m OK. Well, on the first day when we came here, lots of guys, they were like, wow, I want to go and fight and so on. And I was like, I’m pretty much OK with the things as they are now. And the terrible thing is that we are getting used to this state of things. And I don’t want this to be my usual state. The day before yesterday, we went to the place where we learn to shoot guns. We have Kalashnikovs, and I was thinking about my old sewing machine because I work in the theater so I can saw costumes for a theater place. And I was thinking about, well, I used to hate to oil my sewing machine, but I would love to do it now instead of oiling my gun. So it was like, you know, those flashbacks about what life used to be. Hi, Courtney. It’s been a month and two days since the beginning of the war, and I have been thinking a lot about it one hell of a time, which happened not so often because we are either too busy or too exhausted to think. There are things that depress me, but there are good things though. For example, some people from our unit, they added us as friends on Facebook. And one of them came up to me the other day and he said, I read your post on Facebook. And he said, I didn’t put a like below this post, but I really want to say that I think it’s a great post and I liked it. In the post, Sashko talked about the similarities between the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and Ukrainian independence. He said that where Russia was driven by fear and hate, he hoped Ukraine would follow a different path after the war, a path of tolerance and acceptance. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN So it was a good thing, and that really made my day. For the next few weeks, Sashko’s unit stayed in the same warehouse in Kyiv, protecting ammunition and resupplies for the regular army troops that were pushing the Russians back in other parts of the city. Then in April, Ukrainian forces retook the suburbs, places like Bucha, where hundreds of civilians were tortured and killed. Sashko messaged that he and Antonina had been moved and were now doing a different job but still mainly on guard duty. A few days later, we got on the phone. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney.
antonina ramanova
Hello, Courtney.
courtney stein
And I got to hear Antonina for the first time. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah, Courtney, the thing is, Antonina speaks very little English.
antonina ramanova
My English is not very good.
courtney stein
So Antonina just listened while Sashko and I talked. Sashko said that now he assumed people in their unit understood that he and Antonina were a couple, but they still weren’t publicly acknowledging their relationship. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN But sometimes we like, I don’t know, touch fingers or — well, that’s mostly it. We touch fingers. That’s it. I saw on your Facebook pages that you have decorated your guns with stickers. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah. It feels like a small act of resistance. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah. And our guns really stand out from the other guns. Can you describe them? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yes. So like there’s a rainbow and a unicorn and a pineapple. Do other people decorate their guns or is it just you guys? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN No, not really. We are the only ones with the stickers. Now, I saw one more person with a sticker, but it was like a sticker of a skull. And we have those optimistic, cute stickers. And has your commander, anyone ever mentioned it like as a security concern or question you about it? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah, yeah, yeah. One person came up to me like two days ago and said, that sticker has lots of white and it’s going to be a problem if we fight in the darkness like it could be seen from afar. And I said, OK, so when we fight in the darkness, I’ll take it off. At the end of April, Putin declared victory in Mariupol, and Russian troops continued to push into Eastern and Southern Ukraine where hundreds of Ukrainian troops were dying every day. Sashko sent me a text message. Their unit had been given a choice, they could pack up and go volunteer in Kyiv as civilians or they could help bolster the military’s ranks and join another battalion and be sent to the front lines in the south. This time, the decision wasn’t so clear. Sashko thought that he could be more useful as a volunteer. But for Antonina, returning to Kyiv was out of the question. Sashko wrote me that Antonina was intent on going with or without him. So he decided he was going too. But they weren’t sent right away. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN We’re waiting here for the transfer. Weeks passed. Then at the end of May, Sashko got back in touch. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney. Sorry for not responding to you right away. Things had been busy, he said. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And on Wednesday, that’s tomorrow, we are going to Mykolaiv. Mykolaiv is a city in the south of Ukraine. It’s close to Odessa. Mykolaiv, Sashko explained, was part of the New frontline in the war. Like in Mariupol to the east, the Russians had managed to cut off water to Mykolaiv, forcing many of the city’s half a million residents to flee. Before leaving for the south, Sashko and Antonina were sent home to Kyiv for a few days. Their apartment hadn’t been damaged in the shelling. And for the first time in the three months since they signed up for the territorial defense, they were able to sleep in their own bed. And with the Russians no longer anywhere near the city, cafes and shops were open again. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN We were walking around the city, and I felt like I was walking next to a fish tank looking at people who are having their lattes. And the war seemed very real, but this life in Kyiv, the peaceful life seemed like something impossible. And I could physically feel it. I felt weak at my knees, and I had a strange feeling in my stomach and everything seemed so unstable. And I just can’t pull myself together. Everything feels like a very bad, meaningless movie without the end. And the worst thing, the thing that I’m afraid most is that the war is going to be for like two, three, five, eight years more. Sashko and Antonina met up with a friend from the theater world while in Kyiv. But Sashko could only think about war. He no longer related to his past life, and he was distracted by his upcoming deployment. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And the thing that I’m worried about is that in the new battalion, maybe there will be like real army people with strong hierarchy. I have an idea that in Mykolaiv in that new battalion, I’m going to be more open about my sexuality. Like I’m not going to wait if anyone asks or I’m not going to let them be guessing. A few days later, I heard from Sashko again. They had made it to Mykolaiv. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hey there, Courtney. Hope you’re hearing me OK. They’d begun digging trenches in anticipation of a new Russian offensive. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And today when we met our commander, and he was like getting acquainted, speaking to us, giving his speech, he said, I’ve had gay guys in my unit before and it was no problem with them. So if I see or hear any cases of homophobia, this unit is not a place for homophobia. Is that clear? And we are not going to talk about that again. He said, I don’t care who you are or what you do until you break the rules. So if you’re a good fighter, then I’m OK with you. Russian troops were sending a near-constant stream of bombs and missiles toward Mykolaiv. Huge swathes of the city had been burned to the ground or completely destroyed. But on one quiet evening, I was able to talk to Sashko by phone. And I asked him to tell me more about what happened with his commander. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN He said, I know that there are guys in our unit who are gay. Like, he just looked at me and I raised my hand like, here I am, hello. He made the things clear, you see. And how did the other people in the unit respond? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN They were like, OK. Yeah. They didn’t say much. I mean, the way they talk, they are not like some narrow-minded, homophobic savages. What I expected because I expected the worst. Army is still a world of manly men, but we are not — I mean, I don’t feel threatened physically and I feel much more confident now. I really feel like here I just have to be like a good soldier. And that’s like some guarantee that at least the commanders will protect me if anything happens. But I’m sure that nothing bad will happen. A few weeks later, I got this message from Sashko. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hey, Courtney. Sorry for taking so long to respond to your message. Here’s just another piece of information, which I think is important to see a bigger picture of what’s happening here in Ukraine. So yesterday I think, that was yesterday, L.G.B.T.Q. person was beaten. And that happened when the guy was going to give an interview about his boyfriend who had died in this Russian-Ukrainian war. And at that time, a group of young men came up to him and they attacked him. And they started shouting homophobic things and they beat him. I don’t know what to add. Over many months of conversation, Sashko and I had talked a lot about his hopes for the future and for the future of Ukraine. So many of them revolved around his uncertainty of what version of the country would greet him and Antonina if and when the war finally ended. But one time, I’d gotten a different answer. Do you think about the future? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah, I sometimes stop and think about the future. And I’m trying not to make some great plans like, oh, I’m going to write a play about this war or I’m going to, I don’t know, to write a song. Just very, very small things, down to earth things. Like my mom, she lives in the Central Ukraine. And they bought a house in the village. And they went there yesterday for the first time. And she sent me a video and she said, we’re waiting for you and Antonina to come and live there and repair it because the house is very old. And there’s a garden with fruit trees. And I was, oh my God, yeah. I’d really love to do that, mom.
lulu garcia-navarro |
2022/07/19 | Your Wednesday Briefing | The ayatollah met with Putin in Iran during a rare international trip by the Russian leader, a meeting that Tehran viewed as an honor. There, Khamenei repeated Putin’s argument that the U.S. and Europe had left the Kremlin no choice.
“In the case of Ukraine, if you had not taken the helm, the other side would have done so and initiated a war,” Khamenei told Putin, according to his office, though he expressed distaste for war. Here areupdates.
Analysis: Khamenei’s public proclamation on war appeared to go beyond the much more cautious support offered by another ally, China. It also signaled that the long-tense relationship between Moscow and Tehran was strengthening into a true partnership, cemented partly by the Western sanctions both countries face.
Region: In Iran, the leaders also met with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, who has become a middleman in negotiations. They discussed Syria, where Turkey has been threatening a new military incursion. Khamenei appeared to discourage Turkey’s plans.
Fighting: Long-range artillery from the U.S. is helping Ukraine on the battlefield. But Russia continues to advance in the east. And Kharkiv residents fear that a new offensive is imminent. |
2022/05/10 | Russia Was Behind Cyberattack in Run-Up to Ukraine War, Investigation Finds | WASHINGTON — A cyberattack that took down satellite communications in Ukraine in the hours before the Feb. 24 invasion was the work of the Russian government, the United States and European nations declared on Tuesday, officially fixing the blame for an attack that rattled Pentagon officials and private industry because it revealed new vulnerabilities in global communications systems.
In a coordinated set of statements, the governments blamed Moscow but did not explicitly name the organization that conducted the sophisticated effort to black out Ukrainian communications. But American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about the specifics of the findings, said that it was the Russian military intelligence agency, the G.R.U. — the same group responsible for the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee and a range of attacks on the U.S. and Ukraine.
“This unacceptable cyberattack is yet another example of Russia’s continued pattern of irresponsible behavior in cyberspace, which also formed an integral part of its illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine,” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, said in a statement. “Cyberattacks targeting Ukraine, including against critical infrastructure, could spill over into other countries and cause systemic effects putting the security of Europe’s citizens at risk.” |
2022/07/04 | In Putin’s Russia, the Arrests Are Spreading Quickly and Widely | Now, he said in a phone interview, the family has to return Mr. Kolker’s body from Moscow at their own cost.
It was unclear why the F.S.B. targeted Dmitri Kolker, 54, a specialist in quantum optics. State media reported that he had been jailed on suspicion of passing secrets abroad. But critics of the Kremlin say it is part of a widening campaign by the F.S.B. to crack down on freedom of thought in the academic world. Another Novosibirsk physicist who was also arrested on suspicion of treason last week, Anatoly Maslov, remains in custody.
The arrests came at the same time as the arrest on fraud charges of Mr. Mau, a leading Russian economist who is the head of a sprawling state university, the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
Mr. Mau, 62, was in no way a public critic of the Kremlin. He had joined more than 300 senior academic officials in signing a March open letter calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “necessary decision,” and he was re-elected to the board of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, just last week. But he also had a reputation as what scholars of Russian politics call a “systemic liberal,” someone who was working within Mr. Putin’s system to try to nudge it in a more open and pro-Western direction.
His Kremlin ties were not enough, it turned out, to save Mr. Mau from a fraud case that has already ensnared the rector of another leading university and that critics said appeared designed to snuff out remaining pockets of dissent in Russian academia.
“A big enemy of the government and the stability of the government are people who carry knowledge,” said Mr. Gozman, who worked with Mr. Mau as a government adviser in the 1990s. “Truth is an enemy here.” |
2022/07/19 | France Will Spend Nearly $10 Billion to Renationalize Electricity Company | France plans to pay 9.7 billion euros, about $9.8 billion, to fully renationalize EDF, the state-backed electricity giant, in a move that the government said would allow it to bolster the country’s energy independence, overhaul its nuclear power program and invest in renewables.
The French Finance Ministry said on Tuesday that it would offer EDF shareholders €12 per share for the roughly 14 percent of the company’s stock that the government didn’t already own. That price is more than 50 percent higher than what shares were trading at just over two weeks ago when Élisabeth Borne, the prime minister, announced the renationalization plan.
EDF’s shares, which had been suspended pending details of the offer, rose 15 percent when they reopened for trading in Paris on Tuesday. The Finance Ministry said it planned to file the offer with the market regulator by early September. |
2022/07/09 | Blinken Presses China’s Top Diplomat on Ukraine but Stresses Cooperation | “Many people thus believe that the United States suffers from a growing ‘China phobia,’” Mr. Wang said, echoing the Kremlin’s frequent complaints about “Russophobia.” “If this ‘expanding threat’ concept is allowed to keep growing, the United States’ China policy will soon become an inescapable dead end.”
The tête-à-tête followed the gathering of foreign ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations that ended without a traditional communiqué, reflecting the apparent impossibility of reaching a consensus amid the war in Ukraine. At two points in the sessions, when Russia came under sharp criticism for its attack on its neighbor, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, left abruptly, according to officials, and then departed the gathering before its conclusion.
However, Mr. Lavrov sat down with several ministers from nations that have declined to join the Western-led coalition against his country, including China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Argentina and Indonesia, putting into sharp relief the Biden administration’s challenge to isolate the country and highlighting Russia’s continued success at conducting business with the outside world and funding its relentless war machine. |
2022/07/18 | Your Tuesday Briefing | Britain sizzles under a heat wave
Temperatures in Britain neared a record high yesterday as blistering heat swept the country. By midafternoon, Wales had recorded its highest-ever temperature: The thermometer hit 37.1 degrees Celsius, almost 99 degrees Fahrenheit.
Infrastructure is under strain. Some train services were canceled, while others were running at reduced speeds in case the tracks buckled. Flights at Britain’s largest air base were halted over fears that the tar could melt. And the chains of a Victorian-era bridge were wrapped in foil to keep cracks from expanding and threatening the bridge’s stability.
Global warming has exacerbated Europe’s heat waves, which scientists say are increasing in frequency and intensity at a faster rate than in almost any other part of the planet. So have changes in the jet stream, scientists say. |
2022/07/18 | Rooting Out Spies | Starting in September, students across the country will be required to sit through lectures celebrating Russia’s “rebirth” under President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, my colleague Anton Troianovski writes.
The government has issued directives to schools to teach a series of pro-war propaganda classes, according to activists and Russian news reports. But a proposed decree from the education ministry would go further, enshrining Putin’s two decades in power as a historical turning point in the standard curriculum.
History classes will be required to include several new topics, including “the rebirth of Russia as a great power in the 21st century,” “reunification with Crimea,” and “the special military operation in Ukraine.”
“We need to know how to infect them with our ideology,” Sergei Novikov, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, told thousands of schoolteachers in an online workshop recently. “Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.”
As government employees, teachers in Russia generally have little choice but to comply with such demands. But there has been some grass-roots resistance. A teachers’ union has provided legal guidance to dozens of teachers who have refused to teach propaganda classes this spring, with some principals simply canceling them.
“You just need to find the moral strength not to facilitate evil,” said Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and has resisted promoting government propaganda. “If you can’t protest against it, at least don’t help it.” |
2022/07/09 | Fears of Another Gas Shock Drive Biden to Seek Price Cap on Russian Oil | The Biden administration’s proposal would not affect the European ban, but it would ease some of the other restrictions — but only if the transported Russian oil is sold for no more than a price set by the United States and its allies. That would allow Moscow to continue moving oil to the rest of the world. The oil now flowing to France or Germany would go elsewhere — Central America, Africa or even China and India — and Russia would have to sell it at a discount.
Some economists and oil industry experts are skeptical that the plan will work, either as a way to reduce revenues for the Kremlin or to push down prices at the pump. They warn the plan could mostly enrich oil refiners and could be ripe for evasion by Russia and its allies. Moscow could refuse to sell at the capped price.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen plans to push for more support for the cap when she meets with fellow finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations — including Russia’s — in Asia in the next week. The American delegation will have no contact with the Russians, a Treasury official said.
But even some skeptics say that the price cap could, if nothing else, keep enough Russian oil pumping to avoid a recession-triggering price spike.
Administration officials say privately that there are signs in oil markets that even in its infant stages, the cap proposal is already helping to reassure traders that the world could avoid abruptly losing millions barrels of Russian oil per day at the year’s end.
Other administration officials have pressed the case for the cap in trans-Atlantic video calls and in-person meetings across European capitals like Brussels and London. They are stressing recession risks in talks with other countries, private insurers and a host of other officials over how to structure and carry out the price-cap plan, which leaders of the Group of 7 nations endorsed in principle this past week at a meeting in the German Alps. |
2022/07/18 | ‘Please do all you can to bring us home’: Brittney Griner is not the only American who’s been ‘wrongfully detained.’ | Brittney Griner. Austin Tice. The Citgo 6. And now, potentially, three American military veterans who were captured by enemy forces after traveling to Ukraine to fight Russia.
They are among nearly 50 Americans who the State Department believes are wrongfully detained by foreign governments. At least a dozen more Americans are being held as hostages — including by extremist groups — or on criminal charges that their families dispute.
American citizens are increasingly attractive targets for U.S. adversaries — including China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela — looking to use them as political pawns in battles with the United States. |
2022/07/18 | Putin Thinks He’s Winning | The smallest, most pragmatic and achievable goal concerns Russia’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine. Having failed to advance much further into Ukrainian territory since the first few days of war, Russia promptly downsized its ambitions, relinquishing the idea of taking Kyiv. The current, more realistic goal appears to be control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — which the Kremlin sees itself attaining in a matter of time, a view seemingly vindicated by Russian forces’ effective capture of the Luhansk region — and the land corridor that would secure access to Crimea.
For this goal, of minimal geopolitical weight for the Kremlin, Mr. Putin appears to believe that time is on his side. You can see why. Western military support has shown its limits, while Washington has signaled that it is not prepared to risk invoking Mr. Putin’s wrath by crossing any red lines. His earlier threats to resort to nuclear weapons seem to have been heeded: The West will not directly intervene, nor will it assist Ukraine to a point that could lead to Russian military defeat. Today, for all the protestations to the contrary, the conventional wisdom in the West is that Ukraine will not be able to win back the areas occupied by Russian troops. The Kremlin appears to believe that sooner or later the West will abandon that idea completely. Ukraine’s east would then effectively be under Russian control.
The next goal appears to be focused on forcing Kyiv to capitulate. This isn’t about the occupied territories; it’s about the future of Ukraine’s remaining territory — something that has far more geopolitical importance. On a practical level, capitulation would mean Kyiv accepting Russian demands that could be summarized as the “de-Ukrainianization” and “Russification” of the country. That would entail criminalizing the support of national heroes, renaming streets, rewriting history books and guaranteeing the Russian-speaking population a dominant position in education and culture. The aim, in short, would be to deprive Ukraine of the right to build its own nation. The government would be replaced, the elites purged and cooperation with the West voided.
This second goal sounds fantastical, of course. But for Mr. Putin it is also seemingly inevitable, though it may take longer to achieve. In one to two years, by which point the Kremlin expects Ukraine to be exhausted by the war, unable to function normally and profoundly demoralized, the conditions for capitulation will ripen. At that stage, the Kremlin’s calculation appears to be, the elite will split and an opposition seeking to end the war will coalesce to oust the Zelensky administration. There’d be no need for Russia to capture Kyiv militarily; it would fall of its own accord. Mr. Putin apparently sees nothing that could prevent it. |
2022/07/18 | Reunited in Bucha, a Ukrainian Family Comes to Terms With War’s Traumas | BUCHA, Ukraine — For the first time since the war began, the Stanislavchuk family was together again.
Yehor was leading his parents, Natasha and Sasha, his sister, Tasya, and his grandmother, Lyudmila, on a tour of Bucha, the quaint suburb of Kyiv that has become synonymous with Russian savagery.
Here was the school where Yehor had hid for two weeks as Russian troops bombed and murdered their way through the town. There, at the entrance to the school basement, was where a Russian soldier had shot a woman in the head just because he could. And over there, on top of the yellow crane, was where the sniper sat, picking off civilians as they scrounged for food and water. |
2022/07/18 | Your Monday Briefing | Extreme heat in Europe
A life-threatening heat wave is continuing its march across Western Europe this week.
Spain and Italy baked over the weekend, and wildfires raged in France, prompting the evacuation of more than 14,000 people near Bordeaux since early last week, the local authorities said. France’s national weather forecaster predicted temperatures of at least 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on the country’s Atlantic coast through tomorrow.
Now, the blistering weather is moving to Britain. Today and tomorrow, temperatures could soar to 41 degrees Celsius, which would shatter records. Air-conditioning is rare in the country, where buildings are constructed to retain heat (because cold temperatures have, in the past, been a bigger concern).
Here’s a guide to staying safe and cool during a heat wave.
Climate change: Heat waves in Europe have increased in frequency and intensity over the past four decades. |
2022/07/07 | A Pop Star Tried to Reconcile Russia and Ukraine. War Ruined That. | Instead of performing and promoting “Dorndom” — which Dorn still hopes to release one day; its name is a combination of his own and the Russian word for house — the musician is now playing older hits across Europe and the United States to raise money to help Ukrainians in peril.
“I am trying to understand the extent to which this album would work today,” Dorn said.
For Ukrainian artists like Dorn, whose country’s culture as well as its politics has long been intertwined with Russia’s, such concerns have become familiar: Is it right to perform in a country whose leader claims your nation as part of his own? Should artists switch to writing and singing in Ukrainian, which could mean potentially losing access to a much larger audience, and market, in Russia?
After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, many Ukrainian artists, including Okean Elzy, the country’s most popular rock band, and Monatik, a widely celebrated pop singer, stopped performing in Russia.
Dorn — who was born in Russia, but grew up in Ukraine — took a different approach: He continued touring in Russia in an effort to build “a cultural bridge” between the neighboring countries, he said. |
2022/07/18 | ‘It’s tense’: Under constant fire, Ukrainian soldiers dismiss any suggestion that they cede land. | Outnumbered and outgunned, the Ukrainians say the success or failure of their fight will depend on whether they receive more and better arms. But they say they are determined to try to hold every inch of what is still theirs in Donetsk Province, despite heavy losses, and dismissed the suggestion that they cede territory or give up the fight as ludicrous. They have the conviction of their cause, they said, while the Russians lack purpose.
“There is no choice,” Serhii, 44, a career soldier with one unit, said. “We are protecting our country.”
Dug in in the woods and villages, Ukrainian troops fought off a Russian attack in early July, knocking out a group of tanks in a battle in the farming village of Verkhnokamianske, according to several accounts. The blow stalled the Russian advance and brought a lull in places on the front lines, soldiers said. Military doctors said they saw a drop in casualties arriving from the front for several days last week after the battle. |
2022/07/17 | On Donetsk’s Front Line, Small Gains and Losses Impose a Heavy Toll | DONETSK PROVINCE, Ukraine — Red flames crackled in the golden wheat field, the target of Russian artillery just minutes earlier. Nearby, the commander of a Ukrainian frontline unit was finishing his lunch of pasta from a tin bowl. As more incoming shells exploded in the fields, his men took cover in their bunkers.
Life on the front lines in the eastern Donetsk region has seen little letup in recent weeks. Ukrainian soldiers serving there say they live under almost constant Russian artillery and aerial bombardment. The fields and hedgerows around them are charred and smoldering. Their days and nights are interspersed with the sharp bangs of outgoing Ukrainian artillery and the deeper, rumbling bursts of incoming fire.
“It’s tense,” said the commander, Samson, 55, who, like most members of the Ukrainian military, asked to be identified by only his code name in accord with military protocol. “There is daily mortar fire, airplanes, helicopters, ‘Grads.’ They have a lot of ammunition.” Grad, meaning hail, is the Russian acronym for a commonly used multiple rocket launcher system. |
2022/07/18 | Zelensky fires his prosecutor general and intelligence chief, the top two law enforcement officials. | President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine fired his country’s prosecutor general and the leader of its domestic intelligence agency on Sunday, the most significant shake-up in his government since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February.
The dismissals of the prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, and Ivan Bakanov, the leader of the Security Service of Ukraine — and a childhood friend of the president — were announced in brief decrees. In a televised speech later Sunday night, Mr. Zelensky said he was responding to a large number of treason investigations opened into employees of law enforcement agencies, including the prosecutor general’s office and the domestic security agency.
On Monday, Mr. Zelensky promoted Mr. Bakanov’s deputy, Vasyl Malyuk, as the acting head of the security service. |
2022/07/04 | Russia Advances Behind Brutal Barrage, but Will Its Strategy Keep Working? | Russia’s capture of the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, a significant victory for Moscow’s campaign to conquer eastern Ukraine, demonstrates the success of the Russian military’s grinding strategy based on superior firepower and incremental advances.
It also raises serious questions about how long either side can keep going like this, particularly the battered and vastly outgunned Ukrainian forces, forced to rely on raw recruits and suffering heavy casualties, along with the mental strain of combat, retreat and constant Russian shelling.
Russia’s invasion has taken a brutal toll on its own forces as well, but they continue their slow advance, and with the seizure of Lysychansk this weekend, they have taken control of the entirety of Luhansk Province, putting them in position to push on toward Ukrainian-held cities in Donetsk Province. |
2022/07/17 | A Young Woman’s Wartime Task: Persuading People to Leave Their Homes | The first person Yana Muravinets tried to persuade to leave her home near Ukraine’s front lines was a young woman who was five months pregnant.
She did not want to abandon her cows, her calf or her dog. She told Ms. Muravinets that she put energy and money into building her house near the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, and she was afraid of losing it.
“I said: ‘None of this will be necessary when you’re lying here dead,’” Ms. Muravinets said.
Since the early days of the war Ms. Muravinets, a 27-year-old photographer and videographer from the region, has taken up a new volunteer job with the Red Cross: encouraging people to evacuate. In phone calls, doorstep conversations, public speeches in village squares, sometimes even under fire, she has tried to convince Ukrainians that leaving everything behind is the only sure way to survive. |
2022/07/17 | Griner Case Draws Attention to ‘Wrongful Detentions’ | The office has grown to about 25 negotiators and other officials in recent years, up from five, as more Americans are detained by foreign governments. Each case is assigned an expert on the country where the person is being held.
The process is extremely difficult, said the senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named to describe some functions of the office.
All of the foreign governments that are detaining Americans have, at best, rocky relations with the United States. In some cases, like Iran, messages are sent through other governments that serve as intermediaries; in others, U.S. officials work through levels of the foreign government’s bureaucracy to get to someone senior enough to influence a decision.
The communications are intended to reinforce the consequences of continuing to hold Americans captive, the official said.
He said foreign governments often felt as if they were the aggrieved party and usually began with demands that he called unreasonable.
The State Department does not provide legal assistance to the detained Americans or their families.
Does the United States pay ransom or swap prisoners?
A 2015 directive by President Barack Obama prohibits promising “ransom, prisoner releases, policy changes or other acts of concession” to bring detained Americans home. The policy takes away key incentives for hostage takers to detain Americans in the first place and prevents the exchange of U.S. revenue or other resources that could be used for other nefarious activities, the document notes. |
2022/07/16 | Moscow Signals a Shift to a More Aggressive Phase of Ukraine War | The major strike came on Thursday, when a Russian submarine fired cruise missiles into the heart of Vinnytsia, a city of 370,000 people about 125 miles southwest of Kyiv, the capital.
Ukrainian officials said that strike killed at least 23 people, including a 4-year-old girl with Down syndrome, causing outrage in Ukraine and the West.
The Russian defense ministry said the strike on Vinnytsia was directed at a building where top officials from Ukraine’s armed forces were meeting foreign arms suppliers. Ukrainian officials have denied that the building contained military targets.
The war is causing significant economic stress in the rest of the world, reducing global growth both this year and next, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told a hybrid meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers and heads of central banks.
“The war in Ukraine has intensified, exerting added pressures on commodity and food prices,” she said in a statement on Saturday. “Global financial conditions are tightening more than previously anticipated. And continuing pandemic-related disruptions and renewed bottlenecks in global supply chains are weighing on economic activity.”
Adding to the stress in Germany, which has been dependent on Russian energy, was a new statement by the Russian gas monopoly, Gazprom, urging the German company Siemens to return a turbine it has repaired in Canada to ensure the Nord Stream 1 pipeline delivering gas to Europe can resume working after a 10-day maintenance period that began on Monday. |
2022/07/16 | Italy’s Crisis Redoubles European Foreboding | For many Europeans, the euro’s slide to parity is an apt symbol of the ways in which the war in Ukraine poses economic problems to Europe that are far more extreme than for the United States. President Biden’s determination to bolster Ukraine militarily, rather than seek some diplomatic outcome, may come to be resented as winter takes hold.
Already Mr. Putin’s gas squeeze has led the German government to warn of an imminent recession. Companies and households are preparing for a winter of gas rationing, while homeowners, schools and cities have begun to lower thermostats, cut back on air conditioning and dim streetlights. There are mutterings about American readiness to fight the war at Germany’s eastern flank down to the last Ukrainian.
Italy is looking to speed up energy independence from Russia, in part by pivoting to Algeria for new gas supplies, while ramping up renewable energy sources and burning more coal to keep homes lighted and businesses running.
France, less vulnerable because of its large nuclear power industry, is pushing an “energy restraint plan” that Mr. Macron called necessary in a television interview this week. “This war is going to last, but France will always be in a position to help Ukraine,” the French president said.
That was some distance from his declaration to the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv last month that “Europe is at your side and will remain so for as long as it takes to achieve victory.” |
2022/07/07 | Brittney Griner’s Supporters Hold Steady After Guilty Plea | W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert released a statement Thursday afternoon.
“Brittney Griner remains wrongfully detained in Russia, and nothing that happened today changes that 140 days later,” Engelbert said. She added: “She has the wholehearted and unconditional support of the entire W.N.B.A. and N.B.A. family, who eagerly await her safe return.”
The U.S. State Department first announced that Griner had been classified as “wrongfully detained” in May and said it would look to negotiate her release regardless of the result of her trial.
On Thursday, a Russian diplomat suggested to reporters in Moscow that the public clamor about Griner’s release — which he attributed to the Biden administration — was detrimental to getting a deal done.
Griner’s supporters, though, have long believed that calling public attention to her situation was necessary to get the attention of the Biden administration. After the State Department classified Griner as wrongfully detained, her closest supporters began to feel comfortable drawing attention to her detention. Many fans have been vocal since February. |
2022/07/16 | Putin Aims to Shape a New Generation of Supporters, Through Schools | Starting in first grade, students across Russia will soon sit through weekly classes featuring war movies and virtual tours through Crimea. They will be given a steady dose of lectures on topics like “the geopolitical situation” and “traditional values.” In addition to a regular flag-raising ceremony, they will be introduced to lessons celebrating Russia’s “rebirth” under President Vladimir V. Putin.
And, according to legislation signed into law by Mr. Putin on Thursday, all Russian children will be encouraged to join a new patriotic youth movement in the likeness of the Soviet Union’s red-cravatted “Pioneers” — presided over by the president himself.
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government’s attempts at imparting a state ideology to schoolchildren have proven unsuccessful, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently told thousands of Russian schoolteachers in an online workshop. But now, amid the war in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has made it clear that this needed to change, he said. |
2022/07/16 | The World Economy Is Imperiled by a Force Hiding in Plain Sight | On Friday, China reported that its economy, the world’s second-largest, expanded by a mere 0.4 percent from April through June compared with the same period last year. That performance — astonishingly anemic by the standards of recent decades — endangered prospects for scores of countries that trade heavily with China, including the United States. It reinforced the realization that the global economy has lost a vital engine.
The specter of slowing economic growth combined with rising prices has even revived a dreaded word that was a regular part of the vernacular in the 1970s, the last time the world suffered similar problems: stagflation.
Most of the challenges tearing at the global economy were set in motion by the world’s reaction to the spread of Covid-19 and its attendant economic shock, even as they have been worsened by the latest upheaval — Russia’s disastrous attack on Ukraine, which has diminished the supply of food, fertilizer and energy.
“The pandemic itself disrupted not only the production and transportation of goods, which was the original front of inflation, but also how and where we work, how and where we educate our children, global migration patterns,” said Julia Coronado, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, speaking this past week during a discussion convened by the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Pretty much everything in our lives has been disrupted by the pandemic, and then we layer on to that a war in Ukraine.” |