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At Europe’s Largest Port, Russia Sanctions Meet Their Toughest Test
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“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.
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{'people': ['Kamp', 'Kamp'], 'organizations': ['the European Union'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Russia', 'Rotterdam', 'Britain']}
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Turkey’s Leader Remains a Headache for Biden Despite Aiding in Ukraine Deal
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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.
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{'people': ['Biden', 'Erdogan', 'Erdogan', 'Erdogan', 'Biden', 'Erdogan', 'Erdogan', 'Biden', 'Erdogan', 'Erdogan'], 'organizations': ['NATO', 'Trump', 'NATO', 'Congress', 'NATO'], 'locations': ['Finland', 'Sweden', 'Sweden', 'Finland', 'Turkey', 'Sweden', 'Finland', 'Spain', 'Turkey', 'Turkey', 'Russia', 'U.S.']}
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The Grain Deal
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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.
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{'people': ['Yuzhne'], 'organizations': ['U.N.'], 'locations': ['U.S.', 'Ukrainian', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Odesa', 'Chornomorsk']}
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Four Things Nations Can Do to Conserve Energy
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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.
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{'people': [], 'organizations': ['European Union', 'the International Energy Agency'], 'locations': ['Britain', 'Fahrenheit', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Fahrenheit']}
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Spouses of world leaders to join Ukraine’s first lady in a discussion on postwar lives.
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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.
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{'people': ['Olena Zelenska', 'Zelenska', 'Zelenska'], 'organizations': [], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Brussels', 'Warsaw', 'London', 'Washington', 'Kyiv', 'Ukraine']}
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Draghi’s Fall Reverberates Beyond Italy
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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.
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{'people': ['Mario Draghi', 'Draghi', 'Draghi', 'Snap'], 'organizations': ['the European Central Bank'], 'locations': ['ROME', 'Italy', 'France', 'Germany', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Italy']}
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An American arrested in Russia last year was sentenced by the court handling Brittney Griner’s case.
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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.
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{'people': ['Brittney Griner', 'Marc Fogel', 'Griner', 'Fogel', 'marijuana'], 'organizations': ['U.S. Embassy', 'the U.S. Embassy', 'the Anglo-American School of Moscow', 'the Russian Interior Ministry'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Russia', 'Moscow', 'Moscow', 'New York']}
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N.B.A. Mostly Keeps Low Profile in Public Campaign to Free Brittney Griner
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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.
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{'people': ['Brittney Griner', 'Griner', 'Griner', 'Griner', 'Griner'], 'organizations': ['W.N.B.A.', 'W.N.B.A.', 'N.B.A.', 'the U.S. State Department'], 'locations': ['N.B.A.', 'the United States', 'Russia', 'N.B.A.', 'N.B.A.', 'N.B.A.', 'U.S.', 'N.B.A.']}
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New Weapons, New Confidence
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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.”
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{'people': ['Richard Moore', 'MI6 British', 'Carlotta Gall', 'Kryha'], 'organizations': ['the Aspen Security Forum', 'Pavlivka', '53rd Brigade'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Colorado', 'Ukraine']}
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Putin is ‘entirely too healthy,’ the C.I.A. director says.
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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.
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{'people': ['Vladimir V. Putin', 'Putin', 'Putin', 'William J. Burns'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin', 'C.I.A.', 'the Aspen Security Forum'], 'locations': ['Moscow', 'Colorado']}
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Inside Ukraine’s Thriving Tech Sector
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“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.
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{'people': ['Hameliak', 'Staffs', 'Illia Shevchenko', 'Shevchenko'], 'organizations': ['Transparency International', 'the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology', 'EPAM Systems'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Pennsylvania', 'Ukraine', 'Kremenchuk', 'Einstein']}
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Ukraine Tries to Make the Case That It Can Win, Citing Recent Strikes
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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.
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{'people': ['Olena Zelenska', 'Mykolaiv', 'Taras Chmut', 'Oleksiy Danilov', 'Lloyd J. Austin III'], 'organizations': ['Congress', 'national security council', 'Pentagon', 'NASAM', 'Defense'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Washington', 'Russia', 'Kyiv', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'the United States', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine']}
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Your Friday Briefing
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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.
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{'people': [], 'organizations': ['the U.S. Federal Reserve'], 'locations': ['Ukraine']}
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A Village Retaken, and a Confidence Boost for Ukraine’s Troops
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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.
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{'people': ['Pavlivka'], 'organizations': ['Pavlivka'], 'locations': ['Ukraine']}
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Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair
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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.
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{'people': ['Rupert Goold', 'Peter Morgan', 'Boris Berezovsky', 'Vladimir V. Putin'], 'organizations': ['Patriots', 'Patriots', 'Berezovsky'], 'locations': ['LONDON', 'Russia', 'London', 'Berezovsky', 'Russia']}
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In Washington, Olena Zelenska Dressed for Ukraine
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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.”
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{'people': ['Olena Zelenska', 'Volodymyr Zelensky', 'Antony Blinken', 'Biden', 'Jill Biden'], 'organizations': ['Congress', 'State', 'AMG'], 'locations': ['Washington', 'D.C.', 'Ukraine']}
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I Was Wrong About Capitalism
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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.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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{'people': ['Barack Obama', 'Twitter'], 'organizations': ['Obama', 'Times', 'The New York Times Opinion', 'Instagram'], 'locations': ['Obama']}
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Your Thursday Briefing
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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.”
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{'people': ['Ursula von der'], 'organizations': ['the European Commission', 'the European Union'], 'locations': ['E.U.', 'E.U.', 'Leyen']}
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The Energy War Escalates
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“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.
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{'people': ['von der', 'Matina Stevis-Gridneff'], 'organizations': ['the European Commission'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Russia', 'Leyen', 'E.U.', 'E.U.', 'Brussels', 'E.U.', 'Russia', 'Russia']}
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How War in Ukraine Roiled Russia’s ‘Coolest Company’
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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.
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{'people': ['Elena Bunina'], 'organizations': ['Google’s', 'Kremlin', 'Kremlin', 'Yandex', 'Interviews', 'Kremlin'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Israel', 'Ukraine', 'Russia']}
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Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss Will Compete to Replace Boris Johnson
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“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.
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{'people': ['Arnold Schwarzenegger', 'Sunak', 'Truss', 'Johnson', 'Truss', 'Johnson', 'Sunak', 'Sunak', 'Akshata Murty', 'Sunak', 'Truss', 'Twitter', 'Truss', 'Truss', 'Vladimir V. Putin'], 'organizations': ['the House of Commons', 'Brexiteers', 'the European Union', 'Brexiteer'], 'locations': ['Britain', 'Northern Ireland', 'Brussels', 'Ukraine', 'Russia']}
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War and Warming Upend Global Energy Supplies and Amplify Suffering
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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.
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{'people': [], 'organizations': ['EDF', 'the European Union'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Ukraine', 'France', 'Russia', 'Germany']}
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Putin Finds a New Ally in Iran, a Fellow Outcast
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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.
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{'people': ['Putin', 'Dmitri S. Peskov', 'Raisi', 'Raisi', 'Putin', 'Raisi'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Iran', 'Iran', 'Russia', 'Iran', 'Ukraine', 'Iran', 'Russia', 'Russia', 'Persia', 'Tehran', 'Moscow', 'Russia', 'Moscow', 'Turkmenistan', 'U.S.']}
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Iran Backs the War
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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.
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{'people': ['Khamenei', 'Putin', 'Anton Troianovski', 'Farnaz Fassihi', 'Ali Vaez', 'Farnaz Fassihi'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin', 'the International Crisis Group', 'Times', 'U.N.'], 'locations': ['China', 'U.S.', 'Russia', 'Iran', 'Moscow', 'Tehran', 'Russia', 'Iran', 'Iran', 'Russia']}
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In Russia, Gay People Are Routinely Targeted. That’s Why This Ukrainian Soldier Is Fighting.
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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
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{'people': ['lulu garcia-navarro', 'Oleksandr Zhuhan', 'Putin', 'Putin', 'Courtney Stein', 'Lulu Garcia-Navarro', 'ZHUHAN Hi', 'Courtney', 'calmer', 'ZHUHAN', 'Kyiv', 'ZHUHAN', 'oleksandr zhuhan', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein\n\n', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'oleksandr zhuhan', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'oleksandr zhuhan', 'courtney stein\n\n', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'oleksandr zhuhan', 'courtney stein', 'oleksandr zhuhan', 'courtney stein', 'Putin', 'L.G.B.T.Q.', 'courtney stein', 'L.G.B.T.Q.', 'oleksandr zhuhan', 'Pride', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'Rainbow', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'courtney stein', 'L.G.B.T.Q.', 'ZHUHAN Hi', 'Courtney', 'courtney stein', 'ZHUHAN Courtney', 'ZHUHAN', 'Kalashnikovs', 'Courtney', 'L.G.B.T.Q.', 'ZHUHAN', 'Bucha', 'ZHUHAN Hi', 'Courtney', 'Courtney', 'courtney stein', 'ZHUHAN Yeah', 'Courtney', 'courtney stein', 'ZHUHAN', 'ZHUHAN', 'Putin', 'Kyiv', 'ZHUHAN Hi', 'Courtney', 'ZHUHAN', 'Mykolaiv', 'Mykolaiv', 'Odessa', 'Mykolaiv', 'Mykolaiv', 'ZHUHAN', 'Mykolaiv', 'Courtney', 'ZHUHAN', 'Mykolaiv', 'ZHUHAN', 'Courtney', 'L.G.B.T.Q.'], 'organizations': ['Sashko', 'New York Times Opinion', 'zhuhan\n\nHomosexuality', 'Sashko', 'Sashko', 'Sashko', 'Rainbow', 'Sashko', 'Sashko', 'Eastern', 'Sashko', 'Army'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Antonina', 'Russia', 'Antonina', 'Ukraine', 'the Soviet Union', 'Ukraine', 'Kyiv', 'Antonina', 'Crimea', 'Antonina', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Crimea', 'Antonina', 'Kyiv', 'Antonina', 'Crimea', 'Ukraine', 'Antonina', 'Antonina', 'Antonina', 'Ukraine', 'Antonina', 'Russia', 'Antonina', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Antonina', 'Russia', 'Antonina', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Kyiv', 'Antonina', 'Antonina', 'Antonina', 'Antonina', 'Antonina', 'Mariupol', 'Antonina', 'Antonina', 'Ukraine', 'Mariupol', 'Antonina', 'Kyiv', 'Antonina', 'Kyiv', 'Mykolaiv', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Antonina', 'Antonina']}
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Your Wednesday Briefing
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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.
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{'people': ['Putin', 'Khamenei', 'Putin', 'Khamenei', 'Putin', 'Khamenei', 'Recep Tayyip Erdogan', 'Khamenei'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin'], 'locations': ['Iran', 'Tehran', 'U.S.', 'Ukraine', 'China', 'Moscow', 'Tehran', 'Iran', 'Turkey', 'Syria', 'Turkey', 'Turkey', 'U.S.', 'Ukraine', 'Russia']}
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Russia Was Behind Cyberattack in Run-Up to Ukraine War, Investigation Finds
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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.”
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{'people': ['Josep Borrell Fontelles'], 'organizations': ['Pentagon', 'G.R.U.', 'the Democratic National Committee', 'the European Union’s'], 'locations': ['WASHINGTON', 'Ukraine', 'the United States', 'Moscow', 'U.S.', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine']}
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In Putin’s Russia, the Arrests Are Spreading Quickly and Widely
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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.”
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{'people': ['Kolker', 'Dmitri Kolker', 'Mau', 'Mau', 'Putin', 'Mau', 'Gozman', 'Mau'], 'organizations': ['F.S.B.', 'quantum optics', 'Kremlin', 'F.S.B.', 'Anatoly Maslov', 'the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration', 'Kremlin', 'Kremlin'], 'locations': ['Moscow', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Gazprom']}
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France Will Spend Nearly $10 Billion to Renationalize Electricity Company
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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.
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{'people': ['Élisabeth Borne'], 'organizations': ['EDF', 'The French Finance Ministry', 'EDF', 'EDF', 'The Finance Ministry'], 'locations': ['France', 'Paris']}
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Blinken Presses China’s Top Diplomat on Ukraine but Stresses Cooperation
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“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.
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{'people': ['Wang', 'Sergey V. Lavrov', 'Lavrov', 'Biden'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin'], 'locations': ['the United States', 'China', 'Russophobia', 'the United States’', 'China', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Russia', 'China', 'India', 'Brazil', 'Turkey', 'Argentina', 'Indonesia', 'Russia']}
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Your Tuesday Briefing
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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.
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{'people': ['Flights'], 'organizations': ['Wales'], 'locations': ['Britain', 'Britain', 'Britain']}
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Rooting Out Spies
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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.”
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{'people': ['Vladimir Putin', 'Anton Troianovski', 'Putin', 'Sergei Novikov', 'Sergei Chernyshov'], 'organizations': ['Crimea', 'Kremlin'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Russia']}
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Fears of Another Gas Shock Drive Biden to Seek Price Cap on Russian Oil
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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.
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{'people': ['Biden', 'Janet L. Yellen'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin', 'Treasury', 'Group', 'Treasury'], 'locations': ['the United States', 'Moscow', 'France', 'Germany', 'China', 'India', 'Russia', 'Russia', 'Moscow', 'Russia', 'Brussels', 'London']}
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‘Please do all you can to bring us home’: Brittney Griner is not the only American who’s been ‘wrongfully detained.’
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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.
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{'people': ['Brittney Griner', 'Austin Tice'], 'organizations': ['the State Department'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Russia', 'U.S.', 'China', 'Russia', 'Iran', 'Venezuela', 'the United States']}
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Putin Thinks He’s Winning
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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.
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{'people': ['Putin', 'Putin', 'Kyiv', 'Putin', 'Zelensky', 'Kyiv', 'Putin'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin', 'Kremlin', 'Kremlin', 'Kremlin', 'Kremlin'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Ukrainian', 'Russia', 'Luhansk', 'Luhansk', 'Crimea', 'Washington', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Russia']}
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Reunited in Bucha, a Ukrainian Family Comes to Terms With War’s Traumas
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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.
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{'people': ['Stanislavchuk', 'Yehor', 'Tasya', 'Lyudmila', 'Bucha'], 'organizations': ['BUCHA'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Natasha', 'Sasha']}
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Your Monday Briefing
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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.
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{'people': [], 'organizations': [], 'locations': ['Spain', 'Italy', 'France', 'Bordeaux', 'France', 'Britain']}
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A Pop Star Tried to Reconcile Russia and Ukraine. War Ruined That.
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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.
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{'people': ['Okean Elzy'], 'organizations': ['Monatik'], 'locations': ['the United States', 'Russia', 'Ukrainian', 'Russia', 'Russia', 'Crimea', 'Russia', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Russia']}
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‘It’s tense’: Under constant fire, Ukrainian soldiers dismiss any suggestion that they cede land.
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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.
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{'people': [], 'organizations': [], 'locations': ['Donetsk Province', 'Ukrainian']}
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On Donetsk’s Front Line, Small Gains and Losses Impose a Heavy Toll
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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.
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{'people': ['Grad'], 'organizations': ['Samson'], 'locations': ['PROVINCE', 'Ukraine', 'Ukrainian']}
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Zelensky fires his prosecutor general and intelligence chief, the top two law enforcement officials.
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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.
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{'people': ['Volodymyr Zelensky', 'Iryna Venediktova', 'Ivan Bakanov', 'Zelensky', 'Zelensky', 'Bakanov', 'Vasyl Malyuk'], 'organizations': ['the Security Service of Ukraine'], 'locations': ['Ukraine']}
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Russia Advances Behind Brutal Barrage, but Will Its Strategy Keep Working?
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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.
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{'people': [], 'organizations': [], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Sievierodonetsk', 'Lysychansk', 'Moscow', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Lysychansk', 'Luhansk Province', 'Ukrainian', 'Donetsk Province']}
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A Young Woman’s Wartime Task: Persuading People to Leave Their Homes
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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.
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{'people': ['Yana Muravinets', 'Muravinets', 'Muravinets', 'Muravinets'], 'organizations': ['the Red Cross'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Mykolaiv']}
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NYT
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Griner Case Draws Attention to ‘Wrongful Detentions’
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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.
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{'people': ['Barack Obama'], 'organizations': ['State Department', 'The State Department'], 'locations': ['the United States', 'Iran', 'U.S.', 'the United States', 'U.S.']}
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Moscow Signals a Shift to a More Aggressive Phase of Ukraine War
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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.
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{'people': ['Kristalina Georgieva'], 'organizations': ['the International Monetary Fund', 'Group of 20', 'Siemens'], 'locations': ['Vinnytsia', 'Kyiv', 'Ukraine', 'Vinnytsia', 'Ukraine', 'Ukrainian', 'Ukraine', 'Germany', 'Gazprom', 'Canada']}
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Italy’s Crisis Redoubles European Foreboding
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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.”
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{'people': ['Biden', 'Putin', 'Macron'], 'organizations': ['euro'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'the United States', 'Ukraine', 'Germany', 'Ukrainian', 'Italy', 'Russia', 'Algeria', 'France', 'France', 'Ukraine', 'Kyiv']}
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Brittney Griner’s Supporters Hold Steady After Guilty Plea
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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.
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{'people': ['Cathy Engelbert', 'Brittney Griner', 'Engelbert', 'Griner', 'Griner', 'Biden', 'Griner', 'Biden', 'Griner'], 'organizations': ['W.N.B.A.', 'The U.S. State Department', 'the State Department'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'W.N.B.A.', 'N.B.A.', 'Moscow']}
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Putin Aims to Shape a New Generation of Supporters, Through Schools
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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.
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{'people': ['Vladimir V. Putin', 'Putin', 'Sergei Novikov', 'Putin'], 'organizations': ['Kremlin'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Crimea', 'Russia', 'the Soviet Union’s', 'the Soviet Union', 'Ukraine']}
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The World Economy Is Imperiled by a Force Hiding in Plain Sight
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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.”
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{'people': ['Julia Coronado'], 'organizations': ['the University of Texas', 'the Brookings Institution'], 'locations': ['China', 'China', 'the United States', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Austin', 'Washington', 'Ukraine']}
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Your Monday Briefing: Russia Seizes Lysychansk
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Russia seizes Lysychansk
Ukraine’s military said Sunday that it had withdrawn from the key eastern city of Lysychansk, the last city in Luhansk Province still held by Ukraine.
Moscow’s victory means Russian forces are in control of large parts of the Donbas, a coal-rich region that has become Russia’s focal point since its defeat around Kyiv in the spring. Ukrainian forces are now bolstering defenses along the border line between Luhansk and the neighboring province of Donetsk, residents said.
After Ukraine withdrew from Lysychansk, explosions hit the center of a Russian city just north of Ukraine, killing four, officials said. It is the deadliest known episode affecting civilians in Russia since the start of the war. Moscow blamed Ukraine for the attack in Belgorod; Ukraine’s military had no immediate comment.
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news
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{'people': ['Donbas'], 'organizations': [], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Lysychansk', 'Ukraine', 'Lysychansk', 'Luhansk Province', 'Ukraine', 'Moscow', 'Russia', 'Luhansk', 'Ukraine', 'Lysychansk', 'Ukraine', 'Russia', 'Moscow', 'Ukraine', 'Belgorod', 'Ukraine']}
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The War on Ukrainian Culture
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With Russia actively trying to erase Ukraine’s national identity, the country’s music, literature, movies and monuments have become battlefields, my colleague Jason Farago writes.
A critic at large for the Times, Jason spent two weeks in Ukraine, traveling to the war zone to report on the role that cultural identity is playing in the conflict. The true culture war of our age is the war for democracy, he writes. Ukrainian culture, past and present, has become a vital line of defense for the whole liberal order.
I spoke to him just as he was about to board a flight. Our conversation has been lightly edited.
Why does culture play such an important role in this war?
Jason: Wars destroy culture. And this one is no different.
The last 25 years brought with them an absolutely appalling tide of cultural destruction. The war in Syria, particularly, resulted in dreadful damage to that country’s classical and Islamic heritage.
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{'people': ['Jason Farago', 'Jason', 'Jason'], 'organizations': ['Times'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine', 'Syria']}
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In a Flash of Fire and Shrapnel, a Smiling 4-Year-Old’s Life Is Snuffed Out
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Whether through callousness in targeting or simply by malevolent design, terror has rained down from the skies on shopping malls, apartment buildings, schools and medical facilities, killing dozens of civilians.
Some military analysts have said that Russia, running low on precision weaponry, is firing haphazardly at targets in densely populated areas, heedless of collateral death and destruction. Others, like President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other Ukrainian officials, say the strikes are part of a “terrorist” campaign to break the country’s will to resist. The missile strike on Vinnytsia killed 23 people, including Liza and two other children, and wounded 140 others.
“Russia continues its policy of intimidation and terrorism,” Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, wrote in an online post after speaking with Samantha Power, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, about the strike in Vinnytsia, and missile and artillery bombardments of Mykolaiv in the south, and Chasiv Yar in the east. “That is why it should be recognized as a terrorist state at the international level.”
In a statement on Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had aimed its strike in Vinnytsia at the military officer’s club, where members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were meeting with “representatives of foreign armament suppliers.” The ministry’s account, which could not be verified, concluded by noting that the attack resulted in the “elimination of the conference participants.”
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{'people': ['Volodymyr Zelensky', 'Liza', 'Denys Shmyhal', 'Samantha Power', 'Chasiv Yar'], 'organizations': ['the U.S. Agency for International Development', 'Defense Ministry', 'the Ukrainian Armed Forces'], 'locations': ['Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Vinnytsia', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'Vinnytsia', 'Mykolaiv', 'Russia', 'Vinnytsia']}
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Energy Was the Only Bright Spot in the Stock Market’s Gloom
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The energy industry has become the stock market’s equivalent of a road hog. As financial markets around the world fell this spring on worries about high inflation, rising interest rates and the strength of the economy, energy was the only sector gaining ground.
Energy funds surged 18.4 percent, on average, in the first half of the year. Funds focused on every other area of the U.S. economy lost ground. Energy funds were also the best sector to own in 2021, according to data from Morningstar Direct. But investors with long memories will recall that the energy industry came in dead last in 2020 as pandemic shutdowns sent the economy into recession.
Now drivers are not alone in figuring out how to navigate energy costs. Russia’s war in Ukraine has created so much uncertainty about energy supplies that investors are having trouble making bets about the future of energy prices and the broader economy. A recent investing note from Charles Schwab said the broker did not recommend making significant bets on any market sector, including energy, “partly due to the highly volatile nature of the market and the uncertain trajectory of economic growth.”
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{'people': [], 'organizations': ['Morningstar Direct', 'Charles Schwab'], 'locations': ['U.S.', 'Russia', 'Ukraine']}
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The many parties involved complicate war crimes investigations.
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A Russian missile strike on a city in central Ukraine on Thursday killed at least 23 people, including three children. Two weeks earlier, missiles crashed into buildings near Odesa, killing 21. And for weeks in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, civilians bore the brunt of Russia’s assault — killed on their bicycles or while walking down the street, or executed with their hands bound.
Indiscriminate Russian attacks on civilian areas have become a hallmark of its invasion, and this week, an international conference in The Hague sought to coordinate an approach to the overwhelming allegations of war crimes in Ukraine.
But investigators face a formidable challenge, with as many as 20,000 war crimes investigations, multiple countries and international agencies at work, and a high burden of proof to reach a conviction. Complicating matters further, investigations are working while the war is still raging. The Kremlin has denied allegations against its forces, and Russia’s Defense Ministry has called graphic evidence of atrocities “fake.”
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{'people': [], 'organizations': ['Bucha', 'Kremlin', 'Defense Ministry'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Odesa', 'Russia', 'The Hague', 'Ukraine', 'Russia']}
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NYT
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An American’s Murky Path From Russian Propagandist to Jan. 6
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Konstantin Malofeev, an influential oligarch indicted by the United States over alleged sanctions violations, said he had asked Mr. Bausman to appear on his television network because Mr. Bausman was one of the few Russian-speaking Americans willing to do it.
“Who else is there to invite?” Mr. Malofeev asked.
Mr. Bausman, 58, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. No charges have been brought against him related to the events of Jan. 6, though he appears inside the Capitol in video clips introduced in court cases against others. When a Russian TV host referred to him as “a participant” in storming the Capitol, Mr. Bausman interrupted to say that the description could get him into trouble, and that he was a journalist.
But, on other occasions, he has described himself differently. Speaking on a white nationalist podcast in April, in which he attacked critics of Russia as “evil pedophile globalists” who control the “enslaved West,” he explained why he was back in Moscow:
“I’m a political refugee here.”
Connecticut to Moscow
President Vladimir V. Putin had just invaded Crimea in 2014 when Mr. Bausman said he had an idea. He would create an alternative news source to counter what he called Western media’s “inaccurate, incomplete and unrealistically negative picture of Russia.”
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{'people': ['Konstantin Malofeev', 'Bausman', 'Bausman', 'Malofeev', 'Bausman', 'Bausman', 'Vladimir V. Putin', 'Bausman'], 'organizations': ['Crimea'], 'locations': ['the United States', 'Russia', 'Moscow', 'Connecticut', 'Moscow', 'Russia']}
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Democratic
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NYT
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Gaps in Arms Supplies to Ukraine Point to Countries’ Divergent Strategies
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BRUSSELS — There is the war on the ground in Ukraine and the war over weapons supplies, on which the first war depends.
In the weapons war, there is a significant disparity between the flood of arms supplied by Britain, Poland and the United States, and what the rest of Europe is providing, which has raised the persistent question of whether some countries are slow-walking supplies to bring about a shorter war and quicker negotiations.
Those whispers, coming most loudly from countries on NATO’s eastern flank, closest to the war, have not stopped despite the very public visit to Kyiv in June by some of Europe’s top leaders — from France, Germany and Italy — aimed at reassuring the Ukrainians of their support.
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{'people': [], 'organizations': ['BRUSSELS', 'NATO'], 'locations': ['Ukraine', 'Britain', 'Poland', 'the United States', 'France', 'Germany', 'Italy']}
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Democratic
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NYT
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