published,headlines,articles
2022/06/23,"For a Kyiv Techno Collective, ‘Now Everything Is About Politics’","When Slava Lepsheiev founded the Ukrainian techno collective Cxema in 2014, “I thought it should be outside politics and just a place where people can be happy and dance,” the D.J., 40, said in a recent video interview from Kyiv.

Until the pandemic, the biannual Cxema (pronounced “skhema”) raves were essential dates in the techno calendar of Ukraine, which has become an increasingly trendy destination for club tourists over the past decade. These parties — in factories, skate parks and even an abandoned Soviet restaurant — united thousands on the dance floor to a soundtrack of experimental electronic music.

But as the Cxema platform grew bigger, and Ukraine’s political climate grew more tense, “I realized I had a responsibility to use that influence,” Lepsheiev said, and to look beyond escapism on the dance floor. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February deepened that commitment, and the war has transformed how Lepsheiev and his team think about their priorities and work."
2022/06/21,"After a Pivotal Period in Ukraine, U.S. Officials Predict the War’s Path","Several military analysts say Russia is at peak combat effectiveness in the east, as long-range artillery systems promised to Ukraine from NATO countries are still trickling in. Ukraine is hugely outgunned, they say, a stark fact that President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged last week.

“The price of this battle for us is very high,” he said in a nightly address. “It’s just scary. And we draw the attention of our partners on a daily basis to the fact that only a sufficient number of modern artillery for Ukraine will ensure our advantage and finally the end of Russian torture of the Ukrainian Donbas.”

President Biden on Wednesday announced an additional $1 billion in weapons and aid for Ukraine, in a package that includes more long-range artillery, anti-ship missile launchers, and rounds for howitzers and for the new American rocket system. Overall, the United States has committed about $5.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Mr. Zelensky and his aides have appealed to the West to supply more of the sophisticated armaments it has already sent. They have questioned their allies’ commitment to the Ukrainian cause and insisted that nothing else can stop Russia’s advance, which even by conservative estimates has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers."
2022/06/13,"The Corpse of a Russian Soldier, and the Cold but Human Urge to Look","The Russians have abandoned the bodies of many of their troops, a startling practice that flouts a common code among combatants. Does it signal disarray? Low morale? Or was it, in this case, something more personal?

Maybe if he had been popular in the platoon, the guy who picked you up from the bar at 4 a.m. no questions asked, they would have fought to put out the flames. Or at least to get his body, so he could be buried under a familiar sky.

Or maybe it was so catastrophic that by the time the survivors made it to safety and looked around and realized, good god, he’s missing, they knew there was nothing they could do. He was still in there. Trapped.

I’m looking at him, thinking about all this, trying to figure out if that’s his rib cage, listening to the artillery in the distance and wondering if it’s getting closer or farther away.

Husarivka was a speed bump in a Russian advance that failed, leaving the village of dairy farms, and little else, briefly occupied by Russian soldiers — and saturated with Ukrainian artillery fire in response — until the Ukrainians advanced at the end of March."
2022/06/11,Biden Races to Expand Coalition Against Russia but Meets Resistance,"A month later, Mr. Ramaphosa lamented the impact that the conflict was having on “bystander” countries that he said “are also going to suffer from the sanctions that have been imposed against Russia.”

Brazil, India and South Africa — along with Russia and China — are members of a group of nations that account for one-third of the global economy. At an online meeting of the group’s foreign ministers last month, Moscow offered to set up oil and gas refineries with its fellow partners. The group also discussed expanding its membership to other countries.

Other nations that abstained from the United Nations vote, including Uganda, Pakistan and Vietnam, have accused the U.S.-led coalition against Russia of shutting down any chance of peace talks with its military support of Ukraine. U.S. and European officials maintain that the weapons and intelligence it has provided serves only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s military.

The growing urgency in the Biden administration is embodied in the president’s plans to visit Saudi Arabia, despite his earlier denunciations of its murderous actions and potential war crimes. Mr. Biden’s effort, which is already being criticized by leading Democrats, is partly aimed at getting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to help on the margins with Ukraine. One goal is to have those nations coordinate a substantial increase in oil production to help bring down global prices while the United States, Europe and others boycott Russian oil.

U.S. officials have been disappointed by the proclaimed neutrality of the two Gulf Arab nations, which buy American weapons and lobby Washington for policies against Iran, their main rival.

Israel, which also buys American weapons and is the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East, has expressed solidarity with Ukraine. At the same time, however, it has resisted supporting some sanctions and direct criticism of Russia."
2022/06/13,"As China Rattles Sabers, Taiwan Asks: Are We Ready for War?","Underlying Taiwan’s defense dilemma is a question left unanswerable by design: Will the United States send military forces to Taiwan’s aid? In May, President Biden suggested he would, but the United States offers no explicit security guarantees, a strategy it hopes will avoid either provoking Beijing or emboldening Taiwan to declare formal independence.

Mr. Xi has said he seeks a peaceful unification with Taiwan, and he may be deterred by the huge economic and diplomatic blowback China would suffer for an invasion. But China has also been pointed in its warnings. Its defense minister, Gen. Wei Fenghe, said over the weekend that Beijing would “fight to the very end” for Taiwan. It is sending fighter jets toward the island almost daily — including 30 aircraft in one day last month alone.

The concern is that such maneuvers could, intentionally or otherwise, be a prelude to conflict.

“We cannot wait; we are competing with time,” said Michael Tsai, a former defense minister of Taiwan. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happened in an instant — who knows when the P.L.A. might choose to invade Taiwan.”

The ‘Porcupine Strategy’

Several military drills conducted in January were intended as a show of force to China — to demonstrate how Taiwan planned to stop invaders from intruding on its airspace, landing on its beaches and, in the worst case, taking over its cities.

At an air base in central Taiwan, a siren wailed, and within minutes pilots were taking off in F-16 fighter jets to ward off intruders. Off the northern coast, the navy debuted new mine-laying craft as two small warships fired live ammunition. In a southern city, smoke filled the air as soldiers practicing urban combat shuffled past fake storefronts of bubble tea shops and cafes, exchanging gunfire with combatants."
2022/06/08,"U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine’s War Strategy, Officials Say","Of course the U.S. intelligence community collects information about nearly every country, including Ukraine. But American spy agencies, in general, focus their collection efforts on adversarial governments, like Russia, not current friends, like Ukraine. And while Russia has been a top priority for American spies for 75 years, when it came to the Ukrainians, the United States has worked on building up their intelligence service, not spying on their government.

The result, former officials said, has been some blind spots.

“How much do we really know about how Ukraine is doing?” said Beth Sanner, a former senior intelligence official. “Can you find a person who will tell you with confidence how many troops has Ukraine lost, how many pieces of equipment has Ukraine lost?”

Even without a complete picture of Ukraine’s military strategy and situation, the Biden administration has pushed forward new capabilities, like the rocket artillery systems President Biden announced last week. Ukraine is awaiting the arrival of more powerful Western weapons systems as both sides in the war suffer heavy losses in the eastern Donbas region of the country.

Pentagon officials say they have a robust process for sending weapons in place, which begins with a request from the Ukrainians and includes a U.S. assessment of what kind of equipment they need and how quickly it can be mastered."
2022/06/02,"U.S. Technology, a Longtime Tool for Russia, Becomes a Vulnerability","Technology restrictions have harmed other Russian industries as well, U.S. officials say. Equipment for the oil and gas industry has been degraded, maintenance for tractors and heavy equipment made by Caterpillar and John Deere has halted, and up to 70 percent of the commercial airplanes operated by Russian airlines, which no longer receive spare parts and maintenance from Airbus and Boeing, are grounded, officials say.

But some experts have sounded notes of caution. Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va., voiced skepticism about some claims that the export controls were forcing some tank factories and other defense companies in Russia to shutter.

“There’s not been much evidence to substantiate reports of problems in Russia’s defense sector,” he said. It was still too early in the war to expect meaningful supply chain problems in Russia’s defense industry, he said, and the sourcing for those early claims was unclear.

Maria Snegovaya, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who has studied sanctions on Russia, said the lack of critical technologies and maintenance was likely to start being felt widely across Russian industry in the fall, as companies run out of parts and supplies or need upkeep on equipment. She and other analysts said even the production of daily goods such as printer paper would be affected; Russian companies had bought the dye to turn the paper white from Western companies.

“We expect random disruptions in Russia’s production chains to manifest themselves more frequently,” Ms. Snegovaya said. “The question is: Are Russian companies able to find substitutes?”

U.S. officials say the Russian government and companies there have been looking for ways to get around the controls but have so far been largely unsuccessful. The Biden administration has threatened to penalize any company that helps Russia evade sanctions by cutting it off from access to U.S. technology."
2022/06/02,U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Yacht Company That Caters to Russian Elites,"WASHINGTON — The U.S. government leveled sanctions against a yacht management company and its owners, describing them as part of a corrupt system that allows Russian elites and President Vladimir V. Putin to enrich themselves, the Treasury Department announced on Thursday.

Imperial Yachts, which is based in Monaco and controlled by the Moscow-born Evgeniy Kochman, caters to Russian oligarchs. The Treasury Department said Mr. Kochman and his company provide yacht-related services to “Russia’s elites, including those in President Putin’s inner circle.” Imperial Yachts, the department said, conducts business with at least one person subject to sanctions.

The Treasury Department also identified four yachts linked to Mr. Putin: the Shellest, the Nega, the Graceful and the Olympia. The department said Mr. Putin used the Nega for travel in Russia’s north, and the Shellest periodically travels to his Black Sea palace. The department said Mr. Putin has taken numerous trips in the Black Sea on the Graceful and the Olympia."
2022/06/04,"U.S. Warship Arrives in Stockholm for Military Exercises, and as a Warning","ABOARD U.S.S. KEARSARGE, in the port of Stockholm — If ever there was a potent symbol of how much Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has altered Europe, the sight of this enormous warship, bristling with 26 warplanes and 2,400 Marines and sailors, moored among the pleasure craft and tour boats that ply this port, would certainly be it.

“No one in Stockholm can miss that there is this big American ship here in our city,” said Micael Byden, the supreme commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, standing on the amphibious assault ship's deck in the shadow of an MV-22 Osprey under a clear sky on Saturday. “There are more capabilities on this ship,” he marveled, “than I could gather in a garrison.”

In this perennially neutral country that is suddenly not so neutral, the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which showed up just two weeks after Sweden and Finland announced their intention to seek membership in NATO, is the promise of what that membership would bring: protection if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia turns his ire toward his Nordic neighbors."
2022/05/31,"Russian Military Is Repeating Mistakes in Eastern Ukraine, U.S. Says","But by May 13, control of the city had flipped again. “The Russians took Kharkiv for a short period of time; the Ukrainians counterattacked and took Kharkiv back,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said at a news conference at the Pentagon last week. “We’ve seen them really proceed at a very slow and unsuccessful pace on the battlefield.”

Ukraine is now pushing Russian troops north and east from Kharkiv, “in some cases all the way back to Russia,” said retired Gen. Philip Breedlove, the former supreme allied commander for Europe. “So now Ukrainians are threatening to cut off Russian lines of supply and pushing their forces to the rear.”

Cutting off Russian supply lines east of Kharkiv would put Russian troops in the same situation they were in after their advance on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, at the beginning of the war, officials said. Ukrainian units carrying shoulder-fired Javelin antitank missiles picked off Russian soldiers as miles-long Russian convoys near Kyiv stopped moving forward. The invasion stalled, and thousands of Russian troops were killed or injured. Russia then refocused its mission on the east.

In the early weeks of the war, Russia ran its military campaign out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, American and other Western officials said. In early April, after Russia’s logistics and morale problems had become clear, Mr. Putin put General Dvornikov in charge of a streamlined war effort.

General Dvornikov arrived with a daunting résumé. He started his career as a platoon commander in 1982 and later fought in Russia’s brutal second war in Chechnya. Moscow also sent him to Syria, where the forces under his command were accused of targeting civilians."
2022/05/31,"Forces Battle for Ukraine City, as E.U. Ratchets Up Responses","BRUSSELS — Russian troops battled their way into the devastated Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk on Tuesday, as their slow, brutal offensive in eastern Ukraine shifted from indiscriminate shelling to street fighting, with thousands of civilians still trapped among the ruins.

With Moscow pressing its advance despite heavy losses, Ukraine’s allies looked to new ways to raise the price Russia pays for aggression, while easing the pain it causes elsewhere. A day after the European Union agreed to ban most Russian oil imports, the bloc’s focus shifted to aiding Ukraine and helping it resume food exports that are vital to feeding the world.

Wrapping up a two-day summit meeting in Brussels, E.U. leaders agreed to $9.7 billion in aid to Ukraine this year, albeit with demands attached to fight the corruption that has plagued the country. And Ursula von der Leyen, president of the E.U. executive commission, said the developing global food crisis is “only the fault of Russia,” which has seized or blockaded all of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports."
2022/06/01,"Putin’s Threats Highlight the Dangers of a New, Riskier Nuclear Era","WASHINGTON — The old nuclear order, rooted in the Cold War’s unthinkable outcomes, was fraying before Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, it is giving way to a looming era of disorder unlike any since the beginning of the atomic age.

Russia’s regular reminders over the past three months of its nuclear might, even if largely bluster, were the latest evidence of how the potential threat has resurfaced in more overt and dangerous ways. They were enough to draw a pointed warning to Moscow on Tuesday from President Biden in what amounted to a tacit acknowledgment that the world had entered a period of heightened nuclear risks.

“We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote in a guest opinion essay in The New York Times. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”"
2022/06/01,Two Telling Numbers,"In the Opinion section, President Biden has published an essay explaining that his administration will continue to send weapons to Ukraine but not troops. In the essay, he announces that the U.S. will send longer-range missiles to Ukraine than it previously has.

Alongside those pieces, we’re using today’s newsletter to give you an overview of the war.

A Russian pincer

The big question over the next several weeks — according to our colleague Julian Barnes, who covers U.S. intelligence agencies — will be whether Russia can encircle Ukraine’s forces in Donbas. If Russia can, the Ukrainian troops could be cut off from the rest of the country and suffer heavy losses. Russia might then be in position to take control of nearly all of Donbas.

“Intelligence officials have repeatedly said, both publicly and privately, that this next phase is going to be very important in setting the tenor for the war in the months to come,” Julian said. “It will determine whether we stay in something approximating a stalemate or if one side gets the upper hand.”

In the war’s early weeks, Russia tried to move quickly and capture large sections of territory. Its military proved incapable of doing so, rebuffed by Ukrainian troops, with help from weapons provided by the U.S., E.U. and other allies. In the war’s current phase, Russia has emphasized a strategy from other recent wars, in Syria and Chechnya: using missiles and other heavy artillery to bombard cities and towns and eventually take them over."
2022/05/31,"U.S. to Send Ukraine $700 Million in Military Aid, Including Advanced Rockets","That has proved to be a tricky line to walk for the president and his advisers since Mr. Putin sent his troops into Ukraine nearly 100 days ago.

In his article on Tuesday, Mr. Biden described his administration’s resolve to support Ukraine in its attempts to repel Russian invaders. But Mr. Biden also offered specific assurances for Mr. Putin that the United States does not intend to provoke a wider conflict or the use of weapons of mass destruction.

“We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”

Mr. Biden stated bluntly in his article that he did not seek to overthrow Mr. Putin, despite his off-the-cuff remarks during a speech in Poland earlier this year, when he said the Russian president “cannot remain in power.” On Tuesday, Mr. Biden presented a different view."
2022/05/28,Diplomats Fear Russia May Use Syrian Aid as Bargaining Chip in Ukraine,"An international pressure campaign to keep the route open is now underway. The United States is presiding over the Security Council this month and has held a series of meetings touching on the plight of Syrians who have become homeless or otherwise need assistance to survive.

Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said Moscow had not decided how it would vote. But in an interview on Friday, he said that under the current system, the aid was vulnerable to extremists in Idlib.

“I do not deny that it goes to refugees as well, but the terrorist groups — they benefit from this,” he said, adding that the extremists had attacked deliveries.

Mr. Polyanskiy would not discuss negotiations to keep the corridor open, except to say that talks between Russia and the United States were stagnant, given “current geopolitical circumstances.”

“Frankly, we don’t have very many things to make us optimistic at this stage,” he said.

But three foreign diplomats said Russia had sent vague signals suggesting it might try to use the vote to gain concessions in the standoff over Ukraine. The United States and European countries have imposed a variety of sanctions on Russia to punish the country for invading its neighbor.

The diplomats would not describe the signals in detail and said Moscow had stopped short of directly tying the corridor’s fate to the war in Ukraine. But they said they believed Moscow would lean on countries that would be directly affected by a new wave of refugees for help in evading the sanctions."
2022/05/30,"For NATO, Turkey Is a Disruptive Ally","WASHINGTON — When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey threatened this month to block NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, Western officials were exasperated — but not shocked.

Within an alliance that operates by consensus, the Turkish strongman has come to be seen as something of a stickup artist. In 2009, he blocked the appointment of a new NATO chief from Denmark, complaining that the country was too tolerant of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and too sympathetic to “Kurdish terrorists” based in Turkey. It took hours of cajoling by Western leaders, and a face-to-face promise from President Barack Obama that NATO would appoint a Turk to a leadership position, to satisfy Mr. Erdogan.

After a rupture in relations between Turkey and Israel the next year, Mr. Erdogan prevented the alliance from working with the Jewish state for six years. A few years later, Mr. Erdogan delayed for months a NATO plan to fortify Eastern European countries against Russia, again citing Kurdish militants and demanding that the alliance declare ones operating in Syria to be terrorists. In 2020, Mr. Erdogan sent a gas-exploration ship backed by fighter jets close to Greek waters, causing France to send ships in support of Greece, also a NATO member."
2022/05/27,Why the Once-Hawkish Heritage Foundation Opposed Aid to Ukraine,"On Thursday, Mr. Roberts published a podcast interview with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of only 11 Senate Republicans to oppose the Ukraine aid package and the author of a recent op-ed entitled “No to Neoconservatism.”

“Neither you, nor we, intend any opposition to an aid package to be dismissive of the heroism that we’ve seen in Ukraine,” Mr. Roberts told Mr. Hawley. “But I can at least speak for Heritage and say, ‘We’ve had enough of business as usual.’”

The core tenets of the organization have long been grounded in promoting free enterprise, limited government and strong national defense. But it has increasingly fed off the rising populism in the party, first during the ascent of the Tea Party and then during the Trump administration, stocking some of the most prominent members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet and boasting that nearly two-thirds of its ideas had been carried out or embraced by his White House during his first year in office.

“What was so surprising about this moment was Heritage, which has always been tough on Russia, strong on NATO and guided by the mantra of ‘What Would Reagan Do?’ took a very odd turn,” said Eric Sayers, a current nonresident at the American Enterprise Institute who began his career at Heritage as a junior staff member.

The move, Mr. Sayers said, reflected the ascendancy in the organization “of more populist forces focused more on following the right than leading it.”

Mr. Roberts, who referred to himself in an interview as a “recovering neocon,” said Heritage’s stance on the aid package reflected “a real skepticism among the conservative grass-roots about the entrenched conservative foreign policy leadership.”"
2022/05/19,"U.S. Aims to Cripple Russian Oil Industry, Officials Say","But sanctions have a mixed record. Severe economic isolation has done little to change the behavior of governments from Iran to North Korea to Cuba and Venezuela.

One measure American officials are discussing would require foreign companies to pay a below-market price for Russian oil — or suffer U.S. sanctions. Washington would assign a price for Russian oil that is well under the global market value, which is currently more than $100 per barrel. Russia’s last budget set a break-even price for its oil above $40. A price cap would reduce Russia’s profits without increasing global energy costs.

The U.S. government could also cut off most Russian access to payments for oil. Washington would do this by issuing a regulation that requires foreign banks dealing in payments to put the money in an escrow account if they want to avoid sanctions. Russia would be able to access the money only to purchase essential goods like food and medicine.

And as those mechanisms are put in place, U.S. officials would press nations to gradually decrease their purchases of Russian oil, as they did with Iranian oil.

“There wouldn’t be a ban on Russian oil and gas per se,” said Maria Snegovaya, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who has studied sanctions on Russia. “Partly this is because that would send the price skyrocketing. Russia can benefit from a skyrocketing price.”

But enforcing escrow payments or price caps globally could be difficult. Under the new measures, the United States would have to confront nations that are not part of the existing sanctions coalition and, like India and China, want to maintain good relations with Russia."
2022/05/19,"Chinese Hackers Tried to Steal Russian Defense Data, Report Says","Under China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, Beijing has refined its approach to cyberspying, transforming over the past decade into a far more sophisticated actor. China’s premier spy agency, borrowing a page from Russia, has recruited beyond its ranks, pulling from the country’s growing pool of tech workers. The strategy has made its attacks more scattershot and unpredictable, but analysts say it has also helped strengthen the country’s efforts, enabling spies to run stealthy attacks that target intellectual property as well as political and military intelligence around the world.

Mr. Xi has made improving China’s scientific and technical capabilities a priority in the coming years, with ambitions of becoming a global leader in high-tech fields such as robotics, medical equipment and aviation. The campaign targeting Russian defense research institutes “might serve as more evidence of the use of espionage in a systematic and long-term effort to achieve Chinese strategic objectives in technological superiority and military power,” Check Point’s report said.

More recently, hackers based in China, like their counterparts elsewhere, have taken advantage of the war in Ukraine to break into the computer systems of organizations across Europe. Hackers have preyed upon heightened anxiety about the invasion, tricking their victims into downloading documents that falsely claim to contain information about the war or pose as aid organizations raising money for charity.

Many of the attacks originating from China appear to be focused on gathering information and intellectual property, rather than on causing chaos or disruption that could sway the conflict in favor of Ukraine or Russia, security researchers said.

In late March, Chinese hackers began going after Ukrainian organizations, according to security researchers and an announcement from Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency. A hacking team known as Scarab sent a document to Ukrainian organizations that offered instructions on how to film evidence of Russian war crimes but also contained malware that could extract information from infected computer systems, researchers at the security firm SentinelOne said.

Also in March, another hacking team affiliated with China, which security researchers have called Mustang Panda, created documents that purported to be European Union reports on conditions at the borders of Ukraine and Belarus, and emailed them to potential targets in Europe. But the documents contained malware, and victims who were tricked into opening them inadvertently allowed the hackers to infiltrate their networks, researchers at Google and the security firm Cisco Talos said."
2022/05/20,"On Ukraine, McConnell Tries to Show the World This Isn’t Trump’s G.O.P.","This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did you decide to make the trip to Europe last weekend?

One was to try to convey to the Europeans that skepticism about NATO itself, expressed by the previous president, was not the view of Republicans in the Senate. And I also was trying to minimize the vote against the package in my own party.

We have sort of an isolationist wing, and I think some of the Trump supporters are sort of linked up with the isolationists — a lot of talk out in the primaries about this sort of thing. And I felt this would help diminish the number of votes against the package. I think that worked out well.

I’d had a private dinner with the president of Finland back in March, right after the invasion, so we’d sort of developed a relationship. So we decided to head up to Stockholm and Helsinki. These are incredibly important admissions to NATO. They both have great militaries. They’re both independent of Russian energy. If anybody’s ready to be a part of NATO, these two countries are, so it was exciting to be there.

I think the trip helped convince Europeans that Republicans are the way we used to be on NATO.

Did you personally lobby individual senators to try to allay some of their concerns about the aid bill?

I certainly was talking about it for the last two weeks to my own colleagues. I said, No. 1, this is a pittance compared to the $2 trillion the Democrats dumped on the economy last year, producing 40-year-high inflation. If ever there were a reason where for an expenditure of this amount, this is it. And if the Russians succeeded, it would cost us a lot more. So yes, I was arguing for support for the package."
2022/05/20,G7 nations pledge $20 billion to Ukraine.,"KÖNIGSWINTER, Germany — The Group of 7 economic powers agreed on Friday to provide nearly $20 billion to support Ukraine’s economy over the coming months to help keep the country’s government running while it fights to repel a Russian invasion.

In a joint statement after two days of meetings, finance ministers from the Group of 7 affirmed their commitment to help Ukraine with a mix of grants and loans. Ukraine needs approximately $5 billion per month to maintain basic government services, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The $19.8 billion of financing was agreed on after the United States, which is contributing more than $9 billion in short-term financing, pressed its allies to do more to help secure Ukraine’s future. The statement did not break down how much the other Group of 7 nations will contribute."
2022/05/19,Biden Seeks Swift Effort to Bring Finland and Sweden Into NATO,"Under an agreement with the Soviet Union, Finland stayed outside the alliance, which was created to contain Russia after World War II. It remained independent in the post-Soviet era even after joining the European Union and growing ever closer with the West. Until now, Sweden had kept to more than 200 years of neutrality.

But that posture has been quickly abandoned after Mr. Putin’s decision in February to invade Ukraine, which is not a NATO member. Both Finland and Sweden suddenly realized that the threat from Russia had changed and that their status as a bystander to great-power conflict was now a huge risk.

The speed of the reversal has been so great that there has been virtually none of the debate that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when even some of Washington’s most experienced Cold War diplomats warned that the more Russia felt encircled, the higher the chances that it might eventually lash out, especially if the effort to integrate the country with the West failed.

On Wednesday, Mr. Sullivan said that Mr. Biden had asked his national security officials whether they backed the addition of Finland and Sweden to the alliance and that they had “emphatically supported” the move in a unanimous fashion.

The Rose Garden ceremony deliberately contained echoes of a state visit, complete with a military band. Mr. Biden characterized the move to usher Finland and Sweden into the alliance as almost a formality, noting that both countries had contributed forces to conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq — the major NATO commitments of the past 20 years — and that they were strong democracies that “meet every NATO requirement and then some.”

Mr. Biden argued that the two countries would add to the alliance’s firepower.

Finland has a sophisticated military that runs complex operations to track Russian activity in the seas of Northern Europe and spends heavily on modern equipment. Sweden is a more difficult case: It dismantled some of its military power and, as Ms. Andersson conceded, would have to reorient its budget to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, the target for NATO members."
2022/05/19,"The Senate overwhelmingly approves $40 billion in aid to Ukraine, sending it to Biden.","Determined to project strong bipartisan support for Kyiv, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, worked for days leading up to the vote to tamp down on the anti-interventionist strain in his party, arguing both privately and publicly to his colleagues that the United States needed to aid a young democracy standing between Russian aggression and the Western world.

The pinnacle of that effort came over the weekend, when Mr. McConnell traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine, Stockholm and Helsinki, Finland, in what he said was partly a bid to push back on former President Donald J. Trump’s hostility toward NATO and the aid legislation itself. When Mr. Trump announced his opposition to the $40 billion package, Mr. McConnell said, he worried that he “could lose a lot more than 11” Republican votes.

The trip was designed “to convey to the Europeans that skepticism about NATO itself, expressed by the previous president, was not the view of Republicans in the Senate,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview. “And I also was trying to minimize the vote against the package in my own party.”

“We have a sort of an isolationist wing,” he continued. “And I think some of the Trump supporters have sort of linked up with the isolationists — a lot of talk out in the primaries about this sort of thing. I felt this would help diminish the number of votes against the package. I think that worked out well.”

Most of the Republicans regarded as presidential prospects in 2024 — Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida — backed the legislation even in the face of opposition from right-wing organizations.

In a 24-minute speech on the Senate floor, announcing his vote on Wednesday night, Mr. Cruz said he had carefully listened to a litany of arguments against the aid bill, including that it was too expensive and bloated with provisions unrelated to military aid, and that it was not in America’s security interest to counter Russia’s campaign when there were so many domestic problems at home."
2022/05/19,"The Senate is expected to pass a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, sending it to Biden.","The Senate is set on Thursday to give final approval to a $40 billion emergency military and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine, as the United States deepens its support for an increasingly costly and protracted fight against a Russian invasion.

The measure is the largest foreign aid package passed by Congress in at least two decades, and its enactment would bring the American investment in the war to roughly $54 billion in just over two months. The Senate was expected to approve it overwhelmingly, in the latest reflection of the remarkable bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for a massive investment in Ukraine’s war effort, which propelled the spending package through the House last week.

President Biden was expected to quickly sign it into law. His administration and Ukrainian leaders have pressed hard for its swift enactment, warning that they would run out of aid by Thursday if Congress failed to act."
2022/05/19,G7 Finance Ministers Race to Secure More Ukraine Aid,"KÖNIGSWINTER, Germany — Top economic officials from the world’s advanced economies moved closer toward agreement on a global rescue package for Ukraine on Thursday, with finance leaders negotiating the details of a multibillion-dollar plan to keep the Ukrainian government operating amid Russia’s onslaught.

Finance ministers of the Group of 7 nations expressed optimism about the emergency financing deal on the first day of a two-day summit, where they are focused on how to provide aid to Ukraine and exert pressure on Russia while avoiding economic blowback that will slow the global economy. Officials have been consumed with how to contain rising food and energy prices that have some economists worrying about a global recession.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said at the end of the first day of meetings that the G7 was prepared to spend what is necessary to help Ukraine."
2022/07/29,Brittney Griner and the Total Lopsidedness of Prisoner Swaps with Russia,"Reports are circulating that the United States is negotiating with Russia to exchange two Americans being held in Russian prisons for a notorious arms dealer serving time in America. The deal is totally lopsided: The two Americans — the basketball star Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, a security company executive — are not criminals and certainly not remotely comparable to Viktor Bout, a notorious purveyor of arms to terrorists once known as the “Merchant of Death.”

But if that’s the way to get American citizens out of a Russian prison, do it. The only caveat, an urgent one, would be to include in the deal Marc Fogel, an American teacher sentenced to an absurd 14 years in prison for taking marijuana into Russia. His infractions are similar to the ones Ms. Griner, 31, is charged with. She was detained in February with two hashish oil vape cartridges in her luggage; Mr. Fogel, 61, was carrying 14 vape cartridges of marijuana and some cannabis buds.

Both say they need cannabis for dealing with injuries and pain. But for reasons the State Department has not clarified, the U.S. government has designated Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan as “wrongfully detained” but not Mr. Fogel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not mention this third American prisoner during a recent news conference, in which he said he intended to take up the matter of a swap for Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia."
2022/07/27,The U.S. and Russia Need to Start Talking Before It’s Too Late,"Starting talks while the fighting rages would be politically risky and would require significant diplomatic efforts, particularly with Ukraine — and success is anything but guaranteed. But talking can reveal the possible space for compromise and identify a way out of the spiral. Otherwise, this war could eventually bring Russia and NATO into direct conflict.

The current U.S. approach assumes that would happen only if the Ukrainians are given particular systems or capabilities that cross a Russian red line. So when President Biden recently announced his decision to provide Ukraine with the multiple-launch rocket system that Kyiv says it desperately needs, he deliberately withheld the longest-range munitions that could strike Russia. The premise of the decision was that Moscow will escalate — i.e., launch an attack against NATO — only if certain types of weapons are provided or if they are used to target Russian territory. The goal is to be careful to stop short of that line while giving the Ukrainians what they need to “defend their territory from Russian advances,” as Mr. Biden said in a statement in June.

The logic is dubious. The Kremlin’s focus is precisely on making advances on Ukrainian territory. The problem is not that providing Ukraine with some specific weapon could cause escalation but rather that if the West’s support of Ukraine succeeded in stemming Russia’s advance, that would constitute an unacceptable defeat for the Kremlin. And a Russian battlefield victory is equally unacceptable to the West.

If Russia continues to push farther into Ukraine, Western partners would likely provide yet more and better weapons. If those weapons allow Ukraine to reverse Russia’s gains, Moscow may feel compelled to double down — and if it is really losing, it might well consider direct attacks against NATO. In other words, there’s no mutually acceptable outcome right now. But talks could help identify the compromises needed to find one."
2022/07/26,A Maestro and His Musicians Face Scrutiny Over Ties to Russia,"“He belongs to the system of Putin,” Vasyl Khymynets, the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, said in an interview. “He hasn’t criticized this brutal war, yet he has the chance to be presented on one of the most famous stages in Europe and probably in the world.”

The esteemed pianist Evgeny Kissin, a frequent performer in Salzburg, said that while he would not object if Currentzis appeared with a Western orchestra, MusicAeterna’s ties to the Russian government were problematic.

“In the current situation, groups funded by the Russian state should not be allowed to perform in the civilized world,” said Kissin, who was born in Moscow and is now based in Prague, citing Russia’s “criminal war in Ukraine.”

Currentzis, through his representatives, declined to comment.

Since founding MusicAeterna in Siberia in 2004, Currentzis has sought to defy labels. He is known as an uncompromising classical musician but has also earned a reputation as a punk, a goth and an anarchist. Born in Athens, he went to Russia in his 20s to study music and now carries a Russian passport. (Putin awarded him citizenship by presidential decree in 2014, the Russia news media reported.)

Currentzis began his career as an outsider trying to build artistic centers away from the traditional bases of Moscow and St. Petersburg, including at the Novosibirsk State Opera in Siberia and in the industrial city of Perm. He stood up to the Russian authorities, including in 2017, when his friend and collaborator Kirill Serebrennikov, one of Russia’s most prominent theater directors, was detained in Moscow, a move seen as retribution for his critical portrayals of life under Putin."
2022/07/29,Russian National Charged With Spreading Propaganda Through U.S. Groups,"MIAMI — The Russian man with a trim beard and patterned T-shirt appeared in a Florida political group’s YouTube livestream in March, less than three weeks after his country had invaded Ukraine, and falsely claimed that what had happened was not an invasion.

“I would like to address the free people around the world to tell you that Western propaganda is lying when they say that Russia invaded Ukraine,” he said through an interpreter.

His name was Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, and he described himself as a “human rights activist.”

But federal authorities say he was working for the Russian government, orchestrating a yearslong influence campaign to use American political groups to spread Russian propaganda and interfere with U.S. elections. On Friday, the Justice Department revealed that it had charged Mr. Ionov with conspiring to have American citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government."
2022/07/29,Blinken Resists Push to Label Russia a Terrorist State,"WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate supports it unanimously. So does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the Ukrainian Parliament.

But Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is not so sure.

For weeks, pressure has mounted on Mr. Blinken to formally declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, a label currently reserved for North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Iran. But despite the emotional appeal, Mr. Blinken is resisting a move that could force him to sanction U.S. allies that do business with Russia and might snuff out the remaining vestiges of diplomacy between Washington and Moscow.

Amid outrage over Russia’s brutal military campaign in Ukraine, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution calling on Mr. Blinken to designate Russia as a terrorism sponsor for its attacks in Ukraine, as well as in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, that resulted “in the deaths of countless innocent men, women and children.”"
2022/07/27,Russia Cuts Natural Gas Flow to Germany Yet Again,"Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, followed through on Wednesday with its announcement earlier this week that it would further restrict the flows of natural gas to Germany and other European countries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. It also blamed Siemens Energy, the German maker of turbines used on the pipeline, for causing the cutbacks, prompting a sharp retort from the company.

News of the reduced flows of natural gas caused a jump in the already-high price for natural gas in Europe, to heights not seen since the days immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Prices later moderated, but remained about double what they were in mid-June, when Russia began a series of restrictions on flows through the pipeline.

Data from Nord Stream showed that flows were reduced to about 20 percent of the pipeline’s capacity.

Gazprom said maintenance issues concerning turbines supplied by Siemens Energy were to blame for diminished output. German officials dispute this claim, and European officials say Russia is cutting back its gas deliveries to punish Europe for its opposition to the war in Ukraine."
2022/07/29,"Russia Is Making Heaps of Money From Oil, but There Is a Way to Stop That","It is an audacious and untested idea. It also appears to be the best available option. If it works, it could deprive Russia of revenue without devastating the economies of nations that are trying to support Ukraine.

Constructing a cartel is not easy. The United States has already secured the agreement in principle of the other members of the Group of 7, a coordinating body for the major democratic economic powers. American officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, are working with their counterparts to hammer out the details. The buyers’ cartel would be strengthened if other big buyers of Russian oil, notably India and China, could be persuaded to participate. That seems unlikely. But U.S. officials argue the cartel could still increase pressure on Russia by allowing nations that are not participating to extract larger discounts, too.

Maintaining a cartel is also hard. Because the participants can benefit by cheating on the price ceiling, policing a price-fixing agreement is notoriously difficult. But in this case, there may be a plausible enforcement mechanism. A key piece of the new sanctions by the European Union and Britain is a ban on insuring tankers that carry Russian oil. Shippers need insurance to navigate canals and to enter harbors. European companies dominate the market; in April and May, 68 percent of Russian oil exports traveled on tankers insured by European businesses. That measure could be modified to ban insurance for tankers with oil purchased at a price above the cartel’s ceiling.

The Russian government has sought to forestall the plan by warning that it would refuse to go along with it. “As far as I understand, we won’t be supplying oil to those countries which would impose such a cap, and our oil, oil products will be redirected to the countries which are ready to cooperate with us,” Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank, said at a news conference last week. Analysts, however, say that if a cartel is established, Russia’s real choice would be between accepting its terms and leaving a large share of current oil production in the ground."
2022/07/26,Europe Weans Itself Off Russian Gas,"Before the meeting, President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of waging “an overt gas war” against “a united Europe” and urged leaders not to give in to Russian threats. Russian gas accounts for 40 percent of E.U. consumption, and gas is a leading source of energy for homes and businesses.

All of the E.U.’s 27 member states supported the move, except for Hungary, which voted against the agreement but couldn’t veto it. Some exemptions were given to Ireland, Cyprus and Malta, which have little flexibility to seek alternative energy sources, as well as to the Baltic States that have electricity grids connected to Russia’s.

The bloc’s gas storage tanks, usually almost full before winter, are currently at 66 percent capacity, according to the E.U.’s energy commissioner, Kadri Simson.

The stakes are particularly high for Germany, which relied on Russia to supply 55 percent of its natural gas before the invasion. It has cut that share to 30 percent over the past months but is scrambling to ensure that it will have sufficient fuel in storage to last the winter."
2022/07/26,Russia Says It Will Quit the International Space Station After 2024,"Mr. Putin’s response: “Good.”

With tensions between Washington and Moscow rising after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Russian space officials including Dmitry Rogozin, Mr. Borisov’s predecessor, had made declarations in recent months that Russia was planning to leave. But they all left ambiguity about when it would happen or whether a final decision had been made.

If Russia follows through, it could accelerate the end of a project that NASA has spent about $100 billion on over the last quarter-century and set off a scrambling over what to do next. The space station, a partnership with Russia that also involves Canada, Europe and Japan, is key to studying the effects of weightlessness and radiation on human health — research that is still unfinished but needed before astronauts embark on longer voyages to Mars. It has also turned into a proving ground for commercial use of space, including visits by wealthy private citizens and the manufacturing of high-purity optical fibers.

An official at the White House said the United States had not received any formal notification from Russia that it would withdraw from the space station, although officials have seen the public comments.

“We are exploring options to mitigate any potential impacts on the I.S.S. beyond 2024 if in fact Russia withdraws,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council."
2022/07/27,U.S. Offers to Swap Russian Arms Dealer for Griner and Whelan,"In an interview last month, however, the judge who sentenced Mr. Bout, Shira A. Scheindlin, said that Mr. Bout “was not a terrorist, in my opinion. He was a businessman.” She added that she felt the mandatory 25-year sentence she was forced to impose was too high and that a trade of Mr. Bout for Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan would be reasonable.

A White House national security spokesman, John F. Kirby, declined to provide more specifics about the U.S. proposal.

“I’m sure you can all understand that it’s not going to help us get them home if we’re negotiating publicly,” Mr. Kirby told reporters. But he seemed to welcome the opportunity to say something beyond months of past official assurances that the administration was working quietly behind the scenes.

“What I will say is that the president and his team are willing to take extraordinary steps to bring our people home,” Mr. Kirby said. “We believe it’s important for the American people to know how hard President Biden is working to get Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan home. We think it’s important for their families to know how hard we’re working on this.”

A senior administration official said Justice Department lawyers, who have long argued against releasing Mr. Bout, part of an institutional reluctance to trade away federal prisoners, voiced initial opposition to the deal but were overruled by Mr. Biden.

Mr. Blinken disclosed the existence of the proposal hours after Ms. Griner testified for the first time about her arrest, telling a Russian courtroom that she had been tossed into a bewildering legal system with little explanation of what was happening and what she might do to try to defend herself."
2022/07/28,"Russians, Risking Isolation in the South, Build Up for Ukrainian Attack","In Kherson, which the Russians captured quickly after invading in February, they have had months to fortify their defensive lines, and the Ukrainians have yet to launch any major land-based counteroffensive.

“Of course, we are waiting for the command to attack, but it’s not really that simple,” said Senior Sgt. Oleksandr Babynets, 28, a member of the Ukrainian 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which is dug in along the Kherson region’s western border.

“The Russians have organized defensive lines, dug in and deployed a lot of weaponry,” he said. “We don’t just want to go ahead and die just like that. We need to work intelligently.”

In the last month, with most Russian forces tied down in the battles far to the east, in the Donbas region, Ukrainian forces in the south have managed to force Moscow’s troops back a few miles in the direction of Kherson. At their closest, along the Kherson region’s western border, they are about 30 miles from the city. There, the lines have largely frozen as each army jockeys for advantage.

As the counteroffensive brews, Russia has renewed attacks on the north, launching strikes from the Black Sea, Belarus and Russia that injured at least 15 people in the region of the capital, Kyiv, the Ukrainian authorities said on Thursday. The attacks were the first in weeks to hit the capital region, which the initial Russian offensive failed to capture early in the war."
2022/07/26,Brittney Griner’s Lawyers Argue for Leniency in Russian Court,"Wearing a black and gray sweatshirt with the slogan “Black lives for peace” printed on the back, Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star who has been detained in Russia on drug charges, appeared in a court near Moscow on Tuesday as her defense team continued to present evidence that she had not intended to break the law.

She was escorted to a courtroom by a group of police officers, one of them wearing a balaklava, and stood in a metal cage, holding photographs of her relatives, teammates and friends, according to video footage from the scene published by Russian state television.

After being detained in a Moscow airport one week before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Ms. Griner has become an unlikely pawn in a diplomatic game between Moscow and Washington. With her guilty plea making the verdict seem a foregone conclusion, experts said that her best hope was that the Biden administration could find a way to swap her for a high-profile Russian being held by the United States."
2022/07/24,Russia Tells Famine-Fearing Africa It’s Not to Blame for Food Shortage,"CAIRO — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia likes to cast himself as the leader of a global movement rising up against domination by the United States and its allies. On Sunday, his top diplomat brought that message directly to Africa, hoping to turn the hunger and social strife across the continent to Russia’s advantage.

He is likely to find a receptive audience.

Even before setting out on his four-country tour, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov made clear he would use the trip to blame the West for the grain shortages tied to the war in Ukraine that are raising fears of famine in African countries and to paint Russia as the continent’s faithful ally.

Ahead of the trip, Russia acquiesced to an agreement that allows Ukraine to resume exporting critically needed grain that has been blocked in Black Sea ports by the fighting, a sign of Mr. Putin’s apparent concern for public opinion across the developing world."
2022/07/27,Brittney Griner Describes Her Legal Ordeal to Russian Court,"The authorities detained Ms. Griner, 31, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who plays for the Phoenix Mercury, about a week before President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine in February. She was accused of having two vape cartridges of hashish oil in her luggage when she arrived at an airport near Moscow on her way to Yekaterinburg, where she plays for a team in the W.N.B.A. off-season.

Russia did not make her detention public until after the invasion began.

Earlier this month, Ms. Griner pleaded guilty, saying that she had unintentionally carried a banned substance into Russia because she had packed in a hurry. In Russia, a guilty plea does not end a trial and the proceedings are expected to continue into August. She faces a possible 10-year sentence.

Ms. Griner’s lawyers have said they hope her guilty plea will make the court more lenient, but experts say that her best hope is that the Biden administration finds a way to swap her for a high-profile Russian who is being held by the United States.

On Wednesday, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said the United States had “put a substantial proposal on the table weeks ago” to gain the release of Ms. Griner and Paul Whelan, a former Marine who was sentenced last year to 16 years in prison on espionage charges. He declined to discuss details of the offer."
2022/07/25,"Russia Cuts Gas Flow to Europe, Intensifying Fears It Is Weaponizing Fuel","BERLIN — On the eve of a European Union emergency meeting on cutting natural gas consumption, Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly said Monday that it would slash gas deliveries to Germany, as President Vladimir V. Putin once again showed his unpredictability and his power to inflict pain on the bloc for backing Ukraine.

E.U. energy ministers are set to meet Tuesday to weigh a 15 percent reduction in gas use, specifically because of fears that the Kremlin could create artificial shortages threatening heat and power generation over the winter. As if to confirm such worries, Gazprom, the Russian company, on Monday said it would cut by half the flow through its pipeline to Germany to just 20 percent of capacity — less than a week after resuming limited flows following a maintenance shutdown.

Western officials dismissed the Russian explanation of equipment troubles — coincidentally or not, with German equipment — as nothing but a cover for its manipulation. “Based on our information, there is no technical reason for a reduction in deliveries,” the German Economy Ministry said in a statement."
2022/07/29,"Blinken Speaks to Russia’s Foreign Minister, Seeking Deal for Griner and Whelan","Ms. Griner, a W.N.B.A. star who had been playing for a Russian team during the off-season, is on trial in a Russian court and faces a sentence of up to 10 years in prison on drug charges. The 31-year-old athlete was detained in a Moscow airport about a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, after customs officials discovered hashish oil in her luggage.

Mr. Whelan, a former Marine and corporate security executive, was detained in 2018 in a Moscow hotel, where he had been staying for a friend’s wedding. In 2020, a Russian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison for espionage, a charge that he and his family have denied.

The State Department has classified both Mr. Whelan and Ms. Griner as “wrongfully detained.”

According to a person briefed on the matter, the Biden administration offered last month to trade the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who is currently serving a 25-year federal prison sentence in the United States, for Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan.

Mr. Blinken also said he had pressed Mr. Lavrov to make good on a recent Russian agreement to allow the passage of Ukrainian grain from Black Sea ports, and told him that the world would never accept the further Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory."
2022/07/22,"Bucking the global trend, Russia lowers interest rates again.","Moving in the opposite direction to much of the rest of the world, Russia’s central bank lowered its interest rate 1.5 percentage points to 8 percent on Friday, taking it even lower than it was before the country invaded Ukraine.

The bank said inflation, which fell to 15.9 percent last month from about 17 percent in May, was slowing in the country because of “subdued” consumer demand and the strength of the ruble, which reached a seven-year high against the dollar last month. The rate cut was larger than economists had expected.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, energy and food prices across the globe have soared as the war has disrupted the export of wheat and other commodities, while nations can no longer be assured of the security of Russia’s supply of natural gas."
2022/07/25,Russia Announces Deeper Cuts in Natural Gas Flows to Germany,"BERLIN — Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom, said on Monday that it would further reduce the amount of natural gas it sends to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, less than a week after it resumed limited flows after an annual maintenance shutdown.

Flows had already been cut back to 40 percent of capacity, but Gazprom said that it would crimp them to 20 percent starting Wednesday, citing problems with one of the powerful turbines that are manufactured by the German company Siemens Energy. The turbines build pressure within the pipeline to ship the gas long distances.

In mid-June Russia started cutting the amount of gas shipped through the 760-mile undersea pipeline, blaming the reduction on a missing turbine that had been shipped to Canada for repairs."
2022/07/21,"Russia Restarts Gas Shipments Through Pipeline, but Keeps Germany Guessing","Russia’s decision to restart the flow of natural gas through a vital pipeline on Thursday brought a moment of relief to Germany, which uses the fuel to power its most important industries and heat half its homes. But it is unlikely to be much more than that.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made clear that he intends to use his country’s energy exports as a cudgel, and even a weapon, to punish and divide European leaders — loosening or tightening the taps as it suits him and his war aims in Ukraine.

He is counting on that uncertainty to impose heavy economic and political costs on European leaders. Those elected officials are under growing pressure to bring down energy prices and avoid gas rationing that might force factories and government buildings to close and require people to lower thermostats in winter. Leaders in some nations, like Spain and Greece, are already chafing at a European Union plan to have every member country cut its gas use, arguing that they are already much less reliant on Russia than Germany."
2022/07/21,Russia Moves to Close Agency Handling Emigration to Israel,"The Jewish Agency official said that Russian disgruntlement with Israel over a variety of other matters might also help explain the new Russian pressure. These include Israeli military activities in Syria and a dispute over church property in Jerusalem.

Israeli officials have also become increasingly outspoken in their criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine, after initially trying to tread a diplomatic middle path. Last week, Israel began providing helmets and other protective equipment to Ukrainian rescue forces and civilian organizations after earlier refusing to do so, and Mr. Lapid signed a joint declaration with President Biden expressing “concerns regarding the ongoing attacks against Ukraine.”

“The attempt to punish the Jewish Agency for Israel’s stance on the war is deplorable and offensive,” Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, Nachman Shai, said in a statement on Thursday. “The Jews of Russia cannot be detached from their historical and emotional connection to the State of Israel.”

The Jewish Agency, founded nearly a century ago as the Jewish Agency for Palestine, was instrumental in helping establish Israel in 1948, and has facilitated the emigration of millions of Jews from around the globe. It describes itself as the largest Jewish nonprofit organization in the world, and runs social programs in Israel and for Jewish communities abroad.

The agency was banned in the Soviet Union, where Jews faced pervasive discrimination, until its final years. About a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union arrived in Israel from the late 1980s to the end of the 1990s. The agency now helps Russians with Jewish roots move to Israel and runs Sunday schools and Hebrew classes across Russia."
2022/07/22,"Russia Agrees to Let Ukraine Ship Grain, Easing World Food Shortage","BRUSSELS — After three months of talks that often seemed doomed, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement on Friday to free more than 20 million tons of grain stuck in Ukraine’s blockaded Black Sea ports, a deal with global implications for bringing down high food prices and alleviating shortages and a mounting hunger crisis.

Senior United Nations officials said that the first shipments out of Odesa and neighboring ports were only weeks away and could quickly bring five million tons of Ukrainian food to the world market each month, freeing up storage space for Ukraine’s fresh harvests. The difference might be felt most powerfully in the drought-stricken Horn of Africa, which relies heavily on Ukrainian and Russian grain.

The breakthrough, brokered with the help of the United Nations and Turkey, is the most significant compromise between the warring nations since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but it moves them no closer to peace. While government ministers signed the agreement in an ornate room in Istanbul, with their countries’ flags lined up together, a few hundred miles away their troops continued to kill and maim each other."
2022/07/23,"Russia Strikes Odesa Port, Stirring Doubts on Deal to Export Grain","ODESA, Ukraine — A string of explosions rocked Ukraine’s southern city of Odesa on Saturday, hitting one of the country’s most important ports less than 24 hours after Russia and Ukraine signed a deal to secure the transit of millions of tons of grain through Black Sea routes.

The strikes raised concerns about Russia’s commitment to the agreement, which was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, before it could even be put into action. The deal is seen as critical for shoring up global supplies after a steep drop in Ukrainian grain exports raised fears of food shortages in poorer nations.

The string of explosions were also grim reminders of Russia’s violent fulcrum of the five month old war: signals from Moscow that it can rain destruction on any part of Ukraine at random, no matter the military situation on the front lines or diplomatic breakthroughs elsewhere."
2022/07/29,"With Russia using energy as leverage, the quest in many parts of Europe is to shrink demand.","But European nations can hardly wait to see how the weather turns out.

Seeking to speed up its energy independence from Russia, Italy has looked to Algeria as a potential new supplier of gas, ramped up renewable energy sources and burned more coal to keep homes lighted and businesses running.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has warned that the country should brace itself for a total cutoff of Russian natural gas, has said that to tackle the gas shortage, the government would prepare a measured conservation plan to limit energy use. He has also noted that France’s large nuclear power industry makes it less vulnerable than some of its European neighbors.

“Russia is using energy, like it is using food, as a weapon of war,” Mr. Macron said earlier this month.

Élisabeth Borne, the French prime minister, told lawmakers in early July that France would renationalize its state-backed electricity giant, Électricité de France, which produces most of the country’s electricity and operates all of its nuclear plants."
2022/07/20,Russia Signals That It May Want a Bigger Chunk of Ukraine,"Russia’s top diplomat said Wednesday that his country’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine might broaden, as European leaders warned their citizens to prepare for sacrifices in the face of a conflict that shows no sign of ending any time soon.

In recent months, Russian forces have concentrated their assault on eastern Ukraine, which by all indications Russia appears determined to annex as it did Crimea in 2014. But on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov told the Russian state news agency that Moscow was now casting its gaze on a swath of Ukraine’s south, as well, specifically naming the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as well as “a number of other territories.”

“This is an ongoing process,” Mr. Lavrov said in an interview with RIA Novosti.

In comments reminiscent of the justification offered for the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin, who said Western military aggression had left him no choice, Mr. Lavrov said Ukraine’s allies were to blame if Russia expanded its military objectives."
2022/07/30,"As Ukraine defends in the east and south, a U.S. official says Russia’s war effort is failing.","Although Russia’s forces are trying to push deeper into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, they have not been able to break through Ukrainian defenses, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.

“Throughout July, the occupiers have been trying to storm Donetsk region,” Serhii Haidai, the head of the military administration in neighboring Luhansk Province, said in a statement. But unlike with the Russians’ push in the spring and early summer, when they could use their significant artillery advantage to flatten areas before advancing, Mr. Haidai said the Ukrainians’ destruction of Russian ammunition depots had “made it much more difficult for them to replenish arms stocks and maneuver.”

Still, he said, Russian forces continued “to destroy settlements, employing barrel and jet artillery.” At least six civilians were killed and 15 others were injured by Russian shelling in the Donetsk region on Friday, local Ukrainian officials said.

On the southern front, at least one civilian in the port city of Mykolaiv died when a Russian missile struck a high-rise building overnight, according to Vitalii Kim, the local governor."
2022/07/30,How the Kremlin Is Forcing Ukrainians to Adopt Russian Life,"Mr. Konstantinov, a longtime pro-Russia politician in Crimea, sat next to Mr. Putin at the Kremlin when the Russian president signed the document annexing the peninsula to Russia. He also helped organize the Crimean “referendum” in which 97 percent voted in favor of joining Russia — a result widely rejected by the international community as a sham.

Now, Mr. Konstantinov said, he is in constant touch with the Russian-imposed occupying authorities in the neighboring Kherson region, which Russian troops captured early in the war. He said that the authorities had told him a few days ago that they had started printing ballots, with the aim of holding a vote in September.

Kherson is one of four regions in which officials are signaling planned referendums, along with Zaporizhzhia in the south and Luhansk and Donetsk in the east. While the Kremlin claims it will be up to the area’s residents to “determine their own future,” Mr. Putin last month hinted he expected to annex the regions outright: he compared the war in Ukraine with Peter the Great’s wars of conquest in the 18th century and said that, like the Russian czar, “it has also fallen to us to return” lost Russian territory.

At the same time, the Kremlin appears to be keeping its options open by offering few specifics. Aleksei Chesnakov, a Moscow political consultant who has advised the Kremlin on Ukraine policy, said Moscow viewed referendums on joining Russia as its “base scenario” — though preparations for a potential vote were not yet complete. He declined to say whether he was involved in the process himself."
2022/07/29,A Ukrainian appeals court reduces the life sentence of a Russian soldier tried for war crimes.,"His case became a milestone of Ukrainian justice as the war raged on: Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian soldier, was sentenced in May to life in prison after pleading guilty to shooting a 62-year-old riding a bicycle in northeastern Ukraine.

On Friday, the Kyiv Court of Appeals reduced his sentence to 15 years, saying it would provide the reasoning for its decision on Aug. 3. His lawyers had argued that he had not intended to kill the victim, Oleksandar Shelipov, when he shot him in the northern region of Sumy in the early days of the war.

Ukraine’s justice system has come under criticism in the past from human rights advocates for imposing life sentences in which the only possibility for release was terminal illness or a presidential pardon."
2022/07/24,‘An abyss of fear’: A report accuses Russia of further abuses against civilians.,"Russian forces have tortured and beaten civilians in the areas of southern Ukraine that they control, part of a series of abuses that may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said this weekend in a report that further undermined the public case repeatedly made by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for the invasion.

Atrocities committed by Russian forces north of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, have already drawn global outrage and have been the subject of war crimes trials by Ukrainian prosecutors, but the report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nonprofit, casts a spotlight on the south of the country, where the Russian occupation forces tightly control access and information.

Starting in February, Russian forces pushed north from Crimea, a region of Ukraine that Moscow seized in 2014, and took control of territory along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coasts including in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Provinces."
2022/07/29,Russia’s foreign minister says he will propose a time for a phone call about a prisoner exchange.,"During a trip to Uzbekistan on Friday, Mr. Lavrov said that he had learned about Mr. Blinken’s statement from television during a visit to Africa this week. He said that any phone conversation between the two men would have to be conducted from his office and that Russia had asked the American side “to clarify the questions they want to discuss.”

Mr. Lavrov said that the question of prisoner exchanges had been discussed during a January meeting in Geneva between President Biden and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and both leaders ordered their government agencies to discuss it further. Mr. Lavrov said that his ministry was not involved in that discussion, but that he would listen to what Mr. Blinken has to say.

The American government has come under increased pressure from relatives of U.S. citizens to get them released from Russian prisons.

Ms. Griner, a W.N.B.A. star who had been playing for a Russian team during the off-season, is on trial in a Russian court and faces a sentence of up to 10 years in prison on drug charges. The 31-year-old athlete was detained in a Moscow airport about a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and customs officials discovered hashish oil in her luggage."
2022/07/26,Ukraine Is the Next Act in Putin’s Empire of Humiliation,"Mr. Putin’s manipulation of the cycle of humiliation and aggression is integral to his psychological grip on Russia. That manipulation can look like legislating to criminalize opposition to the war while also appealing for solidarity in the fight against the West. As the impact of economic sanctions rolls across Russia, Kremlin propaganda has called for Russians to show how tough they are: Haven’t they survived great trials in the past? These calls for toughness can resonate — people can learn to define themselves through surviving pain to the point of getting a certain satisfaction from it.

The Kremlin, of course, avoids any suggestion that it is the source of any pain, now or in the past. There are no major public memorials in Russia, in the shape of museums or movies, statues or open archives, that stand as a record of how the Soviet Union sadistically slaughtered its citizens in the gulags and colonized and repressed other territories and peoples. Some school textbooks in Russia celebrate Stalin as an “effective manager.”

Certainly, Russia is not the only country with a history of colonialism and internal repression. But in other countries these histories are usually part of an active debate. In Russia there seems to be nothing in the mainstream discourse that tries to make sense of the past, take responsibility for it or imagine a different path forward.

For Russia to have a chance to come to terms with itself, it will be necessary to confront this history and bring it into the public consciousness — via TV shows or public memorials and educational projects. But admitting one’s own role in this cycle of humiliation and aggression is stymied by the very culture of humiliation: The humiliated feel they have no agency, so why should they feel responsible?

Meanwhile, the threat Russia poses — to Ukraine and to the world — must be mitigated now.

Mr. Putin recently declared that there are only two types of countries: “Either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony,” he said. This is the logic of internal humiliation projected onto geopolitics. For those who are chronically humiliated and humiliate others in turn, the idea that countries large and small alike could have rights is impossible: The world is split into those who dominate and those who are dominated.

Mr. Putin is not just trying to break Ukraine; he is using energy dependency to get Europeans to kneel to Russia’s demands and until recently was holding hostage in Ukrainian ports more than 22 million tons of grain that the world needs. In the face of such threats, it can be tempting to try to placate Russia. The editorial board of The New York Times has said that Ukraine will most likely have to accept territorial compromises. Mr. Macron has said that the West should avoid humiliating Russia. Such proposals are fundamentally misguided: Russia’s sense of humiliation is internal, not imposed upon it. To coddle the Putin regime is merely to participate in the cycle. If you yearn for sustainable security and freedom, abusive partners and predators cannot be indulged. The only option is to limit the sources of dependency."
2022/07/20,"With Russian Cutoff Feared, Europeans Are Told to Curb Natural Gas Use","The main argument to get all E.U nations on board, despite their different levels of vulnerability, is that the bloc’s economies are so interconnected that a blow to one is a blow to all.

“The choice we have today is triggering solidarity now or waiting for an emergency that will force solidarity upon us,” said Frans Timmermans, a senior Dutch politician who is the commission’s energy and climate czar.

He said savings in gas around the E.U. would create spare capacity to direct to the countries most in need in the wintertime, ensuring that no member state goes into economic shock because of the lack of power.

Ms. von der Leyen, putting a political spin on a seemingly economic issue, said this approach would deliver a blow to Mr. Putin, who wants to sow discord within the European Union, undermining the bloc and its most powerful countries economically and politically. Determined to make that backfire on him, European leaders have drawn closer together since the war began and have taken the first step toward possibly making Ukraine an E.U. member — something Mr. Putin set out to prevent.

“Putin is trying to push us around this winter and he will dramatically fail if we stick together,” Ms. von der Leyen said.

With Russia having slashed or completely cut gas supply to a dozen E.U. countries already, and the looming threat that it will not fully reconnect an important pipeline on Thursday that has been offline for maintenance, the bloc’s alternatives are few. Mr. Putin suggested late Tuesday that natural gas would resume flowing to Europe through the pipeline, but warned that supplies may be severely curtailed."
2022/07/27,Ukraine hits a key bridge in Kherson as Russia steps up missile strikes across the south.,"Explosions lit up the sky over the southern city of Kherson overnight, and as dawn broke on Wednesday it was clear that Ukrainian long-range missiles had once again found their target: a bridge that is critical in the Russian effort to resupply the forces charged with holding the port city.

At the same time, dozens of Russian missiles struck targets across the southern regions of Odesa and Mykolaiv, hitting port and transport infrastructure, two leisure centers, houses, a parking lot and two restaurants, according to Ukraine’s southern military command.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said its forces struck Ukrainian military strongholds, killing scores of soldiers, and other key Ukrainian infrastructure. The claims could not be verified. But it was clear that both armies were trying to limit their opponents’ logistical operations."
2022/07/21,Russia restarts gas shipments through a key pipeline to Germany.,"BERLIN — Russia resumed flows of natural gas to Germany early Thursday, easing fears in Europe that a key pipeline would become the latest target in the escalating confrontation between Moscow and the West as the war in Ukraine stretches into its fifth month.

A steady stream of weapons from Western allies that are being used by Ukraine to increasingly devastating effect against Russian forces had raised the suspense around whether Moscow would resume gas deliveries after a 10-day hiatus for annual maintenance. The tensions served as a stark reminder of how dangerously dependent Germany — Europe’s largest economy — and several of its neighbors remain on energy from Russia.

The Ukrainian military said on Thursday that over the past 24 hours it had conducted 10 strikes across southern Ukraine using attack helicopters and fighter jets, targeting five Russian strongholds. They also targeted six Russian ammunition depots and several command posts with missile and artillery strikes against more than 200 Russian targets."
2022/07/19,Leading Russian Tennis Player Criticizes War in Ukraine,"Kasatkina’s comments come as Russian players have returned to the top level of professional tennis following a forced hiatus.

In April, acting at the behest of the British government, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which runs Wimbledon, and the Lawn Tennis Association, which oversees the other annual spring and summer tournaments in England, barred Russian and Belarusian players from their tournaments.

“The U.K. government has set out directional guidance for sporting bodies and events in the U.K., with the specific aim of limiting Russia’s influence,” said Ian Hewitt, the chairman of the All England Club. “We have taken that directional guidance into account, as we must as a high-profile event and leading British institution.”

He said the combination of the scale and severity of Russia’s invasion of a sovereign state, the condemnation by over 140 nations through the United Nations and the “specific and directive guidance to address matters” made this a “very, very exceptional situation.”

The move was popular in Britain, according to opinion polls, but received significant pushback from the men’s and women’s tennis tours. They condemned it as discriminatory and decided to withhold rankings points for any victories at Wimbledon. It also represented a dramatic break with precedents of not letting politics interfere with individual athletes’ participation in sports and of limiting punishments taken in reaction to the war to barring Russian and Belarusian teams or any flags or other symbols of the countries from competitions.

In a twist of irony, Elena Rybakina, who was born in Russia but opted to represent Kazakhstan four years ago in exchange for funding from that country’s tennis federation, won the Wimbledon women’s singles title. Rybakina, whose parents still live in Russia and who still spends time there, deferred when asked about the war, claiming her English skills were limited, despite holding lengthy news conferences in English on a variety of subjects throughout the tournament."
2022/07/29,Explosion Kills Dozens of Ukrainian Captives at Russian-Held Prison,"ODESA, Ukraine — For the Russians, the Ukrainian fighters held prisoner at Correctional Colony No. 120 are a trophy. For the Ukrainians, they are war heroes.

Why either side would want any of them dead is a mystery, but that is the question that hung over the fighting in Ukraine on Friday after another deadly episode, with each side accusing the other of committing a war crime.

What is known is that an explosion ripped through a barracks of the prison camp in the Russian-occupied town of Olenivka in southeastern Ukraine early Friday morning, killing at least 50 captured fighters and maiming dozens more, according to both Ukrainian and Russian officials. Videos posted by Russian war bloggers show twisted metal bunk beds and the charred bodies of their former occupants."
2022/07/19,Why Russia Believes It Cannot Lose the War in Ukraine,"Sergey Karaganov is a prominent Russian political scientist whom I have known for almost 20 years in covering Russia and have interviewed many times as a window into Kremlin thinking. The academic director of the faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics and honorary chairman of Russia’s premier nongovernmental think tank, Mr. Karaganov warned for years about a potential conflict in Ukraine over NATO expansion. Since the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February, he has written articles and given interviews in broad support of President Vladimir Putin, so I interviewed him to better understand Mr. Putin’s aims in the conflict. Ukraine continues to suffer, and those who hope to support Ukraine must understand those aims as it tries to confront Russia’s aggression.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your articles and interviews, you have said, as President Putin has, that the war against Ukraine is existential for Russia. Why? In February 2022, there was no more talk of Ukraine joining NATO, Ukraine was posing no economic risk to Russia, the United States was far more concerned with China and the Middle East than with Russia. Where was the existential threat that required an all-out invasion?

When the military conflict started, we saw how deep Ukraine’s involvement with NATO was — a lot of arms, training. Ukraine was being turned into a spearhead aimed at the heart of Russia. Also we saw that the West was collapsing in economic, moral, political terms. This decline was especially painful after its peak in the 1990s. Problems within the West, and globally, were not solved. That was a classic prewar situation. The belligerence against Russia has been rapidly growing since the late 2000s. The conflict was seen as more and more imminent. So probably Moscow decided to pre-empt and to dictate the terms of the conflict."
2022/07/25,"Eyeing a City Captured by Russia, Ukraine Prepares an Ambitious Counterattack","After losing control over most of the region in the war’s first weeks, Ukrainian troops have now liberated 44 towns and villages along the border areas, about 15 percent of the territory, according to the region’s military governor, Dmytro Butrii. Ukraine’s top officials have given no clear timeline for retaking Kherson, but the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has made clear it is a top priority.

“Our forces are moving into the region step by step,” Mr. Zelensky said this week.

Ukraine’s planned counteroffensive in the south has created debate among Western officials and some analysts about whether Ukraine was ready for such a big effort, or if it is the best use of resources when Russian advances have come mostly in the Donbas.

Still, Ukrainian officials and several Western intelligence officials said it was important that Ukraine try to launch a counterattack. They say that the Russian military is in a relatively weaker position, having expended weapons and personnel in their Donbas offensive. Richard Moore, the chief of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, predicted that the Russians would be forced to take a pause, offering an opening to Ukrainian forces."
2022/07/20,Ukraine steps up attacks on key Russian targets in the south.,"“Ukraine and its Western partners may have a narrowing window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory,” said the spokesman, John Kirby.

Since April, Ukrainian forces have effectively been locked into a defensive posture as they gradually retreated from an onslaught of Russian artillery in the eastern Donbas region. The Russians have not seized new territory in weeks, and the Ukrainians say their defensive positions have stabilized.

But the purpose of the longer-range missile systems that Ukraine has been pleading for, and that Western countries have increasingly started to supply to its government, is not just to forestall Russia’s advance, but also to win back lost territory.

“We all strive to liberate Ukraine from the enemy,” the spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern forces, Natalia Humeniuk, said on Tuesday. “We have a single goal.”"
2022/07/18,Zelensky Takes Aim at Hidden Enemy: Ukrainians Aiding Russia,"KYIV, Ukraine — Even as it engages in fierce fighting with Russia on the battlefield, Ukraine is also waging war on a different, more shadowy front: rooting out spies and collaborators in government and society who are providing crucial help to the invading forces.

While Ukrainian society as a whole has rallied to the country’s defense, Russian sympathizers are reporting the locations of Ukrainian targets like garrisons or ammunition depots, Ukraine’s officials say. Priests have sheltered Russian officers and informed on Ukrainian activists in Russian-occupied areas. One official said collaborators had removed explosives from bridges, allowing Russian troops to cross.

The issue was cast into sharp relief on Sunday night when President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed two senior law enforcement officials, saying they had not been nearly aggressive enough in weeding out traitors. It was the first major reshuffle of his brain trust since the war began."
2022/07/19,Intelligence Agencies Say Russia Election Threat Persists Amid Ukraine War,"His agency, General Nakasone said, was anticipating “all that and other things that will be disruptive.”

In recent years, U.S. intelligence analysts and officials have been divided over the threat China poses — and whether it is undertaking the same kind of influence operation that Russia is. Some believe Beijing is more focused on shaping debate over the United States’ policy toward Hong Kong and Taiwan.

But others say China is as grave a threat as Russia in trying to influence the election. Part of the problem has been that intelligence analysts working on China and Russia do not share a common definition of influence operations, something intelligence officials have been trying to remedy over the past 18 months.

In an interview Tuesday with The New York Times, Mr. Wray said China has a “policy of trying to influence our policies and politics.”

“It’s not a straight election issue, but sometimes that strays into election issues,” he said, adding that “it’s more focused on the overall stance of the United States.”

“Elections are just a piece of a much bigger mosaic for them,” he continued.

He added that the Chinese “care more about being caught, which may contribute to their calculus in terms of how they go about what they are doing.”"
2022/07/25,A U.S. intelligence report finds that Russia’s use of ‘filtration centers’ to detain and deport Ukrainians has intensified.,"The analysis outlined three possible fates for those who pass through the centers.

“Those who are deemed nonthreatening may be issued documentation and permitted to remain in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, or in some cases forcefully deported to Russia,” the agency reported. “Others deemed less threatening, but still potentially resistant to Russian occupation, face forcible deportation to Russia and are subject to additional screening. Those deemed most threatening during the filtration process, particularly anyone with affiliation to the military or security services, probably are detained in prisons in eastern Ukraine and Russia, though little is known about their fates.”

The New York Times interviewed some of the people who were processed through the centers and managed to escape to Estonia. They described the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that went along with being forced from their homes by war and then being pressured to accept Russian citizenship.

A report released earlier this month by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe warned of abuses at the detention centers, including executions.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this month that “tens of thousands of people” were being held in the centers. “Young women disappear there,” he said. “I think you all understand what is happening with them there.”"
2022/07/29,Blinken and Lavrov Discuss Griner in Their First Call of the War,"Russia routinely denies well-documented atrocities, its own losses and even its role as the aggressor. It outlawed any negative description of its “special military operation,” including calling it a war. Within Russia, the Kremlin has near-total control of information, with independent news outlets having shut down rather than face prosecution.

Novaya Gazeta, one of the most prominent and last remaining of those outlets, reported Thursday that the Russian authorities have gone to court to strip its license. Novaya Gazeta — whose editor, Dmitri A. Muratov, shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year for defending free expression — suspended operations in March rather than face prosecution, but unlike many others, it did not dissolve.

Western officials have repeatedly accused Russia of using food as leverage in the war, a claim the Kremlin denies. In addition to blockading ports, the main conduit for Ukrainian food exports, Russian forces have struck farms and food storage facilities, and seized grain. Russia’s own food exports have fallen sharply, too, which it blames on Western sanctions dissuading companies from carrying or insuring Russian shipments.

The resulting shortages helped drive food prices up sharply. This spring the price of wheat futures were more than double what they were a year earlier, though they have since declined somewhat."
2022/07/20,"Seeking ‘Axis of Good’ Against U.S., Russia Taps Allies of Convenience","With Western sanctions having a “colossal” impact on Russia, in Mr. Putin’s own words, Moscow needs places to do business, especially as the sanctions bite harder over time. Iran, isolated by even tougher American economic sanctions over its nuclear program, is happy to do business with Russia, Mr. Kupchan said.

Russia also needs more surveillance of the battleground in Ukraine, and Washington has revealed Moscow’s interest in buying both armed drones and observation drones from Tehran.

Russia and Iran have a long and complicated history. Ties and trade improved after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was the first country to recognize the Islamic Republic after the country’s 1979 revolution, though Moscow went on to back Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. In general, the two countries have had a mutual interest in pushing back American power in places such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Relations improved with the deterioration of Russia’s ties to the West and the steady imposition of sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2021, mutual trade hit record levels, though at a relatively modest amount of about $3.5 billion."
2022/07/28,Russian Arms Dealer in Proposed Swap for Brittney Griner Has Notorious History,"Shortly after his conviction in 2011 on charges including conspiring to kill American citizens, the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout relayed a defiant message through his lawyer, even though he faced the prospect of decades in prison.

Mr. Bout, his lawyer said, “believes this is not the end.”

More than a decade later, Mr. Bout, 55, may be nearing a chance for a new beginning even though he has served less than half of his 25-year prison sentence.

The United States, trying to negotiate the release of two Americans imprisoned in Russia — the basketball star Brittney Griner and a former Marine, Paul Whelan — proposed exchanging them last month for Mr. Bout, according to a person briefed on the negotiations."
2022/07/28,U.S. Offer to Swap Russian Arms Dealer for Griner Highlights Uncomfortable Choices,"“I take a pretty hard line on it,” said John R. Bolton, a former U.N. ambassador and national security adviser. “It’s one thing to exchange prisoners of war. It’s one thing to exchange spies when you know that’s going on.” But “negotiations and exchanges with terrorists or with authoritarian governments” become dangerous “because then you’re just putting a price on the next American hostage.”

Ms. Griner’s case has commanded attention not just because she is a star player in the W.N.B.A. but also because her arrest came a week before Russia invaded Ukraine and seemed to be a brazen attempt by Moscow to gain a bargaining chip. Mr. Biden has come under enormous pressure to find a way to free her and approved the offer of Mr. Bout over the concerns of the Justice Department, which often takes a dim view of horse trading the criminals it puts away.

Mr. Bout, a former Soviet military officer, was once one of the world’s most wanted men, accused of selling weapons to Al Qaeda, the Taliban and various governments and militants in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Algeria. The movie “Lord of War,” starring Nicolas Cage and released in 2005, was based on his case. American agencies hunted him down for years until finally catching up with him in Bangkok in 2008 and extraditing him in 2010.

Why the Russians would be so intent on freeing Mr. Bout so long after his capture is something of a mystery. Any secret information Moscow may have worried about him revealing presumably was spilled long ago or is certainly dated by now. But it may simply be a feeling of solidarity on the part of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former K.G.B. officer.

“There are lots of hints in Bout’s biography, even on his Wikipedia page, which suggests that he had close ties with Soviet and Russian intelligence,” said Michael A. McFaul, a former American ambassador to Moscow. “You know who else does? Putin. My guess is that Putin wants to liberate his comrade. Loyalty among these folks, the Chekists, runs deep.”

Still, even after the U.S. offered up Mr. Bout, Russia seemed to be playing hard to get. After Mr. Blinken said he was ready to talk with Mr. Lavrov for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials indicated they were in no hurry. Mr. Lavrov “will pay attention to this request when time permits,” his spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said on Thursday. “Now he has a busy schedule of international contacts.”"
2022/07/27,Looming Question for Putin Opponents: Can You Change Russia From Jail?,"Mr. Gudkov went into exile after what he described as “credible threats” that a criminal case against him would result in jail time. He said he had encouraged Mr. Yashin, a longtime friend, to go into exile as well.

Yevgenia M. Albats, a journalist and friend of Mr. Yashin who also decided to stay, took the opposite view, saying it was impossible to engage in politics seriously from abroad.

“You cannot be a Russian politician in New York, in Manhattan,” Ms. Albats said in a phone interview from Moscow. “You cannot call yourself a Russian politician and be in London.” Still, she conceded, “The risks are very high and they are getting higher.”

Mr. Yashin acknowledged as much in the YouTube interview posted shortly before his arrest, with the Russian journalist Yuri Dud. “I understand that each day could be my last one as a free man,” he said.

He later wrote on social media that he believed it was his clear refusal to leave, expressed in that interview, that resulted in his arrest."
2022/07/18,Russia fines Google for failing to remove news it calls ‘fake.’,"A Russian court fined Google about $360 million (21.1 billion rubles) on Monday for failing to remove content the country deems illegal, including coverage of the war in Ukraine.

The forbidden content includes clips encouraging Russian citizens to participate in protests and news Moscow considers “fake.”

Censorship on Russian social media channels is not new, but efforts have ramped up since the war in Ukraine began. Four months ago, President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law effectively criminalizing any public opposition to the war as an attempt to silence critics while spotlighting pro-Kremlin media. Under this law, even the use of the word “war” is off limits."
2022/05/13,Treasury Warns Foreign Banks Against Helping Russia Evade Sanctions,"The Biden administration is urging international banks not to help Russia evade sanctions, warning that firms risk losing access to markets in the United States and Europe if they support Russian businesses or oligarchs that are facing financial restrictions as a result of the war in Ukraine.

The admonition by a senior Treasury official highlights U.S. efforts to exert pressure on the Russian economy through American financial power and underscores the broad view that the Biden administration is taking of its ability to enforce sanctions as it looks to isolate Russia from the global economy.

In private meetings on Friday with representatives of international banks in New York, Adewale Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, laid out the consequences of helping Russians flout sanctions. He pointed to the “material support provision” that dictates that even if a financial institution is based in a country that has not imposed sanctions on Russia, the company can still face consequences for violating U.S. or European restrictions, including being cut off from those financial systems."
2022/07/19,Germany Is on Edge Waiting for Russia to Restart the Gas on Nord Stream 1,"Months of brinkmanship by Russia over the flow of natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe could reach a high point later this week, when a temporary shutdown of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is scheduled to end.

Nord Stream 1, the main pipeline connecting Germany and Russia, is operated by Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy giant. Gazprom, which recently warned European buyers of its gas that it might cut off flows, shut down the pipeline on July 11 for annual maintenance. Gazprom is scheduled to restart the pipeline after about 10 days, as it has done in past years.

But this year the closure has raised concerns that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will keep the pipeline shut to punish Germany and the rest of Europe for their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Other pipelines, running through Poland and Ukraine, are not being used as alternative links to send gas as they were in past years during the temporary shutdown, Germany’s pipeline regulator said."
2022/07/15,"In Space, U.S.-Russian Cooperation Finds a Way Forward","In April, Mr. Rogozin demanded that economic sanctions against Russia be lifted and said that he had submitted a proposal urging the Russian government to leave the space station.

This week, after the European Space Agency formally pulled out of a collaboration with Russia on sending a robotic rover to Mars, Mr. Rogozin said Russian astronauts on the space station would stop using a robotic arm built by the Europeans and lobbed disparaging words at Josef Aschbacher, the director general of the European Space agency, and Josep Borrell Fontelles, a top European Union foreign policy official.

“I, in turn, give a command to our crew on the ISS to stop working with the European ERA manipulator,” Mr. Rogozin wrote on his Telegram channel. “Let Aschbacher himself and his boss Borrell fly into space and do at least something useful in their lives.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, insisted that the move had nothing to do with Mr. Rogozin’s performance and promised that the former director would soon be employed again."
2022/07/16,"As Biden Reaches Out to Mideast Dictators, His Eyes Are on China and Russia","JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — During his painful encounters with a series of Arab strongmen here in Saudi Arabia this weekend, President Biden kept returning to a single reason for renewing his relationship with American allies who fall on the wrong side of the struggle he often describes as a battle between “democracy and autocracy.”

“We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran,” Mr. Biden said at a session on Saturday with nine Arab leaders in a cavernous hotel ballroom in this ancient port on the Red Sea. “And we’ll seek to build on this moment with active, principled American leadership.”

Mr. Biden’s framing of America’s mission as part of a renewed form of superpower competition was revealing. For decades, American presidents largely saw the Middle East as a hotbed of strife and instability, a place the United States needed a presence largely to keep oil flowing and eliminate terrorist havens. Now, more than 20 years after a group of Saudis left this country to stage terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and strike the Pentagon, Mr. Biden is driven by a new concern: That his forced dance with dictators, while distasteful, is the only choice if his larger goal is to contain Russia and outmaneuver China."
2022/07/26,"Facing ‘Putin’s Energy Blackmail,’ Europe Agrees to Cut Russian Gas Use","The European Commission’s original proposal last week presented a less flexible plan to urgently cut use of the fuel across the bloc. It foresaw fewer exceptions, and put the Commission itself in charge of calling an emergency and triggering mandatory natural gas curbs.

Controversially, the proposal asked even those countries that are less dependent on Russian gas or have already started ambitious energy-saving plans to equally share the burden of cutting consumption, to help those who are more dependent.

Critics saw the proposal as primarily benefiting the bloc’s biggest economy and de facto leader, Germany, which is very dependent on Russian natural gas imports.

The German vulnerability turned the tables on an old European script; in previous financial crises, the Germans pointed the finger at weaker countries, especially in the continent’s south, for being irresponsible. Now southern countries, among them Greece, Spain and Italy, were able to take the moral high ground.

But the complexities of curbing gas use in Europe go far beyond cliché cleavages between north and south. Ultimately, the modus operandi of resolving the disagreements was entirely different from the old E.U. playbook, normally characterized by fruitless, late-night meetings and public disparagement.

Instead, E.U. energy ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday morning were out of their talks five hours later, with a compromise that seemed to address individual concerns without diluting the policy goal — to cut gas use and defang Mr. Putin’s energy threats."
2022/07/17,"As Russia Runs Low on Drones, Iran Plans to Step In, U.S. Officials Say","WASHINGTON — The White House disclosure last week that Russia is seeking hundreds of armed and unarmed surveillance drones from Iran to use in the war in Ukraine reflects Moscow’s need to both fill a critical battlefield gap and find a long-term supplier of a crucial combat technology, U.S. intelligence, military and independent analysts say.

Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, offered few details about the intelligence assessment he revealed to reporters last Monday, including whether the shipments had started. But other U.S. officials said Iran was preparing to provide as many as 300 remotely piloted aircraft and would start training Russian troops on how to use them as early as this month.

Russia has exhausted most of its precision-guided weapons as well as many of the drones it has used to help long-range artillery strike targets in its monthslong bombardment of Ukraine. Meantime, the first batches of American truck-mounted, multiple-rocket launchers have destroyed more than two dozen Russian ammunition depots, air defense sites and command posts, according to two U.S. officials, making Moscow’s need to counter the new, advanced Western arms more urgent."
2022/05/13,Russian Shipping Traffic Remains Strong as Sanctions Take Time to Bite,"Data from MarineTraffic, for example, a platform that shows the live location of ships around the world using those on-ship tracking systems, indicates that traffic from Russia’s major ports declined after the invasion but did not plummet. The number of container ships, tankers and bulkers — the three main types of vessels that move energy and consumer products — arriving and leaving Russian ports was down about 23 percent in March and April compared with the year earlier.

“The reality is that the sanctions haven’t been so difficult to maneuver around,” said Georgios Hatzimanolis, who analyzes global shipping for MarineTraffic.

Tracking by Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a maritime information service, shows similar trends. The number of bulk carriers, which transport loose cargo like grain, coal and fertilizer, that sailed from Russian ports in the five weeks after the invasion was down only 6 percent from the five-week period before the invasion, according to the service.

In the weeks following the invasion, Russia’s trade with China and Japan was broadly stable, while the number of bulk carriers headed to South Korea, Egypt and Turkey actually increased, their data showed.

“There’s still a lot of traffic back and forth,” said Sebastian Villyn, the head of risk and compliance data at Lloyd’s List Intelligence. “We haven’t really seen a drop.”

Those figures contrast somewhat with statements from global leaders, who have emphasized the crippling nature of the sanctions. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Thursday that the Russian economy was “absolutely reeling,” pointing to estimates that it faces a contraction of 10 percent this year and double-digit inflation."
2022/07/22,"Germany bails out Uniper, a crucial gas provider squeezed by Russia.","As part of the rescue, the German government expanded the credit it granted Uniper to 9 billion euros ($9.2 billion), from €2 billion before, and offered up to €8 billion in equity. The government also announced that it would allow energy suppliers to begin passing on increased costs to private and business consumers to spread the burden as broadly as possible beginning Oct. 1.

“We will do everything that matters, today and for as long as necessary,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters in Berlin, announcing the bailout as part of a wider package of measures to combat the energy crisis.

“We will make sure that nobody is overwhelmed in the current situation,” Mr. Scholz said.

Uniper’s share price veered wildly after the announcement, jumping at first but later crashing as details of the rescue sank in. The company has lost about 80 percent of its value this year, making it worth less than €3 billion, a sum far overshadowed by the money the government deemed necessary to bail it out.

The Berlin government deliberately made the terms of the deal tough on shareholders and the company, based on a model that it used to keep the German airline Lufthansa afloat two years ago. It will require Uniper to use its own capital and operating profit before the government support will kick in."
2022/07/18,U.S. aid chief criticizes China’s ‘absence’ in a food crisis stoked by Russia’s invasion.,"Nations that have refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risk accelerating a global food crisis, the United States international aid agency’s chief said on Monday, singling out China for hoarding fertilizer and grain while millions of people in East Africa face starvation.

Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, also criticized China for contributing only $3 million to the United Nations’ World Food Program in 2022 — compared with $2.7 billion donated by the United States — despite predictions of an “explosion of child deaths” in the Horn of Africa because of food shortages. The shortages started with a devastating drought and spiraled after Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

Ms. Power’s comments highlighted the increasing anger of the United States and its allies over China’s tacit support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his war to control Ukraine."
2022/07/14,Priests Once Aligned With Russia Come Under Suspicion in Ukraine,"RIVNE, Ukraine — A priest doused in green dye during a Sunday liturgy. Another yanked out of his western Ukrainian church as the police stood by watching. A church attacked by vandals, who filled it with foam, plastered the walls with portraits of Stalin and later set it on fire.

For centuries, the Orthodox Church has been a dominant spiritual force in the country. Now the church is increasingly an object of distrust, largely because its spiritual leadership — at least until May — was in Moscow, rather than Kyiv.

Government officials once courted church leaders. Now they speak openly about suspicions that some priests are collaborating with Moscow and worry that the broader church could be a Trojan horse for pro-Russian views and more."
2022/07/22,Turkey says a deal between Ukraine and Russia to unblock grain exports will be signed on Friday.,"The United Nations said on Thursday that its secretary general, António Guterres, had landed in Istanbul as part of his effort “to ensure full global access to Ukraine’s food product and Russian food fertilizer.”

“The situation remains a little bit fluid, so I can’t really say when something will be signed,” said the United Nations deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, earlier on Thursday. “But as you can see from the fact that he is traveling to Istanbul, we are moving ahead with this.”

Last week, after meeting in Istanbul with negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and Turkey, Mr. Guterres told reporters that a deal was “technically done” and that he would interrupt his vacation and travel to Istanbul for the signing of it.

Until now, one of the major hurdles to an agreement were the mines Ukraine had placed in its ports on the Black Sea Coast to deter Russia’s warships. In late June, Mr. Guterres outlined the primary elements of a deal proposed by the United Nations and Turkey that would solve that problem."
2022/07/17,Family Members Mourn a 4-Year-Old Girl Killed in Russian Missile Attack,"The family and friends of Liza Dmytriyeva brushed away tears on Sunday as four men carried her coffin into the cathedral, where a photo of the smiling girl was nestled between roses and teddy bears three days after she was killed by a Russian cruise missile strike.

The death of Liza, a 4-year-old with Down syndrome whose family nicknamed her Sunny Flower, encapsulated the brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

She had been on a walk with her mother, pushing her own baby carriage through a park on Thursday when a flash of fire and metallic shrapnel erupted near them in Vinnytsia, a central Ukrainian town far from the front lines where some sense of normalcy had still seemed possible."
2022/07/20,Ukraine’s first lady tells the U.S. Congress that ‘Russia is destroying our people.’,"Ukraine’s first lady met her future husband, Volodymyr Zelensky, when they were still students at different universities in their hometown, the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. She later became a script writer at Kvartal 95, the production company that Mr. Zelensky founded before he traded comic acting for the presidency — and then became a wartime president.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ms. Zelenska, 44, focused on issues of female empowerment, literacy and culture in Ukraine. But the war has thrust her into the global spotlight. In recent weeks, she has stepped forward more on social media, and has used her profile to raise awareness about Russian crimes against children and older citizens.

During her speech, she also described a 4-year-old girl killed in the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, in a missile attack that left 25 people dead; a 5-year-old who died in a shopping mall attack; and a 3-year-old boy who lost his legs and is learning to use a prosthesis.

She asked members of Congress for more weapons, including air defense systems, before they leave for their August recess, so that “our kids are not going to be killed.”"
2022/07/14,Janet Yellen Says It’s in Russia’s Interest to Go Along With an Oil Price Cap,"On the eve of a meeting of finance chiefs from the world’s major economies in Bali, Indonesia, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen continued to push for a price cap on Russian oil, calling it “one of our most powerful tools” to alleviate the painful leaps in energy and food prices.

Ms. Yellen said at a news conference on Thursday that imposing a price limit on Russian oil would not only reduce President Vladimir V. Putin’s ability to continue waging a brutal war in Ukraine and shrink the Russian economy but also lower global oil prices.

Russia could still export oil at a profitable price if there was a cap, she said, and maintain access to markets that have restricted imports of Russian energy as part of sanctions against Moscow. At the same time, consumers around the world, including in India and China, which have been buying more Russian crude, would get some relief at the gas pump and grocery store."
2022/07/14,Strikes on Civilians Deep in Ukraine Show Russia’s Lethal Reach,"VINNYTSIA, Ukraine — A volley of missiles hit a shopping center, a dance studio and a wedding hall in central Ukraine on Thursday, killing at least 23 people and setting off a frantic search for dozens more missing in the rubble, in the latest strike to hit civilian targets far from the front line.

Seventy-one people, including three children, were hospitalized after three missiles hit the center of Vinnytsia, a typically sleepy provincial capital, leaving behind a harrowing scene of smoking ruins.

The attack used cruise missiles fired by a Russian submarine in the Black Sea, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office said. It said three children were among those killed in the strike on Vinnytsia, about 240 miles inland from the coast."
2022/07/20,"Seeking Leverage Over Europe, Putin Says Russian Gas Flow Will Resume","BERLIN — When the main natural gas artery between Russia and Germany, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, was taken off-line last week for 10 days of scheduled maintenance, European leaders began bracing for the possibility that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would not switch it back on as retaliation for opposing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

But Mr. Putin has suggested that the gas will resume flowing to Europe after the work on the pipeline — controlled by Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom — finishes on Thursday, though he warned that supplies might be further curtailed.

The European Commission called on the bloc’s 27 members to immediately begin taking steps to reduce gas consumption by 15 percent. “Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the commission, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday."
2022/07/19,Kharkiv Tried to Return to Normal. Russian Shelling Wouldn’t Let It.,"Ukraine repelled the effort to capture its second-largest city, but the artillery attacks did not stop. Many residents who left have returned but fear that a new offensive is imminent.

Jane Arraf and

KHARKIV, Ukraine — Alina Titova fell to her knees on the steps of the central railway station at her first glimpse of her home city after arriving back on the train.

“I want to kiss these steps,” Ms. Titova, 35, told the two friends who had come to meet her. It was her first trip back to Kharkiv since she left the besieged city in March, ending up in Germany with her three young children.

It was hardly an uplifting return. Ms. Titova was staying only long enough to take care of some business matters and to try to persuade her parents to leave their nearby village before winter set in."
2022/07/12,U.N. Yields to Russia’s Limits on Aid Mission in Syria,"WASHINGTON — World powers agreed on Tuesday to continue a United Nations aid mission to northwest Syria for six more months, bending to a deadline demanded by Russia that will, for now, avoid shutting down lifesaving deliveries for about four million people living amid an 11-year civil war.

Just days earlier, Russia had vetoed a plan at the U.N. Security Council to keep the humanitarian aid corridor, from Bab al-Hawa on the Turkish border into Idlib Province, open for one more year. In response, Western diplomats had then rejected a Russian proposal to instead allow the mission to remain for six months, calling it too short and unacceptable, given that the food, medicine and other supplies would be cut in the middle of winter, when the aid is needed the most.

But with little alternative to help war-weary Syrians — more than one million of whom have been living in tents during the conflict that began in 2011 — the council adopted the six-month mission as officials consider how to assist after it ends."
2022/07/08,"Despite a Wimbledon Ban on Russian Players, a Russian Woman Might Win","WIMBLEDON, England — After all the debate over whether to bar Russian and Belarusian players from Wimbledon, and under pressure from the British government, the women’s singles title may be won on Saturday by a player born in Russia after all.

Elena Rybakina is the 23rd-ranked player in the world, and before this week she had never advanced past the quarterfinal of a Grand Slam tournament. She is tall (6 feet) and powerful, an imposing presence on the tennis court. She has long appeared to lack the consistency required to win the six consecutive matches needed to contend for one of the most important titles, and in her late teens, her national tennis federation told her she was going to have to make it on her own.

That tennis federation was Russia’s. Rybakina was born in Russia and spent her first 18 years there. Her parents still live in Russia."
2022/07/18,Pulitzer Board Rejects Trump Request to Toss Out Wins for Russia Coverage,"The board of the Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious award in journalism, on Monday rejected an appeal by former President Donald J. Trump to rescind a prize given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election and Russian ties to Mr. Trump’s campaign and members of his administration.

The board said in a statement that two independent reviews had found nothing to discredit the prize entries, for which the two news organizations shared the 2018 Pulitzer for national reporting.

The reviews, part of the formal process that the Pulitzers use to examine complaints about winning entries, were conducted after the board heard from Mr. Trump and other complainants."
2022/07/17,More accounts of abuses in so-called Russian filtration camps in new report add to international concern.,"International concern is growing over reports of abuses involving Russia’s so-called filtration camps, including the eventual executions of some detainees, according to a new report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The international security agency’s report was released Thursday, a day after a statement by the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, that said Russian authorities have “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, from their homes into distant Russian territory.

Russia has acknowledged that 1.5 million Ukrainians are now in Russia, but has asserted that they were evacuated for their own safety."
2022/07/11,Putin extends a fast-track Russian citizenship process to all Ukrainians.,"President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday signed a decree offering a simplified path to Russian citizenship for all Ukrainians, an effort to broaden Moscow’s appeal and solidify its presence in the country.

Mr. Putin’s decision indicated that Russia might seek to establish permanent control of the Ukrainian territories currently occupied by Moscow’s forces, and that the Kremlin is also interested in extending its presence beyond them.

Since 2019, Russia has been offering a fast-track citizenship process to residents of the self-proclaimed breakaway republics in Ukraine’s east. In May, Russia extended that option to Ukrainians in the southeastern Kherson and Zaporizka regions, parts of which have been occupied by Moscow — along with other measures, like giving newborns automatic Russian citizenship."
2022/07/11,"Russia Steps Up Attacks on Civilian Areas, Even With Advance Paused","Russia and Ukraine keep the numbers of battlefield dead and wounded careful secrets, but the British military recently estimated the number of dead Russians at 25,000, with tens of thousands more wounded or simply exhausted after almost five months of war. That is far more than the roughly 15,000 the Soviet Union lost in its nine-year war in Afghanistan.

Even by conservative estimates, tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have died.

Ukraine also faces a manpower problem, but its officials have pleaded loudest for help with their primary disadvantage: heavy weapons and ammunition to counter Russia’s strategy of long-range strikes on homes, malls and transit centers, as well as troops.

In Chasiv Yar, where the apartment building was hit, one young man was trapped for more than 20 hours, pinned under the rubble. On Sunday evening, he was pulled out by rescuers, who quickly covered him with a blue blanket and gently placed him on a stretcher.

He was one of nine people saved from the complex so far, officials said. It was unclear whether anyone else was alive.

“My grandmother was here,” one neighbor said, before pointing into the pile of rubble.

“That’s her bed,” he said. “I hope they will find her, and I can give her a funeral.”

Carlotta Gall and Kamila Hrabchuk reported from Bakhmut, Ukraine, and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London. Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Alan Yuhas from New York."
2022/07/17,German’s Biggest Importer of Russian Gas Runs Through Its Credit Line,"One of Germany’s largest energy providers, Uniper, has used up a 2 billion-euro credit line from the German state-owned investment bank and has applied for more money, it said Monday, increasing the pressure on Berlin to bail out the company.

Uniper, which is also Germany’s largest importer of Russian gas, has racked up daily losses of tens of million of euros since Russia cut gas flows to Germany last month, forcing it to buy gas from other sources at much higher prices. The company has been forced to begin drawing down its own natural gas reserves that were set aside for winter, and has informed customers that gas prices may rise, steps it described as “emergency measures.”

Flows of natural gas through Nord Stream 1, the main pipeline connecting Germany and Russia, have stopped for annual maintenance. The routine shutdown has raised concerns that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will keep the pipeline closed to punish Germany and the rest of Europe for their opposition to the war in Ukraine."
2022/07/14,Witnesses testify in Brittney Griner’s defense as her drug trial continues in Russia.,"Witnesses for the defense praised Brittney Griner’s athletic prowess and character on Thursday in a courtroom outside Moscow, where the American basketball star — now one of the world’s most famous prisoners — is facing a possible 10-year sentence on drug charges.

Maksim Ryabkov, the director of UMMC Yekaterinburg, the professional Russian team that Ms. Griner has played for, testified to her “outstanding abilities as a player and personal contribution to the strengthening the team’s spirit,” said Ms. Griner’s lawyer, Maria Blagovolina, a partner with the firm Rybalkin, Gortsunyan, Dyakin and Partners.

Ms. Griner’s trial resumed a week after she pleaded guilty to drug charges. The Russian authorities accused her of having a vape cartridge with hashish oil in her luggage at an airport near Moscow on Feb. 17, where she had traveled to play with UMMC Yekaterinburg during the W.N.B.A. off-season. In the Russian justice system, trials go on even when defendants plead guilty, but Ms. Griner’s lawyers have said they hoped her plea would make the court more lenient."
2022/07/15,Brittney Griner’s lawyers say she had a doctor’s note for the drug she mistakenly carried into Russia.,"Brittney Griner’s lawyers argued on Friday that the American basketball star had a doctor’s note recommending the drug that she mistakenly carried into Russia, where she has been detained for nearly five months amid Moscow’s escalating tensions with Washington over the war in Ukraine.

As Ms. Griner’s trial on drug charges resumed at a courtroom outside Moscow, her defense team provided medical documents showing that she had a medical note recommending cannabis for chronic pain, according to Reuters.

The Russian authorities accused Ms. Griner in February of having two vape cartridges with hashish oil — a cannabis derivative — in her luggage at an airport near Moscow. The 31-year-old Phoenix Mercury star and two-time Olympic gold medalist had traveled there to play with UMMC Yekaterinburg, a Russian team, during the W.N.B.A. off-season."
2022/07/10,"Desperate for Recruits, Russia Launches a ‘Stealth Mobilization’","“Mostly, of course, it is a way of earning money,” said Sergei Krivenko, director of the Russian human rights organization Citizen Army Law. Many, especially older volunteers, have substantial debts, he and others said. A May law scrapped the age limit of 40 for contract soldiers.

Such piecemeal efforts sustain the war, but do not address the fundamental manpower deficit, analysts said. While Ukraine faces similar problems, what it lacks in professional soldiers it compensates for in enthusiastic volunteers, they said.

The online Russian ads avoid mentioning Ukraine, and the short-term offers, often three months, are meant to play down the risks of never coming home. “It may be that it is necessary to get them into the army, and when they are already in the army, figure out what to do,” said Mr. Galeev.

The high death toll among soldiers from poorer republics populated by ethnic minorities, like Dagestan in the Caucasus and Buryatia in southern Siberia, indicate that they fill the front ranks in disproportionate numbers. Statistics, compiled by MediaZona, an independent news outlet, from public sources, show 225 dead in Dagestan through June, along with 185 in Buryatia, compared to nine from Moscow and 30 from St. Petersburg.

Minority conscripts in particular are pressured to sign contracts. “They tell them that if they return to their hometown, they will not find any job, so it is better to stay in the army to earn money,” said Vladimir Budaev, a spokesman for the Free Buryatia Foundation, an antiwar group abroad for the Buryats, an Indigenous minority."
2022/07/12,The European Space Agency cuts ties with Russia on its Mars mission.,"The European Space Agency is formally ending its partnership with Russia on a rover mission to explore the surface of Mars, the agency’s chief said on Tuesday, citing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

ESA, an intergovernmental organization with 22 member nations, paused cooperation with Roscosmos, Russia’s state space agency, in March to comply with Western sanctions, after ESA’s leadership council agreed unanimously on the “impossibility” of continuing to work together under the circumstances.

As an intergovernmental organization whose mandate was to develop and implement space programs “in full respect with European values,” the agency said in a news release at the time, “we deeply deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the aggression towards Ukraine.”"
2022/07/15,Germany Hopes to Outrace a Russian Gas Cutoff and Bone Cold Winter,"Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, agreed. Germany’s industrial success is based on added value more than cheap energy, he said. Most German exports, he said, are “highly specialized products — that gives them an advantage and makes them competitive.”

Labor policy, too, will have an impact.

Wage negotiations for the industrial sector are scheduled to begin in September. The powerful I.G. Metall union will seek an 8 percent wage increase for its 3.9 million members. And starting Oct. 1, a new minimum wage law will establish for the first time a single national rate — 12 euros an hour.

For now, supply chain breakdowns are still causing headaches, and businesses that were only beginning to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic are busy devising contingency plans for gas shortages.

Beiersdorf, maker of skin care products including Nivea, has had a crisis team in place since May to draw up backup plans — including readying diesel generators — to ensure production keeps running.

At Schmees, high costs have already forced the shutdown of one furnace, cutting into the foundry’s ability to meet deadlines. Customers waiting for deliveries of stainless steel include companies that run massive turbines used in icebreaker ships and artists who use it in their sculptures.

Mr. Schmees, an energetic man who prides himself on having nurtured a strong company culture, is planning to ask his employees to work a six-day week through the end of the year, to ensure that he can fill all of the firm’s orders by December. That is how long he’s betting that Germany’s natural gas supplies will hold if Russia cuts off the flow entirely."
2022/07/12,A hail of Russian strikes brings terror to Ukraine’s east.,"Russian strikes killed at least eight people in eastern Ukraine in 24 hours and the death toll from an apartment complex hit by Russian rockets grew as well, local officials said on Monday, a chilling reminder of the devastation Russia has inflicted on civilians, even as its military pauses its drive to seize Ukrainian territory.

While the Russian military regroups and resupplies, its attacks on civilian targets and morale have intensified in recent days. In one town after another in eastern Ukraine, a hail of seemingly random Russian strikes, delivered by warplanes, artillery and missiles, has killed, maimed and terrified residents.

The attacks have ramped up in particular in Donetsk, an eastern province increasingly in Moscow’s cross hairs after Russian forces seized the last major city in neighboring Luhansk Province this month."
2022/07/12,Jockeying in oil markets may strain Russia’s relations with Venezuela — and Iran.,"As Russia pushes to find new buyers for its oil to skirt ever tougher Western sanctions, it is cutting into the market share of two of its allies — Iran and Venezuela — and setting off a price war that could hurt them all.

The competition for sales to Asia has already forced Venezuela and Iran to sharply discount their crude to try to hang onto the few available outlets for their own sanctioned exports, according to oil analysts and traders.

And although both Iran and Venezuela publicly remain close to Russia, experts expect that if the oil battle intensifies it will raise tensions with the Kremlin even as its leader, Vladimir V. Putin, is working to shore up his alliances. On Tuesday, his government announced he would make a rare trip outside the country next week to Tehran."
2022/07/11,"Ukrainian Medic’s Months in Russian Cell: Cold, Dirty and Used as a Prop","KYIV, Ukraine — During the siege of Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, Russians pounded the city with artillery and blocked civilian escape routes, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises of the war. As Ukrainian soldiers holed up in the Azovstal steel plant, the medic Yulia Paievska took on the dangerous work of evacuating families from a city under constant assault.

Ms. Paievska, 53, was already well known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she first used in the video game World of Warcraft. Her all-female volunteer medic group, called Taira’s Angels, had become famous in Ukraine during the earlier war in the eastern Donbas region.

So when Russian soldiers captured her on March 16 as she was evacuating a group from Mariupol, they knew exactly who she was. Held for three months, unable to communicate with her husband and daughter, she became a symbol of Ukrainian bravery and self-sacrifice."
2022/07/12,Ukraine says its forces hit a Russian ammunition depot in the Kherson region.,"Ukrainian forces fighting to recapture territory in the south of the country said they had blown up a Russian ammunition depot in the Kherson region overnight, the latest in a series of missile attacks that Kyiv has claimed on Russian military infrastructure.

Officials loyal to the government in Moscow said the strike, in Nova Kakhovka, instead hit a warehouse containing saltpeter — sometimes used to make fertilizer or gunpowder — resulting in a large explosion that Russia said had damaged residential buildings, a hospital, a market and a humanitarian aid center. At least seven people were killed and dozens more wounded, the Russian state news agency Tass reported, citing a local official.

The competing claims could not be independently verified. Satellite imagery released on Tuesday morning by Planet Labs PBC, an American satellite imagery company, showed a notable impact crater where a missile appears to have struck, surrounded by destroyed buildings and warehouses."
2022/07/10,"In Eastern Ukraine, Attacks Intensify as Russia Readies New Offensive","The Ukrainian police guard the last checkpoint on the edge of the town of Sloviansk, hunkered down in the woods just a few miles from the front line. Police officers edged toward their bunker midday Saturday as a Ukrainian multiple rocket launcher roared into action nearby, firing a volley toward Russian positions.

Villages beyond the checkpoint remain in Ukrainian hands but have come under blistering bombardment for weeks. Russian artillery hit the area Saturday morning, setting fire to trees and undergrowth flanking the main highway. The fields were still smoldering midday Saturday when New York Times journalists drove through.

President Vladimir V. Putin has said his aim is to bring Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk under Russian control. Parts of the two provinces have been under the control of pro-Russian separatists since 2014, and Russia’s invasion forces have concentrated their efforts on the remaining area since they pulled back from around Kyiv at the end of March.

Russia has announced an operational pause as its troops regroup after the intense battles for two cities to the east in Luhansk, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk. But Ukrainian officials and civilians said heavy fighting was continuing in the frontline villages as Russian forces pursued their push westward, and Ukrainian troops remained determined to make them fight for every inch of land."
2022/07/11,"Russia is seeking surveillance drones from Iran, a top Biden aide says.","WASHINGTON — President Biden’s national security adviser said on Monday that Russia was seeking hundreds of surveillance drones from Iran, including those capable of firing missiles, to use in the war in Ukraine.

The official, Jake Sullivan, said that it was unclear whether Iran had already sent any of the remotely piloted systems to Russia, but that the United States had information that indicated Iran was preparing to train Russian troops to use them as soon as this month.

“Our information indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred U.A.V.s, including weapons-capable U.A.V.s on an expedited timeline,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters at the White House, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles."
2022/07/08,"As Russia Looms, a Ukrainian City’s Loyalties Divide","He said the pro-Russian portion of the population remained a minority, perhaps half of the 23,000 still remaining out of a prewar population of 100,000.

“These are, apparently, the people who are waiting for the arrival of the Russian Army and the L.D.N.R.,” he said, using a shorthand term for the areas of Luhansk and Donetsk under separatist control. “They already have an ingrained opinion.”

Mr. Lyakh was once seen as a pro-Russian politician. He entered politics as a member of the pro-Russian party of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych and opposed the democracy protests that overthrew him in 2014. He is serving his second term as mayor of Sloviansk, as a member of an opposition bloc that was formed from the remnants of Mr. Yanukovich’s party. The bloc has been banned since the Russian invasion in February.

Yet, appointed by President Volodymyr Zelensky as the head of the civil-military administration in his region, Mr. Lyakh insists there is no question of his loyalty to Ukraine.

Other residents of Sloviansk, however, revealed deeply conflicted views in conversations. Many residents lived through the period under the separatist government in 2014 and said they could do so again.

Russian rule would be no better or worse than Ukrainian, said another man who gave his name as Serhii. “It was at least stable,” he said, sitting outside the only working supermarket in town. “They rounded up the drunks and the drug addicts.”"
2022/07/09,Behind Russia’s ‘pause’ are signs of a troubled effort to regroup.,"With Russian forces in the middle of a purported “operational pause,” some Ukrainians in the country’s battered eastern frontline regions are questioning what that means at a time when their towns are still coming under continued shelling.

Military analysts say they have indeed observed a Russian pause — an effort to regroup and prepare reinforcements for a renewed assault on cities in Donetsk Province.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia warned this month that his forces had yet to unleash their fiercest efforts on Ukraine. But according to some assessments, as well as information trickling out about Russia’s scramble to send more troops into the offensive, some analysts are questioning the effectiveness of the units that Russia is moving up."
2022/07/08,Russia sentences a lawmaker to seven years in prison for denouncing the war.,"A court in Moscow on Friday sentenced an opposition lawmaker to seven years in prison for denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine, handing down the first prison term for what the government made a crime shortly after the invasion.

The sentence is likely to have a chilling effect on Russian society by further raising the stakes for anyone who publicly opposes the war that President Vladimir V. Putin began in late February. While thousands of people protested across Russia in the first weeks of the conflict, the dissent was quickly suppressed amid police violence and the passage of draconian laws that limited free speech.

The opposition lawmaker, Aleksei Gorinov, a municipal deputy in Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district, was found guilty of spreading false information about the Russian Army and its activities, the Tverskoy Court said in a statement on Friday. It said Mr. Gorinov had conspired with others and had used his public office to commit that crime."
2022/07/13,"After Ukraine-Russia Meeting, U.N. Sees ‘a Ray of Hope’ to Free Grain","The strategy by Ukrainian forces was still in its early days, and it was not yet clear whether it was allowing them to disrupt Russian artillery attacks and offensive operations.

Some Ukrainian officials argued that the Russians were being forced to move supply hubs farther from the front, a claim that could not be verified.

“The Russian army has not stopped shelling, but it is likely preserving its existing supplies of ammunition because these provisions have been disrupted by the work of our new long-range weapons,” said Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk region’s military administration.

Crucial to this effort, Ukrainian officials say, has been the arrival of new long-range weapons systems and artillery units, particularly the truck-mounted, multiple rocket launchers from the United States known as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems or HIMARS, and similar systems from other NATO countries.

Those rocket launchers, which began arriving in Ukraine in June, are proving effective at targeting Russian military bases and ammunition supply depots far behind enemy lines. The systems fire satellite-guided rockets, whose range of more than 40 miles is greater than anything else Ukrainian troops have in their arsenal.

Ukrainian officials said a strike by such rockets last week on a Russian military base and ammunition depot in the Kherson Region had killed as many as 100 Russian servicemen and wiped out an antiaircraft installation."
2022/07/29,A Disputed Blast Kills P.O.W.s,"Each side accused the other of committing a war crime. At least 40 captured fighters were killed and dozens more were maimed, according to both Ukrainian and Russian officials.

Russia’s defense minister claimed that Ukraine had used a U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, to strike the prison. Ukraine’s motive, Russia said, was to intimidate Ukrainian soldiers who might consider surrendering.

Ukraine rejected the claim, accusing Russia of bombing the facility to hide evidence of torture and extrajudicial executions and calling it a false-flag operation to discredit Ukraine.

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, the S.B.U., published an audio recording of what it claimed were two Russian-backed separatist fighters discussing the explosion over the phone. In the call, which could not be independently verified, one person said that there was no sound of any rocket before the explosion, and that Russian forces had likely blown up the barracks themselves."
2022/07/30,Ukraine Calls for Investigation Into Prisoner Deaths as Outrage Grows,"As global outrage grew over an explosion that killed at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners held at a Russian detention camp, Ukrainian authorities called for an international investigation on Saturday while marshaling evidence that they said would prove that Russia had orchestrated what they described as a “terrorist attack.”

Since the explosion late Thursday at Correctional Colony No. 120, a prison camp in the Russian-occupied eastern region of Donetsk, the warring parties have presented diametrically opposed accounts of what happened, further embittering a war now entering its sixth month.

Russian officials claimed that Ukrainians, using precision weapons supplied by the United States, had attacked the prison themselves, to deter defectors. The Ukrainian authorities rejected the narrative as absurd and said that the deaths were a premeditated atrocity committed by Russian forces from within the prison, where survivors described being given just enough food to survive and suffering ritual beatings, including with chains and metal pipes."
2022/07/31,"As Ukraine Orders Civilians to Evacuate the East, Residents Face a Grim Choice","DONETSK PROVINCE, Ukraine — Thuds from the artillery pounding Ukraine’s embattled east reverberated in the distance, yet it was the shouts of playing children on a recent afternoon that echoed across the yard near the front line.

The scene spoke to the grim choice that residents face after President Volodymyr Zelensky called this weekend for a mandatory evacuation of the region, directing hundreds of thousands of civilians in eastern Ukraine to leave their homes.

“We could go,” said Natasha, a 46-year-old mother of six, talking over the din of war with unflagging calm. “But how would we earn money? And I have kids to feed.”"
2022/07/31,A former Kremlin adviser is hospitalized in Europe.,"Anatoly Chubais, who resigned as a top Kremlin adviser shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was hospitalized on Sunday in a western European country in critical condition with the symptoms of a rare neurological disorder. Mr. Chubais had suddenly grown numb in his hands and legs, his wife, Avodtya Smirnova, told the Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak.

Mr. Chubais, 67, told Ms. Sobchak himself that he had been diagnosed with the rare Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves.

According to Ms. Sobchak’s news channel, specialists in “chemical protection suits” examined the room in which he suddenly became ill."
2022/07/31,The Red Cross says it still doesn’t have access to the prison camp where dozens of Ukrainians died.,"However, the I.C.R.C. said hours later that — despite having requested access to the site, the wounded and the dead as soon as it learned of the attack — it still had not yet received any confirmation that access would be granted.

It noted in a statement that all parties to the conflict have an obligation under international law to give the I.C.R.C. access to prisoners of war.

“We are ready to deploy to Olenivka,” the I.C.R.C. said, adding that it already had medical, forensic and humanitarian teams in the vicinity. “It is imperative that the I.C.R.C. be granted immediate access to the Olenivka facility, and other places where the wounded and dead might have been transferred.”

The Olenivka facility is a few miles from the front line in Donetsk, where fighting has intensified following a brief pause in July after the Russians gained control over nearly all of the neighboring Luhansk Province."
2022/07/29,Lebanon says it is investigating Ukraine’s claim that a docked ship contains plundered grain.,"Lebanese authorities said Friday that they were investigating a Ukrainian claim that a Syrian ship under U.S. sanctions that docked in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli was carrying Ukrainian grain stolen by Russia.

The Laodicea, a Syrian-flagged cargo ship owned by the state transport company, arrived in Lebanon on Wednesday carrying nearly 10 tons of wheat and barley. Soon after, the Ukrainian Embassy alerted Lebanese authorities that they believed the grain had been stolen by Russia. Russia is a close ally of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and intervened in that country’s civil war to prop him up.

Lebanon’s customs authority is inspecting the ship’s documents to assess whether the cargo is under sanctions or was stolen, according to Raymond El Khoury, director general of the authority. But he said that the Ukrainian Embassy had sent no evidence to back up its allegations, and that if no proof was found that the grain was stolen, it would be unloaded. It was not clear where the grain was ultimately bound."
2022/07/29,I’m Ukraine’s Foreign Minister. Putin Must Be Stopped.,"KYIV, Ukraine — Russia, apparently, is ready for a cease-fire. The door to negotiations, the Kremlin’s spokesman said last week, has never been closed.

No one should be fooled. Whatever its officials may say, Russia remains focused on war and aims to ruin Ukraine and shatter the West. The sight of Odesa, hit by Russian missiles just hours after a deal was reached to allow grain exports from southern ports, should dispel any lingering naïveté. For Vladimir Putin, a cease-fire now would simply allow his depleted invasion forces to take a break before returning for further aggression.

The truth is simple: Mr. Putin will not stop until he is stopped. That’s why calls for a cease-fire, audible across Europe and America, are badly misplaced. This is not the time to accept unfavorable cease-fire proposals or peace deals. The task instead is to defeat Russia and limit its ability to attack anyone again in the foreseeable future. With sustained and timely assistance, Ukraine is ready and able to do so."
2022/07/31,One of Ukraine’s richest businessmen is killed in the port city of Mykolaiv.,"MYKOLAIV — The first air raid alarm rang out over Mykolaiv at 1:01 a.m. and for the next four hours, explosions thundered as Russian missiles rained down on this already battered southern port city.

By dawn, a hotel, a sports complex, two schools, a service station and scores of homes were in ruins and emergency crews raced between blast sites were working to establish the full casualty count. But one of Ukraine’s richest businessmen, Oleksiy Vadaturskyi, and his wife were among the dead after what President Volodymyr Zelensky called “one of the most brutal shellings” since the war began.

Mr. Vadaturskyi’s company, Nibulon, confirmed that he and his wife, Raisa, died in their home.

Tributes to Mr. Vadaturskyi — who had been declared a “Hero of Ukraine” more than a decade ago for his contributions to society — poured in from across the country as news of his death spread. Mr. Zelensky called it “a huge loss for Mykolaiv and for all Ukraine,” later referring to Mr. Vadaturskyi as a “hero.”"
2022/07/29,"Lethal missile strikes in Kharkiv hit sites related to Ukraine’s military, a new pattern.","KHARKIV, Ukraine — Two missile strikes hit military compounds in central Kharkiv just before dawn on Friday, the latest in a series of powerful nighttime strikes on the city that seem increasingly targeted at sites used by the Ukrainian armed forces.

At least two soldiers died, according to rescue workers and police officers at the scene.

Ukrainian officials rarely release information on military casualties or damage done to military sites and forbid photographers from recording the destruction at them. The head of the regional administration in Kharkiv, Oleh Synyehubov, said only that a 71-year-old civilian had been wounded in the head from the blasts.

On Friday, soldiers and emergency workers covered in brick dust cleared away the rubble from the courtyard of a two-story building. Two vehicles, an S.U.V. and a jeep, caked in dust and crushed by falling debris, had been dragged out into the street."
2022/07/30,Europe’s Race to Secure New Energy Sources Is on a Knife’s Edge,"As Russia tightens its chokehold on supplies of natural gas, Europe is looking everywhere for energy to keep its economy running. Coal-fired power plants are being revived. Billions are being spent on terminals to bring in liquefied natural gas, much of it from shale fields in Texas. Officials and heads of state are flying to Qatar, Azerbaijan, Norway and Algeria to nail down energy deals.

Across Europe, fears are growing that a cutoff of Russian gas will force governments to ration fuel and businesses to close factories, moves that could put thousands of jobs at risk.

So far, the hunt for fuel has been met with considerable success. But as prices continue to soar and the Russian threat shows no sign of abating, the margin for error is thin."
2022/07/28,The Prisoner Swap,"Bout is serving a 25-year jail sentence after his conviction in 2011 on four counts of conspiracy, including conspiring to kill American citizens. He is probably the highest-profile Russian in U.S. custody, and Russian officials have pressed for his return since his conviction.

The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said today that while negotiations on a deal were ongoing, “no concrete result has been achieved.”

A former officer in the Soviet Air Force, Bout was notorious among American intelligence officials, earning the nickname Merchant of Death as he evaded capture for years. His exploits helped inspire a 2005 film, “Lord of War,” that starred Nicolas Cage.

In 2008, he was taken into custody in Bangkok after being ensnared in a foreign sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration. His extradition to the U.S., which Russian officials strenuously opposed, took more than two and a half years."
2022/07/28,"Why does Ukraine fight? So it can exist, Zelensky says.","Ukraine already celebrates Independence Day, on Aug. 24, to mark the country’s break from the Soviet Union in 1991. But officials have said the government felt the need to create the new holiday last summer after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, fomented rebellion in the east and threatened further aggression.

In contrast to Independence Day, Statehood Day is meant to address a more existential question by stretching back a millennium to demonstrate that Ukraine has its own history and culture independent of Russia.

Questions of history — and how to interpret that history — might have once been the subject of nuanced discussion in university lecture halls. But they were weaponized in the run-up to the war in Ukraine as President Vladimir V. Putin sought to justify his unprovoked invasion of a neighbor that shared deep cultural and historical ties.

Only three days before launching the first missiles at targets across Ukraine on Feb. 24, Mr. Putin declared Ukraine an invention of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin. He argued that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction and that it had been a mistake to endow Ukraine with a sense of statehood by allowing it autonomy within the newly created Soviet state."
2022/07/27,Britain’s Power Grid Warns of a Tight Energy Supply This Winter,"Britain’s power grid raised the prospect of a tight energy supply this winter, publishing an unusual early forecast to help the energy industry prepare for strains over the winter related to the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“While Britain is not reliant on Russian gas to the extent that the rest of Europe is, it is clear that the cessation of flows of gas into Europe could have knock-on impacts, including very high prices,” Britain’s National Grid said in a new report.

The organization said it would cope with expensive and unpredictable energy, along with any outages, by delaying the closure of coal plants and encouraging greater participation in “demand side response” from energy users."
2022/07/28,Here are some prisoner swaps that freed Americans.,"The prospect of the United States exchanging a Russian prisoner for the basketball star Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, a former Marine, is reminiscent of the fraught deals Washington orchestrated with Moscow and its allies during and after the Cold War.

Perhaps the most dramatic exchange was the 1962 swap on a fog-shrouded bridge between East Germany and West Berlin that became the stuff of Hollywood. The United States exchanged Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, a Soviet spy, for Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot of a U‐2 spy plane that shot down over the Soviet Union two years earlier. More than 50 years later, the trade was portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 2015 film, “Bridge of Spies.”

Now, experts say a prisoner exchange may be the only path to freedom for Mr. Whelan and Ms. Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who plays for the Phoenix Mercury."
2022/07/28,The Final Frontier Soon May No Longer Belong to All of Us,"The symbolic value of the treaty is obvious: Nationality recedes into the background when astronauts are floating in space. But beyond that, it has created standards and practices to prevent environmental contamination of the moon and other celestial bodies. It promotes data sharing, including about the many objects, like satellites and spacecraft, launched into space, which helps to avoid collisions. And its codified norms of the common heritage of mankind, peaceful use and scientific cooperation help preserve multilateralism in the face of states’ derogations.

But the looming prospect of the commercialization of space has begun to test the limits of international space law. In 2020, NASA, alone, created the Artemis Accords, which challenge the foundational multilateral principles of ‌prior space agreements. These are rules primarily drafted by the United States that other countries are now adopting. This is not collaborative multilateral rule making but rather the export of U.S. laws abroad to a coalition of the willing.

The accords take the legal form of a series of bilateral treaties with 21 foreign nations, including Australia, Canada, Japan, the U.A.E. and Britain. This is not simply a relic of the antiglobalist rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration. Just two weeks ago, ‌ Saudi Arabia‌ signed the Artemis Accords, during President Biden’s visit.

Moreover, the accords open up the possibility of mining the moon or other celestial bodies for resources. They create “safety zones” where states may extract resources, though the document states that these activities must be undertaken in accordance with the ‌Outer Space Treaty. Legal experts point out that these provisions could violate the principle of nonappropriation, which prohibits countries from declaring parts of space as their sovereign territory. Others suggest that it is important to get in front of the changing technological landscap‌e, arguing that when mining the moon becomes possible, there should already be rules in place to regulate such activities‌. Failure to do so could result in a ‌‌crisis similar to that around seabed mining‌‌, which is poised to begin even though U.N. rules have yet to be finalized."
2022/07/31,What’s a Critic Doing in a War Zone?,"Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

A news organization needs all sorts of journalists and professionals to cover a war zone effectively: reporters and photographers who can gather information, local journalists and interpreters to gain access to sources, security experts and drivers to help everyone stay safe. One person you almost never need is a critic.

Yet I spent several weeks this July in Ukraine, leaving behind my usual bailiwick of art galleries and biennials to look head-on at military conflict and humanitarian crisis. As one of The New York Times’s critics at large, my job is to help readers understand culture against wider backdrops of history, politics, cities and climate. And this era-defining war is, at its core, a culture war: an imperial incursion buttressed by misrepresentations of history, language and religion.

So I headed to Kyiv — one of the most artistically vibrant cities in Europe, its avenues now punctuated by military checkpoints — to survey its museums and monasteries, to interview its artists and archivists, and to check on the capital’s fabled nightclubs. I also traveled to several mangled towns north of Kyiv, carefully navigating the ruins of blasted heritage sites, and reported from Lviv, the handsome Hapsburg city in the west of Ukraine, where many of the country’s cultural preservation initiatives have been masterminded."
2022/07/27,The Battle for Kherson,"Ukrainian long-range missiles hit a bridge overnight that is critical for Russia to resupply its forces in Kherson. Dozens of Russian missiles also struck targets across the Ukrainian regions of Odesa and Mykolaiv as Moscow moved troops and military equipment in the direction of Kherson to reinforce its positions, according to the Ukrainian military high command.

Both armies are trying to limit their opponents’ logistics operations.

Since long-range Western weapons systems started arriving, Ukraine has pounded Russian ammunition depots and command and control center behind the front lines.

Ukraine’s southern military command said today that its forces took back two villages in the north of the Kherson region, Andriivka and Lozove. A spokeswoman for the military command said that retaking the villages put more Russian positions within range of Ukrainian artillery.

Recapturing Kherson could help restore momentum to Ukraine, and give its troops a much-needed morale boost, my colleague Michael Schwirtz reported from the Kherson border region."
2022/07/29,Your Friday Briefing,"U.S. debates climate and the economy

The gross domestic product of the U.S. shrank again, fueling fears of a recession.

G.D.P. fell 0.2 percent in the second quarter after a 0.4 percent decline in the first. That means by one common but unofficial definition, the U.S. economy has entered a recession, two years after it emerged from the last one.

News of the back-to-back contractions heightened a debate in Washington over whether a recession had begun and, if so, whether President Biden was to blame.

Democrats are increasingly focused on taming inflation. They argue there’s one possible step forward. It’s the energy, tax and health care agreement that was announced Wednesday after Senator Joe Manchin reversed his opposition to the bill."
2022/07/28,"German Inflation Hits 8.5 Percent, Again Driven by High Energy Prices","So far, energy providers have been bearing the brunt of the exorbitant increase in the price of natural gas. One financially troubled German energy company, Uniper, was bailed out last week by the government, which took a 30 percent stake. But starting this fall, the government will introduce an energy surcharge of several cents per kilowatt-hour on consumer energy bills that will be passed along to utilities. Officials expect the charge will translate to an annual increase of several hundred euros per household.

Germany, which still relies on Russian natural gas for about a third of its needs, has been hit especially hard by Russia’s decision to sharply reduce deliveries of the fuel. This week, Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, reduced flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany to 20 percent of capacity, a further restriction on already limited deliveries.

Economists have said Germany is on the edge of a recession, as business sentiment declines and officials urge citizens to cut their energy use in any way possible, even by taking cold showers.

Last week, the European Central Bank raised interest rates for the first time in more than a decade to control rising prices amid mounting concerns over an economic slowdown."
2022/07/29,"Dry Fountains, Cold Pools, Less Beer? Germans Tiptoe Up the Path to Energy Savings","“If Putin gets the impression that he can really hurt the economy of the biggest European countries, he won’t hesitate to cut off gas supply,” he said. “If it’s not hurting too much, he’ll choose taking the money over inflicting the pain.”

While not binding, for now, the E.U. consumption targets have sent a clear signal not only of European resolve to stand up to Mr. Putin, but also real concern that European economies are at risk, especially if Germany, the continent’s economic powerhouse, takes a hit.

The Kremlin-controlled Gazprom underlined the threat this week when it reduced flows through Nord Stream 1 into Germany to just 20 percent, citing, unconvincingly for many, problems with its German-made turbines.

Roughly half of all homes in Germany are heated with gas, while a third of the country’s gas is used by industry. If the coming winter is particularly cold, a cutoff would be brutal."
2022/07/27,"The U.S. offered a prisoner swap to free Brittney Griner and another American, an official says.","In response to a question last week about potentially trading Mr. Bout, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, did not sound enthusiastic, calling Mr. Bout “a creep.”

Mr. Bout, 55, is a former Soviet military officer who made a fortune in global arms trafficking before he was caught in a federal sting operation. Russian officials have pressed his case for years, and in recent weeks Russian media outlets had directly linked his case to Ms. Griner’s.

Russia has held Ms. Griner, 31, since mid-February, when she was arrested at a Moscow airport on charges involving hashish oil found in her luggage. She has pleaded guilty to the drug charges against her and said in a court appearance outside Moscow on Wednesday that she accidentally packed a small amount of the cannabis-related substance, which she uses at the direction of a doctor to manage pain. Russia has notoriously strict drug laws. At her trial on Wednesday, she testified of her ordeal navigating an unfamiliar legal system."
2022/07/08,Russia Votes to Shut Down Last U.N. Aid Route Into Syria,"“Our position has been clear on the issues here and have been known to everybody from the very beginning,” Mr. Polyanskiy said. “We haven’t misled anyone.”

He urged diplomats to support the Russian plan, “if, of course, the fate of the project is important, and not your dubious political games.”

More than 5.7 million Syrians have fled the country since civil war began in 2011. The border crossing’s closure could force thousands more to leave, setting off another refugee crisis in countries in the Middle East and Europe that are already dealing with an influx of people escaping conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and sub-Saharan Africa.

It was also one of the few areas of compromise between the United States and Russia, which had for years negotiated agreements to leave the route open but ended nearly all diplomatic communications after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February.

U.N. officials have described the Bab al-Hawa route as the gateway for the world’s largest humanitarian aid operation, one that has delivered more than 56,000 truckloads of lifesaving supplies to Idlib Province in northwestern Syria over the last eight years. As many as four million people in Syria — including an estimated 1.7 million who are living in tents — receive supplies that are delivered to Idlib.

Aid groups estimate that 70 percent of Syria’s population does not have reliable food supplies.

“Closing the cross-border could result in catastrophic consequences,” Dr. Khaula Sawah, the president of the U.S. chapter of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, said in a statement ahead of the U.N. vote."
2022/07/28,Crops ‘Stored Everywhere’: Ukraine’s Harvest Piles Up,"There is political will from Ukraine’s allies: The White House welcomed the accord, as did the United Nations and international aid organizations, which have warned of potential famine and political unrest the longer Ukraine’s grain remains blocked.

Freeing the grain for shipment is expected to ease a growing hunger crisis brought on by Russia’s aggression — not so much because Ukrainian grain may be shipped to desperate countries faster, but because more supplies can help bring down prices, which spiked after the war but have been falling recently. “It’s quite positive,” said Nikolay Gorbachov, head of the Ukrainian Grain Association. “It’s possible to find the way.”

Yet even when reopened, the Black Sea ports are expected to operate at just about half of their prewar capacity, experts say, covering only a portion of the more than 20 million tons of backlogged grain. Ships will steer through a path cleared of Ukrainian mines used to prevent Russian ships from entering, and endure inspections in Turkey to ensure they don’t carry weapons back into Ukraine.

And it is uncertain that enough ships will venture back. Shipping companies that once operated in the Black Sea have taken on other cargo routes. Insurers are wary of covering vessels in a conflict zone, and without insurance, no one will ship.

In the meantime, Ukraine’s farmers are grappling with vast amounts of trapped grain from last year’s harvests. Before the war, new crops moved in and out of grain elevators — from harvest to export — like clockwork. But Russia’s Black Sea blockage created a massive pileup."
2022/07/28,Your Thursday Briefing,"U.S. proposes a prisoner swap

The U.S. offered a prisoner swap to Russia: Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer, for Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star, and Paul Whelan, a former Marine.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that he would speak to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine about a “substantial proposal” to free Griner and Whelan. The U.S. State Department says the two were wrongfully detained.

Blinken’s comments came the same day that Griner, who has been detained in Russia on drug charges since February, testified in court. She said that she had been tossed into a bewildering legal system with little explanation of what was happening. Here are live updates."
2022/07/28,Why a Vogue Cover Created a Controversy for Olena Zelenska,"Still, other readers have come to the defense of Ms. Zelenska, seeing the shoot as a symbol of national pride: a means to show the world Ukrainian elegance; a reminder of the balm that can be found in beauty; and a subtle nod to shared humanity in the face of inhuman aggression. She is not, after all, in a ball gown eating cake. She is in a war zone, looking haunted.

To a certain extent, the debate simply shows how tangled our feelings about fashion still are and how entrenched the view of it as a nonserious subject remains — despite the fact that fashion is a key part of pop culture and the rare equivalent of a global language. It’s one that every politician, and public figure, employs to their own ends, whether they want to admit it or not. (That’s why, despite the risks, they keep appearing in magazines like Vogue.)

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a war being conducted on all fronts: on the ground, in the air, in the digital sphere and in the arena of public opinion. (See, for example, Ms. Zelenska’s appearance in Washington last week.) Vogue — and, indeed, any outlet that allows the Ukrainian people to reach different swaths of the global population and influence sentiment — is one of them. As Ms. Zelenska and her husband, who founded one of the biggest television entertainment production companies in Ukraine before getting into politics, know.

By putting Ms. Zelenska on its cover, Vogue is furthering her role as the relatable face, and voice, of the struggle; bringing her up close and personal for the watching world. And by appearing in public, and raising issues in public, when her husband cannot, she is keeping her country’s needs alive in the international conversation at a time when other crises are vying for attention. She has, essentially, weaponized Vogue."
2022/07/28,Your Friday Briefing: Biden and Xi’s Fraught Phone Call,"A tense call between the leaders of the U.S. and China

President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China spoke by phone for two hours and 17 minutes — their first direct conversation in four months during which relations between their countries have soured.

China and the U.S. have been at odds over Russia’s war in Ukraine, tariffs and aggressive Chinese action in the Asia-Pacific region. The future of Taiwan, a self-governing island which China covets and which Biden has said he would defend with force, has become a particularly contentious issue, especially since Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is reportedly planning to visit.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the call was productive, but issued a stern warning against what it considered American provocations, without directly mentioning Ms. Pelosi."
2022/07/11,Germany on Edge as Russian Gas Pipeline Goes Offline for Repair,"“It’s simply a situation like we haven’t had before,” Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, told German public radio Deutschlandfunk on Monday. “We honestly always have to prepare for the worst and work a little bit for the best.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz convened the heads of big German companies in Berlin on Monday to discuss the impact that the war in Ukraine and the economic sanctions against Russia is having on their businesses. Industry leaders are faced with high energy prices and growing uncertainty while struggling to emerge from disruptions caused by pandemic shutdowns and supply chain snarls. Economists are predicting that a full gas cutoff could tip Germany, Europe’s largest economy, into a recession.

Over the weekend, Mr. Habeck reached an agreement with Canada for a turbine needed for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that had been sent to Montreal for repairs to be returned to Germany. The turbine’s return had been held up by sanctions against Russia, and Gazprom had cited the missing equipment as the reason it was forced to reduce supplies through the pipeline.

Even as Germans are flocking to the beaches and mountains for their summer vacations, the economy ministry is calling on them to begin servicing their furnaces, installing water-saving shower heads and preparing to lower their heating by at least one degree in the coming winter to save energy."
2022/07/27,Germany Counts on Chilled Gas to Keep Warm Over Winter,"WILHELMSHAVEN, Germany — When a major energy company wanted to bring liquefied natural gas to Germany through the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven three years ago, the proposal hit a brick wall. The company couldn’t find enough customers, the government offered only tepid support and residents denounced the scheme as a threat to a local apple orchard.

“Apple juice, not L.N.G.,” protesters said. The company, Uniper, shelved its plans.

Now, steel pipes are being rammed into the sea floor to prepare for the arrival of a nearly thousand-foot-long L.N.G. processing vessel, the Höegh Esperanza. Nearby, construction crews in bulldozers are digging along the perimeter of a forest to clear the way for a new 20-mile pipeline to connect to Germany’s gas grid.

The hope is for gas to start arriving here before the end of winter, Uniper said, as the demand for heating homes soars."
2022/07/27,Special Military Cell Flows Weapons and Equipment Into Ukraine,"About 75 percent of the arms are sent to staging bases in Poland, where Ukrainian troops pick up their cargo and take it back across the border. Admiral Heinz declined to identify two other neighboring countries where shipments are delivered, citing security concerns by those nations. The planners use different border crossings into Ukraine for weapons and for humanitarian assistance, he said.

In nearly five months, the center has moved more than 78,000 tons of arms, munitions and equipment worth more than $10 billion, U.S. and Western military officials said.

Many Baltic and Eastern European countries have donated Soviet-standard weapons and ammunition that the Ukrainian military has long used. But given the intense fighting, those stocks are running low, if not already depleted. One factory in Europe is making some Soviet-standard munitions, including howitzer shells, and it is operating 24/7, Admiral Heinz said. The shortage has required Ukraine to begin transitioning to Western-standard weapons and ammunition, which are more plentiful.

Once the weapons are in Ukraine, U.S. and other Western military officials say they are not able to track them. They rely on Ukraine’s accounts of how and where the arms are used — although U.S. intelligence and military officials, including Special Operations forces — are in daily contact with their Ukrainian counterparts, U.S. officials said.

American and Ukrainian officials have downplayed reports that some weapons are being siphoned off on the black market in Ukraine, but Admiral Heinz acknowledged that “we are not serial-number tracking these once they go across the border.”

Russia has attacked Ukrainian train depots and warehouses but has not shown it can effectively strike moving targets — like weapons convoys — with its rapidly diminishing arsenal of precision-guided munitions, American officials said."
2022/07/08,"Russia’s Lavrov Is Pariah at Group of 20 Event, but Only for Some","NUSA DUA, Indonesia — He was like a skunk at the tropical resort party, shunned by many, though by no means all.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, attended a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations in Bali on Friday, despite his country’s pariah status in Europe and elsewhere over its brutal war in Ukraine. His country’s invasion of its neighbor drove two central topics of discussion at the annual event: global disruptions of food and energy supplies.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declined to meet with Mr. Lavrov, as did several other Western foreign ministers. So many attendees refused to pose with Moscow’s top diplomat that a customary group photograph was canceled."
2022/07/26,"Navigating mines and threatened by war, ships laden with grain are expected to leave Odesa soon.","If all goes to plan, a ship captain will weigh anchor at a wharf in Ukraine’s Odesa region in the coming days and steer a cargo vessel loaded with grain through the port before heading gingerly out into the Black Sea. A government vessel will lead the ship through a maze of mines and a rescue boat will follow.

Many eyes will be tracking the voyage. It would be the first since the signing of a deal last Friday to allow a resumption of Ukraine’s grain exports, which have been blocked since Russia’s invasion five months ago by Moscow’s dominance in the Black Sea and Kyiv’s decision to mine its southern ports to forestall a Russian amphibious assault.

Ukraine and Russia together supply more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, and Russia is also a major supplier of fertilizer. Ukraine is also a leading exporter of barley, corn and sunflower."
2022/07/28,This 150-Year-Old Mining Law Hurts Taxpayers and the Environment,"Last year, the bipartisan infrastructure act created the first-ever abandoned hardrock reclamation program. But no money was allocated to pay for it. To get the money, a fair royalty for hardrock mining on public lands would be established by the proposed legislation, one like the royalties established long ago for coal, oil and gas. The royalties would be used to clean up these abandoned mine sites.

The problem is so large that the federal government cannot reclaim the worst of the sites without help. But states, counties, nonprofits and other potential partners in reclamation efforts are hamstrung by federal laws that treat volunteers who want to help clean up abandoned mines as if they were the very polluters who created the messes.

An example is the effort to clean up the Lilly/Orphan Boy mine near Helena, Mont., one of several abandoned mines on Telegraph Creek in the Little Blackfoot watershed. Under a partnership between the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and Trout Unlimited, toxic mine waste was removed from a floodplain. But the partners could not legally treat the acidic pollution flowing directly from the shuttered mine into the creek without taking on liability for a mess they didn’t create. As a result, though the mine was shut down in 1968, the pollution continues.

That’s why another of the proposed measures would provide states, counties and nonprofit groups with carefully prescribed liability protections, allowing these public-private and nonprofit partnerships to begin working on the root of the problem by directly treating toxic discharges.

As the United States pursues a transformation to renewable energy, responsible mining has a crucial role to play. The pandemic revealed major flaws in our reliance on foreign supply chains, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has highlighted the need for secure domestic sources of critical minerals that are the raw materials of clean power generation, electric vehicles and other emerging technologies.

At the same time, we need to invest a fair share of today’s gains into cleaning up the lasting consequences of more than a century of mining on our rivers and streams, fish and wildlife and communities that depend on clean water and healthy landscapes.

Martin Heinrich, a Democrat, represents New Mexico in the U.S. Senate. Chris Wood is the president and chief executive officer of the conservation group Trout Unlimited."
2022/07/28,The Role of Art in a Time of War,"High on a wall of the Palazzo Pitti, in Florence, hangs a famous painting that Rubens completed in the last years of his life.

At its center is Mars, the god of war, surging out in battle armor from the doors of the Temple of Janus.

In Roman peacetime, this temple’s gates were always closed. Now they have burst open, and the frenzy has begun.

Beneath Mars’s feet lie victims about to be trampled. You see a mother looking up with terror at the gathering violence, desperate to protect her wailing child.

Next to her are two figures who have fallen to the ground and are on the verge of destruction. One is a woman with a lute, her instrument already broken. Another is a personified Architecture, his compass falling from his hand.

These are “The Consequences of War,” as Rubens saw them in 1638. Civilians suffer, but not only them; culture is a casualty too."
2022/07/27,Your Wednesday Briefing,"A new Constitution in Tunisia

Tunisians have approved a new Constitution that cements the one-man rule instituted by President Kais Saied, according to the results of a referendum on Monday.

The referendum could spell the end of a young democracy. The Arab Spring uprisings began in Tunisia more than a decade ago. At the time, the country was internationally lauded as the only democracy to survive the revolts.

But in the years since, many Tunisians have come to view the government as corrupt and inadequate. In 2019, frustration with political paralysis and economic devastation led many to look to Saied, a political outsider at the time. That same anger drove some voters to vote yes on the referendum this week.

“If you tell me about democracy or human rights and all that stuff, we haven’t seen any of it in the last 10 years,” a 50-year-old bank employee said. He said he did not mind the Constitution’s concentration of powers in the hands of the president. “A boat needs one captain,” he said. “Personally, I need one captain.”

Context: The Constitution was approved by 94.6 percent of voters, according to the results released yesterday. But most major parties boycotted the vote to avoid lending it greater legitimacy.

Background: Saied suspended Parliament and fired his prime minister a year ago, effectively giving himself almost absolute power."
2022/07/07,Brittney Griner Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges in Russian Court,"American officials insist they are doing all they can to secure the release of Ms. Griner, 31, a seven-time W.N.B.A. All-Star, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the first openly gay athlete signed to an endorsement contract by Nike. At Thursday’s hearing, the chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy in Moscow, Elizabeth Rood, handed Ms. Griner a letter from President Biden.

“Ms. Griner was able to read that letter,” Ms. Rood told reporters outside the courtroom. “I would like again to emphasize the commitment of the U.S. government at the very highest level to bring home safely Ms. Griner and all U.S. citizens wrongfully detained.”

But with tensions between the United States and Russia at their worst level in decades because of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has few options to secure her freedom. That was underscored by Mr. Ryabkov on Thursday as he made some of the most extensive comments by any Russian official about Ms. Griner’s case in the nearly five months she has spent in custody.

“Hype and publicity, for all the love for this genre among modern politicians, only gets in the way in this particular instance,” Mr. Ryabkov said. “This does not just distract from the case, but creates interference in the truest sense of the word. That’s why silence is needed here.”

He hinted, however, that Moscow was interested in negotiating over Ms. Griner’s fate, saying she would be helped by “a serious reading by the American side of the signals that they received from Russia, from Moscow, through specialized channels.”

Mr. Ryabkov did not specify what those signals were, though Russian state media has suggested that the Kremlin might be interested in exchanging the American athlete for Mr. Bout, 55, a former Soviet military officer who made a fortune in global arms trafficking before he was caught in a federal sting operation."
2022/07/27,Hardly Anyone Talks About How Fracking Was an Extraordinary Boondoggle,"Update: This newsletter has been updated to reflect news developments.

In the energy scramble provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American liquid natural gas has so far played the role of Europe’s white knight. If Europe manages to keep its lights on, homes heated and factories running this winter, when energy demand is highest, it will be in large part thanks to shipments of American gas, which have more than doubled since the war began. Today, two-thirds of American oil and even more of its gas come from hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, which has played this heroic-seeming role before, in the country’s long effort post-9/11 to get out from the grip of Middle Eastern producers and secure what is often described as “energy independence.” (Donald Trump preferred the term “energy dominance.”) It hasn’t proved quite as useful as you might think: Because energy prices are set on global markets, domestic production doesn’t mean Americans pay less at the pump. But thanks in large part to fracking, the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and gas.

Perhaps the most striking fact about the American hydraulic-fracturing boom, though, is unknown to all but the most discriminating consumers of energy news: Fracking has been, for nearly all of its history, a money-losing boondoggle, profitable only recently, after being propped up by so much investment from Wall Street and private equity that it resembled less an efficient-markets no-brainer and more a speculative empire of bubbles like Uber and WeWork. The American shale revolution did bring the country “energy independence,” whatever that has been worth, and more abundant oil and gas. It has indeed reshaped the entire geopolitical landscape for fuel, though not enough to strip leverage from Vladimir Putin. But the revolution wasn’t primarily a result of some market-busting breakthrough or an engineering innovation that allowed the industry to print cash. From the start, the cash moved in the other direction; the revolution happened only because enormous sums of money were poured into the project of making it happen.

Today, with profits aided by the energy price spikes of the last year, the fracking industry is finally, at least for the time being, profitable. But from 2010 to 2020, U.S. shale lost $300 billion. Previously, from 2002 to 2012, Chesapeake, the industry leader, didn’t report positive cash flow once, ending that period with total losses of some $30 billion, as Bethany McLean documents in her 2018 book, “Saudi America,” the single best and most thorough account of the fracking boom up to that point. Between mid-2012 and mid-2017, the 60 biggest fracking companies were losing an average of $9 billion each quarter. From 2006 to 2014, fracking companies lost $80 billion; in 2014, with oil at $100 a barrel, a level that seemed to promise a great cash-out, they lost $20 billion. These losses were mammoth and consistent, adding up to a total that “dwarfs anything in tech/V.C. in that time frame,” as the Bloomberg writer Joe Weisenthal pointed out recently. “There were all these stories written about how V.C.s were subsidizing millennial lifestyles,” he noted on Twitter. “The real story to be written is about the massive subsidy to consumers from everyone who financed Chesapeake and all the companies that lost money fracking last decade.”"
2022/07/26,Our Leaderless Free World,"The central fact about the democratic world today is that it is leaderless.

Twenty-five years ago, we had the confident presences of Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl and Tony Blair — and Alan Greenspan. Now we have a failing American president, a timorous German chancellor, a British prime minister about to skulk out of office in ignominy and a chairman of the Federal Reserve who last year flubbed the most important decision of his career. Elsewhere: the resignation of Italy’s prime minister, a caretaker government in Israel, the assassination of Japan’s dominant political figure.

This is bad in normal times. It is catastrophic in bad ones. We are stumbling, half-blind, into four distinct but mutually reinforcing crises, each compounding the other.

The first crisis is one of international credibility. The war in Ukraine is not merely a crisis unto itself. It is a symptom of a crisis, which began with a withdrawal from Afghanistan that telegraphed incompetence and weakness and whose consequences were easily predictable. Beyond Ukraine, in which President Biden has committed enough support to prevent outright defeat but not to secure a clear victory, there is an imminent nuclear crisis with Iran, in which the president seems to have no policy other than negotiations that are on the cusp of failure, and another looming crisis over Taiwan, in which he alternates between challenging Beijing and trying to mollify it."
2022/07/26,The I.M.F. warns that a global recession could soon be at hand.,"“Under this scenario, both the United States and the euro area experience near-zero growth next year, with negative knock-on effects for the rest of the world,” Mr. Gourinchas said.

According to the report, the likelihood of a global recession is rising. It said the probability of a recession starting in one of the Group of 7 advanced economies was now nearly 15 percent, four times its usual level. And it said some indicators suggested that the United States was already in a “technical” recession, which the I.M.F. defines as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Data set for release on Thursday is expected to show that the U.S. economy grew little or perhaps shrank in the second quarter of 2022.

At a news conference following the release of the report, Mr. Gourinchas added that the I.M.F. was not currently projecting that the United States was in a recession and that even if its economy contracted in the second quarter, defining a recession can be complicated.

“The recession in the way it is defined typically is looking at more than just output, you want to take into account the strength of the labor market,” Mr. Gourinchas said. “The general assessment as to whether the economy is in a recession overall is a little bit more complex.”

Mr. Gourinchas also suggested that the kind of “soft landing” that the Fed was trying to engineer — where it cools the economy just enough without setting off a recession — would be difficult to achieve. As the labor market cools, even a small “shock” could tip the economy into a recession, he said."
2022/07/25,Inside the Azovstal Siege,"On Feb. 24, at the start of Russia’s invasion, the director of Azovstal and its board made a decision that would shape the battle for eastern Ukraine: They turned the plant into a refuge for employees and their families. The plant’s 36 bomb shelters, some more than 20 feet underground, had enough food for weeks.

Ukrainian soldiers also arrived at Azovstal, which they saw as the perfect place to make a last stand, surrounded on three sides by water and ringed by high walls.

But Azovstal also became a trap. The presence of civilians hampered the soldiers’ ability to defend themselves. The presence of Ukrainian fighters meant the civilians had to endure a vicious siege as food and clean water ran out.

On March 21, two helicopters carrying Ukrainian Special Forces fighters, crates of Stinger and Javelin missiles and a satellite internet system made a daring descent into the Azovstal complex. It was the first of seven missions in “Operation Air Corridor” to bring weapons in and wounded soldiers out."
2022/07/26,Your Tuesday Briefing,"Thatcher looms large in U.K. race

Either Rishi Sunak, a former top finance official, or Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, will be the next prime minister of Britain.

Each candidate has tried to adopt the style of Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister whose right-wing policies remain popular among the Conservative voters that Sunak and Truss hope to win over. They are casting themselves as the heir to Thatcher’s free-market, low-tax, deregulatory revolution at home and her robust defense of Western democracy abroad.

But experts on Thatcher say the candidates are cherry-picking the legacy of the woman known as the Iron Lady. They are emphasizing the crowd-pleasing elements while glossing over the less appetizing ones, like tax increases in 1981, during the depths of a recession, at a time when she was determined to curb runaway inflation.

Sunak: He kicked off his campaign over the weekend in Grantham, Thatcher’s birthplace, and described his agenda as “common-sense Thatcherism.” His approach echoes Thatcher’s belief in balancing the books and her dislike of borrowing, which she viewed as a burden on future generations.

Sunak served in Boris Johnson’s government and is responsible for some of the economic policies he now proposes to sweep away."
2022/07/26,"Bryan Young, an American volunteer who died fighting in Ukraine, felt called to help.","Bryan Young feared for his adopted homeland, his partner said. That’s why Mr. Young, a U.S. Army veteran, left the Republic of Georgia, where he settled and got married after an international cycling trip, and volunteered to fight the Russians.

“We had a very, very big fight because I didn’t want him to go,” said Mr. Young’s partner, Maria Lipka.

In March — not long after Russia invaded Ukraine — Mr. Young traveled to Istanbul, and then Ukraine, enlisting as a volunteer fighter. “He wanted to be useful and he wanted to use his knowledge because he’s former military,” Ms. Lipka said."
2022/07/26,Kyiv Nightlife Comes Back Amid Urge for Contact. ‘This Is the Cure.’,"KYIV — The rave had been planned for weeks, with the space secured and the D.J.s, the drinks, the invites and the security all lined up.

But after a recent missile strike far from the front lines killed more than 25 people, including children, in central Ukraine, an attack that deeply unsettled all Ukraine, the rave organizers met to make a hard, last-minute decision. Should they postpone the party?

They decided: No way.

“That’s exactly what the Russians want,” said Dmytro Vasylkov, one of the organizers."
2022/07/25,"As Prices Soar in Ukraine, War Adds Economic Havoc to the Human Toll","LVIV, Ukraine — At his compact stall in Lviv’s main outdoor food market, Ihor Korpii arranged jars of blueberries that he and his wife had picked from a nearby forest into an attractive display. Fragrant dill and fresh peas harvested from their garden lay in neat piles on a table.

A schoolteacher surviving on modest pay, Mr. Korpii peddles produce during summers to supplement his family’s income. But this year, he has had to raise prices by over 10 percent to make up for a surge in fuel and fertilizer costs brought on by Russia’s invasion. Now, buyers are scarce, and sales have slumped by more than half.

“War has driven up the cost of almost everything, and people are buying much, much less,” Mr. Korpii said, pointing with weather-beaten hands to a heap of unsold carrots. “Everyone, including us, is tightening their belts,” he added. “They’re trying to save money because they don’t know what the future will bring.”"
2022/07/25,"U.K., Eurovision Runner-up to Ukraine, Will Host Song Contest in 2023","Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, said in a statement on Monday that the 2023 contest “will showcase the creativity and skill of one of Europe’s most experienced public broadcasters whilst ensuring this year’s winners, Ukraine, are celebrated and represented throughout the event.”

Representatives from UA:PBC, a Ukrainian broadcaster, will work with the BBC on the Ukrainian elements of the show, Eurovision said in a statement. Mykola Chernotytskyi, the chief executive of the broadcaster’s managing board, said in a statement that the event “will not be in Ukraine but in support of Ukraine,” adding that organizers would “add Ukrainian spirit to this event.”

Although the decision was reached with the Ukrainian government, at least one of the country’s past winners still appeared unhappy with Monday’s announcement. Jamala, who won Eurovision in 2016 with “1944,” a song widely interpreted by Eurovision fans as a comment on Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, said in an emailed statement that the decision still felt “a bit premature.”

“With this gesture, they are taking away the hope of Ukrainian people to win this unprovoked war in the near future,” she added."
2022/07/24,Your Monday Briefing,"In declaring the disease a “public health emergency of international concern,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, overruled a panel of advisers, who could not reach a decision.

The declaration signals a public health risk requiring a coordinated international response. That could lead member countries to invest more in their response to outbreaks and encourage nations to share vaccines, treatments and other key resources.

Details: The U.S., Britain and Spain have each recorded about 3,000 cases, and monkeypox has infected more than 16,000 people worldwide, overwhelmingly men who have sex with men. Many infected people report no known source of infection, indicating undetected community spread.

Context: This is the seventh public health emergency since 2007. Currently, the W.H.O. designation is used to describe two other diseases: Covid-19 and polio.

What’s next: One expert estimated that it might take a year or more to control the outbreak. By then, the virus is likely to have infected hundreds of thousands of people and may have permanently entrenched itself in some countries."
2022/07/09,There is no sign of a Russian ‘pause’ for one Ukrainian town under fire.,"BAKHMUT, Ukraine — Russia’s defense ministry has said that it is conducting an “operational pause” in the war in Ukraine to allow units that have been fighting to rest, prompting military analysts to suggest that Russia was not ready to press into a full assault within Donetsk Province after its capture of neighboring Luhansk.

Yet while Russian troops have eased up on the sort of intense, all-day artillery strikes that they unleashed to help capture the final city in Luhansk Province, they have begun launching almost daily strikes on the next line of cities — Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Bakhmut.

On Friday, families were fixing broken roofs and windows in the city of Bakhmut after another night of Russian shelling. One man died, and three were wounded when multiple rockets smashed into a street of small one-story houses on the eastern side of the city."
2022/07/25,U.S. Officials Grow More Concerned About Potential Action by China on Taiwan,"WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has grown increasingly anxious this summer about China’s statements and actions regarding Taiwan, with some officials fearing that Chinese leaders might try to move against the self-governing island over the next year and a half — perhaps by trying to cut off access to all or part of the Taiwan Strait, through which U.S. naval ships regularly pass.

The internal worries have sharpened in recent days, as the administration quietly works to try to dissuade House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from going through with a proposed visit to Taiwan next month, U.S. officials say. Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, would be the first speaker to visit Taiwan since 1997, and the Chinese government has repeatedly denounced her reported plans and threatened retaliation.

U.S. officials see a greater risk of conflict and miscalculation over Ms. Pelosi’s trip as President Xi Jinping of China and other Communist Party leaders prepare in the coming weeks for an important political meeting in which Mr. Xi is expected to extend his rule."
2022/07/25,"As Ukraine Signs Up Soldiers, Questions Arise About How It Chooses","Ukraine has long had conscription, and young men are required to do military service unless they fall into an exempt category, like being enrolled in a university, having a disability or having at least three children. After the war began, all nonexempt men ages 18 to 60 were required to register with their local recruitment offices and undergo medical screening for possible service, but at times enforcement and record-keeping have been haphazard.

Government officials say that only those with military experience or specifically needed skills have been drafted so far, but that others are likely to be called up as the war continues. Critics say that conscription has not been as selective as officials make it out to be, and that with the military in charge of recruitment, registration and drafting, the process is shrouded in secrecy, with little transparency about the standards applied to each step.

“This process of handing out summonses fully complies with the law,” said Yevheniia Riabeka, former legal adviser to the commander in chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “This is a normal attempt to register citizens who are obligated to defend their country.”

Each local recruitment center is given targets for numbers of people to register, she said — but those figures are “completely secret information.”"
2022/07/24,"‘We Survived Another Night’: In Ruined Suburb, Solace in a Small Community","SALTIVKA, Ukraine — On a recent Saturday morning, Yevhenia Botiyeva weeded the flower bed outside her apartment building, a routine she has taken on since she returned home in late spring.

She worked methodically, seemingly unbothered by the apocalyptic landscape of burned buildings, shattered windows and the occasional thud of artillery that surrounded her.

Her husband, Nikolai Kucher, who had survived Covid-19 and a heart attack and now had cancer, would emerge soon from their first-floor apartment to build a wood fire to heat water in a blackened kettle for coffee. But for now it was just Ms. Botiyeva, 82, tending to the overgrown lilies."
2022/07/24,"An American killed in Ukraine was moved to volunteer by his heritage, a friend says.","Mr. Young’s family did not immediately respond to messages and calls on Sunday.

A longtime friend of Mr. Lucyszyn’s, Corey Mesimer, 29, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., confirmed on Sunday that his friend’s family had been informed that Mr. Lucyszyn was killed in battle.

Mr. Lucyszyn, 31, felt a responsibility to travel and fight in Ukraine because his grandmother was born there, and he felt close to his heritage, Mr. Mesimer said.

“That was something that he needed to do; he felt very strongly about it,” Mr. Mesimer said by phone on Sunday. “And even talking to him while he was over there, he felt like it was something that he needed to do for the country of Ukraine.”

Mr. Mesimer said that Mr. Lucyszyn, whom he described as the “life of the party,” had been living in Myrtle Beach for the past two years and that the two had played on the same paintball team there, the Carolina Rage."
2022/07/24,Fears rise for a rights activist captured while fighting for Ukraine.,"The man they know, they say, is the opposite of the one portrayed on Russian television.

“He never accepted either the extreme-right views or the extreme left,” said his mother, Yevheniia Butkevych. “He took shape as a person who is absolutely alien to extreme positions, which, as a rule, are aggressive.”

In fact, Ms. Butkevych said, her son was a pacifist who had maintained after Russian proxies invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014 that the best use of his talents was as an activist. But that changed on Feb. 24, when Russian missiles crashed into his hometown, Kyiv, and cities and towns across the country.

The same day, Mr. Butkevych, 45, reported to a military recruitment center.

“He said, ‘I will leave my human rights work for a while, because now it is necessary, first of all, to protect the country,” Ms. Butkevych recalled. “Because everything I have worked on all these years and everything that we all worked for, the rules of our lives and of our society are now under threat.’”

Mr. Butkevych, her only child, was called up on March 4 and became a platoon commander around Kyiv, before being sent in mid-June to try to reinforce the army as it fought to keep Sievierodonetsk."
2022/07/24,Last Stand at Azovstal: Inside the Siege That Shaped the Ukraine War,"“We locked eyes,” he said. “There was unbelievable happiness.”

Along with the other women in her unit, Ms. Polyakova had been told to stand down on the third day of the war, as the shelling in Mariupol intensified. She hid in the basement of the couple’s apartment building until it was hit by a shell and burned to the ground.

Then she had fled the city on foot.

She made it as far as the outskirts when she was arrested at a checkpoint manned by Russian forces. They had searched her phone, discovered that she was the wife of an Azov soldier and taken her into custody. They called her a fascist and made her sing the Russian national anthem. They told her that her husband was most likely dead.

“Azov fighters are not taken prisoner,” she said they told her. “They are shot on sight.”

She alone from her prison camp was selected as part of the same trade that freed her husband. Ukrainian officials had pressed for their release for the sake of their children, who had been left in the care of an ailing grandmother.

“When I saw him, I simply — I’m even crying now,” she said.

Today, the other surviving soldiers from Azovstal are being held at a prison camp in a Russia-controlled part of eastern Ukraine. The commanders, including Captain Palamar, were transferred to Russia and are being held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a place of torture during Stalin’s purges.

Ukraine’s leaders have vowed to bring them back alive, but Russian officials are threatening to charge some of them with war crimes. Of the dead, so far the bodies of more than 400 soldiers have been returned to Ukrainian-held territory for burial.

An unknown number remain entombed in the ruins of Azovstal."
2022/07/08,"At Europe’s Largest Port, Russia Sanctions Meet Their Toughest Test","“That first weekend, when the first regulation went into force, we didn’t want to take any risks that a container with certain goods which were not allowed to go to Russia ended up in Russia,” said Mr. Kamp. “So we blocked at the time, a large number of containers, about six or seven thousand. They had to be stopped, we would first investigate,” he added.

The number of backlogged containers languishing at Rotterdam is now down to about 100 awaiting detailed inspection — not enough to slow the humming of this highly automated port that seldom requires human hands to touch a container.

Mr. Kamp had bolstered his staff in previous years because of Britain’s departure from the European Union, building an 850-strong team that left him relatively well-equipped to deal with this new crisis.

“We put in place overtime shifts, extra people from other regions of the country, and we have had dozens of people working on the sanctions,"" he said in an interview."
2022/07/23,Turkey’s Leader Remains a Headache for Biden Despite Aiding in Ukraine Deal,"Mr. Biden seemed especially grateful for the breakthrough. “I want to particularly thank you for what you did putting together the situation with regard to Finland and Sweden,” he told Mr. Erdogan in the presence of reporters.

The two-page agreement said in generalized language that Sweden and Finland would address Turkey’s “pending deportation or extradition requests of terror suspects expeditiously and thoroughly.” But Turkish officials have said they expect the extradition of more than 70 individuals. It was unclear whether Sweden and Finland would agree or how Mr. Erdogan might react if they did not.

On Monday, Mr. Erdogan warned that he could still “freeze” NATO’s expansion if his demands were not met.

Mr. Biden also told Mr. Erdogan in Spain that he supported the sale of 40 American F-16 fighter jets that Turkey requested last fall, along with technology upgrades for dozens of fighters it already owns. Turkey wants those planes in part because the Trump administration canceled plans to sell the country advanced F-35 fighter jets in 2019 after Mr. Erdogan, in one of his more confounding recent moves, purchased Russia’s S-400 antiaircraft missile system in defiance of U.S. warnings.

Mr. Biden denied that he offered the planes to buy Mr. Erdogan’s support for NATO’s expansion. “And there was no quid pro quo with that; it was just that we should sell,” he said. “But I need congressional approval to be able to do that, and I think we can get that.”

Congress’s approval may not be a given. And it was unclear whether Mr. Erdogan might block NATO’s proposed expansion until he reaches a deal on the F-16 jets."
2022/07/22,The Grain Deal,"Given the realities on the ground and the lack of trust, getting the two sides to stick to the deal could be a challenge, and the risks that it could unravel are high, analysts and officials warned. U.S. and Ukrainian officials expressed skepticism that Russia would follow through on its commitments.

Ukraine and Russia together supply more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, and Russia is also a major supplier of fertilizer. Ukraine is also a leading exporter of barley, corn and sunflower.

When Russia invaded, Ukraine mined its ports to prevent an assault from the sea. Those mines, along with Russia’s blockade, prevented Ukraine from safely resuming its exports and trapped its grain.

How the deal will work

The first shipments out of Odesa and the neighboring ports of Chornomorsk and Yuzhne are expected within weeks, U.N. officials said."
2022/07/23,Four Things Nations Can Do to Conserve Energy,"This month, temperatures in Britain reached a record 40.3 degrees Celsius, or 104.5 Fahrenheit, capping a brutal heat wave that scorched Europe and sent electricity demand soaring.

It came amid a war in Ukraine that has upended the global energy market.

The energy crunch prompted European Union nations to agree on Tuesday to reduce their gas consumption by 15 percent between now and next spring as officials prepare for Russia to cut deliveries of natural gas in the coming months.

Here are of some of the things countries could do to curb energy demand, and some of the potential pitfalls:

Adjust thermostats, starting in government buildings

Setting an air-conditioner just one degree Celsius, or about two degrees Fahrenheit, warmer could reduce the amount of electricity used by 10 percent a year, according to the International Energy Agency."
2022/07/23,Spouses of world leaders to join Ukraine’s first lady in a discussion on postwar lives.,"The spouses of world leaders will be talking about the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine this weekend during the second Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen, hosted by Olena Zelenska, the nation’s first lady.

Some of Ms. Zelenska’s counterparts will participate through a video link from studios sin Brussels, Warsaw, London and Washington. The main studio leading the event on Saturday will be in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

In a statement released earlier this month, Ms. Zelenska, who initiated the summit last year, said the central focus of this year’s would be human capital because often too much emphasis is placed on the economy and infrastructure when discussing reconstruction."
2022/07/22,Draghi’s Fall Reverberates Beyond Italy,"ROME — Just over a month ago, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy boarded an overnight train with the leaders of France and Germany bound for Kyiv. During the 10-hour trip, they joked about how the French president had the nicest accommodations. But, more important, they asserted their resolute support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. The pictures of the men tucked in a cabin around a wooden conference table evoked a clubby style of crisis management reminiscent of World War II.

The mere fact that Mr. Draghi had a seat at that table reflected how, by the force of his stature and credibility, he had made his country — one saddled by debt and persistent political instability — an equal partner with Europe’s most important powers. Critical to that success was not only his economic bona fides as the former president of the European Central Bank, but also his unflinching recognition that Russia’s war presented an existential challenge to Europe and its values.

All of that has now been thrown into jeopardy since a multi-flanked populist rebellion, motivated by an opportunistic power grab, stunningly torpedoed Mr. Draghi’s government this week. Snap elections have been called for September, with polls showing that an alliance dominated by hard-right nationalists and populists is heavily favored to run Italy come the fall."
2022/07/09,An American arrested in Russia last year was sentenced by the court handling Brittney Griner’s case.,"With the spotlight on the case of Brittney Griner, the American basketball star who has been detained in Russia since February, the sentencing of a former U.S. Embassy worker in Russia last month on similar drug charges has his loved ones also pleading for him to be allowed to return home.

Marc Fogel, a teacher who previously worked for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was convicted of drug smuggling, according to his family and Russian news outlets. He was sentenced in June — by the same court that is handling Ms. Griner’s case — to 14 years in a high-security penal colony.

Mr. Fogel, 60, worked at the Anglo-American School of Moscow and was arrested in August when customs officers at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow found marijuana in his luggage after he arrived from New York. The cannabis, according to a statement from the Russian Interior Ministry, had been packaged in a container carrying contact lenses, and cannabis oil was also found in e-cigarette cartridges."
2022/07/22,N.B.A. Mostly Keeps Low Profile in Public Campaign to Free Brittney Griner,"The N.B.A. is a $10 billion corporation that has the power and reach to promote not just its teams and players but to provoke discussion and debate around social issues. It has used that influence most prominently to fight racism in the United States.

Yet when it has come to Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star who has been detained in Russia since February, the N.B.A.’s teams have been mostly absent from the public campaign for her release. The N.B.A. founded the W.N.B.A. and still owns about half of it, but the N.B.A. has been relatively muted outside of news conferences as Griner’s family, her agent and the women’s league and its players have led the public push for her freedom. N.B.A. players have also shown support.

Officials in both leagues said they had stayed quiet at first at the urging of U.S. government officials who worried that publicizing the case would backfire and jeopardize Griner even further. But even after the U.S. State Department said that it had determined she had been “wrongfully detained” and government officials began regularly speaking about Griner, the N.B.A. and team owners remained mostly quiet, fueling sentiments that the case has not gotten the kind of spotlight Griner’s supporters have demanded."
2022/07/21,"New Weapons, New Confidence","Ukraine’s stepped-up attacks are consistent with preparations for a ground offensive, analysts say.

“It’s important, I think, for the Ukrainians themselves that they demonstrate their ability to strike back,” Richard Moore, the head of MI6 British foreign intelligence service, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

“To be honest, it will be an important reminder to the rest of Europe that this is a winnable campaign, because we are about to get into a pretty tough winter,” he said.

Moore added that Ukrainian forces would have an opportunity to mount a counteroffensive in the coming weeks. The Russian military is “about to run out of steam,” he said, and will be forced to suspend its offensive.

In the east, the Ukrainian military claimed a small but important victory recently when it recaptured the village of Pavlivka, my colleague Carlotta Gall writes.

It marked a welcome turnaround in the region for Ukrainian troops, who have been on the back foot for months.

It also gave them a close-up view of the enemy, and what they saw gave them confidence.

“They were well-spoken, educated and well-equipped,” Kryha, who led Ukraine’s 53rd Brigade in seizing the village and who goes by a code name, said of the Russians taken prisoner. “But they were all tired and lacked motivation.”"
2022/07/21,"Putin is ‘entirely too healthy,’ the C.I.A. director says.","Western intelligence officials, as well as the Kremlin, this week dismissed longstanding rumors that Vladimir V. Putin, the 69-year-old Russian president, is unwell.

Mr. Putin coughed during a speech in Moscow on Wednesday, leading observers to raise concerns about his health. His planned meeting that day with officials from South Ossetia was canceled, fueling speculation that he was sick. In June, when a video released by state media showed him grasping a table tightly, for a moment too long, many on social media were convinced that his health was declining.

“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health and as far as we can tell he’s entirely too healthy,” William J. Burns, director of the C.I.A., said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Wednesday."
2022/07/22,Inside Ukraine’s Thriving Tech Sector,"“What’s really frustrating are the clients who work with Russian companies and aren’t willing to change,” Ms. Hameliak said. “I try to be polite.”

The corruption problem

Last year, the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International ranked Ukraine as the second-most-corrupt country in Europe, behind Russia. For years, a small group of oligarchs owned a huge swath of the economy, and bribery was commonplace. As bad, a shadow economy of unreported transactions has long eroded the tax base. Four years ago, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology estimated that 47 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product was essentially invisible to the government.

The situation is improving, many executives here say, as more companies vie for contracts in the international economy, where integrity is more highly prized. But young entrepreneurs understand that, before the war turned the country into a symbol of resistance, it had an image problem. And there was no point in waiting for the government to fix it, or even provide basic social services, like a safety net. People here live on what they earn or they don’t retire, or they live in misery.

Staffs understood that companies were at risk of hemorrhaging customers and would disappear if they could not prove that they were every bit as viable as they were the day before hostilities began. Plus, focusing on work was a good way to ignore unfolding horrors.

“We felt a lot of emotions, and most of them were pretty negative,” said Illia Shevchenko, a Ukrainian manager at EPAM Systems, a digital product design company that is based in Pennsylvania and has offices around Ukraine. “The best way to distract yourself from these emotions is to work. There’s a specific task. You sit down and think about it.”

Mr. Shevchenko was speaking over a video call from a small bedroom in an apartment in Kremenchuk, where his wife and two children moved soon after Kharkiv, their former hometown, was attacked. He wore a red T-shirt with an illustration of Einstein on it, and gave a tour of his new office that lasted about six seconds. He lifted his laptop and pointed it at the tiny table and chair where he now works."
2022/07/21,"Ukraine Tries to Make the Case That It Can Win, Citing Recent Strikes","Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, carried the message personally to Washington on Wednesday, making a rare appearance before Congress by a foreign first spouse. She pleaded for more weapons, saying Russia was “destroying our country.’’

Despite the Ukrainians’ renewed optimism, military analysts and Western officials say it’s far too soon to forecast a turn in fortunes, and that a long slog seems likely. And they caution against hanging too many hopes on particular weapons amid the chaos and fluidity of a front line that winds hundreds of miles from Kharkiv in the north to Mykolaiv in the south.

“We are now achieving what we have not achieved before,” said Taras Chmut, the director of a nongovernmental group aiding Ukrainian soldiers. “But there was no breakthrough at the front. There is no panacea, no magic wand, that will lead to victory tomorrow.”

Still, in interviews in Kyiv this week, senior Ukrainian security officials projected optimism.

“The faster our partners supply us with weapons, the faster we will end this war,” said Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security council. Ukraine has no intention of ceding territory in a negotiated settlement, as some in the West have suggested, he said. “This is just a question of who beats whom.”

Ukraine received affirmation of its strategy from the United States on Wednesday, when the Pentagon committed to supplying four more HIMARS rocket launchers and other potent weaponry, including two NASAM air-defense systems to help Ukraine protect against missile strikes. And Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III offered a more optimistic assessment of Ukraine’s chances."
2022/07/21,Your Friday Briefing,"Officials hope the move will be a powerful tool to help control rapid inflation, and the central bank described it as an effort to “front-load” its rate increases. And in a sign of investor confidence, European stocks ended the day roughly where they started.

Financial context: Last week, the euro fell to parity with the dollar for the first time in 20 years. That added to the bloc’s inflationary pressures because the lower currency value increased the cost of imports. Concern is growing that the bloc will enter a recession.

Global context: The increase follows similar measures taken by the U.S. Federal Reserve and dozens of other central banks this year. The world’s outlook has worsened in recent months, as pandemic-induced disruptions and the war in Ukraine have continued to disrupt supply chains.

Resources: Here are answers to questions you may have about what causes inflation and how interest rate increases — which make it more expensive to borrow money — can help fight it."
2022/07/21,"A Village Retaken, and a Confidence Boost for Ukraine’s Troops","Pavlivka, just a few miles from the nearest Russian positions, remains a precarious foothold for the Ukrainians. The Russians have bombarded the village so heavily since losing it that only a small group of Ukrainian soldiers were hunkered down at the entrance. The few civilians still living there were taking cover, nowhere to be seen.

Villages, towns and cities across eastern and southern Ukraine have suffered similar destruction as the Russian forces have made their slow, grinding advance over the last five months, pummeling Ukrainian troops with relentless artillery strikes and killing tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians.

Yet the retaking of Pavlivka was a welcome turnaround for Ukrainian troops in the region, after months of being on the back foot. It also gave them a close-up view of the enemy, and what they saw gave them confidence."
2022/07/21,"Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair","LONDON — There’s a chill in the air at the Almeida Theater, notwithstanding the record-breaking heat here. That drop in temperature comes from the coolly unnerving “Patriots,” a new drama whose look at power politics in Russia over the last quarter-century induces a shiver at despotism’s rise.

The gripping production, directed by Rupert Goold, runs through Aug. 20.

Written by Peter Morgan (“The Crown,” “Frost/Nixon”), “Patriots” surveys the sad, shortened life of Boris Berezovsky, the brainiac billionaire who died in 2013, age 67, in political exile in London. An inquest into Berezovsky’s mysterious death returned an unusual “open verdict,” but on this occasion, it is unequivocally presented as a suicide: The play ends with this balding man, bereft of authority, preparing to end his life.

An academic whiz-turned-oligarch who expedited the rise of the younger Vladimir V. Putin, Berezovsky later fell out with the onetime ally who enlarged his power base, according to the play, with promises of “liberalizing Russia,” yet proceeded to do anything but."
2022/07/21,"In Washington, Olena Zelenska Dressed for Ukraine","On Wednesday, on the third leg of an unofficial three-day trip to Washington, D.C., Olena Zelenska, the wife of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, became the rare first lady to address Congress.

But despite the fact that she had, on the initial two days of her trip, engaged in what could have been called typical first lady things — posing primly with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his office; warmly greeting President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, who met her with a bouquet of flowers; wearing an array of dresses and suits by Ukrainian designers, with nods to the colors of the Ukrainian flag — she was not, as she said in her speech, there to talk about typical first lady things.

“Usually the wives of presidents are exclusively engaged in peaceful affairs,” she said as she stood in the Capitol in a black suit dress by the Ukrainian label AMG, a slice of white fabric bisecting one side of the jacket. “Education, human rights, equality, accessibility.”"
2022/07/21,I Was Wrong About Capitalism,"By the time I came to this job, in 2003, I was having qualms about the free-market education I’d received — but not fast enough. It took me a while to see that the postindustrial capitalism machine — while innovative, dynamic and wonderful in many respects — had some fundamental flaws. The most educated Americans were amassing more and more wealth, dominating the best living areas, pouring advantages into their kids. A highly unequal caste system was forming. Bit by bit it dawned on me that the government would have to get much more active if every child was going to have an open field and a fair chance.

I started writing columns about inequality. I called around to my right-leaning economist friends and they sensed inequality was a problem, but few had done much work on the subject or done much thinking on how to address it.

I saw but didn’t see. By the time the financial crisis hit, the flaws in modern capitalism were blindingly obvious, but my mental frames still didn’t shift fast enough. Barack Obama was trying to figure out how to stimulate the economy and I still had that 1990s “the deficit is the problem” mind-set. I wrote a bunch of columns urging Obama to keep the stimulus reasonably small, columns that look wrong in hindsight. Deficits matter, but they were not the core challenge in 2009. I opposed Obama’s auto bailout on free-market grounds, and that was wrong, too.

Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.

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."
2022/07/20,Your Thursday Briefing,"The E.U. prepares to ration gas

The E.U.’s executive branch put forth a plan to avert an energy crisis from a likely Russian gas cutoff and yesterday called on member states to ration natural gas.

Europe is being asked to cut its use of natural gas by 15 percent from now through next spring, the European Commission said. The 27 member nations would have to approve the proposal and pass legislation to go with it. If ratified, the proposal would put Europe’s economy on a war footing.

“I know this is a big ask for the whole of the European Union, but it’s necessary to protect us,” the commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said yesterday, adding, “We have to prepare for a potential full disruption of Russian gas, and this is a likely scenario.”"
2022/07/20,The Energy War Escalates,"“Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said as she introduced the plan.

If the E.U.’s 27 member countries agree to the measure, it will put Europe’s economy on a war footing, my colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff writes. E.U. energy ministers are set to meet next week in Brussels to debate the plan.

The E.U. imported 155 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia last year, some 40 percent of its total gas imports. Gas makes up a quarter of its energy mix and is overwhelmingly what Europeans use to heat their homes.

Since the start of the war, Russia has cut supplies to the bloc. There are fears that a key pipeline, currently down for regular maintenance, may not come back on at full steam."
2022/07/06,How War in Ukraine Roiled Russia’s ‘Coolest Company’,"Its success as a search engine and service provider was founded, as is Google’s and that of other social media giants, on public trust. Before the war, around 50 million Russians visited its home page every day, where a list of the five top headlines was a main source of information for many.

Executives at Yandex, and its users, had come to accept the Kremlin’s curation of news sources, but considered it a limited slice of a sprawling, groundbreaking tech empire. With the invasion and the Kremlin’s crackdown on any public discussion of the war, however, Yandex quickly became the butt of jokes.

Online, some users mocked its longstanding slogan of “Yandex. You can find everything,” as “Yandex. You can find everything but the truth,” or “Yandex. You can find everything but a conscience.”

“Yandex was like an island of freedom in Russia, and I don’t know how it can continue,” said Elena Bunina, a math professor whose five-year tenure as Yandex’s chief executive ended in April, when she emigrated to Israel.

Interviews with 10 former and current employees of Yandex reveal a portrait of a company stuck between two irreconcilable imperatives. On one side, it needs to satisfy the demands of a Kremlin determined to asphyxiate any opposition to what it veils as its “special military operation” in Ukraine. On the other are Western governments, investors and partners horrified by Russia’s war, as well as the more worldly segments of its own Russian audience."
2022/07/20,Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss Will Compete to Replace Boris Johnson,"“Hasta la vista, baby!” he said to lawmakers, borrowing a familiar farewell from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also famously said, “I’ll be back.”

How successfully Mr. Sunak and Ms. Truss escape Mr. Johnson’s shadow may determine their success in the next six weeks of campaigning. That could pose a bigger challenge to Ms. Truss, who sat alongside Mr. Johnson in the House of Commons on Wednesday and has stayed in his cabinet when several others, including Mr. Sunak, quit.

Mr. Sunak will likely present himself as a responsible steward of the nation’s finances during a period of extreme stress, with surging inflation and the specter of recession. His victory caps a remarkable comeback from last spring when his political career appeared finished following the disclosure that his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter of an Indian billionaire, did not pay taxes on all her income in Britain.

So far, analysts said, Mr. Sunak has conducted a smooth, disciplined campaign, refusing to be drawn out on policy details and giving journalists few openings to investigate him. Ms. Truss’ campaign has gotten off to a shakier start, though she has gained momentum. On Wednesday, after her victory, she posted on Twitter that she was ready “to hit the ground from day one,” forgetting to add “running.”

Ms. Truss will be viewed as the candidate of hard-line Brexiteers, pursuing aggressive negotiations with the European Union over trade in Northern Ireland. Critics say she undermined the talks with Brussels to pander to the Brexiteer wing of the party, and now risks triggering a trade war.

She will also likely play up her hard-power credentials as foreign secretary during the war in Ukraine. At a recent televised debate, Ms. Truss was the only candidate to say she would be willing to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at a meeting of the Group of 20 industrial countries in November — positioning herself as an adversary who would get tough with the Russian leader for his aggressions."
2022/07/20,War and Warming Upend Global Energy Supplies and Amplify Suffering,"Deadly heat and Russia’s war in Ukraine are packing a brutal double punch, upending the global energy market and forcing some of the world’s largest economies into a desperate scramble to secure electricity for their citizens.

This week, Europe found itself in a nasty feedback loop as record temperatures sent electricity demand soaring but also forced sharp cuts in power from nuclear plants in the region because the extreme heat made it difficult to cool the reactors.

France on Tuesday detailed its plan to renationalize its electricity utility, EDF, to shore up the nation’s energy independence by refreshing its fleet of aging nuclear plants. Russia, which for decades has provided much of Europe’s natural gas, kept Europe guessing as to whether it will resume gas flows later this week through a key pipeline. Germany pushed the European Union to greenlight cheap loans for new gas projects, potentially prolonging its reliance on the fossil fuel for decades longer."
2022/07/19,"Putin Finds a New Ally in Iran, a Fellow Outcast","But the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed the calculus.

Increasingly cut off from Western markets, Russia is looking to Iran as an economic partner, as well as for expertise in skirting sanctions.

Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, has signed a nonbinding $40 billion deal to help develop gas and oil fields in Iran, according to Iranian reports. And, American officials say, Russia is looking to buy much-needed combat drones from Iran for use over Ukraine, a matter that was not addressed publicly in Tuesday’s meetings.

Ahead of Mr. Putin’s visit, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told an Iranian broadcaster that Iran and Russia could soon sign a treaty on strategic cooperation that would expand their collaboration in banking and finance. He evoked the 16th-century diplomacy between Russia and Persia to set the scene for what he promised would be a new era of friendship between Tehran and Moscow.

The courtship between the two countries started even before the war began on Feb. 24, as Russia’s tensions with the West were escalating. In January, Mr. Raisi, the Iranian president, went to Moscow. Then last month, the two men met again at a regional summit in Turkmenistan, where the Russian leader sought to cement support from countries on the Caspian Sea.

On Tuesday, as he and Mr. Raisi met for the third time this year, Mr. Putin said the two countries’ relations were “developing at a good pace” in economic, security and regional affairs. He said he and Mr. Raisi had agreed to strengthen cooperation in energy, industry and transportation, and to increasingly use national currencies — rather than the U.S. dollar — to denominate their trade."
2022/07/19,Iran Backs the War,"The endorsement went well beyond the much more cautious support offered by another key Russian ally, China. Khamenei repeated Putin’s claim that the West had left the Kremlin no choice but to act.

It was a signal to the world that after Europe and the U.S. hit Russia with sanctions comparable to those that suffocated Iran’s economy for years, Moscow and Tehran were broadening their relationship into a more far-reaching partnership, my colleagues Anton Troianovski and Farnaz Fassihi write.

“Russia and Iran still don’t trust one another, but now need each other more than ever,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group. “This is no longer a partnership of choice, but an alliance out of necessity.”

It is also one in which Russia will hold most of the power, as Farnaz Fassihi, The Times’s U.N. correspondent and an expert on the Middle East, told us last week."
2022/07/07,"In Russia, Gay People Are Routinely Targeted. That’s Why This Ukrainian Soldier Is Fighting.","lulu garcia-navarro

From The earliest days of the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen the images of everyday Ukrainians signing up to defend their country against the Russian invasion leaving behind the lives they’d been living just days before. Wars can be uniting in that way with citizens coming together against a shared enemy, putting their differences aside. Oleksandr Zhuhan, Sashko for short, was one of those who joined Ukraine’s volunteer forces. He’s gay, and for him, Putin’s Russia held particular terror. Gay people are routinely targeted their, arrested without cause, even tortured. And among the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine, he said the country had embraced values, quote, “contrary to human nature.” But Sashko had also experienced homophobia within Ukraine in the years leading up to the war. So when he started talking to my colleague, Courtney Stein in the early days of the fighting, he was facing dual fears a future under Russia, but also how he might be treated by the soldiers he was serving alongside. From “New York Times Opinion,” this is “First Person.” I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Today, Sashko and the fight for his future in Ukraine. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney. Today is calmer than it was yesterday, but still it’s not safe here. Anyway —

courtney stein

When we first started talking, Sashko was too busy to get on the phone. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN We hear bumping sounds like every 15 minutes or every half an hour. He was just a couple of days into his enlistment, and these were the early days of the war when Russia was shelling Kyiv. His unit was stationed in what had been a mall there. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And we are sleeping now next to the window shop. It looks somehow surrealistic because we see that beautiful clothes and we are wearing the same clothes that we came here in. So I asked him to send me voice memos whenever he had a free minute. And what most came through was just how disorienting this all was for him.

oleksandr zhuhan

I haven’t — I hadn’t held a gun in my life until the 24th of February. I skipped all the lessons of —

courtney stein

In Ukraine, boys learn how to shoot guns in school. But Sashko never wanted any part of that sort of thing. He’d never imagined fighting in a war, even up to the moment he enlisted alongside the partner he calls his husband, though they can’t be legally married.

oleksandr zhuhan

We didn’t think that we would be given guns. We thought that we would do something like, I don’t know, cooking or cleaning or carrying heavy things, something like that. My husband is a director, and I am an actor and a director and a playwright. We are very stereotypically gay, if I can put it this way, like we are a gay couple who are vegans and we are very anti, I don’t know, war.

courtney stein

Or at least they had been, then Russia invaded. Sashko and Antonina spent the night of the invasion hiding in their bathroom, weighing whether to enlist.

oleksandr zhuhan

For both of us, it was a very difficult decision because we used to avoid places where there are lots of manly men, like stereotypically heterosexual men who want to fight. And we have met violence against gay people before and it was difficult.

courtney stein

But the day after Russia invaded when it became clear just how serious the situation was, both Sashko and Antonina signed up. They weren’t telling anyone they were together though.

oleksandr zhuhan

There was a situation when a man from our unit came up to us and asked, so are you brothers or friends? And since he only gave us like two options, I said friends very quickly. But then I was sorry and I kept thinking to myself, what would have happened if I had said we are husband and husband? What would have changed? I’m not sure.

courtney stein

In Ukraine, boys learned how to shoot guns in school. But Sashko never wanted any part of that sort of thing he’d never imagined fighting in a war, even up to the moment he enlisted alongside the partner he calls his husband, though they can’t be legally married.

oleksandr zhuhan

So I grew up in a small town in the Central Ukraine. When I was born, it was still the Soviet Union.

courtney stein

As a kid, Sashko spoke Russian in school. Then in 1991 when he was seven, Ukraine declared its independence. But it wasn’t a big patriotic moment in Sashko’s memory. What he remembers is the economic collapse that followed.

oleksandr zhuhan

People had to survive and they did different things, like some people stole, some people — I don’t the word for that. They did very bad things to survive and to get some food for their children.

courtney stein

Sashko and his parents lived in an apartment block with a shared courtyard.

oleksandr zhuhan

All the kids knew one another from the moment they were born. And I knew that there were some boys that my mom said, you mustn’t be friends with those boys because they smoke and their parents are not a very good family. Some of them smoked cigarettes beginning at the age of five I suppose.

courtney stein

What?

oleksandr zhuhan

Yeah. Yeah. That’s true.

courtney stein

Sashko wasn’t that kind of kid though. He was a rule follower.

oleksandr zhuhan

I was really very out of touch with the reality I think. I mean, I didn’t know much about sexuality, about homosexuality, or anything like this. I really like to draw, and I drew things like every day. I had albums. Do you do you say album or notebooks?

courtney stein

Notebooks.

oleksandr zhuhan

Filled with sketches. Yeah. And I had a secret notebook where I drew all like naked, people naked men. And I was about, I don’t know, 10 or 11 years old. And my mom found it and she said, oh my god, what was that? I was so ashamed. And she said that it was really a bad thing.

courtney stein

That was the message Sashko got from basically everyone growing up.

oleksandr zhuhan

Homosexuality was something that you should be ashamed of. And it was something that people in prison, you know, prisoners used to punish other prisoners. Does it make sense what I’m saying?

courtney stein

So it wasn’t like that people were actually gay. It was just a punishment.

oleksandr zhuhan

Yeah. Yeah. Or whenever you heard the word homosexuality, it was considered some of the world’s biggest threats, you know, like homosexuality atomic war.

courtney stein

And given that, when he left his hometown and went to Kyiv for college, he stayed in the closet. But in his second year, he fell in love with his roommate who was straight.

oleksandr zhuhan

One day I just decided that, oh my god, if he doesn’t love me then I have no more reason to live. I know now that it was very stupid, but I was 16. So I got all the drugs that I had, I mix them with alcohol and I drank them all. And at first, I fainted, but then my friends found me and they called the ambulance.

courtney stein

He ended up in the hospital. They called his mom to take him home.

oleksandr zhuhan

And of course, she started asking questions, and I had to tell her.

courtney stein

How did she respond?

oleksandr zhuhan

She said, it’s OK, I love you. Maybe one day you’ll meet a woman and you’ll have children and I’ll pray for you. Let’s pray together. And I said, oh my god, mom, don’t. Please, I — and that was like second coming out. I said, I don’t believe in God. I’m an atheist. Yeah. And then some years later, I’m a vegan. And you know, like it was a bingo, gay vegan atheist. No more hope for mom.

courtney stein

Which one was hardest for her, the atheist, the veganism, or the being gay?

oleksandr zhuhan

I don’t think that she accepted anything, any of these.

courtney stein

When he finished college, Sashko stayed in Kyiv. He met some other gay people, but he said it was still too early to call it a community. He started dating, but it didn’t always go well.

oleksandr zhuhan

One of them was a criminal, so that was that bad. Yeah. And so I embraced that some people find their partners in life and some people don’t. Some people die lonely. And it stopped scaring me because before that, I thought that it was one of my biggest priorities, you know, to find a partner, to make family, and so on.

courtney stein

Then in 2014, Sashko got a message on a dating site.

oleksandr zhuhan

And at that stage, I met Antonina. I looked through his profile and I found out that he was into theater and that he was a refugee from Crimea. And that looked interesting.

courtney stein

Antonina recently began identifying as non-binary and using she and her pronouns. But Sashko still goes back and forth.

oleksandr zhuhan

He or she, yeah, I’m still confusing these things. We arranged a meeting. It wasn’t a date. It was a meeting.

courtney stein

They connected at a big moment in Ukraine, the moment a lot of Ukrainians say was the actual beginning of this war. The Ukrainian president at the time, who Putin supported, had just fled to Russia after months of protests forced him from office. Within days, Russian troops moved in to occupy Crimea. And like a lot of L.G.B.T.Q. people there, Antonina fled and ended up in Kyiv.

oleksandr zhuhan

We met on the bridge which is non-existent now. And we spend the night like talking and drinking coffee, talking about children, about theater and all kinds of things. And it was like, I don’t know how many hours. And that’s how we met. I think that talking to him and spending evenings and nights talking about what’s right and what’s wrong made me the person I am today.

courtney stein

Not long after they met, Sashko says he and Antonina decided to stop speaking Russian. And they helped create a theater group that performed pieces calling out Russian aggression in Crimea and homophobia within Russian culture. Outside the theater, they were also calling on Ukraine to recognize L.G.B.T.Q. rights and taking part in some of the earliest Pride celebrations.

oleksandr zhuhan

I think it was 2015, the biggest slogan of this Pride was that we exist. And there were like less than 50 people and lots and lots and lots of the police.

courtney stein

Since then, Pride in Kyiv has grown. In recent years, the parade has attracted thousands of people, part of a broader liberalization, especially among young people in the cities. But with that liberalization, there’s also been a backlash. Sashko told me about a night last November when he and Antonina were approached by two men in the street.

oleksandr zhuhan

First they came up to us, and Antonina was wearing a tiny — what’s this thing called that’s not a stripe but ribbon? Oh, I forgot the word.

courtney stein

Rainbow?

oleksandr zhuhan

Rainbow. Yes, rainbow ribbon. Thanks. And I felt this danger right away the way they looked at us. And they were like about 50 meters away, and the street was empty. And one of them started following us. And they started talking to us in a very rude manner like, hey, are you fags? What are you wearing? Do you believe in God? Are you patriots? And they started pushing us and so on. And that was the first time when all I am like anti-violent person. If there is a chance for the words to work it out, I usually use the words.

courtney stein

But then, one of the guys pushed Antonina to the ground.

oleksandr zhuhan

And I was like off. I went bananas. And I was so mad that I felt I could tear those men with my bare hands because I was like, I don’t know where I got the strength. But it was like the first, maybe the second time in my life when I got to hit a person right in the face. And I felt so, I don’t know, empowered. That was the word. Like I hit back, and they didn’t expect it. Like, they thought that they were like no attacking to fags who couldn’t hit back.

courtney stein

The attack was still fresh in Sashko’s mind when Russian forces invaded Ukraine just a few months later. It was all part of what was weighing on him and Antonina that night they spent huddled in their bathroom considering their options.

oleksandr zhuhan

I definitely had doubts like, I was not afraid to go and fight, but I was really — I felt a great anxiety if I would fit in. And being gay was part of things that gave me that anxiety. But on the second day when Russia went full scale and when we understood that it was not a joke, it’s going to be for a long time, we couldn’t make any other choice really. What mattered was to protect our country.

courtney stein

So that’s how Sashko and Antonina came to enlist in this war, fighting to protect a country that hadn’t always protected them alongside soldiers who in peacetime might have been their enemies.

oleksandr zhuhan

I’m not considering the option of losing my freedom, because for an L.G.B.T.Q. person to lose freedom, to get captured by the Russians is worse than death, so I’ll be fighting until I win or I die. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney. It’s the eighth of March, Tuesday. So I’m going to go on describing what life has become for me since the war started.

courtney stein

Not long after he enlisted, Sashko sent me this voice memo. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN It’s been 13 days since Russia attacked Ukraine for no reason. I’m sick now, and almost everyone in our unit is either sick or getting better. And it’s because it’s always cold in here. We’re sleeping on the floor now in sleeping bags. But I’m not complaining, it’s just that you ask me to describe what it is like here. I go patrolling three times a day. On these patrols, Sashko and Antonina were often together but still keeping their relationship a secret. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN The commander is very loyal. Well, he doesn’t know or he doesn’t want to know that we are a gay couple. We don’t touch or we don’t hold hands, we don’t hug each other. And the riskiest thing that my husband has done since the first day he kissed me on the forehead when I said that I probably had temperature. And he pressed his lips against my forehead like just to check if I had temperature. But it was a kiss, I knew it. He’s the one person who can — I don’t know, who can calm me down and ask if I’m OK. Hello, Sashko? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Courtney, can you hear me now? I can hear you. Can you hear me? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Oh, that’s perfect. Yeah. As winter turned into spring, Russia continued to focus a lot of its air power on Kyiv. At this point, the volunteer forces were largely playing a support role away from the fighting. So Sashko and Antonina weren’t seeing active combat, but the war was all around them. How are you? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Well, it’s been tough time. Tonight, there were like three regions where the bombs fell, and one of them was right next to us, next to our base. But it’s OK. We’re alive and more or less healthy. In 15 minutes, I’ll have to go to unpack the big cars with provisions and ammunition. So that’s our job. That’s the riskiest thing I’ve done so far. We’re just defending the base. And how are you feeling about that being your role right now? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN I’m OK. Well, on the first day when we came here, lots of guys, they were like, wow, I want to go and fight and so on. And I was like, I’m pretty much OK with the things as they are now. And the terrible thing is that we are getting used to this state of things. And I don’t want this to be my usual state. The day before yesterday, we went to the place where we learn to shoot guns. We have Kalashnikovs, and I was thinking about my old sewing machine because I work in the theater so I can saw costumes for a theater place. And I was thinking about, well, I used to hate to oil my sewing machine, but I would love to do it now instead of oiling my gun. So it was like, you know, those flashbacks about what life used to be. Hi, Courtney. It’s been a month and two days since the beginning of the war, and I have been thinking a lot about it one hell of a time, which happened not so often because we are either too busy or too exhausted to think. There are things that depress me, but there are good things though. For example, some people from our unit, they added us as friends on Facebook. And one of them came up to me the other day and he said, I read your post on Facebook. And he said, I didn’t put a like below this post, but I really want to say that I think it’s a great post and I liked it. In the post, Sashko talked about the similarities between the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and Ukrainian independence. He said that where Russia was driven by fear and hate, he hoped Ukraine would follow a different path after the war, a path of tolerance and acceptance. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN So it was a good thing, and that really made my day. For the next few weeks, Sashko’s unit stayed in the same warehouse in Kyiv, protecting ammunition and resupplies for the regular army troops that were pushing the Russians back in other parts of the city. Then in April, Ukrainian forces retook the suburbs, places like Bucha, where hundreds of civilians were tortured and killed. Sashko messaged that he and Antonina had been moved and were now doing a different job but still mainly on guard duty. A few days later, we got on the phone. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney.

antonina ramanova

Hello, Courtney.

courtney stein

And I got to hear Antonina for the first time. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah, Courtney, the thing is, Antonina speaks very little English.

antonina ramanova

My English is not very good.

courtney stein

So Antonina just listened while Sashko and I talked. Sashko said that now he assumed people in their unit understood that he and Antonina were a couple, but they still weren’t publicly acknowledging their relationship. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN But sometimes we like, I don’t know, touch fingers or — well, that’s mostly it. We touch fingers. That’s it. I saw on your Facebook pages that you have decorated your guns with stickers. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah. It feels like a small act of resistance. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah. And our guns really stand out from the other guns. Can you describe them? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yes. So like there’s a rainbow and a unicorn and a pineapple. Do other people decorate their guns or is it just you guys? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN No, not really. We are the only ones with the stickers. Now, I saw one more person with a sticker, but it was like a sticker of a skull. And we have those optimistic, cute stickers. And has your commander, anyone ever mentioned it like as a security concern or question you about it? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah, yeah, yeah. One person came up to me like two days ago and said, that sticker has lots of white and it’s going to be a problem if we fight in the darkness like it could be seen from afar. And I said, OK, so when we fight in the darkness, I’ll take it off. At the end of April, Putin declared victory in Mariupol, and Russian troops continued to push into Eastern and Southern Ukraine where hundreds of Ukrainian troops were dying every day. Sashko sent me a text message. Their unit had been given a choice, they could pack up and go volunteer in Kyiv as civilians or they could help bolster the military’s ranks and join another battalion and be sent to the front lines in the south. This time, the decision wasn’t so clear. Sashko thought that he could be more useful as a volunteer. But for Antonina, returning to Kyiv was out of the question. Sashko wrote me that Antonina was intent on going with or without him. So he decided he was going too. But they weren’t sent right away. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN We’re waiting here for the transfer. Weeks passed. Then at the end of May, Sashko got back in touch. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hi, Courtney. Sorry for not responding to you right away. Things had been busy, he said. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And on Wednesday, that’s tomorrow, we are going to Mykolaiv. Mykolaiv is a city in the south of Ukraine. It’s close to Odessa. Mykolaiv, Sashko explained, was part of the New frontline in the war. Like in Mariupol to the east, the Russians had managed to cut off water to Mykolaiv, forcing many of the city’s half a million residents to flee. Before leaving for the south, Sashko and Antonina were sent home to Kyiv for a few days. Their apartment hadn’t been damaged in the shelling. And for the first time in the three months since they signed up for the territorial defense, they were able to sleep in their own bed. And with the Russians no longer anywhere near the city, cafes and shops were open again. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN We were walking around the city, and I felt like I was walking next to a fish tank looking at people who are having their lattes. And the war seemed very real, but this life in Kyiv, the peaceful life seemed like something impossible. And I could physically feel it. I felt weak at my knees, and I had a strange feeling in my stomach and everything seemed so unstable. And I just can’t pull myself together. Everything feels like a very bad, meaningless movie without the end. And the worst thing, the thing that I’m afraid most is that the war is going to be for like two, three, five, eight years more. Sashko and Antonina met up with a friend from the theater world while in Kyiv. But Sashko could only think about war. He no longer related to his past life, and he was distracted by his upcoming deployment. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And the thing that I’m worried about is that in the new battalion, maybe there will be like real army people with strong hierarchy. I have an idea that in Mykolaiv in that new battalion, I’m going to be more open about my sexuality. Like I’m not going to wait if anyone asks or I’m not going to let them be guessing. A few days later, I heard from Sashko again. They had made it to Mykolaiv. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hey there, Courtney. Hope you’re hearing me OK. They’d begun digging trenches in anticipation of a new Russian offensive. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN And today when we met our commander, and he was like getting acquainted, speaking to us, giving his speech, he said, I’ve had gay guys in my unit before and it was no problem with them. So if I see or hear any cases of homophobia, this unit is not a place for homophobia. Is that clear? And we are not going to talk about that again. He said, I don’t care who you are or what you do until you break the rules. So if you’re a good fighter, then I’m OK with you. Russian troops were sending a near-constant stream of bombs and missiles toward Mykolaiv. Huge swathes of the city had been burned to the ground or completely destroyed. But on one quiet evening, I was able to talk to Sashko by phone. And I asked him to tell me more about what happened with his commander. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN He said, I know that there are guys in our unit who are gay. Like, he just looked at me and I raised my hand like, here I am, hello. He made the things clear, you see. And how did the other people in the unit respond? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN They were like, OK. Yeah. They didn’t say much. I mean, the way they talk, they are not like some narrow-minded, homophobic savages. What I expected because I expected the worst. Army is still a world of manly men, but we are not — I mean, I don’t feel threatened physically and I feel much more confident now. I really feel like here I just have to be like a good soldier. And that’s like some guarantee that at least the commanders will protect me if anything happens. But I’m sure that nothing bad will happen. A few weeks later, I got this message from Sashko. OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Hey, Courtney. Sorry for taking so long to respond to your message. Here’s just another piece of information, which I think is important to see a bigger picture of what’s happening here in Ukraine. So yesterday I think, that was yesterday, L.G.B.T.Q. person was beaten. And that happened when the guy was going to give an interview about his boyfriend who had died in this Russian-Ukrainian war. And at that time, a group of young men came up to him and they attacked him. And they started shouting homophobic things and they beat him. I don’t know what to add. Over many months of conversation, Sashko and I had talked a lot about his hopes for the future and for the future of Ukraine. So many of them revolved around his uncertainty of what version of the country would greet him and Antonina if and when the war finally ended. But one time, I’d gotten a different answer. Do you think about the future? OLEKSANDR ZHUHAN Yeah, I sometimes stop and think about the future. And I’m trying not to make some great plans like, oh, I’m going to write a play about this war or I’m going to, I don’t know, to write a song. Just very, very small things, down to earth things. Like my mom, she lives in the Central Ukraine. And they bought a house in the village. And they went there yesterday for the first time. And she sent me a video and she said, we’re waiting for you and Antonina to come and live there and repair it because the house is very old. And there’s a garden with fruit trees. And I was, oh my God, yeah. I’d really love to do that, mom.

lulu garcia-navarro"
2022/07/19,Your Wednesday Briefing,"The ayatollah met with Putin in Iran during a rare international trip by the Russian leader, a meeting that Tehran viewed as an honor. There, Khamenei repeated Putin’s argument that the U.S. and Europe had left the Kremlin no choice.

“In the case of Ukraine, if you had not taken the helm, the other side would have done so and initiated a war,” Khamenei told Putin, according to his office, though he expressed distaste for war. Here areupdates.

Analysis: Khamenei’s public proclamation on war appeared to go beyond the much more cautious support offered by another ally, China. It also signaled that the long-tense relationship between Moscow and Tehran was strengthening into a true partnership, cemented partly by the Western sanctions both countries face.

Region: In Iran, the leaders also met with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, who has become a middleman in negotiations. They discussed Syria, where Turkey has been threatening a new military incursion. Khamenei appeared to discourage Turkey’s plans.

Fighting: Long-range artillery from the U.S. is helping Ukraine on the battlefield. But Russia continues to advance in the east. And Kharkiv residents fear that a new offensive is imminent."
2022/05/10,"Russia Was Behind Cyberattack in Run-Up to Ukraine War, Investigation Finds","WASHINGTON — A cyberattack that took down satellite communications in Ukraine in the hours before the Feb. 24 invasion was the work of the Russian government, the United States and European nations declared on Tuesday, officially fixing the blame for an attack that rattled Pentagon officials and private industry because it revealed new vulnerabilities in global communications systems.

In a coordinated set of statements, the governments blamed Moscow but did not explicitly name the organization that conducted the sophisticated effort to black out Ukrainian communications. But American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about the specifics of the findings, said that it was the Russian military intelligence agency, the G.R.U. — the same group responsible for the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee and a range of attacks on the U.S. and Ukraine.

“This unacceptable cyberattack is yet another example of Russia’s continued pattern of irresponsible behavior in cyberspace, which also formed an integral part of its illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine,” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, said in a statement. “Cyberattacks targeting Ukraine, including against critical infrastructure, could spill over into other countries and cause systemic effects putting the security of Europe’s citizens at risk.”"
2022/07/04,"In Putin’s Russia, the Arrests Are Spreading Quickly and Widely","Now, he said in a phone interview, the family has to return Mr. Kolker’s body from Moscow at their own cost.

It was unclear why the F.S.B. targeted Dmitri Kolker, 54, a specialist in quantum optics. State media reported that he had been jailed on suspicion of passing secrets abroad. But critics of the Kremlin say it is part of a widening campaign by the F.S.B. to crack down on freedom of thought in the academic world. Another Novosibirsk physicist who was also arrested on suspicion of treason last week, Anatoly Maslov, remains in custody.

The arrests came at the same time as the arrest on fraud charges of Mr. Mau, a leading Russian economist who is the head of a sprawling state university, the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

Mr. Mau, 62, was in no way a public critic of the Kremlin. He had joined more than 300 senior academic officials in signing a March open letter calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “necessary decision,” and he was re-elected to the board of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, just last week. But he also had a reputation as what scholars of Russian politics call a “systemic liberal,” someone who was working within Mr. Putin’s system to try to nudge it in a more open and pro-Western direction.

His Kremlin ties were not enough, it turned out, to save Mr. Mau from a fraud case that has already ensnared the rector of another leading university and that critics said appeared designed to snuff out remaining pockets of dissent in Russian academia.

“A big enemy of the government and the stability of the government are people who carry knowledge,” said Mr. Gozman, who worked with Mr. Mau as a government adviser in the 1990s. “Truth is an enemy here.”"
2022/07/19,France Will Spend Nearly $10 Billion to Renationalize Electricity Company,"France plans to pay 9.7 billion euros, about $9.8 billion, to fully renationalize EDF, the state-backed electricity giant, in a move that the government said would allow it to bolster the country’s energy independence, overhaul its nuclear power program and invest in renewables.

The French Finance Ministry said on Tuesday that it would offer EDF shareholders €12 per share for the roughly 14 percent of the company’s stock that the government didn’t already own. That price is more than 50 percent higher than what shares were trading at just over two weeks ago when Élisabeth Borne, the prime minister, announced the renationalization plan.

EDF’s shares, which had been suspended pending details of the offer, rose 15 percent when they reopened for trading in Paris on Tuesday. The Finance Ministry said it planned to file the offer with the market regulator by early September."
2022/07/09,Blinken Presses China’s Top Diplomat on Ukraine but Stresses Cooperation,"“Many people thus believe that the United States suffers from a growing ‘China phobia,’” Mr. Wang said, echoing the Kremlin’s frequent complaints about “Russophobia.” “If this ‘expanding threat’ concept is allowed to keep growing, the United States’ China policy will soon become an inescapable dead end.”

The tête-à-tête followed the gathering of foreign ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations that ended without a traditional communiqué, reflecting the apparent impossibility of reaching a consensus amid the war in Ukraine. At two points in the sessions, when Russia came under sharp criticism for its attack on its neighbor, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, left abruptly, according to officials, and then departed the gathering before its conclusion.

However, Mr. Lavrov sat down with several ministers from nations that have declined to join the Western-led coalition against his country, including China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Argentina and Indonesia, putting into sharp relief the Biden administration’s challenge to isolate the country and highlighting Russia’s continued success at conducting business with the outside world and funding its relentless war machine."
2022/07/18,Your Tuesday Briefing,"Britain sizzles under a heat wave

Temperatures in Britain neared a record high yesterday as blistering heat swept the country. By midafternoon, Wales had recorded its highest-ever temperature: The thermometer hit 37.1 degrees Celsius, almost 99 degrees Fahrenheit.

Infrastructure is under strain. Some train services were canceled, while others were running at reduced speeds in case the tracks buckled. Flights at Britain’s largest air base were halted over fears that the tar could melt. And the chains of a Victorian-era bridge were wrapped in foil to keep cracks from expanding and threatening the bridge’s stability.

Global warming has exacerbated Europe’s heat waves, which scientists say are increasing in frequency and intensity at a faster rate than in almost any other part of the planet. So have changes in the jet stream, scientists say."
2022/07/18,Rooting Out Spies,"Starting in September, students across the country will be required to sit through lectures celebrating Russia’s “rebirth” under President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, my colleague Anton Troianovski writes.

The government has issued directives to schools to teach a series of pro-war propaganda classes, according to activists and Russian news reports. But a proposed decree from the education ministry would go further, enshrining Putin’s two decades in power as a historical turning point in the standard curriculum.

History classes will be required to include several new topics, including “the rebirth of Russia as a great power in the 21st century,” “reunification with Crimea,” and “the special military operation in Ukraine.”

“We need to know how to infect them with our ideology,” Sergei Novikov, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, told thousands of schoolteachers in an online workshop recently. “Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.”

As government employees, teachers in Russia generally have little choice but to comply with such demands. But there has been some grass-roots resistance. A teachers’ union has provided legal guidance to dozens of teachers who have refused to teach propaganda classes this spring, with some principals simply canceling them.

“You just need to find the moral strength not to facilitate evil,” said Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and has resisted promoting government propaganda. “If you can’t protest against it, at least don’t help it.”"
2022/07/09,Fears of Another Gas Shock Drive Biden to Seek Price Cap on Russian Oil,"The Biden administration’s proposal would not affect the European ban, but it would ease some of the other restrictions — but only if the transported Russian oil is sold for no more than a price set by the United States and its allies. That would allow Moscow to continue moving oil to the rest of the world. The oil now flowing to France or Germany would go elsewhere — Central America, Africa or even China and India — and Russia would have to sell it at a discount.

Some economists and oil industry experts are skeptical that the plan will work, either as a way to reduce revenues for the Kremlin or to push down prices at the pump. They warn the plan could mostly enrich oil refiners and could be ripe for evasion by Russia and its allies. Moscow could refuse to sell at the capped price.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen plans to push for more support for the cap when she meets with fellow finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations — including Russia’s — in Asia in the next week. The American delegation will have no contact with the Russians, a Treasury official said.

But even some skeptics say that the price cap could, if nothing else, keep enough Russian oil pumping to avoid a recession-triggering price spike.

Administration officials say privately that there are signs in oil markets that even in its infant stages, the cap proposal is already helping to reassure traders that the world could avoid abruptly losing millions barrels of Russian oil per day at the year’s end.

Other administration officials have pressed the case for the cap in trans-Atlantic video calls and in-person meetings across European capitals like Brussels and London. They are stressing recession risks in talks with other countries, private insurers and a host of other officials over how to structure and carry out the price-cap plan, which leaders of the Group of 7 nations endorsed in principle this past week at a meeting in the German Alps."
2022/07/18,‘Please do all you can to bring us home’: Brittney Griner is not the only American who’s been ‘wrongfully detained.’,"Brittney Griner. Austin Tice. The Citgo 6. And now, potentially, three American military veterans who were captured by enemy forces after traveling to Ukraine to fight Russia.

They are among nearly 50 Americans who the State Department believes are wrongfully detained by foreign governments. At least a dozen more Americans are being held as hostages — including by extremist groups — or on criminal charges that their families dispute.

American citizens are increasingly attractive targets for U.S. adversaries — including China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela — looking to use them as political pawns in battles with the United States."
2022/07/18,Putin Thinks He’s Winning,"The smallest, most pragmatic and achievable goal concerns Russia’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine. Having failed to advance much further into Ukrainian territory since the first few days of war, Russia promptly downsized its ambitions, relinquishing the idea of taking Kyiv. The current, more realistic goal appears to be control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — which the Kremlin sees itself attaining in a matter of time, a view seemingly vindicated by Russian forces’ effective capture of the Luhansk region — and the land corridor that would secure access to Crimea.

For this goal, of minimal geopolitical weight for the Kremlin, Mr. Putin appears to believe that time is on his side. You can see why. Western military support has shown its limits, while Washington has signaled that it is not prepared to risk invoking Mr. Putin’s wrath by crossing any red lines. His earlier threats to resort to nuclear weapons seem to have been heeded: The West will not directly intervene, nor will it assist Ukraine to a point that could lead to Russian military defeat. Today, for all the protestations to the contrary, the conventional wisdom in the West is that Ukraine will not be able to win back the areas occupied by Russian troops. The Kremlin appears to believe that sooner or later the West will abandon that idea completely. Ukraine’s east would then effectively be under Russian control.

The next goal appears to be focused on forcing Kyiv to capitulate. This isn’t about the occupied territories; it’s about the future of Ukraine’s remaining territory — something that has far more geopolitical importance. On a practical level, capitulation would mean Kyiv accepting Russian demands that could be summarized as the “de-Ukrainianization” and “Russification” of the country. That would entail criminalizing the support of national heroes, renaming streets, rewriting history books and guaranteeing the Russian-speaking population a dominant position in education and culture. The aim, in short, would be to deprive Ukraine of the right to build its own nation. The government would be replaced, the elites purged and cooperation with the West voided.

This second goal sounds fantastical, of course. But for Mr. Putin it is also seemingly inevitable, though it may take longer to achieve. In one to two years, by which point the Kremlin expects Ukraine to be exhausted by the war, unable to function normally and profoundly demoralized, the conditions for capitulation will ripen. At that stage, the Kremlin’s calculation appears to be, the elite will split and an opposition seeking to end the war will coalesce to oust the Zelensky administration. There’d be no need for Russia to capture Kyiv militarily; it would fall of its own accord. Mr. Putin apparently sees nothing that could prevent it."
2022/07/18,"Reunited in Bucha, a Ukrainian Family Comes to Terms With War’s Traumas","BUCHA, Ukraine — For the first time since the war began, the Stanislavchuk family was together again.

Yehor was leading his parents, Natasha and Sasha, his sister, Tasya, and his grandmother, Lyudmila, on a tour of Bucha, the quaint suburb of Kyiv that has become synonymous with Russian savagery.

Here was the school where Yehor had hid for two weeks as Russian troops bombed and murdered their way through the town. There, at the entrance to the school basement, was where a Russian soldier had shot a woman in the head just because he could. And over there, on top of the yellow crane, was where the sniper sat, picking off civilians as they scrounged for food and water."
2022/07/18,Your Monday Briefing,"Extreme heat in Europe

A life-threatening heat wave is continuing its march across Western Europe this week.

Spain and Italy baked over the weekend, and wildfires raged in France, prompting the evacuation of more than 14,000 people near Bordeaux since early last week, the local authorities said. France’s national weather forecaster predicted temperatures of at least 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on the country’s Atlantic coast through tomorrow.

Now, the blistering weather is moving to Britain. Today and tomorrow, temperatures could soar to 41 degrees Celsius, which would shatter records. Air-conditioning is rare in the country, where buildings are constructed to retain heat (because cold temperatures have, in the past, been a bigger concern).

Here’s a guide to staying safe and cool during a heat wave.

Climate change: Heat waves in Europe have increased in frequency and intensity over the past four decades."
2022/07/07,A Pop Star Tried to Reconcile Russia and Ukraine. War Ruined That.,"Instead of performing and promoting “Dorndom” — which Dorn still hopes to release one day; its name is a combination of his own and the Russian word for house — the musician is now playing older hits across Europe and the United States to raise money to help Ukrainians in peril.

“I am trying to understand the extent to which this album would work today,” Dorn said.

For Ukrainian artists like Dorn, whose country’s culture as well as its politics has long been intertwined with Russia’s, such concerns have become familiar: Is it right to perform in a country whose leader claims your nation as part of his own? Should artists switch to writing and singing in Ukrainian, which could mean potentially losing access to a much larger audience, and market, in Russia?

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, many Ukrainian artists, including Okean Elzy, the country’s most popular rock band, and Monatik, a widely celebrated pop singer, stopped performing in Russia.

Dorn — who was born in Russia, but grew up in Ukraine — took a different approach: He continued touring in Russia in an effort to build “a cultural bridge” between the neighboring countries, he said."
2022/07/18,"‘It’s tense’: Under constant fire, Ukrainian soldiers dismiss any suggestion that they cede land.","Outnumbered and outgunned, the Ukrainians say the success or failure of their fight will depend on whether they receive more and better arms. But they say they are determined to try to hold every inch of what is still theirs in Donetsk Province, despite heavy losses, and dismissed the suggestion that they cede territory or give up the fight as ludicrous. They have the conviction of their cause, they said, while the Russians lack purpose.

“There is no choice,” Serhii, 44, a career soldier with one unit, said. “We are protecting our country.”

Dug in in the woods and villages, Ukrainian troops fought off a Russian attack in early July, knocking out a group of tanks in a battle in the farming village of Verkhnokamianske, according to several accounts. The blow stalled the Russian advance and brought a lull in places on the front lines, soldiers said. Military doctors said they saw a drop in casualties arriving from the front for several days last week after the battle."
2022/07/17,"On Donetsk’s Front Line, Small Gains and Losses Impose a Heavy Toll","DONETSK PROVINCE, Ukraine — Red flames crackled in the golden wheat field, the target of Russian artillery just minutes earlier. Nearby, the commander of a Ukrainian frontline unit was finishing his lunch of pasta from a tin bowl. As more incoming shells exploded in the fields, his men took cover in their bunkers.

Life on the front lines in the eastern Donetsk region has seen little letup in recent weeks. Ukrainian soldiers serving there say they live under almost constant Russian artillery and aerial bombardment. The fields and hedgerows around them are charred and smoldering. Their days and nights are interspersed with the sharp bangs of outgoing Ukrainian artillery and the deeper, rumbling bursts of incoming fire.

“It’s tense,” said the commander, Samson, 55, who, like most members of the Ukrainian military, asked to be identified by only his code name in accord with military protocol. “There is daily mortar fire, airplanes, helicopters, ‘Grads.’ They have a lot of ammunition.” Grad, meaning hail, is the Russian acronym for a commonly used multiple rocket launcher system."
2022/07/18,"Zelensky fires his prosecutor general and intelligence chief, the top two law enforcement officials.","President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine fired his country’s prosecutor general and the leader of its domestic intelligence agency on Sunday, the most significant shake-up in his government since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February.

The dismissals of the prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, and Ivan Bakanov, the leader of the Security Service of Ukraine — and a childhood friend of the president — were announced in brief decrees. In a televised speech later Sunday night, Mr. Zelensky said he was responding to a large number of treason investigations opened into employees of law enforcement agencies, including the prosecutor general’s office and the domestic security agency.

On Monday, Mr. Zelensky promoted Mr. Bakanov’s deputy, Vasyl Malyuk, as the acting head of the security service."
2022/07/04,"Russia Advances Behind Brutal Barrage, but Will Its Strategy Keep Working?","Russia’s capture of the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, a significant victory for Moscow’s campaign to conquer eastern Ukraine, demonstrates the success of the Russian military’s grinding strategy based on superior firepower and incremental advances.

It also raises serious questions about how long either side can keep going like this, particularly the battered and vastly outgunned Ukrainian forces, forced to rely on raw recruits and suffering heavy casualties, along with the mental strain of combat, retreat and constant Russian shelling.

Russia’s invasion has taken a brutal toll on its own forces as well, but they continue their slow advance, and with the seizure of Lysychansk this weekend, they have taken control of the entirety of Luhansk Province, putting them in position to push on toward Ukrainian-held cities in Donetsk Province."
2022/07/17,A Young Woman’s Wartime Task: Persuading People to Leave Their Homes,"The first person Yana Muravinets tried to persuade to leave her home near Ukraine’s front lines was a young woman who was five months pregnant.

She did not want to abandon her cows, her calf or her dog. She told Ms. Muravinets that she put energy and money into building her house near the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, and she was afraid of losing it.

“I said: ‘None of this will be necessary when you’re lying here dead,’” Ms. Muravinets said.

Since the early days of the war Ms. Muravinets, a 27-year-old photographer and videographer from the region, has taken up a new volunteer job with the Red Cross: encouraging people to evacuate. In phone calls, doorstep conversations, public speeches in village squares, sometimes even under fire, she has tried to convince Ukrainians that leaving everything behind is the only sure way to survive."
2022/07/17,Griner Case Draws Attention to ‘Wrongful Detentions’,"The office has grown to about 25 negotiators and other officials in recent years, up from five, as more Americans are detained by foreign governments. Each case is assigned an expert on the country where the person is being held.

The process is extremely difficult, said the senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named to describe some functions of the office.

All of the foreign governments that are detaining Americans have, at best, rocky relations with the United States. In some cases, like Iran, messages are sent through other governments that serve as intermediaries; in others, U.S. officials work through levels of the foreign government’s bureaucracy to get to someone senior enough to influence a decision.

The communications are intended to reinforce the consequences of continuing to hold Americans captive, the official said.

He said foreign governments often felt as if they were the aggrieved party and usually began with demands that he called unreasonable.

The State Department does not provide legal assistance to the detained Americans or their families.

Does the United States pay ransom or swap prisoners?

A 2015 directive by President Barack Obama prohibits promising “ransom, prisoner releases, policy changes or other acts of concession” to bring detained Americans home. The policy takes away key incentives for hostage takers to detain Americans in the first place and prevents the exchange of U.S. revenue or other resources that could be used for other nefarious activities, the document notes."
2022/07/16,Moscow Signals a Shift to a More Aggressive Phase of Ukraine War,"The major strike came on Thursday, when a Russian submarine fired cruise missiles into the heart of Vinnytsia, a city of 370,000 people about 125 miles southwest of Kyiv, the capital.

Ukrainian officials said that strike killed at least 23 people, including a 4-year-old girl with Down syndrome, causing outrage in Ukraine and the West.

The Russian defense ministry said the strike on Vinnytsia was directed at a building where top officials from Ukraine’s armed forces were meeting foreign arms suppliers. Ukrainian officials have denied that the building contained military targets.

The war is causing significant economic stress in the rest of the world, reducing global growth both this year and next, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told a hybrid meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers and heads of central banks.

“The war in Ukraine has intensified, exerting added pressures on commodity and food prices,” she said in a statement on Saturday. “Global financial conditions are tightening more than previously anticipated. And continuing pandemic-related disruptions and renewed bottlenecks in global supply chains are weighing on economic activity.”

Adding to the stress in Germany, which has been dependent on Russian energy, was a new statement by the Russian gas monopoly, Gazprom, urging the German company Siemens to return a turbine it has repaired in Canada to ensure the Nord Stream 1 pipeline delivering gas to Europe can resume working after a 10-day maintenance period that began on Monday."
2022/07/16,Italy’s Crisis Redoubles European Foreboding,"For many Europeans, the euro’s slide to parity is an apt symbol of the ways in which the war in Ukraine poses economic problems to Europe that are far more extreme than for the United States. President Biden’s determination to bolster Ukraine militarily, rather than seek some diplomatic outcome, may come to be resented as winter takes hold.

Already Mr. Putin’s gas squeeze has led the German government to warn of an imminent recession. Companies and households are preparing for a winter of gas rationing, while homeowners, schools and cities have begun to lower thermostats, cut back on air conditioning and dim streetlights. There are mutterings about American readiness to fight the war at Germany’s eastern flank down to the last Ukrainian.

Italy is looking to speed up energy independence from Russia, in part by pivoting to Algeria for new gas supplies, while ramping up renewable energy sources and burning more coal to keep homes lighted and businesses running.

France, less vulnerable because of its large nuclear power industry, is pushing an “energy restraint plan” that Mr. Macron called necessary in a television interview this week. “This war is going to last, but France will always be in a position to help Ukraine,” the French president said.

That was some distance from his declaration to the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv last month that “Europe is at your side and will remain so for as long as it takes to achieve victory.”"
2022/07/07,Brittney Griner’s Supporters Hold Steady After Guilty Plea,"W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert released a statement Thursday afternoon.

“Brittney Griner remains wrongfully detained in Russia, and nothing that happened today changes that 140 days later,” Engelbert said. She added: “She has the wholehearted and unconditional support of the entire W.N.B.A. and N.B.A. family, who eagerly await her safe return.”

The U.S. State Department first announced that Griner had been classified as “wrongfully detained” in May and said it would look to negotiate her release regardless of the result of her trial.

On Thursday, a Russian diplomat suggested to reporters in Moscow that the public clamor about Griner’s release — which he attributed to the Biden administration — was detrimental to getting a deal done.

Griner’s supporters, though, have long believed that calling public attention to her situation was necessary to get the attention of the Biden administration. After the State Department classified Griner as wrongfully detained, her closest supporters began to feel comfortable drawing attention to her detention. Many fans have been vocal since February."
2022/07/16,"Putin Aims to Shape a New Generation of Supporters, Through Schools","Starting in first grade, students across Russia will soon sit through weekly classes featuring war movies and virtual tours through Crimea. They will be given a steady dose of lectures on topics like “the geopolitical situation” and “traditional values.” In addition to a regular flag-raising ceremony, they will be introduced to lessons celebrating Russia’s “rebirth” under President Vladimir V. Putin.

And, according to legislation signed into law by Mr. Putin on Thursday, all Russian children will be encouraged to join a new patriotic youth movement in the likeness of the Soviet Union’s red-cravatted “Pioneers” — presided over by the president himself.

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government’s attempts at imparting a state ideology to schoolchildren have proven unsuccessful, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently told thousands of Russian schoolteachers in an online workshop. But now, amid the war in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has made it clear that this needed to change, he said."
2022/07/16,The World Economy Is Imperiled by a Force Hiding in Plain Sight,"On Friday, China reported that its economy, the world’s second-largest, expanded by a mere 0.4 percent from April through June compared with the same period last year. That performance — astonishingly anemic by the standards of recent decades — endangered prospects for scores of countries that trade heavily with China, including the United States. It reinforced the realization that the global economy has lost a vital engine.

The specter of slowing economic growth combined with rising prices has even revived a dreaded word that was a regular part of the vernacular in the 1970s, the last time the world suffered similar problems: stagflation.

Most of the challenges tearing at the global economy were set in motion by the world’s reaction to the spread of Covid-19 and its attendant economic shock, even as they have been worsened by the latest upheaval — Russia’s disastrous attack on Ukraine, which has diminished the supply of food, fertilizer and energy.

“The pandemic itself disrupted not only the production and transportation of goods, which was the original front of inflation, but also how and where we work, how and where we educate our children, global migration patterns,” said Julia Coronado, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, speaking this past week during a discussion convened by the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Pretty much everything in our lives has been disrupted by the pandemic, and then we layer on to that a war in Ukraine.”"
2022/07/03,Your Monday Briefing: Russia Seizes Lysychansk,"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."
2022/07/15,The War on Ukrainian Culture,"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."
2022/07/15,"In a Flash of Fire and Shrapnel, a Smiling 4-Year-Old’s Life Is Snuffed Out","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.”"
2022/07/15,Energy Was the Only Bright Spot in the Stock Market’s Gloom,"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.”"
2022/07/15,The many parties involved complicate war crimes investigations.,"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.”"
2022/07/03,An American’s Murky Path From Russian Propagandist to Jan. 6,"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.”"
2022/07/15,Gaps in Arms Supplies to Ukraine Point to Countries’ Divergent Strategies,"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."