Russian retreat leaves trail of slain civilians in town near Kyiv
Simon Gardner, Zohra Bensemra and Abdelaziz Boumzar – April 2, 2022
Soldiers walk to see destroyed Russian military vehicles, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in Bucha, in Kyiv regionA serviceman uses his mobile phone to film a destroyed Russian tank and armoured vehicles, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in Bucha, in Kyiv regionUkrainian soldiers are pictured on their military vehicle, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in Bucha, in Kyiv regionUkrainian soldiers are pictured on their tanks as they drive along the street, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine, in Bucha, in Kyiv region
BUCHA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Dead civilians still lay scattered over the streets of the Ukrainian country town of Bucha on Saturday, three days after the invading Russian army pulled back from its abortive advance on Kyiv to the southeast.
The smell of explosives still hung in the cold, dank air, mingling with the stench of death.
Sixty-six-year-old Vasily, who gave no surname, looked at the sprawled remains of more than a dozen civilians dotted along the road outside his house, his face disfigured with grief.
Residents said they had been killed by the Russian troops during their month-long occupation.
To Vasily’s left, one man lay against a grass verge next to his bicycle, his face sallow and eyes sunken. Another lay in the middle of the road, a few metres from his front door. Vasily said it was his son’s godfather, a lifelong friend.
Bucha’s still-unburied dead wore no uniforms. They were civilians with bikes, their stiff hands still gripping bags of shopping. Some had clearly been dead for many days, if not weeks.
For the most part, they were whole, and it was unclear whether they had been killed by shrapnel, a blast or a bullet – but one had the top of his head missing.
“The bastards!” Vasily said, weeping with rage in a thick coat and woollen hat. “I’m sorry. The tank behind me was shooting. Dogs!”
“We were sitting in the cellar for two weeks. There was food but no light, no heating to warm up. “We put the water on candles to warm it … We slept in felt boots.”
OPEN GRAVE
Local officials gave Reuters reporters access to the area, and a policeman led the way through streets now patrolled by Ukrainian tanks to the road where the bodies lay.
It was not clear why they had not yet been buried.
Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said more than 300 residents of the town had been killed, and a mass grave at one church ground was still open, with hands and feet poking through the red clay heaped on top.
Several streets were strewn with the mangled wrecks of burned-out Russian tanks and armoured vehicles. Unexploded rockets lay on the road and, in one spot, an unexploded mortar shell poked out of the tarmac.
A column of Ukrainian tanks patrolled, flying blue and yellow national flags. One resident who had survived the ordeal hugged a soldier, and gave the military battle-cry: “Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes!”
Mariya Zhelezova, 74, worked as a cleaner at an airplane factory whose poor health stopped her leaving before the Russians came.
Walking with her 50-year-old daughter Iryna, she tearfully recalled brushes with death.
“The first time, I went out of the room and a bullet broke the glass, the window, and got stuck in the dresser,” she said. “The second time, shattered glass almost got into my leg.
“The third time, I was walking and didn’t know he was standing with a rifle and the bullets went right past me. When I got home, I couldn’t speak.”
She removed a white cloth armband that she said residents had been ordered to wear.
“We don’t want them to come back,” she said. “I had a dream today – that they left, and didn’t come back.”
The Kremlin and the Russian defence ministry in Moscow did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
(Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
‘A year-after-year disaster:’ The American West could face a ‘brutal’ century under climate change
Elizabeth Weise – April 2, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO – The West, once a beacon for all that was new and hopeful in America, could become an example of the grim, apocalyptic future the nation faces from climate change.
The last five years already have been harrowing.
Whole neighborhoods burned down to foundations. Children kept indoors because the air outside is too dangerous to play in. Killer mudslides of burned debris destroying towns. Blood-red skies that are so dark at midday, the streetlights come on and postal workers wear headlamps to deliver the mail.
And it’s going to get worse unless dramatic action is taken, two studies published this week forecast.
The first predicts the growth of wildfires could cause dangerous air quality levelsto increase during fire season by more than 50% over the next 30 years in the Pacific Northwest and parts of northern California.
A second showshow expected increases in wildfires and intense rain events could result in more devastatingflash floods and mudslides across a broad portion of the West.
“These studies reinforce the likelihood of a brutal future for the West,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.
“Even climate scientists are scared,” he said. If climate change isn’t curbed, a “dystopian” landscape could be the result.
El Dorado County firefighters battle a fire close to a home off of U.S. Highway 89 in the Christmas Valley community near Meyers, Calif., on Monday, Aug. 30, 2021.
Each study, based on evermore-precise climate modeling, follows previous research showing the recentred skies, torched forests and neighborhoods, and catastrophic flooding and mudslides could bethe new normal unless carbon emissions are halted soon.
“These papers echo an overwhelming trend,” said Rebecca Miller, who studies the impact of fire on the West at the University of Southern California. “Fires and their impacts are getting more severe and are projected to just get worse, becoming a year-after-year disaster.”
What this means for the West, home to 79 million people, is in some ways a return to the past.
“When you moved to the West a century ago, it was an inhospitable place. There was an underlying danger,” said Bruce Cain, director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. “We’re returning to that.”
The dire consequences, however, may be an incentive for Americans to take meaningful climate action.
“It’s a kick in the pants to get stuff done,” Cain said.
Bad air days
Rising levels of dangerous particles in the air due to smoke from wildfires are a growing threat not just in the American West but across the country, the paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science showed.
In just the last five years, the West saw a series of historically large and destructive fires that burned millions of acres, destroyed thousands of homes and killed hundreds of people. The annual area burned by forest fires in the region has increased tenfold over the past half-century.
The smoke from those fires turned skies red and was so pervasive that Pacific Coast cities from Los Angeles to Seattle kept children indoors during recess and canceled sporting events. Residents were advised not to go outside and to tightly close windows and doors. Sales of air filters skyrocketed.
Downtown Los Angeles and Dodger Stadium are shrouded, looking south from Elysian Fields through the smoke from the Bobcat and the El Dorado fires, Friday, Sept. 11, 2020.
By the end of the century, these kinds of dangerous, polluting firescould occur every three to five years across the Pacific Northwest and parts of northern California, the study by scientists at Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found.
“These unhealthy particle pollution levels that occurred in the recent large fires may become the new norm in the late 21st century,” said Yuanyu Xie, a researcher in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Princeton and one of the paper’s authors.
The scientists modeled several scenarios. In what’s known as the “middle of the road” climate change scenario, in which carbon emissions don’t start to fall before mid-century and don’t reach net-zero until 2100, the models show smoke pollution increasing by 100% to 150%.
In the “business as usual” scenario, in which society doesn’t make concerted efforts to cut greenhouse gases, smoke increases 130% to 260%.
The danger stretches across the United States. Wildfire smoke can travel hundreds and even thousands of miles. In July, smoke from Western wildfires triggered air quality alerts and caused smoky skies and red-orange haze in New York, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston.
Staten Island ferry commuters take in the view of the Statue of Liberty seen through the haze on July 20, 2021, in New York. Smoke from wildfires across the U.S. West, including Oregon’s Bootleg Fire, has wafted over large swaths of the eastern United States. New York City’s skies were hazy with smoke from fires thousands of miles away.
“It’s not simply a health threat to people who lives in Western states. We’re seeing impacts hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away,” said the American Lung Association’s senior vice president for public policy Paul Billings.
The particles in smoke can penetrate deep into the lungs, creating and exacerbating multiple health issues.
“It can cause asthma attacks, strokes, heart attacks and increases in cardiovascular problems,” said Billings. There’s also evidence that smoke may impact pregnancy and birth outcomes.
Cloudbursts, floods and mudslides
A second paper, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, modeled two separate trends in the West – increasing “fire weather” and increased extreme rainfall events – that together spell trouble.
In the past, extreme rainfall was unlikely to follow a major wildfire, but the one-two punch is becoming more common and can be a dangerous combination.
Westerners have long lived with so-called fire weather, times of exceptional heat, dryness and wind that increase fire danger. The National Weather Service even produces fire weather forecasts. The researchers’ models show that these extreme events will increase in the coming decades.
At the same time, the frequency and intensity of extreme rain events are projected to also increase in much of the western United States, the study showed. By mid-century, midsized heavy rain events are expected to increase by more than 30%.
“It’s like rolling dice, you have your set of fire dice and your set of rain dice. Sometimes it comes up fire and rain in the same year,” said Samantha Stevenson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a co-author of the paper.
That poses an additional risk to anyone living downhill from charred areas. Fires destroy vegetation that holds soils in place and can sometimes harden the ground, lessening its ability to absorb water. Both contribute to the possibility of catastrophic flash floods and what scientists call debris flows.
“It’s a mixture of rocks, soil, vegetation and water that’s moving downhill at a rate you can’t outrun,” said Matthew Thomas, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “A flood can inundate a home, but a debris flow can take it off its foundation.”
Models run by scientists predict that in the Pacific Northwest, more than 90% of fire weather days will be followed within six months by extreme rain events. Over five years, almost all fire weather will be followed by at least one extreme rainfall event – and it can take that long for scorched land to recover.
The findings were similar, though less extreme for California and Colorado.
The results surprised Danielle Touma, an environmental engineering researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who co-authored the paper.
“Seeing the numbers on your screen, it’s quite shocking,” she said.
The phenomenon is already visible.
A man stands in a roadway flooded by Issaquah Creek and takes photos Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, in Issaquah, Wash. Heavy rain sent the creek over a major roadway, under an apartment building east of Seattle and up to the foundations of homes as heavy rains pounded the region. A flood watch was in effect through Friday afternoon across most of western Washington.
A USA TODAY investigation last year found that between 2018 and 2021, fast-moving debris flows have damaged and destroyed hundreds of homes, closed major transportation routes across at least three states and caused more than $550 million in property damage. Close to 170 people have been injured and 28 people died since 2018.
Last year, flash floods in Colorado’s Poudre Canyon killed at least three people. It occurred in the burn scar left by the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire, the largest recorded fire in Colorado history.
In 2018 the Montecito mudslide killed 23 people near Santa Barbara, and properly loss claims totaled $421 million. It came just a month after the Thomas fire, one of the largest in state history, killed two people, destroyed at least 1,000 structures and cost $1.8 billion in property damages.
The speed at which wildfires have worsened across much of America has exceeded predictions by the scientific community, said Overpeck.
“If anything, the theory and the models were underestimating how hard and fast these impacts would accumulate,” he said. “Mother Nature is making that crystal clear.”
Contact Elizabeth Weise at eweise @usatoday.com
San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood at 9:55 am Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday, September 9, 2020. Smoke from numerous wildfires over a layer of marine fog turned the sky an eerie orange color. Cars were using headlines and some street lights were still on.
Ukraine: Dozens of dead civilians found on street in Bucha as Russian forces retreat
Chiara Giordano – April 2, 2022
The dead bodies of dozens of civilians have been found scattered across the streets of a town recaptured by Ukranian forces.
Journalists in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, watched as Ukrainian soldiers backed by a column of tanks and other armoured vehicles used cables to drag bodies off of a street from a distance, fearing they may have been rigged to explode.
Locals said the dead were civilians who were killed by departing Russian soldiers without provocation.
One AFP reporter said they had seen at least 20 bodies on the ground. Bucha’s mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said more than 300 residents had been killed.
“Those people were just walking and they shot them without any reason. Bang,” said a Bucha resident who declined to give his name citing safety reasons. “In the next neighborhood, Stekolka, it was even worse. They would shoot without asking any question.”
Ukraine said on Saturday its forces had seized back all areas around Kyiv, claiming complete control of the capital region for the first time since Russia launched the invasion.
Troops have retaken more than 30 towns and villages around Kyiv since Russia pulled back from the area this week, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned in his nightly video address that departing Russian troops were creating a “catastrophic” situation for civilians by leaving mines around homes, abandoned equipment and “even the bodies of those killed”.
Boris Johnson spoke with Mr Zelensky on Saturday evening, a Downing Street spokesperson said.
“He congratulated Ukraine’s brave armed forces for successfully pushing back Russia’s invading army in a number of areas, but recognised the huge challenges that remain and the immense suffering being inflicted on civilians,” they added.
The prime minister updated Mr Zelensky on the progress made at the recent military donor conference, convened by the UK with 35 countries, No 10 said, and “committed to continue to step up defensive support”.
Russia has vowed to target UK weapons shipped into Ukraine after one of its helicopters was reportedly shot down by a British-made missile.
Andrey Kelin, Moscow’s ambassador in London, claimed Britain’s decision to send arms supplies to the Ukrainian army had made the war “even bloodier”.
His comments came after the Starstreak high-velocity missile system, supplied to Ukraine by Britain in March along with anti-tank weapons, was involved in an attack on a Russian aircraft in the Luhansk region.
They also follow British defence secretary Ben Wallace’s promise to send more lethal aid to Kyiv.
Mr Kelin told the Tass news agency: “All arms supplies are destabilising, particularly those mentioned by Wallace.
David Arakhamia, a Ukrainian negotiator, reportedly indicated draft peace treaty documents were at an advanced enough stage to allow for direct consultations between the two nations’ leaders.
The Interfax Ukraine agency quoted Mr Arakhamia as telling Ukrainian television Russia accepted Ukraine’s overall position, with the exception of its stance on Crimea.
A man stands next to a civilian vehicle that was destroyed during fighting as Ukrainian servicemen ride on a tank vehicle outside Kyiv (Vadim Ghirda/AP)
In the east, a Red Cross convoy was again seeking to evacuate civilians from the besieged port city of Mariupol after abandoning an attempt on Friday because of a lack of security guarantees. But that renewed mission was not expected to reach the port until at least Sunday.
The Russian Defence Ministry blamed the Red Cross for humanitarian aid columns being unable to reach the city on Friday or Saturday.
RIA news agency cited a senior official as saying due to the actions of the Red Cross, the convoys had left very late and were not able to reach Mariupol on time.
Civilians cheer along with a Ukrainian serviceman as a convoy of military and aid vehicles arrives in the formerly Russian-occupied Kyiv suburb of Bucha (Vadim Ghirda/AP)
Russia has depicted its drawdown of forces near Kyiv as a goodwill gesture in peace negotiations, but Ukraine and its allies say Russian forces have been forced to regroup after suffering heavy losses.
Pope Francis on Saturday came the closest he has yet to criticising Russian president Vladimir Putin since the invasion began on 24 February.
During a visit to Malta, the head of the Catholic Church criticised the “infantile” war in Ukraine, saying the world thought such behaviour was a thing of the “distant past”.
He said: “Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that, will either be shared, or not be at all.”
Missing Ukrainian photographer and videographer Maksim Levin, who was working for a Ukrainian news website and was a long-time contributor to Reuters news agency, was found dead in a village north of Kyiv on Friday.
Concerns were raised for the 41-year-old journalist after he went missing on 13 March while photographing fighting taking place near the capital.
Russia denies targeting civilians in what Mr Putin calls a “special military operation” aimed at demilitarising and “denazifying” Ukraine.
Descent into Hell: Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near Kyiv
Sergiy Karazy and Herbert Villarraga – April 1, 2022
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A view of destroyed Russian tank, in Dmytrivka village
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A Russian military uniform is seen on the ground, in Dmytrivka village
Residents walk past a destroyed Russian tank, in Dmytrivka village
DMYTRIVKA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Wisps of smoke still rising from the smouldering wrecks of tanks, business executive Leonid Vereshchagin wends his way past the charred corpses of Russian troops in this Ukrainian hamlet after what he calls a living hell.
For a month, he and his wife sought refuge in a friend’s basement in Dmytrivka, about 22 miles (35 km) west of Kyiv, as Russian troops advanced and occupied the area and took over the homes of some of his neighbours.
Most of the 300 residents left, but around a third remained, co-existing with the Russians as their tanks patrolled day and night.
“They went to our houses. Those houses that were closed, they opened them, they just broke the windows and they tried to open the doors,” he said, returning to his village on Friday. “We were with them when they were visiting houses, they were trying to open cupboards.”
“I have a very brave wife, she was watching them, making clear that they should not take anything,” he added, sitting in the same basement he had hunkered down in. Several mattresses lay on the floor, and to the side, shelves with provisions.
Three days ago, while the Russians were patrolling the area, Ukrainian troops arrived. When the Russians returned, unaware, there was a fierce battle. Vereshchagin and his wife escaped in a car through the woods during a brief break in the fighting.
Some houses in the smart residential area were completely destroyed. In the garden of one cowered a doe, badly injured from shelling, raw flesh exposed where patches of fur had burned.
“The Hell started in the evening on the (March) 29th,” Vereshchagin said. “From one side we were hearing the tanks shooting at us, and from the area of Bucha was a massive mortar shelling,” he added, referring to a town to the north.
“It’s something like you having a casque (helmet) and someone is hitting by hammer from above.”
The pungent smell of dank vegetation sits heavy in the air. A mist envelops the rural area, a patchwork of fields and forest land.
Reuters correspondents saw the remains of eight Russian soldiers next to destroyed tanks on the road running through the hamlet.
One had been decapitated by a blast. His naked body lay nearby, his feet blown off and a blackened arm still extended upward as if frozen in time.
“You see that enemy overestimates its potential around Kyiv at least. And we keep going forward liberating our cities and evacuating our people,” said Deputy Interior Minister Yevhen Yenin. “The first task is to restore public order to provide supplies of water, food, electricity, communication,” he added.
To the north, near the Belarus border, lies the nuclear disaster site Chernobyl.
“According to our reconnaissance, Russians have left Chernobyl but we should be aware of any unpleasant surprise that could be hidden there,” Yenin said.
Vereshchagin dismisses Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rationale for the invasion – clearing neo-Nazis and protecting Russians in Ukraine. While born in Ukraine, his mother tongue is Russian.
“I’ve never ever experienced any problems in Ukraine being a Russian-speaking Ukrainian,” he said.
“Definitely neither I nor any of my Russian speaking friends were waiting for any salvation army, which was completely fake and paranoia.”
(Writing by Simon Gardner; editing by Diane Craft)
Ukraine War Pushes Germans to Change. They Are Wavering.
Katrin Bennhold and StevenErlanger – April 13, 2022
The facility where the Nord Stream 2 pipeline arrives outside Lubmin, Germany after crossing the Baltic Sea, April 1, 2021. (Lena Mucha/The New York Times)
BERLIN — Chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised the world, and his own country, when he responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a 100 billion euro ($108 billion) plan to arm Germany, send weapons to Ukraine and end his nation’s deep dependence on Russian energy.
It was Germany’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, what Scholz called a “Zeitenwende” — an epochal change — that won applause for his leadership at home and abroad.
But six weeks later, the applause has largely ceased. Even as images of atrocities emerge from Ukraine since the invasion by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Scholz has ruled out an immediate oil and gas embargo, saying it would be too costly. He is dragging his feet on sending 100 armored vehicles to Ukraine, saying that Germany must not “rush ahead.” There are new debates in the ruling coalition about just how to go forward with the massive task Scholz has laid out, let alone how fast.
Already doubts are building as to the German government’s commitment to its own radical plans. “Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”
The changes Scholz announced go far deeper than his commitment to spend 2% of gross domestic product on the military — some 70 billion euros ($76 billion) a year, compared with France’s 41 billion euros ($44 billion).
They go to the heart of Germany’s postwar identity as a peaceful exporting nation — and to the heart of a business model that has enriched Germany and made it Europe’s largest and most powerful economy.
Now Germans are being asked “to rethink everything — our approach to doing business, to energy policy, to defense and to Russia,” said Claudia Major, a defense expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “We need a mindset change. We need to recognize that this is about us — that power politics are back and Germany must play a role.”
But she added, “Once again Germany is not leading. It is being dragged.”
Truly reorienting Germans for a new world where security has its real costs — not only in terms potentially of lost lives, but also in lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth — will be a wrenching endeavor that will take time, even a generation, and more than an afternoon’s policy pronouncement.
That realization is dawning, for Germans and their frustrated European partners.
“I don’t understand how anyone in Germany can sleep at night after seeing horrors like this without doing anything about it,” said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador in Berlin, referring to the atrocities in Ukraine. “What does it take for Germany to act?”
Even Annalena Baerbock, the self-assured Green foreign minister, expressed concerns that Zeitenwende may be more temporary than fundamental. She said she worried that the consensus was fragile, that Germans who favor close ties to Russia were silent now but had not changed their views.
“You can feel this,” she said. “They know they have to do it right now with regard to sanctions, energy independence and weapons deliveries, also with regard to how we treat Russia. But actually, they don’t like it.”
Since Scholz put forth his Zeitenwende before a special session of the parliament Feb. 27, multiple cracks in Germany’s commitment to change have already begun to appear.
German celebrities made headlines with an appeal to the government against rearmament and the “180-degree change in German foreign policy” that has so far been signed by 45,000 people. Green lawmakers have lobbied to spend only part of the 100 billion euro ($108 billion) special fund on the military, citing other needs like “human security” and climate change. Labor unions and industry bosses are warning of catastrophic damage to the economy and an immediate recession if Russian gas stops flowing.
As the CEO of German chemicals giant BASF, Martin Brudermüller, put it last week: “Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness.”
It has in fact been the basis of the German economy. Now that German businesses are facing the possibility of being asked to do without it, resistance is quietly mounting. Government ministers say they are being asked discreetly by business leaders when things will “go back to normal” — that is, when they can return to business as usual.
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, business as usual has largely meant “change through trade” — the conviction that economic interdependency would alter authoritarian governments like Russia and China for the better and help keep the peace. Prosperity and democracy, the thinking went, go hand in hand.
The link to Russia is particularly complicated by a long and complex history of hot and cold war, including guilt over the millions of Russians killed by the Nazis. This reinforced the belief that the security architecture of Europe had to include Russia and take account of Russian interests.
It was a model that paid off nicely for Germany, too.
“We export to China and import cheap gas from Russia; that’s been the recipe for the German export success,” said Ralph Bollmann, a biographer of Angela Merkel, a former German chancellor who is now seen as having protected Germans from a rivalrous world but not preparing them for it.
Few in Germany, including its intelligence services, predicted that Putin would invade a sovereign European country. But the war has set off a cycle of soul-searching, even among prominent politicians like Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a former foreign minister and now federal president.
A senior member of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, he was a prominent supporter of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, now halted, that bypassed Ukraine and that the United States opposed.
“We were clinging to the idea of building bridges to Russia that our partners warned us about,” Steinmeier said, after Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador, accused him of enabling Putin. “We failed to build a common Europe,” Steinmeier said. “We failed to incorporate Russia in our security architecture.” He added: “I was wrong.”
In the immediate aftermath of Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech, the details of which he had shared with only a handful of people, the resolve to act decisively seemed palpable.
The three diverse parties in his coalition swung behind it, and partisan divisions with the conservative opposition were briefly forgotten, too. Public opinion mirrored the shift, rewarding the new chancellor with better popularity ratings.
But in a short time, the breadth of the change Scholz announced seems to have intimidated even his own three-party coalition. “The government has made some courageous decisions, but it can seem afraid of its own courage,” said Jana Puglierin, director of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
There is skepticism that the political establishment is ready to break fundamentally from Moscow, or that German voters will happily pay so much more for energy and food for the foreseeable future.
“German pacifism runs very deep,” said John Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who has lived in the country on and off since the 1960s. “German illusions may have shattered, but not its traumas about Russia and the war.”
That “neurotic relationship with Russia may be on pause for the moment, but it will return in full force as soon as the shooting stops,” he said.
Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesperson in parliament for the Social Democrats, said that Germany’s soft stance toward Russia “reflects German society, and what will remain is this idea that Russia is there and part of Europe, and we will have to deal with that.”
The war has produced “dashed hopes” of a peaceful united Europe, shared by his generation of 1989, he said. But he noted that with this war, “there can be no return to business as usual. No one really wants to go back to the old times of engagement with Russia.”
Still, he said, “We shouldn’t overdo it. The balance will shift to more deterrence and less dialogue. But we must keep some dialogue.”
Puglierin has little patience for such arguments. “People need to let these old ideas go and adapt to reality as it is, and not as they want it to be,” she said. “Russia has shown that it does not want a stable relationship on this existing security order, which is now an empty shell.”
A prominent conservative lawmaker, Norbert Röttgen, argued that Germany must make a complete and immediate break with Russia. “War has come back to Europe, one that will affect the political and security order of the continent,” he said.
Germany must also draw on the lessons of its dependency on Russia for its future relationship with the more powerful authoritarian realm of China, on which key sectors of Germany’s export-driven model rely, Röttgen said.
“The real Zeitenwende,” Puglierin said, “will come when we remake our model for a future of competition with both Russia and China and realize that every dependency can be used against us.”
Russia says Ukraine blew up an oil depot in Russian territory in a helicopter raid, part of an apparent wider fightback
Bill Bostock – April 1, 2022
A Russian politician said two Ukrainian helicopters blew up an oil depot in Russia on Friday.
The governor of Belgorod said Ukrainian helicopters launched an airstrike on the city of Belgorod.
Ukrainian officials denied carrying out the attack, saying it could be a false flag operation.
A Russian politician said Friday that Ukrainian forces blew up an oil depot on Russian soil in a helicopter raid.
Belgorod regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on Telegram that two Ukrainian helicopters launched an airstrike on the depot in the Russian city of Belgorod, located 24 miles north of the Ukrainian border.
There were no casualties but two oil workers were injured, Gladkov said.
Insider was unable to verify the authenticity of the videos.
During a press conference Friday, Col. Oleksandr Motuzyanyk, a spokesman for Ukraine’s ministry of defense, said Ukraine could neither confirm nor deny it was responsible.
A representative for Ukraine’s army earlier told the BILD newspaper that the attack could be a false flag operation to justify further violence against Ukrainians.
Russia’s defense ministry has not commented on the incident.
The apparent attack came amid a wider Ukrainian counter offensive, focused on retaking parts of the territory lost to Russia at the start of the war.
The gains came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russia was preparing to shift the focus of its attacks on Ukraine, to focus on attacking the eastern Donbas region.
Zelenskyy said that a claim Russia was “radically” scaling back attacks on Kyiv was actually a repositioning.
April 1 (Reuters) – Two of Ukraine’s military helicopters struck a fuel depot in the Russian city of Belgorod on Friday, a Russian official has said, making the first accusation of a Ukrainian air strike on Russian soil since Moscow invaded its neighbour in late February.
Video images of the purported attack posted online showed what looked like several missiles being fired from low altitude, followed by an explosion. Reuters has not yet been able to verify the images.
The helicopters struck the facility after crossing the border at low altitude, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on messaging app Telegram.
The resulting blaze injured two workers, Gladkov added, while some areas were being evacuated in the city near the Ukrainian border.
However, Russian oil firm Rosneft, which owns the fuel depot, said in a separate statement that no one was hurt in the fire, though it gave no information on the cause.
Ukraine’s defence ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.
An ammunition depot near Belgorod caught fire on Wednesday, causing a series of blasts. At the time, Gladkov said authorities were waiting for the Russian defence ministry to establish its cause.
Moscow calls its action in Ukraine “a special military operation”. (Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Russia’s War Lacks a Battlefield Commander, U.S. Officials Say
Helene Cooper andEric Schmitt – April 1, 2022
WASHINGTON — Russia is running its military campaign against Ukraine out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, according to U.S. officials who have studied the five-week-old war.
That centralized approach may go a long way to explain why the Russian war effort has struggled in the face of stiffer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, the officials said.
The lack of a unifying military leader in Ukraine has meant that Russian air, ground and sea units are not in sync. Their disjointed battlefield campaigns have been plagued by poor logistics, flagging morale and between 7,000 and 15,000 military deaths, senior U.S. officials and independent analysts say.
It has also contributed to the deaths of at least seven Russian generals as high-ranking officers are pushed to the front lines to untangle tactical problems that Western militaries would leave to more junior officers or senior enlisted personnel.
A senior U.S. official said that NATO officials and the intelligence community had spent weeks waiting for a Russian war commander to emerge. No one has, leaving Western officials to conclude that the men making decisions are far from the fight, back in Moscow: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu; Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian military; and even President Vladimir Putin.
On Wednesday, Biden administration officials, citing declassified U.S. intelligence, said Putin had been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s problems in Ukraine. The intelligence, U.S. officials said, also showed what appeared to be growing tension between Putin and Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.
Russian officials have disputed the U.S. intelligence assertion, with the Kremlin on Thursday calling it a “complete misunderstanding” of the situation that could have “bad consequences.”
But it is hard to run a military campaign from 500 miles away, U.S. military officials said. The distance alone, they said, can lead to a disconnect between the troops who are doing the fighting and the war plans being drawn up in Moscow. Instead of streamlining the process, they said, Russia has created a military machine that is unable to adapt to a quick and nimble Ukrainian resistance.
A second senior U.S. official said that Russian soldiers, who have been taught not to make a single move without explicit instructions from superiors, had been left frustrated on the battlefield, while Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov continued to plot increasingly out-of-touch strategy.
This top-down approach means that Moscow transmits instructions to generals in the field, who then transmit them to troops, who are told to follow those instructions no matter the situation on the ground.
“It shows up in the mistakes that are being made,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe during the Kosovo war.
Last week, Ukrainian forces blew up the Russian warship Orsk, which had docked in southern Ukraine. Describing the incident, Clark asked: “Who would be crazy enough to dock a ship in a port” before first securing the area?
That the Russian planners who sent the Orsk into the port were inattentive to the potential danger shows that no one is questioning decisions coming from the top, officials said. The troops at the bottom are not empowered to point out flaws in strategy that should be obvious, they said.
Military analysts said a complex chain of events, originating with a broken-down command structure that begins in Moscow, had led to the deaths of the Russian generals.
“I do not see the kind of coherent organizational architecture that one would have expected given the months of exercises and presumably even longer period of planning in advance of the invasion,” retired Gen. David Petraeus, who served as the head of the military’s Central Command and as the top commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, said in an email.
In a U.S. war command structure, a four-star field commander would coordinate and synchronize all subordinate air, land and naval forces, as well as special operations and cyberoperations. The campaign would have a main objective, a center of gravity, with operations supporting that goal.
In the case of the deaths of some of the Russian generals, for instance, the problem originated far away from the battlefield, when Moscow did not respond quickly enough after Ukraine jammed Russian communications, the analysts said.
Putin’s dishonest portrayal of the mission of the Russian military may have hurt its ability to prosecute the effort, which the Russian president initially presented publicly as a limited military operation.
Clark recalled teaching a class of Ukrainian generals in 2016 in Kyiv and trying to explain what an American military “after-action review” was. He told them that after a battle involving U.S. troops, “everybody got together and broke down what happened.”
“The colonel has to confess his mistakes in front of the captain,” Clark said. “He says, ‘Maybe I took too long to give an order.’ ”
After hearing him out, the Ukrainians, Clark said, told him that could not work. “They said, ‘We’ve been taught in the Soviet system that information has to be guarded and we lie to each other,’ ” he recalled.
Putin’s decision to send Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov to the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol this week for a victory lap despite the fact that Mariupol has not fallen demonstrates the Russian president’s continued belief that the biggest battle is the information one, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert.
The feared Chechen “is a general, not a real military commander,” he said, adding, “This shows that what Putin still believes is that propaganda is the most important thing here.”
Russian officials are signaling that Putin might be lowering his war ambitions and focusing on the eastern Donbas region, although military analysts said it remained to be seen whether that would constitute a meaningful shift or a maneuver to distract attention before another offensive.
The Russian army has already committed more than half of its total combat forces to the fight, including its most elite units. Moscow is now tapping reinforcements from outside Russia, including Georgia, as well as rushing mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private military company, to eastern Ukraine.
Putin has also signed a decree calling up 134,000 conscripts.
“They seem to have no coherent concept of the amount of force it will take to defeat the Ukrainian regular and territorial forces in urban terrain, and to retain what they destroy or overrun,” said Jeffrey J. Schloesser, a retired two-star Army general who commanded U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan. “Hundreds of thousands of more Russian or allied troops will be necessary to do so.”
Mystery Chemicals in Plastics Might Lead to Obesity
Olivia Rosane – April 01, 2022
Chemicals that encourage fat growth might leach into our food via household plastics. Wachirawit Iemlerkchai
Is plastic making you fat?
It’s well known that plastics contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. However, a recent study published in Environmental Science and Technology found that these infamous chemicals may just be the tip of the trashberg. The researchers tested 34 common plastic products from bath slippers to yogurt cups and found that a third of them contained chemicals that induced the growth of fat cells in the lab.
“The most important finding, I think, is that everyday plastic products contain chemicals that can disrupt our metabolism in a process we call adipogenesis,” study co-author and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) associate professor Martin Wagner told EcoWatch. “And we know that adipogenesis is like the first step towards developing obesity or becoming overweight later.”
Mystery Chemicals
The researchers used mass spectrometry to identify the chemicals in 34 common plastic items, including food packaging like yogurt cups and plastic bottles as well as household items like kitchen sponges or placemats. The goal, Wagner said, was to cover the major types of plastic polymers.
They found a total of 55,300 distinct chemical features, but were only able to identify 629 of them. Among them were 11 previously-known metabolism disrupting chemicals (MDCs). However, the scientists then tested whether or not exposure to the plastics would encourage precursor cells to transform into fat cells. Some of the plastics that encouraged fat-cell growth did have one of the 11 known MDCs in their chemical makeup, but others did not.
“It’s very likely that it is not the usual suspects, such as Bisphenol A, causing these metabolic disturbances,” first-study author Johannes Völker of NTNU’s Department of Biology said in a press release emailed to EcoWatch. “This means that plastic chemicals other than the ones we already know could be contributing to overweight and obesity.”
Causes of a Pandemic
The study adds to a growing body of research that suggests the obesity pandemic isn’t just a question of poor diets and sedentary lifestyles. Almost three times more people are obese today than they were in 1975, and this is a major public health concern. Obesity contributes to many of the most common causes of death including cancer and heart disease and can increase the risk of contracting infections including COVID-19.
At first, health experts thought that obesity was caused by a mix of genetics and lifestyle factors, but this doesn’t explain all the data. For example, a 2016 study found that the body mass index (BMI) for 36,377 U.S. adults between 1988 and 2006 rose by as much as 2.3kg/m(2) even when caloric intake and physical activity stayed constant. This led to the conclusion that there must be another factor promoting weight gain. But what? One potential culprit was chemicals that mess with the endocrine system, which controls appetite, metabolism and weight.
“Connecting endocrine disruption and obesity gave rise to the so-called obesogen hypothesis, which poses that environmental chemicals (obesogens) contribute to obesity,” the study authors wrote.
Plastics aren’t the only potential source of exposure to these chemicals. Pesticides are another. For example, a 2021 study found that chlorpyrifos can slow the calorie-burning efforts of brown fat in mice. However, plastics are an increasingly ubiquitous part of our daily lives. The obesogen hypothesis indicates that obesity, like many public health and environmental problems, will not be solved by appeals to personal responsibility alone.
“It puts the responsibility, in our case, I think, really on the plastic producers, because they should make sure that their products that they’re selling us are safe,” Wagner told EcoWatch.
But what is the chance that the chemicals contained in the 34 plastic products are actually ending up in people’s bodies? There are several ways that this could happen, Wagner said. Chemicals can leach from plastic food containers, especially when heated. Children might chew on toys or items like plastic sponges. It’s also possible that the chemicals could migrate through the skin when you wear plastic gloves or slippers. Finally, we might breathe them in; phthalates have been found in household dust. While more research would be needed to test whether the chemical mixtures discovered in the study would encourage obesity in animals, there is evidence from both animal and epidemiological studies that BPA at least is strongly associated with obesity.
Losing the Plastic Weight
In the meantime, what can consumers do to make sure the plastic products in their lives aren’t working against their diets or gym memberships? Wagner said that PVC and polyurethane products “really stood out” when it came to MDC content. PVC is often found in flooring and also placemats, while polyurethane is a foam used for insulation but also other squishy materials like sponges.
These two polymers can therefore be avoided, or at least kept out of the mouths of babes. But for the other polymers like polystyrene and polyethylene, which are often used in food containers, the results were more ambiguous. One polystyrene sample had very active MDCs, while the others did not. This can make things more difficult for conscientious shoppers.
“If you buy [a] yogurt cup from polystyrene, you don’t know which one contains the toxicity,” Wagner said.
However, it also provides an opportunity for plastics manufacturers.
“Apparently you can make a polystyrene yogurt cup that actually doesn’t contain endocrine disrupting chemicals or metabolism disrupting chemicals,” Wagner said.
Wagner’s team hopes to next work on identifying which of the unknown chemicals they discovered are truly active MDCs. This will help regulators and manufacturers to know what to look out for. But Wagner also thought that plastic makers should work on designing products that have simpler chemical recipes. This will be especially important if we succeed in switching to a circular economy, because more chemicals usually have to be added to a plastic when it is recycled and reused.
“How can we design a yogurt cup that only contains ten chemicals that we can analyze and assess and make sure that they are safe?” Wagner challenged.
Democrats Worry That What Happens in Nevada Won’t Stay in Nevada
Jennifer Medina and Reid J. Epstein – April 1, 2022
Recent apartment and housing developments in Las Vegas, where housing prices and rents have skyrocketed March, 24, 2022. (Bridget Bennett/The New York Times)
LAS VEGAS — Scars from the coronavirus pandemic are still visible here. Housing prices skyrocketed, with rents rising faster than almost anywhere else in the country. Roughly 10,000 casino workers remain out of work. Gas prices, now more than $5 a gallon, are higher than in every other state except California.
Amid a flagging economy, the state Democrats held up as a national model for more than a decade — registering and turning out first-time voters — has become the epitome of the party’s difficulties going into the 2022 midterm elections.
Democrats have long relied on working-class and Latino voters to win Nevada, but the loyalty of both groups is now in question. Young voters who fueled Sen. Bernie Sanders’ biggest victory in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary remain skeptical about President Joe Biden. And Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., the country’s first Latina senator, is one of the party’s most endangered incumbents.
She must overcome the president’s sagging approval ratings, dissatisfaction with the economy and her own relative anonymity. And she lacks the popularity and deep ties with Latino voters that Sen. Harry Reid, who died in December, harnessed to help build the state’s powerful Democratic machine. The state has long been a symbol of the Democratic Party’s future by relying on a racially diverse coalition to win elections, but those past gains are now at risk.
“There’s a lot of frustration on the ground that no one is listening,” said Leo Murrieta, director of Make the Road Nevada, a liberal advocacy group. “They are not wrong. It’s hard to talk about the possibility of tomorrow when your todays are still torn apart.”
Nevada, which Biden carried in 2020, has been a linchpin for Democrats in presidential elections since 2008. But an election cycle pattern that has alarmed Democrats has emerged. The party dominates in presidential elections but struggles during the midterms when a Democrat is in the White House. Democratic turnout takes a steep drop, largely because of the state’s highly transient population, and Republicans gain ground.
In 2014, the last midterm election with a Democrat in the White House, the state’s turnout dropped 46% compared to the previous presidential election, ushering in Republican control of the state Legislature. This year, Republican victories could unseat the Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, and the state’s three Democratic members of Congress while also replacing Cortez Masto with a 2020 election denier in the Senate.
Beyond turnout, a deeper problem for Democrats is that the state has been turning, ever so slightly, less blue. The state’s share of registered Democrats has fallen — from 39.4% in 2016 to 33.6% in February, according to figures from the Nevada secretary of state. At the same time, more than 28% of registered voters are now unaffiliated with any party, an increase from 20% in 2016. Officials said the spike in unaffiliated voters stems from an automatic voter registration system Nevada voters adopted in 2018.
The state’s economy has shown some signs of improvement. Joblessness in Reno is down to some of the lowest numbers in a century. Democrats are counting on the region, which has attracted new residents, many from California, and become something of a tech hub. But with more than 70% of the state’s population living in Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas, the election is likely to be decided on the outcome there. In interviews with Las Vegas voters, the economy overshadowed all other issues. There was a sense of optimism among some, but they worried that they would not have enough money for the basics: rent, food, gas.
“What I care about is opportunity and the economy,” said Angel Clavijo, 23, who voted for the first time in 2020. Although he cast his ballot for Biden, Clavijo said he was not registered with either party.
Although he was able to keep his job as a housekeeper at The Venetian Resort through the pandemic, Clavijo watched anxiously as his parents’ bills stacked up. “I really can’t say I’m paying a lot of attention to politics right now,” he said. “I’m not just going to vote by party.”
Margarita Mejia, 68, a retired hotel worker, said she has voted for most of her life for Democrats but sat out the 2020 election as she helped her family and friends deal with the pandemic.
“It was depressing, being alone, struggling for everything,” said Mejia, who was selling clothing, stuffed animals and art from her front yard last week. “I don’t know what the government does for us, even when they say they want to help.”
Clavijo and Mejia could not name Nevada’s incumbent senator up for reelection — Cortez Masto, whose seat is critical if the Democrats want to maintain control of the Senate.
Despite five years in the Senate and eight years as Nevada’s attorney general, Cortez Masto remains unknown by a broad swath of the Nevada electorate as a result of her longtime aversion to publicity, cautious political demeanor and Nevada’s transient voters.
Almost half the voters on Nevada’s rolls have registered since Cortez Masto was last on the ballot in 2016, according to an analysis by TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. Her own internal polling found that nearly one-quarter of Latinos did not have an opinion on the race between her and Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general who is likely to be her Republican opponent in the general election.
The Cortez Masto campaign began reintroducing her to Latino audiences earlier this month with a Spanish-language television advertisement that leaned heavily on telling her life story as a political pioneer and her family’s history in the military.
It gave a generous interpretation of her biography: Her father, Manny Cortez, was one of the most powerful figures in Las Vegas during stints on the Clark County Commission and later as the head of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. In that role, he approved the ubiquitous Las Vegas marketing phrase, “What happens here, stays here.”
“He didn’t start at the top,” Reid said from the Senate floor after Cortez died in 2006, “but he ended up there.”
Cortez, who maintained a close friendship with Reid, operated as a behind-the-scenes player. While that served him as a political operator, it may not help his daughter in this year’s high-profile race that will help determine control of the Senate.
“He was never a guy who went out and sought attention from the media,” said Jon Ralston, a longtime Nevada journalist. “She is kind of an exaggerated version of him in many ways.”
That aversion to seeking the spotlight has left Cortez Masto as essentially a generic Democrat in a midterm year when being yoked to Biden is a political hazard. A January poll from The Nevada Independent showed Biden’s approval rating in the state at just 41%.
Cortez Masto declined to be interviewed.
“No state was hit harder than Nevada, and we’re recovering quickly because Catherine fought to get the relief our hospitality industry needed, supporting the tens of thousands of workers who rely on our tourism economy,” a spokesperson, Josh Marcus-Blank, said in a statement.
Jeremy Hughes, a Republican who was a campaign adviser to Dean Heller, the former Republican senator, said Cortez Masto would have difficultly separating herself from Biden and the national party’s diminished brand.
“Every data point I’ve seen points to Hispanic voters being more open to supporting a Republican this cycle than any in recent memory,” Hughes said. “If the economy is the No. 1 issue on voters’ minds across the country, in Nevada and especially among Hispanic voters, it’s the No. 1, 2 and 3 issue.”
But Democrats say that her likely Republican opponent, Laxalt, is unlikely to win over moderate voters. Laxalt, whose father and grandfather both served in the Senate, ran the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn Nevada’s 2020 election results.
Democrats are also counting on more economic improvement in Las Vegas, where the economy took a hit with the abrupt shutdown of the Strip but has started to be revived with crowded casinos.
On a recent sunny afternoon in east Las Vegas, Paul Madrid and Daniel Trujillo took a break in front of the barbershop they have run for the last 20 years. Business has been brisk lately, and they described themselves as relieved that the worst was behind them. Still, they have winced while watching the price of gas tick up at the station across the street.
Madrid, 52, called himself a “lifelong working-class Democrat” and said he had tried to pay less attention to politics since former President Donald Trump left office. As frustrated as he has been, he is likely to vote for Democrats in November. But he said he felt less loyal than he once did.
“Something’s got to change,” he said. “We’ve got to put the country before party. I’ve got to stay positive. My business is back, customers are back, and I just want this all to be over with.”
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A view of destroyed Russian tank, in Dmytrivka village
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A Russian military uniform is seen on the ground, in Dmytrivka village
