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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
In a Twist, Old Coal Plants Help Deliver Renewable Power. Here’s How.
Elena Shao – July 15, 2022
Silos of ash and other waste at the Brayton Point Power Station, a retired coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Mass., on July 7, 2022. (Simon Simard/The New York Times)
Across the country, aging and defunct coal-burning power plants are getting new lives as solar, battery and other renewable energy projects, partly because they have a decades-old feature that has become increasingly valuable: They are already wired into the power grid.
The miles of high-tension wires and towers often needed to connect power plants to customers far and wide can be costly, time-consuming and controversial to build from scratch. So solar and other projects are avoiding regulatory hassles and potentially speeding up the transition to renewable energy by plugging into the unused connections left behind as coal becomes uneconomical to keep burning.
In Illinois alone, at least nine coal-burning plants are on track to become solar farms and battery storage facilities in the next three years. Similar projects are taking shape in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Maryland. In Massachusetts and New Jersey, two retired coal plants along the coast are being repurposed to connect offshore wind turbines to the regional electrical grids.
“A silver lining of having had all of these dirty power plants is that now we have fairly robust transmission lines in those places,” said Jack Darin, director of the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group. “That’s a huge asset.”
Over the past two decades, more than 600 coal-burning generators totaling about 85 gigawatts of generating capacity have retired, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (Individual power plants can have more than one generator.) A majority of the 266 remaining coal-burning power plants in the country were built in the 1970s and 1980s and are nearing the end of their approximately 50-year operational lifetime.
Most of that retired capacity will not be replaced with coal, as the industry gets squeezed out by cheaper renewable energy and tougher emissions regulations. At the same time, renewable energy producers are facing obstacles getting their projects connected to the grid. Building new power lines is costly and controversial, as neighbors often oppose transmission lines that can disturb scenic vistas or potentially reduce property values nearby. In addition, getting power line projects approved by regulators can be time-consuming.
Building and operating renewable energy projects has long been cheaper than fossil fuel plants. The barrier “is not economics anymore,” said Joseph Rand, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which conducts research on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy. “The hardest part is securing the interconnection and transmission access.”
This makes old coal plants an attractive option as sites for renewable energy projects. Not only are the old plants already wired into the transmission system, they also have substations, which help convert electricity to a supply that is suitable for use in homes and businesses.
That was a key factor in choosing Brayton Point Power Station as a grid connection point for a 1,200-megawatt wind farm 37 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, said Michael Brown, CEO of the offshore wind developer Mayflower Wind.
At 1,600 megawatts, the coal-fired plant was the largest one in New England when it retired in 2017. The facility itself, located in the waterfront town of Somerset, will be replaced by an undersea-cable factory owned by the Italian company Prysmian Group. And the offshore wind project will connect to the grid at the Brayton Point interconnection point, making use of the existing substation there.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, Vistra Corp., a Texas-based power generation company that also owns a variety of power plants in California and Illinois, said it would spend $550 million to turn at least nine of its coal-burning facilities in Illinois into sites for solar panels and battery storage.
The largest, a plant in Baldwin, Illinois, that is set to retire by 2025, will get 190,000 solar panels on 500 acres of land. Together, the panels will generate 68 megawatts of power, enough to supply somewhere between 13,600 and 34,000 homes, depending on the time of year. It will also get a battery that can store up to 9 megawatts, which will help distribute electricity when demand peaks or the sun is not shining.
Vistra CEO Curtis Morgan said it became clear that the power company would need to “leave coal behind,” and it was eager to build new zero-emissions projects to replace some of the power from those plants. However, he said, the slow process of getting approval from grid operators, which coordinate and monitor electricity supplies, has been a roadblock for a number of Vistra’s proposed projects.
A surge in proposals for wind, solar and battery storage projects has overwhelmed regulators in recent years, according to an analysis from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which overlooks the University of California’s Berkeley campus. In 2021, wait times had almost doubled from a decade before, to nearly four years, and that does not include the increasing number of projects that are withdrawing from the process entirely.
If every project currently waiting for approval gets built, “we could hit 80% clean energy by 2030,” said Rand, the lead author of the report. “But we’d be lucky if even a quarter of what’s proposed actually gets completed.”
Three of Vistra’s battery storage projects in Illinois — at the Havana, Joppa and Edwards coal plants — also benefited from an infusion of grants from a state law, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, aimed at supporting a “just transition” for coal-dependent communities toward renewable energy. It was signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker last fall and also required all fossil-fuel-burning plants to cut their emissions to zero by 2045, which could lead to their closure, though most of the coal plants in Illinois were already poised to shut down within a decade.
The Coal-to-Solar Energy Storage Grant Program that emerged from the legislation also supports two other battery projects, owned by NRG Energy, which will be built at the Waukegan and Will County coal-burning power stations.
The advantage of building renewable energy projects on old coal plants is twofold, said Sylvia Garcia, director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which oversees the coal-to-solar program. First, projects benefit from the ease of reusing an existing connection to the grid. Second, it is an effort toward “trying to reinvest in the communities that have lost those coal plants” in the first place, she said.
While the new projects will temporarily create construction jobs, operating a solar plant or battery facility usually does not require as many employees. The Baldwin plant previously employed around 105 full-time workers. And while Vistra has not yet finalized numbers on a site-by-site basis, the nine Illinois projects combined will create 29 full-time jobs annually, the company’s communications director, Meranda Cohn, said in an email.
Coal plants also typically sit on a sizable parcel of land, and redeveloping those sites into renewable energy projects is a way to put something productive on a piece of property that might otherwise go unused.
“It’s really shifting a very negative resource into one that is more positive for the community,” said Jeff Bishop, CEO of Key Capture Energy, which plans to locate a 20-megawatt battery storage project at a retired coal plant near Baltimore.
Elsewhere in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the retirement of Mount Tom Station, a coal plant that had operated for more than five decades, presented a number of possibilities, said Julie Vitek, vice president of government and regulatory affairs for the power producer ENGIE North America. After meetings with government officials, environmental groups and residents, a solar farm emerged as the best way to “give new life to the industrial land at Mount Tom,” she said.
Today, the property is home to some 17,000 solar panels and a small battery installation that form a community solar project managed by Holyoke Gas & Electric, a city-owned utility that gives customers the choice to opt in to receiving solar power from the project. The panels produce about 6 megawatts of power, enough to power about 1,800 homes.
It is not only solar, battery and wind developers that are eyeing old coal plants for their infrastructure. TerraPower, a nuclear power venture founded by Bill Gates, is locating a 345-megawatt advanced nuclear reactor adjacent to a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The location will not only allow the reactor to take advantage of the existing grid connection but also to make use of the coal plant’s cooling system, said Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s president and CEO.
“In a way, it’d be a real shame not to make use of those coal plants,” Levesque said.
‘Things Are Going to Break’: Texas Power Plants Are Running Nonstop
Will Wade, Mark Chediak and Naureen Malik – July 15, 2022
(Bloomberg) — As searing Texas heat drives power demand to record highs, the state’s grid operator is ordering plants to run at a historic pace, often forcing them to put off maintenance to keep cranking out electricity. That’s helped keep the lights on, for now, but the short-term focus is putting even more stress on a system that’s already stretched near the limit.
Twice in the past week, officials have called on Texans to limit electricity use during scorching afternoons as demand inched perilously close to overwhelming supply. Now, there are growing concerns over how long power plants can maintain the grueling pace as they run nonstop, according to Michele Richmond, executive director of Texas Competitive Power Advocates, a generator industry group.
“Things are going to break,” she said. “We have an aging fleet that’s being run harder than it’s ever been run.”
Also See: Texas Confident Stressed Grid Will Hold Up Amid Summer Heat
To meet the surge in power demand, Ercot, the grid operator, is leaning heavily on a mechanism called reliability unit commitments to ensure there’s enough supply. Plants are being regularly ordered to go into service, or remain in operation, and skip any scheduled maintenance. The measure also overrides shutdowns for economic factors or any other issues. And Ercot is using the rule more than ever before as the state battles bout after bout of extreme weather.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, as the operator is formally known, called for 2,890 hours of RUCs system-wide in the first half of this year. That’s more than triple the 801 hours in the first half of 2021, according to data from Ercot’s independent market monitor provided by Richmond. For all of 2020, there were 224 RUC hours.
The problem is that deferring repairs now will likely come back to haunt power-plant owners, Richmond said.
“If you put off preventative maintenance because it’s needed for reliability, it increases the chances you’ll need a more comprehensive outage” later on as plants start to malfunction, she said.
Growing Population, Crypto
The situation underscores that the Texas grid is relying on short-term solutions for what’s poised to be a long-term problem. The state is contending with a population boom that’s driven demand higher. Crypto mining has also taken off in the past year, bringing with it the industry’s power-intensive operations. Meanwhile climate change has made extreme weather events that drive up electricity use more likely to occur and more severe — creating situations like a deadly February 2021 freeze that caused blackouts across the state.
Brad Jones, Ercot’s interim chief executive officer, is aware he’s walking a fine line. On one hand, there have been six times in the past year that using RUCs have enabled the operator to avoid declaring grid emergencies. Or as Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, said at a June 22 hearing: Six times when the grid otherwise would’ve been “on the brink of rolling blackouts.”
However, Jones says he knows that forcing plants to stay in service is raising the risk of breakdowns. For example, a key concern at this time of year is boiler-tube leaks, especially at older plants. These leaks don’t always mean a plant must shut down immediately, but if they’re not closely monitored they can lead to bigger, more costly repairs.
“Typically, a generator can run for a while with the water leaking,” Jones said in an interview. “The question is, how long is that.”
The grid operator is in constant contact with generators and works to give them time to make needed repairs when conditions allow, Jones said. Ultimately, the state needs more power plants, and regulators are working on ways to make that happen, he said.
Ercot and other operators are facing dual challenges, said Michael Webber, an energy-resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Most companies schedule maintenance during the spring and fall, when the weather is mild and power use is typically lower.
But climate change means these windows of temperate weather are getting shorter. This year, for instance, an early May heat wave forced some generators to skip tune-ups. And periods of high heat are also lasting longer, putting more stress on power plants that are running all-out for weeks at a time.
Maintenance for power plants — especially older ones — can be time consuming and complicated, said Webber, who also serves as chief technology officer of Energy Impact Partners, a clean tech venture fund
“You kind of have to dismantle the plant,” he said. “It’s not something you can do in a couple of hours.”
All of this is exacerbated by the state’s aging fleet. The average age of coal-powered plants in Texas is about 50 years, and natural-gas plants average about 30 years.
“It’s kind of like humans — we need to rest and recover,” Webber said. “If we run full speed for a long time, we can collapse.”
They sounded alarms about a coming Colorado River crisis. But warnings went unheeded
Ian James – July 15, 2022
A boat juts from the shoreline of Lake Mead, exposed as the water has receded to the lowest levels since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The Colorado River is approaching a breaking point, its reservoirs depleted and Western states under pressure to drastically cut water use.
It’s a crisis that scientists have long warned was coming. Years before the current shortage, scientists repeatedly alerted public officials who manage water supplies that the chronic overuse of the river combined with the effects of climate change would likely drain the Colorado’s reservoirs to dangerously low levels.
But these warnings by various researchers — though discussed and considered by water managers — went largely unheeded.
Now, many of the scientists’ dire predictions are coming to pass, with Lake Mead and Lake Powell nearly three-fourths empty and their water levels continuing to fall. Some researchers say the seven states that depend on the river would have been better prepared had they acted years ago.
“If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that humans are really reluctant to give things up to prevent a catastrophe,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. “They’re willing to hang on to the very end and risk a calamity.”
The Colorado River, vital to seven states, as seen from the Toroweap Overlook on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
He said it’s just like humanity’s lack of progress in addressing climate change despite decades of warnings by scientists.
If larger cuts in water use were made sooner, Udall said, the necessary reductions could have been phased in and would have been much easier.
Peter Gleick, a water and climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, said the collective failure to heed scientists’ repeated warnings is “directly responsible for how bad conditions are today.”
“If we had cut water use in the Colorado River over the last two decades to what we now understand to be the actual levels of water availability, there would be more water in the reservoirs today,” Gleick said. “The crisis wouldn’t be nearly as bad.”
In a 1993 study for the federal government, Gleick and coauthor Linda Nash examined the threat climate change posed for the river and warned that the water supply would be very sensitive to rising temperatures.
“Under conditions of long-term flow reductions and current operating rules, these reservoirs are drawn almost completely dry,” they wrote. “Current approaches to water management in the basin will have to be modified.”
Whitewater rafters ride the Colorado River, as seen from Toroweap Overlook on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
In 2000, board members of the Metropolitan Water District who were concerned about climate change invited scientists including Gleick to speak at a workshop. The scientists advised them to start preparing for consequences including less Sierra snow and possible decades of drought.
Gleick said a common refrain from many water managers in the 1980s and ’90s, when told about risks based on climate projections, was to respond that once they had a more definitive picture of effects on water resources, they could deal with it.
Even later, as the projections got more definitive and “alarm bells got louder,” Gleick said, political barriers hindered changes in the entrenched system of how the river’s water is divided and managed, a system established starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Action was stymied, he said, by those “who either didn’t want to believe the science or had something to lose if we changed our policies.”
Gleick said there is a parallel in how fossil fuel interests have long fought the sorts of changes necessary to address global warming.
In the Colorado River Basin, Gleick said, the vested interests that have hindered new approaches for dealing with the water shortfall include some in agriculture who benefit from generations-old water rights, water managers with a “find more and more water” mentality, and politicians who’ve fought to defend old state apportionments.
In the 2000s, as drought ravaged the watershed, a growing body of scientific research showed that higher temperatures would substantially shrink the flow of the river, which supplies farmlands and cities from the Rocky Mountains to Southern California and northern Mexico.
“If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that humans are really reluctant to give things up to prevent a catastrophe.”
Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist
In a 2004 study, scientists at the University of Washington projected major declines in runoff and river flow with warmer temperatures.
In other research in 2007, scientists Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid wrote that climate simulations showed an an increase in drought severity would occur “in lockstep” with global warming, projecting a 25% reduction in flow from 2006 to 2030, and a 45% decrease by midcentury.
When federal officials released a report in 2007 on new river management rules, their estimates of future risks were rosier, showing minimal odds of reservoirs reaching low levels. The report cited studies predicting declines in river flow with climate change, saying that while those projections “are of great interest, additional research is both needed and warranted to quantify the uncertainty of these estimates.”
The Colorado River flows over rocks along its banks at Lees Ferry, a narrow stretch that marks the divide between the river’s upper and lower basins. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
In a 2008 study, scientists Tim Barnett and David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography wrote that if climate models were correct, the Colorado River would “continue to lose water in the future,” with its flow likely declining 10% to 30% over the next 30 to 50 years. Those estimates turned out to match, if conservatively, the 20% decline in flow that has occurred since 2000.
Barnett and Pierce estimated that if current allocations stayed the same, there was a 50% chance the usable water supply in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s two largest reservoirs, would be gone by 2021. They titled their study “When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?”
They said that annually the region was taking out about 1 million acre-feet of water more than the river was providing, which they warned was “simply not sustainable.” Barnett and Pierce wrote that time was short to decide how to use a reduced water supply, and the alternative would be a “major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest.”
Discussing the research, Barnett said: “You have to wonder if the civilization we’ve built in the desert Southwest is sustainable in the future.”
The scientists’ findings, however, were discounted at the time by some water managers. Terry Fulp, regional director for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, said he disagreed with the study’s assumption that climate models were sensitive or refined enough to project regional effects, and the agency’s own studies didn’t project such severe declines.
Some Southern California water officials said people shouldn’t panic over the report, pointing to ongoing water-saving efforts and the past winter’s above-average snowpack. Roger Patterson, an assistant manager of the Metropolitan Water District, was quoted as saying that back-to-back winters like that could largely refill the reservoirs.
In another study in 2009, Barnett and Pierce found that if human-caused climate change continued to make the Southwest drier as projected, the reduced river flow would mean significant shortages. Pierce said shortfalls could be avoided “if the river’s users agree on a way to reduce their average water use.”
But that didn’t happen, at least not on the scale the researchers said was necessary.
Visitors climb rock formations near the Colorado River at Lees Ferry. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
“The scientists have been raising the warning flag for quite a while now,” said Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society.
Pitt said for years she and other conservationists urged water managers to look more at the climate models. And although officials gradually incorporated more climate science in their projections, she said, the institutions that manage the river clearly didn’t embrace the red flags soon enough.
A 2012 study by the Bureau of Reclamation discussed estimates of reduced water supplies due to climate change, but Pitt said the severity of the projections was muted in the report’s summary.
Even as the reservoirs dropped, she said, there were other reasons why representatives of states and water districts resisted change.
“Each state and each water user has an inclination to fight to defend their access to water,” Pitt said, and this drive has weighed against “the need to defend the reliability of the entire system.”
The Colorado River has long been overallocated, with so much water diverted that its delta in Mexico dried up decades ago, leaving only small remnants of its once-vast wetlands.
Boaters cross the Arizona-California border on the Colorado River near Needles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
In studies during the last decade, scientists have homed in on what climate models indicate about the river’s future, finding that roughly half the decline in flow has been due to warmer temperatures; that climate change is driving the “aridification” of the Southwest; that warming could take away more than one-fourth of the average flow by 2050; and that for each additional 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the river’s flow is likely to decrease about 9%.
As the West endured more hot and dry years, the few wet winters failed to produce the sort of rebound that water managers had hoped for. As water kept flowing to growing cities and farmlands producing hay, lettuce and other crops, the reservoirs continued to drop.
But with Lake Mead and Lake Powell now just 27% full and declining toward new lows, the federal government has stepped in and ordered the seven states to come up with plans to cut water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet, the equivalent of roughly 15% to 30% of total annual diversions in the U.S. and Mexico.
Even long before scientists began studying the effects of rising temperatures on the river, various people raised concerns that there wouldn’t be sufficient water — among them John Wesley Powell, leader of the historic 1869 expedition through the Grand Canyon; scientist Eugene Clyde LaRue, whose warnings about insufficient water went unheeded during negotiations that led to the 1922 Colorado River Compact; and the writer Wallace Stegner, who warned in 1985 that the West was growing “beyond our limits” and that “There is just not enough water.”
Visitors to Hoover Dam can see where severe and prolonged drought conditions have exposed the rocky sides of Black Canyon and the intake towers that feed the dam’s power generators. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Some environmental activists have pointed out that in 1954 California water lawyer Northcutt Ely testified in Congress to oppose the construction of Glen Canyon Dam and another proposed dam, saying they were unnecessary, would lead to more losses from evaporation and increase the “overdraft” of the water supply.
John Weisheit, co-founder of the group Living Rivers, said Ely’s overarching goal was watershed sustainability. The concerns Ely raised nearly seven decades ago, he said, have only been compounded by climate change.
Weisheit recalled telling federal officials at a public meeting in 2005 that the reservoirs were going to go empty, “and they laughed at me.”
Weisheit said water managers knew how bad the situation was years ago but have failed to rein in water demands to match the limited supply.
Udall said he has been frustrated that federal agencies continue to use 30 years as a baseline “climate normal,” because data from the late 20th century, which was cooler and wetter, “blinds us to the period we’re in right now.”
Federal officials have been using what they call “stress test” hydrology in their projections in recent years, leaving out earlier 20th century records while considering data going back to 1988. But Udall said this approach has continued to yield some projections that are too rosy, an issue that he said government specialists appear to be working to address.
Valley of the Gods is a scenic sandstone valley in southeastern Utah near the San Juan River, a major tributary of the Colorado River. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Udall said he has looked over charts showing the reservoirs’ declines over the last 23 years and has wondered at what point “should we have been smarter?” That point, he said, was about a decade ago.
“We’re out of time,” he said. The solutions now will have to be “harsh and drastic.”
Looking back at the 2019 deal, the years of negotiations culminated in an agreement that reflected what was politically possible at the time, said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
“No one was willing to take bigger cuts then,” Entsminger said.
Entsminger said that in 2014, when he started leading the agency, he and his staff were focused on climate projections and the risks of low reservoir levels. That was why, in addition to prioritizing conservation, the agency spent $522 million building a new low-level pumping plant and intake at Lake Mead, which would allow Las Vegas to keep accessing water if the reservoir dropped to “dead pool,” a level at which water would no longer pass through Hoover Dam.
In 2015, when the water authority endorsed the project, Entsminger said he and others hoped they would never have to turn on the pumping plant. But they switched it on this year, and now Las Vegas is relying on the deeper intake.
Entsminger said many water managers who came before him had seen full reservoirs in the 1980s and operated under the assumption that a couple of snowy winters could bring a rebound. In hindsight, he said, “clearly, we should have had bigger cuts sooner.”
Now every water supplier needs to consider how to use less, he said.
“This is a tragedy of the commons situation,” he said. “If we don’t all pitch in and make corrections, Lake Mead and Lake Powell could get to dead pool.”
Why hasn’t the Russian economy tanked yet? Putin has been preparing for this moment for years
Yvonne Lau – July 16, 2022
When Russia invaded Ukraine, countries around the world condemned the move, and abruptly cut economic, business and diplomatic ties.
Over 1,000 companies—from American to European and Japanese firms—abandoned their business operations in Russia. Western nations booted Russia from SWIFT—the international payments system that moves money around the world—and froze Russia’s central bank assets, barring it from accessing its $630 billion foreign reserve stash.
Across Russia, signs have emerged that the country is adapting to global economic isolation better than most people anticipated.
Russian businessmen have gobbled up western companies’ operations, like Siberian billionaire Alexander Govor’s purchase of McDonald’s 850 outlets across the country. Russian property developers, like MR Group are opening new shopping malls—simply sans western brands like H&M, Nike and Starbucks.
And despite becoming the world’s most sanctioned nation in the world, Russia’s economy hasn’t tanked. Russian President Vladimir Putin had began preparing the country years ago to endure western financial pressure by shoring up its currency reserves and befriending China. And in a stroke of luck, the Kremlin’s coffers are bursting because oil prices have skyrocketed, stabilizing the ruble.
The economy is staying afloat for now. But as the war drags on, cracks are beginning to show as Russia stares down its worst recession in 30 years, faces a looming EU oil embargo and grapples with a growing number of citizens pushed into poverty.
Customers stand in a queue to get in the Russian version of a former McDonald’s restaurant next day after its opening ceremony in Moscow on June 13, 2022. Former McDonald’s restaurants in Russia have been renamed “Vkusno i tochka” (“Delicious. Full Stop”), the new owner said ahead of their grand re-opening .
Stockpiling and rallies
After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Putin began preparing the country’s economy to endure western sanctions. He stockpiled foreign currencies, reduced Russia’s dollar dependency and pivoted to a stronger partnership with China.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of this year, it did so with large currency reserves and minimal public debt.
In the weeks following the invasion, western nations pummelled Russia with harsh, unprecedented sanctions, restricting Russia’s access to the global financial system. In response, Russia barred citizens from transferring money to bank accounts abroad to prevent capital outflow, while the central bank imposed a 20% emergency interest rate hike as the ruble tumbled to record lows. Those “timely and strong” moves allowed the country to stave off a “full scale financial crisis,” Laura Solanko, senior advisor at The Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies in Transition (BOFIT), an organization that researches emerging economies, told Fortune.
Such measures “would have been very difficult to implement in a democracy, but [feasible] in an autocracy [where] state-owned companies play a larger role,” she says.
The widespread notion that the Russian economy would collapse from sanctions in a few short months was “as unrealistic as Russia’s own blitzkrieg plan to conquer Ukraine” in mere days, because of the government’s preparations to ensure a financially stable economy, Russian political scientist Ilya Matveev told Fortune.
But Russia hasn’t just played a good game of economic defense. Its invasion of Ukraine destabilized the global oil market, raising prices, which provided it with an incredible source of funding.
Petrodollars
Since Feb. 24, petrodollars from energy sales have filled the Kremlin’s coffers and offered it an economic lifeline.
In the first 100 days of the war, Russia earned a record $94 billion from fossil fuel sales, despite selling its crude at a 30% discount and exporting lower volumes, according to analysis from Switzerland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). In May alone, Russia raked in $20 billion from energy sales, alone, up 11% from April.
Russia’s energy revenue is “unprecedented, because prices are unprecedented,” said CREA analyst Lauri Myllyvirta. From January to May this year, the country’s energy revenue grew 50%, says the International Energy Agency (IEA). Russia’s current account surplus—which measures a country’s exports against its imports—reached nearly $139 billion in the first six months of 2022, helped by its profits from energy and commodity exports, coupled with a collapse in imports due to sanctions.
Those petrodollars also powered the ruble’s remarkable turnaround. Russia’s currency is the best-performing currency in the world this year. The ruble’s value plunged to less than one cent in March. But since January, it has surged 45% against the dollar. As of July 12, one U.S. dollar is worth 58.40 rubles. The ruble’s rally, in turn, has helped tame Russian inflation to its lowest level since February. In June, Russia’s consumer prices grew 15.9% year over year, compared to 17.1% in May and 17.8% in April, according to Russian government data.
The “bottom line” is that Russia’s oil and gas revenues haven’t been dented at all, allowing the government to keep funding the war and providing financial support for citizens, Peter Rutland, a Russia-focused professor of government at Wesleyan University, told Fortune.
“In the short run, the deck is stacked in favor of Russia,” he says.
Turbulence ahead
So far, Russia has managed to soften the blow to its economy and for its citizens. But its strong policy moves and growing oil revenues mask the ominous economic future that’s brewing just below the surface.
The ruble’s stunning turnaround is an artificial indicator that Russia’s economy is faring well, Sergei Guriev, scientific director of Sciences Po’s economics program and a research fellow at London-based think tank the Center for Economic Policy Research, told Fortune. Normally, a rising currency reflects the strengthened competitiveness of a country’s exports. But the main driver of the ruble’s strength is the collapse of Russian imports, which have plunged to 20-year lows, and drastically reduced its demand for dollars, Guriev says. The strong ruble doesn’t reflect Russia’s economic strength, but is a “symptom of something that’s very bad” for the nation, he says.
And behind the façade of a stabilizing economy, ordinary Russians are bearing the brunt of the sanctions. Russians’ real wages are expected to drop almost 6% this year, and their real disposable incomes set for a 7.5% decline, according to Russian bank VEB. Putin has authorized 10% hikes for pension incomes and minimum wages that went into effect last month. But even these boosts won’t stop Russians’ real wages, incomes and pensions from deteriorating, VEB said.
Although inflation is currently rising less rapidly than it was, double-digit inflation is set to continue in a country where 21 million people—nearly 15% of the national population—live below the poverty line, a number that has surged since the war began.
“Already-poor [Russians] will get poorer,” Matveev says. Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin aide, predicts that the number of Russians living in poverty will likely double, or even triple, as the war progresses, he told the BBC.
And four months into the war, Russian industries are suffering from a severe tech supply crunch.
Russia has replaced western goods with smartphones from China, refrigerators from Uzbekistan and 5G equipment from Israel and India since the war started. Still, there are big gaps that not even China—Russia’s largest trading partner—will be able to fill.
Sanctions have restricted western companies from supplying the country with chips, electrical equipment and other critical hardware needed to produce everything from kitchen appliances, cars, computers, data servers and military equipment. Entire supply routes for “[data] servers to computers to iPhones—everything—is gone,” one western chip executive told the FT.
China holds only 4% of the global semiconductor share and can’t make up the stymied supply from the world’s biggest chipmakers in the U.S. and Taiwan, Guriev says. Chinese firms are also holding back over concerns of triggering secondary sanctions from the west. The collapse of high-tech imports means that the Russian economy will undergo a “regressive transformation,” Matveev says. He notes that while the world progresses, Russia will be relegated to trying to reach its pre-war economic state, thus its technological and economic gap with the rest of the globe will widen over time.
Russia “hasn’t seen the worst yet,” even as its economy has undergone some initial shocks, Matveev says. “Unemployment will [increase] and shortages [of goods and parts] and price increases will continue,” he says.
Other experts agree. The EU’s sixth sanctions package against Russia, which will ban Russian seaborne crude by December and petroleum products by next February—90% of the bloc’s Russian oil imports—will be a major blow to the Kremlin if it’s implemented properly. The bloc accounted for 61% of Russia’s fossil fuel revenues from January to May this year. If the embargo is seriously enforced, Putin “won’t have enough money to recruit soldiers,” let alone prop up its citizens and industries, Guriev says.
Russia’s central bank expects an 8 to 10% gross domestic product (GDP) decline this year, compared to a pre-war growth forecast of 2%. That figure is a “substantial decline largely caused by western sanctions,” Solanko says.
Russia’s economic squeeze will come in the long run as the country deindustrializes, faces growing unemployment and continued stagflation and a run on goods, Rutland says.
In short, Russia is staring down its worst recession in 30 years, Guriev says.
Russia’s economic crises in 2009, 2014 and 2020 involved steep drops and fast recoveries. But experts agree that Russia won’t experience a speedy economic reboot his time around. Russia is facing a future of stagnation for years, perhaps even decades, Matveev says.
As Solanko notes, Russia is “isolating itself and decoupling from the global economy. This time, the fast recovery won’t come.”
U.S. cannot fulfill climate change pledges if Manchin won’t vote for clean energy, experts say
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – July 15, 2022
If Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., will not vote for a budget reconciliation bill that includes the measures to reduce climate change in the version passed by the House of Representatives last year — as the Washington Post reported Thursday night that he would not — it virtually guarantees that the United States will fail to meet its international commitments to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, experts say.
As part of his efforts to galvanize a strong global agreement to avert catastrophic climate change by staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) in Glasgow, Scotland, last year, President Biden pledged that the U.S. would reduce by at least half its emissions from a 2005 baseline by 2030. Due to the energy sector’s reduction in coal use, the nation is already almost halfway to that goal, with emissions having dropped by about one-fifth since 2005. But getting the rest of the way there is impossible without legislation that hastens the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, according to modeling by economists, scientists and policy wonks.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin with Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, both of West Virginia. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
“This appears to be the final installment in the collapse of Democratic hopes for a major legislative package on climate for the 117th Congress,” Barry Rabe, a professor of environmental policy and public policy at the University of Michigan, told Yahoo News in an email about Manchin’s reported stance. “Despite bold initial promises, Congress has once again failed to deliver on a climate bill. This clearly imperils any prospects to honor President Biden’s emission reduction pledge and further challenges American credibility in global climate deliberations.”
On Thursday, the Rhodium Group, a research and data analytics firm specializing in energy and the environment, issued a study showing that the U.S. is on pace to reduce emissions 24% to 35% below 2005 levels by 2030. Absent significant new policies, in other words, the best-case scenario is that the U.S. gets 70% of the way towards Biden’s goal of cutting emissions in half, and it is just as likely to get halfway to the goal.
Manchin had previously signaled support for provisions in the budget bill, formerly known as Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, that would subsidize the deployment of clean energy and electric vehicles. Democrats wanted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years on tax credits for purchases such as rooftop solar panels, electric cars and tax credits on incentives for projects such as advanced battery storage and cleaning up industrial processes. Congressional Democrats and Biden had already agreed to drop other climate provisions, such as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would have provided incentives for electric utilities that switched to clean energy sources such as wind and solar power, at Manchin’s request.
Solar panels on a rooftop in Los Angeles. (Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)
Previous studies by organizations such as the World Resources Institute (WRI), a leading global environmental think tank, had found that the U.S. could meet Biden’s emissions target, just barely, with the package of climate provisions Manchin had indicated he could support, possibly in exchange for approval of more fossil fuel infrastructure projects.
“Failure to enact a climate-smart budget package would be a devastating setback to achieving the United States’ pledge to cut emissions in half by 2030,” said Dan Lashof, director of WRI United States, in a statement on Friday. “Research shows that strong financial investments, like those under consideration in the budget reconciliation package, are essential for the U.S. to achieve that timeline.”
But on Thursday evening the Washington Post reported that Manchin had told Democratic leaders he would not vote for a bill that includes spending on climate change or tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations to pay for it. “Senator Manchin believes it’s time for leaders to put political agendas aside, reevaluate and adjust to the economic realities the country faces to avoid taking steps that add fuel to the inflation fire,” said Manchin’s spokesperson Sam Runyon.
On Friday morning, the West Virginia Democrat told a local radio station in his home state that he is open to backing the climate change policies if inflation eases next month. “I said, ‘Chuck, can we just wait until the inflation figures come out in July … and then make a decision what we can do and how much we can do?’” Manchin said, referring to a conversation he had with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “[Schumer] took that as a no, I guess, and came out with this big thing last night. And I don’t know why they did that. I guess to try to put pressure on me, but they’ve been doing that for over a year now. It doesn’t make any sense at all. As far as I’m concerned, I want climate, I want an energy policy.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. (Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images)
If Manchin doesn’t provide his crucial vote, however, and Republicans gain control of at least one chamber of Congress in November’s midterm elections, there is no hope for legislation to address climate change. And without legislation, the federal government has limited tools at its disposal to reduce emissions. Only Congress can tax and spend. And contrary to Manchin’s reasoning about inflation, a 2021 study by the Rhodium Group found that American households would save an average of about $500 per year on energy bills if the climate package were passed.
“We need to make it more affordable for everyday Americans to get off of fossil fuels,” Leah Stokes, a political scientist who specializes in environmental policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Yahoo News. “Fossil fuels are expensive, they are driving inflation. The bill would have been really great for everyday Americans’ pocketbooks. It would have helped them close the gaps, so that they could afford an electric vehicle, so that they could afford an electric heat pump. There were all these investments that were going to make it easier for utilities to build wind and solar, that were going to make it easier to retire dirty, expensive fossil fuel plants. It really was about helping to invest in climate solutions, so that we can move at a faster pace.”
Using executive authority under existing laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency can require stronger pollution controls and the Department of Interior can restrict fossil fuel development on federal land, but those moves — assuming they survive the inevitable legal challenges from the fossil fuel industry — will only reduce emissions at the margins.
President Biden speaking in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Wednesday. (Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“One of the tragedies of the past 18 months is that the Biden administration has been wary of upsetting these delicate negotiations with Senator Manchin and so they have held back on using the full force of their executive authority,” Stokes said. “That’s not the case going forward, the Biden administration will be acting. It will be much more aggressive on everything from Clean Air Act regulations to limiting fossil fuel development. There’s no reason to delay anymore. So we could be in a slightly better place, if and when the Biden administration kicks into high gear on climate change.
“But getting to the goal is difficult,” she added. “And there is modeling that has estimated what does it mean if the Biden administration uses all the regulations it can and it tends to be, it gets us like five percentage points closer to the goal. So if we’re at 35%, it gets us to 40%, optimistically.”
“We are not currently on track to meeting our international climate commitments or our environmental justice commitments,” Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group, told Yahoo News. “A major investment was necessary over the next decade to supercharge our transition to clean energy and bring down the cost of wind and solar and ramp up renewable energy production. Without that major investment, it’s hard to see how we meet our commitments.”
FILE PHOTO: U.S. military forces fire a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rocket during the annual Philippines-US live fire amphibious landing exercise (PHIBLEX) at Crow Valley in Capas, Tarlac province, north of Manila
KYIV (Reuters) – Ukrainian rocket strikes have destroyed more than 30 Russian military logistics centres in recent weeks and significantly reduced Russia’s attacking potential, Ukraine’s defence ministry spokesperson said on Friday.
The official, Oleksandr Motuzianyk, singled out the role played by U.S.-produced HIMARS rocket systems, one of several types of long-range weapon supplied by the West to help Ukraine fight back against Russia.
“In the last weeks, over 30 of the enemy’s military logistical facilities have been destroyed, as a result of which the attacking potential of Russian forces has been significantly reduced,” Motuzianyk said on national television.
Motuzianyk told Reuters in separate comments that the 30 targets were destroyed by multiple launch rocket systems, including HIMARS.
If confirmed, the comments would suggest that Western weapons are having an impact on the battlefield and could indicate a shift in the war’s dynamic after nearly five months.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, has captured a chunk of territory in southern Ukraine and used its artillery supremacy in the east to make gradual territorial gains, eventually capturing Luhansk region.
A top Ukrainian general said on Thursday that Russia had not taken a “single metre” of land in the last week and that Ukrainian strikes were disrupting Russian supply lines, forcing Moscow to keep its ammunition further back from the front line. Reuters was not able to immediately confirm battlefield reports.
HIMARS have a longer range and are more precise than Ukraine’s Soviet-era artillery, allowing Ukrainian forces to hit Russian targets that were previously unreachable.
On Friday, Ukraine’s defence minister said Kyiv had taken receipt of a first consignment of M270 multiple rocket launch systems, without specifying which country provided them.
Russia on Thursday criticised the United States and Britain for helping train Ukraine’s armed forces, calling it part of NATO’s “hybrid warfare” against Moscow. It said Washington was providing Ukraine with instructors to help use HIMARS.
Kyiv said this week that its forces carried out strikes on Russian military infrastructure in a city that lies deep in Russian-occupied territory in southern Ukraine.
Motuzianyk also said that only 30% of Russian strikes were hitting military targets, with the rest landing on civilian sites. That assertion could not be verified by Reuters. Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians in what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Max Hunder; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
New report details Russian torture of Ukrainian civilians
Paulina Smolinski – July 15, 2022
FILE – Men wearing protective gear carry a dead body during the exhumation of killed civilians in Bucha, outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, April 8, 2022. / Credit: Efrem Lukatsky / AP
Washington — An international investigation has found grim new evidence of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, identifying cases of direct targeting of civilians, torture, rape and forced deportations.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a regional security organization, issued a report Thursday detailing “clear patterns of serious violations of international humanitarian law” committed mainly by the Russian army.
The report describes in vivid detail the torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops.
In a summer camp in Bucha, just outside Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv that was occupied for over two weeks by Russian forces, the investigators said they found a series of torture chambers.
“In Zabuchchya, a village in the Bucha district, 18 mutilated bodies of murdered men, women, and children were discovered in a basement: some had their ears cut off, while others had their teeth pulled out,” according to the report.
Speaking Thursday in Vienna, U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE Michael Carpenter described a Russian missile attack on the central city of Vinnytsia that killed more than 20 people, including 3 children, as “disgusting,” but “a reality that we contend with each and every day.”
Ukrainian emergency services showed images of a child’s dead body lying on the ground next to a play stroller she had been pushing down the road with her mother when the missiles struck.
In an interview with CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov called the strike the latest proof that his country is at war with “a state of terrorists.”
“They’re using that weapon against civilian people, against the civilian facilities, against the hospitals… against the kindergartens,” he said.
The OSCE report says that as Russia is increasingly unable to muster enough of its own forces, it has recently begun resorting to conscripting Ukrainian men between the ages 18-65 from territory it occupies and sending them straight to the front lines, with little to no training.
“The escalation, and rising casualty rates, have begun to spark anger even among pro-Russian communities. Several videos posted online purportedly show the wives of Donetsk and Luhansk conscripts demanding assistance for their husbands and asking why men with no military background are being sent to fight,” according to the report.
Incidences of gender-based violence have remained prevalent throughout the war, the report states. Natalia Karbowska, co-founder and director of strategic development for the Ukrainian Women’s Fund, suggested during a June U.N. Security Council briefing that “the Russian Federation is using sexual violence and rape as instruments of terror to control civilians.”
In one instance, 25 girls aged 14 to 24 were allegedly kept in a basement in Bucha where they were gang-raped by Russian troops. Nine of the girls became pregnant, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights.
Russian President Vladimir Putin bestowed the honorary title of “guard” on the military unit accused of war crimes in Bucha, according to a Russian presidential decree.
In a Facebook post, the Russian Embassy in the U.S. dismissed the report as an attempt by Washington “to vilify the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” which it suggested was due to “dissatisfaction with the success of a special military operation.” The Putin regime has consistently referred to the invasion of Ukraine as a “military operation.” Referring to it as a war can land Russians in prison.
The OSCE report also discusses “filtration centers,” set up by Russia’s occupying forces, where Ukrainian civilians “are separated from others and often simply disappear.”
The report says detained individuals are handed over to authorities in the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where some are sentenced to death.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for an immediate end to Russia’s “filtration” operations and for the release of detained Ukrainian civilians. Russian authorities have deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents, according to the Biden administration.
“The unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and is a war crime,” Blinken said in a statement Wednesday. “Russian authorities must release those detained and allow Ukrainian citizens forcibly removed or coerced into leaving their country the ability to promptly and safely return home.”
Producers of fries refusing to supply to Russia, McDonald’s successor says
July 15, 2022
(This content was produced in Russia, where the law restricts coverage of Russian military operations in Ukraine.)
MOSCOW (Reuters) – The head of the company now running the former McDonald’s Corp chain of restaurants in Russia told RBC TV that producers of French fries are refusing to supply to the country and warned that attempts to increase domestic processing are fraught with difficulties.
McDonald’s quit Russia after a Western backlash against Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine, which included a barrage of economic sanctions, and sold all the restaurants it owned to a local licensee in May.
Restaurants began opening under the new name Vkusno & tochka, or “Tasty and that’s it”, on June 12. CEO Oleg Paroev told Reuters the chain had sold almost 120,000 burgers on opening day.
The new ownership was keen to stress that high quality standards would be maintained or even bettered, and that consumers would not notice much difference. It has since been forced to admit that it is facing a shortage of French fries until autumn, blaming a poor harvest in Russia and supply chain woes.
“What has happened now is that due to well known events many foreign companies, I would even say all major producers of fries, have refused to deliver this product to Russia,” Paroev told RBC TV, a business channel, late on Thursday.
Paroev said that factories in both “friendly” and “unfriendly” countries that produce fries belong to five or six major companies, whose headquarters are based in unfriendly nations and which have therefore refused to supply to Russia.
Moscow deems countries that have imposed sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine as “unfriendly”.
Paroev said there was a shortage in Russia’s harvest this year of the specific potatoes needed for French fries and that other issues could arise, with only a few enterprises capable of processing potatoes for French fries in Russia.
Ukrainian forces could wipe out all of ‘exhausted’ Russian troops’ territorial gains, retired US general says
Jake Epstein – July 14, 2022
Soldiers of Ukraine’s special operations unit sit in the car after combat operation on a forest road on the Russian troops’ potential way in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, late Tuesday, June 14, 2022.AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
A retired US general told Insider that Ukraine could push Russian troops back to pre-war borders.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges said Ukraine’s ability to do so continues to ride on Western support.
He said Russian forces are “exhausted” and “don’t have much else they can do right now.”
Ukraine could push Russian forces back to its pre-war borders by 2023 — wiping out its territorial gains — because President Vladimir Putin’s troops are “exhausted,” a retired US general said on Thursday.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the US Army in Europe, told Insider that Ukraine’s ability to push Russian troops back to the existing borders depends on continued Western support through sanctions and weapons deliveries.
“The Russians are exhausted,” Hodges said. “They don’t have much else they can do right now.”
He added that much of Putin’s military is already committed to the war, but Russia has had little territorial success to show for its efforts after 20 weeks of war.
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Hodges said the “full weight” of Western support is just now beginning to take shape with the delivery of long-range rocket systems — weapons Ukraine has begged for from the US and its allies for weeks.
He added that one key to Ukraine’s success will be knocking out Russia’s “only advantage:” Putin’s arsenal of artillery and rockets.
“It looks to me that wherever the Russians do not have overwhelming firepower advantage, then the Ukrainians win one hundred times out of a hundred,” Hodges said. “So, providing the Ukrainian’s ability to strike Russian artillery, Russian rockets, their ammunition storage, and command posts, that’s what destroys and disrupts the one thing that the Russians have that is to their advantage.”
Ukraine also maintains a significant advantage in morale, Hodges said, while Russian troops are bogged down by a lack of resources and capabilities — preventing them from making any “meaningful progress” on the battlefield.
Still, Russia has seen some incremental progress in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where the conflict has emerged as a deadly and slow-moving campaign of artillery exchanges after Putin’s troops failed to capture the capital city Kyiv.
Hodges said Russian troops are willing to keep fighting a “war of attrition” because they have “nothing else they can do,” and Putin could drag the conflict through the end of the year with the hopes that the West loses its interest in supporting Ukraine because of domestic issues like gas prices or inflation.
In a war of attrition, Hodges said, Russia needs unlimited time, ammunition, and personnel. They appear to have enough ammunition, he said, while UK intelligence said on Monday that a troop shortage may force the Kremlin to recruit from prisons.
But, Hodges said, “I do think they’re on the clock a little bit. If the West sticks together through this year then I think it will be over.”
Throughout the war, many Western countries have joined in slapping a slew of sanctions on Russia and providing Ukraine with requested weapons. In turn, Putin has tried to threaten and apply pressure on the West for its widespread support of Ukraine.
The war has also pushed Western countries to unite in historic ways. Last month, the European Union accepted Ukraine as a candidate country to join the bloc, while NATO invited Finland and Sweden into the alliance in a show of defiance against Putin.
“If we don’t stick together, if we don’t deliver what we said we would, then I think the Russians will happily settle for a long war, where they just continue intruding away and doing all they can to destroy Ukraine as a country, and destroy its economy, and destroy the idea of Ukraine as a state,” Hodges said.
‘We Will Kill Them Again’: As Russia Advances, Ukrainians Dig In
KimberlyDozier – July 14, 2022
TOPSHOT-UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CONFLICT – Credit: Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty Images
KYIV—Leaning back from the picnic table, Den drowns his cigarette in a murky cup of water cut from the bottom of a plastic bottle and grimaces as I press him on what he and his fellow volunteers did with suspected Russian soldiers they captured during the opening days of the war.
How did you spot them? He shrugs and lights another cigarette. He says he doesn’t want the Russians to know what to fix.
Then he does offer one tale: a Russian who came to a hospital he and his fellow volunteers were guarding, who didn’t want to take his shirt off. They removed it for him, revealing that the man’s shoulders were bruised in the shape of a flak jacket, something no one would take off voluntarily in a city being rocked by explosions and gunfire — unless it revealed something incriminating, like Russian military insignia.
What happened then? Den laughs uncomfortably and looks down. He mumbles something in Ukrainian, and my fixer, a volunteer battlefield medic who has known Den for years, says the Russians were handed over to Ukrainian special forces. And then what? Another shrug.
“Den” is not his real name. The Kyiv native is on a three-day furlough from his Territorial Defense Force duties to visit his family. Blondish, medium height, with the creased face of fatherhood and middle age, he’s recounting how he volunteered to defend Kyiv on the first day of the Russian invasion, together with his grown sons.
He’s still at it, pulling security in the Kyiv suburb of Hostomel, near the war-shattered airport. He hadn’t wanted to be interviewed, saying he’s no hero. He just picked up a gun and volunteered to fight, as did tens of thousands in the capital alone — a sight, he says, that brought tears to his eyes, as men and some women, young and old, poured into Kyiv’s main sports stadium in the hours after Russia invaded, asking for a gun to defend their home.
Den wants to remain anonymous, because he believes the Russians will be back, and he will have to fight them again. Most Ukrainians I spoke to agree with him, gut-punched by the recent loss of Luhansk, half of the eastern territory Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly set his sights on. They once thought Putin would never dare invade. Now, they believe he will never stop. And while they are thankful for foreign military aid, I heard time and again that it’s just enough to keep them going, but not enough to drive Moscow out. War is the past, present, and future for the Ukrainians, and a resigned fatalism has swept across the nation. They don’t want to sound ungrateful, or weak. They vacillate, just like their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, from bravado to panicked warnings to stoic forbearance.
So, the brutal battle grinds on. U.S. officials mutter that Ukraine is asking for too much aid, or enough to threaten Russia itself, which the Biden administration fears could enable Ukraine to attack Russia proper and trigger Putin to go nuclear. The Ukrainian lawmakers laugh openly when I ask them if they would use those weapons to seize Russian territory. We just want our land back, they say, describing Biden as forcing them to fight with hands tied behind their backs.
Ukrainians bristle at what they consider not-so-veiled accusations of asking for handouts in anonymous quotes that they read in U.S. and European media, with their Defense Ministry trumpeting that it intends to amass a million-strong army to retake its lost territory. But the Ukrainian people also know that most of their troops fighting Russia are barely trained volunteers, with some basic marksmanship and first-aid schooling, if they are lucky. Not that training matters when Russia is still firing a fusillade of artillery, 10 times as much as the Ukrainians, and dozens are being killed, and hundreds wounded daily. Yuriy Sak, adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister, says the Russians are firing an average of 50,000 rounds of artillery a day. “And we are able to respond with five to six thousand,” he says.
And it’s working. Witness the fall of the eastern cities of Severodonetsk and then Lysychansk, with Ukraine in retreat, though Sak gamely insists that was all part of the plan. Though “outnumbered and outgunned … we have been able to wear down Russians around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, which means that they are kind of running low,” on both manpower and resources, and now need to pause to resupply. Sak, a former crisis-comms executive who used to be in business with now-Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, is a prime example of that evolving Ukrainian psyche. He tells me in one call that he is worried that the West isn’t providing Ukraine enough, then tries to reassure me in the next call that losing key territory is part of some cunning plan to exhaust Russia and eventually take all the land back. It doesn’t wash. It makes me wonder if he is trying to convince me, or himself.
Children play at a playground near a residential area destroyed by Russian shelling in the city of Borodyanka, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, on July 7, 2022. – Credit: Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Still, it’s easy to pretend otherwise on this late spring day, sitting with Den at a lakeside picnic table in the forests of Holosiivskyi Park, on Kyiv Day, when whole families don their Sunday best to promenade down the capital’s wide picture-perfect avenues, past Victorian icing-topped buildings, and snap selfies at the Dnipro River overlook.
War looks like an afterthought here, in the occasional pile of sandbags still blocking a government building’s windows, or the rusted iron tank traps that multiply in number as you get closer to Zelensky’s offices, as if some gargantuan kids got distracted and ran off, leaving their game of jacks half-played.
And there’s the raging popularity of camouflage, worn as patterned tights, or across a Chanel-like handbag, or anything even resembling a military uniform, a new wartime chic at the city’s numerous cafés and shisha pubs.
Air-raid sirens still go off daily, but despite deadly impacts, few heed them. I saw only one couple leave their table to seek shelter, returning a few minutes later, before their Georgian wine could get warm or their melted-cheese-and-egg bread congealed. It’s partly the government’s fault, as it discourages reporting where Russian projectiles land, lest that sharpens Moscow’s aim. But chosen ignorance is also bliss, a psychological survival tool, when any moment could end you.
The war has also fallen out of the top headlines, even as Finland and Sweden join NATO, and President Biden promises to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” The media is doing what it does with wars, by moving on to the next horror: a Texas school shooting; the overturning of Roe vs. Wade; and a gunman opening fire on a July 4th parade.
Moscow shows no such distraction, its brutal war machine stumbling into high gear. Billions in sanctions may be denting its high-tech weapons supply. But you don’t need those if you don’t care what you hit. Moscow has plenty of the old “Kill ’em all” Soviet-era gear.
And the killing has been plague-strength. Ukrainian former special operator turned military adviser Oleksandr Biletskyi tells me up to 200 troops are killed a day, and sometimes double that are wounded, averaging roughly 1,000 a week taken out of the fight. Ukraine is trying to offset those losses, thanks to volunteers like Den, who have swelled the ranks from 250,000 up to a million, if the government’s recent claims are to be believed. But Ukraine’s prewar population was 44 million, millions of those now displaced. Russia’s is 144 million or so. All Putin has to do is mobilize his whole country by declaring a war. Many who say he can’t or won’t also predicted he’d never invade.
“The Russians tried to eat the whole elephant,” a stressed-out senior Ukrainian security adviser tells me between medicating shots of pepper vodka. “Now, they’re just eating it piece by piece.” In eight to 10 months, they’ll be back, he says, knocking at Kyiv’s gates again.
Listen to the man himself. Putin warned on July 7 that “we haven’t even yet started anything in earnest” in Ukraine, adding a dare to anyone who hopes to defeat Russia on the battlefield: “Let them try.” And Putin has compared his Ukraine invasion to Peter the Great’s conquest of Sweden, saying it’s his “destiny” to recapture the land seized by the 18th-century emperor. He even mentioned the now-Estonian city Narva, sending that small Baltic country into a tizzy.
“I think Putin’s aim is 1) to render Ukraine non-viable — crippled, uninvestable, in political social and economic torment, and 2) to show that the West doesn’t have the willpower to resist him,” says Edward Lucas, of the Center for European Policy Analysis. He and I had just pulsed Baltic opinion at Estonia’s Lennart Meri security conference, where most attendees seem to believe Estonia and its neighbor Lithuania would be next on the menu, if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine. “We have/had a choice of confronting Putin with a functioning 40-million-strong country on our side or waiting until Ukraine is defeated and doing it later in the Baltic,” Lucas says.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines agrees that Moscow still wants to swallow Ukraine; she just doesn’t think Moscow can, calling it a “disconnect” between Putin’s ambitions and his military’s abilities.
Ukrainian officials appreciate that vote of confidence, and the nearly $55 billion in promised U.S. aid, including more than $7 billion in security assistance the U.S. has partly delivered since Russian forces invaded on Feb. 24. Despite the latest infusions of aid, Sak tells me, “I’m grateful, but we need more.” And faster. “Why not start training Ukrainian pilots how to fly advanced jets right now,” because within a few months, the West is finally going to realize Ukraine needs them to survive, he asks.
Ukrainian officials also gripe privately that the West, the Pentagon especially, takes a “father knows best” attitude to Ukraine’s requests, as in “we know better than you what you need to win this war.” For instance, giving them a dozen long-range artillery systems, called HIMARS for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, when they say they could use at least twice that or more to turn the battle.
It’s a question that makes U.S. officials uncomfortable, because as one senior U.S. official tells me, the slow-rolling has come from a Biden White House still concerned that Kyiv might antagonize Moscow if it does too well on the battlefield. “Not getting enough to turn the tide is accurate, and a big debate within the administration,” and with U.S. allies, the official says. The Pentagon is also concerned it will so drain its stocks feeding the Ukraine war effort that it might be less well-prepared to defend U.S. territory. “But we are moving in a better direction,” the official insists.
A State Department spokesman, speaking anonymously, would only offer a banal “We have moved quickly to send Ukraine a significant amount of weaponry and ammunition so it can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
In Kyiv, what they see as their Western allies’ delayed absorption of battlefield realities is measured in the lives of people they know lost forever, and in territory lost that will be even harder to win back, as the defender almost always has the advantage.
And Ukraine can’t train enough people fast enough to keep up with Russia’s onslaught. Officials welcome a new British initiative to train up to 10,000 soldiers every four months, which Sak tells me is already underway. But that’s 4,000 short of the numbers they are losing every four months, by Biletskyi’s count. And the Ukrainian military’s own training remains slapdash and uneven, multiple officials and military trainers tell me, in part because commanders need troops as fast as they can get them for the front.
And despite Zelensky’s early attempts at rooting out Ukraine’s infamous corruption, it’s still a “telephone society” i.e., you only get things done if you know the right person. Or if you get the right piece of paper to, say, leave the country if you’re a male of “conscription age” between 18 to 60.
At least two men were removed from my train by Ukrainian border guards before we crossed into Poland — a student in his twenties, and a fortyish guy in a wheelchair with visibly wasted legs — apparently for not having the right pieces of paper proving they’d been released from military service. They were left at an empty station platform just inside Ukraine. That the border guards felt they couldn’t allow at least the guy in the wheelchair to pass spoke volumes, to either their commitment to bureaucracy, or their belief that they need every last man to survive the Russian assault. The border-guard agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
This was supposed to be a good news story. At the start of the war, I’d heard how Ukraine had overhauled its military, chastened after Moscow’s near-bloodless seizure of Crimea in 2014. Aided and advised mainly by the U.S., U.K., Canada, Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Ukrainians made changes that meant their troops in 2022 were better led, provisioned, and fed than their Russian counterparts. Or so the common wisdom went, as Russian forces turned tail and exited western Ukraine in mid-May.
Among the changes I was told by senior U.S., European, Baltic, and Ukrainian officials that were made: They retired most Soviet-trained, old-school-style generals who did not play well, or share information well, with others. They created a non-commissioned officer corps, sergeants who actually take care of the troops, instead of bullying and beating them, as per traditional Russian, and past Ukrainian practice. They mostly fixed their broken logistics delivery system. Better, but not totally fixed, a Kyiv-based military official explains.
Perhaps most important of all, Ukraine’s special-operations troops learned to fight less like U.S. Army Rangers assault troops, punching through enemy lines in a battle charge, and more like Green Berets, who practice the dark art of unconventional warfare, usually behind enemy lines. Ukrainian special operators worked with volunteers like Den, organizing semi-trained locals into lethal squads to secure neighborhoods, gather intelligence, and sometimes protect elite units, as Den’s crew did for a drone reconnaissance team. Den would saunter into the nearest town to get supplies for the drone operators, passing Russian troops who were none the wiser.
Special operators worked with locals that trapped and decimated the infamous 40-mile Russian convoy headed for Kyiv back in March. One group worked to open dams, turning fields into a muddy quagmire that Russian tanks dared not enter. Armed drones struck the flood-trapped convoy, while commandos hit with tank-killing rockets, usually under cover of dark, leaving the ribbon of surviving Russian troops trapped between smoking wrecks, breathing in the stench of their immolated comrades.
It’s called an asymmetric attack — using inferior numbers with superior local knowledge to harass, kill, maim, and psych out one’s opponent. Such devastating trickery was turned high art by the CIA’s precursor, the World War II era Office of Strategic Services. The OSS’s special-operations branch parachuted “Jedburgh” teams into France in 1944, to work with the French resistance and prepare the way for the Normandy landings.
Ukraine’s special-operations forces have been at work the same way, current and former officials inside Ukraine tell me. They point to the near killing of a senior city official who’d been cooperating with the Russians in occupied Melitopol by a mysterious explosion. “Maybe he just lit a cigarette too close to the stove gas,” a lawmaker smirks at me, refusing to confirm or deny the operation. Even the Pentagon, normally reluctant to comment on actions behind Russian lines, confirmed “growing indications of resistance against the Russian occupation,” including “assassinations of local Russian officials,” a senior U.S. defense official said.
A Ukrainian soldier is in position during heavy fighting on the front line in Severodonetsk, in the Luhansk region, on June 8, 2022. – Credit: Oleksandr Ratushniak/AP
Ukraine is defending itself as it has for centuries, environmental scientist Alex Zakletsky tells me, over a sadly dwindling supply of Crimean tea while sitting outside at Cheburek.UA, one of the few restaurants to stay open throughout the conflict, winning a loyal military, and volunteer, following. “We knew we’d have to save Ukraine ourselves,” because the army is too small to defeat the Russians, and the government is too corrupt, with many senior officials in Russia’s pocket, he says, the beret atop his mismatched camouflage “uniform” striking a revolutionary note.
So, when a fellow scientist offered Zakletsky a detailed topographical map of then-Russian-occupied Chernobyl, he didn’t give it to just anyone. He reached out to a friend’s spouse, high up in the security services — the only person he could think of to trust with such sensitive information, gleaned from tracking wolf packs that thrive in Chernobyl’s irradiated forests. He was led to believe it was very useful in taking back Chernobyl, but he refuses to provide more details, as the troops might have to use whatever they found in those maps to fight Russia on the same ground.
Ukrainians are willing, but winning also takes skill — at least some skill. “I just got asked to train 1,500 guys to go behind enemy lines, in roughly a week,” retired U.S. special operations Marine Col. Andrew Milburn tells me, over omelets at the ironically named Bimbo Café. That’s the kind of skill the U.S. would take months if not years to impart.
White-haired and occasionally limping from an old rugby injury, Milburn has his black retriever-like Ukrainian rescue dog in tow, interjecting excited barks as Milburn relates how his firm, the Mozart Group, is regularly asked to do what he considers impossible: turn out highly skilled troops in the time it would normally take to teach how to simply load and fire a weapon safely. And his funding, from international donations, is due to run out in September, and he can’t seem to convince the Ukrainian government that he can help, or that they need it.
A senior European-based special operator who has advised the Ukrainians for years insists they do have their own training programs, but they’re not always well-organized or well-attended. And the soldiers-turned-trainers hate staying in the rear, away from the fight. It makes them feel like cowards.
“We still have too many heroes,” former Ukrainian special operator Biletskyi tells me. He’s seen how NATO troops work, and he says the disorganized training, for volunteers and regular troops, is just one of the many military systems that’s being exposed as subpar as the war stretches on.
And when Ukrainians see things going wrong, they step up to fix it, hence what Biletskyi, Milburn, and the senior special-operations official all call the “hero” syndrome: Individuals feel they must step up and save the day.
“We have shown that … even people with basic training are able to achieve success because they are fighting for their land,” counters Defense spokesman Sak. “But if you are under a barrage of phosphorus bombs, cluster munitions, and if you’re being shot at incessantly by Russian heavy artillery,” what you need is a way to stop that deadly rain.
European officials are worried that Americans don’t know how bad it’s going, or how bad it will likely get. “The Russians … they are just going to keep coming,” one tells me, making angry waves in her cappuccino with her spoon. “And the West is going to start asking Ukraine, ‘We gave you so many weapons.… Why aren’t you doing better?’”
And we’re just going to stand by and blame the victim and watch a bloody marathon that is measured in years, not days or months, she says. And Putin knows that, biding his time until the Western alliance gets restive, divided, and eventually turns away.
This time, we’re prepared, counters scientist-turned-volunteer Zakletsky, who insists the Russians won’t pass easily through Chernobyl to Kyiv a second time, because now the locals, renowned hunters, are prepared. He visited what he calls the “werewolf” tribe for a wedding. At night’s end, the wedding guests started baying at the moon like wolves marking their territory. To his surprise, an actual wolf pack answered back, acknowledging the villagers’ claim. Should the Russians come back, he says, the villagers, and the whole country, will fight like a wolf pack.
Den puts it more simply: “We killed them the last time.” If they come back, he says, “we’ll kill them again.”
Ukrainian photojournalist Olena Maksymenko contributed to this report.
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