Check your fridge: More than 30 fruit and veggie products are being recalled over listeria concerns

As convenient and delicious as fresh-cut fruit from the grocery store may be, make sure to proceed with caution in the coming weeks. The Food and Drug Administration announced Sunday that various products processed by Fruit Fresh Up, which is carried at Wegmans and other grocery stores in the New York area, have faced potential exposure to the organism Listeria monocytogenes.

The full report, available here, details that the dangerous bacteria was found on packaging as well as preparation surfaces used in the production process. Over 30 products are included in the voluntary recall, including cut fruits and vegetables — such as watermelon chunks, pineapple spears, and cantaloupe — as well as pre-prepared dips.

Listeria monocytogenes, commonly referred to as listeria, can pose a more severe health threat to young children and elderly people, as well as anyone with a compromised immune system. Symptoms of a listeria infection in an otherwise healthy person can present with a high fever, headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and more. Infections among pregnant people can cause miscarriages and stillbirths.

The products in question can also be identified by their “Best if Used By” dates. Any fruit with a date printed between March 5, 2022, and March 23, 2022 that matches the previous description should be disposed of immediately.

As of the date of publication for this article, no illnesses have been reported. For a full list of the products recalled, visit the FDA’s company announcement page.

Some of our most popular weeknight meals:

The most annoying kitchen tools to clean

Clean Like You Mean It shows you how to tackle the trickiest spots in your home — whether they’re just plain gross or need some elbow grease. You’ll get the cleaning secrets we’ve learned from grandma, a guide to our handiest tools and helpers, and so much more. Pull on those rubber gloves and queue up the tunes: It’s scour hour!

It’s OK, we’ve all been there. You opt to not use a handy tool in your kitchen for one simple reason: so you don’t have to clean it. Many of these appliances make chopping or shredding or grating a breeze, but along with that comes some very specific cleaning challenges. Sure, the meal turned out great, to rave reviews, but the time spent afterward at the sink sometimes makes you wonder, Was it really worth hauling this thing out? If you’ve spent way too much time scrubbing, destroying sponges, and realizing there are so many other things you’d like to do with your time, here are some foolproof ways to wash some of the most difficult-to-clean tools in your kitchen.

Box grater

You’ve seen the horror before your very eyes — either stuck-on bits that have hardened over time, or a sponge that is shredded and completely unusable after trying to clean your box grater. It’s so convenient for cheese and veggies, but washing it can be a challenge. The best way is to either soak the grater in hot water right after using it, or gently scrub with vinegar to get those loose bits off. Scrubbing in the opposite direction of how you’d grate should help with any tears. If some of those bits are particularly stubborn, especially with foods like hardened cheese, try soaking overnight, then using a bottle brush to scrub the next day.

Food processor

This helpful gadget can become a workhorse in your kitchen, but there are so many damn parts to clean. After taking it apart, focus on the blade first. For extra insurance, you can wear gloves, but since the blade runs the risk of having the most food bits in it, it’s important to wash as soon as you’re done with it. The other parts (besides the base/motor) can soak if you don’t want to clean them right away. Gently wipe the base, and if there are stubborn bits in the crevices, use baking soda or vinegar.

Also, check with your manufacturer to see if the removable parts of your food processor are dishwasher-safe. Most should be good to go as long as you place them on the top shelf of the dishwasher.

Fine-mesh sieve

Oh, the agony of scrubbing those little holes, only to see food still stuck in them no matter how vigorously you rinse and rub. Just keep in mind that when you’re done straining, bang the sieve against the sink to loosen up the larger pieces, then give it a soak in warm, soapy water (frankly, the key for most of the tools here). Use the rougher side of your sponge and a spray nozzle if your sink has that option after soaking. Let the sieve air-dry on the counter for best results, since a towel probably won’t be able to get to all the water in the small holes of your sieve.

Whisk

Before you gaze longingly at your fork, there’s a super-simple way to clean your whisk: If you whisk hot, soapy water in the bowl you used for said whisk right after you use it, you’ll be all set. If your whisk has been a long-term problem child, let it soak in the bowl overnight before filling again with fresh water and soap and whisking again.

Potato masher

The key here: Wash it immediately with hot water after using it. This is a tool that you shouldn’t wait to clean. If you let it sit, the potato residue gets tough and stuck-on, making cleanup a huge pain. Many are dishwasher-safe, but always check with the manufacturer beforehand. If your masher is made of plastic or stainless steel, you’re most likely stuck with cleaning the masher the old-fashioned way. But as long as you get to it right away, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Garlic press

One could argue that there’s no such thing as too much garlic, which is why owning a garlic press can be a handy tool to have around. But cleaning it? Talk about a tale of woe. Sometimes it’s best to not use it for just one ingredient, right? Wrong! Garlic lovers, unite!

Here’s one of our best tips: Generously spray your garlic press with cooking spray right before using. That way, nothing will get stuck and it can easily be cleaned after use. Again, give it a soak after using and try to clean it with a sturdy sponge before it sits for too long. You could also try to find a garlic press with removable parts, making cleanup that much easier. If all else fails, pour yourself a glass of wine and track down a toothpick. That’s right, you’ll have to use that toothpick to poke through the holes of your press to dislodge the garlic, which is why a little prep work will save you from a lot of hassle.

Microplane

If there’s been one lesson here throughout, it’s this: Don’t leave your tools in the sink dirty, and give them a soak as soon as you’re finished using them. Same goes for your trusty microplane, which can have so much built-up food residue that even a dishwasher won’t be able to get into all those nooks and crannies (plus, it’s not a great option if your microplane is made of stainless steel).

Another pro tip? If you’re tired of scrubbing with a sponge or don’t think your microplane is getting clean enough, try cleaning it with an old toothbrush. The thin bristles get into all the holes and you don’t have to worry about destroying your sponge. The extra soaking time and rinsing right away may be easier said than done, of course, but the minutes and sponges and sanity you’ll save will be well worth it.

Winner winner cream of mushroom chicken dinner

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. Inspired by the column, the Big Little Recipes cookbook is available now.

Since the 1930s, canned cream of mushroom soup has been a shortcut for all sorts of meals, from green bean casserole to beef stroganoff to shepherd’s pie. And while it’s hard to beat the convenience of a can — let’s be real, you can’t — this recipe comes awfully close.

The sauce needs only three ingredients. And yes, two of those are cream and mushrooms. And no, half-and-half or whole milk cannot be substituted. It is called cream of mushroom. This is what we came for.

Play around with the mushroom type if you’d like, but I’m convinced that baby bellas (aka cremini mushrooms) are the sweet spot. Their flavor digs deeper than white buttons, while their price point is less than half that of oysters.

Which comes in handy here because we are using a lot of mushrooms — a full pound. This might seem excessive coupled with a pound of chicken breast. And that’s the point. It yields a savory, earthy cream sauce that I would swim in if I could, taking a notoriously soft-spoken cut of meat and giving it a microphone.

There is a lot of fear mongering when it comes to mushrooms. But it is a weeknight, and we don’t have time for all that. So here’s what you’re not going to do:

You’re not going to painstakingly wipe each cap with a damp towel. You’re not going to carefully cut them into even pieces. You’re not going to trim or even remove the stems. You’re not going to cook them in batches.

Instead, you’re going to get into pajamas, turn on your favorite podcast, and rest assured that with enough cream and mushrooms, even a cardboard box would taste good, which means crispy chicken will taste great, greater, greatest.

But you’re probably wondering about that third ingredient for the sauce, right? I have a hunch that it’s in your fridge right now.

***

Recipe: Weeknight Chicken with Creamy Mushrooms

Yields

2-4 servings

Prep Time

15 minutes

Cook Time

20 minutes

Ingredients

1 pound baby bella (aka cremini) mushrooms
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
2 (about 1 pound) boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard, preferably grainy
1/3 cup finely chopped chives (or parsley or dill)

Directions

Wash and dry the mushrooms (and don’t remove the stems — they’re delicious). Slice half. Quarter the other half.
Set a large skillet over medium heat and add 2 tablespoons of butter. When the butter is melted and starting to turn golden, add all the mushrooms and toss to coat. (This looks ridiculous, but it’ll work out.) Cook for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they’re browned and starting to stick to the pan, with no remaining mushroom liquid.
Meanwhile, horizontally halve the chicken breasts, then use a mallet or heavy skillet to pound the pieces to an even 1/4-inch thickness. Pat chicken dry, then season all over with salt and pepper.
Stir the mustard into the cream with a fork (directly in its measuring cup to save a dish).
When the mushrooms are browned and sticking, sprinkle with salt and pepper, then deglaze with 1/3 cup of water.
Let the water come to a boil while you set another large skillet (preferably cast-iron or enamel) over medium-high heat and add the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter. When the butter is melted and starting to brown, add the chicken. Cook for about 5 minutes, until the bottom is deeply browned and crusty. You can rotate the pan halfway through and press down on the chicken if it starts to curl up, but don’t shuffle it around.
As soon as the chicken starts cooking, stir the mustard-cream into the mushrooms. Vigorously simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring once or twice, until pale brown and thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon, then turn off the heat. Season to taste with mustard, salt, and pepper.
Flip the chicken and cook for about 1 minute more, until just cooked through (165°F on an instant-reader thermometer or opaque in the thickest part). Turn off the heat.
Spoon the creamy mushrooms on and around the chicken. Shower all over with the chives and serve directly out of the skillet.

Experts outline exactly what Tulsi Gabbard gets wrong about U.S. and Russian press freedom

Democratic former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has been pandering to MAGA Republicans a lot recently, speaking at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida and making frequent appearances on Fox News —where she hasn’t been shy about defending Russian President Vladimir Putin. During a March 15 appearance on Fox News, Gabbard told far-right host Jesse Watters that freedom of the press in the United States is “not so different” from Russia. And PolitiFact’s Bill McCarthy pushes back against that claim aggressively in an article published on March 18.

Gabbard told Watters, “This foundation of freedom of speech, freedom of expression is directly under threat and under attack.… What’s happening here is not so different from what we’re seeing happening in Russia, where you’ve got state TV and controlled messaging across the board. This is where we’re at.”

McCarthy, in response, explains, “A new law in Russia threatens up to 15 years of prison time for spreading information about the war that authorities consider to be ‘false.’ There are no parallels in the U.S., where freedom of speech, expression and the press are safeguarded by the Constitution. Gabbard alleged censorship by social media companies, but experts say those claims are not supported by evidence.”

Scott Gehlbach, who teaches political science at the University of Chicago, denounced Gabbard’s claims as “absurd.”

“In Russia, one can now face up to 15 years in prison for simply calling a war a war,” Gehlbach told PolitiFact. “In the U.S., citizens such as Tulsi Gabbard are free to make not only truthful, but untruthful, statements without fear of legal sanction.”

Similarly, Ellen Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told PolitiFact, “The state in Russia is criminalizing speech and locking people up. That is not happening in the U.S. — not at (the) hands of private parties or state.”

David Kaye, who teaches law at the University of California, Irvine, also pushed back against Gabbard’s claims.

Kaye told PolitiFact, “Russia is exercising extraordinary powers of censorship unseen in Russia since the Soviet era…. Is there anything remotely like this in the United States? No. The U.S. government lacks power under the Constitution to engage in the kind of actions taking place in Russia.”

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge forced to answer for colonialism while touring Caribbean nations

Prince William and Duchess Kate arrived in Jamaica on Tuesday to growing protests after being forced to recently cancel their trip to a village in Belize, the first stop on a planned tour throughout several Commonwealth nations in the Caribbean, after a group of villagers protested the couple’s visit and Britain’s past colonial influence in the region.

The first demonstration staged on Friday, reportedly stemmed from a dispute over where the couple would land their helicopter upon arrival. According to Sky News, the Cambridges expected to touch down on “contested property” between residents of Indian Creek village and Flora and Fauna International for a visit to the Akte ‘il Ha cacao farm. Photographs taken of the protest showed demonstrators holding several anti-colonialist signs, one of which read: “Colonial legacy of theft continues with Prince & [Flora and Fauna International].” Other signs displayed messages like “Prince William leave our land” and “Not your land, not your decision.” According to the The Times of London, conversations between the organizers of the event and villagers registered “very colonial in nature.”

The development is a significant hiccup in the royal couple’s eight-day tour to Belize, Jamaica, and the Bahamas in honor of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, a celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s seventy years service as Britain’s monarch.

Image from today’s protest at Indian Creek, Belize: “Colonial Legacy of THEFT continues with Prince & FFI” (ref to Flora and Fauna International, in dispute over communal land rights) Photo from Maya Culture Belize FB pic.twitter.com/uYYYylSG4P

— Kate Quinn (@KateQuinnUCL) March 18, 2022

The protest calls upon a darker time in Britain’s past, during which the imperial country installed extractive economies in of several nations throughout the Caribbean, enforcing this system of exploitation through racial terror and violence.

Residents of Barbados, for example, lived under British rule for 400 years until the former British colony declared independence from Britain in 1966 amid the Black power and anti-colonialist movements that swept the globe in 1960s and ’70s. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, British forces enslaved roughly half a million African people on Barbadian sugar plantations, as Smithsonian Magazine noted, with countless violent anti-slavery rebellions erupting at the time. In late 2021, the nation formally ended its 400-year connection to the British crown when it removed Queen Elizabeth II as its ceremonial head of state.

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Last week, dozens of Jamaican professors and politicians reportedly demanded the same, along with an apology and reparations from the prince and duchess in light of Britain’s past misdeeds.

“We see no reason to celebrate 70 years of the ascension of your grandmother to the British throne because her leadership, and that of her predecessors, have perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind,” read a Sunday letter signed by the Advocates Network Jamaica, an alliance of organizations and individuals in Jamaica and the Jamaican Diaspora.

“We are of the view that an apology for British crimes against humanity, including but not limited to, the exploitation of the indigenous people of Jamaica, the transatlantic trafficking of Africans, the enslavement of Africans, indentureship and colonisation is necessary to begin a process of healing, forgiveness, reconciliation and compensation,” the letter added.

Mike Henry, a Jamaican lawmaker who has led a years-long movement effort to collect 7 billion pounds in reparations, said that an apology from Britain is in order to even begin to address the sheer “abuse of human life and labor.”

“An apology really admits that there is some guilt,” he told the Associated Press.

It isn’t the first time that the royal family has come under accusations of racism in recent years.

In a bombshell CBS interview last year with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, cited racism within the British monarchy as one of the chief reason’s for their unprecedented exit from the royal family. Markle, who is biracial, told Winfrey that at least one member of the family expressed concerns over “how dark [their son Archie’s] skin might be” while she was pregnant with him.

“That conversation, I am never going to share,” she said. “At the time it was awkward, I was a bit shocked.”

After the interview, Prince William alleged that the royal family is “very much not racist” – a claim that was widely scorned after photos resurfaced of the prince and duchess’ 2012 trip to Tuvalu, where the couple was carried around in throne-like chairs by locals of Honeira.

“We’re very much not a racist family” – Prince William pic.twitter.com/JP8kKT9R3m

— Myra (@SussexPrincess) March 11, 2021

Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader, quotes “The Wire” after 9-year sentence in “sham” trial

A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced opposition leader Alexei Navalny to nine years in prison after what international observers decried as a “sham” trial.

Navalny was imprisoned last year after Western intelligence officials said Russian agents tried to assassinate him with poison, a tactic the Kremlin has reportedly employed numerous times against perceived opponents of President Vladimir Putin. (Russia denies this.) Navalny, who was arrested dozens of times for leading protests against the Putin regime, was serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence after Russian prosecutors accused him of violating his parole by failing to report to authorities, including while he was recovering from the poisoning in Germany.

A Russian court set up in the maximum-security prison where Navalny is imprisoned sentenced the opposition leader to serve an additional nine years in a high-security prison and pay a fine of about $11,500 after convicting him of fraud, according to the New York Times. Prosecutors alleged that Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation, which Russia banned as “extremist” last year, had embezzled large sums of donated money.

After the trial, Navalny attorneys Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev were arrested and hauled away in a prison van, according to CNN. A Russian state news agency reported that they were detained for failing to comply with demands to unblock the road after the hearing.

Critics decried the trial as a way for the Kremlin to keep a leading critic locked up amid its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Amnesty International last month said that Navalny’s “sham trial,” which was attended by prison guards rather than members of the media, “breaks international human rights law and clearly deprives Navalny of his right to a fair trial.”

Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation last week released a video showing that the judge in the case had received numerous phone calls from a number that researchers traced back to the head of public relations for the Kremlin. The New York Times reported that the judge was promoted to a more senior position last week.

“The case was entirely fabricated by specific people,” Ivan Zhdanov, one of the group’s leaders, said in the video. “This verdict is being written by Putin’s officials.”

Navalny used the highly publicized trial to continue to stoke opposition to Putin.

“It is every person’s duty to fight against this war,” Navalny declared in the makeshift courtroom last week, arguing the invasion was cooked up by a “group of crazy old men who don’t understand anything and don’t want to understand anything.”

After his sentencing, Navalny tweeted a quote from David Simon’s HBO series “The Wire.”

“9 years. Well, as the characters of my favorite TV series ‘The Wire’ used to say: ‘You only do two days. That’s the day you go in and the day you come out,'” he wrote. “I even had a T-shirt with this slogan, but the prison authorities confiscated it, considering the print extremist.”

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Leading Kremlin critic Bill Browder, another Putin foe who has been targeted for arrest, said Navalny was imprisoned “for the crime of simply standing up to Putin.”

“Alexei is the Nelson Mandela of Russia,” he tweeted. “Remember this man when Putin falls. A proper leader in waiting.”

In a subsequent Twitter thread, Navalny vowed that the prison sentence would not silence him or stop the work of his Anti-Corruption Foundation. Just on Monday, the group released a video detailing evidence that Putin was hiding a $700 million yacht in Italy.

“Words have power,” he wrote, “Putin is afraid of the truth.”

The Kremlin in recent weeks has led a massive crackdown on information amid its bombardment of Ukraine, blocking Facebook and Instagram and threatening to imprison journalists who report information the Kremlin does not like. Thousands of protesters have been arrested for opposing the invasion.

Tuesday’s sentence could allow Russia to move Navalny to a higher security prison far away from Moscow, which would make it more difficult for his family and allies to visit him. His supporters also raised concerns that Russia may again to assassinate him.

“Without public protection, Aleksei will be face to face with those who have already tried to kill him,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on Twitter. “And nothing will stop them from trying again. Therefore, we are now talking not only about Aleksei’s freedom, but also about his life.”

World leaders have also spoken out to condemn the trial. German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz last month denounced the trial as “incompatible with the principles of the rule of law.” President Joe Biden last year said he warned Putin there would be “devastating” consequences if Navalny dies in prison.

Navalny on Tuesday said he was “very grateful” for the support from around the world.

“I want to say: the best support for me and other political prisoners is not sympathy and kind words, but actions,” he added. “Any activity against the deceitful and thievish Putin’s regime. Any opposition to these war criminals.”

Read more:

Report from Ukraine: Life goes on and spirits remain high — Putin wasn’t counting on that

LVIV, Ukraine — Yesterday I met a three-year-old boy named Benjamin. He smiled a lot and liked to play peekaboo. His grin was infectious. He also worried about airplanes dropping bombs on him while he played.

His family hails from Barkhumut, a region of Ukraine that has effectively been at war with Russia for eight years. He’s never lived in a world without war.

Benjamin sat on a chair at the New Hope Mission, in Lviv with his mother and grandmother, just happy to be away from the war. His mother, grandmother and father sighed a lot. The worried looks on their faces only changed when they watched Benjamin play and smile.

After nearly a month on the run, with nowhere to stay and little hope for food, his parents found the mission near Lviv’s city center. Their home, they say, no longer exists. Some of their friends and family are missing and presumed dead, or worse. “The Russians take them, maybe,” Benjamin’s mother said. “We don’t know. We don’t know.”

As we spoke, his mother took a breath and rifled through their belongings. Everything they owned was in a suitcase and several heavy-duty plastic garbage bags, the kind usually used for lawn refuse.

“We thank God for life,” she said, with no hint of irony.

Benjamin’s family joins millions fleeing the ravages of a war that has shattered lives in Ukraine. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” said one woman, getting off a train in Lviv from the besieged port city of Mariupol. “These were supposed to be our neighbors. Our friends.” The woman, who said she was in her mid-50s, still had the stains of smoke on her clothes. She fled, she said, in the middle of the night after watching Russian artillery destroy her home. She has no idea where her family is. She had no idea where she would go, and little money with which to do it. “I go away. I go away,” she explained, still seemingly in shock days after leaving the carnage.

Mariupol appears to be key to Putin’s war designs, much as Bastogne was to the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Its capture would enable Putin to link up separate plots of conquered land and cobble together a contiguous state. Residents fleeing the area describe a hellish existence over the last two weeks in which the Russian army, unable to conquer the city and unable to convince its leaders and defenders to surrender, seemed determined to reduce the entire city to rubble. Residents there say on that point, the Russians have been most successful.

Romaz, his wife Maria, their 8-year-old daughter Valera and their 12-year-old son Rostik say they spent five days in a communal bomb shelter in Mariupol. Their apartment was across the street from a theater in the city that was clearly marked in extremely large letters: “Children,” in Russian. The sign was visible in satellite photos. Romaz watched Russians destroy his home, floor by floor, reducing the building to “outside walls, nothing more,” he said. He and his family watched Russians indiscriminately bomb the theater, killing an unknown number of children. Later, when an elderly man died in the bomb shelter, he helped others go outside and bury the man in his own front yard. “To be outside at any time was to be ready to die,” Romaz said.

After five days, Romaz, with his wife, children, a nervous puppy and a handful of belongings, made their way to a Jewish relief mission in Lviv. They have no friends and no family in the region. Romaz had a co-worker who now lives in Germany. “We go there to figure out our lives,” he said. He was last seen leaving with his family on a bus for Germany, with thoughts of relocating to Israel. He was dazed and silent.

In a news conference early on Tuesday morning, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko, the former professional boxer who held multiple heavyweight championships, spelled out the potential consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “They exterminate women, children and life,” he said. “Who’s next? We must unite. We need your help. We are defending each and every European citizen.”

The news conference, held by the Ministry for Communities and Territories Development and entitled “Local Governments Unite for Welfare and Peace,” featured dozens of local Ukrainian leaders, many of whom boiled their comments down to asking for humanitarian aide while denouncing the Russian invasion as “a plague which will spread across the world” if nothing is done. “Please help,” Klitschko said. “We are dying because we hold European democratic values to heart. They want to destroy us for that.” Mayors across Europe responded by video conference, offering empathy and assurances that they would help “our European brothers and sisters in Ukraine.”

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Russia continues to try and destroy the Ukrainian morale and will to fight. The tales of Russian atrocities are ubiquitous among those displaced by Putin’s chosen war.

Those reported atrocities are not limited to civilians fleeing the war zone. Intelligence cables obtained by reporters told of hit squads targeting Westerners and people who look like Westerners. Hospital workers in Mariupol reportedly snuck reporters out the back of a hospital dressed as doctors after Russian soldiers stormed the facility looking for the “fucking journalists.”

The Russians are also targeting Western aid workers and private NGO contractors helping to extract residents from the war-torn country. That is becoming a seemingly never-ending task as Putin’s army has turned his private war into a personal vendetta — trying to burn the country to the ground because he knows he can never control it.

That fact has so far escaped Putin’s understanding. He is used to bullying people into submission, and a country led by a former comedian, whose largest city is led by a former prizefighter, was apparently seen as nothing more than a bump in the road as Putin tries to re-establish the former Soviet empire. Ukraine, which is often fractured and argumentative among its own populace, was supposed to be a three-day excursion at most. Russian officers who knew the details of the mission into the country — and many did not — thought they would be hailed as conquering heroes, and told their soldiers as much.

But the plucky Ukrainians surprised Putin, and perhaps themselves, by collectively flipping the middle finger to the autocrat. In many ways Putin has accomplished something Ukrainian residents and politicians thought was nearly impossible prior to the invasion — a united, single-minded Ukraine.

To Western eyes, used to Putin’s terse words of war and his bullying threats, the Ukrainians are the plucky underdogs we all love to support. The New Hope Mission in Lviv, which houses refugees, is more than just a happenstance reference to Star Wars. It is also indicative of how we see the struggle — the rebel alliance versus the evil galactic empire and Darth Vader.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the world, “I need ammunition, I don’t need a ride,” in response to a U.S. offer of evacuation at the beginning of the war, he not only expressed the Ukrainian spirit,but rallied support from around the world. “Oh, this guy we have to save,” one relief worker told me. Zelenskyy and the civic leaders in the country have lived under death threats since then.

U.S intelligence reports shared with humanitarian relief workers have included this warning, “Russian elements in and around Lviv will attempt to target western speakers/personnel in Lviv to disrupt aid and discredit Ukraine ability to provide security.” That report came out Sunday. Relief workers began taking it seriously, but also said it showed that Putin’s desperation had increased exponentially. “If he were winning this easily, then he wouldn’t bother to do this,” I was told. Still, Russia has a history of targeting civilian targets and spreading terror in conflict zones to destroy public morale.

Across Ukraine, the level of tension has increased due to reports of “Russian hit squads” targeting Western relief workers, reporters and local civic leaders. That tension has lead to paranoia in some cases: tighter control at government checkpoints and increased scrutiny of Russian-speakers. It has also served to increase the resolve of Ukrainian resistance.

The pluck demonstrated by Zelenskyy is seen everywhere. When Ukrainian farmers towed away abandoned Russian tanks, it became a meme. “Question: What’s the best way to stop a Russian tank? Answer: Put it on a Ukrainian country road.”

Ukrainian propaganda posters at bus stops, train stations, malls and in most public places depict a Ukrainian David telling a Russian Goliath: “Go fuck yourself.”

A bus stop sign declares, in Ukrainian: “We are on your land. You will be in it.” And most of us have already heard about the Ukrainian grandmother who told Russian soldiers to put sunflower seeds in their pockets, so when they were buried in Ukraine new life would come.

A farmer outside Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv, told me, “I hear Americans have many guns. Please send them and we will kill many Russian bears.”

* * *

The citizens of Ukraine live under the daily threat of violence. The threat of chemical warfare has increased. Fleeing residents in the east and south tell horrible tales of war crimes and atrocities unseen since World War II. Each day, air raid sirens warn residents across the country to evacuate to bomb shelters. After a month of sirens, the beleaguered people of Ukraine do so calmly and quietly — and some don’t even bother.

A street vendor in Lviv Monday shrugged off the latest air raid. “If bombs fall, I will go inside,” he said. “Otherwise, would you like a coffee? I think some of this is to make us scared. I don’t want to be scared.”

Ukrainians are acting less afraid, and going about their daily lives in defiance of Putin’s threats, though certainly not unmindful of war. The population of Lviv, for example, is estimated to have nearly doubled in the last month due to displaced residents from elsewhere making the city their temporary home. Sidewalks, restaurants, hotels and streets are packed, resembling a typical Manhattan afternoon. But the residents are leisurely, even friendly. Traffic conditions that would create road rage in the United States are dealt with through a wave and a smile in Lviv, even during wartime.

Ukrainians understand the stakes. “This is the biggest war since World War II and if you think this doesn’t involve you, then you are wrong,” Kyiv mayor Klitschko said Tuesday. They get it. But it is increasingly apparent that others outside Ukraine, including some in the U.S. and many more in Russia, do not.

In the end, Putin can’t win. He’s made a huge miscalculation which confounds some and angers others.

Is he that stupid? Did he have a mental breakdown? Is he just a Trump-style bully who was finally found out?

A nation that continues to fend Russia off while facing such atrocities, and keeps on making jokes about Putin’s attempt to subjugate them, is not a nation to take lightly. Behind such stubborn pride is confidence and hope. And the more Putin pushes, the more sarcastic and demonstrative the Ukrainian resistance gets. For whatever reason, Putin almost literally walked into a trap.

Sitting at lunch on the seventh floor of a hotel in Lviv this week, I saw the vast panorama of the city spread out before me. Putin might have the military might to level this country, but he cannot conquer it and could never occupy all of it.

The best he can hope for is a stalemate. If Walter Cronkite were reporting on this war, it would be easy to imagine him saying that some sort of negotiated peace will have to occur. Putin cannot pacify the population, and he cannot win.

But Putin is stubborn. So far that has only led to more dead bodies — and more tanks lost to Ukrainian farmers. The West’s economic sanctions will destroy the Russian economy, throwing that nation back into the same desperate state it was in at the end of World War I.

The Ukrainian military remains formidable, and with assistance from the rest of the world may yet prevail — or, at worst, grind Putin to a stalemate, while sarcastic old Ukrainian women offer Russians sunflower seeds and shout daily insults at Moscow’s strongman.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given that nation a cause for unity, thus raising its profile among European nations while showing the world how to stand up to a bully. That’s ultimately a sign of hope: Children like Benjamin, who’ve been born of war, may eventually know peace.

Read more on the Ukraine war and its consequences:

Ted Cruz turns Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court hearing into rehabilitation of Brett Kavanaugh

“Teenage dating habits.”

That is the exciting new euphemism that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., adopted Monday to describe an alleged sexual assault. He rolled this one out during the first day of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Jackson was nominated by President Joe Biden to be the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court, but as far as Republicans were concerned, the hearing was mainly about how white men are the truly oppressed in America — especially white men who have been credibly accused of sexual violence, such as Republican Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

It’s been three and a half years since Kavanaugh was first held publicly to anything resembling account for allegations of attempted rape, and yet Republicans are still angry about it. Monday’s hearing was supposed to be about Jackson but was taken up by Republicans whining about Kavanaugh, and about how men are done dirty when women come forward with stories of rape and assault. Sen. Lindsey Graham told Jackson “none of us are going to do that to you,” referring to the 2018 hearings in which Christine Blasey Ford stepped forward to accuse of Kavanaugh trying to rape her. As the New York Times drily noted, one reason might be that “Judge Jackson has never been accused of committing sexual assault.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa complained about the Kavanaugh hearings being a “spectacle.” Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska whined about the “jackwagons” who protested the Kavanaugh hearing over the sexual assault allegations. And, of course, the biggest whiner was the forever troll Cruz, who sneeringly told Jackson, “No one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits.”

Of course, no one accused Kavanaugh of trying to date Ford. For those who pretend to forget, what she specifically testified under oath to was that “Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming.” And while she feared “Brett was accidentally going to kill me,” he was “drunkenly laughing during the attack.”

Cruz does not believe these behaviors constitute “teenage dating habits.” No one does. To describe it that way only serves one purpose: To legitimize sexual assault.

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Even though Republicans pretend Ford offered baseless allegations, the overwhelming evidence shows that she was the one who spoke truthfully under oath, while Kavanaugh lied. For one thing, there are two other accusers who went to college with Kavanaugh. But even taking his testimony on its own shows he was transparently dishonest because he pretended he had never drunk to blackout, even in the face of his own emails saying otherwise. He also claimed that obvious dirty yearbook jokes about a girl in his class were innocent joshing. He even tried to claim that his high school title of “Beach Week Ralph Club Biggest Contributor” was a reference to a “weak stomach.” Republicans curiously like to act like these obvious lies are credible but that the corroborated accusations Ford made were not.

This stand-by-your-man approach to rape and sexual abuse is just standard operating procedure for the GOP. Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault and rape by over two dozen women, and crucially, is on tape bragging about how much he enjoys sexual assault. Another Republican justice, Clarence Thomas, was also confirmed despite not just sexual harassment accusations by Anita Hill but by multiple women. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida is currently under investigation for sex trafficking a minor. Republican leadership in the House has done nothing in response, unlike the way they censured the two Republican congressional members who have joined the investigation into the January 6 insurrection.

It’s not just that Republicans don’t take sexual violence seriously. They also project their own ugly habit of shielding and defending alleged sexual predators onto Democrats. For instance, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri unveiled a series of nasty and flatly false accusations against Jackson, painting her as some sort of advocate for child sex predators who can’t wait to get them back out onto the streets. Needless to say, his claims are utterly without merit.

In response to Hawley’s shameless dishonesty, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, “I’m not sure that someone who refused to tell people whether or not he would vote for Roy Moore is an effective and credible messenger on this.” She was referring to yet another high profile Republican accused of sexual abuse: a former Senate candidate who was handsomely funded by and supported by the Republican Party despite nine separate allegations of sexual abuse of minors. The youngest was only 14 at the time of the alleged assault.

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With his insinuations, Hawley was nakedly pandering to the conspiracy theory cult QAnon, who like to argue that Trump has some secret plan to break up “pedophile rings” of Democrats — which exist only in the QAnon imagination. In truth, what they’re doing is rewriting reality to cast Trump as a hero, to make themselves feel better about supporting a man who is, in actuality, a confessed sexual predator. But while QAnon is an extreme case, the GOP chest-beating about Kavanaugh’s alleged victimization during what was supposed to be Jackson’s hearing was of the same flavor. Projecting their own crimes and transgressions onto their opponents is a Republican-wide phenomenon.

The Republican tendency to flip reality on its head, pretending that the oppressors are oppressed, is gross even in the best of times. It’s especially grim right now, as they groan and wail about their supposed maltreatment during the hearing of the first Black woman ever nominated for the Supreme Court. Right now, there are two Supreme Court justices who are accused sexual predators. That’s more than the total number of Black women who have ever served on the high court.

Simply by being there and looking so different than every other person who has been in her position, Jackson disproves the GOP’s implicit contention that it’s men — and white men especially — who are the true victims of discrimination. It’s tempting to write this off as little more than petty political point-scoring, of no consequence as Jackson’s confirmation is all but assured. But in doing this, Republicans are spreading myths about sexual violence and recasting the victims as victimizers. Leave it to Republicans to hijack this historic confirmation process and turn it into an extended gripe session over that one time a white guy got called out for — but did not face serious consequences for — a terrible thing he probably did.

Why the right sees Biden’s promise of a Black woman on the Supreme Court as an attack

From SCOTUS to “critical race theory”: There’s no law or fact the GOP feels bound to respect now

The psychology of “nudging” during a global pandemic

In the early 1990s, the renovations manager at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport decided to decorate each bathroom urinal with a realistic image of a fly, placed just above the drain. For decades, urinal designers had sought a way to curb the unpleasant spillage around urinals, and it turned out that by giving men something to aim at — in this case, a humble insect — spillage dramatically reduced.

This airport innovation went on to become one of the most well-known examples of a nudge: a subtle prompt that can alter human behavior. The formal concept of nudging was first popularized by economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, who co-authored the best-selling 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” The book defines a nudge as something that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.” The authors framed nudging as a bipartisan technocratic fix that could solve tricky policy problems while preserving individual freedom. Governments didn’t need to tell people what to do; they needed to nudge them.

Following the book’s publication, nudges were embraced by both the U.S. and U.K. governments, and Thaler went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. But two years after Covid-19 was first detected in Wuhan, China, nudges have lost some of their luster. To curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, governments and businesses have resorted to harsher measures, such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates, which nudges were purported to help policymakers avoid. For skeptics, a reassessment of nudges was overdue. We shouldn’t “fool ourselves into thinking that nudges are going to magically fix our larger systemic issues,” said Neil Lewis, Jr., a behavioral scientist and assistant professor at Cornell University. “They’re not.”

Nudging draws on insights from psychology, primarily the work of Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, and Amos Tversky. These two Israeli psychologists pioneered the study of mental shortcuts that humans rely on to make decisions, known as heuristics. They presented initial findings in a 1974 paper, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Their work had clear implications for economics, which assumes that people make rational decisions in pursuit of their interests. Kahneman and Tversky showed that that isn’t how the human mind usually works. Beginning in the late 1970s, Thaler partnered with Kahneman and Tversky to apply their findings to his field, creating behavioral economics.

In “Nudge,” Sunstein and Thaler brought behavioral science to the masses, with intuitive and simple examples, such as placing carrot sticks at eye level in school cafeterias to encourage healthier eating. Governments quickly caught on. Sunstein went to Washington, D.C., to work for the White House in 2009. Six years later, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order to encourage the use of behavioral science in federal policymaking. In 2010, the U.K. Prime Minister set up the Behavioral Insights Team within the government’s Cabinet Office; the team was spun off as a private company in 2014 and now has offices around the world. Globally, there are now more than 200 teams, or nudge units, that specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life.

Nudge units had important successes. In the U.K., the Behavioral Insights Team sent letters to clinics whose family doctors were overprescribing antibiotics. The effort yielded a 3 percent decrease in prescriptions. Another initiative demonstrated the power of tweaking a message: Taxpayers who paid their income tax late received letters telling them they were in a minority, as nine out of 10 people pay on time. That gentle admonition appears to have resulted in an additional 120,000 people paying about $6.5 million into U.K. government coffers. And behavioral science notched another win when governments and companies made enrollment in retirement savings plans a default option, helping people save more.

But as with any trend, there are skeptics. Some commentators decry nudges as government overreach or as an infringement on individual autonomy. But there are also people who say the opposite: that nudges result in governments’ not doing enough. In 2011, the U.K. House of Lords issued a report that questioned why nudges were being favored over more traditional policy tools, like regulation. In theory, behavioral science doesn’t skew left or right, but in the hands of politicians dubious of “big government” nudges can become a way to sidestep more muscular interventions.

Behavioral science had a rough start during the pandemic. When Boris Johnson decided not to impose a U.K. lockdown in March 2020, rumors swirled that the head of the Behavioral Insights Team, David Halpern, was advising against stricter measures. Hundreds of behavioral scientists then signed an open letter demanding the government explain the evidence supporting its decision. A subsequent inquiry by the Parliament found that senior officials had opted initially for softer measures assuming, incorrectly, that the public wouldn’t comply with a lockdown.

The pandemic revived a debate that has swirled around behavioral science for the past decade: What can nudges achieve? And what can they not?

As Covid-19 infections grew exponentially in 2020, behavioral scientists wanted to help. Nudges presented a possible route to controlling the virus, particularly in the absence of vaccines and evidence-based treatments, said Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology at New York University. That April, Van Bavel and 41 other researchers — among them, Sunstein — published a paper that outlined how the social and behavioral sciences could contribute, from boosting trust in government policies to fighting conspiracy theories. The authors were circumspect, though; the findings they summarized were “far from settled” and pre-dated the Covid-19 crisis.

Research on the social dimensions of the pandemic soon began in earnest. The National Science Foundation launched a rapid response program, which could provide up to $200,000 per grant. According to Arthur Lupia, who recently completed his term as leader of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, the directorate processed the same number of grants over a six-week period that spring as it normally does in six months. The nonprofit Social Science Research Council also put out a call for proposals and was overwhelmed by the response: Out of 1,300 applications, they could only fund 62.

As scientists learned more about how the coronavirus spread through the air, the science in support of social distancing and masks became clearer. Governments knew what they wanted their citizens to do, but they still had to think carefully about how to encourage people to change their behavior. That’s where nudges could help.

Researchers didn’t know if nudges would work under the extreme conditions of a pandemic. “Nudges are usually tested for the routine tasks most citizens undertake, such as submitting a tax return, not in crisis situations when both the environment and people’s choices are anything but routine,” wrote four academics who ran a survey on people’s intentions to adhere to the U.K.’s first stay-at-home order. The paper looked at whether public health messages could nudge behavior. Were people more likely to comply if they were told everyone else was abiding by the rules? Or was it better to stress how social distancing would benefit someone specific, like grandparents?

The results were discouraging: Behavior change only occurred when people were asked to take an extra step of writing about how they intended to reduce the spread while reflecting on someone more likely to be vulnerable or to be exposed to the virus. But the impact faded within two weeks.

A similar experiment in Italy, conducted in mid-March and published on the preprint server medRxiv, showed that such nudges mattered little because most people already knew what they needed to do and were following orders. More information, however formulated, didn’t matter. Other early studies that used surveys to measure the impact of public health messaging in Western countries similarly showed mixed results.

Even so, there were findings that were more encouraging, such as an experiment in West Bengal that used video clips of Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee explaining Covid-19 public health guidance; researchers found reporting of symptoms to community health workers doubled among those who watched the videos. A similar survey-based study among low-income Americans showed that video messages from physicians increased knowledge of Covid-19 and encouraged people to seek more information. But Lupia of the NSF, which funded the studies, interpreted the findings cautiously. “Do we know if they generalize?” he asked, reflecting on whether the videos, or something similar to them, would have been so effective elsewhere. “I’m not sure.”

Not everyone jumped into Covid-19 research. Lewis, the behavioral scientist at Cornell, was nervous about the sudden pivot. In September 2020, he wrote an article in FiveThirtyEight pointing out that in fewer than seven months, 541 studies on Covid-19 had been released as preprints — a version of a paper that has yet to be peer reviewed — on PsyArXiv, the main repository for preprints in psychology. A lot of that research wasn’t ready to be applied to real-world settings, said Lewis. In October 2020, he and other likeminded psychologists expressed their misgivings in a paper titled “Use Caution When Applying Behavioral Science to Policy.”

Sibyl Anthierens, a sociologist and co-lead of the social science studies team of the European Union-funded Covid-19 research initiative RECOVER, said that pandemic researchers were able to produce studies that offered a “rich description of a particular situation,” such as how some families prevented infections from spreading within the household. But applying such findings to an ever-evolving pandemic proved tricky. Sometimes, by the time a study was finished, “the context might have already been changed completely,” she said. For example, studies done on handwashing in the first wave were no longer as relevant by the second, as the focus shifted to mask-wearing. Tailoring research to context was crucial, but difficult.

The pandemic also magnified a weakness of nudges: The effects captured by researchers could be lost when a nudge was scaled up and used to influence behavior beyond the confines of a laboratory. One meta-study, which was based on 126 randomized controlled trials — long considered the gold standard of scientific evidence — showed that where academic studies had influenced behavior on average 8.7 percent of the time, nudge units only had an impact of 1.4 percent.

As research ramped up during Covid-19, the gap between what experts thought they knew about nudges and how they function in practice widened. As Varun Gauri, a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the World Bank’s behavioral science unit, said, the pandemic “left behavioral scientists and others kind of scratching our heads saying, what do we do?”

Once vaccines began rolling out in 2021, behavioral scientists turned to getting shots in arms. Dena Gromet, executive director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, had co-authored a study that showed sending texts to more than 47,000 patients before their primary care visit increased flu vaccinations by 5 percent in fall 2020. The same tactic might work with the Covid-19 vaccine, she hypothesized, and, initially, it did. A study from California in the winter of 2021 used text messages to boost appointments by 6 percent and actual vaccinations by 3.6 percent.

As winter turned to spring and summer, though, vaccinations lagged. Policymakers began offering incentives. In May, Ohio announced its “Vax-a-Million” lottery: Ohioans who were vaccinated could win up to $1 million in a weekly draw that would be held over five weeks. Several other states launched similar initiatives. Gromet was cautiously optimistic. Lotteries had successfully changed behavior before, such as by motivating adults to exercise. Other experts also thought that the chances were good. “If you need something quick and off the shelf during a crisis, I would have thought the lotteries would have been it,” said Gauri, noting that lotteries are relatively easy to implement.

Gromet and her colleagues approached Philadelphia’s officials with a proposal: They would run three sweepstakes of $50,000 each to test the impact of a lottery on vaccination rates. There was a modest increase of 11 percent in the first draw, but overall the lottery had had little effect. (The results were published on the preprint server SSRN.)

That’s why governments need to test nudges and incentives before investing their limited resources, said Gromet: “Different approaches are going to work for different people and at different times.”

Nudging works if people are already inclined to do the thing they are being reminded to do, she points out, which is why tactics that worked earlier in the vaccination campaign no longer did. Governments and businesses were increasingly dealing with vaccine holdouts who couldn’t be nudged or offered incentives. Instead, mandates caught on, with major companies like United Airlines requiring employees to get vaccinated to come to work.

No one knows if governments will continue to use heavier-handed interventions for public health, but in an August op-ed, Thaler himself suggested that it was time to do more than merely nudge those not yet vaccinated against Covid-19. Instead, he suggested sterner measures like vaccine passports and different isolation policies for vaccinated versus unvaccinated people, as adopted by the NFL. We might call these interventions, he wrote, “pushes and shoves.”

Putin’s endgame: Will it be stalemate, nuclear war — or regime change in Moscow?

Most people have heard the most famous truisms about armed conflict. No plan, we are told, survives contact with the enemy. In any war, truth is the first casualty. Of course, there is “the fog of war.”

Those truisms are playing out in real time in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Much of the American and Western media is focused on sensational stories and images of human struggle and loss, rather than on the larger picture of what is really happening on the ground in this grinding, brutal conflict. Coverage is dominated by dueling propaganda narratives in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a saint and his besieged nation is a “brave little Belgium” (a First World War reference) while Vladimir Putin is an “irrational” bully, driven solely by a desire for mayhem and evil.

Digital media means that we see nearly real-time coverage of events on the ground in Ukraine — but that has produced at least as much confusion — if not more — among the general public than traditional media coverage. In total, much of the global public’s understanding of what is actually happening in the Ukraine conflict has been clouded by information overload.

Punditry has gone into overdrive: A global crisis attracts experts, both genuine and self-appointed, who are trotted out by the 24/7 cable news machine to offer sometimes questionable or dubious “insights” to a global public hungry for answers.

We hear, of course, the usual narratives of American exceptionalism: Russia’s war against Ukraine has proven again that the United States is an indispensable nation and has reclaimed its place as leader of the free world.

One thing is clear: the historical importance of Ukraine, and of this war, is beyond reasonable dispute. As Yaroslav Hrytsak recently wrote in the New York Times:

Ukraine is once again at the center of a potentially global conflict. World War I, as the historian Dominic Lieven put it, “turned on the fate of Ukraine.” World War II, according to the legendary journalist Edgar Snow, was “first of all a Ukrainian war.” Now the threat of a third world war hinges on what could happen in Ukraine…. After all, the struggle for Ukraine, as history tells us, is about much more than just Ukraine or Europe. It is the struggle for the shape of the world to come.

In an effort to make more sense of the confusing and rapidly changing events in Ukraine, I recently spoke with Matthew Schmidt, a professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven. Schmidt is an expert on Russia, defense, intelligence and foreign policy who has taught strategic and operational planning at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College. He has also taught at the Army War College and served as a representative to Ukraine’s presidential election after the 2014 Maidan Revolution. His analysis and commentary have been featured on CNN, NBC News, Fox News, CBC News, CBS News and other outlets.

In this conversation, Schmidt explains why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone so badly, leaving Putin’s military in a stalemate and on the verge of defeat. He also argues that, contrary to the analysis offered by many commentators, Putin himself is a rational actor, whose decisions are meant to advance his goal of a form of Russian manifest destiny that places his nation at the center of human history.

Schmidt issues an ominous warning: He believes Putin may order the use of battlefield nuclear weapons against Ukraine as a way of forcing a surrender and peace on his terms. With Russia’s invasion force blunted by fierce Ukrainian resistance, Putin is targeting cities and other population centers for destruction in an effort to force Zelenskyy to sue for peace.

At the end of this conversation, Schmidt describes Zelenskyy as the true leader of the free world and a model of leadership that will be studied decades into the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As an expert in international relations and military affairs, when you look at Russia’s war in Ukraine what do you see?

I see a war of independence that started in 2004 and will come to an end here. I do not believe it’s just a war of independence in Ukraine. In the end, this all ends in the streets of Moscow. The shooting may stop in a year, it may stop in five years, or it may take considerably longer. But this is the event that has to bring down Putin. I think Ukraine frees Russia, eventually.

In terms of the mainstream American news media, 24/7 news cycle and all these talking heads and pundits, what are they getting wrong about the war?

The overall narrative frame was incorrect. We see this with all the retired generals who are on TV making their rounds. These generals are describing the war in Ukraine in terms of realpolitik. They take Putin’s claims about Ukraine being in NATO seriously. Ukraine becoming part of NATO does not change the strategic balance.

The other incorrect assumption was that Russia was going to take Ukraine easily, that it was somehow inevitable. Too many observers misunderstood the nature of the Ukrainian military and how, in a good way, their society was militarized over eight years.

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Putin talks as though we’re going to roll tanks to Moscow from eastern Ukraine, which is just absurd. What such claims reveal is that Putin doesn’t understand modern warfare. Stupidity is always a causal possibility here as well. Or Putin is engaging in maskirovka, this idea that you lie and deceive your enemy. One can even lie to their own people in the pursuit of this greater good.

The other error is a willingness by too many supposed experts to disregard the fact that Putin is driven by a vision, a form of manifest destiny.

What I find frustrating is the business of punditry itself. These people go from being supposed experts on the pandemic a few weeks ago to now being “experts” on military affairs and international relations. Some of the loudest and most confident voices do not have much specific expertise on matters of war and violence and politics.

You can do a lot of harm if you have access to mass media and you’re not using that power to properly educate the public. When I am interviewed, I think of myself as a teacher. My class isn’t in front of me in person, it’s on the other side of that camera. I have 30 seconds to say something that will help people better understand this confusing and frightening situation.

Too many pundits go on TV and do interviews and focus on how they have 30 seconds for the the camera to be pointed at them. They are thinking about how to make this time about me, because this is my career now — or my second career in the case of retired generals or others with a similar background. Many commentators actually seem to be excited when they talk about the war in Ukraine. In my opinion, that is dangerous in terms of what it does to U.S. policy.

What are some analyses you have seen that are just pure hyperbole? Are there others that perhaps underplay the real dangers?

I’m not sure there is much hyperbole anymore. At the start of the war, the discussions about the potential for Putin to use nuclear weapons were hyperbolic. We have seen his tone change. We now have to take Putin’s threats seriously and consider the most extreme possible outcomes.

I do not believe that Putin is going to nuke London and New York. I think that the real threat is the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. Because to me, what is driving Putin is his vision of manifest destiny for Russia and the larger region. I also believe that this vision is quasi-religious. What happens with secular “religious” fanatics, people possessed by some sense of destiny and vision, is that they often end up as martyrs and are willing to do extreme things. That is what is truly frightening to me.

There’s good cause for people to be scared, but again, they are scared of the wrong thing. People are scared that New York is going to be nuked, instead of battlefield weapons being dropped across Ukraine, breaking that taboo.

Why would Russia deploy battlefield nuclear weapons? Why risk that spiral of escalation?

The danger is that Putin is losing the war. The Russians have — this comes from the Soviet era — written into their doctrine a theory called “escalate to de-escalate.” Putin could escalate the war by using battlefield nukes to bring Zelenskyy to the table, who would then say that the cost to society, to his people, of doing this is now greater than the desire to hold on to their unity, their sovereignty as a nation. That’s one way Putin could do it. He could use battlefield nukes in order either to push the West to act as an arbiter in negotiations with Zelenskyy, or to back the West off.

As long as he’s using nukes inside Ukraine, it’s a reasonable bet that the West won’t intervene. Putin can use those nukes to regain control of what we in military planning call “operational tempo.” Here Putin is forcing the other side to react to him instead of vice versa. At present, the Ukrainians and Russians are evenly matched to some degree. The Ukrainians are forcing the Russian military to react. The Russian military was not ready for that. But of course, using tactical nukes would radically change that balance.

Nobody starts a war planning to lose. What were Putin and his generals’ assumptions? How did it go so wrong for them?

They thought they could take Ukraine in a few days and that they would have Kyiv and functional control of the rest of the country. They woefully underestimated the fighting spirit and commitment of the Ukrainian military and of ordinary Ukrainians. Putin and his generals also misunderstood that the Ukrainian military always had a two-line strategy. The first was to defend the borders as long as possible. The second was to fall back in a cohesive way so that those military units were still able to operate in an orderly way and then transition into guerrilla war. The civilian reserves are integral to Ukraine’s defenses as well.

What was the Russian military’s plan, on the tactical level?

I train people at the operational and strategic level of war. The mistakes the Russian military made are at that operational level. As a practical matter, there are errors in how they are trying to bring together a series of tactical operations into a whole that in turn leads to a strategic aim.

It appears that the Belarusian troops and the troops from the north are mostly conscripts. The plan was to roll them in, in large numbers, to take Kyiv. But these forces were second-tier. In the south, the Russians positioned the naval infantry, the marines out of Novorossiysk, to take the road that runs along the Sea of Azov and connects into Crimea. Those forces would then work as ground troops in cities like Mariupol and in the surrounding area. Russian forces are working toward Odessa, which is understood to be a “Russian city” culturally and is very important to Putin to take.

Putin had bad troops in the north who failed to maintain their vehicles. Stupidity was the causal variable that really caused that much-discussed huge convoy to bog down. The key error there was not maintaining the vehicles. The other error was that the Russians do not have a good NCO core, meaning the non-commissioned officers. Russian troops were also not told what they were going to Ukraine to do. That is a tactical error that has strategic-level importance.

And then, of course, where has the Russian air force been? The Russians did not expect the Ukrainians to be as capable as they have been in air defense. That’s been a huge problem for the Russians, and will continue to be, because the United States has given Ukraine so many Stinger missiles. The U.S. and NATO are going to try to create a no-fly zone from the ground up. The Russian pilots were not given enough hours in their jets to properly train. They are not capable of effectively maneuvering around the Ukrainian air defenses, which they should be able to do.

Is this a story of the Russian military being incompetent or is the Ukrainian military that good?

It is both. The Ukrainian military is one of the best in Europe now. It’s small, and it doesn’t have the equipment, but it is battle-hardened. You have two or three generations of fighters who have now passed through the front lines in Ukraine, going back to 2014. There are a lot of Ukrainians that have really good operational experience on the ground.

I think the Russians really did underestimate just how good the Ukrainian military was. Putin misunderstood the nature of the war. I also believe that Putin, like Western armchair generals, overplayed the impact of fancy tech and fancy weapon systems, and underplayed the importance of solid small-unit capabilities and the will to fight.

And then I think you have a problem with the culture of the Russian military. It is true that Putin modernized the military, but the culture is still heavily Soviet. It is deeply hierarchical. It doesn’t devolve command down to the tactical level because it doesn’t trust tactical commanders. As a result, the Russian military under that system makes many mistakes on the ground, whereas the Ukrainian military has highly talented, mobile, independent units that can punch above their weight because they’re led better than the Russians are, even if the Russians have better weapons.

But this is also why the war is going to get even bloodier. The Soviet tendency to work from the top down means that orders are given to just obliterate cities because that is the easiest thing to do.

There are many cheerleaders for NATO who are proclaiming that the Russian military is so incompetent that the U.S. military, along with NATO, would defeat them easily. What is the error of inference and assumption there, if there is one?

The error is that Putin would escalate. Putin sees Ukraine as Russian territory. If the U.S. and NATO were to go into Ukraine and impose a no-fly zone or something of that sort, Putin is going to see that as an attack on Russia. Putin would then have a rationale to escalate with things like battlefield nukes.

There are units such as the naval infantry that are probably Russia’s best troops. They would put up a hard fight. But as good as those elite troops are, our entire Marine Corps is as good as they are. Not just our special forces in the Marine Corps, but your average jarhead is probably close to Russia’s best in many ways. Yes, we would win if we were allowed to fight it at that level. But Putin would escalate to de-escalate.

Will the weapons and other support being sent to Ukraine by the U.S. and its NATO allies help to turn the tide of battle against the Russian forces? I am thinking specifically of Switchblade drones and other semi-autonomous weapons, as well as the S-300 surface-to-air missile systems that are being discussed.

When Zelenskyy says he needs a no-fly zone, we should listen. But in this case, I see the evidence as showing that the bulk of the damage is being caused by missiles and artillery. We’ve made a mistake not putting in Patriots or an “Iron Dome” system, and anti-artillery systems (counter-battery systems). Not doing that has given Putin leverage by being able to punish civilians and in effect take them hostage because he can target civilians with impunity.

Is Vladimir Putin a rational actor? That does not mean that you and I or anyone else endorse his behavior — that is a common misunderstanding of the definition. How do experts explain what that concept actually means?

Here is how I explain the concept of a “rational actor.” You go home for Thanksgiving, and you have one side of your family that watches Fox, and you have the other side of your family that watches MSNBC. Both sides are rational, but you don’t recognize the validity of the logic of the other side. But within their system of logic, they’re behaving appropriately. If A leads to B leads to C, and someone on the other side of the table says, “Well, then the next answer is D,” that’s rational. That’s following the system of logic. If they go, “A leads to B, leads to C, leads to F,” that doesn’t make sense, that is illogical. But Putin’s not crazy. Putin is following his own system of logic. He’s as predictable as any of us are.

What is Putin’s theory of Russia’s destiny?

Putin believes that Russia has a special place in world history. Russia’s role is to drive world history by standing between what he sees as European values and Asian values. In Putin’s mind, if Russia is not the center of this geographic and cultural and spiritual space known as Eurasia, then the future of mankind is different, perhaps even catastrophic. Putin is trying to preserve the capacity of Russia to keep its space as a great power in human history. Putin has to maintain control of Ukraine because it is historically and spiritually critical to that project.

For Putin, if Ukraine goes democratic and adopts European values, which “Eurasianism” is against, then Ukraine becomes the point through which Russia loses its Eurasian values and becomes European. He is afraid of a Westernized and Europeanized Ukraine that has a stable democracy, however corrupt and whatnot, that believes in things like gay rights and a free press. If that happens, that destroys what Putin believes is the appropriate cultural space for Russia to lead.

There is a multitude of competing images and narratives about the events in Ukraine. What advice do you have for the public about how to better navigate what is really happening? How can the public be more critical in terms of understanding propaganda and how these images and stories are generated and in whose interests?

The public needs to understand that the information war is arguably more important than the war on the battlefield. To some extent, the kinetic war is driven by the need to create images and narratives that are circulated across the information realm. In turn, this drives the willingness of the U.S. Congress, for example to pass bills that will bring aid to Ukraine. That is a huge strategic win for Ukraine, in terms of the information war and world public opinion. Propaganda works best when there is truth in it, even if there are things that are not real as well.

I also believe that, insofar as you can have a justified or a moral war, then Ukraine’s defense of their country is one such example. The public needs to get ready for the fact that there will be atrocities committed by Ukrainian troops. There is a huge amount of anger in these troops. Especially as this devolves into a war with civilians, I think you’ll see those stories come out. You’ll find less disciplined civilian defense units that will commit war crimes against Russians if they have the opportunity.

How would Putin define some sort of “victory with honor,” in terms of ending this war in a ceasefire or other negotiated resolution?

Victory for Putin is controlling the political future of Ukraine. Putin does not need to make Ukraine a part of Russia in the legal sense. However, Putin has to control the political future of Ukraine. I do not believe there is an ending to this war short of that which will satisfy Putin. That is why I’m afraid of escalation.

Again, ultimately this ends in the streets of Moscow with the destruction of the Putinist regime. For Russia, this means the culmination of its post-Soviet stage of development because it has replicated the same sort of personality cult as the czars and Stalin. Now it is in the form of Putin. That must end.

That’s where we end up ultimately. It may be a long time after the shooting stops in the war. I do not see any other route for the Russian people but to decide that their country has to step down from being a world power and instead be a European power, with all the rights and theories of European governance in place. Russia must cede its position as a world player to countries like the U.S. and China.

The situation in Ukraine is dynamic. With all of the talk of negotiation, Putin’s army supposedly stalled and daily images of atrocities, how do you read the big picture?

The Russian military has reached “culmination.” That term means the time when the attacking force can no longer continue its advance. Russia has been hit unexpectedly hard. It’s taken significant losses, including in senior officers, critical equipment and supplies. The front is basically static at this point.

The implication is that Putin will have to: 1) negotiate, 2) resupply and restart the same basic plan or 3) adopt a new plan that gets around the reasons he can’t advance. Putin is not actually ready to negotiate. He will escalate the war with NATO and not Ukraine. The escalation is aimed at pressuring the West to be his weapon and to put pressure on Zelenskyy to capitulate, because he knows the West won’t intervene to allow Ukraine to win on the ground.

Zelenskyy is now saying that he’d negotiate right away. Putin changed his plan and decided to use missiles and artillery — which the West could have helped to blunt — to take whole cities and populations hostage. Now Zelenskyy is being forced to choose between the population he’s responsible for that is being held hostage, such as in Mariupol, and the things that population is fighting and dying for, which are independence, territorial integrity and European values and identity.

Putin’s center of gravity is the fact that he can hold those cities hostage. Without that, he doesn’t have leverage. But at this moment in the war, Putin has that leverage. In this moment, Putin is in fact not deterrable by anything Ukraine can do, because they don’t have the tools to stop his hostage-taking.

The only other choice for Zelenskyy is to continue the fight until the conditions shift and he has leverage to counter Putin’s leverage, but at a great cost in the lives of his people. The only other option is for NATO to intervene by forcibly setting up the necessary weapons to stop the missiles and artillery, which would be a significant escalation.

How would you assess Zelenskyy’s performance?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has effectively become the leader of the free world. He has articulated the values of the West better than any of his peers and proven himself the most capable military leader on the planet today. He has led his people to a stalemate against the second-best military on the planet. Even if he can’t “win,” he’s shown Western militaries how to use information, diplomacy and force of arms to fight the most modern war yet. He will be studied in war colleges for decades to come.

Ukraine’s kids and adoption: Will an ugly history repeat itself?

Last week, a startling but seemingly familiar story emerged on the periphery of the Ukraine war: A former Washington state representative named Matt Shea, long associated with the far right, turned up in a hotel in a small Polish town with 63 Ukrainian children he apparently hoped to bring to the U.S. for adoption. For those who have followed both Shea’s career and the recent history of evangelical Christian adoption advocacy, this was cause for alarm.

Over his six terms in the Washington House of Representatives, Shea maintained close ties to “Patriot” and militia groups. He became involved in the armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 and proposed legislation to transform rural eastern Washington, a heavily conservative region, into a 51st state to be called “Liberty.” Shea partnered with a group that ran a training camp to instruct youth in “Christian warfare,” and authored a pamphlet called “Biblical Basis for War” that appeared to offer advice to Christian “patriots” readying themselves for war against Muslim and Marxist “terrorists” (and which included a proposal to “kill all males” who resisted the new theocratic order they’d establish). Shea has maintained that document only amounted to notes for a sermon, but he also reportedly wrote an eight-page plan for the restoration of civilization after a civil war and governmental collapse (including banning all “centralized” education and medicine, implementing “severe” penalties for anyone seeking to limit public religiosity, and reinstating the death penalty for murder, rape, “sodomy” and possibly adultery — a provision marked for discussion).

Shea’s record led his state House colleagues to commission an independent investigation into his far-right associations. In 2019, that probe concluded that Shea’s activities amounted to support for “domestic terrorism,” after which he was stripped of his committee assignments and suspended from the legislature’s Republican Caucus. He didn’t run for reelection in 2020, but instead transformed himself into a pastor, and now leads his own church, On Fire Ministries.

This month Shea and a group of his supporters, drawn from both the U.S. and Polish far right, reportedly set up camp in a hotel in Kazimierz Dolny, a small town in eastern Poland about three hours from the Ukrainian border. They were accompanied by dozens of children Shea claimed had been evacuated from an orphanage in the besieged city of Mariupol. When an aide to the local mayor went to the hotel to find out what was going on, she said Shea refused to explain himself or even give his full name. In an interview with a right-wing Polish television show though, he claimed to be working with a Texas group, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, that arranges for American families to host Ukrainian children on a short-term basis, with the ultimate aim of facilitating adoptions.

After the Seattle Times and a number of other media outlets began investigating, Shea’s plans appeared murkier still. Loving Families and Homes for Orphans wasn’t a registered adoption agency and its website didn’t work. Shea pointed supporters to a different website that seemed to have been recently created and contained language, as journalist Daniel Walters noted, that appeared to have been copied word for word from other hosting groups.

Although Loving Homes has been registered as a business entity in Texas for several years, the group registered itself anew in Florida in mid-February, under the names of at least two individuals connected to Spokane, Washington, Shea’s hometown. The addresses listed for the organization, and for two of its three officers, appear to be vacant lots.

One of Shea’s allies, former Spokane Valley City Councilman Mike Munch, told Walters that Shea was trying to adopt four children from Ukraine, and an American volunteer with Shea’s party said the group’s hope was to take the children to America soon. But after the media attention, Shea denied any such plan, complaining on Facebook that his critics didn’t understand the distinction between hosting programs and adoption. Talking Points Memo’s Matt Shuham, however, reported that Shea delivered a sermon in a Polish church describing his efforts to “bring these orphans home” — standard language in the adoption world for finalizing an adoption — and also to “bring them home to the father,” an almost certain reference to Christian evangelism.

Shea has accused his critics of deploying “Russian-style propaganda” to bring “politics and religion into a humanitarian issue.” And on a March 17 livestream show, “Church & State,” which is linked to Shea’s ministry, he argued that the coverage had distressed potential adoptive parents in particular. “You have a lot of very, very upset parents right now who were ecstatic that their kids were rescued out of a war zone, brought to safety, and now the media is literally trying to put some insidious motivation behind this,” Shea said, “when really it’s about making sure there’s no more orphans in the world.”

* * *

Whatever Shea’s agenda may be, he’s not the only person who sees the crisis in Ukraine as a moment that may call for the large-scale adoption of children. On social media, numerous people have posted requests seeking information on how to adopt, host or foster a war “orphan” from Ukraine. Former Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel announced on Twitter that she had an apartment building standing ready to house 157 orphans currently taking refuge in Poland. In the U.K., a brief political battle broke out between two members of Parliament after one accused the other of slowing the transport of 48 purported Ukrainian orphans to Scotland, while the second charged that it was “wrong to move children without attempting to reunite them with their family first and without the agreement of their home and host governments.”

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That sort of explanation — both in the British skirmish and in broader internet debates about Ukraine’s vulnerable children — was met with variations of the response, “Don’t you know what ‘orphan’ means?” as though explaining for the simple-minded that orphans by definition are children without parents.

That may be the dictionary definition, but it’s not true in the world of adoption, where many children who live in institutional care have living parents or other kin who have no intention of giving them up. Amid emergency circumstances, whether natural or manmade, it’s often simply impossible for officials tasked with determining which children are actually eligible for adoption, and which are not, to do that job. And that vacuum can create situations ripe for exploitation.

That was certainly the case in Haiti in 2010 with the notorious case of Laura Silsby, a woman from Idaho who was arrested trying to take 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic without paperwork or permission. Silsby led a group of 10 Baptist missionaries who had flown to Haiti in the aftermath of that year’s devastating earthquake, on a vague mission to help.

Her plans were more specific: With her personal and business life in shambles, Silsby seemingly intended to reinvent herself as the head of an orphanage in the Dominican Republic where Christian couples from the U.S. would stay in “seaside villas” while waiting out that nation’s adoption residency requirement. When the earthquake hit, she devised a scheme to drive a bus through Haiti “and gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then bring them back to the DR,” where she had leased a 45-room hotel. Instead, when the bus reached the border, Silsby and her missionaries were arrested and charged with kidnapping and criminal conspiracy.

Many other evangelical Christians and adoption advocates denounced Silsby as a bad apple who gave international adoption a bad name, especially after it turned out that all 33 children she’d tried to abduct had at least one living parent or other close relatives. Silsby protested that she was being punished for something many other people in the adoption world had gotten away with. She had a point.

What Silsby tried to do “has been done a million times in human history, especially after disaster,” said Canadian global development professor Karen Dubinsky, the author of “Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas.” After catastrophe, she continued, a form of “disaster rescue” often emerges as a parallel to disaster capitalism: “You can do almost anything in the name of rescue, and so much more so when it comes to child rescue.” And the process has become “almost seamless: Disaster happens and we in the West show up with bottled water — and we’ll take your children.”

It happened in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in 14 countries, prompting one American missionary group to announce its effort to “airlift” 300 Muslim children out of one devastated province and raise them according to “Christian principles.” It happened two years later in Chad, when a French charity was accused of kidnapping 103 children it claimed were Sudanese war orphans, but in many cases were just local kids with families.

After the Haitian earthquake, while adults in that nation were warned not to try to seek asylum in the U.S., the drive to expedite adoptions rose to fever pitch. The U.S. government began following new guidelines of “humanitarian parole” to fast-track the paperwork of about 1,200 children who were already somewhere in the adoption process. But soon after that came efforts to expand the loopholes even wider and transport children out of Haiti who had no adoption plans in place, or whose parents hadn’t signed off on them leaving.

Media coverage grew increasingly focused on the plight not just of Haitian “orphans” but prospective adoptive families in the U.S., and a strange counterfactual language took hold, calling for the “repatriation” of Haitian kids who’d never been to America, or their “reunification” with families they often had never met. Headlines called for flying children out of the country now, and sorting out “the paperwork” later, even though children with ambiguous legal status who end up in American families’ homes are often not returned.

Politicians joined the chorus, lobbying to speed adoptions up, or warning that recalcitrant aid groups like UNICEF — one of many groups that warned against fast-tracking earthquake adoptions — might lose their funding if they stood in the way. In Pennsylvania, then-Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, muscled through the evacuation of 54 children from a Haitian orphanage run by two Pittsburgh sisters — including 12 children whose families had not agreed to adoption, and in at least one case didn’t find out their child was gone until they visited the orphanage.

A version of this story may now be unfolding in Ukraine. “Out of the children in orphanages or shelters, only about 10 percent are actually available for adoption,” said Teresa Fillmon, the American director of a Ukraine-focused children’s organization, His Kids Too!, and the former director of an agency that facilitated adoptions from eastern Ukraine before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Most of the kids in such institutions, Fillmon said, are there because a parent “might be in jail, might be sick in the hospital, might be doing a number of things that there is no one able to take care of the children. They’re usually there in a temporary situation.”

When war came to Ukraine, the nation’s Ministry of Social Policy declared a moratorium on adoptions, explaining that it was impossible to properly vet the documentation of either prospective adoptive families or the status of potential adoptees. The National Council for Adoption in the U.S. has echoed this, saying: “It is paramount that the identities of these children and their families be clearly established, and their social, legal and familiar status is fully verified by government authorities. For many of these children, we cannot do that at this time.”

* *. *

Around the same time that Laura Silsby was making headlines, I reported on a surprisingly similar plan unfolding in Alabama, albeit one with a much more sympathetic face. In early 2010, Alabama pastor Tom Benz announced his intention to “airlift” some 50 to 150 Haitian children out of the country and bring them to a church retreat center he had recently acquired halfway between Montgomery and Birmingham, from which he hoped the children might be adopted to local Christian families. Benz raised funds for this plan, using donations and volunteer help to overhaul the retreat center’s aging infrastructure. While that was happening, he told reporters that he planned to skirt the tense politics around unauthorized adoptions out of Haiti by presenting his program to authorities there as a “cultural exchange.”

But by late 2010 his Haiti plan had fallen apart and Benz shifted his focus to Ukraine, where his wife had been born and where he’d worked earlier in his career, handing out Bibles after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That December, Benz brought over his first group of “orphans,” and he has done so, at a pace of several groups per year, ever since, amounting to around 500 children hosted and close to 200 adopted.

At the time, Benz admitted that his program was walking a blurry line. “Our program in Ukraine, if it were about adoption, it couldn’t happen,” he told me. Each group of children he flew over prompted a new letter from the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, telling him the purpose couldn’t be adoption. “Everyone knows it’s about adoption,” he said, “but it can’t be about adoption.”

It couldn’t “be about adoption” because the Ukrainian government was seeking to retain more control over its child welfare programs than often happens in an international adoption industry that can function like a boom-and-bust market. As the nation developed and grew more stable, it sought to promote domestic adoption by Ukrainian parents. It also wanted to prevent the sort of scandals that had happened in the first years after the country’s independence, including one episode in the early 1990s when dozens of Chicago-area families refused to return Ukrainian children they were hosting and wanted to adopt.

When I visited Benz’s retreat center in 2011, it was obvious the line was often blurred beyond legibility. Staff at the center warn visitors to never use “the ‘A’ word,” but each group of children was accompanied by an independent Ukrainian adoption facilitator, who stood to earn thousands of dollars for every successful adoption they completed. Children were painfully aware that their presence wasn’t just an American vacation but an unofficial audition for families who might whisk them into a new life — a reality underscored when I drove into the center and my car was surrounded by a half-dozen Ukrainian kids, opening doors and shaking my hand, eager to make a good first impression on any adult who arrived.

Ukraine has tried to prohibit foreign groups from sharing photos or information about children available for adoption, and, at least technically, bans most “pre-selection” adoptions — that is, foreign parents requesting a specific child.

Fillmon says both these rules have been broken by some groups working in Ukraine. But amid the chaos of the war, as she fields calls from people asking whether it’s possible to go to Ukraine to “get some children,” she worries about what the new disorder could bring.

“It makes me think about the children that came across the border from Mexico” under the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, she said. “There’s [hundreds of] children that they still can’t find their parents. I wouldn’t want that to happen in Ukraine.” She sketches out scenarios in which children are dispersed into foster homes in the U.S., where the foster parents later become unwilling to send them back to a country that, no matter the outcome of the war, is likely to be a difficult place to live in coming years.

Nonetheless, pressure is beginning to mount. Media coverage focusing on prospective adoptive parents often includes suggestions that the public urge their legislators to expedite adoptions, or casts Ukraine’s adoption moratorium in ominous tones.

In early March, Tom Benz announced in a press release that he was working to shuttle eight or nine Ukrainian children who had come to Alabama last December into neighboring countries, in hopes that they can be moved through the adoption process “on their way to the U.S.” One prospective adoptive father made national news as he and Benz traveled to Poland in hopes (so far unmet) of bringing some of the children back.

On Monday, Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., called on the State Department and Homeland Security to begin expediting international adoptions from Ukraine, specifically calling for the reinstitution of the humanitarian parole program that sped up adoptions from Haiti 12 years ago.

Despite the echoes of the child welfare missteps in 2010, Dubinsky says she hopes things might be different this time: After more than a decade of falling international adoption numbers, many adoption advocates have begun embracing family preservation or local child welfare alternatives instead. As generations of adoptees have come of age and begun to speak for themselves, public discussion of adoption and its consequences has become more nuanced and complex.

“My impression is that the rescue narratives that came very easily to people’s lips in Haiti” do not come as easily now, Dubinsky said. “The idea that adoption is always good, adoption is rescue, just grab the children and sort out the details later — that story has become more complicated.”

Read more from Kathryn Joyce on the far right:

DeSantis eyes special session to target Florida’s Black-held congressional seats: report

Florida lawmakers gave their Republican governor nearly everything he demanded during the current legislative session, which ends today. They passed restrictions on abortion, immigration and teaching about race and sexual orientation and gender. They gave him the election fraud police force he said is necessary and capitulated to his threat to veto a water bill pushed by the sugar industry but opposed by Everglades advocates.

But NBC News reports that the GOP governor, who is running for reelection in November and many expect to run for president in 2024, is spoiling for a court fight over what’s known as a “minority access” congressional seat in north Florida held by a Black Democrat. He is threatening to call back the Florida legislature into special session and pressure them to approve his plan to eliminate not only the north Florida seat held by Democratic Rep. Al Lawson but also the Orlando-area district held by another Black Democrat, Rep. Val Demings.

NBC News reports: “Dragging legislators back to Tallahassee, which would be the ultimate power play for DeSantis, is on brand for a governor who became a top 2024 Republican presidential contender — second only to former President Donald Trump — for his willingness to fight anyone who hints at crossing him.” That’s making GOP lawmakers wary.

“This is DeSantis’ M.O.: What he cares about, he cares about deeply. And if you get in his way, he’s going to roll through you,” said state Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Tampa Republican. “Members don’t know him and don’t know what he’s going to do. And that not knowing is part of the reason they fear him. This whole session was a showcase for DeSantis — a trial balloon for a White House campaign — and nationally he’s a 600-pound gorilla with the possibility of becoming an 800-pound gorilla, especially if he gets his way with these maps

Ted Cruz’s run in with the law: Cops called for conflict with airline employee at Montana airport

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared to be leaving Montana on Sunday when he had a conflict with an airline employee, a video posted to Reddit said. Cruz was flying out of Bozeman International Airport when he was angered by something not identified in the video and police were called to intervene.

Raw Story reporter Bob Brigham confirmed that this is Bozeman airport. He also explained that there are frequently Republican fundraisers at the Yellowstone Club and Big Sky. It’s nearing the weekend of Spring Break, so it’s possible that flights were full or the weather stopped some flights out of the city.

He appeared to be wearing his signature grey mask with the condom-shaped cannon on it reading, “Come and take it.”

Many flocked to ridicule Cruz for the encounter, with some referencing his flight to Cancún, saying that because it was snowing in Bozeman he was fleeing the area.

Even former MSNBC host Kieth Olbermann had a jab at Cruz.

Raw Story has reached out to Cruz to confirm if it was him in the video and what the problem was at the airport.

So @TedCruz was apparently so out-of-control abusive to airline staff at the airport in Bozeman, Montana, that law enforcement had to get involved.

It must've been snowing. Video here: https://t.co/PiivouySRJ pic.twitter.com/NCsf85Fbm6

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) March 20, 2022

His flight to Cancun was delayed 15 mins.

— javtgre (@jvatgre) March 21, 2022

Dog dumped for being “gay”: Owners offer bizarre reason for abandoning pet at animal shelter

A dog was dumped at a North Carolina dog shelter because the owners were convinced it was gay after it tried to have sex with another male dog, WCCB reports.

The shelter is now asking for local shelters to step and take the dog, whose name is “Fezco.”

As the The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) points out, mounting or thrusting is normal play behavior for pets and doesn’t necessarily indicate sexuality. That being said, homosexual behavior has been noted in over 1,500 animals species, according to Scientific American.

One cannot simply book Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the Oscars, Amy Schumer

Amy Schumer, who is co-hosting the Academy Awards alongside Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes, has made it clear that she’s “going all in” for Sunday’s ceremony with her jokes, stage presence and even a ludicrous pitch.

In a recent appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” the “Life & Beth” creator revealed that she asked the Oscars producers if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could virtually attend the ceremony, you know, during Russia’s ongoing military invasion. Her request was ultimately turned down, which was quite disappointing for Schumer.

“I think there is definitely pressure in one way to be like, ‘This is a vacation. Let people forget we just want to have this night,’ but it is like, ‘Well we have so many eyes and ears on this show,'” Schumer told host Drew Barrymore, per Variety. “I think it’s a great opportunity to at least comment on a couple of things. I have some jokes that kind of highlight the sort of current condition. I mean, there are so many awful things happening that it seems hard to focus on which one.”

“I actually pitched — I wanted to find a way to have Zelenskyy satellite in or make a tape or something just because there are so many eyes on the Oscars,” she added. “I am not afraid to go there, but it’s not me producing the Oscars.”

Although Schumer probably had good intentions to support Ukraine, her request comes across as wildly inappropriate and frankly, absurd. The crippling Russia-Ukraine war continues to be a major topic in the global conversation, and there’s no doubt that the conflict will be addressed during Sunday’s ceremony by numerous A-list attendees. That is true of any awards show these days.

That is far different from asking the leader of an invaded country to beam in via satellite to wave at the audience. Is now the best time to ask Zelenskyy — who is practically pleading with foreign powers for support and staying put in his war-torn nation — to take a break from the conflict for a little bit of face time in America? And is attending this year’s Oscars a legitimate use of his time? The answers to both are quite obvious: No and also, no.

Planning such appearances takes time — lots of time, even if it’s pre-taped. Before the war, Zelenskyy had plenty on his plate, but asking him to squeeze in an Oscars appearance now among other matters of life and death is rather, well, selfish.

Let’s be clear. Zelenskyy’s proposed appearance would do nothing to help his cause, really. Schumer’s pitch is predicated on the assumption that a sizable audience even watches the Oscars, whereas awards show ratings have dropped over the last few years, including during the pandemic. The only ones who’d benefit from a Zalenskyy cameo are the Academy Awards, which would be seen as a transparent and gross ratings ploy, and Schumer presumably as the originator of the idea. Again, selfish.

Yes, Zelenskyy was once an actor and has been using those skills to great effect for his public appearances. But it doesn’t mean he has an agent like any other performer through whom we can book him for his next gig. (It would be a vastly different story, however, if he got in touch with the Academy and asked if he could use their platform for a speech.)

Instead, that performance experience is why Zelenskyy is comfortable using media and other modes of live-video communication to urge Western lawmakers to do more to help Ukraine fight against Russia. Last Thursday, Zelenskyy addressed Congress virtually, asking leaders and officials for more military aid and economic sanctions placed on Russia. He also called actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis (who is from Ukraine) to thank them for raising $35 million in aid for refugees. And most recently, Zelenskyy delivered a speech to Israeli lawmakers over Zoom, urging them to follow in the footsteps of their Western allies by vehemently opposing Russia.

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As for Schumer, the stand-up comedian and actor also appeared on a segment of “The View” where she discussed her upcoming co-hosting gig.

“I’m really excited to do this and I’m also a mean-spirited comedian . . . I consulted my lawyer and he said, ‘You know, you can’t say half of those things,'” Schumer shared. “And so the ones that I can say, I’m going to.”

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg, who hosted the Oscars a whopping four times, gave Schumer a few words of advice.

“Go have a good time,” Goldberg said. “And don’t read anything, stay away from all the Internet. Don’t read it two days before and don’t read it two days after. Everyone thinks it’s the easiest job in the world, and it’s not. But have a good time.”

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For the “Killing Eve” final season, Eve is “embracing a more Villanelle side of herself”

“Killing Eve” operates differently.

The BBC America show spins the story of an assassin who may have a heart of gold — or at least, a heart and some regrets and questions — and features two women in a cat and mouse game that may have romance at the end (or middle).

But “Killing Eve” is also different in the way it works behind the scenes. Every season of the show has featured different showrunners (called head writers in the UK), controlling the central vision of the show. While Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”) created the series in its first season, a new person has taken over each subsequent season. It’s important to note that all of the “Killing Eve” showrunners have been women — still a rarity in television where, in the 2019-2020 season, women only accounted for 28% of all showrunners according to the “Boxed In: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television” report from San Diego State University.

Now in its fourth and final season, the “Killing Eve” baton has been passed to Laura Neal (“Sex Education“).

This season started off with the characters in very different places, including Villanelle ensconced in a religious community, a deliberate decision to disrupt characters’ lives and begin in the middle, according to Neal, who said she wouldn’t mind spending time with Villanelle in real life — if the killer was behind a protective wall of plexiglass.

As the season deepens, so do the storylines for multiple characters. Some, like would-be assassin Pam (Anjana Vasan) are beginning new roles. Some, like Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) are trying to reconcile with the past. And some are getting back to what they’re good at: killing.

Salon spoke to Neal about what fans can expect as the show draws to a close, from Villanelle and Eve’s relationship, new faces this season — one of whom gets kiss and a bubble bath with Eve — to that incredible vision of Villanelle in Jesus drag (which we are predicting will be a hot Halloween costume this year).

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and condensed.

You took over being the head of the show, whereas I know you had been in the writers’ room before, but now you’re in charge of the finale. How has that experience been?

Really exciting. I loved working on season 3 and I loved the show before I was a writer on season 3 as well, like Phoebe’s work, Emerald [Fennell]’s work, Suzanne [Heathcotte]’s work. It feels like a real privilege to be the last in line of all those amazing women.

Obviously, it’s a huge pressure as well because you want to make sure that the ending to this show is as glorious as the show itself has been and that we bring it to a close in a way that feels satisfying for people.

Fiona Shaw as Carolyn in “Killing Eve” (Anika Molnar/BBC America)

The show seems so much to be at first, the journey of two women, Villanelle and Eve. But then it’s really the journey of at least three women, including Carolyn. This season, so far, we seem to be seeing the aftermath of her fall, working without resources against The Twelve now. She’s not in a great place. We’ve seen Eve maybe at her lowest and maybe now we’re seeing Carolyn there. Could you talk about that?

I think you’re right. I think in earlier seasons, the focus is very much on Eve and Villanelle and as we’ve progressed across the four seasons, we’ve kind of broadened our focus. Definitely Carolyn and also Konstantin feel more like protagonists than they did in season 1. I love writing for Carolyn, I find her story really interesting. We were all really curious in the writers’ room about what would happen if we stripped this character who was so much about status and hierarchy and we stripped her status and her hierarchy from her. And also, we’re so used to seeing Carolyn in her element. We’re so used to seeing her 10 steps ahead of everybody else. We’re used to seeing her sort of lord it over her environment. It was exciting for us to take her out of all of that.

I think Carolyn is somebody who loves the game of spying and that fuels her. That’s her sort of core identity. That’s the thing that drives her. It was interesting to me: What happens if you take that part of her identity away?

That leads into my next question, which is this season doesn’t start directly after the last one. It moves forward in time and all the characters, including her, are in much different situations in their life. Could you talk about why you wanted to do that, to jump forward in time?

I was really excited by the idea of hitting the ground running. I think looking back at the process, a lot of that was driven by a desire to see Villanelle in the community that we already find her in and it felt like in order for her to be in this place and to have established herself in the way that she’s been established, we needed a little bit of a gap between the end of season 3 and the start of season 4. It just excited me to see all of the characters in new places, so that as an audience member, you’re slightly having to play catch up a little bit at the start of episode 1. The question is: “Okay, how have these characters ended up in this new place?” And then for a writer, it’s really freeing to be able to find them in slightly different head spaces and to be able to run with that.

It really is like starting anew, each new season with a new head writer, but I think especially this one, it’s a whole new story for these people that we love, which is exciting. So far this season, Villanelle seems to want to change, maybe for herself, maybe for someone else, which is hard for her because although she was definitely trained to be a certain way, there also seem to be violent tendencies that are innate in her, that she can’t help. It’s just the way she is. Do you think that characters in the show, especially Villanelle, can change or do you think they just are who they are?

I think the question of can these people change was the central one of the season. We spoke a lot about that question in regard to all the different characters, actually, even our new characters that we introduced. Obviously for Villanelle, it’s kind of like the most obvious question. Can this murderous killer be anyone else other than who she is?

Do I think they can change? Yeah, I do think they can change. I think the characters can change.

I think the question for me that’s interesting is: How much and do they actually want to? Deep down, does Villanelle want to be a good person? Does she want to be maybe the nihilistic blinkered person that she is at the start of season 1? Or, are these people just trying on a different version of themselves for size in a way that they hope will make them feel or come closer to who they actually are on the inside?

What was the inspiration for Villanelle this season?

There wasn’t really one inspiration. There were a lot of questions about Villanelle and a lot desire from Jodie [Comer] and from the writers to deepen our understanding of her. She’s such a fun character to watch and to write and we’d scratched under the surface of her, Suzanne had scratched under the surface of her in season 3 — but it felt like there was a lot more to uncover about her. So, I think that was just a real desire because it’s the final season to explore the questions that we all had about her.

It’s sad that it’s the final season — although I know all stories have to come to an end and it’s good that you can come to an end that you plan — but I think Villanelle is someone we could see forever. She’s so layered and she’s so different.

Totally. I’ll think about her as a character forever. I hope she really will stay in people’s minds because for me, she’s such an inspirational character, which sounds crazy to say about someone who brings so much death and destruction. But there’s something about Villanelle, which I think encompasses the appeal of “Killing Eve,” which is she’s a woman who doesn’t hold herself up to society’s expectations. She behaves exactly as she wants with no shame and no fear and that for me is really empowering actually.

She does bring a lot of light. I mean, she’s very lively, even though she’s a killer, she’s very alive. She brings a lot of energy and I think she does inspire people, especially women.

I think she’s also a character — and I don’t think we often think of her this way — but I think she’s a character who craves connection. She’s actually a lover of human connections, even if that’s in the moment of killing someone, that’s what she’s seeking. A kind of a thread that ties her to somebody else, even if it’s in the moment of death.

Jodie Comer as Jesus-Villanelle in “Killing Eve” (BBC America)If that’s all she has, that’s all she has, and she’ll cling to that. I really like that. I wanted to ask you about the Jesus drag hallucination she has, which is so incredible. It seems for all the characters, clothes are important, but for Villanelle especially, it seems like such a part of who she is: how she dresses and that kind of clues the audience into things that are happening in her.

The vision was an early idea that we had. Probably one of the earliest ones in the writers’ room. It actually came from us thinking here’s Villanelle in an environment that seemed totally at odds to who she is as a character. The more we spoke about it, the more we realized that environment actually speaks to a lot we already know about her, like we know that Villanelle loves theater. She loves stories and she loves things that feel heightened, things that feel a little bit camp. So, it didn’t feel, for us, like a mad thing for her when she’s absolutely involved in this sort of world where iconography is really important, where she is steeped in it all.

If she was to imagine a kind of guiding figure, it would be a religious icon. If Villanelle imagined a religious icon, of course, Villanelle being self-centered like she is and having a god complex already, she would imagine herself as that figure. That felt really fun to us. It was also just a way to inject a bit of surrealism, a bit of surreal humor, into the show, which I was really keen to do in that episode. Obviously, the vision’s costume is incredible and that’s all down to our brilliant costume designer, Sam Perry, and her team. That was her.

I feel there may be a lot of Halloween costumes this year that are Villanelle as Jesus. That would win the costume contest.

Maybe I’ll try and get my hands on the costume so I can have the original one.

Oh, you have to.

I think the costumes in general this season have been really interesting because you’re right, part of the reason I loved “Killing Eve” to begin with was like, what costume is Villanelle going to be wearing? What’s the fashion going to be?

What’s she going to show up as next?

What I find really interesting in this season is that we’ve given some of that to Eve as well. We’re seeing Eve in different costumes that we would never have seen Eve in before. I think that speaks to Eve embracing a more Villanelle side of herself. So that was interesting to me to take some of the elements of a costume that we love seeing Villanelle in and having Eve share in them.

Also, we talked about Carolyn at the beginning too, but her station has changed and so have her clothes. She always looks so put together, but now she’s drifting too. So, what is the experience writing a pair like Villanelle and Eve that so many people love and so many viewers want to end up together, or have strong ideas about. What’s that like as a writer?

Really exciting, because I feel like it’s one of the most complex relationships that I’ve ever been lucky enough to write. What I love about their relationship is that everybody has a different idea of what exactly it is.

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And what exactly is the pull between these two women? I think you can’t deny the pull. For me, there’s a kind of cosmic force that’s driving them together, but what I love is that everyone has a slightly different take on what the nature of that pull is. So, it was really exciting to be able to explore that a little bit more in this season. In terms of how their relationship progresses over the course of the season, you can never please everyone. Everyone has such a strong opinion. That’s going to be impossible to serve everyone. I think what we try to do in the writing room is focus on what feels true to those two women at this moment in their journeys. We let that question guide us in terms of how their relationship progresses.

My last question for you is what can you tell us that we can expect from this final season? What will we be left with as this story finally comes to a close?

We always wanted to make this last season feel triumphant. We wanted people to watch it and feel like we had really examined some of the questions that remain about relationships in the show and even about plot stuff, like The Twelve. Who are The Twelve and what do they really want? So, we wanted people to feel like we’d dive deep on those questions.

Emotionally, what we wanted was for people to enjoy this relationship between these two women, as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and we’ve all enjoyed writing it. Then to come out with a feeling of, “oh, that was glorious.” That’s the word I keep using. It should feel glorious at the end.

That’s a good thing to look forward to. I’m definitely going to miss these characters when it’s over. I know you probably wouldn’t want to hang out with Villanelle in real life, but …

I would at a distance.

More stories like this:

Ashley Biden’s diary, Project Veritas, the Trump campaign and the New York Times

A Florida woman tried to shop around the diary of Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter, during a 2020 Trump campaign fundraiser attended by Donald Trump Jr. before it was obtained by the conservative group Project Veritas, according to the New York Times.

Last November the FBI raided the homes of several current and former Project Veritas members while investigating the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary, the contents of which were published on a different right-wing website shortly before of the 2020 election. Project Veritas denied that it had illegally obtained the diary and said it had “no involvement” with the two individuals who had acquired it.

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, a Trump ally, claimed that he learned of the diary from “tipsters” and said the group made an “ethical” decision not to publish it because they could not authenticate it. The group, which regularly conducts undercover stings intended to embarrass liberal groups and journalists, has insisted in court filings that it is protected under the First Amendment as a news publisher. The Times report suggests the group may have tried to “trick” Ashley Biden while trying to authenticate the diary. In response to Project Veritas’ argument, prosecutors accused the group of making statements that are “false or misleading and are directly contradicted by the evidence.”

The diary was found at a Florida home where Ashley Biden, who was recovering from addiction, had previously stayed, according to the Times report. (When she moved away, Ashley Biden reportedly agreed with the owner of the house to store some personal belongings there.) The diary was later shown around a Trump fundraiser in Florida at the home of a donor who was later nominated by then-President Donald Trump to a federal position. Shortly after that, Project Veritas obtained the diary and asked the couple who had originally acquired it to retrieve more items from the home where Ashley Biden had stayed to verify that it was hers, according to the report. A caller from Project Veritas’ headquarters in New York later tried to “trick” Ashley Biden into confirming its authenticity, using a fake identity in a phone call offering to return it, according to the Times. That apparent effort could complicate the group’s claims that its activities were protected under the First Amendment.

In July 2020, a woman named Aimee Harris moved into the home of an ex-boyfriend in Delray Beach, Florida, amid a custody dispute. She learned that Ashley Biden, a friend of the ex-boyfriend, had stayed there during the pandemic, according to the report. Ashley Biden had left several bags of her belongings, including the diary, at the house after moving back to the Philadelphia area, saying she planned to retrieve them later. In August, Harris, who supported Trump, reached out to another friend, Robert Kurlander, a Biden critic who served 40 months in prison for fraud in the 1990s, and hatched a plan to sell the diary to help pay for lawyers in her custody battle, according to the Times.

Kurlander then contacted Trump donor Elizabeth Fago, who hosted the fundraiser that was attended by Donald Trump Jr. Fago was later nominated by President Trump to the National Cancer Advisory Board. Harris and Kurlander attended the fundraiser at Fago’s home three days later where they showed the diary to a number of people and sought to find out whether Trump’s campaign “might be interested in it,” according to the Times.

It’s unclear whether Donald Trump Jr. or anyone affiliated with Trump’s campaign saw the diary. Mark Paoletta, a former lawyer for ex-Vice President Mike Pence who was hired by Project Veritas to lobby congressional Republicans to push back against an FBI probe into the group, initially told the lawmakers that Trump Jr. had “showed no interest” and said it should be reported to the FBI, according to the report. Paoletta called the lawmakers back later, however, to say he was “unsure whether the account about Donald Trump Jr.’s reaction was accurate.”

Project Veritas then sought to acquire the diary after learning about it in September, according to the Times. Harris and Kurlander flew to New York to meet with members of the group and began negotiating a deal to sell the diary. The two sides failed to reach an agreement and Harris and Kurlander went back to Florida. Project Veritas also sent Spencer Meads, one of O’Keefe’s top lieutenants, to do more digging in the state.

Project Veritas later said in court filings that it had obtained items belonging to Ashley Biden that its “sources” described as “abandoned.”

“The sources arranged to meet the Project Veritas journalist in Florida soon thereafter to give the journalist additional abandoned items,” the group said in a court filing.

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That somewhat conflicts with Harris and Kurlander’s statements to others, which suggest that someone from Project Veritas directly asked them to retrieve more items belonging to Biden, according to the Times.

Project Veritas lawyers had repeatedly instructed the group not to encourage sources to steal evidence. In a 2017 memo obtained by the Times, one of the group’s lawyers noted that Project Veritas “enjoys substantial legal protections to report and disclose material that may have been illegally obtained provided it played no part in obtaining it.”

Federal prosecutors say the group played a key role in obtaining the evidence. “Put simply, even members of the news media ‘may not with impunity break and enter an office or dwelling to gather news,'” prosecutors said in a court filing, disputing the group’s “repeated claim that they had ‘no involvement’ in how the victim’s property was ‘acquired.'”

In October 2020, a caller who did not identify himself as associated with Project Veritas and used a fake name offered to return the diary to Ashley Biden in an effort to authenticate it. Members who heard recordings of the call said they believed that Ashley Biden had said “more than enough to confirm that it was hers,” according to the report.

On Oct. 12, O’Keefe sent an email to his team saying he had decided not to publish a story about the diary despite having “no doubt the document is real,” Project Veritas told a federal judge. O’Keefe said in the email that the story would be “characterized as a cheap shot.”

But four days after that email, a top lawyer for the group told Joe Biden’s campaign that it had the diary and wanted to interview the then-candidate about it, according to the Times. Less than a week later, Project Veritas wired $40,000 to Kurlander and Harris and signaled that it planned to publish the story after all.

That never happened. Instead, an obscure right-wing site called National File published handwritten pages from the diary that it said it had obtained from a Project Veritas whistleblower. O’Keefe was “furious” that one of his own operatives may have leaked it out of frustration with their refusal to publish it, according to the Times.

Subsequent to that, a lawyer for Project Veritas flew to Florida and turned over the diary and other items belonging to Ashley Biden to the Delray Beach Police Department, saying that the items were “possibly stolen.” The department informed the FBI, which sent an agent to retrieve the items.

The FBI interviewed Kurlander and Harris nearly a year later, and raided the homes of O’Keefe, Meads and another Project Veritas operative named Eric Cochran two weeks after that.

O’Keefe did not comment on the Times report but criticized the paper for publishing it. “Imagine writing so thoroughly divergent from reality and so mendacious with innuendo that there is literally no utterance that won’t make it worse,” he said in an email.

O’Keefe has repeatedly denied that Project Veritas has ever done anything illegal. “We never break the law,” he said in a YouTube video last year after coming under FBI scrutiny. “In fact, one of our ethical rules is to act as if there are 12 jurors on our shoulders all the time.”

Project Veritas, which has been backed by former Blackwater founder Erik Prince and was trained by a former MI6 officer, has often come under criticism for its “stings,” which typically involve getting journalists or liberal political figures to say something embarrassing on hidden video, often under false pretenses. Some efforts have been more daring. In 2018, the group launched an operation to set up Tinder dates with employees at the Justice Department and other federal agencies and then record them secretly, in hopes of finding evidence of an anti-Trump “deep state.” The group’s lawyer warned in an internal memo that the effort could risk violating the Espionage Act, according to the Times.

Journalists say the undercover nature of the group’s work may not be illegal but is highly problematic.

“It opens you up to the charge that you’ve been intentionally deceptive and you lose your moral standing,” Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and former editor at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, told the Times. “Every newsroom I’ve ever worked in has basically said undercover journalism was unacceptable. I’ve never had a reporter tell me he wanted to pose as somebody they were not.”

New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman agreed that the group “uses deceptions that no reputable news organization would use.”

Project Veritas, which has dealt with a range of legal issues, last year asked a judge to block the New York Times from publishing an article that included excerpts of memos prepared by one of the group’s lawyers. A judge granted the motion but a New York State appeals court temporarily lifted the prior restraint order last month, allowing the Times to publish certain documents.

Ted Boutrous, one of the most prominent First Amendment attorneys in the country, criticized Project Veritas for seeking to block news stories about itself while demanding broad First Amendment protections for “illegal activity” which “the First Amendment would not protect.”

“Project Veritas cannot hide behind the First Amendment when it wants to speak out,” Boutrous tweeted, “and then trash the First Amendment when it wants to shield itself from scrutiny simply by self-styling itself as a news organization.”

Read more:

When the war in Ukraine isn’t about you: The narcissistic tendency to co-opt tragedy, explained

It was a photograph of a young woman, standing in Moscow’s Red Square. The woman was a writing acquaintance, the photo 30 years old. She’d included it in her health and lifestyle–focused Substack one recent week, along with her expressions of concern for the people of Ukraine. Some distant ancestors, she’d always believed, were from that part of the world, and her heart was there with them. Her compassion was perhaps genuine. Her self-centeredness definitely was.

The impulse to see ourselves in the story is profoundly human, and understandable. We watch the spires of Notre Dame burning and sadly recall a life-changing trip to Paris. We hear of a celebrity dying from a seemingly mild head injury, and remember a friend similarly lost too soon. Identification is an essential part of how we cultivate empathy in the world. Think of Barack Obama when he said, “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son.”

That’s all pretty normal. Laurie Hollman, PhD, a licensed clinical social worker and psychoanalyst and expert on self-perception and narcissism, explains it this way, “People often think of what would be the impact on ‘me’ before considering another person. It’s natural to identify with another’s circumstances and at first presume the other’s situation is like one you have experienced. For some, this may be considered ego-centric, but I don’t always believe this is so. It’s just a starting point to first acclimate oneself to something familiar to oneself before branching out to another’s experience.”

But just like a dead-eyed robot, there’s a point at which empathy passes through the rubicon into Uncanny Valley, leaving us feeling queasy instead of moved. Think, this time, of Gal Godot and her famous friends crucifying “Imagine”; or more recently, of AnnaLynne McCord taking to social media to poetically envision herself as the nurturing mother who would have saved Vladimir Putin from himself.

As our TV critic Melanie McFarland chronicled recently, the list of celebrities who’ve awkwardly inserted themselves into public tragedies is a textbook exercise in secondhand embarrassment — John Cena wishing he “could somehow summon the powers of a real life #Peacemaker” while hashtaggingly promoting his show, Andy Cohen spelling out “PEACE” in Wordle tiles. It’s not that these famous people can’t or don’t feel sincere sorrow and outrage. It’s that they’re not doing such a great job expressing those sentiments in a way that isn’t about themselves.

Where human connection is minimized, one wants to seek the approval and praise of others in the online world.

Yet it’s not just clueless rich people who fumble here. I think of that Substack writer, composing an entire newsletter entry ostensibly about Ukraine but mostly about herself and that time she went to Russia. I think of the neighbor whose fascination with the high profile murder of a coworker became an uncomfortably frequent anecdote in social settings. And I think of how often and easily the appearance of empathy can be weaponed — Well, I went through something difficult and I’m fine, why aren’t you?

Social media, along with all the other forms of mass communication we perpetually have at our fingertips, makes it not just easy to express every insight that traipses through our minds, but almost obligatory. Your sober response to police violence or pandemics may be poorly received, but your silence might also be harshly judged. The pressure to respond, somehow, can feel incessant and intense. And a well-crafted Facebook post or group text can provide the illusion of actually having done something good.

“In this digital age, where human connection is minimized, one wants to seek the approval and praise of others in the online world,” says Dr. Lea McMahon LPC, a licensed counselor, adjunct professor of Psychology and Chief Clinical Officer at Symetria Recovery. “Even though the problem isn’t linked to us or affects our daily lives, we still have the urge to talk about it through social media. People want to appear empathetic and caring online, as it helps them boost their image.”

Everybody likes a little dopamine hit of validation, just as we instinctively look for points of commonality or divergence in the stories we seek. But for some people, everything can become their own personal narrative. In her 2011 memoir, Kris Jenner hinted that had she just been a more attentive friend, she could have saved the life of Nicole Brown Simpson. “Nicole really wanted someone close to her to know what was going on,” she wrote, “so that somebody — namely me — could be a witness.” Donald Trump is a champion of the savior complex art form, evidenced recently by confident assertions about Ukraine that “As everyone understands, this horrific disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged and if I was the president,” and that “The fake news said my personality is going to get us into a war… but actually my personality is what kept us out of war.”

As psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Lombardo notes, “A narcissist views himself as the center of his universe. Other people are used as props in their schemes, intrigues, dramas, and smear operations. Additionally, narcissists exhibit a deficiency of empathy. A lack of empathy makes it challenging for someone with NPD to comprehend another person’s point of view — it’s all just about them.”

So how can we avoid both the obviously boneheaded responses to tragedy and the subtler trappings of Main Character Syndrome? Hollman says that when it comes to being truly useful to those in need, “It’s okay to say, ‘I want to help but am not so sure what works best for you. Do you want to tell me more about what’s happened or happening?’ In other words, good people often want to jump to solve the other’s problem but solutions are premature — better to hold such ideas for the distant future after you might learn the direction the other person is leaning toward. What works best, to begin with, is attentive listening to what is on the other person’s mind.” And when in doubt, she advises simply, “We need to think before we speak or act. The person the tragedy is actually happening to should be the focus. Thinking to oneself before speaking impulsively is what’s in the other person’s best interest.”

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How to focus on simple cooking, according to a professional chef

Much has been written about the radical changes in the development of cuisine and gastronomy over the last 35 years, particularly on the discussion about the “virtues” of molecular gastronomy or modernist cuisine (or any other term employed by the food media). This trend in cooking has its roots in neo-Catalan cuisine, and Ferran and Albert Adrià initially developed the principles at Restaurant El Bulli in Spain.

The best way to describe this style of cooking is an effort to deconstruct classic and modern French cuisine, utilizing the principles of Spanish regional cuisine along with techniques and ingredients from the industrial food processing industry, which incidentally brings up the legitimacy and safety of these techniques. The point was to create preparations that were completely unrecognizable to the diner to evoke new emotional experiences in eating. I’m not going to argue the virtues or the limitations of this trend in cooking. I agree with the citizens of one of the great food cities of the world, Rome, that have described these modern cooking trends as “all smoke and no roast.” This is a trend that all new cooks want to mimic when starting out with careers in the food industry. Many questions are begging for an answer regarding this and the primary one, paraphrasing Julia Child (when she was asked about these modern trends), is why would anybody want to deconstruct food to the point where it is so over-processed that it becomes completely unrecognizable?

I’m revisiting one of the most iconic cookbooks of the 1970s: “Simple French Food” by Richard Olney; the preface of this book should be required reading by any serious cook or gastronome, professional or amateur. The author states that simple cooking has many subtleties and complexities. This starts with mastering the understanding of methodology, ratios and formulas. I always tell my students at the Institute of Culinary Education that, to become a good cook, one needs to master and completely understand all of the 12 to 15 basic cooking methods, the relationship between the ingredients in a preparation, why the ingredients have a particular sequence during the method of preparation and their ratio to each other. For example: Why is a particular quantity of egg whites utilized in a specific ratio of lean ground protein and aromatics when clarifying a specific quantity of stock to prepare a consommé?

Another equally important consideration is the influence that terroir has on the outcome of a preparation. The influences of climate and seasonality, topography and geology, the microbiological eco-system of a particular environment, production, harvesting and processing techniques, husbandry and slaughtering techniques, and cultural and historical influences all determine the production of raw ingredients. An example of this would be how two dairy cows of the same breed raised in two different geographic locations can produce milk, and the products from that milk have completely different flavor profiles, fat contents, colors and textures. Without these and other considerations, blindly following a recipe will almost never yield the results one is looking for.

The term simple cooking is an oxymoron. Cooking requires a certain level of skill and knowledge and a deep level of intuition, the latter being unteachable and none of it easily acquired. Cooks often say that the most difficult dishes to prepare are the ones that appear to be the most simple and uncomplicated — a perfect roast chicken, sole meuniere, fried egg over easy or a French omelette, for example. A cook can’t hide behind fancy sauces, garnishes or complicated food processing techniques with these recipes. An equally important idea or corollary to this would be that a good cook cannot hide behind poor or mediocre knife skills — but that’s a discussion for another point in time.

By Ted Siegel, chef-instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education

4 tips for eating healthier without counting calories or using a scale

March is National Nutrition Month, a great opportunity to reassess our relationship with food and commit to making better food choices. There is a lot of advice for how we should eat, and it can get overwhelming. We know we should eat enough — but not too much — fat, protein and carbohydrates. And we know that we should be getting our full complement of vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.

Here are a few tips to eat healthier without using a scale or counting calories (although it can be good to occasionally log our meals to recalibrate as needed):

Make plants the star of the plate. Studies continue to show the benefits of eating a plant-based diet, from lowering risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, to increasing life expectancy and happiness.
Eat the rainbow. Many of the micronutrients we need — vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytochemicals — are associated with distinctive colors. For example, beta carotene gives foods like carrots, pumpkins and apricots an orange color. Beta carotene gets converted to vitamin A, which contributes to our skin and eye health and supports our immune systems. Choosing a rainbow of fruits and vegetables helps ensure we get a variety of micronutrients to support our health.
Slow down and savor your meal. It takes 20 minutes for our brains to register the chemicals that tell us we are full. When we’re hungry, it’s easy to eat quickly and potentially overeat. By slowing down and savoring the appearance, smells and tastes of our food, we give our brains time to catch up.
Hydrate. We need fluids to maintain our health and the functions of our body’s systems. Staying hydrated helps our hearts pump blood through our bodies, our muscles work more efficiently and our food digest to maximize nutrient absorption. Drink water throughout the day, not just during meals. You’ll feel more energized and it may help you feel more satiated between meals.

By the Natural Gourmet Center at the Institute of Culinary Education

The Australian wildfires were so big that they punched a hole in the ozone layer

Few layers of Earth’s stratosphere are as important to humans — or as endangered — as the ozone layer, so-named because of its disproportionately high concentration of the molecule ozone (O₃). Without the ozone layer, more ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun would reach the ground, harming any exposed life forms and increasing cancers and other radiation-linked diseases as the planet cooks

Unfortunately, thanks to global warming, all of those things are already happening. A United Nations panel found that climate change will increase the frequency of wildfires by up to 50% by 2100. Forests in the American west are already turning into scrubland because wildfires have become more common than they once were.

That means the climate change–wildfire cycle has become a self-reinforcing loop, and a new study in the journal Science illustrates just how much that is the case: Smoke from major wildfires, like human carbon emissions, destroys the ozone layer for months in affected areas.

Scientists from the University of Waterloo reviewed data from the Canadian Space Agency’s Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) that measured the effects of smoke particles in the Southern Hemisphere’s stratosphere for months. They found that smoke particles from Australia’s wildfires in 2019 and 2020 destroyed parts of the Southern Hemisphere.

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“The Australian fires injected acidic smoke particles into the stratosphere, disrupting the chlorine, hydrogen and nitrogen chemistry that regulate ozone,” Peter Bernath, research professor at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Chemistry and the study’s lead author, said in a news release. “This is the first large measurement of the smoke, which shows it converting these ozone-regulating compounds into more reactive compounds that destroy ozone.”

The Canadian Space Agency’s Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment satellite has an infrared spectrometer which measured light waves from the smoke particles caused by Australia’s “Black Summer” fires. In the study, the authors noted that the smoke particles “produced unexpected and extreme perturbations in stratospheric gases beyond any seen in the previous 15 years of measurements, including increases in formaldehyde, chlorine nitrate, chlorine monoxide, and hypochlorous acid and decreases in ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and hydrochloric acid.”

They added, “These perturbations in stratospheric composition have the potential to affect ozone chemistry in unexpected ways.”

While the effects of the Black Summer fires were temporary, in the sense that the ozone seemed to return to its normal state after a period of time, it is unclear what the long-term effects will be on the atmosphere if wildfires occur more regularly. Scientists expect that this will indeed be the case as climate change worsens; the challenge will rest in figuring out exactly how the increased number of wildfires is being specifically caused by the warming of the planet.

“There’s no doubt that climate change is playing a role here,” Professor Dean L. Urban, Professor of Environmental Sciences and Policy at Duke University, previously told Salon. “The complicated part is separating climate from weather: climate is essentially the long-term average weather. So in the west now we’re seeing a warming climate, plus a long-term drought, plus freakish short-term weather (for example, the lightning storms in [California], and the crazier than usual winds).”

Uban added, “Climate change and weather are linked, of course, in that under climate change we expect warmer weather but we also expect more extreme events.”

There are ways for public authorities to manage lands that are likely to set on fire so that the chances of that happening are reduced. At the same time, as Francis E. Putz, botanist at the University of Florida told Salon in 2020, the only effective long-term solution to the problem of increased wildfires is to address climate change.

“If we do not address the climate change issue, no amount of forest management is going to avoid this sort of situation in the future — and note that the rate of change has increased, not decreased or stabilized,” Putz told Salon.

Read more on climate change and ozone:

“They followed my family”: Public health officials face increased harassment during pandemic

Conspiracy theories around COVID-19 and an ever-widening political divide led to a terrifying uptick in harassment against America’s public health workers, new research finds.

To quantify the gravity of harassment public health figures faced during the pandemic, researchers looked at data from a national survey of local health departments — conducted by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) — and searched media reports of harassment and attacks.

According to the new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, there were 1,499 unique reports of harassment across local health departments during the first 11 months of the pandemic, between March 2020 to January 2021. More than half of surveyed local public health departments from the NACCHO survey —57 percent— were targets of harassment. Estimates show that there are over 2,500 local and state public health departments across the country; at least 335 had leadership attacked or harassed during the beginning of the pandemic.

The researchers estimated that at least 222 public health officials left their jobs during the timeframe, too. Over one-third of those departures—36 percent—involved officials who had experienced some form of harassment.

“This is a wakeup call for the field about the need to prioritize the long-term protection of our public health workforce,” said Beth Resnick, one of the leading authors, in a press statement. “Taking care of the workforce needs to be a fundamental component of the public health infrastructure that doesn’t end when the pandemic does.”

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The researchers found that of those who have been harassed, 2 percent said their personal information was publicly shared online, 6 percent said they received death threats directed toward them or their family, another 6 percent said they received personally targeted messages on social media, and 24 percent faced backlash on social media.

“No public health professional should feel undervalued, unsafe, or be questioning the fundamental mission and purpose of their work,” said Resnick. “We need to do better and prioritize worker well-being and safety by implementing policies that reduce undermining, ostracizing, and intimidating behaviors to support these key workers and leaders.”

The study quoted officials detailing their experiences.

“I get threatening messages from people saying they are watching me. They followed my family to the park and took pictures of my kids,” said one official, who eventually resigned. “I know it’s my job to be out front talking about the importance of public health — educating people, keeping them safe. Now it kind of scares me… when they start photographing my family in public, I have to think, is it worth it?”

The authors suggest that training public health officials on how to respond to political and societal conflict, and establishing robust reporting systems for incidents are key to reducing acts of harassment when they do occur.

“Interventions to reduce undermining, ostracizing, and intimidating acts against health officials are needed for a sustainable public health system,” the authors wrote. “We recommend training leaders to respond to political conflict, improving colleague support networks, providing trauma-informed worker support, investing in long-term public health staffing and infrastructure, and establishing workplace violence reporting systems and legal protections.”

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Are Putin’s oligarchs plotting to topple him?

U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders are setting their sights on Russia’s oligarchs as they seek new ways to punish Vladimir Putin – and those who have enabled him and profited from his reign – for waging war in Ukraine.

Biden singled out wealthy oligarchs in his State of the Union address, promising to “seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets.” “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” he said. And in the U.K., two more rich Russians were added to the nine other oligarchs who have been personally sanctioned over the invasion.

Yet who are these oligarchs, and what is their relationship with Putin? And more importantly, will eroding their wealth do anything to end the war in Ukraine?

The oligarchs come to power

As a scholar of emerging markets, corporate strategy and the post-Soviet political economy, I have studied the oligarchs in depth.

Oligarchs, in the Russian context, are the ultrawealthy business elites with disproportionate political power. They emerged in two distinct waves.

The first group emerged out of the privatization of the 1990s, particularly the all-cash sales of the largest state-owned enterprises after 1995. This process was marred by significant corruption, culminating in the infamous “loans for shares” scheme, which transferred stakes in 12 large natural resource companies from the government to select tycoons in exchange for loans intended to shore up the federal budget.

The government intentionally defaulted on its loans, allowing its creditors – the oligarchs-to-be – to auction off the stakes in giant companies such as Yukos, Lukoil and Norilsk Nickel, typically to themselves. In essence, then-President Boris Yeltsin’s administration appeared to enrich a small group of tycoons by selling off the most valuable parts of the Soviet economy at a hefty discount.

After Putin came to power in 2000, he facilitated the second wave of oligarchs via state contracts. Private suppliers in many sectors such as infrastructure, defense and health care would overcharge the government at prices many times the market rate, offering kickbacks to the state officials involved. Thus, Putin enriched a new legion of oligarchs who owed their enormous fortunes to him.

Oligarchs lose their grip – keep their wealth

In the 1990s, the oligarchs had the upper hand with the Kremlin and could even dictate policy at times. Under Yeltsin, multiple oligarchs assumed formal positions in the government, and anecdotes abounded describing coffers of cash being carried into the Kremlin in exchange for political favors.

But since the 2000s Putin has been calling the shots. Essentially, Putin proposed a deal: The oligarchs would stay out of politics, and the Kremlin would stay out of their businesses and leave their often illegitimate gains alone.

Furthermore, popular disappointment with the privatization of the 1990s facilitated its partial rollback in the 2000s. Putin’s Kremlin applied political pressure on oligarchs in strategic industries like media and natural resources to sell controlling stakes back to the state. Putin also passed laws that gave preferential treatment to the so-called state corporations. These moves secured the Kremlin’s control over the economy – and over the oligarchs.

The three shades of oligarchy

Today, three types of oligarchs stand out in terms of their proximity to power.

First come Putin’s friends, who are personally connected to the president. Many of Putin’s close friends – particularly those from his St. Petersburg and KGB days – have experienced a meteoric rise to extreme wealth. A few of Putin’s closest oligarch friends from St. Petersburg are Yuri Kovalchuk, often referred to as Putin’s “personal banker”; Gennady Timchenko, whose key asset is the energy trading firm Gunvor; and the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who own assets in construction, electricity and pipelines. All of these individuals have been sanctioned.

The second group includes leaders of Russia’s security services, the police and the military – known as “siloviki” – who have also leveraged their networks to amass extreme personal wealth. Some of these so-called “silovarchs” are former KGB, and now FSB, intelligence officers who had eyed the Yeltsin-era oligarchs’ power and wealth jealously and obtained both under Putin. The man reputed to be the informal leader of the siloviki is Igor Sechin, chairman of oil giant Rosneft, widely seen as the second-most powerful person in Russia.

Finally, the largest number of Russian oligarchs are outsiders without personal connections to Putin, the military or the FSB. Indeed, some current outsiders are the 1990s-era oligarchs. While Putin selectively crushed politically inconvenient or obstreperous oligarchs after coming to power, he did not seek to systematically “eliminate oligarchs as a class,” as he had promised during his initial election campaign. For example, oligarchs such as Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska, who accumulated their wealth in the 1990s, regularly feature in the lists of richest Russians today.

Putin’s enablers

Make no mistake: Regardless of their type, the oligarchs have helped Putin stay in power through their political quiescence and economic support of the Kremlin’s domestic initiatives.

Furthermore, my research highlights instances in which oligarchs used their wealth – in terms of jobs, loans or donations – to influence politicians in other countries. For example, in 2014 the Russian bank FCRB lent 9.4 million euros (US$10.3 million) to the populist anti-EU party of Marine Le Pen in France, creating a political debt to Russia. And in 2016, Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, paid a $1.4 million government fine for Martin Nejedly, a key adviser to the Czech president in 2016, which allowed Nejedly to keep his influential position. This helped make Czech President Milos Zema “one of the Kremlin’s most ardent sympathizers among European leaders.”

Some oligarchs appear to initiate such geopolitically significant transactions voluntarily to create rapport with the Kremlin. While it is difficult to establish direct causal links between what I dub the oligarchs’ “geopolitical volunteering” and their beneficiaries’ pro-Kremlin policies, there is strong anecdotal evidence that oligarchs’ financing facilitates the adoption of pro-Putin positions in countries outside Russia.

Furthermore, my research on the concealment of corporate political activity suggests that using ostensibly nonpolitical intermediaries such as private companies is a key strategy through which organizations like the Kremlin can hide their political activity.

Putin’s hostages

This brings us to the most important question on many people’s minds: As the sanctions decimate oligarchs’ wealth, could that prompt them to abandon Putin or change the course of the war?

Some oligarchs are already speaking out against the war, such as Alfa Group Chairman Mikhail Fridman and metals magnate Oleg Deripaska – both of whom have been sanctioned by the West. Lukoil also called for the war’s end. Although Lukoil is not currently under direct sanctions, oil traders are already shunning its products in anticipation.

I believe we will see increasingly vocal opposition to the war from the oligarchs. At the very least, their willingness to do the Kremlin’s dirty work by trying to influence Western politicians will likely subside significantly.

But there are two crucial limits to their influence and ability to affect Putin’s behavior.

For one thing, the oligarchs do not work well together. In Russia’s “piranha capitalism,” these billionaires have mostly sought to outcompete their rivals for government largesse. Individual survival with a view to the Kremlin, not the defense of common interests such as sanctions’ removal, has been the oligarchs’ modus operandi. The Kremlin, for its part, has promised state support to sanctioned companies, especially in the banking sector.

More importantly, it is the guns, not the money, that speak loudest in the Kremlin today. As long as Putin retains his control over the siloviki – the current and former military and intelligence officers close to Putin – the other oligarchs, in my view, will remain hostages to his regime.

The generals are more likely to sway Putin than the oligarchs – and an economic collapse may be even more convincing still.

Stanislav Markus, Associate Professor of International Business, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Israel doesn’t have a special exemption”: Republican slammed for blasting lack of Russia sanctions

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., doubled down on his claim that Israel should take a stronger stance against Russia, insisting that “everyone must pick a side” amid Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine.

“We have stood with Israel and will continue to do so. But at the moment there is a battle between Good and Evil, between a world based on raw power or one based one the post WW2 rules,” the congressman tweeted. “Everyone must pick a side.”

“If we don’t want to directly attack Russia, then our leverage is in the world uniting in sanctions and assistance for the people of Ukraine,” he added. “This includes everyone, and Israel doesn’t have a special exemption.”

Thread on Israel: so i grabbed the third rail of foreign policy today, as I said Israel needs to pick a side, and that future aid could be at stake.

I want to double down on this, let me explain.

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) March 21, 2022

Kinzinger’s comments stem from a Sunday exchange between Israeli lawmakers and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who asked the Knesset why Israel has not imposed sanctions on Russia or provided certain military aid to Ukraine.

“One can ask for a long time why we can’t accept weapons from you or why Israel didn’t impose sanctions against Russia, why you are not putting pressure on Russian business,” Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, said during his address. “It is your choice, dear brothers and sisters.”

Israel’s reaction to #Ukraine will have bearing on future aid from the US to #Israel. Pay it forward

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) March 20, 2022

“Really good questions of #Israel,” Kinzinger responded on Twitter after the speech. “Israel’s reaction to #Ukraine will have bearing on future aid from the US to #Israel. Pay it forward.”

Kinzinger, the first Republican congressman to suggest such an idea, came under immediate fire from conservatives, who argued that suspending aid to Israel would be unjustifiable.

“Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East surrounded by terrorists who want them dead,” said conservative author Brigitte Gabriel. “How disgraceful for you to threaten their existence because they don’t agree with you on Ukraine.”

“I take strong issue with your previous tweet. No one is saying friends can’t disagree, that’s healthy in a relationship,” echoed Matt Brooks, Executive Direct of the Jewish Republican Coalition. “What is absolutely unacceptable is your suggestion that we hold aid to Israel hostage to coerce our ally to bend to our will.”

Thus far, Israel has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, though it has refrained from imposing sanctions of providing military assistance. Israel’s foreign minister has strongly condemned the incursion. However, Naftali Bennett, the country’s prime minister, has refrained from doing so.

Some critics have argued that Israel has been slow to criticize Russia due to its financial and military connections to Moscow. For instance, Israel heavily relies on Russia’s support to facilitate its military intervention in Syria, according to The Guardian. Additionally, many Russian oligarchs are Jews who have strong ties to Israel and have funneled millions of dollars to Jewish major institutions.